Slow Going

It's sort of strange that now we're into some of the more picky, random tasks that we're having a heck of a time getting them done. I blame it on timing. Between my spouse's job and night class, and my crazy job and heaps of OT, we just don't have the time like we used to. Weekends we end up desperately trying to catch up. We're still getting things done on the rat hole, but they're small things, and they happen slowly. The next couple of weekends will continue to be patchy, and then we're out of town for a bit, but hopefully sometime around mid-May we'll really get the ball rolling. Because I want to tear out the den this summer. ^_^

Anyway, enough whining about how busy we are. Who isn't busy?

At the end of March, we managed to finish putting down the underlayment.

Here I am nailing.



Oh, and here's my spouse nailing. Notice, however, that we put back one of the old pieces of newspaper, and put a new piece down beside it, along with a little note describing what we had found when we tore up the floor. I doubt anyone will ever find our note, but there it is, just in case.



And more nailing. But now the floor looks like a floor, sort of, or at least like it will actually be a floor when it grows up.



In fact, now the room actually resembles some sort of in-process community theater set. Which is much, much better than it was before. This week and weekend we'll put up a few remaining pieces of drywall and do some wiring, which will allow us to get our drywall inspection by the end of the month. Then we can begin taping and putting mud on the seams as we steadily creep closer to having an actual room.

This past weekend we had a BEAUTIFUL Saturday. It was warm, sunny, and just absoluely lovely. We went and played in the park and visited some friends, which did us good, and when we got home we sat outside and planted vegetable seeds. We planted several heirloom varieties of tomatoes, some spinach, chard, several lettuces, beets, and carrots. Hopefully most of them will germinate, and come summer we'll have yummy produce to munch on.

Also, we think we've located the flooring we want to use for the kitchen. Too bad that's probably several years away. Oh well, we'll take it as it comes. Now that the weather is getting nicer, our living/dining room is a really pleasant place to be, and even though we're far from finished, we feel pretty proud of how well the room is turning out.

Old News

Two posts in one week! That hasn't happened in ages. I suppose it's been about a year - that's when we both got new jobs and were no longer able to work on the house in the evenings. Which has been sort of a drag, but oh well. I digress.

What I really wanted to talk about was the old newspapers we found. Okay, not so much talk about as show. There's really not too much to say, except that we thought they were really cool. The news itself wasn't actually too different than today - killings, disasters, and the like. One of the papers, the Seattle Star, seemed much more sensationalist than the Seattle Times. I especially like some of the old ads, and the "lifestyle"-type photos. Pretty bizarre, but who's to say that our photos/ads/etc. won't seem strange in 70 years?

Without further ado, here you go, a highlight reel of 1934-1936 as taken from Seattle newspapers.

Here's some animal cuteness for you:

We couldn't really figure out what this meant, even after we looked at the rest of the paper.

Everyone needs a holiday!

A bit of racism, anyone? Times have definitely changed for the better, in this regard...

This was our personal favorite. Let the gals have their jewelry.

I want a daydream fortune.

Dogs have always been heroes!

This was one of the more historically interesting things we found, in my opinion. It was definitely a reminder of what was going on in this country when the rat hole was first built.

Thank goodness somebody finally found a way!

And last, but not least...

It's going to be difficult to pick a page to frame. They're all water- and nail-damaged, and so the trick will be to figure out which one is both the most representative of the times and which is most interesting. We'll see how it works out. We hope you enjoyed!

Un-Flooring

We're back, after more illness, more work, and more guests. And, thankfully, a bit more good weather.

Our floor probably wishes we had stayed away longer. The below photo was actually taken a couple of weeks ago (we do work, even if we don't post), and here you can see the completed underlayment of the area that used to be the sun porch. This is what we plan on doing to the entire room, and this weekend we took more steps towards that goal.

Anyway, we had to rip the floor up layer by layer, since each layer was running in a different direction. We also wanted to have a good shot at preserving whatever we could of the newspapers that were the final layer before reaching the subfloor.

Here's me tearing up the oak floor, which is the topmost layer with the fake "pegs".

Here's the next layer exposed, the layer of wainscoting. This stuff was horrible to try to pull up. The nails were rusty, and yet they didn't want to let go, and if we pulled too hard, the stuff would just splinter. Not fun, especially since we were already tired from crouching for so long pulling the first layer up. I don't know how flooring people do it. We managed just fine, but ugh. There was this fine, strange dust everywhere-most of it was dirt and accumulated crap from over the years, but we couldn't help but think of all the shed skin cells, pet hair, etc., that the dust must have contained. If you see little spots in the photos that look like bugs, that's dust. Ewww. Oh well.

