While I was busy with furniture yesterday the kitchen counter tops were being installed. They look amazing and I couldn’t be happier with the kitchen. Now if we could only use it! Still no word on when the electrician and plumber will be here. Tomorrow our painter will be here to refinish the bay window and closet door.After that he’ll be painting the kitchen ceiling and back entry. He will also be doing touch ups through the house as a courtesy. After all of this all that’s left is the cleaning work and the rest of the wood work being installed. I did find out yesterday that the duct work and duct cleaning will be done next week at the earliest. After that they’ll come back in to clean carpets upstairs and steam clean the tile floors in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. I have to admit I’m not happy that we’ll end up waiting again. We’re just so close to being done that I’m getting impatient.

Since I have been bad with posting pictures recently, hopefully this one will make up for it.

Our living room:

Dining room:

Close-up:

Hallway to the main floor bedroom:

Main floor bedroom:

Quality test – PASSED:

We have to wait until Monday to move stuff in to allow it to fully “cure.” So, after 5 months of living upstairs, Monday is our “move-in” day. If I didn’t owe a good chunk of hours to my employer, I’d love to have taken the day off. For now, we are going to have to settle for cleaning all the dust off of the wood work and windows.

Some time today, our main contractor is supposed to be coming over to install the main kitchen counter top. That will allow the plumber and electrician to show up on Monday and get the kitchen finished. I should say that is the ideal scenario. I emailed the second tier “general contractor” to set up the plumber and electrician and haven’t heard from him yet. I’ll assume they’ll just show up sometime early next week.

What’s left?

1. Kitchen counters (today the main piece is installed, early next week the island and sliver between the stove and fridge is installed)
2. Sink, dishwasher, stove, and refrigerator hookup
3. Baseboard trim in the kitchen
4. Cabinet crown
5. Kitchen ceiling paint
6. Baseboard trim re-installation in the dining room by the door to the kitchen
7. Dining room door to the kitchen trim
8. Baseboard trim in the main floor bedroom on the wall opposite the kitchen (where we took out the added door)
9. Main floor lights installation
10. Upstairs hallway trim installation
11. Upstairs bathroom trim installation
12. Upstairs bathroom cabinet installation
13. Duct cleaning

All-in-all, not too huge of a list. Most of the items are pretty simple. 80-90% of it should be done this coming week. I probably missed a few things, but if I did, they probably aren’t more than a 5 minute job.

We’re getting there!

Sunday, it rained. It was cold. It snowed.  Yes, those white flakes that fall from the sky fell once again. When I started to see them fall, I decided to go to sleep early in hopes it would all be gone by the time I woke up, making it appear to just be a bad nightmare. It almost worked. My car had a little bit left on the rear window.

In a way, I was greatful for the change from rain to snow. While it was raining consistently, I started hearing a water drop every couple of seconds. This house just loves water incase you haven’t noticed yet. The leak I had hoped to have fixed a month or so ago in the roof isn’t fixed. I have no idea where it is coming from. So when the rain turned to snow, the leak stopped. Tonight I’ll be climbing back on the roof with more roof caulk stuff in hopes to find the issue and put it to rest. This time I hopefully won’t drop the tube of roof caulk stuff off of the roof. Yes, I dropped the roof caulk stuff off of the roof the last time. Rookie.

With flooding expected on the Red River this spring, the city of Grand Forks has taken the first step to access state resources to help minimize the damage. The city has declared a state of emergency to allow Grand Forks to prepare for high waters.

Flood controls are in place to protect Grand Forks from a flood crest of up to 57 feet. In 1997, the river reached a level of 54.3 feet. The National Weather Service has projected a 50 percent probability of the river reaching 47.6 feet and a 10 percent probability of reaching 50.3 feet.

The National Weather Service is scheduled to come out with an updated forecast on Friday.

Thankfully Grand Forks has a fancy new multimillion dollar dike that should keep us dry. Being a few blocks away from the river makes you a bit nervous none-the-less however. That would be the last thing we’d need, finish fixing the water damage to our house to have a flood come wash it away.

Anyways, to sum it up. Tomorrow Andy will be back to start the upstairs since we need that done in order for the guy to come do the floors. His helper will finish up the bathroom downstairs. When he is done with that, Roger will be here patching in the tile, installing our pine baseboards, swapping out the toilets* and hopefully moving the washer and drier in there! Can we say finished basement bathroom any one?!?! In case you can’t tell, I’m very excited!

