State of the 'Vation

State of the 'Vation! Get it? It's like, State of the NATION, but it's VATION, which is short for RENOVATION!

Okay, so it's not, but it totally should be.

Well, here we are, another year, another successfully completed Operation Fat & Happy (mostly the former, but enough of the latter to make up for it), and I thought it was time for a little general update/random assortment of words and almost-words to bring everyone up to date. Especially me, seeing as how the last two weeks or so are a barely-remembered haze of head colds, coffee with eggnog, and lots and lots and lots of really good food - often, but not always, at the same time.

(Note: The preceding paragraph was written just after New Years, and this has been sitting around in draft form since then. I apologize for the delay. Still fat, though.)

Our current project is probably my least-favorite project we've ever done. No, seriously: I hate everything about it. Everything. But it didn't start out that way...

So, we did a little laundry room renovation this past summer, and the room itself turned out great. It started out pretty ratty and outdated, obviously (and full of crap):

We took out all the crappy old trim and cleaned the walls off REALLY well:

Bonus! This Week In Mayonnaise!

I have absolutely no idea what that was about. It was an old drink coaster, stuck to the wall with mayonnaise, covering up a hole in the wall that was filled in with... mayonnaise. I... yeah. Just... no.

Then we painted the whole room a beautiful, warm grey color and put down some pretty stellar vinyl plank flooring, right over the linoleum.

We even cleaned up and repainted the security bars on the window. Not that I think we NEED security bars on the window, but they were already there, and repainting them was easier than trying to fill the enormous holes in the window sashes left by the mounting hardware.

The flooring is great stuff - way better than the crap we installed in the sunroom. No stupid adhesive tabs for one thing; it actually locks together like engineered hardwood. Super easy to install, really heavy duty, and easy to clean. Looks pretty snazzy, too.

Once all that was done - and pretty easily, I might add - the real problems started. See, the War Department really wanted some built-in storage to hold the vacuum cleaner (currently stored in a relatively empty corner in whatever room it happened to have last been used) along with a few other bits and pieces. So, she came up with a design/general layout, and left it up to me to figure out the actual mechanics and implementation.

"No problem," I thought. "I got a garage full of tools and I've always wanted to make some built-in units!"

I'm an idiot, but you already knew that, and I'm getting ahead of myself anyway.

The overall design looked something like this (too lazy to figure out how to draw it up in SketchUp, even though it would probably be a good exercise):

That's three separate cabinets with doors (including a big one for the vacuum cleaner), a cubby on the bottom left without for the cat boxes, and a large open space on one side for the little chest freezer. The only common mesaurement was that they would all be 24" deep. The cabinets would go from floor to ceiling, and be attached directly into the studs in the walls.

I planned to make three separate units: one for the top right cabinet, one for the top left, and another that comprised the vacuum cubby and the open space for the cat boxes.

Here's a list of just some of the things that went wrong (in very rough chronological order):

