Locust Attack

So Monday, one of our good helpful friends came over to help me kill stuff.

Remember the tree I cut down last summer? Well, it came back. With friends.

Okay, so it wasn't really as big as last time. But it was still a pain in the butt. The locust trees really bother me. They take over the yard and don't let other things get light.

Here's our yard before:


You can see that the entire corner of our yard was obscured by these plants. Our neighbors have some large locust trees in their yard, which are probably giving rise to many of our trees, and the blackberry they have in their yard seems to think it's great fun to make it over our fence, too.

Well, super-friend and I took care of that. She pulled up and chopped out with great vigor while I poisoned in her wake. It was good fun, as she's fabulous company, not to mention very effective.

Here's the corner afterward:


Success! I'll probably have to kill the same trees many times in the future until we get that part of the yard leveled and re-seeded, but for now, at least, I feel much better. Plus our yard once again seems as big as it really is.

Get Bent

Okay, I've been meaning to post all week, but it just got away from me. Now I have to try to remember...

Last week and weekend we finished up framing the ceiling in what used to be the sun porch. Each ceiling joist had to be cut individually, but with me doing the nailing and my spouse cutting and also nailing, we did all right. Saturday we really got quite a lot done, and Sunday we managed to finish it off.







The room actually feels very good. The ceiling will still be low, but it will be fine. Now that the ceiling doesn't slope in that part of the house it feels much bigger.

Sunday we also framed the ceiling, but we ran out of nails. We picked up lumber and new nails and set to work.

So, I get my brackets, my ladder, my hammer, and my nails, and begin my work. The first bracket I bend three of the four nails. Okay, maybe I'm just tired. The next bracked I bend two. Each time I try to remove the bent nails, the heads just pop off and it's up to the magic of vise grips to save the day. Which is fun.

After the fourth bracket, I'm really getting frustrated. I successfully nailed tons of brackets the day before, so what the hell was my problem? Had I suddenly become completely incompetent? (You just be quiet, all you out there in the audience.) I thought there was something wrong with the nails. We take some other nails, the same size but galvanized, and I nail a bracket in with those. No problems. I strongly suspected the nails.

My lovely spouse, in a move of great consideration (and also self-preservation, most likely), got new nails. In fact, he went through all the boxes and only bought the ones that had sturdy-seeming nails.

See the comparison in the head of the nail, as well as nail thickness, below. (Both nails were marked as 10d.)



And here are the wretched, twisty nails that caused me so much frustration. Grrr.



In the end, I'm really happy it was the nails and not me. Even though it still was most likely at least partly me.

Header for Trouble

Hopefully posting each of the days has worked out well for our readers.

Tuesday night I was able to take out the too-short header from our framing, cut a new header, and we installed it before heading out to drinks with friends of mine from my marketing certificate course. Our project for this week is measuring the ceiling joists in what used to be the sun porch. My goal is to get all the joists in this weekend. Who knows if that's a reasonable goal or not. At any rate, it was a HUGE pain in the butt to have to rip out that framing twice. It's not something I ever want to do again. Funny how we manage to keep the house from crashing down on our heads (knock on wood) but can't seem to frame a simple damn doorway, one that won't ever even have a door in it. Oh well.

One thing I forgot mention about Monday night was we made a new little friend. We were just getting home from a trip to Home Depot when my husband saw a weird movement in our hedge planting bed. We looked closer and found a pretty green frog. It was tiny and adorable. It wasn't even as long as our thumb. We had no idea where it came from, or what kind it was. My spouse asked someone at work about it yesterday, and apparently they're all over the place.

It's actually a native species of tree frog, known as the Pacific chorus frog, or pseudacris regilla. All that aside, it was adorable and wonderful and I hope we see a lot more of the adorable froggies.

Labor Day

Just like last year, Labor Day was true in fact as well as name. We didn't get much done on Sunday, either, because we had to wash clothes, get groceries, and make a trip out to my husband's old boss's house on Vashon Island. For those of you that don't know, this guy's a pretty incredible landscape architect, and his garden was AMAZING. You can see it at http://www.davidpfeiffer.com/project_vashon.html (website by yours truly). His house is amazing, too. We got the tour, and it's so tasteful, beautiful, well-crafted, and comfortable. It gives the feeling of being sheltered, yet living outdoors. I want to copy so much of it for our house. Anyway, we had a really lovely time, but due to the fact it was quite a trek from the rat hole, we ended up using all our afternoon and evening. It was worth it, though.

Monday, though, we FINALLY got down to business. First, we tore out the wallboard in the kitchen.

Then we realized how horrible the condition of the studs was. So we had to rip those out. We did that very carefully, since they were holding up the wall. We managed to do it without bringing the house down.

Cutting of nails was involved. Pretty to watch, what with the sparks and all, and luckily there weren't too terribly many of them.

Once we got everything reframed, we realized that the doorways were missing headers. We consulted our framing books, and then pulled out the work we'd just done and re-framed again with headers.

Then we realized the header for the new kitchen door (on the right in the photos) was too short - there was a 1.5 inch difference between the width of the top of the door and the bottom. But we were just too tired to tear it out again, and so we called it a night. We think it'll all work out well when everything's framed right, though.

Saturday

Saturday we ended up getting pretty derailed. We ran TONS of errands, errands we've been meaning to run for months, and by the end of the day, we didn't have the time or energy to work on the house. Oh well.

We did manage to take the old front door to an architectural salvage store in Ballard called ReStore. Those of you who live in the area and like old stuff should go there. They have cool house parts. There's a store in Bellingham, too - I've added a link at the side of the blog. Anyway, they loved our hobbit door, and because we had it still in its frame, and the screen door, and even the key, they think they'll be able to find it a good home, which makes me glad. We got store credit, too, which will be good when we're buying interior doors. They have lots of the five-panel kind that I love and that will go great with my knobs.

Here's us saying good-bye to our door.

We also took a picture of the MONSTER chocolate mint plant that's taking over our planting bed. That plant, the globe basil plants next to it, and the rosemary to the east, have been the happiest plants I've ever seen. They've grown so huge in such a short amount of time. Too bad the pictures don't really do them justice.

Friday Night

I'm going to break the weekend up into different posts, because I think it'll be easier to talk about the pictures that way.

Friday night we didn't get a whole lot done. We just prepped for framing the new kitchen door and the fridge bump-out. This required prying up the floor. I did the manual labor while my spouse cooked. As it should be, hee hee.

I pried up the fake-peg wood floor, and then the layer of wainscoting that serves as another flooring layer, and encountered some old stuff, maybe the precursor to linoleum, which had a fake wood grain pattern on it. Beneath that was a layer of newspaper, and beneath that, the original subfloor.

The newspapers looked pretty old, but it took us a while before we found a date. The stuff we pulled up was from the October 11th, 1934 edition of the Seattle Star, so that was right when the house was built. That means that the crappy fake wood pattern stuff was the original floor. We couldn't salvage any pieces of newspaper, but once we start tearing up the floor in earnest hopefully we'll be able to save some and get it framed. We'll see.

Here are some images of the newspaper. There's an amusing headline, and some sort of advertising graphic that seems awfully lewd to me, especially for the days in which it was published, but what do I know.

Yes, he "'Ate Himself Into His Grave", and that woman in the illustration IS completely naked, with fancy, groping men after whatever's in her lap. Seems the media hasn't changed much in the last 70 years.