This is the house Jack built...

This is not an update.

2009-09-24T16:41:00.001-07:00

I am a lousy blogger. Nothing new here really.

We haven't been working on the house much this year. I was laid off from my job and we haven't invested much into home stuff. The house is still standing and we're both still alive so there should be more here in the future.

Shake for me girl, I want to be your back-door man!

2008-07-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

When we bought the house, this was the view of the back. The small out-jutting part was a "storage closet", sort of. Once upon a time long before, it was a back door! A beautiful alternate opening to the house thoughtfully and intentionally placed right where it should be, right in the middle. It was a 2 way wonder portal that would allow one to park their car in the conveniently located driveway and welcome them into a wonderful hallway that gently spilled them and all of the stuff they lug back and forth into the funky kitchen. We imagined what it was like to go in and out of that door, whether we were in a hurry or wanted to take our time, we knew we had to have that door. We wanted, no, NEEDED that extra opening.
The hallway on the other side of this closet holds our laundry area as well. With the closet there, it was an unpleasant cave in the back of the house. The only reason to be in that hall was to get to the bathroom, the laundry crap or to get to the closet. We decided we'd had enough of and that opening this up would give us a lot more options for future demos, since we could park a dumpster right in the driveway and then chuck all our debris out the back door.

Here's the good stuff!!!
We didn't get many in-progress pictures because we were both busy tearing crap down. But most of the way through the process, Tina came to the rescue! Before this point, we had completely emptied the crap out of the closet, torn down the insulation the former owner nailed to the inside of the closet walls, disconnected the electricity to the three different electrical outlets that were connected to the 2x4s, pulled down a huge amount of lattice and a few sheets of plywood.
Dave was there, chucking stuff into a bucket. I was disconnecting the wiring to one of the three inside-rated electrical outlets that had been installed, while co-workers Ben and Andrew were verifying it was OK to remove the 2x4s that may or may not have been holding the roof up. You can also see the remains of the rock and concrete planter that was built up over the last step. We smashed that out with a 10lb sledge.

Once we had the door open and all the extra wood and junk cleared away, I just kept going in and out, repeating "Holy crap! We have a back door!" I was very pleased.

Steps!

Tina made me stop running in and out and up and down the stairs like a maniac so she could install the new door handle and electronic keypad deadbolt. Before I let her proceed with the installation I made her stand in front of our newly-recovered door to show off all of our hard work.

As you can see, she was very pleased with me.

Once I got out of her way and she started with the door handle, she was happy again.

We all stood back and admired our results, occasionally repeating "holycrap-backdoor" under our breaths.

TA DAAAA!!!!

Bonus pictures:

While everyone else was working, the dogs were running around the yard like the crazy mutts they are. They stopped a few times to square off.

On the other side of the house, we're still working on getting the yard into some semblance of manageable. We should probably use a front-end loader or something, but we also have shovels so Tina has decided to displace a mountain. Here's her start.You can't tell from this picture, but that hill is enormous.

The next projects will probably include purchasing and installing a storm door for the back door. We're currently leaning toward a Larson storm door with a screen that slides right up into the door and hides so you can have screen or glass and don't have to mess with popping screens out. Pretty slick. http://www.larsondoors.com/script/browse_2.asp?Product=Lifestyle

We're also going to paint that back door closer to the color of the rest of the outside doors on the house.

All ready to go!

2008-06-22T09:53:00.000-07:00

The house is clean and organized. The storage closet/soon to be backdoor again is empty. Electronics are all disconnected. Tools are out and everything is ready to go for people to come over and get this party started!

There will be pics later probably tomorrow of what we get done and hopefully tons of progress to report.

Keep your fingers crossed that no mishaps happen!

It's happening....

2008-06-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

We did it.

We ordered the first dumpster of the year!

To celebrate, we're having a bunch of people over on Sunday to help fill the dumpster with paneling and shingles from the livingroom and laundry room. Plus, for the grand prize of food and beer, they get to help spackle too!!

I know, we're just awesome friends that way letting them do all that.

Tonight, I took measurements for the fence that's needed to be fixed since about 6 months after we moved in. I'm going to call the town planner tomorrow because we were told that 30 feet to the corner in each direction can only be a 3ft fence. I'm going to see if we can make it a 4ft and if so, instead of repairing the fence, we're going to start replacing it in sections. Ugly, I know, but cost is cost.

Tonight was dull but productive. Mike moved about 7 carts full of rocks and I started digging out the mound from hell and moving it over to the area that was messed up from digging out the sewer line. He was able to get all the rocks out from the side yard and what's left is now in the front yard by the fence where I'm digging. It's all slow going, but I'm seeing such progress that soon I won't be embarrassed for people to drive by my house.

Workaholic

2008-06-10T19:19:00.000-07:00

Tina is inside cleaning, re-organizing, re-arranging, and generally tearing like a whirlwind through our office. We're officially decommissioning my desktop machine since it's got a dead power-supply and hasn't even been up for months. I'm relying completely on my laptop. She just interrupted me mid-blog to drag me in there and show me what she did. WOW. It looks like a different room. Much nicer than the old way we had it laid out.

I plan to get some updated pictures of the grass growing and the new bushes and mulching and such we did. I have a buncha stuff I should do and update on, but I don't have anything ready. So here's some crazy old pictures of the house instead.

I like this one a lot. This is the Jacks. I'm pretty sure the dapper fellow in the chair is Frances Marion. I believe the woman next to him is his wife and the lady in front of the window is his daughter. We think this picture was taken in 1917. We seriously contemplated reproducing the fence, but decided against it because of our crazy dogs. This picture (compared to our modern pics) also illustrates how much the ground around the house has changed and the level of the house itself. I love this picture.

Date of this one is unknown. We're pretty sure it was also sometime in the 20s. It proves to me that there have always been dogs here. It's a good place for dogs. :) It's also the best picture of we have of the original porch bits.

Finally, a long shot of our house and part of the house next door. F.M. Jack was the postmaster at one point, and his wagon is in front of the house. Notice the woman out in front of the window again. Same person? I dunno.

That's all for this time.

Before I finish, I do have to say that once Tina and I started working on the house again (and thus the blog) we were both very pleased and VERY surprised at how many hits the blog still had, even though it was dormant for a year. Thanks readers! We'll try not to take year long breaks anymore.

-Mike

Ouchie

2008-06-09T14:32:00.000-07:00

So, finally there was a nice day on Sunday and we got a ton more done. I woke everyone at around 10:30am (in our house on a weekend that's EARLY) and we went to breakfast at the corner cafe. We followed that up with a trip to Coastal farm store and Home Depot to get a few things for the day.

Once we got home, it was on to the yard. I had to use grass scissors to cut all the grass growing in the wire fence because it was about 4 feet high and the mower wouldn't go there and the fence would eat the weed wacker. So now, you can see there is a fence there! Then I went on to weed wacking a 30' x 125' swath of ground that we can't mow because we have to get all of the rocks out. It looked like the African bush out there and now it's just a bad haircut :P.

Mike pulled out 6 carts full of rocks from that area and it looks like we'll have about 10 more cart fulls to go. That sounds like an awful lot but considering we're actually on the home stretch of moving rocks, it's not too bad. We've got such a huge pile of rock now it's not even funny. We were able to get the edging and fencing up around the japanese maple bushes so now the mulch won't move and the dogs will leave the bushes alone while they get a chance to grow.

We got all the limbs hacked off the one really nasty, yellow jacket attracting, dog freak out tree so that all there is left on that is to dig up the stump. Mike also did some mowing yesterday but apparently hit a massive rock that's never been there before and bent the blade at a 90 degree angle. So, the mower is now in the shed, sitting on the blade because the wheels won't touch the ground. Off to get a new blade this week as well as having to start visually sweeping the yard again before each mowing.

This week, we have to dig out the location for the new firepit since we have all these limbs to burn. Hey, we've got plenty of gravel to line the bottom and lots of rocks to ring it with to make it all pretty. Additionally, we're going to be filling in more holes in the backyard and side yard that were made when the rocks were pulled out. Finally, we're going to dig up the massive mound that's been in the front of the house forever. That's this week in a nutshell. Next weekend, it's on to getting the other two bushes in, more mulch, more edging and more fencing.

Man summer is painful.

Sometimes jury duty works out

2008-06-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

So, I was called for jury duty yesterday and they didn't select me so I got to go home and work on the list some more. I got Ehren's room completely cleaned out and rearranged which made me realize there are now many more floorboards that need to be fixed than before he lived in there. The upstairs hallway got cleaned as well as our room. I also got the porch completely cleaned out and de-cobwebbed ready for us to start ripping up the deck. Then it was on to 3 loads of laundry, 2 loads of dishes in the dishwasher and sweeping the stairs.

So, now finished is:

Reclaim Ehren's room
Level the pond area, finishing filling in pond, seed.
Seed old firepit
Fill in random yard holes with dirt we have ... 1/2 done, only a few more to go
Plant the new maples & clover ... 1/2 done we have the other side of the house to do

Tonight is bellydance practice and tomorrow is getting my nails done so I know nothing will be happening tonight but on Thursday after nails I'll probably put the edging and the fencing around the tree/mulch area to keep the dogs out. If only this stupid weather would cooperate we could do so much more but apparently this year, June in Oregon = rainy and 62 degrees... blech.

See...I promised!

2008-05-25T21:33:00.000-07:00

Today, we did get the pond filled in and leveled and seeded. The firepit was turned over and seeded. Two Japanese Maples were planted. Tomorrow, we've got to mulch the area with the maples and clean the windows on that side, then that segment of the yard is done. I'm totally giddy to see flat land where that farking pond used to be...I really hated that pond. It was scummy and nasty and smelled horrible.

So, because it's a real crowd pleaser...some pictures! (Yes, I know they're always at night, deal with it!)

The pond before:

The pond after:

The last remaining firepit:

Front of house with maples!

It time to ressurect this thing...

2008-05-24T23:15:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a year now since I've posted here. There were just too many stress factors going on in our lives which totally precluded being able to do any work on the house at all. The only things that got done were necessities (like fixing a toilet, replacing lightbulbs, etc.) We've lost an entire year's worth of work at this point, but we're getting ready to dive in headlong. We're going to be getting the house appraised in about 2 months and we need to have it ship shape (or at least looking like it). No, we're not selling the house, just doing a re-fi now that we're in a much better position to get the loan that we wanted from the beginning instead of the last-minute-holy-crap-we-need-a-loan-now-or-we're-homeless-in-Oregon loan.

On the hit parade for this summer:

Massive spring cleaning and reorganizing of all storage.
Upstairs - level the bathroom floor, remount toilet, fix floor in guest room.
Livingroom - pull down the rest of the paneling, finish up the stove area, drywall patching, paint.
Laundry room - pull down shingles on the walls, patch nail holes, paint.
Bathroom - spruce up with some cabinets/shelves or something, fix toilet better.
Storage Closet - remove exterior walls, remove floor, remove stone planter from bottom step, voila! backdoor again!
Kitchen - finish puttying/painting cabinet doors and drawer and rehang, rip up old floor, put down new linoleum, touch up painting, new appliances

Outside (already underway)

Level the pond area, finishing filling in pond, seed.
Seed old firepit
Fill in random yard holes with dirt we have.
Plant the new maples & clover
Clean windows on outside
Fix fence (moving gate possible)
Fix deck
Repaint deck
Spot paint the house

Sure... we've got plenty of time if we do nothing but go to work each day and work on the house each night! We'll do it. The pond, the firepit and 2 of the 4 Japanese Maples should be done tomorrow probably pretty early and we might get to something else on the list (more than likely cleaning). We'll need to get a dumpster in to take away the shingles and paneling and such and then it'll really feel like summer. Aaaaaaah the first dumpster of the year... it just makes me giddy!