• After cutting, painting, and assembling the cabinets in the garage, I brought them in to the laundry room to install them and THEN realized that the walls of the laundry room weren't actually square, and my oh-so-carefully built cabinets would have to be heavily shimmed before they could make contact with the walls. 
• When I measured, I had measured the distance at the FRONT of the cabinets - the room narrowed into the corners, meaning that I had to recut one of the cabinets (one I fortunately hadn't assembled yet) before it would fit.
• There was exactly ONE useful stud in each of the three walls. 
• The cabinets were so heavy and unwieldy that I bashed the hell out of the walls and ceiling trying to jimmy them into place.  
• I had glued and nailed the face trim to the front of the first cabinet before realizing that the face trim had to span both cabinet edges - I had to take it off and do a lot of scraping to get the faces flat again.
• I finally had a chance to use my fancy new (to me - I bought it used from the same guy who sold me the saw) Veritas Shelf Pin Drilling Jig to make adjustable shelf pins. The first cabinet went fine, but in my excitement and foolish confidence, I accidentally drilled the holes for the second cabinet in the top and bottom of the unit, rather than the sides. Which meant patching approximately 48 holes and repainting the entire cabinet. Not gonna lie: that really hurt.
• I had to redesign the face frame mid-build because I failed to account for a surface large enough to accept and support decent hinges. Oh, and I had to buy different hinges because the ones I was planning to use looked horrible.
• I had drilled a hole in the side of the litter box cubby hole because the plug was on the opposite side of the center piece from the freezer (of course). Stupid me drilled it too small and I had to cut out a larger one with a hole saw.
• I ordered some poplar from a store to make the doors out of (I had heard it was easy to work with and took paint really well). I went all the way out to the store in Langford the following weekend to pick it up and the guys in the yard in Vancouver had forgotten to actually put it on the truck - and then misplaced it. It didn't show up at the store for another two weeks. 
• I had to take the freshly installed, painted, and caulked trim off the door between the laundry room and family room so I could get the top right cabinet in. 
• Whilst reinstalling and repainting the trim, Amy noticed that the paint I was using was really shiny, and didn't match the existing paint. That's because I had inadvertently bought "medium base" instead of, you know, paint. I had to repaint the door trim on both doors in the laundry room - AND all of the cabinet trim, cabinet interiors, AND the cabinet doors, just as I thought they were ready to install. 
• When I finally finished painting the doors for the second time and went to install them, I realized that the curve in the wall to which I had carefully matched my face trim meant that the door on the top left cubby was overlappping on the top and gapped on the bottom - even with the hinges at maximum opposite adjustments. I had to remove and cut down the doors - and then repaint them to remove the marks left by the table saw.
• At which point Amy and I agreed that the finish on the doors was terrible (mostly due to the foam roller I had been using) and I had to repaint them all for a third time - by hand - to cover it up.
• Oh, and one last little indignity (and one Amy doesn't actually know about yet) I spent a VERY enjoyable evening in the shop making a sweet little jig for installing the handles. It worked like an absolute charm and the door handles are all lined perfectly (which is important because of all the parallel lines involved in the design). They're just a quarter inch too low because I measured the wrong damn thing. But because I double-checked before I drilled, I realized that the jig was wrong before I drilled the first hole. I went ahead and drilled them all anyway because god damn it I had just about had enough.

There's more (of course), but I'm depressed now just remembering all of it and I want to stop writing this. 

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would, but oh my god I would do almost EVERYTHING differently. Starting with the design, damn it. Who the hell thought 24" deep cabinets was a good idea? (Besides me, obviously...)

But, they ARE done - mostly empty still , but done:

Aloha! And, uh, other types of greetings, I suppose

Wow. It's been an interesting month (and a half another month). So interesting that I just couldn't be bothered to share it with anyone?

No? Not buying it?

Well, maybe now that I'm old (like, FORTY) my memory is shot and I just forgot I even HAD a blog? Sure, let's go with that. What were we talking about again?

Right! Hawaii! Aloha and all that! Yes, we went to Hawaii (Maui, to be precise) and it was absolutely everything you might expect a tropical vacation in the middle of winter could be. Fantastic. And surprisingly renovation-free. Or maybe not surprisingly. Whatever. We're back, and it's cold and wet here, and totally not Maui. Boo.

But, and here's where I start to sound like a broken record, you don't come here to read about our vacations, do you?

"Shut yer yap," you say. "Get to the renos and the mistakes and the mayonnaise and the hurting yourself! Especially the hurtings!"

Well, tough. This is what Haleakala and the eastern side of Maui look like from above:

Soooooo many thanks to M & M for the helicopter tour, by the way. Absolutely a high-light of our trip, and an unforgettable experience.

Sigh. I miss Maui. Fish tacos every day. World's best pineapple. Snorkeling with sea turtles. Sigh.

Anyway, enough of that - okay, one more, looking across the street from our hotel at sunset the first night:

Okay, maybe two:

Sigh.

 

 

Anyway, we ARE back, hard at work on the sunroom renovation, and while I think I've missed photographing a few steps (especially on the inside), I think you'll agree that it's really coming along nicely. First, here's a few shots that I didn't post last time of the work our contractor Mike did to the outside:

You can see how the siding now tucks UNDER the flashing on the side of the roof instead of butting up against it. You know - like it's SUPPOSED to.

And to prove that we haven't exactly been neglecting the inside, either:

Probably a good time to mention that the War Department really has done the lion's share of the finishing work so far. I put the trim up, but she's done pretty much all the painting and caulking. I installed the floor tiles, but she was the one who cleaned it all up and put down the underlayment.

