Showing off

Merry Christmas and happy holidays!  My family got to spend a week up at the house for the holidays to give it a good trial run.  While we did a little bit of work, we mostly just relaxed and enjoyed being away from the TV and computer for a little bit.  I had finished one bedroom before we got there so this is where my husband and I slept:

 

During the first couple of days I focused on finishing the floor in our den.  I was able to complete all of it, including the difficult, uneven pieces around the stone fireplace.  I am sure there is a much better tool for scribing these planks, but all I had was my miter saw.  So I'm sure what I did would be a no-no in all safety manuals but it worked.  I had to get the saw going with my right hand, then lift the blade guard and hold it up with my my right thumb.  With my left hand I ran the board sideways along the spinning blade to eat away a little at a time.  When I was done the amount of particulate and burning wood smell in the house was making us all sneeze and wheeze.  Luckily we were leaving to come home for Christmas night.  By the time we returned the next day, the dust had settled and the floor looked great:

 

 

I still need to install baseboards and caulk around the fireplace but I was able to bring in the furniture.  It is amazing how much a real kitchen table and a coffee table make a house feel more comfortable!  Not to mention having a table to work a puzzle on, my specialty.  (We did two 1000 piece puzzles over the week).  As you can see, the dogs also made themselves comfortable:

 

 

By far the best part of the week was using the fireplace during the cold spells.  Here we are before I got that last row of flooring in at the fireplace:

 

All in all, the week was a success.  But we did decide that we will need to find a solution for our water quality.  Like most of the folks in the area, we have a sulfur smell to our water.  It is not a health issue, just a smell issue.  We can bring bottled water to drink, but the sulfur smell happens with each flush of the toilet and with every tooth brushing.  After a while, you smell it everywhere.  We are not sure if the solution is a holding tank that will let the sulfur gas come out before it comes to the house, to install a chlorination system, or to bite the financial bullet and switch from well water to rainwater.  Stay tuned on that one.

On to the new year!

Flooring, flooring and more flooring

I am realizing just how much flooring I have to do.  I finished the first bedroom and it came out great.  This is the smallest bedroom which is about 12 x 12.  It took about 10 hours of working to get the floor laid in there.  I used plain cedar 1x4s as the baseboards and gave them a wash of thin white paint.  In order to seal them I was going to brush on polyurethane but that seemed to take away most of the white tint.  So I bought a can of spray-on poly which did a better job.  (Although maybe I should look again after the paint high has worn off! Mental note - future baseboards should not be sprayed in the garage no matter how cold it is!)

So this bedroom is pretty much done.  I installed the basebards and caulked them, installed the curtains and put back the closet doors.  Once we move the mattress and dresser in there and install a new door, the room will be ready to go.


Now on to the main living area.  This floor installation will be done over an existing tile floor so I am floating the wood floor over it.  That means no adhesive, just gluing the planks together with a type of wood glue.  This type of flooring installation is much easier, in my opinion, because you can start and stop whenever you like.  There is no sticky adhesive all over everything and no timing concern with getting the floor laid before the adhesive sets.  However, I think the floating floor delivers a lesser final product.  Since the floor isn't attached to anything, it can get pockets that stick up a little.  That makes the floor sound and feel funny when you walk on it.  The glue-down floor feels much more solid.

This room is quite a bit bigger than the smaller bedroom.  I am starting on the longest wall which is over 35 feet long.  So far I have spent about 8 hours on it and this is as far as I have gotten.  There have been some precise cuts around two doorways that slowed me down a little and the pad that goes under the flooring has been difficult to deal with.  I am hoping things will go a little faster now.  When I do the mathmatical calculations, I have already laid more floor in this room than the bedroom, and in less time.  However, I am only about 1/4 of the way done. For someone like me who needs to see those results as a reward for hard work, this room is proving to be difficult.  And don't get me started on my aching knees and back....

Maybe I should just appreciate the ease of this glue together floor because all of the rest will be the messy adhesive kind.

Exterior Shots

I finally remembered to bring my camera with me this week to take some pictures of the exterior work that was done to the house.   Our contractor was Sheds and More and I was really happy with the work they did.