You can see some of the splintering here.

Finally, the last layer was exposed. We had thought that it was all that old vinyl stuff with the wood grain print, but it was actually only that around the edges, as you can see in the photo. The rest was black paper, which I assume was the sort that could be used for a vapor barrier or something.

Up that layer came as well, exposing all the newspaper we could ever want. most of it was from 1936, but there were a few mixed in from 1934. Here you can see what the entire floor looked like.

We actually pulled up every single piece and put them all in a pile so we can go through them later. We'll be selecting a couple that we want to get framed/archived so that we can hang it in the house somewhere, and we'll also put a couple of the pages back underneath the underlayment. We're also thinking about putting in a few pages from a current newspaper under there, just as a surprise for anyone who comes after us who might tear up the floor we put in. We really, really enjoyed getting to see all the old newspaper - it was fun and interesting, and sort of transporting, actually. I'll do another post around just some photos of the newspaper later on in the week.

Finally, when the papers were all pulled up, we were left with the old, raw cedar planks of the subfloor. They're in good shape, but they're sure not pretty or even. Still, they're nice and solid, and will be a good foundation for our underlayment.

It's going to seem like a whole new room once the underlayment's in and we don't have to be frightened to walk across the floor anymore. I can't wait until we can put a real floor in, but first things first.

Sun in Seattle

I blame the weather for our lack of house progress.

Actually, I blame illness first. And then I blame work. And after that I blame homework. Then I blame our recent need to socialize (imagine that).

But after all that, I blame the sunshine. Oddly enough, it makes me really feel motivated to work on the house, but then I go outside, and the next thing I know I'm hiking in the park. Oh darn.

We've had a glorious week and a half of lovely weather, and we've been enjoying it thoroughly. We haven't gotten much done on the house, but we've been having a good time. Actually, we did a bit of mowing and trimming around the yard, cleaned up our hedge planting strip, and made a trip to the nursery and planted some new stuff (moss for the shady side of the hedge, strawberries for the sunny side). So we did do SOMETHING.

This weekend is supposed to be crappy weather, and we actually have no social obligations, so I think I'm finally going to get to rip up the floor and put down the underlayment. I'm crossing my fingers.

Back in Action

Sorry for the delay, everyone. We've been pretty busy lately. As if everyone we know isn't busy all the time. Not only have we been busy, me with working a lot of overtime and my spouse with his long commute and homework, but our computers have also been acting up. Plus my brother was here for a couple of weeks. The holidays didn't help.

Anyway, we're back in action on the rat hole now. Over the past few weeks we've put up almost all the drywall in the room. The ceiling and walls are all completely finished, except for a couple strips right around the doorways and the fireplace/shelf area. We've also ripped up the floor where the sun porch used to be and have put down a thin sheet of underlayment. The plan is to put down underlayment all over the living/dining room floor, then when we tear out the den, do the same there, put the self-leveling compound all over it, then put down cork, and finally the hardwood floors. We'll probably do tile in the entryway and something else in the kitchen/nook - we're still mulling that over. But that's the plan.

Here's a pic of the drywall installation:


Here's what it looked like when my brother was visiting, in early January:


Here's what it looks like with the floor torn up:


And here's more floor:


Finally, we were able to install half of one of the Solatubes we bought last April. We haven't punched through the roof yet, so it doesn't function like a skylight, but we did install the part that has the lightbulbs in it. so now we have a light source in that part of the room, which rocks. We'll install the light part of the other Solatube in the next week or two. We'll have so much light we won't know what to do. Okay, I'm pretty sure we'll know exactly what to do - work our butts of even more.



Hopefully posting will be much more regular, although my spouse's class doesn't get over until the end of June, and my time in February is taken up by several overtime projects. Still, we'll do our best!

Ceilings, Snow and Trees

Here are a few photos of the new ceiling, falling snow, and Xmas tree.

First, the new ceiling.

Before the new ceiling could be truly affective, large gaps between the new ceiling and the old ceiling had to be filled. We found that "Great Stuff" polyurethane foam worked quite well for this.

This year it snowed and our walls weren't open to the outside. Oh, the little pleasures!

And because the mood struck us...

Now With Fewer Rats

I just have not been able to get online lately. I guess it's just that hectic time of year.

Anyhow, a couple of weekends ago we continued where we left off - hanging ceiling drywall. The part of the ceiling that used to be the sun porch was finished, as you know, but that left the rest of the room. Hanging that drywall meant getting rid of some 2x4s beneath the second beam we put in, so it was time for what we like to call "surgical demo." We use that term to describe when we need to destroy something without destroying everything else around it. Enter the handsaw and chisels.

So about this same time, we'd been dealing with the rat. Considering its leavings, we figured it was only one. We had put all our food in the kitchen in plastic containers, and so the rat wasn't a problem yet, but we knew it could become a problem and we needed to take care of it. We weren't sure what the best way to kill it was, and so we put out both traps an poison. A couple days later, the traps still hadn't sprung. That was Friday, since we got the implements of rodent murder on a Wednesday.

That brings us back to Saturday, when we were doing our surgical demo. We'd been whacking on things, and stuff was falling down from the ceiling onto the floor. We'd been walking through the little passageway between the den and the laundry room/entryway all day, and then, suddenly, something was in the middle of the floor. It was a rat. A large, gray, fuzzy rat. It didn't look anything like the slick, glossy brown rat I had seen poking around outside our house over the summer.

The rat just lay on the floor. Its eyes were still shiny, and it was awfully fuzzy and cute. When we poked it, it didn't move. And so the poor thing died. It wasn't even stiff when I picked it up to take it outside, so it must have been pretty recently dead. We felt sad, but there wasn't much else we could have done. Poor rat. I hope it didn't suffer much.

Anyway, Sunday some friends came over to help us hang more ceiling drywall. It was the first time they had been over, and they were VERY helpful. We got most of it hung.

Because our room is so nice now, and we're actually hanging out in it, we decided to get a Christmas tree. So now we have a festive rat hole. It's almost like a home. Except that everything's still crappy. But I can finally see how it will slowly get better.

This past weekend, we finished up the ceiling drywall and confirmed the location of the Solatubes. It's gonna be good! Maybe if we're lucky we'll get all the drywall up by the first of the year.

We have pics on the camera, but I haven't really had time to download them, and when I might have had a second, I was too lazy. So if I post at all between now and 2008, I'll post those pics.

If I don't post, Happy Holidays from us at the Rat Hole!

Thanks Were Given

So, as you know, we were able to get the insulation up in time for our guests. The electrical inspector came on Wednesday and signed us off for cover, and so Wednesday night we put up some ceiling drywall so we could have the lights over our table at Thanksgiving.

Here's a photo of hanging the drywall.

The lights weren't as easy to install as we thought they might be - turns out the directions were horrible and it wasn't necessarily very intuitive to figure out. But figure it out we did, or rather my spouse did, and they ended up looking lovely. We put up the table, put paper on the floor to protect guests' socks from staples and glue, and voila! We had a functional room.

And a lovely, functional room at that. The light came through the windows nicely, and the lights are on a dimmer switch, so as it faded into evening we turned those on. We had six people over for Thanksgiving, and all eight of us fit comfortably at the table, and we played videogames in the room while dinner was in the oven. It stayed plenty warm in the rat hole, and everyone seemed to be comfortable. I think a good time was had by all.

For us, it felt like we were finally turning a corner. It is no longer unbearably cold in the house, and after such a pleasant week in our new room, we're feeling excited. It feels like we could actually LIVE here someday. It feels like it could be very close to the home of our dreams someday. We also feel proud of ourselves for creating such a pleasant space. We look forward to getting the drywall up and the Solatubes in so that the room has even more light and substance. Once the bookshelf is in and the fireplace is finished, it should be a charming room.

So, our sense of accomplishment and the company of our wonderful friends, combined with a warm and happy home, made for a lovely and fun Thanksgiving.

It's hard to believe that it's been two years since we closed on the house. What a long way we've come since then!

Insulation Installation

As I've already mentioned, we got our insulation delivered last Friday. They literally dumped it in our driveway, and it just sort of lay there on its side. It looked so funny that I ran to get the camera, but by the time I got back, the delivery guy had righted it and driven away.

Here's what we got ourselves into with the insulation.

When we had our framing inspection on Friday, I had a few questions for the inspector. One of the questions was to verify what R value of insulation we needed to put in our walls. He said R-19. I asked if that was true even for 2x4 construction. He said yes. I asked if R-19 would fit in our walls, since it was meant for 2x6 construction. He still said yes. So we panicked, and had R-19 insulation delivered instead of our original R-15. That night, we were doing some reading, trying to figure it out, and everything we read said that you couldn't fit R-19 in 2x4 construction without compacting it, which would reduce its R value to R-13. That made putting R-19 in our walls seem really stupid to us, since we wanted an R value of 15 or higher, so we traded our R-19 in for our original order of R-15. When we had our insulation inspection yesterday (which we passed!), the inspector, who's sort of the head inspector, said absolutely R-15 was the right choice, and confirmed all our suspicions about R-19. I believe his words were something along the lines of, "Oh no, you can't put R-19 in 2x4 walls. That's like trying to put 5 lbs of dog doo in a 1 lb bag. You just can't do it."

I liked our inspector. He was very helpful, nice, and knowledgeable. And after all our anxiety about the insulation inspection, he just stood in the middle of the room, turned around once, and signed off. All that worry for one minute of time. Oh well, we passed, and that's what matters!

So here we are installing our kraft-faced R-15 batts in our exterior walls. It went a lot more quickly than we thought it would.

My husband had a knack for getting the insulation without it bunching, so I decided not to mess with a good thing. He put in the batts and I followed with the stapler. 1500 staples and two days later, my arm and hand are still feeling destroyed.

Here's what the ceiling insulation, which is R-38, looks like when you cut open the package. It does this cool blossoming thing. We liked it.

The ceiling insulation actually went quite quickly. It was even easier than the wall insulation, in that we didn't have to cut around electrical things like outlets in the same way. We just had to cut around the can lights, and that was it.

And here's the view in the attic. It looks so fluffy and cozy!

We used formaldehyde-free insulation, and it held together really well. We hardly itched at all, although we still wore respirators and goggles and the whole bit. It took us about 5-6 hours to install everything, and we finished up about 1am Monday morning. Ugh, long day! But we got it done and now our house actually stays above 50 degrees. We can even turn on the heaters. Hooray!

The only bad thing is that the electrical inspector couldn't come out yesterday or today, so we have to wait to put up some of the drywall. But he said that we could put up drywall wherever there wasn't electricity run, so that's what well do tonight, and hopefully we'll be comfy cozy for Thanksgiving, or at least cozy enough.

The Fireplace Installation

We actually got the fireplace delivered last Wednesday, and worked frantically for the next couple of nights to get the thing installed for our framing and mechanical inspection on Friday, which we passed. Yippee!

Here's the fireplace, right were kbot and I left it on Weds. afternoon.

And here's where we needed to put it.

The above photo was taken after our final framing push, with everything all nice and measured and pretty. We went to put the fireplace in and whoops, it wouldn't fit. This was expected, since we would have to tilt the unit and slide it under to get it past the fireplace header (the horizontal member in the photo). No worries there. We tilted it, pushed, tilted it, pushed, and uh-oh, it will wouldn't fit. After about 5 seconds of really being worried, we realized we could just take off some brackets. That worked like a charm, and in it slid.

Next came the pipe kit for the chimney. When we ordered the fireplace, the salesperson had said we were getting a 6-inch pipe, and so when we measured we didn't order an angle kit because we thought we had a straight shot to the roof. What we actually got was an 8-inch pipe, which after the double-walls and safety whatnots, ended up actually being a 12-inch pipe. Which was just barely not a straight shot. We ended up having to lean the pipe a little bit, which worried us. When we tested it, though, with a bit o' burning something, no smoke came through any of the seams and it seemed to be drawing fine. I guess we'll find out for sure when we light our first fire! Hmmm, maybe we should do that before we put up the drywall, just in case...

Anyway, we were a bit worried about how the fireplace would look because it was just so darn big. Once we got it in, though, we were very pleased. It's a little wider than our bookshelf, and it actually looks quite nice paired with it. We think it looks so nice, actually, that we installed an additional pair of can lights to shine on the fireplace and whatever artstuffs we put on the mantel and hang above the mantel.

Here it is finished.

We spent a lot of time angsting about our framing, if it was okay, was it okay to tilt the pipe, etc. When the inspector showed up on Friday, he spent a good bit of time looking at things, and then signed us off, no problems, no issues. Which made us VERY happy. We also got our insulation on Friday, so that made us happy, too.

I'll leave you with a shot of the piece of our roof that we cut out to fit the fireplace pipe through. We thought it was sort of pretty, with the moss and the red-brown of the shingles. I think maybe the house has finally driven us insane, that we're considering this sort of thing pleasant to look at.