Man, I haven't even explained why we wound up using those vinyl planks again, have I? Sheesh - I really suck at this blogging thing.

To make a long story short, when we started ripping up the carpet and whatnot in the sunroom, we found what we thought (at the time) was something of an oversight on the builder's part. See, about a foot in from the wall, all around the outside perimeter of the sunroom was what looked like a two-by-four buried in the concrete. (You can see it in the original picture I took of the moldy corner here.)We thought (at the time) that the builders had been lazy and just left their forms in place when pouring the two portions of the slab. Especially seeing as how it looked like it had been sealed up (at the time) with mayonnaise. When we got around to demolishing the rest of the sunroom, I yanked out the old moldy strips of wood that turned out to just be two-by-twos and figured that (at the time) I was doing the right thing. We planned (at the time) to fill in the gap with hydraulic cement.

Well, as it turned out (at the time), those WEREN'T forms but an actual on-purpose, designed part of the sunroom slab - called an expansion joint. Meaning that hydraulic cement would probably be the absolute worst thing to use to fill in the gap. Who knew?

Okay, fine, so we needed to replace the wooden slats. No worries, right? Get some pressure-treated two-by-twos, cut 'em to fit and smack 'em down. Just as well, we thought (at the time) because man, that hydraulic cement is expensive, and we would have needed quite a lot of it.

Of course, the other thing that's expensive is Ditra. That's the orange rubbery stuff you see Mike Holmes putting down underneath his tiles. Of course, he's on TV, he can afford it. We can't - which is a problem because we really can't tile over an expansion joint without it, just in case the expansion joint, you know, EXPANDS. No Ditra means cracked grout at worst, and more likely cracked tiles.

Anyway, after a lot of back and forth and discussion, we settled on using the vinyl planks we had used in the laundry room at the old place. Worst-case scenario: we take them out in a few years and tile over. You know, once we've saved up a million dollars to spend on frakkin' Ditra.

 

Oh, and I believe I mentioned the shelf I was building when I nailed my finger? Yeah, it turned out pretty nice, too:

Can't even seen the blood from that angle, can you? (It was all on the inside anyway.)

 

Well, that's it for now; aside from a little more pointless moping about Maui, of course. Which reminds me; obligatory Mountain Don shot:

It's a thing, okay? Shut up.

 

Anyway, I'm really not lying when I say I've actually already written the next post. But I needed to finish this one first, and realized halfway through that I was missing a lot, and decided to go back and add it and then it started getting out of hand, so I split the post into two pieces. Really. I'll publish the next one as soon as I get the pictures figured out.

No, really. This one time, I'm not even lying.

 

Why doesn't anyone believe me?

 

 

Oh, right. All that other lying.

 

 

(Man, I wasn't raised very well at all, was I? My parents must be terrible people. I blame them.)

 

 

So... wanna buy a house?

No, not our house. Well, not our current house.

This one is on the market again.

Doesn't look like they've done much to it, aside from destroying the exterior with a whole bunch of ugly landscaping, and wasting a lot of perfectly good cedar turning the downstairs workshop into a laundry room. And given that what they're asking isn't a whole lot more than what they paid US for it, I don't think they're being motivated by any potential capital gains, if you know what I mean.

I'm tempted to go and take a tour if they have an open house, but the War Department has no interest in it at all. Something about preferring the memories over whatever travesty has been foisted upon it since we gave it up. Actually, I can see her point.

But anyway, I'm sure nobody comes here for updates on the old shed. You want to know what's up with the new digs, right? Well, we're mired in that unbelievably interminable stretch of paint, fill, sand, paint, fill, sand, sand, vacuum, beer, sand, fill, paint, etc. Which is a pretty accurate summary of doing the trim in the War Department's office/our new guest room.

I would give you a preview of what it looks like but a) it looks a lot like my office, only slightly bigger and slightly brighter, and b) I just painted the window sills and had to erect a cat barricade to keep the little bastards from jumping up onto the fresh paint:



And before some smart-ass (Dad) asks why I didn't just close the door to keep them out, it's because the door frame is also wet, and I haven't hung the door yet.

