Scheduling

Well, we're through Christmas and fast approaching the new year. It's been nice to have a bit of a break. Too bad we have to start packing up our stuff now. Oh well. It'll probably be sitting in boxes for at least a year, if not longer. We'll see. At least one of the bedrooms doesn't need too much work. It's going to be box-o-rama for us for a while.

In the meantime, our gutters are scheduled for the 4th, not the 6th. This means that we could have our money out in a week and can finally go to town. If, of course, we can get the appraiser out there to check our work and give the okay. We're crossing our fingers. Regardless, we're having a new electrical box put in on the 11th, which will be a good, good thing. We have to dig a hole underneath the meter 3 feet deep and 3 feet long so that we can run the wire underground at a later date. No problems there.

So, starting next week, we're going to pack and get our stuff ready to move over. Today someone came by and looked at the apartment. Hopefully he liked it and wants to live here starting February. If so, we're golden. It'll be really hard to leave this place- it was our first home together, and it has treated us well.

Upward and onward! Happy New Year!

We're Floored

So this week we've been priming and painting closet shelves and doors and the doors to the master bedroom. They cleaned up nicely, and today the carpet installers came. We bought our carpet at Carpet Liquidators. The service was good, the prices were good, and the installation seems pretty good, to me. Of course, I'm not a carpet snob, but it seems like they did the best they could with the uneven, pitted subflooring. And everybody we dealt with, from the sales guy to the installation guy, was very, very nice. Funny, getting the house was such a pain in the ass, and everybody we dealt with was so horrible, but so far all the contractors we've dealt with (carpet guys, plumbing guys, stove guy) have all been really great. It's nice to have some things go right.

Anyway, the entire house is now covered with nice, new, cheapo grey-blue carpet. I actually really like the color, and it goes well with the poorly painted walls in the rest of the house. The master bedroom looks very nice. If it had new windows, it'd look like a brand-new room. I feel good about moving in there in a couple of weeks. It's still going to be very, very difficult to leave our current apartment. It's so cozy and nice, and we love the view, but the new place will serve us well.

I think that having the carpet in gives us a much better idea of just how cute the little rat hole can be someday. I'm really looking forward to it. The carpet changes the whole look and feel of the house, and it's not even nice carpet. Imagine what wood floors will do...

The installation of the carpet also marks the beginning of our break from the rat hole. We're going to put doors back on tonight, and then we'll be too busy with the holidays to mess with it any more, not to mention we'll be out of town. So, we'll let the carpet off-gas while we're gone, and when we come back, we can focus on actually moving into our newly-floored place.

Flashing and fumes

The weekends just aren't long enough. This used to be because it didn't seem like a long enough break between work weeks. Now it's because we don't have enough time to get done what we need to get done. The rat hole takes up a lot of our time, and we still need to keep up with our chores around our current place. Funny how dishes and laundry sneak up on you. Oh well.

This weekend we did not end up showing our place. Oh well. It gave us a good excuse to clean up, I suppose. We did buy carpet, however. Hooray for remnants and discounts. We liked our carpet place. The service so far has been good, the price was right, and they're installing it on Wednesday. I think it's a blue-gray color. We'll see. The installer fella came out yesterday and measured everything. He seemed really nice and cared about his work. He appeared disappointed when he found out that we didn't really care how well he installed it, since we're basically just using it as a dropcloth until we do the electrical and the walls and install our hardwoods. So far so good with the carpeting, and then we'll only have the gutters to do before we can get our money out.

We also purchased flashing and slipped it under the edges of the shingles on the roof to protect the wood until we get the gutters in. I spent a good portion of the afternoon on the roof. I tried to sweep it while I was up there, but too many branches and leaves were actually frozen to the shingles. Stupid cold weather. It'll rain soon enough, I guess, and that'll take care of that.











Today we finished painting the master bedroom, so once the carpet's in, we could move in, except we won't. It seems like an actual, liveable room. It seems CLEAN, and I feel good about putting my clothes and furniture, and even sleeping, in there. We're pretty happy with it. We also primed several doors, which filled the house with fumes. Lovely. It's funny how toxic chemicals in the air, even through a respirator, can dehydrate you.

Week in review

This week was crazy. Too much to do, not enough time to do it in. I can't even remember Monday. Seems like we fiddled with the stove, did some cleaning, some patching, and called it good. Tuesday we didn't get to go over there except for some patching and putting pellets in the stove, because we were helping a friend pick up furniture from another friend. Wednesday we cracked down and got the closets primered. They look sooooo different! They actually look clean and nice. I'm even almost comfortable about hanging clothes in there. Imagine that! Last night we were going to go over and actually start painting, but then we got a call from someone wanting to see the apartment. They wanted to come over last night, but we told them it wasn't a good time. They're coming over tonight instead. We decided to forgo painting in order to clean the place up. So, even though we didn't go over to the rat hole, we cleaned a-plenty. Our current place has been sort of neglected because we're never there. It's nice and tidy now, though, and we'll see if the people actually want to rent our place come February.

