New Roof!

We meant to post about the new roof sooner, but we've been sanding and mudding and just couldn't quite find the time. So, without further ado...

The first thing we had to do to prepare for the new roof was mark the locations for the new bathroom fan vents and the Solatubes. I went into the attic space and marked each location by driving a screw up through the roof to the outside. This would have made me nervous if it were any other season but summer. Then I went up onto the roof and attached duct tape to the screws indicating what the locations were for (14" Solatube, 10" Solatube, 4" fan vent). Here are some photos of me on the roof.

The roofing materials (shingles, etc.) were delivered the week prior to the work being done. The dumpster was delivered the morning that the work began. I stayed home that morning to make sure everything was okay and to answer any questions. Good thing, too, since the dumpster guy wanted to put the dumpster right against the house. The kitchen sink has a drain field on the north side of the house, so I didn't want the dumpster too close. I directed the dumpster to be placed about 9 feet from the house and felt comfortable about the drain feild.

The roofers took a little longer than I anticipated. I had thought that the job would take a day. They had thought it would take a little over a day. It took 2 full days. Plus, they had to come back on the third day to clean up. Still, the new roof looks great! They took out the individual roof vents and replaced them with a single vent that stretches the ridge of the roof.

My spouse and I also had the roofers plumb cut the rafters on the east side of the house. This will allow us to install the gutter in a horizontal manner and not the canted way that it was before.

All of the Solatubes are in the roof now and all that needs to be done is for them to be connected to the ceiling below. We are very happy with our new roof! We are gauranteed for 20 years against leaks and should be nice and dry (at least when it come to rain).

Slow Mudding

We thought we'd share some photos of our drywall mudding progress. As you can see in the photos, We've got all of our seams taped and mudded. The screw holes are all mudded, too. All of the tapered seams between the drywall boards were very easy to mud, but the flat seams are requiring a bit more artistry. We have to feather the mud out much further to hide the slight hump that results from the tape and mud.

We've been sanding with the vacuum attachment and that has made cleanup less of a pain. The ceiling has been the hardest part by far. We think we should be able to finish mudding and sanding by the end of this weekend or early next week.

By the way, our new roof is on! More on that in the next post.

Weak-end

I'm freaking tired today. My arms and back feel a bit like jelly. This is good, because it means I worked hard this weekened. But it's bad because it means that I'm weak and out of good digging shape. Hmmm.

One of the reasons I'm so tired today is because we ignored one of the first rules of remodeling/house projects: put it where you want it the first time.

As you may have read before, my spouse and I moved a couple of tons of rocks from a messy pile to nice stacks under our trees not so long ago. If we had put them in the right spot the first time, we would have saved ourselves a lot of time and effort.

Well, this weekend I knocked down the big pile of dirt that was sitting in front of our house, gathering weeds and spiders. I dug and dug and shoveled and hoed,and now the pile is gone, and the sunken spots from when the electrical was run are now filled. Hence the weakness. But, if we had put the pile of dirt someplace else when we were first determining where to put what, I wouldn't have had to spend all day in the sun flattening it out.

Oh well. If I keep it up, I'll get nice and strong. In our defense, when the dirt pile was first created, we had no idea what we were doing or where we wanted things. Plus the contractor put it in the wrong spot. I'm being a bit hard on us.

The motivation for moving the pile was the dumpster that was delivered this morning for the roofers. Hooray, new roof!! Today they took off the old roof and started to put on the new; they'll finish up tomorrow. They're also going to install the top portion of our Solatubes, where the flange comes up through the shingles. AND they're going to cut some of the joists that are at the edge of the roof so that they're perpendicular to the ground instead of slanted. We're very happy and excited. Anyway, the pile was right where it'd be good to put the dumpster, and so in the interest of cleanliness, the pile was flattened. And sure enough, that's where they put the dumpster. I'd feel good if I wasn't so stiff. Time for more Pilates...