But the floor is done, the new curtains should arrive sometime this week (thanks, Mom!), the trim is almost, almost, almost finished, and with a little luck and some more work, we should be moving furniture in this weekend and getting our respective rooms together.

Oh, and speaking of flooring, we've got about 150 sq. ft. or so left of Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron engineered hardwood flooring - anyone want some? Cheap?

Happy birthday to meee

I hate to admit it, but I just might have found the one renovation task that, well, I actually enjoy. I've certainly expounded at length on how much drywalling or insulating or digging sucks, but there have been precious few tasks that I've admitted to not hating.

Flooring, on the other hand... well, I actually LIKE it. I mean, if I didn't enjoy it, why would I spend the entire day - on my birthday of all days - looking forward to leaving work so I could get home and do some more of the flooring in my office? I even considered bailing out early so I'd have more time to work on it and maybe even get it all done before bed, instead of having to finish it later in the week. (As it turns out, I didn't leave early, and I therefore had to finish it later in the week, but hey - I actually looked forward to that part, too.)

Anyway, I thought that maybe the best way to explain why I like it would be to try and document the process. So, without further ado, this is how to lay an engineered hardwood floor - the Don and Amy's Broadmead Reno way.

The first step is to clean, scrape, sweep, patch, fill, and prep the subfloor. This may, as in our case, include a half-box of coated floor screws driven in every eight inches or so along the joists to tighten up any warped boards and reduce the amount of squeaking. If you have a War Department, get her to to do it: she's really good at it. Also, get her to patch the floor if you can, because that stuff is hard to work with and she's probably already got the knee pads on from putting in the screws anyway.

So, once the patching compound is dry, give the room a good sweep and a quick vacuum, and you should have something like this:



Nice colour, eh? It's yet another Restoration Hardware-inspired choice, called "butter". (We used the "saffron" from the same collection in our bedroom, and the "butter cream" in the downstairs hallway.)

The next step is to gather all your tools. If you're like us (and who isn't?) you probably keep all of your tools in the garage, which requires several hundred trips up and down the stairs because of course you're working on the room that is the furthest you can possibly get from the garage and still be in the same house. Once you've gathered everything you think you will possibly need, organize them on the opposite side of the room from where you intend to start putting down your floor:



From left to right (mostly), the assembled tools are:

• Work light: used to mess up your sense of time so you can keep working long after it gets dark and you should have stopped for something to eat.


• Ear protection: almost everything you're working with is LOUD. Especially the compressor.


• Hammer: used for pounding things, like staples that didn't go in quite far enough.


• Nail set: (hidden behind the hammer) used to keep the hammer from hitting the flooring and wrecking the edges when a staple didn't go in quite far enough.


• Screwdriver: not required, actually, unless you left it downstairs, in which case you WOULD need it and have to go downstairs (again) to get it.


• Box cutter: used for cutting the underpad and (sometimes) fingers, and opening the boxes.


• Safety gogglers: like the screwdriver, completely unnecessary unless you don't have them, in which case a freak, never-happen-again-in-a-million-years accident will send a staple directly into your eye socket. (I wore mine.)


• Pencil: used to make pencil marks.


• Tape measure: used to determine where the pencil marks should go.


• Brad nailer: not actually the ideal tool for this. We really should be using 16-gauge nails, but our little nailer only takes 18-gauge. Given that the flooring is really light, however, and I can make up for the weaker nails by using more of them, I figure we can get away with it.


• Stapler: used to pin down the underpad to the subfloor so it doesn't move around while you're trying to work on it.


• Floor stapler: I love this thing. It's my second favourite tool, behind the reciprocating saw (of course).


• Big-ass box of staples: surprisingly economical, given how much the smaller packs cost. I'll never use these up - not in this house, anyway - but it was still cheaper than trying to buy a bunch of smaller boxes.


• Way-too-long air hose: seriously - WAY too long.


• The Incredible Hulk: our Kawasaki air compressor that we bought for a ridiculous price at Costco. This thing is loud, large, and in charge, baby. And really hard to get up the stairs. I actually filled it up while it was still in the garage because it's REALLY loud, and I figured the cats would appreciate not having the Hulk roaring away on a bare wooden floor for half-an-hour.