On the agenda for tonight: painting! And painting. And maybe even some more painting. We'll probably be doing that most of this weekend. We're also working on scheduling the gutter guys to come over and install that stuff. Once the painting is done, we'll schedule the carpet, and then we'll start moving in.

A Long Sunday

We had a full day on Sunday. A friend came over and helped, too. Big thanks to the K-bot! He and my wife primered the master bedroom (most of it). I had forgotten a few supplies, so they went and bought some. This exciting picture is of the same section of wall that I patched last week.

I spent all day in the crawl space directly below the master bedroom repairing a small leak in the cast iron drain line. I hate plumbing. This experience confirms my dislike. I had gotten an estimate for the repair a couple of weeks ago. The plumbing guy was really nice and told me I could easily do the repair myself and save some money. He suggested I get a cast iron pipe cutter/cracker, cut the pipe on both sides of the leak, and replace the section with ABS pipe using rubber couplers. That sounded easy enough.

I went to the equipment rental store and rented the cracker. The salesman walked me through how to use the tool. I crawled under the house, tried to use it, and successfully got the tool stuck on the pipe with no way to remove it. K-bot even came under the house to add his strength to the lever arm and all we did was bend the tool's arm! I just don't see how the cracker was supposed to be able to even crack the pipe! We bent the arm straight again, and I went and got a sawzall (which I should have gotten in the beginning) and tried to cut the pipe, thus freeing the pipe cracker and the leaky joint. The cut on the right side of the leak took forever and four blades. With only one blade left and one more cut to make, I went back to the rental store and got more blades. The guys at the store said it must have been one hard pipe (it was!). They offered the use of a sledge-hammer. The second cut went very quickly and I only went through 2 blades! The pipe on the left side of the leak must have been a different material, or my technique had vastly improved! I am also very thankful about not getting sprayed in the face by water from the drainline. I'd been trying to avoid this the entire time. I used a grinder to clean up the ends of the iron pipe(s) and remove some of the embossed lettering. I inserted the ABS pipe and tightened the collars. All done. I hope it doesn't leak! I'll go under and check later this week. The repair in the drain line is at a low point and I think that this is not good. When we redo the bathrooms (and probably connect to the sewer), this problem will be eliminated.

By the way, I returned the pipe cracker with the section of pipe still trapped in the tool. They said it was okay. I hope they don't charge me to remove the pipe. There was no way I could do it, though.

Oh, the pellet stove seems to be working well. It went out over Saturday night because we turned it down too far. We are trying a higher setting now. I feel like we own a real house now that it doesn't smell musty and is warm. I know this feeling will just continue to grow as the house slowly becomes a home.

We like it hot, hot, hot

Today we had the pellet stove guy over. He showed up two hours early, which worked out very well for us, and was a very nice guy. We had no experience with pellet stoves, and so he walked us through everything. He cleaned the stove, made it work, and explained everything as he did it. So now we have heat. Hooray! We could redo the pipe, if we wanted to, but since we're not going to use it past this winter, we're not going to put the money in it. He did say that we could rehab the paint job and probably get some money for it if we decided to sell, which was nice. We had also been led to believe that we wouldn't be able to find parts for it, but he set us straight. Now we feel like we're on the right page with our pellet stove, and it's been burning all day. The rat hole no longer smells like musty old house, but like warm, slightly musty house. It's great. it's going to be so nice not to have to wear six shirts whenever we go work over there. Yay.

We also did some more work with the mud and drywall. Tomorrow we fix the sewer pipe, begin priming and painting the master bedroom, and begin work on the gutters. Once we're done with the painting, we'll probably put the carpet in, finish the gutters, get our money out of escrow, and start working on the electrical.

Hole(s) in the wall

Last night we patched the holes in the master bedroom wall. I am not completely sure why the holes are there. At first, I thought they were opened up so the valves for the tub could be repaired (the full bath is on the other side of this wall), but I don't think so any more. They really just look like exploratory holes. Maybe a family pet disappeared into the walls and these holes are how the pet was removed. Who knows?

I decided to cut out one big piece of wall instead of patching the four holes separately. This way I could just use one big piece of drywall to make the patch and have even, regular seams to mud and tape. The piece I removed was 40"H x 34"W. I exposed half a stud on the left side and one in the middle which gave me something solid to attach to.



Here I am looking at crud inside the wall. Is it a shoelace? I'm glad we didn't find bones. (There are animal bones in the crawlspace under the house.) My spouse is filling nail holes around the room while I patch the big hole.

