The roof, she is new, yes?

The single biggest thing that we knew was wrong about this house coming in was the roof. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons we could afford this house at all was because someone else had put in an offer on it, but the deal had fallen through once the potential buyers found out that the roof would absolutely positively need to be replaced within the year. So Frank, the owner, promptly dropped the asking price to account for the cost of a new roof, and the house fell right into our wheelhouse.

Needless to say, we'd been dreading this particular chore, and not only because of the price. Both the War Department and I have done roofing before - not a whole lot, mind you - but more than enough to know that there was no way in hell we'd be doing this job ourselves. We'd have to hire somebody, and that meant dealing with quotes, supervising gangs of deadbeat roofers and their delinquent helper monkeys, and all the other fun, fun, fun stuff that goes along with it. Not to mention the possibility of having to use vacation days to make sure the company we would hire was doing a decent job.

So imagine our surprise when we were absolutely inundated with recommendations for good roofers! There was only one company we were strongly warned away from, and having seen some of their work on houses in our old neighbourhood, we hadn't planned on even contacting them anyway. This was almost an exact opposite of the situation when we were looking for movers, by the way; in that case, we had exactly one recommendation, and uncountable warnings of shiftless deadbeat assholes. (For the record, the movers we hired were fast, on time, and generally awesome - and charged us LESS than the quoted price. Yeah. Just about gave me a heart attack.)

Well, we got a couple roofing quotes (one from the company our Crazy Neighbour^TM across the street used), and eventually picked the company who gave us an itemized quote and came with a hearty recommendation from some friends. (And also took the time to point out how our neighbour's roofers had screwed up, and how they would do it differently and why.) I must admit, I was a little concerned that the company we hired wasn't actually listed in the phone book, but they'd been in business for 25+ years based solely on word-of-mouth, so that had to be worth something, right?

Turns out, it WAS worth something: they did a hell of a good job. It took them a little longer then they had anticipated, partly due to getting some wrong materials from the supplier, and partly because of the BRUTAL temperatures during the first week. It was so hot, the shingles were melting! Well, okay, not melting, but walking on them would have scuffed them up too much, so they had to wait until later in the evening before they could lay out the shingles. On a couple of nights, they couldn't START shingling until seven p.m. (There was also a small incident with the War Department's favorite garbage can - don't ask - but that was resolved and it's all better now.)

Just for reference, here's the shabby mess we inherited from Frank (as usual, click any picture you want to see it embiggenated):





Yeah. Twenty-year shingles after twenty-five years? So not good. Very ungood, in fact.

Anyway, I could go on and on about how things went, but I figured pictures work best in SOME situations, so... here's a photo essay on the whole process - in chronological order. Enjoy!

Day One: Materials arrive, along with a garbage trailer (but no roofers, yet):



Day Two: Destruction!
I'm still completely amazed that they didn't break anything. Not even the statues, sadly.





Day Three: The first shingles (at 7pm):






Day Four: More destruction, more shingles








Day... Five? I dunno... I lost track about this point, actually. Why don't we just skip to the end? Here's the finished product.





God damn, that looks good, eh? The guys we hired were fantastic, and I'm pretty sure they got more work in the neighbouhood from neighbours walking by and admiring the result. I mean, why else would they leave their sign on our lawn for two weeks after they finished? Anyway, they have no web presence at all, so here it: Saanich Shingling Service - they're awesome, and I highly recommend them. (If a Google search brought you here, feel free to ignore the rest of my ramblings and just hire the roofers, mmmkay?)


But wait, there's more! That's right, it's the long awaited return of everyone's favorite feature (I'm assuming that This Week in Mayonnaise has not yet surpassed it, anyway),

The Injury Report

I bruised my thumb really badly the other day. That in itself is not exactly noteworthy, but as with the vast majority of my injuries, the humor is in the acquiring of the injury, not the injury itself.

You see, the crazy neighbour who lives up the hill behind us (the really crazy one, not the Crazy Neighbour^TM from across the street) found out we were giving away some of the statues and quickly volunteered to take them off our hands for us. Well, how could we say no?

So I helped load up her car with the crappy little mermaid, and the squirrel birdbath, and offered her one of the two peasant girls. Of course, she said yes, so I tried to move the closest one off its pedestal. Well, it was on there pretty tight (Frank must have used extra mayo) so I clambered up through the brush and weeds to the one in the back to see if I could get it off its base any easier. Unfortunately, the piece of statue I grabbed onto and pulled came right off in my hand, and whacked me in the thumb pretty good.

Still, this story does have a happy ending. First, I managed to get the other peasant girl off its base with a couple delicate taps from the Ol' Persuader, so the neighbour went home happy. Second, the statue I broke looks WAY better now, I think:



I've started calling it "Mary No Head", much to the War Department's chagrin. Come Hallowe'en, that thing is going to look damn freaky...

So, next post, I explain why these two unobtrusive, unassuming, unimposing vents in the middle of the roof (on either side of the vent stack) represent such a major effort on our part.



Stay tuned...

How Don's brain works.. or doesn't

The following is a complete sidetrack only tangentially related to this blog...

Okay, so last week I got a question from a reader about the post where I described having to go to Canadian Tire four times in one day.

I tried to explain it as just a fact of renovations, and how the unexpected is really the expected when renovating -- especially plumbing -- but she wasn't having any of it. Truth be told, I wasn't even really buying the explanation myself, and I eventually realized I was completely full of shit.

You see, it has nothing to do with renovating one's house, or even fixing toilets, and everything to do with me. And to prove it, I offer the following anecdote. It's not really about renovations (at all), but it does go to show how my brain works, and why, just sometimes, it happens that I find it necessary to do something to make up for being an idiot - like making four trips to the same store in one day...

Last week, I finally decided it was time to do something about my worn-out shoelace. The lace on my left shoe hadn't quite broken yet, but it was getting close, and every time I laced up my shoes, I noticed it, made a mental note to replace it before it broke... and then promptly forgot about it until the next time I had to lace up my shoes.

So I was pretty pleased with myself when I remembered my stupid broken lace randomly in the middle of the afternoon, and decided to take a little break from staring at my monitor and amble down the street in the warm summer sunshine to get a pair of shoelaces. I even had cash in my wallet, and figured it would be about a ten minute round trip, tops.

When I got to the store, I realized that I couldn't remember what length my shoelaces were. No problem, I thought - I happened to be wearing the very shoes for which I wanted to purchase laces!

Rather than attempt to get the nearly broken lace out of my left shoe, I took the good lace out of my right shoe, and compared it to the ruler mounted on the wall for exactly that reason. Given that the laces I had were somewhat long, I dropped 12 inches off the end of the resulting length, and came up with a length of 45".

I grabbed two packets of laces, stuffed the old lace in my pocket, and took the new ones up to the counter. After paying for them, I sat down in one of the chairs in the store, and opened up one of the packets. You see, I had taken the lace out of my right shoe, and didn't want to walk all the way up to the office with no lace. At the same time, I didn't really want to put the old lace back in, only to have to swap it out again when I got back to work.

Fortunately, the new lace was exactly the right length, so I grabbed the rest of my stuff, and headed out to the street, figuring I'd replace the other lace, the broken one, when I got back. Right outside the shop was a garbage can, into which I tossed the old lace, my receipt, and the packaging for the first pair of laces. As I headed up the street toward the office, I stuck the other pair of laces into my pocket... where I found my old lace.

Yes, I had just thrown the other NEW lace into the garbage can, along with the receipt and the packaging. Given that I'd seen what people threw into the garbage cans downtown, there was no way I was going in to get it, so I trudged back to the office, cursing my stupidity.

When I got back to my desk, I took the broken lace out of my left shoe, and the brand new lace out of my right shoe and threw them both away.

"But Don," you say, perplexed. "Didn't you put the new lace in your right shoe right away because you didn't want to have to replace it again anyway? Why didn't you just put a new lace into your left shoe and toss the other new one?"

To which I reply because I said I bought two packets of laces. I didn't say I bought two packets of the same colour.

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:

A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.