• Big roll of underpad: there should be lots left over to do the War Room.

Also required, but not shown (and therefore most likely requiring a separate trip back downstairs to fetch them when you realize you've forgotten them):

• Flooring blocks: used to brace against the lip/edges of the flooring so you can whack them into place with the hammer without having to whale directly on the floor. Still can't believe I forgot about these things when I was prepping - you literally can't do flooring without them.


• Scrap blocks: used to ensure you have adequate space around the edges of the floor to allow for expansion.


• Broom: to make sure there aren't any little bits of wood or other debris underneath the underpad before you staple it all down.


• Magic bar: to pry up the first row after you screw it up (I'll get to that in a minute).


• Pliers: to pull out staples that didn't go in anywhere close to far enough.


• Knee pads: cause, otherwise, your back is going to burn like the fire. Oh, and your knees, too.


• Chalk line: trust me on this one.

So, once all of the necessary tools and materials have been gathered (the actual flooring itself - Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron - has been sitting in the upstairs hallways and bedroom closets for more than a year; it's the one thing I DIDN'T have to bring up from downstairs), it's time to get busy.

I started by measuring the width of the room to make sure that the last row wouldn't wind up being an inch thick or anything. Luckily, the room size and the width of the planks match up fairly well, and the final row should be about four inches - close enough for government work! Let's get started!

The first step is to lay down a piece of underpad. The stuff we're using is supposedly designed for maximum noise reduction under engineered hardwood, and we got a big roll of it when we got the floor. Next, I grabbed a few likely pieces of our fine flooring and started laying them out.

Now, when working that close to the wall, you can't use the flooring stapler because the handle and the magazine for the staples stick out the back - you simply can't get the tool close enough to the wall to place it over the tongue of the flooring (unless you've got 12" wide planks, which... we don't). So you have to use either a hammer and nails, or - like me - a brad nailer held at just the right angle. It also means you have to be extra careful putting in the first few pieces - which I certainly THOUGHT I was.

Uh, not so much. The first row I put it looked okay, but once I started laying out the second row, I realized I didn't quite have it perfectly straight - the next pieces were not fitting anywhere near tightly enough. So I pulled them all up and tried again.

The next attempt seemed to go in quite a bit better, and I even got the floor stapler going to snug up the second row. Unfortunately, once I took a closer look, I realized that I had followed the wall a little too closely - because the wall was curved.

You can't see it in this picture, but trust me, this is not good enough:



So I ripped it all up again, and did what I should have done the first time: asked the War Department what I was doing wrong. She suggested that we get the chalk line out, and measure equal points from the far wall - that way the flooring would stay straight as it came across the room. We did, and snapped a nice clean line that I could use to line up the first row of planks.

Much as I hate to admit it (any more than I absolutely have to, anyway), she was totally right, and the third try produced a nice, tight, straight first row that only looked better once the second and third rows were installed. (It's a good thing we've got extra wood!)



Once I got to the fourth row, however, I had to deal with the first finicky bit; the closet opening:



Fortunately, I had actually planned ahead (shocker, I know) and aside from having to make a couple of extra trips up and down the damn stairs to trim up the inside piece on the table saw, I managed to wrap the wood around without any problems, and got in a couple more rows before I ran out of working hours and had to call it a night:





The next night was actually my birthday, and with the War Department out at the opera (gettin' sum kulcher), I was free to keep plugging away at it to my heart's content. Which I did. Got a fair bit done, too; I was doing so well, I had to stop and remind myself to take a picture so as not to let it all get away from me (I had to move the compressor and work light to the other side of the room anyway):



And here's where I stopped for the night and treated myself to one of the excellent Scottish beers my Crazy Neighbour™ left on the front steps for me in honour of my birthday (seriously, is there anything in this world better than free surprise beer? I doubt it...)



It was actually about 10:30 at that point, and I had reached the limit of what I could do with the floor stapler. See, you need a fair amount of room on the front side of the stapler too, what with having to swing the big-ass mallet around to drive in the staples. From that point on, it would be mostly the nail gun and a lot of finicky work around the door opening and up against the wall, and I was utterly gassed.