There will be more soon... this time I promise!

Wow...it's been awhile since I've posted

2007-07-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

There has been quite a lot that has gone on since the last time I posted. Basically, about 3 days after I last posted, I wound up going on a 72 hour round trip out to pick up my son out in Ohio. We've been financially and emotionally trying to catch up since then.

Katie's room is complete sans carpet, molding & a light fixture. We haven't even begun on Ehren's room yet since we're trying to come to grips with feeding and clothing 2 additional people who came with basically just the clothes on their backs and nothing else.

We've done a lot of yardwork and have ripped out the pond. We just need to fill it in with some dirt from around it and from the free dumpload of dirt we got from John. We still need to borrow a rototiller from Joe to break up the side yard and then grade it.

The fence & gate got dealt another blow this week because they are redoing all of the city sewer lines and they ripped up a piece of sidewalk and damaged the fence and gate. So Tuesday we have to go out and get a whole bunch of fencing to fix that entire area. Oh, and while we're out getting wood, we have to get planks for the deck because we've got 3 rotted out boards. Plus all the paint for both the fence and the deck since the whole deck needs to be repainted and is flaking.

This has not been a good summer, let me tell you. Adding in tons of flights, 2 whole warddrobes, feeding two very picky extra people, the dog costing us about $300, one kid who's constantly mopey and one who is extremely unaware of his presence...well, I'm calling the whole thing a wash and I'm looking forward to next summer instead. If I don't do that, I'll go insane.

Oh and to top it all off, I've been sick with my first ever summer cold for 3 days.

Joy.

Doom, Gloom and the Black Room

2007-05-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

Well...Katie is here and we've been shopping and such the past two days. We've gotten all of the curtains hanging up in the livingroom and I have to say, I'm really impressed with this new fangled technology. Bay window curtain rods completely change the look of the window. So much nicer than than the crappy 3 different rods.

We also picked up three gallons of black paint so we can get the walls painted and then she can paint stars all over it. We also found an awesome lightshade for the overhead light that is hand painted to resemble the lunar surface.

We also helped her get her garden on with tons of flowers and seeds. Last I talked to Mike, she's out playing happy gardener as we speak. Mike's mowing the lawn, I'm working. After Katie's done, they're going to go make themselves look like little ghosties and sand the walls more.

Fun!

Nothing like waiting until the last minute

2007-05-07T16:58:00.001-07:00

Last week was a complete whirlwind and we wound up not getting anything done on the house, but that was for a very good reason. We bought ourselves a new car! First new car for either of us ever! It's a 2007 Honda Element SC and it's awesome for toting around dogs, kids & stuff all at the same time. It's a funky cool vehicle and I think it's just going to make life tons easier.

This weekend was another entertaining yet quite expensive one. We ordered the Bali blinds for the french doors so we'll finally get some privacy there. We also picked up curtains and a nice bay window rod (which I had no idea even existed) for the livingroom window so we'll finally have privacy there too. So, $400 later, we have privacy...ouch.

We had a bunch of other stuff to do including a last minute plane ticket purchase so grand painful total for the day was about $1100. *cry*

Sunday was all about a rush job trying to get Katie's room on the fast track because she's going to be here Wednesday night. Drywall patches are up, 1st layer of mud is up including making the weird angle wall joints into coves. I'm really proud of how that went. Tonight, I'll be cleaning the entire house and getting the drywall put up while Mike cleans up the floor and caulks it. Tomorrow we'll be sanding the walls and putting up the final coat of mud so this way on Thursday (we're taking the day off) we'll be able to sand, tack cloth and paint the walls and the floor. She's going to be sleeping on the futon in the livingroom for about a week because after the paint, we have to put in the carpet and molding then we can move the furniture in. I have no idea how to install carpet so we'll probably have to get someone to come in and do it.

Good times man. Not bad first whole room we are tackling and since we have no choice but to finish it quickly, it'll be nice to have one whole room done and we'll know just what we're in for with Ehren's room this summer because we'll be doing the same thing.

Yay!

Progressing slowly but finally going somewhere

2007-04-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

It's nice to finally be doing something on the house again. Since all the rain put everything on hold during the winter. We'll have to plan better next time or maybe just pray we don't have another major catastrophe at the beginning of the season that saps all our dinero!

Anyway, we've gotten all of the paneling down and that stupid carpeting on the walls. There was that same pressboard/fibreboard/drywall-ish kind of stuff up there that was in the living room but painted NEON LIME GREEN!!!! Holy jesus that's some eye-bleeding color in there! Other than the color, they seriously did this room on the cheap. The paneling was put over the drywall, except for 4 inches between where the wall goes from vertical to a slant because of the design of the house. The molding all around the room was plastic except for around the door which was just painted 1x4's. Plus, apparently they ran out of the pressboard/fibreboard/drywall-ish kind of stuff and for 6" around the entire doorway, they put acoustic ceiling tiles instead?!? It makes me wonder if the doorway was originally bigger all the way around. I really don't know. At this point, we don't have time to investigate or experiment because we're on a tight deadline.

So, we went and got sheet rock, mud, tools, tape, etc. We'll be putting up filler strips in the areas that apparently it wasn't necessary to have walls behind the paneling. We had to get some solvent specifically to remove the adhesive from the 2 slanty walls from the carpeting that was up there. Plus we have to patch 8,748,237,408,423,497 dings and holes in the walls and actually put up corner beading which was apparently also optional when whomever it was redid this room. It's going to be fun since Mike's never done this before and it's been years since I have. Let's put it this way, there was no such thing as self-adhesive seam tape when I was doing it last. I'm really looking forward to using that stuff. Plus, I made sure to pick up some seriously large trowels so that we don't have to do much sanding on the final coat.

Mike did get all the boxes of books out of the room on Friday and they are all in the living room right now along with the futon, all the rest of the stuff we had down here and the drywall. We no longer have a living room. That's ok, because we no longer have a hallway upstairs either because of the armoire, shop vac, ladder, heater and couch parts up there. Good thing we only need to cut strips off the drywall and bring it up there instead of whole sheets. It's difficult enough getting stuff up these damn narrow twisty stairs let alone the obstacle course of stuff.

We (meaning me) were apparently gluttons for punishment yesterday because we decided that the flower bed next to the driveway completely sucked and we hated all the plants in there except for the one calla lily. So everything had to go. I spent the rest of the daylight hours digging everything out of there including this massive ugly bush that didn't want to leave the ground, a holly bush that stabbed the crap out of me as I was digging it out, a smelly tree that stank like poo and about 20 gajillion square feet of live and dead ivy. Today, I'm going to get the rest of the mulch out of there, even it all out and hit it with a garden weasel thingy to aerate it. Plus I also de-weeded the other 2 plant beds this woman had out there. I'm going to get rid of the farking dandelions in this yard one bucket at a time. The anal retentive in me is delighted. Almost our entire 70 gallon yard trash can is full of nothing but dandelions and I haven't even hit the worst places in the yard yet. Ugh. Also because of all of this digging and such, it looks like we're going to need to do another bonfire next weekend because we now have this huge pile of stuff.

All this week though it's going to be working on that room each night until we have it all sanded and ready to prime. Katie has no idea what color she wants the room so we don't know if we need to use tinted primer or not. One thing we will be able to get done is caulking and painting the floor so it's ready for carpet or whatever she wants in there. Even once she gets here, it's not going to be fully ready because of all the painting and carpeting and molding that will need to be done.

Oh and to add insult to injury, while we were working outside, the little black kitty Ash decided the curtain on the center window in the living room bump out would look much better on the floor...rod, hangers and all. Yes, I know it's him, he's the only one with claws. Little asshat.
Well, I was looking forward to losing weight this summer, this is definitely a good start.

Big changes are a-coming

2007-04-26T19:47:00.000-07:00

Due to some unforseen circumstances, this weekend, we are going to be tearing apart a bedroom to get rid of all the paneling and crappy ceiling and get it all drywalled and ready for Mike's daughter to arrive next week sometime. We're getting a futon bed for her this weekend and picked up a nifty antique armoire since she needs a dresser and there's no closet in the room.

In about a half an hour, we're going to go and rip down some paneling to see what we'll need to do. I've got my fingers crossed that there's already drywall there and all we'll have to do is drywall the ceiling, paint and put up molding.

We've got the new video camera so expect more vids and stills coming soon as things change very quickly over the next few days.

Progression

2007-04-25T20:18:00.000-07:00

So, as I mentioned before, we have the guys coming in to work on the yard. They started today and have gotten tons done. They filled in the one path that was low with the gravel from the one we got rid of. They moved the gravel from 2 other paths into the driveway to meet up with the large pile of grave. They got rid of the cinderblocks and stacked them for us to use later. They started to grade off that section of the driveway as well. It looks like they should have it done tomorrow with how fast they work. This means that we'll be able to plant grass or clover seed this weekend.

We'll probably be getting a dumpster very soon so that we can rip down the paneling in the kids rooms and get drywall up instead so they have fun comfy rooms instead of 1970's dreary den.

The pond still isn't dry because the weather hasn't been cooperating. I know it will over the summer then it'll get all filled in. If you couldn't tell by this, yes, the damn frogs are still here. Grrrrrrr!

New video camera coming in the next couple days!

The sounds of nice weather

2007-04-20T19:18:00.000-07:00

It's really not normal for people around here (us included) to mow their lawns on a Friday night but considering it's been almost 3 weeks since we've been able to mow because it was either too cold or raining or stopped raining but the grass was soaked, and it's supposed to rain tomorrow again, we've got to do it now. The grass is about a foot high right now. I went around and did a metric ton of weed wacking and Mike is mowing the lawn as we speak along with a ton of other people in the neighborhood. It's like a symphony of lawn mowers. The grass is so high that the mower keeps sounding like it's going to die any second because it keeps getting clogged up. It looks like this time we'll actually have to rake up all the grass....ugh.

Perhaps if we get dryness here and there, we can move some gravel tomorrow, but I'm not counting on it. I also found out that the guys who are going to move/take all the gravel are not going to be able to grade out the side yard because they are doing it all by hand!!! So, they get rid of the gravel in the driveway that's sitting there and grade out the one small part by the driveway and get to keep the gravel. Basically they are going to trade 15 hours of work for the gravel so if they don't use it all on the driveway, we'll have time to have them help with other things around the house scott free!

Oh and I'm hoping to have better videos in the future because I got a nice bonus at work from all the extra I've been doing that should be in my next check so that's going to go to 3 things: A utilikilt for Mike, 4 tickets to Body Worlds and a video camera. So, more and better vids to come soon!

Please dry out!