Actually, it's been fine. Now that our strawberry crop has petered out, the raspberries are coming into their own. I'm getting about a cup of fresh raspberries a day. Yum!

We actually had a pretty good weekend. We put the final coat of joint compound on the drywall screws, and many seams were sanded and had another layer of mud put on. We'll put pictures up of all this later in the week. We're going to try to have it all finished up so we can start putting on primer this weekend or early next week. We have to move on this room; our permit ends in September and we'd like to have the den insulated before it gets cold. Whew!

Cherry Stain

We think that we've settled on the way we're going to finish the wood we're using for the built-in book shelf. As stated before, we're using a cherry veneer plywood. While visiting the Environmental Home Center (EcoHaus) in Seattle, we found a very nice bee's wax and linseed oil sealer. After applying a coat on the plywood, we decided that we wanted a little more "cherry" than what we were seeing. Since the linseed oil and wax finish is not a petroleum product, we wanted to find a stain that was water based. After some research, we found a brand that was exactly what we were looking for. Saman offers water based stains in a variety of colors. The one we chose is a little on the pink side when unfinished, but gets nice and red (in a wood sort of way) when the wax & linseed sealer is applied. You can see the final color in the photo below (as well as the steps leading up to it).

1. Untreated cherry veneer
2. Bee's wax & linseed oil
3. Saman's water base stain (chamois)
4. Stain with wax sealer

We thought we'd try to finish our shelf using non-petroleum products and feel pretty successful in this regard. The wax finish will require a little maintenance over the years but not much. Now we just have to build the shelf!

Berry Bounty

It's been a good couple of weeks for strawberries. The strawberries we planted last year spread like crazy, and now our hedge is full of them. Here's the haul for one day:



Over the space of two days, we nearly filled a colander.



Tasty treats. The slugs haven't attacked too many berries - the resident crows have taken more. There are four of them, all of them very young-looking, and so I suspect they're an easy snack while they're learning to fend for themselves. They don't take too many, so we don't mind too terribly much. They always seem to take the best ones, though. Oh well. It's not like we're lacking for good strawberries.

Other than eating from our garden (our red leaf lettuce has gone crazy, and we might have more than we can manage to eat this summer), we've been slowly chugging away on the drywall. We finished taping this weekend, and next is the round of sanding, then the final finish layer of mud. So close! Still, I don't think we'll be done with the drywall until the end of the month. After that it should be short work to paint and put the clay up, and the trim should be up by the end of August. That's much more slowly than we wanted (we wanted to have the den torn out and the insulation up by then), but that's life. Still, we are making progress, and the hedge keeps us happy.

In the Garden of Eatin'

We planted our vegetables a couple of weeks ago in the hedge garden. The slugs have found a couple of lettuces and some caterpillars found a collard plant, but everything else seems to be happy. Here are some pictures.

As you may remember, we've got heirloom tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, read leaf lettuce, butter crunch lettuce, beets, carrots, spinach, collards, and rainbow chard. Besides our newly planted veggies, we've got lots of strawberries going in the hedge, oregano, chives, three kinds of mint (plus Corsican mint), and a few other things. We used the mint to make mojitos on Father's Day. The spearmint was better than the orange mint for the mojitos. Yum.

We've been mudding our seams in the living/dining room. More posts about that later.

Magic Box of Samples

We spent the weekend slathering more joint compound on our walls. We would have put on more, but my poor spouse was sick all weekend with a bad fever. He's a little better now, but still not great. So, I did what I could on my own. Progress was made. Pretty much the whole room has the first coats except for the ceiling. Because of my old back injury, doing stuff over my head is really hard for me. My nerves get pinched and my arms end up going numb. Not very conducive to doing ceiling drywall taping. Still, I managed to do some.

We've also been doing other sorts of research, such as on washing machines/dryers. The ones we got when we moved in are okay, but they like to eat clothes sometimes. We'll also be moving the location of our laundry room, and machines capable of different configurations might be beneficial, such as a front-loading washer (that way we can put more storage on top).

We also found out that Teragren, who makes that bamboo flooring we liked, is a local company. So, we ordered up a box of samples.

Here are the ones that we liked, the Synergy line. It's oriented strands of bamboo. The strands are more carefully oriented than in OSB. The color we like is the Java, in the center.

Apparently the Synergy line is generally used in commercial applications. It's 100% harder than red oak (2200 on the hardness scale, as I mentioned before). It has a 25-year finish warranty, and its production adheres to LEED standards. So far, we think it's pretty good stuff. Even though it's an engineered floor, it's the same material all the way through, instead of a veneer over a different wooden core. So, if we ever needed to refinish, we can.

And, just for the heck of it, here are some other products of theirs. There were even more samples in the box, like bamboo plywood and butcher block, but these were the most interesting.

I liked my magic box of samples. It'll come in handy once we have the clay up on our walls and want to test for color, and it's also nice to see how the different colors look during different times of day.

Mud Honey

We have officially entered the final phases of the living/dining room work. Hooray!

This weekend we popped down to the Environmental Home Center (now Ecohaus) to look for some non-toxic stain for our cherry bookshelf wood and check out the colors of American Clay, the clay we're going to use to "paint" our walls (it's more like plaster). It was fun. I've probably said this before, but I've never really liked to shop much - but I LOVE shopping for the rat hole. We looked at all the colors, and we picked Tucson Gold, which is a light yellow. Not pastel, but not too bright, either. It will go well with our pendant lights and really create a nice atmosphere in the room, we think. Anyway, we ended up picking up non-voc primer and flat paint for the ceiling, semi-gloss for the trim, and then the supplies we'll need for putting on the clay. While we were there, we checked out flooring just for the heck of it. We've been waffling over what we want to use for our floor. We need something with a slightly beveled edge, like most engineered flooring has, because our floor isn't exactly level, and we think that might be easier and more forgiving for our project. We like bamboo, so long as it rates well on the hardness scale (we pay very particular attention to hardness), but a lot of bamboo flooring uses toxic adhesives. Bamboo is good if we're trying to be environmentally friendly from the standpoint that it's a quickly-renewable resource, but then you have to factor in all the resources needed to truck that stuff across the Pacific, which is decidedly not environmentally friendly. It would be nice to get something harvested in the US, so long as it's harvested sustainably, to cut down on emissions and all that. And, of course, underlying all this is how much we can afford. *sigh*

But I digress. While we were at the store, we saw some beautiful flooring. One of the problems with bamboo, aside from all the environmental/hardness arguments, is that it very well could look a bit dated 40 years from now (although who knows). So we'd been looking into regular hardwoods, too. The flooring we saw, though, was bamboo (2200 on the hardness scale), but it was oriented strands put together with a relatively non-toxic glue. This particular sample was Teragren Synergy (the Wheat color). We're still on the lookout for flooring and haven't made any decisions, but we were both really surprised at how well we liked it.

The rest of the weekend was spent doing drywall taping. Mudding. Not exciting, not really fun. And because of some of our walls not really being straight or plumb, we're going through a lot of mud in some places. Neither of us have very much experience doing this sort of thing, either. All in all, not the best combination. Luckily, we have some gracious friends who let us borrow all of their taping tools (hooray, corner trowel!), and we have some extra joint compound and tools from other good friends. We also have another friend who actually doesn't mind taping and is going to come over and help. So, hopefully we can get through this stage relatively quickly, but we're also going to take our time and try to get it right. After all, we have to look at these walls for the coming years. Luckily the clay we'll ultimately be putting up on the walls will help hide our mistakes a little.

So here's what we've got done so far. Not much, really, and just the first layers of mud.

We'll probably sand next weekend and put on the final layers.

We started mudding, and THEN we looked through our books and online for tips and tricks. So I had gone around doing all the screwheads, then read online about a great technique for doing them all at once (which is how the pros do it). Oh well. I think it'll be okay.

Our friends who lent us all the equipment also told us about this contraption that allows a shopvac to suck up all the dust when you sand, so we found one at the hardware store and picked it up. That will hopefully make cleanup easier.

So, we'll just keep mudding, slowly and surely. I know what I'm doing every single night this week...and probably next week...but it will be worth it. Or at least that's what I'm going to tell myself.

Drywall Inspection Passed!

Well, we had our drywall inspection today. We passed! And we learned a little something.

First off, the inspector pointed out that we missed some screws on the ceiling ( just 3 or 4). Oops! We'll have to put those in. He was surprised that we used green wallboard. He said that the white stuff actually resists mold better and that the city no longer allows green wallboard on the ceiling in bathrooms or kitchens. Good to know! He did say that we were fine to keep the green wallboard in the living/dining room.

The next inspection is after we've painted and installed the trim. We don't have to have flooring in. He also said that we likely didn't need another electrical inspection, but we'll check with L&I just in case.

We'll be assembling the walls for the built-in bookcase this week and weekend. Here's a 3D picture that we did in SketchUp to explore what it will look like.

We'll be starting to mud and tape, too. This is something my spouse can do when ever she wants. I'll likely do a lot of the ceiling and she'll do the walls. We'll be borrowing a few tools from some friends this weekend (hopefully). Otherwise, we'll have to buy a corner trowel.

Drywall = Done

Three-day weekends are good for so very many reasons, regardless of what you do for a living or what hobbies you have, but we've found that we appreciate three-day weekends so much more now that we have the rat hole. It lets us get so much done on the house, and we can work a little time for play in there as well.

I'll just get right to it - we finished off hanging the drywall in the living/dining room this weekend, and we're now ready for our drywall inspection. Yay! Hopefully that will happen this week, and then we can begin the long process of putting on the joint compound. Luckily mudding is something that's easy to do on my own, so I can work on it in the evenings after I get off work. (Wait, that actually doesn't sound like very much fun...oh well.)

Here's the front of the fireplace, with all the drywall on.

And here's the door into the kitchen. We're really able to see the impact the rounded corners have on the doors, and we really like it.

To answer Acme66's question - yes, we're going to do the same treatment with the doors that currently exists in the nook. We're going to put that simple trim around the edge of the doorways. In the case of the nook, the trim will actually bump up against the walls, which I think will be fine. We'll probably end up painting it white so it contrasts with whatever color we paint the walls.

Here's the hall doorway, with complete drywall and rounded corners.

We also did work on the built-in bookshelf. We ended up undoing the framing we had originally done (which you can see in the pic at the top of the post) and put in a header instead so we could have deeper bookshelves (ones that would actually fit books bigger than paperback size). You can see the mockup we did.

We think it'll work out really well - we'll have plenty of room for our largest books and photo albums at the bottom, and then several normal shelves. We'll probably end up putting our phone on one of the shelves, too.

Here are the shelves with the drywall on, so you can get a sense of the bookcase. We'll be putting rim around the perimeter so that it has a nice transition.

On Saturday morning, we went to the hardwoods store and got some really nice cherry plywood, so that's what we'll be making the back, top and bottom, sides, and shelves out of. We ran out of time this weekend and didn't get at least the back installed, so we'll have to get started on that part next weekend.

Still, it feels really good to have the room coming together. It's going to be great! We've almost saved up enough money to actually have someone else do our roof, and once that happens, we can finish installing our Solatubes and finally have our skylight light in the room, too. We're getting very excited.

We're also still staying realistic about how crappy the rat hole still is, though, so don't worry. We had our lawnmower repaired, and the guy dropped it off on Friday. He was VERY suspicious that we knew how to actually use a lawnmower after he took a look at our yard. He did not approve at all. Luckily I was only amused and not offended at all. I know how crappy our house looks and our yard is. And hey, our lawnmower was broken. It looks better when our small patch of lawn is mowed. So whatever. We found it funny that someone was so horrified by our yard. That's probably some sort of coping mechanism. Still, we're making progress, little by little. Only a little more than a month until the next three-day weekend.

Flowers and Corners

We had amazing weather over the weekend, and because of various events, we really only got to work on the house for one day. It was so nice out that we did a bit of work in the garden, including taking out the monster blossoms our rhubarb plant put out.

The rhubarb needed trimming, especially since it was choking one of our hedge plants (which are really getting big and bushy, by the way), and we want to plant tomatoes over there later, too. Everything's flowering, including our chives. I had never seen chive blossoms before, and I think they're really cute.

Our big project of the weekend, though, was putting corners up in the doorways. You may recall that the doorway into the nook has rounded corners, and that we wanted to round the corners of the doorway between the living/dining and the kitchen and the hallway in the living/dining room. So my spouse used a router to manufacture multiple rounded corners.

Then there was shimming to make the doorway actually square and level.

And here are the corners installed. They harmonize really well with the ones in the nook, as you can hopefully sort of see in the photo.

And here's the doorway into the hallway:

All in all, we're really, really pleased with the way the rounded corners worked out. We're getting pretty close, and the room is feeling really good. I think it will turn out even better than we hoped, but time will tell. Regardless, it's exciting!

Long Time

We have a good reason for taking so long to post this time - we were out of town. ^_^ If I'm feeling frisky (which I might, once this post-vacation cold goes away), I might post a pic or two. We saw wonderful people and had a fabulous time.

Now back to work. This weekend we're going to try to get stuff done on the house, outside if it's nice, and inside if it's not. The goal is to finish up drywall and install the second Solatube.

In the meantime, here's what we did the last weekend of April, right before we went on our trip. That Saturday was absolutely beautiful. It was warm and sunny, and was a single day of the spring we haven't really had so far. So, we decided to work outside. A long time ago, a friend of ours and my spouse moved a lot of really nice rock that a business associate let us have for free. We put it at the end of our driveway, since that was the easy place to dump it, and told ourselves we would use it to build a retaining wall along our driveway and the address post at the end. I think you know how that turned out.

Well, we finally moved that rock and got some of our driveway back, or at least a place where we can put another planting bed. That spot gets good sun all day, so it would be a great place to grow fruits and veggies. The brown patches in the photo is where the rocks used to be. They were completely overgrown with grass, and we saw all sorts of quality creepy-crawlies during the excavation.



Our neighbor's dog would come over to play with us while we moved rocks. He's a sweet dog, and kept us distracted enough that moving the rocks wasn't too monotonous, but not SO distracting that we didn't get anything done. Plus I got some good dog-playing time in. I love dogs. Anyway, we had initially been piling the rocks by hand. After a couple of tiring hours we realized that we owned a wheelbarrow. It went a lot faster then. Better late than never, I guess.

We figure we probably moved about 2 tons of rock. Now it's under the trees where it won't bother anybody, and also won't grow grass (although moss isn't out of the question).





We took bets on how long it will be before we actually do anything with the rock. I think at least seven; my spouse thinks four. We'll see. It'll probably end up being more like 15, knowing us.

The next day we finished up installing our fireplace by putting in the outside air kit. This necessitated a trip under the house, which I refuse to do. Luckily the ol' spouse is a super trooper - here he is, as seen through the hole he cut in our floor.



Here's the vent thing that he installed under the house, which we connected to the ducting.



Here's the fireplace before and after the connection.





And the fireplace blower and outside air kit were installed and the fireplace finally complete and ready to function at its best!

After that, it was time to finish the rest of the fireplace. So, we installed drywall around the chimney pipe.





Finally we did the front drywall panel.



It's still a bit weird to not see the back of the fridge, but somehow I think we'll manage. The place is looking more and more like an actual room with each baby step. It's getting exciting!