I couldn't work on it Tuesday night, but on Wednesday I geared up again and, after a quick jaunt over to Home Despot to pick up some more nails for the nailer, I got right back at it and finished it all off:





Even tidied up a really narrow bit tight up against the wall inside the closet, too:



All in all, I'm quite pleased. It looks really good, and the War Department did a great job of locking down the subfloor, so it's really solid and doesn't squeak a bit. So now, it's off to Rona to get some trim, and then the fiddly stuff REALLY gets going.

While you're all here, though, it's been a while, so here's another edition of everyone's favorite feature,

The Injury Report

The good news is that I didn't hurt myself while doing the floor and therefore avoided splashing blood all over the new hardwood. No, it was actually a couple of weeks ago that I smashed my left hand with a hammer and walked around with a bit of a bruise for a few days.

Why did I smash my hand?
See, I was fixing an axe, and trying to knock the old handle out of the axe head. I was holding the axe head on a stump while swinging at it with a hammer. I missed the piece of metal I was using to drive out the handle, and whacked myself a good one right on the base of my thumb.

Why was I fixing my axe?
It's not my axe, it's Amy's.

Why was I fixing Amy's axe?
Because I broke it. Again.

What do I mean, again?
Well, TECHNICALLY, it's the first time I've broken THIS axe. Which is actually her splitting wedge. The other axe, well...

Did I break Amy's other axe?
Yes.

How many times?
Twice.

How many times?
TWICE. (And no, despite what Amy says, I really only broke it twice. She says three times, but the "third" time I broke it, I hadn't fixed it from the second time yet, and I just, well, I finished breaking it - totally doesn't count as a separate break.)

Did I fix that other axe?
Yes.

How many times?
Twice, now. After I finished fixing the splitting wedge, I fixed the other one. Again. So I fixed two axes that day I hurt my hand.



Am I going to break her axe again?
No.

Why not?
Because she won't let me use her axes anymore. I had to go and buy my own. Ones with fiberglass handles.

Why do I break so many axes?
Cause I'm good with tools.



In my defence, I've never broken her hatchet, and I've used it plenty of times.



Yes, I know it has a metal handle.

Shut up.

Stay-cation: Day Three

Just a quick update on yesterday before I go get started...

Yesterday was all about two things: getting the bathroom painted, and planning out the tile placement for the floor.

Two coats of Restoration Hardware's "Flax" later:



After realizing we kinda got shafted in terms of how many tiles were scratched or otherwise crappy, and having to plan out where to put the bad tiles to minimize their effect on the floor:



I'm off to Home Depot to pick up the tile saw. It's going to be a long day...

My very first hardwood floor (part last)

Interesting thing about breaking up a six-month old renovation story into three parts, and then spreading it across a three-month span: you kinda forget where you were going with it in the first place.

In the first part of our little saga, I went into (excruciating) detail about how we bought the hardwood flooring for downstairs and then bought more flooring for downstairs and decided to use the first batch upstairs. In the second part, I started explaining how we took the popcorn off the ceiling and (somehow) went off on a tangent to show a few pictures of the reorganized garage, and then got back on track long enough to post a picture of my new flooring tool before pausing the story so I could throw in another episode of This Week in Mayonnaise.

So here we are, all gathered for part three (finally!), and I have absolutely no recollection of what it is I was planning to say in this post. Huh. Maybe if I just start typing, the muses will visit me with inspiration. Worked for Hesiod, didn't it? Except he was sort of more a chiseler than a typist, if you know what I mean.

I'm getting off track again, aren't I?

Right, so. We had leveled the floor as best we could, borrowed Mr. Awesome's compressor, bought a cheap but perfectly serviceable flooring stapler, and we were ready to go. Somehow, and I seriously have no idea how, I completely failed to take a single picture of the flooring in progress. Not one.

I guess that's sort of a testament to how straight-forward the whole job was, really. It got kinda repetitive, but then I got into the tricky bits around the closet, which got interesting, and then ... well, it was done. Didn't even really take me that long, if I remember correctly. Maybe about 24 hours total work? I think I rented the nail gun for about 12 hours, anyway. (Couldn't use the flooring stapler on the first row, or the rows nearest and inside the closet.)