I used the old piece of drywall to size the new piece and locate the hole for the electrical outlet box. I used these nice little drywall brackets to attach the top and right side of the new piece to the existing wall. These brackets worked great! The front part of the clip breaks off so nothing shows after the install (except the screw heads, which get mudded).

So far I've only put on two layers of mud (joint compound) and one layer of drywall tape (paper, not the self-adhesive mesh). I don't know if I'll do more. The wall will likely get demolished when we start redoing the electrical. Right now, we're just trying to make a room habitable so we have some place to live. This is also the first time I've worked with drywall other than spackling holes. While this wasn't the best job, I learned a lot and future drywall work will go more easily. For one thing, I don't have to be quite so anal about my cuts and the fit. Mud covers all.

Aaaand...more windows

Window of opportunity

It was the night of the nasty windows. Nasty, mold-ridden, black windows. Not much to say. I think we used Tile-X with bleach. It kicked mold ass. Tile-X + grout brush = not-so-moldy windows. Good enough, until we get them replaced, which we will do, because they're aluminum, single-pane pieces of crap. So there. Walls were washed with TSP, trisodium phosphate, to clean and prep them for painting. Because boy, we will need to paint.

Tomorrow we patch drywall. Hooray! Once that's done, the master bedroom will be just about ready to live in. Putting the plastic stuff over the windows is also on the list, and a tech is coming to look at the pellet stove on Saturday. The stove we have is no longer made- the company went under a while back. So we can't really sell it, because whomever bought it wouldn't be able to get parts for it. Oh well. We'll use it this winter and try to unload it later.

Here's the improved window.

One down, two to go

The sink is officially in. It only leaked for a little while, but then we figured it out and fixed it. Now it's perfect. It's now an even tinier bathroom than before. I really like the sink, though, and it was satisfying to have put it in ourselves. It's a nice height, and it'll still look good when we redo the bathroom altogether.

The sink is done. Only the gutters and the floor coverings to go! We'll have to wait until this weekend to do the gutters, since we'll need daylight. We'll also hopefully be enlisting friends, some of which have installed gutters recently. The floor coverings can happen soon, whenever. We're just having carpet remnants installed until we put down hardwood floors someday.

In the meantime, we'll work on cleaning walls and prepping them for painting. There are also a few holes in the walls we'd like to patch. Plenty to do. We're also going to try to make sure the pellet stove is in good condition to use- it sure would be nice to have some heat in there.

That sinking feeling

Today was day one of the installation of the sink in the full bathroom. Installing the sink is one of the three things we need to do to pull our money out of escrow. It seemed like a nice, small step, and we were pretty excited, since it would be the first thing we did to actually try to improve the little rat hole. So far it's just been cleaning, which is necessary but more of an undoing of past sins against the house than actual improvements. We went to Home Depot, cruised the aisles for a while, and finally found a darling sink. It's a pedestal sink, which works out well, since that's what was in there before. There is NO space in this bathroom, so a vanity was out of the question. Fine by me. We pay a total $40 for the sink and pedestal and got a cute fixture, gather the rest of the equipment we'll need, and head to the rate hole. It's when we begin the installation that we realize just how low the original sink was. Seriously low. Like a foot lower than the new sink. Previous owners must have liked to sit on the pot and brush their teeth or something. That means that we get to drill through the tile, wallboard, and drywall to fasten the new sink to the wall. It also turns out that the drain pipe we got wasn't long enough because of the sink's new height. Great. Many trips home and to assorted hardware stores later, we finally get back to the hole and prepare to start drilling. This is when we find out that the batteries for our electric drill have died. Not just one, but both of them. So, we just went home. There is only so much Home Depot a person can stand in one day, and the little hardware store didn't carry them. Just as well. There are things that need to be done around our current abode to prepare for the week to come. We'll finish the sink tomorrow.

In the meantime, though, here're a couple pictures of our new little sink, even though it's not actually connected to anything yet.

Clean-fest

Today was the day we knocked out the rest of the cleaning. We got over there this morning and set to work. The master bathroom is now shiny with glory. Okay, not really, but it's a hell of a lot better than it was when I started. The drawers in the vanity were pulled out, and when I was dusting while the drawers were being cleaned, I discovered a poor little spider that had been mashed into oblivion when one of the drawers had been pushed in long, long ago. Oh well. But now that room's as clean as it'll ever be. I'm not sure I'd walk on the floor barefoot, though, even though subsequent passes with wet cloths showed it to be perfectly clean.

We got another few inches of snow in our neighborhood last night, but that did not deter our wonderful friends K&C. They showed up and many windows were washed, scraped free of tape, and the nook's floor actually looks like a real floor now and not a mud hole. It's great. Much was accomplished, like this cabinet door. The one on the right is coated with the original schmutz. The one on the left looks even better in person.











We're still trying to come up with a final plan of action. It's sort of down to doing the wiring before the carpeting or doing the carpeting, getting our money out of escrow, and then doing the wiring. We'll see. We need to talk it out a bit more. Tomorrow, at least, we're set- we're off to buy a bathroom sink and some cleanser that will get the mildew off the aluminum windows in the master bedroom, which are NASTY with the stuff. In the near future we'll assess the gutter situation.

In the meantime, though, it's back to jammies and tea and mulling over the floor plan, deciding where we want things to be, and we raise our cups to our lovely friends and the super job they did today. We couldn't have done it without them.

Bathroom mania

Yesterday evening was another fun-filled adventure into the realm of bathroom filth. Even though the master bath is smaller than the full bath, it took a lot longer to clean. So long, in fact, that I didn't finish it in my allotted two hours. The shower itself was well, shudder-ific. Actually, the tile and grout weren't so bad. Nor even the floor. It looked worse than it was. This is because there was caulking on TOP of dirt. So what looked dirty was actually sealed away, well out of reach of my scrubby. Once I got the tile cleaned, I thought, oh, what the hell, I'll get that cobweb up there in the corner of the ceiling, where it's painted. I reached up with my paper towel and swiped at the ceiling, only to recoil in horror as a black, tar-like substance comes away with the towel. Turns out the entire ceiling of the shower stall was coated with this nasty stuff, almost like someone was smoking something in there, but it wasn't the usual color of cigarette smoke. It was an entirely different black than the fungus growing on the bathroom window, some of which came off the aluminum when Mr. Bleachy Toothbrush came for a visit, some of which is just stuck in the paint and won't come out.

This is a "before" picture of the lovely vanity. Oh, what a fine tile job this is. I can only hope we can do a better job ourselves. I've never tiled before, but I'm pretty sure I can avoid caulking over dirt.

All this simply reaffirmed for us that we need to just get rid of that bathroom and make a new one. The full bath, on the other hand, is totally saveable. We just need to make more room for it. The tub might also be too damaged to repair- it seems the previous owner's workers liked to pour caustic chemicals in it. *sigh*

Here's an "after" shot. Oh, you gotta love the color choices. I don't think I will pick "salmon," but that's just me. I'm sure there are lots of people that love it. I don't know why- I'm not a fan of colored sinks. Give me shiny white any day of the week.

Tonight we return to the master bath and take a final crack at it. I have to get the crusties off the vanity drawers, and the walls need a serious scrubbing. No doubt I'll find more lovely black crap coating everything. At least the toilet cleaned up nicely. I need to do the floor, too. Fear the floor. I'm not sure I'll even be able to tell when it's clean. Oy. My only consolation is that so far, so good.

Scrub-o-rama

We've discovered that cleaning the house takes up ALL of our time, hence the lack of posts. We come home, eat, go to the rat hole, clean, come home, sleep. Every single day.

Monday we just looked the place over, documented what needed to be done, and went home. Tuesday we stocked up on cleaning supplies and bought a dehumidifier (which is working wonders, especially since the windows are single-pane and suck), and a friend of mine came over and graciously helped us clean. She gets a big, shiny, gold star, because she rocks. We worked on the kitchen and determined that vegetarian kitchens are much easier to clean because of the lack of meat-particulate grease coating every single surface. We actually spent most of the hour and a half on the stove alone, since it was gross. But it looks like a normal stove again, and once we buy an element to replace the one that's missing, we'll be able to use it. That's good, because the hot water heater doesn't work, and this way we'll be able to boil water on the stove and use that. Heh heh.

The reason the hot water heater doesn't work is because somebody cut the lines to it. Maybe the previous owner guy. Whatever.

So last night, Wednesday, we went back and cleaned some more. I tackled the full bathroom, which the previous guy had his workmen using as a dumping ground for all sorts of vile liquids. It was horrible. I scrubbed and scrubbed while my spouse dealt with the hot water heater, crawling around the house following wires. When he was done, he swept and dusted and took care of various other things going on.

Before


After several hours, we finally have a usable bathroom, even though it doesn't have a sink. Unfortunately, the pictures don't do it justice. The toilet in particular just looks like a normal toilet and not the creature from the Black Lagoon. Hooray.

Notice the brand-new shine on the tile in the photo below. Oh yeah. ^_^ The floor was also exceedingly disgusting, and many minutes were spent with a razor blade, scraping caulking off the tile. I don't know what we'll do with the wallpaper...


Tonight I tackle the other bathroom while he cleans windows, closets, and more floors. Whee hee.

After