Patchwork Roof

We finally extracted what's left of the old chimney. It wasn't hard, but somehow having a huge hole in your roof is unnerving, and getting around to dealing with the chimney took some time. We could have picked a better day for it as well. It was misting in the morning, and by the time the repair was complete it was raining pretty heavily.

First the chimney came out. All that took was going up on the roof and lifting it out. If we'd only know it was going to be that easy! Then we had to rip off the galvanized sleeve that the chimney sat in. It was nailed and tarred in place. It wasn't too hard to remove. A little patience when removing the nails was all it took. Note: when roofing, knee pads are recommended. We'll remember that for the next round.

The patch was a cinch. We cut some plywood to fit the hole and nailed it in and supported it with some 2x4's.

We had to cut away the shingles that were surrounding the patch to prepare the area for new roofing felt paper and new shingles.

When the new shingles were being nailed down, the rain was really coming down. The room down below got a little wetter that we'd anticipated. All the rows of new shingles got nailed down except the last one (the top one). That one got glued in because there is no way to nail it in since it got sandwiched under the next row of old shingles. While the patch isn't the prettiest in the world, it seems to work just fine. Besides, we'll be re-roofing next summer for sure.

A note about the color... we couldn't remember what color our shingles were while we were at the store. We guessed wrong and were too lazy to go back and make the exchange. Oh, well. Our neighbors in the monstrosity can gaze at our handiwork.

It's a Wrap!

Last weekend we did a few sheathing repairs and wrapped our
exterior walls with Tyvek brand house wrap. It wasn't too hard. While
we could have used staples, we elected to use broad-headed
galvanized nails (as Tyvek recommends these nails as best for the job).
We wrapped up to the top of our windows but no higher because it got dark.
Hammering nails in the dark (even with the use of head lamps) is difficult
and somewhat dangerous in our experience (and we have a far
amount of that now).

We'll do the rest soon. We're trying to decide if we are going to use cedar lap siding or Hardiplank. The decision comes down to price and looks.

A Little Nookie

Okay, so it took me all week to get to this, but here it is.

Our big project last weekend was to replace the nook window. This would complete all the windows on the east side of the house, save the guest room, which we'll do when we get to that room. Replacing the nook window would allow us to reside, and so we ordered our window a while back and did it last weekend. The weather was fabulous, and the installation went pretty well. As you already know, we enjoyed the wallpaper discovery.

Here is the window as it appeared originally, in all it's single-pane, pellet-gun hole glory. Note the wood panelling. Gotta love it.



Luckily, the window wasn't very difficult to remove.



This is when we found all the cool wallpaper.



Oh, look. No insulation. At all. We weren't surprised, really. It just means that the entire front of the house probably doesn't have insulation, either. (Again, not surprised.) The paper they used to back the sheathing was very water damaged, but we couldn't really figure out why.



We ripped the paper out and had to reframe the window a bit, bringing it up to the same height as the new windows in the dining room. And we put in more of a header, since one didn't exist previously. It just seemed like a good idea.



And here we are with the window installed. Hooray! However, we really need to get out of the habit of installing windows at night. It's not fun. Ever. I think the only new window we managed to install during the day so far wasn't even a window-it was the sliding glass door. Still, we think the window looks nice. This one has a film over it to protect the glass, which we liked. The previous windows didn't have that nifty little feature.



Here's the outside of the house. We think it'll look really nice, once it's all wrapped up and sided.



We're trying to decide on siding right now. We've already done the de-siding, after all. Haw haw. (The blogging gets a little iffy around here at the end of the week, apparently.)

We're vascillating between 6" smooth-faced HardiPlank and 6" cedar. The HardiPlank is more durable, and cheaper, but you can't do mitered corners, which I LOVE. The cedar is more environmentally friendly, and you can do the nice corners. Since we're just siding a small portion of the house, the cost difference won't be that huge, which makes it a little more tough to decide. We'll have to make a decision soon. We need to order the stuff, and then we need to side as soon as we can so we can reattach our gutters. It's raining like crazy here with no signs of letting up.

Wonderful World of Wacky Wallpaper

One of the most fun things about our rat hole has been uncovering some of the interesting vintage stuff that lays beneath the many layers of horrible crap. No insult intended to previous owners - they did what they could with what they had, which is what we're doing. Ultimately, our house will probably be just as crappy as it's always been, but it'll be OUR kind of crappy this time. And one of the big reasons we bought the house was because it FELT good, which is something you can't pass up. This house feels like it's always been a happy home.

But I digress.

When we tore apart the living/dining room, it was interesting to see the gray wallpaper with the gigantor asiatic lilies, and the pastel green and pink stuff underneath that. It made me wonder what the rest of the house looked like, what sort of furniture was in it, why the people that lived here chose that, etc. And, of course, seeing the old newspapers from the 30s was super-cool. Even seeing the old linoleum-precursor flooring with the fake wood grain was sort of fun.

So, when we tore out the fake wood paneling (real wood product, but not nice, substantial paneling) in the nook, I was tickled to see several layers of wallpaper. It was nice to suddenly understand exactly WHY the kitchen had been painted pink and turquoise in the past. It actually must have matched the wallpaper quite well.

Here was the first find. This is classic vintage wallpaper, and I thought it was super-neat.



This rooster goes out to a friend of mine in New Mexico. She knows who she is. ;)



Beneath that was this berry-licious wallpaper. Very vibrant. Probably went well with both the pink and the turquoise.



There was a layer between the berries and the pink stuff, but we couldn't really get a good look at it. Maybe we will when we tear out the rest of the nook. But here's the pink stuff. Trippy and abstract.