We added baseboard and trim, filled and painted the holes, painted the closet doors (that was fun - not!), and we were done. Pretty easy, I have to say. The hardest part was the fact that the saws were all down in the sunroom at the time, and every time I had to cut a piece to start or finish a row, I had to measure the piece, take it downstairs, cut it, take it back upstairs and put it in. Still, nothing too out of the ordinary. I even hesitate to say it, but really, I didn't mind doing the flooring. Beats drywall, any day of the week.

In fact, I don't even have a picture of the finished room. I'll have to go take one specifically for this post...

Okay, so here's the deal: the bedroom's a bit of a mess right now. We got a new bed frame, but we couldn't get the mattress we wanted, so the old queen mattress is balanced precariously on the new king frame and, well, it looks bad. Also, we still haven't hung up any of our artwork in there or anything, so for now, no full on shots of the finished room. I do have a couple of the floor, however, so you can see how it looks with the baseboard, trim, and paint.





Pretty snazzy, eh? (Please ignore the huge tufts of cat fur - it's a never-ending issue.) I promise, REALLY promise, that I will post some shots of the finished room once we get the new mattress in, the artwork hung up, and the stupid pull thingy on the drapes fixed. Promise.

So, yeah... sorry the final part of this saga turned out to be such a let down. To make it up to you, how about a very special edition of everyone's favorite feature,

This Week In Mayonnaise

This week, not one, but TWO new uses for mayonnaise never before seen!

First up, we have the issue of the side gate. Now, as a deer deterrent, this thing has always been pretty much useless:



Even if we could remember to keep the side gate closed on a regular basis, the deer just jump the low hedge beside the gate and continue their merry plant-munching way into the back yard. Still, we didn't really have any immediate plans to replace it with something better.

Heh, silly us.

The War Department happened to be poking around over there the other day and noticed that the whole gate was leaning precariously in toward the back yard. Whether a deer nudged it over or the fact that only about twelve inches of each post was actually underground had finally caught up with it, the gate had lost any sort of structural integrity it may have had. Of course, she called me over to take a look at it, and it wasn't long before my usual inclinations took hold (DESTROY!)and the entire thing was lying on the grass beside the hedge. Oh, gee, something else that's broken. What a surprise.

On closer inspection however, we noticed a familiar substance caked on at the top of one of the uprights:



"Huh," I said to the War Department. "Well, THERE'S your problem!"

And finally, for this special edition of This Week In Mayonnaise, I need to take you, dear readers, all the way back to only our second week in the house. Boxing Day, in fact, when the War Department took it upon herself to start scoping out some of the electrical boxes and switches. She was working industriously in the sunroom, having shaken her head in wonder at the dog's breakfast that constituted the two outlets on the outside wall, and was about to head in to continue her inspection in the family room when something caught her eye.

A square of wallpaper was glued crookedly over a bulge in the wall on the side of the sunroom, at about the right height for an electrical outlet. She warily peeled back the paper and discovered a blank face plate for an electrical box.

Acting on a sudden suspicion, she looked outside, at the other side of the sunroom wall. Sure enough, there was the tale-tell sign of a piece of repurposed sprinkler pipe jutting out from the wall and disappearing into the ground outside. Sighing, she sat down next to the outlet and removed the faceplate, expecting to have to disconnect yet another badly wired connection.

Instead, she hit the motherlode:



Oh yeah. Solid mayonnaise, baby. Makes your arteries harden just thinking about it, don't it?

My very first hardwood floor (part two)

Weren't we discussing something about a floor?

When last we checked in on the progress of the flooring, we had successfully completed hiring someone to successfully complete our floor. Sweet. Of course, we told them we'd take care of the trim ourselves, and we're still working on that, what is it, six months later? (Six months? Holy crap. You'd think we had to plan a wedding or something.)

But we've been banging away at it since Christmas (off and on), and it looks really really good, and I'd especially like to thank my brother, who helped with quite a bit of the trim in the last week before the wedding - if only so he could actually spend time with me because I was otherwise too busy to pay attention to him and his new son (cute as he was). I'm a terrible brother and a rotten uncle. (The jury is still out on what kind of a husband I'll make, but if I were you, I'd bet the under.)

(Man, this post got off track in a hurry again, didn't it?)