*I should probably explain about the toilets. In the upstairs bathroom we had a new one and the one in the basement bathroom was in the house when it was bought. In all honesty I hated that one, probably because I wasn’t used to it. Well all it took for me to change my mind was a plumber telling me it was old enough to be original to the house. So now I’m putting the “old” one in the upstairs and moving the new one down!  Funny how that works huh?!

To make my post complete here is a picture of the kitchen as of today:

Here is the actual floor plan for the kitchen:

Counter tops:

Cabinet door style:

And this paper will be applied to the ceiling (and then painted):

Okay, it isn’t quite that yellow in person, but it is yellow none-the-less. Once we get the dark woodwork, and the white claw foot tub, toilet, and pedestal sink in here, it won’t be quite as blinding. We hope.

The part on the light fixtures that hold the shades are new, non-lacquered brass. These will be aged to match the fixture better in the future. Casey also had to have her antique toilet paper holder installed, even though we don’t have a toilet in there yet.

Hard to notice is the hole to the left of the chimney. This is where a cabinet will be built for towels and toiletries. We will also have wood corner trim running along the edges of the drywall next to the chimney.

In the last week, I’ve removed popcorn ceiling from the upstairs bathroom, and from the main floor living/dining room. The former was not painted, the latter was.

Removing the non-painted (or lightly painted) popcorn ceiling is as follows:

1. Take a large putty knife (8″ or so) and knock off the bigger popcorn
2. Take a spray bottle or a garden sprayer and get the stuff as moist as you can without having it drip all over
3. Let sit for 5 minutes or so
4. Take the large putty knife and scrape off the goop
5. Have a beer

Removing the heavily painted (and possibly multiple textured) popcorn ceiling is as follows:

1. Have a beer
2. Schedule a back/neck/shoulder massage for the day you plan to be done (add a day or two overage)
3. Have a beer
4. Find an ice scraper (the kind you use to remove ice from a driveway, about 6-8″ wide and with a 4′ or so handle), and sharpen up the edge
5. Attempt to scrape off as much of the large popcorn as possible
6. Take a garden sprayer and moisten the ceiling. It will only penetrate the areas you knocked off in the last step
7. Wait 5 minutes
8. Spray the ceiling again
9. Wait 5 minutes
10. Spray the ceiling again
11. Wait 5 minutes
12. Scrape away. You might not even get down to the plaster (or drywall) at this step. If not, repeat 6-11 again
13. Have a beer
14. Call it a night and repeat 1-13 over again until you finish it

If you can get your entire ceiling down to the plaster/drywall without settling for an inbetween, mad props to you. For the first area, I went down to the plaster. Of course, I didn’t think of the obvious things I’d find doing so. Things like cracked plaster, bad patch jobs, etc. If I had a few weeks to work on this, I would have taken all of the texture down to the plaster. However, the painter is here to work on it today or tomorrow so I had to settle for what I could. 90% of the ceiling is just scraped down as much as I could without breaking through to the plaster. It will be heavily textured again, but only about 50% of what it was before. Ideal? No, but it will work for now and will look much better than previously (hopefully).

Still no pictures. Sorry. I take the pictures, but I tend to write these posts away from the camera and computer. I will do my best to get them up here soon.

So back to what I wanted to post about: my many projects. Key word here is many! Note to Shane: sorry honey, I know it’s driving you crazy! So I really tried to just start one project and finish it before moving onto another. However, in my defense it is hard to take the heat gun and sander after the wood work when I’m home all day with Brendan.

My first project, the newel post, is coming along. All of the paint is off and Shane started sanding it for me. All that is left is to continue sanding. This is definitely easy enough, however, it is on-hold until we can get Brendan out of the house since it makes a lovely mess and we don’t have doors up here.

My second project is stripping the doors which is why they are not upstairs! Shane took them downstairs for me so the fumes could be in the basement. I have the old bathroom door almost done. I need to take liquid stripper after the sides that face the frame. I tried to take the heat gun after it, but it started smoking. Whoever painted it, just painted onto the unfinished wood making it not so easy! I decided to put this off as I hate working with liquid stripper. Actually, let me clarify…I don’t actually hate the product, because whatever Shane bought me works super fast and actually does the job! What I hate is the smell and I refuse to use it in the house.

Now that this door is on-hold, let’s move on to the other door. The other door is the one we removed from the bedroom/office going into the kitchen. This will be the new upstairs bathroom door. I have one side done thanks to the heat gun and I just started on the backside. I would seriously be done by now, but the electrician showed up and I’m too nice of a person to make him smell the fumes. Actually, I didn’t want him to leave early because of the fumes. Hehe. The electric company was suppose to be here Thursday and never showed and never called. So needless to say I’m not taking any chances!

Last project (yes another one) is the wood work upstairs. I figured why not since every thing else up here was in the process too. I finished the bathroom framing and started on my son’s door frame for his room. I was doing great! I was motivated and eager to finish. Then the fire alarm goes off. *sigh* Now I have no motivation and am sitting here writing this. I apologize if I’m jumpng all over. It’s been too long since I posted last.

On a slightly different note. In our basement bathroom we’ve decided to paint the window trim and baseboards. I’m wondering what to do with the door. Should we paint the bathroom side of the door and leave the front stripped etc., or should I just finish the bathroom side? Would it look funny having all the wood painted, except the door? Or another option is to not paint the window trim or the door and just paint the baseboards? Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

After the walls were ripped out, there was some insulation laying in that corner that had plastic backing. It was left there for several days and one day I decided to clean it up a bit and lifted it up. I wasn’t expecting to hear the insulation dripping when I lifted it, but that is indeed what I heard. There was around a quarter of an inch of standing water in the corner. Keep in mind this corner was completely dried out after the initial water damage, so it had formed from something else. Being these basement walls were more for holding the house up, and never really intended to be used as living space, my first guess is it was seepage through the walls.

I was stuck. As seen in a past post, I’ve been putting up foam boards over the concrete to prevent this type of issue in the rest of the basement, but the bathroom is already framed in. So it impossible to get foam boards put behind them without ripping them out entirely. So my first option was to put the insulation back in for a while, and deal with it later. Obviously extremely far from ideal. After pondering it for a while, I had one of those light bulb moments. An old high school friend of mine does insulation for a living, mostly the foam insulation. So I called him up to ask him if the stuff would seal up the walls, which is said it works great for that purpose. In fact, he was driving around town and was only a few blocks away so he stopped by to look. After telling me what it would cost to get an inch of insulation sprayed in (around R7, which in combination with the fiberglass R11 that will go in, it will be R18), I jumped on it. I was expecting $500+ as I knew the stuff was quite expensive. He gave me a friend discount (free labor) that was less than half of that.

So two Saturdays ago, he came over with the huge truck (26′ all dedicated to the fancy foam equipment… supposedly worth well over $100k) and a buddy and they had the bathroom sprayed and cleaned up in less than an hour.

Sorry about the first few pictures being so dark, I didn’t realize how bad they were until they were shrunk down.

If you are ever considering doing this, I *highly* recommend it. Right before he sprayed, I went through and scraped off all the loose paint and found a crack in the foundation that I have a feeling was the source of the water I had found. When my friend showed up, I asked him if I needed to seal it up before getting it sprayed, and he said that the foam will completely take care of it by itself.

Since I have a bunch of foam board left, I’ll probably continue using that until I run out for the rest of the basement as it serves the same purpose, just doesn’t work quite as well. Once I run out, I’ll probably have this stuff sprayed in the remainder.

By the end of the week, my lovely foam will be hidden hopefully for decades to come.

Did I mention we found mold? On this wall right here:

The poly was put up to keep it from being disturbed. The guy doing the drywall said that it would be easier to put up new drywall than to patch up the stuff that was there, so I spent an evening tearing it down. 75% of the way through, I happened to look at the lathe in front of me. It all had a shade of green with black blotches here and there. Ughh, mold. I stopped there, grabbed a spray bottle with some bleach in it and wet the areas exposed down and called it a night. The company that did the initial water cleanup came in and took down the rest of the drywall and had the drywall guy put up the poly until they could bring in the big guns. This was a Friday. On Monday, a guy came over with a pump sprayer with some nasty chemicals. Our drywall guy ended up leaving early that day as his nose and ears were burning after smelling the stuff all day. I don’t blame him, it was pretty wicked.

Here is the chimney side:

If you look close, you can see the location that the stove’s exhaust used to be on the chimney about a foot and half below the ceiling (that little white circle to the left of that middle stud).

On this wall, you can see where the plaster was yanked down that I believe I mentioned in a previous post:

It was in pretty bad shape, the contractors were wanting to just put a layer of drywall on top of it, cutting the height of the trim around it in half. So I volunteered to take down the only plaster left in the room. On a different note, the paint that is falling off in the rear entry way looks like a flying bird…

Now, we found a really interesting thing when taking down a lone piece of insulation:

There is a little door, all framed in above the ceiling. This happens to be in our son’s closet, under the carpet and linoleum. Any guesses on what this could be? My best guess is just a place to hide valuables (house was built in 1928 – a year before the stock market crash).

Stay tuned for post-drywall pictures and more information about our basement bathroom!