When I get home tonight, a couple rooms are going to look a lot more finished. Last night, the painters textured the kitchen and the basement bathroom.

The kitchen pre-texture:

The bathroom pre-texture:

Today, pending no cancellations due to the blizzard (hey, I’m at work…), both of these rooms should be painted. I cannot put it into words how nice it will be to have these painted. There is something about a layer of paint that just makes things feel more “done.”

On a different note, when the painters were working on the main floor bedroom, he had to do some skim coating to smooth out the transition from painted plaster to areas of the plaster where the paint fell off. Well, the painted plaster happened to have a crackle chemical in it. This caused the skim coat to crackle. So yesterday he also worked on applying some nasty chemical to remove the crackle and then primered the room. I’m not sure if he plans on getting anything done in there today, but I won’t complain if he does.

While I’ve been scraping away at the popcorn ceiling texture on the main floor, the upstairs bathroom has been progressing quite well. Drywall has been taped, mudded (is that a word?), sanded, textured, and finally, painted. After living with boring, bland, and/or dark colors, we decided to liven the room up a bit. With yellow:

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.

Since I’ve been lacking on the posting and picture posting recently, I thought I’d give you an outdated update.

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!

I’m writing this from the prairie of North Dakota. Before the troubles with our new (old) home, we had planned a trip to Casey’s grandparent’s house in Bismarck, ND. That is where we are now, and have been since Tuesday evening. I won’t lie, it is a welcome relief from the constant roar of fans drying out our home.

My last post was posted the day after Christmas, the day we found out our home was more wet than the south coast after a hurricane. That was a day before we were supposed to pack our stuff up from Eden Prairie, MN and drive up. Most (sane) people would have decided to stay put for a while, or at least find another place to stay while the house dries out and is getting repaired. Of course, we were too excited to move into our place, we moved loaded the truck up on a rainy/icy Saturday and headed off to find out what shape the house was in.

Pulling up into the drive way, we see this:

As we walk around to the back door, we see this:

Comforting, right? Just the thing a first time home buyer wants to see.

Walking into the back door puts you on a landing on the stairs that head down to the basement. Directly in front of the door is a wall that has had wainscoting applied a few years ago. It didn’t look like this a month ago:

Taking a left brings you up a few steps to the kitchen. The water flowed in from the upstairs bathroom floor directly through the kitchen ceiling. This resulted in a nice hole:

Looking around quickly in the kitchen, you’d think the hole in the ceiling and a bit of pealing wallpaper were the only things damaged. Look a little closer you’d find the cabinet doors are all separating, and the stove top is rusting from getting rained on.

And another frustrating find was some door hardware we had just stripped the paint off of a few weeks ago:

However, a somewhat nice thing is all of our paint in the living room is falling off of the plaster, all 1/8″ to a 1/4″ of it:

We had been planning on sanding (meh) the paint off of the living room walls as it was extremely textured and simply much too thick. I’m hoping I can literally peel the paint off the entire room, saving the extremely dirty job of sanding it down. Granted this is a few months sooner than planned.

Going upstairs to the source of the entire problem, the bathroom. The day we received the call about this, we had Casey’s dad (who used to be a plumber) attempt to do a quick fix while everything was still wet. The upstairs bathroom had a washer and dryer hookup in it for a stackable, and it looked to be a reasonable candidate for breaking due to the dryer vent right next to it, possibly dropping the temp a few degrees lower than the rest of the room. So that wall was tore out and pipes were capped:

Sadly, when the water was turned back on, the waterfalls in the kitchen resumed. At that point, we figured any other plumbing fixes in that room would require much more time and destruction so he just turned the water to that room off. Problem solved? We thought so. So we turned the water back on and… no leaks. Yay! Upstairs there is also a small kitchen (which will be torn out once this is all fixed, but is rather convenient now). We had the water on for what must have been 6-8 hours and not a leak. Well, just as I was about to go to bed on Saturday, I was walking up the steps and felt something hit my head. Putting my hand on my head, I felt what I expected, water. Ugghh. There was a pin hole sized leak in the water lines running to the upstairs kitchen. Since this was now our main kitchen, we called up a plumber (since insurance will cover it) and he had to demolish some of the plaster (don’t cry, we were planning on flipping the stairs back to the original position, and this would have had to come out anyways) to find the leak. Well, after all that, the guy says he doesn’t carry any PVC plumbing parts (what???) and only installs PEX and copper. Weird.

Assuming I can find time tomorrow, I’ll post an update after the fans and dehumidifiers (hopefully) leave.