Anyway, remind me to post some shots of the finished trim in the dining room, kitchen, and hall, would you? Actually, if you could remind me to TAKE some shots of the finished trim so I have some to post, that would be great.

So, on to the upstairs. The carpet throughout the upstairs of the house was the same as the crappy stuff throughout the downstairs. Only worse. Dustier, dirtier, and more off-putting for the War Department's allergies. Which is why we were sleeping downstairs in the "family room" for the first few weeks. She couldn't spend more than a few minutes near the carpet without breaking out in sneezes or hives or whatever it is allergy sufferers have to deal with. (What am I, a doctor?)

The War Department is also apparently allergic to popcorn ceilings - or at least, so she claimed. Which meant a couple of successive evenings on top of the stepladder misting and then scraping a whole whackload of cellulose off the ceiling. Oh - but not right away. I had to get it tested for asbestos first. After the vermiculite in the attic of the last house, I wasn't taking any chances.

Good thing, too, considering what an unholy mess this job turned out to be.



I have to say, though, once we started scraping it off, I could see just how unbelievably dirty it really was. I mean, it was absolutely covered in invisible cobwebs, dead bugs, dust, and whatever else happened to be light enough to float up there and stick to all the little protrusions.

Anyway, once we'd scraped off all the popcorn, it was time to call our old friend Tony, the drywall artiste. It took him three trips, but he got the ceiling looking like it was brand new.

Oh, while he was here, he also took care of a few minor things downstairs in the living room. The ungodly mess over the fireplace, for example, that was left when we tore off the old, ugly, shabby-ass mantel.

This piece of shit:



Before Tony's magic:



After:



(It's a different color because it's still wet.)

Now that we have the workbenches set up in the garage, I can start maybe thinking about how to build a new mantel for there.

What's that? Oh, yeah, we spent last Saturday (ALL of last Saturday) taking everything out of the garage, organizing a bit of a workspace, and then stuffing it all back in again. Okay, so some of the eighteen brazillian boxes of books went into the house itself, but most of it just got reorganized and stored in the garage.

When we started:



After what felt like 12 hours or so of moving the same box four hundred times:



Wow.. so much for staying on topic, eh?

Anyway, once Tony was done working his particular brand of magic on the ceiling, it was time to paint:



And once THAT was done, it was time to break out the screws and some levelling compound and try to get the floor as flat as we could before actually laying the flooring. Which was right about the time I started thinking seriously about how to actually attach the floor to ... the floor.

I mentioned in the last post about the floor that the flooring we bought was tongue and groove. Rather than float it, I figured we should staple it down - mostly because we could, and its preferable to floating. Only problem was, well, I'm not the world's fastest floorer. (Not a word, but oh well.) So renting a tool would most likely be cost-prohibitive, as they say. Fortunately, Mr. Awesome had a compressor we could borrow, so that was no problem, but he didn't have a stapler, or a nailgun that used the right gauge of nails.

So, once again, it was off to Home Despot, where we were lucky enough to find this little beauty on sale:



As the tool salesman told us, it's not exactly professional grade, but would easily hold up for the 800 or so square feet of our project, and at a price that was only about two-and-a-half days worth of renting a similar stapler. So we bought it.

And it turned out to be a good purchase, actually, as we shall see in the NEXT installment of My Very First Hardwood Floor! But now, it's time for another edition of our new feature,

This Week In Mayonnaise!

Way back when, I pointed out that Frank (the previous owner) had a rather haphazard approach to electrical, particularly when it came to running lines to his various fountains and outside outlets. I believe I mentioned that he used leftover sprinkler piping to run the "wiring" (I use the quotes because I refuse to refer to the use of speaker wire and leftover bits of extension cords as actual wiring) from within the house to the outside outlet. This was accomplished by the simple expedience of drilling holes in the outside of the house and then attaching his "wiring" to the nearest electrical outlet. Here's an example (note that this is the only one where he used actual electrical wires):



Now, Frank wasn't so stupid or senile to be completely unaware of the dangers of mixing water with electricity, and (you can see where I'm going with this) the idea of running his "wiring" through a sprinkler pipe must have fired off the right neurons or something, because he took it upon himself to carefully seal the joints in his sprinkler pipes.

Three guesses what he used to seal those joints, and the first two don't count: