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

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.

Working for the Weekend

This week has been pretty quiet, home-wise. We've been enjoying roma tomatoes and our wonderful strawberries. Our basil's quite good, too. So that's been fun.

We took back the little pendant lights we bought at Home Depot, because while we were in Portland this past weekend playing with a friend, we saw lights we like better. So we're looking into prices and styles in an attempt to decide what we like, since we'll hopefully be wiring for them in the next couple of weeks. We also picked up our window at Home Depot, since we'll be tearing out one of the old nook windows (the one on the east side). That way we can re-side that entire side of the house. One wall will look nice, at least!

We also cut some nails and did a little more demolition in preparation for this weekend. We have to tear up some of the floor to move the door to the kitchen, and then this weekend we will frame our brains out. I'm glad it's a long weekend; hopefully we'll get a lot done.

One fun thing we did this week was bought a dining table. We got it off Craigslist, and it's a nice, sturdy teak table that has two leaves. It'll seat eight comfortably, ten uncomfortably, when the leaves are out. I really like it, and I like that we didn't pay very much for it. Now that we have a dining table, we can place where we want the pendant lights to be. It's exciting. Now that we have a table, and we're talking about lights, it almost feels like we might actually be able to live in our house like real people someday. Imagine that!

Fruits of Our Labor

Actual fruit. I'll get to that in a minute, saving the best for last.

So with all the house crap going on, and autumn/winter fast approaching, we've been feeling a little ragged about the house. We got a notice in the mail from the City of Kenmore that our permit expires at the end of next month, so we either need to finish off our inspections or renew our permit. The renewal won't be as expensive as the first go-around, but it's still a couple hundred dollars. Oh well.

We're also going to Portland to see a friend, and while we're down there we're going to search for a dining room table. We need a table to know where to wire the lights, you see. I really love shopping for the house. I can't wait to shop for bamboo floors.

Anyway, what's the most exciting, I think, is the fact that we have more roma tomatoes than you can shake a stick at. Okay, you could shake a stick at it, but we have so many tomatoes that your stick would get covered with tomato schmutz. We have probably 18-20 roma tomatoes, and the cherry tomatoes are starting to grow and ripen. Our little bell pepper plant has baby bells on it, but I doubt they'll grow and ripen before the first frost. The mutant Home Depot strawberries are ripening, though. Home Depot was the only place we could find strawberries that bore edible fruit when we were ready to plant stuff, and so we got them. But they seem sort of misshapen and strange, like they've been inbred or too chemically altered or something. I'm sure they'll taste fine. The tomatoes came from Home Depot, too, and they're growing fabulously and perfectly, which is also probably the result of genetic tampering. Oh well, who cares - I'm going to enjoy some fresh, ripe tomato from my garden. Without further ado, here are the photos of our bounty.

The plants in our hedge planting bed are all doing VERY well. We only lost one oregano out of all the plants we put in the ground. The mints are CRAZY, pretty much taking over everything, and the basil, rosemary, and oregano are huge. So I'd say the planting bed was a success. Next year I think we'll plant some heirloom varieties. Yum!

Kings of the Trash Heap

This weekend went much better than last. Sunday was still wet, but the water was coming from the sky and stayed out of our house.

Saturday, however, was beautiful, and that was the critical day. We'd rented a 20-yard dumpster to get rid of our construction debris. We originally rented it because we were planning on re-roofing our house from scratch, but we had since since the folly of our plan and are now just going to re-roof right over it. Saves us some hassle and panic.

Anyway, the dumpster wasn't delivered until 7pm Friday night, so we didn't get started as early as we would have liked, but that was okay. Saturday morning a couple of loyal friends came over and we attacked the piles. Some of that debris had been sitting outside since we first tore out the living/dining room (a year and a half ago), so it was nice to finally get it cleaned up. We were worried that we weren't going to be able to fit it all in the dumpster, since it was looking pretty full after just the pile at the side of the house, and we still had the entire carport to do. But we made it! And our neighbors are liking it. I'm sure anything we do to make the rat hole less of an eyesore is a good thing in everyone's opinions. Little do they know that it will probably worse before it gets better, mwa ha.

Here are some pics.

The side of the house, before and after.

The carport, before and after.

The front of the house, before and after. We got rid of the weird, assorted pieces of rusted metal gear thingeys out front.

Me loading the dumpster.

When we were finished, we knew Sunday was supposed to be rainy, and since the garbage fee is determined by weight, we decided we didn't want to pay unnecessarily just because our garbage was loaded with water. Luckily, our lot came with an abundance of nasty old blue tarps. We spread a few out, and then got one from the deepest depths of our yard, which has been sitting undisturbed for who knows how long (we've never touched it). We think this is where the slugs for our entire neighborhood come from, judging by what we saw when we lifted the tarp. Anyway, this final tarp was actually big enough to cover the entire dumpster, which makes us think it was used to keep water off the roof at one point in time or another. Lucky us!

Unfortunately, some of our garbage poked up too far above the rim, so this morning we had to take the tarps off to reconfigure some of the stuff inside the dumpster. And then it poured all day. Oh well. At least it only got ONE day of rain instead of TWO. We'll see how much we end up paying.

Waterworks

So this last weekend we went to my high school reunion.

We swore we were going to turn off the water before we left, but we forgot.

We got up early in the morning on Sunday to return home, made a pit stop to see some family, and battled traffic all the way back to the rat hole. Loaded with stuff, we went to the door, opened it, and were immediately confronted by a waterfall. Pictures don't really do it justice-it was pouring out of the light fixtures and gaps in the ceiling.

Probably the smartest thing we ever did was install the water shutoff valve close to the house, and that's where my spouse ran as I dashed into the house to survey the damage. There was a couple of inches of water on the floor of the laundry room. The bowed floor worked to our advantage.

The carpet in the den had soaked up some of the water, but not enough to damage anything in the den. We had moved most of the stuff in the laundry/entry room when we were investigating the burst pipe rot that there wasn't much in there. Except our shoes. Pretty much all our shoes.

Most of the water was in the laundry room, with just a little bit in the kitchen, and we knew immediately what had happened. After all, this had sort of happened once before. The compression fittings we had put up in the attic space to temporarily repair the lines to the washing machine had let go. We don't really know why. He rushed up into the attic space and began to drill holes in the ceiling to drain the water that was sitting up there.

I caught the water below in buckets, sponging it up as best I could with a mop.

You can see in the photo that I'm wet, but I was actually pretty soaked. My hair was all wet, my clothes were mostly wet. The washing machine was full of water from the ceiling, and the pails filled up really quickly once the ceiling drain holes were drilled. This water wasn't just any water, either. The water that was raining down upon everything was tea made from old blown-in insulation from who knows when, mouse carcasses and droppings, and D-Con. Lovely thing to be drenched in.

Several hours later we'd gotten the sodden insulation out and mopped up most of the water. It was really late, but luckily our managers were really understanding, and I worked a half day the next day. We took the time partially to rest and partially to clean up. I had to tear up a lot of the linoleum and some of the den carpet while he converted the compression fittings to threaded fittings.

The linoleum was really old, and because it was so wet, the glue stuff was really sticky and nasty. It horrible, and the floor was all wavy. In fact, our dryer seems to have sunk a little bit. Not a good sign.

We're probably going to have to tear out all the wood in that room, floor joists, footings, and all. It's just a mess. But it could have been worse - it could have been the rest of the house as well. As it is, the damage is isolated pretty much to that room.

And we're thinking about running the plumbing under the house when we redo it.

I meant to post this sooner, but being tired from the weekend combined with working late to make up the lost time and going to classes for work hindered me.

This weekend we've rented a dumpster (that was supposed to have shown up 5 hours ago, so we're not hopeful it will shoe up at all) for all our construction garbage. We'll finally be able to rid our lot of some of the crap that's lying around, which would be really good. It's even better because we suspect that rats have moved into a pile of lumber just off the side of our house. We saw a big, brown rat on Monday morning as we were standing on the porch.

I seriously doubt it lives in the house with us. Rats are smarter than to live in such a run-down place.

Den of Destruction

So after another weekend away, we made some progress on the house. We managed to demolish another wall in our scheme to make the entryway to the den bigger, and we did the demolition necessary to move the kitchen door. Now all that's left is reframing. Hooray! We also got the materials needed to start doing the ceiling joists, and hopefully we'll be getting the supplies to do our truss in the next couple of days. It will be so nice to take down all the random supports we have nailed in.

Here's the wall of the den, ready to be taken out. This is the original exterior of the house, which was pretty cool to see once we got all the crappy, white-painted wood paneling off.

Here's what it looked like once we got it out.

And here it is all the way out, from the view standing in the living/dining room.

The first permanent ceiling support went in, much stronger and better than the original, in our opinion. You also get an idea, hopefully, of how much taking out the walls expanded the space. Pretty much the entire den is open now, and the house feels less claustrophobic. What a difference!

And, finally, here's the final demo of the kitchen doorway.

We'll be moving the door all the way over to the right to give ourselves more counter space. We'll see how it goes. I should have taken some "before" pics, but I'm a bad blogger and am going to make you go fishing through the archives.

All in all, a pretty productive weekend.