And finally, the oldest layer of wallpaper. Pretty and blue, but somehow less kitchen-y than some of the other prints.



We have to enjoy the wallpaper while we can-we're not planning to have any in the house once we're done with it. Famous last words, I'm sure...

Destructo-rama

Okay, so it wasn't as destructive a weekend as we've had in the past. But it sounds good, doesn't it? Heh heh. Anyway, we got a lot done last week and over the weekend.

I cleaned the gutters, swept the roof, and pulled weeds. Whew.

I also pulled the siding off of the east side of the nook, where we replaced the window over the weekend so we can eventually put siding that side of the house. Hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.

So much happened, in fact, that I think I'll have to do several posts for this week. I'll save our adventures in wallpaper and the actual window installation for separate posts, because there are lots of pictures. The wallpaper is especially fun, but that's just what I think.

Anyway, when I was tearing off the old siding last Friday, I got to the bottom row and the crowbar just went IN. There was suddenly nothing to pry against. I finally get it off just to see that there was nothing there. No sheathing at all. Just the exposed foundations and the ends of the floor joists, just sitting directly on top of the foundation.



I wasn't aware of this, but that's apparently the way they used to do it. Go figure. We'll be finding a way to put sheathing over those exposed floor joist ends, though. Here's a closer look:



Anyway, it's a pretty scary-looking thing. It's bad enough it's on the side that I call "Spider Alley" (on account of the myriad webs built between our house and the fence), but it's classic "haunted house" material. Or, as my brother would say, it's a perfect "nightmare hole."

Assuming that the rest of the old portion of the house is the same way, it explains where all the wasps and assorted bee creatures have been trying to live since we moved in and have been hearing the buzzing. We found some old evidence, and so I imagine when we tear off the north side of the house, we'll see where all the little buggers were coming from the last two summers.



The next morning, the destruction continued with my spouse de-vegetating around our house. I went to a back appointment on Saturday morning only to return to a moving mass of green I could only assume was my husband. Okay, he wasn't that dirty, but almost. He had weed-whacked all around the house and taken the "front yard" down nice and short. I don't think I've ever seen the plants (read: weeds) in front of our house that orderly before. It looked nice.



He also de-thatched the lawn. Got so much grass up that it filled up our yard waste bin. Here's to a healthy lawn!



Up next: wallpaper and windows. Stay tuned!

All Trussed Up

We did it! We are done framing the ceiling. There are more cross-braces we'd like to put in, actually, but we won't do those until after the ceiling and insulation are in. We are VERY happy and excited that our ceiling is framed. We also put in the scissor-truss-like supports, and they seem really solid. Hopefully our roof won't come down on us anytime soon, but even if it does, it will come down a little less quickly than it did before.

Here's me nailing something:

The view looking down into the living/dining room:


And our new roof supports:

I think the most exciting part of the weekend, though, was when we bought the heaters for the living/dining room. We looked at a lot of the convection heaters, which we liked and preferred, since we're not going to go with central heating, but they just needed too much surface area. So, we ended up getting the in-wall electric heaters with the fans. They come with a 5-year warranty, which is about 3 years more than most places, so that makes us feel better, too. I can't wait until those are in.

We also finished off our electrical plan for that room, more or less, and now just need to measure how much wire we need. We also need to go buy the lights that go above the dining room table, so we can wire for all this stuff. That will be fun. While we're out, we'll shop for a fireplace and hopefully get some ideas of what we want it to look like with the mantel and whatnot. We'll see - we're getting to the fun stuff, in my opininon. For some reason I'm really excited to do the floors in our house. It seems like just the sort of picky, boring, repetitive task that I really like.

This weekend we're supposed to have some nice weather (read: not too terribly cold, and probably not raining), so we'll probably forgo the wiring in favor of replacing the window in the east wall of the nook and residing that side of the house. The poor rat hole will look like Frankenstein's monster with all its different types of siding, but that's okay. It looks like that anyway.

Do Not Ad-Joist Your Set

I admit I never thought we'd get there. Not that we're there yet, not by any means, but the room keeps feeling more and more like a...well...actual ROOM.

We returned from vacation relaxed, refreshed, and cursing the wet, rainy autumn Seattlites are in for. It's weather that never bothered me until I no longer had a warm, dry place to live (master bedroom being the exception). This weekend, though, it was time to get back to work.

We finished putting up all the ceiling joists in the living/dining room, with the exception of one. One of the 2x4s we had turned out to not really be usable, so we're missing one. We'll install that tonight, though.

The rest of them are up:

In order to get the southernmost 2x4 up, though, we had to do a bit of chiseling. The log leftover from the cabin actually hangs down below the ceiling, preventing the wall drywall from meeting the ceiling drywall. This was a problem before we bought the house, too, but the old fella had covered it up with crown molding. We didn't want that - we wanted it to actually FIT.

Enter the chisel brigade. We had to manually chisel the length of the wall to carve out enough space for drywall without disturbing the original log structure, since we're not 100% sure it's not supporting anything. It actually went more quickly than we thought it would.

We just need to finish up the joists, put in some scissor-truss stuff, and then it's time to wire. We'll have electricity and - dare I say it? - heat soon. Warmth is on the horizon...

Special thanks to my friend for commenting on the previous post and explaining all about crappy nails. It definitely made me feel better. ^_^

Also, my spouse was at a design expo last week and saw this cool little thing. It's basically an insert that burns ethanol, and does so incredibly efficiently. Plus its emissions are so low you don't even need to vent it. It's a bit pricey, but it might be nice to get it and just use it this winter, if all else fails. You can see it here: EcoDepot