 

We still have some work to do ourselves, including staining the huge deck.  This will be a huge task since it is over 1000 square feets plus three sets of steps.  We aren't sure what color we will use yet but my husband says he wants a reddish brown.

We also need to put up the siding under the porch roof.  The current plan is to use cedar shingles for that siding but I am still trying to figure out how to install them.  Looks like some internet sites say you can just tack them to the wall, but the concern is that moisture collects behind them and makes them cup.  So the much more difficult way to install them is to put up furring strips and then tack the shingles to the strips that way there is air circulation behind the shingles.  I also think the shingles will need some type of sealer to keep their color.  My plan is to spray something on them before they go up so I don't have to deal with covering the rock. 

 

 

 

I can't wait to see the finished version - it already looks 100 times better than it did when we bought it.  Remember this unfinished rock siding?  Everyone thought we should tear it down and just put siding up on the wall.  But I think it turned out even better leaving the rock but leveling it off with a cap stone.

From top to bottom

Well, I finally finished the cedar ceiling.  I haven't posted anything new lately because I seemed to be working on the same thing over and over.  Now that it is pretty much complete, I am happy to move on to another project.  I still want to caulk where the beams meet the cedar and maybe fill in some of the finish nail holes.  But for now I am done.  I think it really warms up the room.

I still want to replace that ugly ceiling fan.  You can't see it in the picture but there is gold stencilling on the blades. But that is for another day...






So, now I am working on the new floor.  It will be an engineered hardwood that will be glued down in some areas and floating in others.  The style is a natural toned hickory which is fairly light colored with lots of variation and knots.  I am starting in the bedrooms so that I can load in some furniture soon.  I would love to sleep on a real bed instead of a twin bunk bed.  Anyway, the back bedrooms had carpet over cement foundation.  So I removed the carpet and pad, and pulled up the carpet tacks.  That left me with pits in the concrete, so I filled all of those in with patching compound.  I scraped the carpet pad glue and vacuumed all the dust.  I cut all of the trim around the doors so the flooring could run under it.

Today I started gluing down the flooring.  I have never glued down a floor so I had watched several youtube videos to get ready.  I went ahead and laid out three rows with all cuts already made so they would be ready to go once the glue was down.  I had gloves, a trowel, a chalk line, a mallet and some rages.  I was most nervous about the glue - how fast would it dry and how hard was it to clean up?  The giant can it comes in says not to let the glue come into contact with skin and to clean any glue off the floor immediately.  As the videos recommended, I struck a chalk line three rows away from the back wall and started trowelling the glue.  The glue was much thicker that I would have guessed.  It also got on everything very quickly.  It is pretty impossible to avoid getting any on the wood or your skin.  For some reason, getting the boards to fit together seemed much harder once they were sitting in the glue.  Everytime I would get a couple of boards in, the next one would push them apart.  It was very maddening.  The first three rows took a long time and had me screaming in frustration.  Finally, once these three looked good, the other rows went much faster and easier.  I am hoping that part of the problem was just learning to work with this flooring and that maybe the next room won't be so hard to start.  We'll see.  I did about 1/3 of the room before I had to leave for mom duty.  I hope to finish tomorrow.  This is an early shot.

 

 

Once I am done with the flooring in this room, I need to make a final decision about baseboards.  I am thinking about using plain cedar 1 x 4 with a light glaze.  I just make the glaze out of paint that I have that has been significantly thinned with water.  I will then coat with poly urethane.  I tried using a tan colored glaze on a sample but wasn't really happy with it.  I will try white tomorrow.  Once those baseboards are done, this room will be ready to load.  Wow, it will feel great to be done with a room.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Back to the grind tomorrow.  I hope some of this glue will come off my skin soon :-)

Exterior work and ceiling update

Sorry to be away so long but it has been a crazy couple of weeks.  I feel like I should be remodeling my car since that is where I am spending most of my time these days.  I have had the normal overcommitments with volunteering for activities associated with the kids.  But on top of that, I have had to be at the hill country house as much as possible because we have contractors working on the exterior.  There is a crew working on adding a partially covered deck and another crew installing new cement board siding and replacing rotted wood.  When these crews are done next week, the exterior will be close to where we want it to be.  That will only leave all the interior work on my long list of to-do items.  In the meantime, I spend over an hour in the car driving to and from the house, as well as trips to Home Depot, etc.

 

 Here are some before pictures of the exterior:

 

 

And, not quite after, but so far:

 

 

 



 

 

Did you notice the new addition in that last picture?  That guy has adopted us while we are working at the house this week.  He must live in the area and comes whenever he hears the construction sounds.  He's very friendly, especially to our female dog who was visiting this past weekend.  So friendly, we had to pull him off of her before he broke her 16 year old back legs :-)  But I digress.

 

 

Since I have been out at the house most days for at least a few hours, I have made some progress on my ceiling project.  I installed all of the wood I could using my 3-step ladder.  (I have shunned the larger ladder since it stranded me in the attic lookout.)  Here is what it looked like this morning:

But now I have a new toy!  I bought a small scaffold from Harbor Freight tools.  I knew I would need some kind of scaffolding to be able to complete the job and to replace the ceiling fan.  The dilemma, as always, is whether to rent or buy.  I could have rented a pretty large scaffold set for $15 - $30 per day.  In addition to the issue of needing the equipment for many days, the main consideration was how to transport the thing.  By the time I rented the equipment and a trailer to transport it, I could buy my own.  I have plenty of storage at this house, so there was no reason not to buy.  Hopefully I will find a use for this new toy again after this ceiling project.  So here is a picture of the scaffold:

I can raise or lower the board depending on the height I need.  I love it! I now wish that I had bought this before I started.  I was able to work on two areas at once.  So after an hour I had this much done:

Since I have finished putting polyurethane on all the boards, all I have to do is cut and nail.  At the rate the scaffold lets me work, I should be able to finish this ceiling in two more sessions of working.  That should be the same timeframe as the exterior project. 

So now that nothing is requiring me to be at the hill country house every day you might think I would take a break and oh, say, take care of my real house (which looks like college students live here).  But you would be wrong!  I just heard today that my flooring should be delivered as early as Monday.  So once I finish the ceiling, I can move directly to the floors.  Yea!

I'll update with the final pictures of the exterior and ceiling soon and let you know how I am proceedings with installing the hardwoods.  That's it for now.

 

e-mail updates

I am still figuring out this blog thing.  I have been asked by several readers to install the ability to receive an e-mail alert for new posts.  While I like the idea of inflating my blog hits with folks coming to check for new posts, I guess it is more convenient for the reader to only come when there is a new one.  So, I think I have added that ability on the right side.  You enter your e-mail address and hit submit.  You should get a message that makes you type in a word to make sure you aren't a robot. (Those raise my stress level since I can never completely read them and end up having to guess).  Then you will receive an e-mail asking you to confirm.  This is my test post to see if it works.  Thanks for reading!

Attics and ceilings...

Do you remember the wall I stripped the sheetrock from?  It is coming down so we can expand our smallest bedroom into a neighboring closet to create a large master bedroom.  So, before I took the sawzall to the studs, I thought I would check to make sure it wasn't a load bearing wall.  The best way I know to do that is to crawl up in the attic to see if any of the roofing or ceiling supports end right above the wall.  Since the weather has turned cool, this task isn't as bad as it could be in the summer.  If you haven't been up in your attic, I would recommend that you get up there and take a look around.  You will learn a lot about your house.

Our attic access is through the garage ceiling.  We don't have one of those attic stair sets but I wish we did.  So I brought our lightweight aluminum ladder from home and propped it under the access panel.  I popped my head up and looked around.  I was pleasantly surprised that the attic was spacious, even above the areas with raised ceilings.  We were predicting problems when we needed to move air ducts and add plumbing vents, but now I am not worried about that at all.  Let me get up there and see it close up....

Aaaaaa!  The ladder just collapsed underneath me and is now laying flat on the garage floor.  I have dropped down but caught myself on the sides of the attic access.  As I was hanging there, I was wondering how this was going to turn out.  I knew I had a contractor coming to give me a bid on the deck but that was in 30 minutes.  I couldn't hang on that long.  I threw off my flashlight to get a better grip of the wooden beams under my arms.  I can see that if I drop down I will land on the ladder and I really don't want to do that because I have a bad ankle from a previous rollerskating injury.  So while my arms are beginning to scream from muscle pain and wood scrapes, I was able to lower myself down to where I am hanging by my hands and can swing myself to the side to miss the ladder.  Here is the aftermath under one arm:

 After spewing every curse word I could think of and walking off my shock, I was able to figure out the problem with the ladder (slick garage floor + crappy old ladder = @$#^%&$%&).  I braced the ladder feet and went back up.  I know, what is the matter with me.  I walked around a little, careful to only step on the ceiling joists.  The attic could use a little more insulation in some spots.  I could even see room light coming in through the pot lights which means that the freezing air will enter during the winter and the air conditioning will escape in the summer.  I made my way over to the wall I wanted to remove and to my surprise, there are roofing supports that rest on that wall. Good thing I didn't just knock down the wall.

 

So, looks like we will need to add some kind of header where this wall is.  I'll start looking for a contractor for that soon.  For now that project is on hold.  On to the next - I will be working on the ceiling in the den.  There is popcorn between the cedar beams on the cathedral ceiling in the den.  Our plan is to cover that up with some type of wood.  I bought a pack each of pine and cedar 1/4 inch thick ceiling planks.  I did some samples of several stains as well as clear finish and I tacked them up to see what they looked like:

 

 

 

I like the cedar better than the pine (which you can barely see in one of the pictures).  I prefer it, not only for appearance, but also the cedar seemed to be easier to work with and better quality.  You cannot tell in the picture and it is barely noticeable in person, but the cedar is stained different colors.  I figure why go to the trouble of staining if you can barely tell. 

 

But the best part is that I got a really good deal on five boxes of the cedar today.  I will still need 24 boxes, but since they only had open boxes at Lowes and several pieces were damaged, the manager gave me 1/2 off.  I think I can work around most of the damaged areas so this saved me $50 today.  I am hoping I can get similar bargains around town at other Lowes since they are discontinuing this product.  I am such a sucker for a bargain!  Here is my work station where I am coating each board with polyurethane.  I think I will do two coats.

 

 

I will update with pictures once I start getting the pieces cut and nailed to the ceiling.  That's all for now!

 

 

Demolition Derby!

I decided to start my week off with a little destruction. Of all the phases of renovation, demolition is one of my favorite, second only to the final phase of placing the last piece of trim or hanging the last picture.  There is no other part of renovation where you can see the most change with the least skill and time.

In this project we are expanding one of the smaller bedrooms by incorporating a large master closet to make that the new master bedroom. Since we won't be living here, we really don't need a giant walk-in closet.  Demolishing the wall between the bedroom and closet took less than one hour.  So here are the before and after pictures, sorry for the picture quality, I only had my Blackberry with me:

There's nothing like swinging a sledgehammer with abandon.  My 11 year old was very disappointed that I did this without him.  He'll be able to break up the big pieces of sheetrock to throw into a trash bag later.

There are two outlets along this wall, as well as a phone line.  I will terminate the phone line in the attic since we are not planning to have a landline at this house.  The two outlets will be fairly easy to move by removing the wire between them, running each of them into the old closet area (it currently has no outlets so that is good), and running a new longer line through the attic to connect them again.  I will try to disturb as little sheetrock as possible.  Also, the light box in the old, small bedroom was centered on the room but will not be centered in the expanded room.  I was just going to move it to the new center but now I am thinking of just running another lightbox off that one which would conveniently go right into the slot where the old wall is.  That way, we would have two ceiling fans in the room and my husband can run the one on his sdie to his heart's delight without making me mad!  It also means less patching of the ceiling.  All good things.

The other issue that I will have to deal with, once I remove the studs, is that there is tile on the closet floor and popcorn on the closet ceiling.  From what I can tell in the rest of the house, the popcorn comes off really easily.  I am debating whether I need to take a batch to get tested for asbestos.  The previous tenants removed most of it from the house.  It looks like it scrapes right off and the closet might be the only area where I need to remove it.  I have no idea how difficult the tile will be.  I am hoping it pops off easy because it is a really ugly teal tile that fills the master bath as well.

The new master feels like a really good sized room.  The old room was 12 x 12 1/2 feet and will now be 18 x 12 1/2.  The added bonus for now is that the old closet used to be part of the original master bath and so now this new master has an access door to the master bath. 

I think the next big project is the den ceiling.  We have cedar beams in a vaulted ceiling.  The space between the beams is covered with popcorn.  Instead of removing the popcorn I am planning to install cedar v-groove planks.  I have experimented with different stains and finishes and I will tack some up to see how each looks.  Right now I am leaning toward the cedar with just a clear satin polyurathane finish.  I'll try to take more pictures next time.

New lock

I set out to change the front door lock on Friday and then to get a lot of other work done at the house.  Due to schedule changes, I did not get out to the house until 1 pm and only had a couple of hours to work.  But how long can it take to change a lock?  I have changed a number of interior and exterior door knobs and deadbolts in my time, so this would be a piece of cake.  I was excited to try out the Kwikset "Smart Key" that says it will let you rekey your own lock whenever you like. 

So I started with the front door handleset with deadbolt.  Surprisingly, I liked one of the cheapest version that was less than $100, so I got that one.  I took the old handleset and deadbolt off, taking care to keep them together just in case (a lesson I have learned in past).  I decided to try the deadbolt  first since that is the part with the key.  I got the handles lined up and screwed them tight.  Everything looked OK and seemed to work with the door open.  However, when I shut the door and locked the deadbolt it was very difficult to lock and impossible to unlock.  Nothing I could do would get the deadbolt to unlock.  I had to unscrew everything from the inside and still couldn't get the lock to release.  I called Kwikset and was waiting in the phone tree line when I tried using the interior bolt from outside the door while jiggling the lock when it released.  Whew!  I obviously did something wrong.  After trying to figure out my mistake and rereading the directions I tried again only to find the same result...four times. 

While waiting again in phone purgatory, I was about to reinstall the old deadbolt when I finally figured it out!  I had left the old strikeplate in the doorframe which was a slightly different shape than the new bolt.  So the lock was trying to fit into a hole too small and getting stuck.  Once I took the plate off, everything worked perfectly.  Installing the handset was not too bad except that it required a slightly larger hole in the door.  A chisel took care of that.  Long story short, the lock is installed and that is all I accomplished on Friday.

Next I will get a new lock for the back door and use that key to reset the front door so they both match.  The way the sets works is that you insert the current key 1/4 turn, then insert the rekeying tool, pull out the current key and insert the new key.  After a turn, the lock will now respond only to the new key.  The new key has to be another Kwikset key.  My plan is to buy a couple of more locks for the back doors and they have three sets of keys I can rotate in and out as needed.  What's the old saying about the best laid plans?  I'll let you know if it works out. 

Next trip out I plan to tear down a wall to expand a small bedroom into a large closet to create a new master bedroom.

Locks and keys

This week I went out to the house to meet some contractors regarding landscaping, deck, and water systems.  The creepy thing is that the front door to the house was open.  Not just unlocked, but ajar.  And there was a copy of our front door key on the front porch shelf.  I happened to be on the phone with a friend and she listened as I walked around the house to make sure nobody was there.  I didn't see anything that looked out of place or missing.  Like Goldilocks, I checked the beds to see if someone had slept there, but I don't think so.  Very weird.  Also, almost all of the windows were unlocked which could be new or not.  Maybe an old friend or housekeeper of the previous owner was returning their key and went in to check out changes we were making.  Who knows.

Needless to say, we are changing the locks.  At this point I am not worried about things being stolen because I doubt someone wants to haul away the various furniture items I have purchased using Craigslist.  But I really don't like the feeling of walking into a house where a stranger might be lurking. 

Anyway, so now the question: purchase all new locks or rekey existing locks.  Right now there are actually three keys to different deadbolts and no keys for the keyed handsets.  I don't know if a locksmith could get all the locks on the same key since they are probably all different brands.  So I went to Home Depot down the road and talked to the lock guy.  Apparently both Schlage and Kwikset have new locks out that you can rekey yourself.  Since we might someday rent out this house for various events, I think that might be a good investment.  So I bought a front door set and will try it out before I purchase the others.  I'll install Friday and then post about how easy or difficult it was.

So this visit was spent mostly with contractors and going shopping.  Not much got done.  I did install a toilet roll holder and clean the soot off the front of the fireplace.  I researched how to clean a stone fireplace and looked for an industrial cleaner called TSP.  Maybe they don't sell this anymore because I couldn't find it at Home Depot, Lowes or HEB.  So I just used some laundry detergent we had out there and a hard bristle brush.  Most of the soot came off fairly easily and wasn't as tough as the website led me to believe.  I guess the moral of this story is to try the easiest and least caustic thing first.

The weird thing about the fireplace was that there were hundreds of nails among the soot that I scooped out.  I assume the previous owners were just burning scrap wood that had nails in it.  But there were so many nails for so little soot I wonder if there is another reason.  Do people purposefully put nails into their fireplace for some reason like holding the heat longer?  If anyone has any ideas, true or make-believe, I would love to hear them.

That's all for now.  Next trip is tomorrow.

In the beginning...

So I am finally getting better about documenting the projects that I work on.  My husband Adam and I have been improving houses for about 15 years.  We try to take photos as we go along but that is never at the top of our list.  Some of my friends have told me that I should do something with these skills I have developed so I have decided to share the things I learn through a blog.  Also, it helps me document things about the house so I can reference it later.

I have a new canvas, so to speak, in a house we have purchase 45 minutes out of town.  It sits on a hillside with 13 acres and a great view of the Texas Hill Country.  We chose it because of the lovely setting, the wooded areas, and the fact that the house has "good bones."  It was built in the 1970's and added onto in the late 1980's so the decor is not great but that's where we come in.  I don't think there is a room in this house that we will not touch in some way.  Probably the utility room is the closest - it only needs a light and countertop.

We purchased the house from the second owners who thankfully painted all of the fake distressed-wood paneling white and removed most of the popcorn ceilings.  We have owned the house now for about 45 days and so far have painted a little bit.  The three smaller bedrooms were coated in this brownish color from ceilings to trim with the exception of the ugly dark brown Luan hollow doors.  The picture to the right doesn't do the ugly brown justice.  It looks like the previous owners bought two colors for this house, white and brown.  Everything is one or the other.
I have painted two of the bedroom ceilings with white Behr ceiling paint.  I have started using that for all ceilings that I paint because I find it is very hard to match whites.  This way I always know which paint will match it if I need to touch up later.

This house needs a great deal of work to the exterior.  It has not been maintained properly over the years so there is a lot of wood rot and erosion.  One of the first tasks is finding contractors to create some type of erosion control on the downslope of the house site.  We also want to add a large deck since the main thing we like about the house is the view.  We will likely have the same company work on those and I am getting bids for that right now.

One strange thing about this house is that the back wall has unfinished stonework on it.  It looks like it has been this way for years.  So the stonework only goes halfway up the wall although there is old tar paper stretching up the wall.  As it is, I don't think it is weathertight and likely collects moisture behind the rock when it rains.  We originally just thought we would tear down the half-wall but are now thinking of a new strategy involving the new deck.  We are taking bids to have a roof put over that part of the deck so that the rock would be covered.  That would protect it from the rain and save us from having to reside the whole area (which is very large).  We may or may not screen in this covered area but we love the idea of having fans with lights and the ability to put more comfortable furniture that is not total exposed to the weather.  We'll see how that turns out. 

We are also going to have the exterior wood replaced with Hardiplank to the extent possible.  The old cedar panels look like they are on their last legs as the sun is pretty bright out here.  Hopefully the cement siding will hold up better.  Once we are done with all the interior remodeling that might require vents to the roof, we will likely get a metal roof but that will be farther in the future and might be cost prohibitive.

So that's the brief introduction.  I will post more as I move forward on specific projects.