2007-04-10T19:59:00.000-07:00

So, we have this pond thing in the yard that we drained out last year because it was basically a sludge-fest. We didn't disassemble it though, that just wasn't really a priority considering we'd be left with a big freaking hole in the ground until we got in some fill. Well, it gathered leaves of course and a nice sized puddle of sludgy water over the rainy season because the rubber lining was still there. Still, no big deal...until they moved in. Yes...we have frogs. "So what?!", you say. "What's a few measly little frogs?" I tell you what's a few little frogs! They do nothing but scream at each other ALL NIGHT LONG! Jesus Christ! They are so loud I hate even sitting out on the deck which is something we couldn't wait for the weather to change so we could.

Tonight, we evicted them. I cute the rubber lining all around the top of the pond (there are too many cemented in rocks to remove them and pull out the lining right now) and Mike yanked it out to the trash pile. However, underneath was the softest wettest mud you've ever seen with, of course, a huge puddle. Ugh. It's not supposed to rain for the next 3-4 days so I'm hoping it dries out some because right now it's just a big hole of gross.

I also discovered tonight that with the little weed hog thingy, I can talk on the phone with my son and de-weed the entire side yard at the same time. Tomorrow, we're going to start moving some of the gravel to the front path because it's definitely very low compared to the sidewalk. I'm hoping that if we do a little every day that it's nice, we'll get the yard prepped and happy in no time. Plus, if reapportion all the gravel that we need, when we have the guy come in to grade, he'll do it for trade in the rest of the gravel. Awesome!

As promised...

2007-04-08T21:46:00.000-07:00

Here is the video of my retarded dog Bacchus viciously attacking his nemesis........the hoe! Enjoy!

Yes...I remember how this feels now...

2007-04-08T15:48:00.000-07:00

Soreness. This is a way of life during the spring and the summer for us now. I accept it, I don't regret being it, but right now, I just want my mommy dammit!

*whine*owwie*sniffle*whine*

I got another good head start today while Mike was still sleeping with the laundry. Then after I woke him, I went to start back on the yard again. I can honestly say this is the most dramatic difference I've seen since we've started on this place last year.

I got the path in the front of the house re-routed so it goes around the house and makes sense. I got rid of all the large rocks that not only defined the path, but also made an island in the middle of the front yard. I moved around a lot of gravel, raked up all of the remaining leaves in the front yard and had a lot of fun with the weeder thingy that we got getting rid of all the dandelions in the island.

I can see how it's going to look once we get grass in there and I'll be pleased. We found another rose plant growing in the front and it looks like it's a creeper so Mike put up some trellising while I ripped out everything around it. I forgot to mention that Mike threw down a ton of clover seed yesterday to start filling in all the muddy spots we have throughout the yard. We're going to get grass seed for the front however, not clover. We didn't get a chance to mow because it started raining and cut the day short, but I can definitely say it was productive.

The dogs are laying next to us on the couch completely conked out. They play 4 times as hard when we are out there, not to mention Bacchus is obsessed with any tool that we hold that you move along the ground, such as a hoe or a rake, and was going batshit crazy while I was using the hoe to move the gravel. Granted, it cracked us both up so I had Mike run in and get the video camera, I'll post it probably tomorrow for everyone's amusement.

Finally, a list of current things that hurt...my left middle finger, all of my nail beds, my left leg (why not both I have no idea), my lower back and my stomach. I think from all the kvetching, it's safe to say that Mike hurts "everywhere" and leave it at that.

Welcome to summer

2007-04-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know, it's not technically summer yet but my muscles think it is. You see, today is the one day a year that they do the "we'll pick up any trash except for tires" day. So, we took the day off yesterday and decided to start some work outside.

In no specific order, here's what we accomplished:

Started to tear down the closet that used to be the back door. I say started, because partway through, we were shut down by a bee/hornet's nest. We did get a ton of trellis stuff off and out to the pile and discovered the downspouts are really elbow jointed at the ground at all. The are straight pipe that a piece was cut off at an angle and then siliconed back together to form an L.
Pulled the massive pile of ground plastic, sewer pipe, rotted plywood & miscellaneous crap from the end of the driveway out to the pile.
Put the dog house out there as well.
Got rid of the broken bookshelf inside the house.
We were going to move the 50 gallon drum over to the compost pile to dump so we can put the drum out to trash. However, when we went to rotate it, it crumbled in two. Ugh. So, we got the ash and such out of the bottom with a hoe and put the two pieces out.
Picked up and put out the wood ties that lined a path to the drum & the compost pile.
Cleared 1/2 the path to the compost heap of gravel and laid down clover seed. Have to do the other half later so we'll be able to mow without having to pick up the mower to get over all the crap.
Got rid of the nasty area rug and welcome mats that were outside.
Used the $100 gift card we got for Jerry's to get one of those multi-functional ladder dealies, as well as put in a little more for 2 hoes and a weed puller.

There were also some lessons learned yesterday....

75 degrees is still hot when you are working while having to stare up at the sun.
If you put poop on the compost pile, after 1 month, it's probably not done cooking and will be the worst thing you have ever smelled in your life if you try to spread it out so that you no longer have a compost pile.
If you put shovel fulls of ash on a ripped apart smelly compost pile, it stops the smell.
Our neighbors are extremely tolerant and didn't come over with torches and pitchforks because we busted apart the smelliest compost pile to ever live.
If you mention to your husband/boyfriend/significant-male-type-person-in-your-life that you want to go and pick up hoes, he will *always* snicker no matter how often it's said.
I like the weed puller, but with as many weeds as we've got, we're are going to have a bajillion little cone shaped holes all over the yard.

So yeah, yesterday was very productive and today is very painful. Good thing? Today was the first day of the Saturday Market. I got my crepe fix and we bought a Japanese Maple to start getting some of the yard planted in the colors we like and to get some coverage in the front of the house. It's small so it'll probably be a few years until it gets as full as you saw in the picture. We also found someone who stocks Lucifers (crocosmia) as well as black pansies which we also want to get.

Oh god, I'm talking flowers...time to stop typing.

We're in the papers!

2007-03-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

Today in both the Albany Democrat Herald and Coravallis Gazette Times, they featured an article about local blogs. The beginning of the article was actually about the people over at 1951 Ranch Redo. Congrats! We got a mention in the list of "Other Local Blogs" with an interesting quote from somewhere in our blog that I can't even remember if it was Mike or I that said it. :P

Doesn't matter where it sits man, it could even be a footnote...it's just neat that anyone would look at what we've written and go "hrmmmm....that's good readin' " because this all started to help us keep track of the things we do to this place and keep our family back east up to date and not having to call every week to make sure we're still alive! Gotta love moms!

To everyone who has found their way here from there....Welcome!

Awesome or SERIOUSLY AWESOME?

2007-03-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

So if anyone looked at the comments in the last post, there's one there from a writer for the Albany Democrat Herald and the Corvallis Gazette Times. She said that they are doing a piece in the papers this Sunday in the Lifestyle section about blogs and they're highlighting ours and recommending it as a good read! I'll link to it if it's online and if not, I'll scan it!

How freaking awesome is that?!!?

See...*sniffle*...we've finally come of age...*sniffle*...we're on our way to being as cool as House in Progress or even Casa Decrepit!

One can only dream

*sigh*

Holy crap what a gorgeous day!

2007-03-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

I swear the weathermen here must be retarded. They can never get it right. This weekend was supposed to be in the mid-50's and rainy. The weather today? Sunny and 72 degrees?!?! I'm not complaining about what it turned out to be but I would have made different plans had I known it was going to be so wonderful out. It can stay like this all year round as far as I'm concerned. Currently, it's 10pm and 61 degrees! w00t!

Anyway, yesterday was migraine day for me and Mike and we got all of zilch done anywhere including cleaning up the place. Today was different though. I went and trudged around on the roof of the porch and breakfast nooks to get leaves out of the place where they meet so rain water can flow through correctly. Mike mowed the lawn which beyond needed it as you can see...

Before

After

Yep...just a little long. I also got the kitchen cleaned and the laundry done (actually still doing that). Plus I made a little video of the outside of this crazy place for everyone to cringe at:

...and finally...an 80lb puppy...

Cold, Wet and Miserable...

2007-03-07T19:50:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling a lot better about all of the work and beer and pizza and money and blood that's going to be going into this house. It's a lot easier now to stand outside and look out at the property and see what great things we can make from it.

It's nice that we have such a large space on the corner to work with and I think Tina and I have come up with some really great ideas together and independently. If we do even half of the things we talk about this is going to be an incredible place. We have enough land to make the yard beautiful and relaxing, and expect to have an awesome place to hang out in and have people over for bonfires, strange conversations and debauchery. Who would have thought to camp in the damn yard? I'm up for it! Anytime we've had friends over, the house lights up like it's hosting itself. Tina and I love the house even more when there are people in it (or outside of it), laughing and eating and having fun.

I'm looking forward to really getting into the house and seeing what's behind some of these walls. (12 layers of wallpaper!?!?) The railing and posts are going to be a lot of work, because we've got a lot of repair to do. The upstairs newell(?) post needs some love, nail removal and wood filler and needs to be reattached to the floor so it stops the wiggles. And if I recall correctly, we have a stair or two that is split and funky. I'm definitely looking forward to it though. I think those stairs may be the same pine that we found under the flooring! (.)(.)!!! W00t!

(Douglas fir my ass!)

I've also gotta say that we have made some damn good friends here in cold, wet and miserable Oregon, and for the most part have totally scored when it comes to the neighbors and place we live. If we have a project to do and it comes up in conversation we have no end of people offering their valuable time and energy for some hard, nasty work. And we've been offered the use of trucks on about 6 different occasions now, in some cases the first day or week we met a neighbor or coworker. So strange coming from the places we've been. It's made all of the nasty little surprises along the way so much less horrific than I would expect them to be. Many of our friends and neighbors "know people" and can hook us up with all kinds of necessary stuff like dirt and grass seed and inexpensive back-hoe service providers. We got more rock than Led Zepplin from a guy our neighbor referred us to for about 1/3 of what I expected it to cost. The guy who excavated the filthy sewer trough did it for $120 or so and the guy who put the gravel and dirt back after we replaced the line did it for the same. We were able to pay off the work on the sewer in fair monthly installments after they had already completed the job, with no interest or fees or crap. The people at the septic place were totally cool about it. Lots of businesses and people here are like that. I don't think we could have picked a better place to live. We just need to gather up some people that need to be here with us and it will be paradise.

Weather is starting to break

2007-03-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

Once again, it's been a long time since there's been any posting on here, but really, unless the weather is nice, there isn't a thing we can do because the ground is so wet.

This weekend we started on some little things. All the trash and plastic and bits of broken pipe were removed from the ugly zone on the side of the house. The fence was repaired in the 2 places it was open so now the dogs can go out and run themselves stupid...thank god! I picked up a metric fark-ton of poop and put it in the compost heap. We figure a.) it's old poop, b.) the compost isn't going to be used for food plants and c.) it doesn't matter what we put on plants in this place, it's like pet cemetary, nothing ever freaking dies!

Which brings me to my next point...flowers. Remember all those hours and days and weeks I spent digging the plants out of the yard so we can start this year with grass and kind of start over? Yeah? Well, they're back...not all, but quite a bit are back. I have no idea how when I dug some super huge holes around them to make sure that nothing was left, but apparently not enough. Ugh. Looks like we're going to invest in a little tractor like thing because we've got tons of dirt to shift around the yard and tons of gravel as well. Doing it by hand would take forever and it would be retardedly expensive to rent one every weekend.

This coming weekend it's supposed to rain, so we've decided to start working on the stairs...sanding. We're going to do the steps themselves first since they just have bits of paint and glue and such on them and it should be pretty quick to get them cleaned up (famous last words!). Doing the posts and such will wait, not sure of when, just not yet.

Weekend after that, it's back outside and taking on the yard a section at a time to get it prepped and cleaned up for machinery later on in the summer. I can't wait until the weather holds for a few weekends in a row. We'll get some people over at that point and start tearing down the paneling and more shingles and work our way upstairs. I want to get the paneling in the kids rooms done before they both get here for the summer so they can paint if they want to.

That's about all for now....hopefully weather will be on our side and there will be more regular posts to come.

Finally, something to report!

2007-02-04T18:05:00.000-08:00

So, we were having a friend come over today so we could work on getting some of the gravel into the ditch of doom outside. While we were waiting, we were doing some straightening out around the house and heard some machinery outside. The guys across the street had a friend over with a backhoe pulling up trees and such in their yard. So Mike went over and asked how much would it be for him to put in the gravel and put all the dirt back ... $100...SOLD! We now no longer have a ditch. We have temporarily put up the fence and will have to fix it before we can let the dogs back out there, but OMG I'm ecstatic! Just a few quick repairs and no more walking the dogs!

Now we just need to level and tamp it, clean up the leaves in the yard and spread a metric fuck-ton of clover to get the mud situation under control. Plus, we have a metric ton of gravel left over which will definitely help get this yard under control. This was unexpected but much much appreciated. I'm so glad that's off our plates. We can start concentrating on other things very very soon. I'm glad the weather is breaking... More work here we come!!!!!!!!

Commenting issues resolved

2006-11-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

For everyone that's noticed blogger has decided to stop showing the comments link in my blog, I've gone ahead and done some fixing. I'm now using Haloscan for all my commenting because even when I choose a default template from Blogger, commenting doesn't show anymore.

No fear, you're comments aren't lost that you made before they just aren't showing now in the new system. So, comment away and all will be well again.

Stupid blogger.

Still going...

2006-11-15T16:15:00.000-08:00

So last night we put up the additional posts for the fence so we can finally just let the dogs out when they have to go...no more walking them in the rain!

Today we are getting in about 10-11 yards of gravel that we are going to be putting into this freaking ditch by hand before the dirt goes back in. If we are done before Mike's mom gets here it'll be a miracle.

Did you ever sit back and wonder what you would do if you won the lottery? I did the other day. I saw the power ball was up to like $35 million and realized I would be perfectly happy winning even just $1 million. Then I started thinking in retarded detail, what I would do step by step in order if I won just $1 million dollars (this equates to about $560,000 post tax).

I’d contact one of those places to get it in a lump sum instead of 20 year installments.
I’d pay off my student loans and any outstanding bills (only about $3800).
I’d pay whatever I need to, to get my license back (maybe $500 tops).
I’d buy both myself and Mike new cars (total of about $75,000 and that’s figuring super high).
I’d hire out contractors to lift the house and put in a new foundation and basement ($45,000)
Again hire contractors to rip out the walls that need to be insulated, insulate the walls, put up the missing walls and redo the layout of the upstairs including new plumbing. ($10000)
Hire electricians to come in and completely re-wire the house the way we want it. ($5000)
Hire an architect to design the new addition to the house ($2000)
Have the addition put onto the house ($60,000)
Hire a landscaper to put the lawn together exactly how I want it including shed, fences, garden, gazebo, etc. ($10,000)
Have people come back in and do all the finish work on the house. ($5000)
Furnish the house how I want it. ($10000)
Invest the rest and save for the future…that’s about $260,000 not a bad deal there.

I know, probably a weirdo sitting there thinking about all that but you know, sometimes it’s just nice to dream.

Sorry to keep you in suspense

2006-11-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

On Friday, the entire sewer pipe was replaced and we were flushing and washing dishes and clothes like crazy. Yay! We're still not completely done with it though. We've got to get in about 10-11 yards of gravel to put in the trench and then put all the dirt back. We've also got to get rid of all the pieces of the old pipe that are just sitting around the yard. That's going to have to get stacked somewhere to wait for the next dumpster. Once that's done, then we're done.

When it rains it pours though man. So we went and got a bunch of that orange warning fence to put around the ditch to keep people from falling in and the dogs from getting out. After we got it up last night, we had a hell of a wind storm which promptly knocked down 1 of the poles, snapped another and busted a downspout from the side of the house. So tonight, we've got to get 2 more poles at Jerry's and a strap or something for the downspout so it doesn't rip the siding off the house.

Will the fun ever end? I'm wondering if any of this is covered under homeowners insurance...any clues?

Will it ever end?

2006-11-09T21:19:00.000-08:00

No, the pipe isn't fixed. No, I can't wash clothes. Yes, however, according to the plumber I can take a quick shower and I'm allowed to flush the toilet at least.

The backhoe did arrive and got the trench dug. The pipe was a mess. He wound up digging all the way to the sidewalk. Ugh. Because he got here considerably later than was originally scheduled, the plumber had to come out later. When the plumber got here, it was a different guy than had been out the last 2 days. When he got here, he was told the estimate of the amount of pipe was about 30-40 feet...that was off by about 60-70 feet. Double ugh. So, of course, he didn't have enough pipe with him and since it was late, he couldn't get anymore until tomorrow.

So, another stinky night. I swear when this is done, I'm going to spend an hour just flushing the toilet over and over again, just because I can!

More poowater...

2006-11-09T14:01:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been 2 days since the last post about the sewer and so much has happened with it. To start, when the plumber tried to snake through the vent stack, he couldn't snake it all out and hit a block. Then he tried to snake through the tub...yet another block. So we decided to have him go outside and do it through there. Well, we don't have a cleanout, so digging commenced to get to the pipe. Once we get to the pipe, we find out it's cast iron. None of the tools he has will go through it. So, he punched a hole in it to relieve the pressure inside for the night. We agreed he would come back the next morning to put in a clean out and clear out the rest of the pipe. We told him we would dig the trench to save a few bucks. Good, right?

So yesterday, he comes out, cuts the pipe, puts in the cleanout attached to the house side and starts to clear the pipe on the other side of the cleanout. That is where we hit snag #2. He starts to run water through it and water starts coming up in the yard. Luckily, it's only about 5 feet from where we stopped digging. So, we dig some more to uncover the problem. Lo and behold, we find a cleanout...buried 3 feet down...attached to a 3" abs pipe...that's crushed...ugh. So, again we start digging to find where the crush stops. It doesn't after about 4 feet more we decide we need to just get some heavy gear out there, dig out the whole pipe and replace it all.

Today, Mike is home waiting for the backhoe and the plumber to arrive. I'm hoping when I get home, I'll be able to shower and wash clothes and flush if I want to!

Ah, the joys of home ownership...

2006-11-07T17:21:00.000-08:00

The past few days, we've started having the first of the winter rains. We also had our first house guest from Florida come in the same day the rains started. That was the day we started to notice issues with the plumbing specifically the sewer drains in the washing machine. I figured that the outlet for the rinse just got too sudsy and spilled out onto the floor like it had done in the past. Oh ho! not this time! This time, it decided to come out the drain on the floor under the bathroom sink! Ok, I figured, this I can deal with, less soap or something. That's apparently not what the house had planned for us. Over the next day or so, everytime we flushed or ran the sink the whole downstairs would start a bubbly sounding sonata. Today it culminated in our guest taking a shower upstairs (that drained fine) and me running upstairs screaming for him to hurry and get out because poo water was coming up to the rim in the toilet, up through the tub and up through the drain under the sink! BLECH!!!!

So, we called the city who came out and took a look at the sewer lines out in the street and they were running better than fantastic. Great. So, a bunch of bugging neighbors and phone calls later, we've got a plumber out here right now trying to snake the line and see if they can clear the blockage. Only good thing about all this is that, they send us a bill?!?! You don't pay when they show up or when their done, but when you get the bill! How cool is that? That would never in a million years happen in Florida. It would be payment up front or no work.

Here's hoping it's a blocked pipe, not a broken one!

It's been a long time...

2006-10-25T21:32:00.000-07:00

Since I injured my wrist, damn near all work on the house has stopped. The good thing though is that I go for my final analysis on Friday and I'm pretty much done with physical therapy. My wrist is feeling great and I'm making sure that I keep it that way.

To celebrate feeling better, Mike and I have started cleaning up the yard again. All but 1 plant is dug out of the center island in the front and all but 2 on the left front. After digging everything up, the yard is looking better already. Plus, we burned up all the brush that we accumulated over the summer getting rid of the rhododendrons and trimming trees and such.

We've got a lot more digging ahead of us however, this weekend, we're going to get under the house and get those electrical splices up and into junction boxes. We're also going to be bracing up under the house where we're going to put the pole jack to jack up the interior wall that they removed. We're not ready to put up the wall yet, but we need to get the bracing down there before it starts raining and from the reports, the season should be starting on Sunday.

Granted, I keep saying "we" when talking about doing stuff under the house when really I mean Mike. I just don't do the under the house stuff. So while he's busy doing that on Saturday, I'll be busy doing more digging. I'm hoping to get the entire front yard cleared on Saturday.

Sunday is going to be decorating day. We've gotten everything that we need to spooky up the house for this year and we need to prep as much as we can because with the retarded dogs we have, we can't put up the final stuff until Halloween itself so that's going to be a mad dash once we get home.

Yes, more pictures will be forthcoming on the spooky old lady. Each year we figure we'll add to it and eventually we'll be the coolest spookiest house on the block and all the kids will have to come just to get the bejesus scared out of them!

The history of the house is being revealed!

2006-09-17T11:28:00.000-07:00

So, Thursday we come home to a post-it on the door from a lady that lived in the house from the time she was born back in '57! She wanted us to call her and talk about visiting the place and wants to take an active role in helping us restore the house! Needless to say, we were in the house 5 minutes before we were calling her. We talked for a few minutes and decided that she needed to come over RIGHT NOW!

She came over about 2 hours later (enough time for us to straighten out the pigsty :P ) and we proceeded on a grand tour of the place through her eyes. A lot of the things we thought should be there in the house and the things that shouldn't be there were confirmed when she looked around. It's neat that a lot of the changes we felt were right were actually the way the house used to be! We had an awesome 2 hour visit or so and then exchanged email addresses so that we could trade pictures of the place. She's going to get her dad (now 85!) to come over and show us all that he did to the place and show us the rest of the "wow! that's wrong" type things. He's apparently saved every single receipt for everything he ever did on this house! Holy crap! Ok, that's something I'm doing, but hell, it's only been 3 months and for them it was over 40 years!

A little history that she remembered and that she's going to confirm for us:

We bought the house from Anita Equival.
She bought the house from the Betty & Harold McFarlan (Brandy's mom and step dad)
Elmer Webb owned the house when he married Betty, she moved in and lived there until he died and then later married Harold McFarlan.
Elmer Webb lived there with his sister when she married into the Morley family who owned the house. When she left, he took ownership of it.

It looks like we are almost back to when the Jack's owned the house at this point. Hopefully, we'll see. It looks like after the Jack's had it, it was essentially passed down around the extended family until they sold it in 1995. So, here's the updated timeline as far as I can tell:

November 26th, 1890 A.S. MacDonald and E.C. Standard bought the property in the exact lots as it is now.
May 14th, 1892 E.C. Standard sold his half to A.S. MacDonald
1893 A $300 improvement was put on the property (aka a house).
1894 The first time there is tax on the house.
September 25th, 1897 F.M. Jack bought the house at a sheriff’s sale
August 3rd, 1900 There is another record of sale, but no indication as to whom it was sold to. It is surmised that the sale was to another of the Jack family as Martha Jack lived in the house until the year of her death, 1922.
1922 - Morley's, I almost positive they bought it then.
19?? - Elmer Webb lives in the house with his sister and her husband (Morley)
19?? - Elmer Webb & Betty marry and live in the house until his death.
19?? - Betty marries Harold McFarlan and they raise their family here.
1996 Anita Esquival bought the house
2006 We bought the house

She couldn't bring over her pics or HOME MOVIES! of the house yet because she needed to get them out of storage, but she did send us over a bunch of pics she had on her computer. Now, here for your enjoyment, a trip through the past...

I am totally envious right now! The house and the yard was so neat and clean and simple. It will be that way again dammit! Something interesting to note in the pictures from 1965...there was a huge garage and shed that stretched almost the length of the back yard. Apparently, it was in really bad repair and they just couldn't save it without completely rebuilding it. Oh, and notice that there's a FREAKING BACK DOOR! GAH! Ok, looking at that made me want to rip that thing down even more.

Soon, I'll be putting up a swell drawing of what the plans are for the yard and how we're going to make it not suck again.

Livingroom Demolition Phase I

2006-09-06T20:22:00.000-07:00

This weekend we were able to get a dumpster in finally and some people over to tear down the shingles in the livingroom.

In the next couple of weeks we'll be tearing down the paneling as well. We just need to pick up some drywall for the walls that are screwed up.

The wall that was under the stairs is going to get plaster as we've got some good wood there for the plaster to tooth into.

There was a spot above the doorway by the stairs that has the shingles still on it because they were put up and then the ceiling and some plywood were put over them. That area will also need drywall, so removal is on hold for that.

We actually ripped down a little of the paneling and found a spot that actually shows the original wallpaper. These aren't the best pictures but it's the best I can do.

We might actually take down some ceiling tiles to reveal the wood ceiling before the dumpster goes back on Friday. It all depends on how squirrelly we're feeling.

Finally!

2006-09-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

We are finally getting to do something on this house again! After money issues and my wrist being all messed up, we've been sitting completely on our laurels and I've been going insane!

Hopefully, we'll have some pics of the demolition party thing on Sunday. The day when the 1970's leaves this house!!!!!!!

We may even *gasp* try some gardening on Monday so the yard stops looking derelict!

A little batty and a little cranky

2006-08-14T19:34:00.000-07:00

So another weekend has come and gone and again, nothing has been done on the house.

We couldn't put up the light fixture because the ladder we have is a bit (read: very) on the scary side and putting it on nice slick laminate is just not going to happen. So that now waits until we get a better ladder.

We started to tear down the shingles in the livingroom and then stopped because we started getting a good collection quite quickly and unless we felt like taking every single nail out of each piece, we couldn't exactly put it in the debris pile because it wouldn't be safe for the dogs. So, the wheelbarrow full is sitting in the shed until I order the next dumpster tomorrow. If they aren't too backed up, we should have one by Friday. We are going to get the next size up because if what we found behind the shingles is any indication of what is behind the paneling, that is coming down too. It's multiple layers of paint over a fabric wallpaper and it's all sealed into the wall and up to the ceiling (nice round smooth joint to the ceiling) by some good looking plaster. The only thing we'd have to do is patch nail holes and paint from what I can see.

We also plucked out a ceiling tile to see what was underneath that. It appears to be painted tongue and groove wood. So yes, the ceiling is coming down too this weekend.

I'm terribly excited about the demo. I've wanted to see what was under all this since I first walked in the place!

I did get one thing done this weekend. A fully measured and to-scale diagram of the house both upstairs and down. I love Illustrator. We'll be able to use it's multiple layer goodness to plan the electrical, networking, telephone, and video/audio cabling. Plus, I also did the proposed changes in the diagram as well. Then I played a little and now you can all see it morph from one to the other! Enjoy!

Oh, and I read 3 books this weekend. Yeah, you can tell it was productive.

Blah

2006-08-09T11:07:00.000-07:00

We've been really lazy on the house.
There's nothing much we can do right now, with the exception of continuing to destroy our yard.
We have a ton of plants that we still want to dig up (because it's apparently the only way to kill 'em) and we have to move all of the paths around and rake tons of gravel.

Other than that, we have a light fixture we bought awhile ago that I'm going to install in the living room.

I have three outlets outside that need to be replaced with outlets designed to be outside - GFCIs with waterproof enclosures. We already bought these too.

Everything else requires money.

We have to buy a new lock for the door to the (currently enclosed) back porch, so that after we pull down the plywood and insulation, replace the beams that were torn out and remove the flower bed cemented onto the steps, we can lock it when we leave. Right now there's a dead bolt and a handle lock. This will probably be the door we use most often and is on the back of the house, so I'd like to replace it with a nicer handle and a keyless entry lock. $150-$???

We have to replace a load bearing wall, add an adjoining wall that was ripped out, and gut and drywall the dining room and living room. For this we need to buy the support beams, 2X4s, screws/nails/etc, drywall, tape, mud, electrical fixtures and wiring, insulation (primarily for soundproofing) and molding/trim. We also need to rent a drywall holder thingy and/or get drywall stilts, and probably get a new ladder or two. Since the entrance from the dining to living room is a wider entrance and public space, we need to find nicer molding to go around it as well. $1500-$2500

We also need to strip, repair and rehang every single window. $???

We have to strip the paint from the stairs and refinish them. $???

We have to buy a few spools of wiring and rewire the entire house, starting with the flying splices under the house. $1500-$2000, unless we hire it out. Then I bet we're looking at $3k+ to even get started.

Once all of the wiring is done, we can insulate.
That's going to be an interesting chore, because we can't figure out what kind of insulation we want or whether we're going to hire it out. I would love to go with the spray foam insulation and I've found a few places online that you can buy it so you can DIY. However I've seen a lot of places that say it's terribly difficult and should only be done by a qualified professional, etc etc. I'm betting playing around with the electricity is probably the same, but I'm already fiddling with that. When was the last time anyone cooked themselves spraying insulation?
Anyone have any experience with this stuff?

I haven't felt like posting much, because I can't say I've been able to actually do any of this. I hate the idea of doing more stuff to the yard, because until we can start planting next year we're just ripping up green and leaving brown.

Blah.

Yes, I know, it's been a while

2006-08-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

We decided that once the floor was done, we were going to take a week off. It was a nice week filled with nothing taxing. This weekend marked the end of that. I dug up a bunch of plants in the garden that were marked for death and I still have a ton more to go. Mike planted and replanted a bunch of things into the bed we are going to use for the winter.

I finally got all the wood that was all over the driveway neatly stacked against the shed and took the stupid freestanding clothesline down. I wasn't able to get the pole out because it's in concrete and I was done digging for the day so I just spray painted the pole orange so we wouldn't run into it. Now the driveway is like 50 gajillion times bigger and when we park it's pretty much a straight shot to the side porch instead of walking all the way around the house.

Final thing we did was completely impromptu. The hose was stuck on the water spigot and was leaking water everywhere so Mike decided he was going to take it off and do some rigging with plumbers putty. Unfortunately, it was on so tight that instead of the hose coming off, the spigot snapped in half and water was pouring everywhere. He quickly ran and turned off the water at the main, then it was off to Home Depot for repairs because the other half of the spigot would not come off the pipe that went under the house, instead the entire pipe came out. Fantastic. Good thing was that when he came back it was a simple 1-2-3 job with him under the house and me outside putting everything together. Now, we have a brand new spigot. Attached the hose and still water leaking everywhere. Apparently the issue was with the hose all along...fun. So we went and got a new hose and life is grand.

Ah, the joys of living in an old house.

If you want to see pictures of the floor and me working on it and the hole in the floor and such, go check it out at the picture gallery.

MyPhotoAlbum free photo and video sharing

Day 5-ish (of 3) of the Laminate Flooring Install

2006-07-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

IT'S DONE!!!

Yes, you read that right...we're finished with the floor!

Mike will probably regale you with pictures and witty anecdotes later... here comes the stuff for the boring people like me!

We took the night off last night because it was just too stinking hot and by the time it cooled off a bit, it was too late to run the saw. We got up today and just kicked it out and got it done in about 2 hours. You know, bay windows and nifty wall structure look really neat, but it's a pain in the ass to cut around for flooring!

We're not putting any molding up yet because we still have to tear down the walls. We have no idea what thickness the walls are currently and what they'll be after putting up drywall so we don't know if the flooring is close enough to the wall to not show after that's done and molding is up. We've decided that if it's not close enough, we'll get a darker color and do a wide border around the outside to butt up against the new wall thickness and then put the molding up.

We also realized that we have no idea what kind of molding we want, whether we want it stained or painted, simple or ornate, or whatever. One thing we have decided is that we aren't painting the downstairs whatsoever until we are ready to finish it off. It's the last thing that we'll tackle before we move to upstairs.

I know that after this entire project, both Mike and I feel a lot more comfortable with the house and our ability to actually succeed in fixing this house on our own. I know that I'll be able to work on and fix the floors upstairs with no problems and Mike is feeling a lot more confident about the electrical work.

We've made some changes in plans for what needs to be accomplished before the rainy season. We're going to run new electrical under the house to the places that currently have the knob and tube. We are going to brace up the section under the house that we are going to put the walls on in the living room including new cement footers. We are going to seal up around the chimney stack that is on the house and finally, we're going to make sure all the gutters are clean and the ground has the right grade going towards the house.

We figure that this way, we know that everything under the house is safe and prepared for the on slaught of the rains. The work in the living room itself can be done during the rainy season because other than some cutting, it's all done inside. We're also going to rip out the office walls at the same time since the only thing that needs to be done in there is drywalling, closing up the door to the closet in the room and then opening up a new door to the closet in the hallway.

We are also amost completely in agreement on the layout of the walls and doors for the new living room and dining room since we're opening up the wall between it and the kitchen. We've also decided that we're going to set it up as close to the Victorian layout as possible with doorways and portiers entering the public areas and actual doors to the private areas (i.e. kitchen and office). We'll see how well we can pull this off when we start to put up the walls. I'm thinking this will take us through the end of the year. I don't want it to and I think that we can get it done in a month's time, but I know the old saying of twice as long as I think it'll be...most times though, it's three to four times.

Day 4 (of 3)of the Laminate Flooring Install

2006-07-20T23:37:00.000-07:00

Yep, we're still at it. Once again, we ran out of daylight and couldn't keep running the table saw or risk pissing off the neighbors. We've got maybe and I mean maybe an hour's work left consisting of 3 full rows, 2 weird ends to cut, 2 normal straight end cut and a rip row, then it's done. We are so close, we can taste it!

Tomorrow, it will be done. Then we can put the living room and office together for the first time since we've lived here. I miss the entertainment center and my computer so much it hurts!

Day 3 of the Laminate Flooring Install

2006-07-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Holy crap! We finally got to put down some real laminate!

We've got about 1/2 the living room/dining room done and we had to stop. It was getting way too late at night to run the table saw because of the noise. Halfway through getting this stupid thing started last night, the blade that I had on the table saw decided to die. It wasn't cutting anything, all it was doing was producing tons of smoke and just not cutting. So, off Mike went to Home Depot at like 9:30pm to get me a new blade so we can at least cut a bunch of starter pieces to put in more rows. I figure that we would cut the end pieces tonight out of the other half of those rows but each one of those takes time and serious measuring. Anyway, he came home with a 2 pack of blades from DeWalt. At first, I was freaking out because DeWalt = BIG$$$, but they were acutally the least expensive ones there in the size and type I needed. Put that thing in and started ripping boards....OH MY GOD! It is the mostly heavenly blade! No chipping, nothing...goes through like butta'! So beyond worth the money...WOW!

We're back at work now but tonight we're going to bust out as much as possible since it's supposed to hit 100+ degrees here for the next couple of days and we need the floor to be down so we can break out the air mattress and sleep in the living room since it's the only room with an AC unit in it.

More pics and hopefully a "Yay! We're finished!" post tomorrow.

On a different note, we went to the city planner yesterday to find out what permits have been pulled on the house so we could find the person that ripped out the walls and ~~beat him to a pulp~~ ask him a few questions. There was only 1 permit pulled on the house in the last 20 years and that was to install a new circuit breaker box. Fantastic. That explains a lot about the way things were done.

We also saw arial pics of the property lines and as we suspected, the neighbor is over our property by at least 7ft. The photos also show that this has been like this for less than 10 years, so we have no squatter's rights issues going on at least. Plus, he also gave us the number to a surveyor in the area to contact. I called and left a message for him. He called back within the hour and is going to be coming by on Saturday to talk about the situation.

Finally, we had been waiting for about 2 weeks for an electrician to come by and give us a run down on the wiring situation in the house. He finally showed up yesterday as well and went on a tour of the house. Looks like if we want to get them in to simply clean up all the junctions, they estimate it would take 2 people about 2 days to get it done (this is just the attic work) and would run roughly $2500....ouch! So, Mike is going to be doing a lot of the clean up himself. We also made a deal. Since I go all fritty when it comes to electricity, I'll take care of all the plumbing. Only problem I have now is getting over the buried alive severe phobia I have to get into the crawlspace to work on it. Fun.

Welcome Visitors!

2006-07-19T11:41:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it's fun to see where people are in the world or even in the country that read this blog. Here's the latest!

create your own personalized map of the USA

As you can see, someone in just about every state has read something on our blog at least once, except for those states that hate us...you know who you are Alabama, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming!

We also have a couple of visitors from outside the U.S. in Canada, France, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands. Now, the one from the Netherlands has me most perplexed. This is a regular visitor from just about the very beginning of this blog. Speak up! Tell me who you are! I'm dying to know! Oh, and to the person from Italy...congrats! We won! (yep...I'm one of them Italians as well!)

Can you tell I don't want to start working yet?

Day 2 of the Laminate Flooring Install

2006-07-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Day 2 of the Laminate Flooring Install

Well, as we expected, we didn’t actually get to install any of the laminate last night but we did get the final prep work done. Before I go into that, a couple of things. One thing we noticed was that the plywood that is nailed down over the subfloor is painted green around the borders of both of the rooms (pre-wall removal)…why?

Then there’s the crawlspace exploration and realizing the horrible state of the vapor barrier…had to put some pics of that as well!

Here are a couple of pics of the wonderful wiring that was done for the outlet in the floor and the splicing expertise under the house:

(note from the editor: The preceding picture was posted upside down. Please stand on your head to view properly.)

It took almost an hour to disconnect the wood stove and get it out onto the front porch. We actually wound up going to the manufacturer’s website to see the installation instructions because we just couldn’t figure out how to take one stupid pipe out. We did finally get it disconnected and now we have a nice hole in the wall that will be covered once we rip out the walls and drywall over everything. Next year, we’ll deal with removing the outside chimney pipe and replacing the siding. For this winter we’re just going to seal it up on the outside.

We got the wood stove (all 300lbs of it) out onto the porch with help from the neighbor, his hand truck and tow chain. Not fun, let me tell you. Then Mike and I got the hearth pad out on our own. Granted, it’s sitting in the living room still and we have no idea where to put it. We’re going to put the wood stove, gas stove, chimney pipe and hearth pad for sale either up on eBay for pickup only or locally. It should all mint a pretty penny I would expect which would go right back into the house, of course. The fun part is once we pulled up the hearth pad, we got to see what the carpet did look like before it got all worn out and it wasn’t too bad. However, we did get to see the fantastical 1970’s green carpet that was on the floor before as well, it was in the cutout where the old hearth pad was. Apparently, placing hearth pads over carpet is common place as both previous owners did it.

We also got the floor completely cleaned with Murphy’s oil soap and we can see exactly where the fireplace used to be. There’s the medallion/cover on the ceiling and a soot/creosote stained piece of plywood directly under it. So that gives us an idea of the dimensions at least. I also figured everyone needed to see a picture of my beautiful patch job:

Final thing we did last night was put down the floor leveling skim coat to prep the seams between some of the glorious particle board so that it is all ready for today to start laying the laminate. We also managed to go grocery shopping yesterday, wash and dry all the laundry (putting it away will be for another day), clean the kitchen and start to organize the breakfast nook/inside tool room.

Today, we really really get to start putting down the laminate! We need to get as much done as possible because according to all the weather stations, tomorrow hits 93 degrees, Friday is set to hit 101 and Saturday 97. We’ll need to have the floor done so this way we can bring the air mattress back out to sleep in the living room where the AC is again just to make it through those 3 days. So, we’re going to be seriously pushing today to get a veritable ton of it done.

Day 1 of the Laminate Flooring install

2006-07-17T23:39:00.000-07:00

So today was the first day we worked on the flooring. We figured it would be simple, tear out cut up particle board, put down new piece, clean floor and it's all ready to go. Ah, well, not so.

First, we tore up the piece of floor that was cutout only to find that the tongue and groove floor underneath had not only been cut but they didn't put all the pieces back. They just kind of placed some of the pieces in there spaced out and nothing was nailed down. I guess that would explain the squeak.

Second, this is our own fault, but we forgot about the electric outlet in the floor and needed to do something with it. Off to the hardware store for the particle board and a junction box so we can seal it up. Since none of us have done electrical before, this was quite a feat. Mikey did a wonderful job splicing all the ends together so we still have the circuit to the other side of the room and mounting the junction box on the joist so we can just cover it over and not have to deal with any outlet again in the middle of the floor.

My job was finding some flooring up in the attic that matches the missing board. Well, I found something similar but had to rip it down to size. Apparently it was some seriously hard wood because the circular saw just refused to go through it at all, like the blade would stop and I had to use the table saw with the largest most coarse teeth I had. I got all of it in and sealed up the hole. This time I did something just totally crazy and nailed the boards to the joists! Then I had to cut out the particle board by taping together the one that I carefully tore out and using that as a template. It was mostly right. With a little shaving here and there, it all fit in. I got it all nailed and screwed down now.

Best thing of all??

THE FLOOR DOESN'T SQUEAK!

Next up to still finish off tonight is to get all of the staples out of the floor from the old padding and finish vacuuming. At that point, we're going to call it a night. Tomorrow it'll be on to cleaning up the floor and doing the skim coat. If all goes well, we'll be able to start laying the laminate tomorrow night.

Wish us luck!

twitch

2006-07-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

Apparently, in Oregon, if you ask someone if they have coveralls, it's apparently the same thing as bib overalls. Last I recall they were two totally different garments.

Oh and am I the only person in the world that knows what a pole jack is? I must be because I kept getting that "you must be an alien" look whenever I was asking for help trying to find it in the store.

How Dare They!

2006-07-14T12:17:00.000-07:00

I have never felt so much anger towards an unknown person in all my life.

Last night we got the carpet ripped up in the livingroom so this way it can all go in the dumpster that is being picked up this morning. We knew we would find some nasty flooring underneath and that walls had been ripped out but I know I never expected this! The previous owner hired some guy that completely butchered the house. I know about remuddling, but there was just no reason for this even if they were tearing down a wall.

I had to make a drawing to illustrate what I'm talking about.

As you can see by the little key everything that is blue is linoleum. In the kitchen, it's normal linoleum put down by the previous owner. In the other areas, it's the old linoleum put in before her and covered with carpet with glued down padding then the carpet was ripped up and the last owner put stapled down padding and carpet over it. So right now it's linoleum with black padding glued to it with little dots of stapled padding everywhere. The office, as you know is already done with the laminate.

Now we move on to the contention points.

We knew a wall was taken out and we figured once this came up we would see the footprint so we could put the walls back exactly how they were. This is where I'm not happy. Other than a load bearing wall, some load bearing studs were also removed. Note the 2 green squares...those are supposed to be part of an open doorway with a transom that HOLDS UP THE SECOND FUCKING FLOOR! *breathe* Ok, no biggie, we'll just put those back.
We can see where 2 doorways used to be, they are illustrated in yellow as original wood and are the 2 strips on the supporting wall. That's good, except the one all the way to the right is because they cut the floor there for some unknown freaking reason and put all that subfloor particle board crap everywhere.
Holes: This is what I am most livid about. See the 2 areas with stripes? Yeah, both of those are cutouts in the floor that were screwed back down. Notice the one is through the ORIGINAL WOOD! The other is in the area where the wood was ripped out and is also not subsquently nailed to ANYTHING and moves when you walk on it. It appears that the only thing holding it even close to in place was all the carpeting. We have no idea what we are going to find under the particle board one and it's got to be repaired before we even do the temporary laminate flooring. Fuck.
Ok, so I don't know how most people put down carpet, but I know that when I do it, if I come to an obstacle say a post or a hearth or something, I'd just cut around it and properly tack it down. Not in this house apparently....when we put down a 1 piece, just sits on the floor not glued in hearth, we just sit it right on the carpet! Also, when we build a box in the closet to contain the plumbing from upstairs that is screwed up, we just put the box right on the carpet.
Apparently, no one had ever heard of sealing a house against the elements that's lived here. First, there's that box that's around the plumbing that's sitting on carpet. We cut through the carpet and Mike was able to stick his hand down through the floor there. Then we looked at the pipe that goes into the wall from the wood stove. First, the gaps are stuffed with regular insulation, you know the very flammable pink stuff? Yeah, that stuff. Plus, we can also see daylight through the gaps as well.

All of this stuff has changed the work we need to do in the livingroom. We've decided to tackle it this way:

Repair the section of the floor with the cutout so that it's sturdy.
Use the old footprint to put the walls back including the 2 new beams we discovered should be there.
Remove wood stove, hearth and pipe from the inside of the room. Put up plywood on the exterior facing portion of the wall, insulate the area, drywall over it and then caulk the holy hell out of the pipe outside. This is just for this winter, we'll deal with removing the outside portion and fixing the siding next summer.
Remove box in closet, verify that the pipes are only for the upstairs bathroom. Cut/cap off plumbing, close off the floor. The plumbing upstairs is so fucked we can't use the bathroom anyway. This way there won't be any pipes running through the livingroom.

Wheee.

*seathe*

In-a-gadda-da-vino baby!

2006-07-13T08:32:00.000-07:00

Tina and I have been very busy. (I guess anyone who's ever bought an old house would read this and say "Yeah, duh!")

As she already mentioned we went to the country fair and I got cooked. Not baked, more like broiled. Every weekend stuff happens here, and in between stuff we're finding things we can do on the house with our limited funds.

We already bought the laminate flooring (at $.99 a sq foot. What a deal!) and have been laying that down in the office. We've finished that room and will be starting on the living/dining room this weekend. We plan to have it finished by Wednesday.

We've decided that our office is going to be the coolest room in the house. We put some furniture in there while we were moving everything out of the living room to rip up the carpet and it looks great, even though it's a disaster area. We envision the way it will look with our desks in there and the light fixture replaced, drywall and painting completed, decoration done and light streaming in through the French doors (Freedom doors! HA!) as we sit and update the blog. I hope the reality is as good as our vision of it.

One of our ongoing and inexpensive projects has been struggling to kill certain things in the garden, to no avail. There are some things currently growing in there that aggressively cling to life. This is bad because a lot of those things are things we don't want to grow. It's also good because the things that we DO want to grow are doing pretty well considering both Tina and I have black thumbs.

Our rose bushes got sick about a week after we moved in and we had to cut them all back to "stick bushes". Now they're thriving and blooming like mad. There are so many buds on them I can't count them all.

I think if someone brought by a dead animal we could bury it in our yard and a few days later it would come back to life. Take that Stephen King!

Now the pics!

Since we both have black thumbs, we decided we needed black plants so they look like they're supposed to be that way. :)

Luckily we also read that the Victorians were obsessed with black plants so it's appropriate for the house! Our neighbors are going to LOVE us!

Check out this cool plant we got at the Saturday market!

It's called a Black Mondo. It's even got a cool name!

We're also planning to get some black calla lillies in the future.

We will have the best Halloween house ever!

Next up is one of the aforementioned stick bushes.

This rose bush has gone from nearly dead to completely mad.

It's alive!

ALIVE!!!!

There are 4 rosebushes in our yard in total. All of them were near death. My favorite (and I think Tina's too) is a creeper near the driveway. We need to get an arbor under it because right now it has nothing to crawl except for the tree next to it. It was also nearly dead and lived as a stick bush. Now it gives us beautiful deep red roses. You really can't appreciate them by the picture. They're much different in person and the color is a lot deeper.

Here's another of the roses, this was the worst of any of them and has been a little slower in coming back to life.

In addition to the roses, we have TONS of lillies. We have white calla lillies, and then a bunch of other lillies that I don't know the names of. I think some of them are day lillies but I don't know which. As I mentioned, we will also be adding black calla lillies to the mix at some point, but it's going to be after a complete re-landscaping. Tina and I really like the dark reddish ones. The orange and yellow ones have only been allowed to live because they have neat dark bits on the insides.
Parade of lillies!

First up we have orange with reddish and yellowish bits inside:

Next we have dark orange that looks stupid pink in this picture, but it's not:

Here's the yellow with the dark bits:

This one is our favorite. In person, it's a dark reddish-purple:

And another view:

We have no idea what the heck these are, but we LOVE them!

They're not usually this blurry in person:

We're not sure what this is, but it's a neat color, so it lives:

And finally we have a neat little flowery thing that looks blue in person. The leafy stemmy bits are so dark purple they're almost black. It looks much different in digital reproduction:

This is what happens to plants we don't like:

That was a huge pile of random growing crap. We didn't like any of it and could barely separate plants from weeds on that little hilly spot, so Tina destroyed it.

Tina is the bringer of death, scourge of the garden,Dark Angel of Frenzied Loppers!

All of you plants better shape up! Just ask the rhododendrons!

Before we took an axe to them, this picture would have looked like a great big bush. You really would not have seen any ground at all. It's amazing how much land we lost to that thing.

Also of note is the great big slate boulder in the corner. I'm trying to figure out how to move it somewhere we can enjoy it a bit more. I like to sit on it and I think it needs to live near a fire pit. It's just in a rotten place and I think it weighs about 2 tons.

I think that the grape vines are planning on staging a revolt. I have nightmares that one day we will be walking by and they'll reach out and grab us and squeeze the people juice out of us to make renovator wine.

We've also sent the wisteria to a better place. No pictures to honor it because I didn't want to get a view of the horrible abomination of a house next door to us. This is in keeping with history. Any of the pictures we've seen of our house from 189x also cut off right at the point of showing the corner of the house next door. Although I'm willing to bet that back then it actually looked like a proper Victorian and not a doublewide like it does now.

And just so this doesn't turn into a garden blog we have pics of the new floor!

We've been busting our asses on this and we finally have a room finished! Those cuts around the bay windows have been super tricky, but I think we did a good job. Now we have to do the living room and dining room, which together are about three times the size of this one.

We also have a new roof!

Unfortunately it's not the wood shingle roof that it should be, but it's waterproof and that's what's important right now. Because of the pitch of the roof and the difficulty involved, this roof is much more expensive to cover than your average ranch would be. Typically, asphalt roofing would run somewhere in the are of $5k. Our beautiful Mansard roof? In the area of $9k+! Wood shingles can wait until I win the lotto, or have a rich relative kick the bucket.

The house is also much straighter now. We had a beam (or two) beneath the house replaced and it shifted the entire house. It may not be as obvious if you haven't looked at it everday and it doesn't help that our last picture of the house before the repair was already crooked and at a weird angle. Trust me when I say there's been a vast improvement. Our bedroom door wouldn't close at all before. Now? No problem. Saves me the work having to plane and rehang it.

Also of note: No satellite dish on the roof!

When the roofers were bringing in the materials, the guy in the supply truck backed into my car.

Fortunately for both of us, they were really cool about ordering the part for me on their dime, so it's as good as new now.

Random picture of hungry birds!

And with that, the camera is empty and I end this post. Happy now Robin?

Woohoo!

2006-07-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

We have floor!

Ok, it's just in the dining room/office but it's a start. Tonight is going to be moving stuff out of one half of the living room, cutting carpet and padding, moving that to the dumpster then moving all the stuff to the other half of the room, ripping up that carpet and padding and moving that out to the dumpster. Can you say tiring?

We got almost all of the stuff outside into the dumpster except a few things that we are going to put on top of the padding/carpet from the livingroom. We got the place cleaned up as well last night in preparation for having to move some of that stuff into the office so we can actually work on the living room. Plus, we have a bunch of boxes that we need to go through since the movers decided to do weird things like pack electronics with storage room stuff or clothing or miscellaneous stuff. Once we go through the 8+ boxes, we'll probably end up with a small stack of electronics and a bunch more stuff for the storage room. This way we won't have to move all 8 boxes around repeatedly because they're really freaking heavy!

We'll get some pictures done once we get the living room floor done as well. Once this batch of flooring is complete, all that'll be left of the flooring downstairs is to put up moldings around and transition pieces. We're not going to do that though until we jack up the ceiling and put up new walls because we'd just need to tear all the molding down to do that.

Some point in time soon, we're going to need to go get a ladder so that we can get up on the roof and paint all the new flashing that's up there to seal it against water damage. Unfortunately, we're going to have to paint it that nasty green or it'll look really out of place. It'll get painted the good color once we get around to that part of the house.

Yep, we're slackers....

2006-07-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

We got absolutely nothing done on the house this weekend. Instead, we went to the Oregon Country Fair where I watched Mike get burned to a crisp and had a fantastic time. Karin came over on Sunday and did the grand tour of the house and Brownsville.

To make up for feeling like we got nothing done, we've been screwing around on the computers playing with the layout of the houseblog and getting some graphics together for it.

Work on the blog counts as work on the house, right? Right??

Now we get to bust our asses tomorrow night to get everything into the dumpster before they pick it up on Tuesday. I think I'm just going to call them and see how much it would be to keep it until the Friday pickup instead.

This state needs to stop having cool stuff go on for just one weekend so we can get stuff done here without being pulled away to go do something that rocks instead of lifting rocks!

It's official

2006-07-08T00:21:00.000-07:00

We are official old house renovators now...they dropped off a dumpster for us this morning. You just aren't official until you have to rent a dumpster.

Sometimes working with an old house is no fun...

2006-07-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

So, ask we toil through putting in this temporary laminate flooring, we discovered there was a reason we were having so much difficulty with boards popping loose and such. You know when you frame up a wall and there's a 2x4 on the bottom all the way around for the studs to attach to? Yeah...we don't have those. So we had to make all kinds of weird long spacers out of scrap wood so that we could have those press against the studs so all the crap would stop shifting. Once we figured that out, the rest has been running smooth. Of course, running smooth is a relative term. If you mean, smashed fingers and bruised knees from bashing them as smooth, then it went very very smoothly.

*ouch*

Quick update...

2006-07-03T22:33:00.000-07:00

Roof is finished! Now we will not have rain on our heads. They did a great job.

Finally uprooted the evil rhododendrons. Man those things are hard to get out of the ground. My cool across the street neighbor let me borrow an axe. I axed all around them, in some places I actually had to wiggle the axe quite a bit to dislodge it from the roots. Once that was done, much digging and some skillful pick wielding by Tina later they were all up.

The neighbor asked what I wanted the axe for. I said "Well, Tina really pissed me off today." Without missing a beat, he said "And it's her time, huh?"
Cool neighbor. :)

We went out and bought a ceiling fan to put in the master bedroom. Tina and I believe that with the exception of a few days a year, the tiny AC unit downstairs combined with a ceiling fan in our room should be sufficient to keep the house a bearable temperature. Could never say that in Florida. ;)

We took down the old fixture in the bedroom (a very old but very ugly 4 light ceiling lamp) and cut all the wires connecting it (after killing the power at the breaker box, duh!). At about that time we realized that this is one of the dreaded fixtures powered entirely by knob and tube. So now we have no light fixture AND no ceiling fan. (For anyone wondering, we HAD to cut the wires to even get the fixture down to see that there was knob and tube behind it.)

I plan to do some reverse fishing-fu and tie good wiring to the bad wiring and find the connection in the attic and then pull the shit through. I hope this will work and we can just attach the correct wiring with ground and be done with it, at least temporarily. We also learned that most of the fixtures in the ceilings of the house are on the same circuit. Upstairs AND down! Interesting mess of wiring. I'm pretty sure this isn't standard procedure. This is going to be quite a chore to fix.

Other than that, I took the psuedo shutters that Joanie hated off of the house. Quick and painless, and then I patched all of the boo-boos with wood filler.

Oh, and we finally got the wireless up and running! I'm writing this post sitting outside on the porch. It's 69 degrees outside and partly cloudy. I love this place!!!

That's about all I can think of to post for now. Next on the agenda is finishing up laying the flooring, ripping down the storage room to uncover the back porch and door (which has to wait until we buy a new lock) and replacing all of the outlets outside. There are currently three outlets outside that are all technically inside outlets, just on the outside of the house. And two of them don't even have roofs above them.

Construction codes? Bah! To hell with them! No waterproof outlets for us, thanks!

History's Mysteries

2006-07-03T22:26:00.000-07:00

So, apparently Mike has made it mandatory that I put in everything from the town historian. Here it is:

We met up with Joani over at the museum and she gave us a bunch of information that she had on the house and now we have a real time line for the place with only a couple of holes...

November 26th, 1890 A.S. MacDonald and E.C. Standard bought the property in the exact lots as it is now.

May 14th, 1892 E.C. Standard sold his half to A.S. MacDonald

1893 A $300 improvement was put on the property (aka a house).

1894 The first time there is tax on the house.

September 25th, 1897 F.M. Jack bought the house at a sheriff’s sale

August 3rd, 1900 There is another record of sale, but no indication as to whom it was sold to. It is surmised that the sale was to another of the Jack family as Martha Jack lived in the house until the year of her death, 1922.

1922 - 1950's...unknown owners

1955 or slightly before The McFarlin's moved into the house. This date we aren't sure of yet. We found an article about their son drowning when he was 11 years old in 1966 and it said that he was born in 1955 and lived in Brownsville his entire life so we are making the assumption that they were in this house from at least the time of his birth if not before that. We are still researching that part.

1996 Anita Esquival bought the house

2006 We bought the house!

We then headed over to the house for her to walk through and tell us what the deal is with some of the oddities in the house. Once Joani got over here, she started in right away. The little fake shutter things weren't original and had to go. Plus the trellis on the porch needed to go as well. Those 2 things disturbed her greatly along with the little frilly things on the porch posts. She didn't say exactly that they needed to be taken down because she is of the opinion that it's our house and we could do what we wished, but she really REALLY hated them.

The mystery of the low windows is basically solved, that's actually how they built houses back then to allow for the outside facade to look balanced and the inside didn't matter as it wasn't the public areas. Along that same vein, the differences in the moldings from downstairs to upstairs make sense as well as only the nice expensive moldings with intricate detail would be in the public areas. Next thing she said is that putting the walls back would be appropriate to the house. Also, the stairs are definitely original along with the balusters, banister and newel posts. The area that looks like it was an addition (the bathroom/pantry area) is not. It was actually the kitchen because they would always build a single story kitchen off the back or sides of the house so that it wouldn't be under any living spaces in the main part of the house. Basically this confirms the suspicions that the current dining room/office and the kitchen were actually downstairs bedrooms, that there were no bathrooms and that the addition is original. Also confirmed is that the windows in the kitchen are not original and that there was only 1 window on the side of the house. We actually saw in old pictures that there was the one tall window in the kitchen (bedroom) and only the bay windows in the dining room (bedroom). We knew that the outside of the house under the kitchen window didn't look right. The breakfast nook and porch was definitely not part of the house. She also confirmed that the house was lower because when you look at the bottom of the house there are supposed to be 3 different levels of water protection and then the foundation and we have none of those just the more modern T-111 as skirting. If we put it back the way it was, the house would have to be at least 4 feet higher to accommodate it all.

So that was the visit with her. We went yesterday to the Pioneer Picture Gallery and that's where we saw pictures of the house dating in the 1960's and 1970's when the McFarlin's owned the house. Even at that point, the house was higher than it is now. Plus, we saw the breakfast nook on the house at that point, so we know they were the ones that added that. With all the shortcuts they took and all the not caring about detail, I'm really surprised that they bothered to match the siding on the outside, but they did. We also were able to see that the porch was not there, so that was from Anita's time. We also saw that there was a different shed or outbuilding behind the house during their time. Finally, they had one thing then that we are bound and determined to bring back to this place...orderly landscaping with GRASS!!!!!!

More history and detail as we go along and find out. Maybe next time Mike will post it as this is really his deal. :P

No People Under the Stairs

2006-06-29T15:33:00.000-07:00

It was Africa hot here the other day.
Temperatures were in the upper 90s.
(I moved away from Florida to get away from this crap!)
Apparently it was a freak occurance. Nobody was ready for it.
Tina and I decided we had to go get an AC unit so that we could leave the dogs in the house while we were at work.

In this beautiful house of ours we have no insulation in either the attic or in the crawlspace. This is a problem. We are also unable to insulate either attic or crawlspace because we have some exposed knob and tube wiring. Once the wiring has been replaced, we can insulate.
Not only do we have no insulation, we also had ancient wood shingling with no plywood or tarpaper beneath.
So basically there's no way to keep the heat out, and once it gets in it likes to stay.

We ran around all over (about 5 different places) until we found the only AC unit we could find that would fit our 27" windows - a tiny AC unit rated for 100 Sq Ft. We popped it into the window of our 600 Sq Ft living/dining room/office area and crossed our fingers.
It fired up and is actually enough to take the edge off of the heat!
For this we were very thankful.

Now the previous owner left us a lot of stuff, not all of it documented here yet.
When it got hot, we discovered another thing that she left us - a helluva flea problem.
As a result, we have decided that tearing up the carpet is now priority.

We decided to look around and see if we could find some inexpensive laminate beause we want to get the carpet up but don't want to damage the floors we found beneath. So we went out the other day and went to Jerry's (Which is like Home Depot but less expensive, they carry nicer stuff and their employees know the difference between a ball peen hammer and their pensu) and found some laminate on sale for $.99 a Sq Ft.
It's not the best in the world, but for that price you're lucky to get any at all.
Tina likes it quite a lot, I'm not so sold on it. It's honey oak. I would have preferred something darker and more reddish, but you choose your battles, and I recognize that the carpet has to go.

We borrowed the neighbor's pickup and went and picked up 29 boxes of this stuff.
It's odd that our neighbors here are so willing to lend us their Ford F150. It's not a junker and we've only lived here for a month now. I would be reluctant to let people I've known for YEARS borrow my car, and they just do it in the interests of being neighborly. They literally just handed us the keys and told us to get it back to them whenever.
Have I mentioned that I love Oregon, especially Brownsville?

We lugged the laminate back to the house and to a big pile in the living room.
While I was lugging laminate, Tina was finishing up with the tearing out of the carpet and pad and weird rubbery vapor barrier crap.
So we currently have a room waiting to be floored once we get home.
We are also going to do the living room as soon as possible. We just need to get all of our crap out of there, tear up the carpet and get all of the laminate laid down. We bought more than enough and even over-estimated the amount we need, just like they say to in all of the books! We're such good little renovators.

While Tina was pulling up stuff she happened across a spot beneath the stairway which has been converted into a closet. There was a board blocking what would have been the last 4 steps or so. Over the board is carpeting. Yes, they carpeted the underside of the steps in the closet. Because I am a big burly guy, it is my job to investigate anything potentially creepy, spider infested or otherwise disagreeable to Tina's delicate sensibilities. ;)
So I crawled into the closet and yanked out the board and the ton of weird "plain brown wrapper" type paper that seems to be behind every surface of the house we have opened up. I hoped to find something neat. I hoped someone had either left something under there on purpose like a time capsule, or at least on accident like the over-the-kitchen shoe fairy from earlier.
I ripped off the paper and what did I see? Mouse turds and an old oil can that someone flattened and used to patch a hole or something on the wall.

No gateway to the world between the walls where the bad kids live. No gimp suit and shotgun for me.

I do have to leave something there when I seal it back up. I'm just trying to figure out what.

In other news, while all of this was going on, we also had 2 guys crawling through filth and scum and gravel and Odin knows what else under our house. They were replacing a beam that runs across the front of the house under the bay windows.
While they were there, they also replaced another beam and fixed a plumbing problem we had, basically just because they're good guys.

They are Cascade Construction, both the nephews of the guy who was contracted to do the work which he subbed out to other people.
They were both born and raised in Brownsville and shared some interesting stories and factoids about various things about the town.
They had good attitudes and senses of humor, despite the incredible heat and general unpleasantness of the work they were there to do.
They may get more work from us in the future.

The other group that was subbed the remainder of the work was High Mountain Cedar Roofing.
The team at our place was a ton of Mexican guys and one white guy. All day long we had Mexican guys on our roof, listening to salsa music and going bugshit with nailguns.
It was almost like we were back in Florida!
Those guys busted their asses and have gotten a lot done in a little time. They have also been INCREDIBLE about cleaning up everything as they work. We made sure and let them know we needed them to clean at the end of the day while they were working because we need to be able to let the dogs run in the yard once we get home.
I couldn't imagine that they would actually keep it as clean as they did. This is not something I've ever seen out of any roofing team in FL.

I've been very impressed with all of the guys working on the house. Based on what I've seen in a lot of other houseblogs, I'd say we've been extremely lucky.

Next post should be about the town's star historian coming to check out our place, and some of the weird shit she told us!

Progress we've made and stuff we've found!

2006-06-20T10:03:00.000-07:00

Where to begin...
We've been busy busy busy.

Let's start with the Kitchen...
Here's the kitchen before:

With Dogbutt!

And here is the kitchen after:

With under cabinet lighting, "cuisine cart" (the black thing, which is actually quite nice. Purchased at Fred Meyer's. That place is cool) and toaster oven shelf built and installed by Tina!

Me, standing in the kitchen.
Oh yeah, and Dogbutt!
(I can't wait until I see people pulling this page up after doing a websearch for dogbutt. HA!)

Lit by under-counter lights alone, this almost looks like a modern kitchen!

Tina did a bang-up job on the shelf. My wiring job underneath is a little less good. It's only temporary!

That kitchen took a lot more time than we expected, but we actually have a kitchen we can stand to be in now.

We busted our asses freeing up the two windows above the kitchen sink. Like nearly all windows in the house, they were painted and nailed shut. The PO also stuffed cotton in any cracks or nooks around the window and painted over that.
Since we got the windows open but did not have screens to fit them, we had to improvise.

I'm sure my neighbor appreciates our white trashiness. (After what they did to their poor house, they have no right to criticize ANYTHING we could possibly do. More on that another time.)

Of all the stuff the PO left, I think I like this little thing the best. And the picture is pretty neat too! I take full responsibility.

One of the first thing we did when we actually took posession of the house was changed the locks.
I installed an electronic keypad lock on the french doors that go out to the side porch. It is incredibly convenient to be able to open the doors without fiddling around with keys!
It's not exactly period, but it can't be seen from the front of the house and the cool and convenient factor wins out over historical accuracy.

Ever since we bought the house, Tina and I have debated things like "Why the hell is that electrical outlet on the ceiling/floor/medicine cabinet?!" and "What's under that panelling?" and "under the carpet: Wood or nothing?"
We have an electrical outlet in the middle of the living room floor.
We thought that this would be the perfect place to get a peak under the carpet, in the hunt for real wood flooring.
We took a box cutter and opened up the carpeting autopsy-style.

Being the classy folks we are, repairs were done with duct tape.

When we looked beneath the carpeting, all we could really see was carpet padding, followed by this weird egg-crate rubbery crap, followed by linoleum and beneath the linoleum was particle board.
At this point Tina was convinced that the floors had all been ripped up.
Because all the rest of the work in the house was done on the cheap or on the lazy, I assumed that they didn't rip up the floors, but simply covered them. Tina thought I was just being optimistic for no reason.
Finally I was able to talk her into really exploring it a bit more.
We started in the corner of the office, right by the French doors.
With much wincing and nervousness, we took prybars to that damn particle board.
Underneath we found what may be flooring, or may be subflooring. The only thing that we were sure of was that it was wood and that it had been painted.

Subfloor or floor? You make the call!

Whatever it is, it's sure ugly!

A little sanding later, we realized two things... 1) We probably should have worn masks before sanding since we have no idea how old the paint was. and 2) We have some gorgeous flooring beneath all that crap! One of our neighbors said it is fir, but I don't think so. It looks like pine to me, but I'm no expert.

And another shot:

Finding wood flooring under all that crap is like finding sunken treasure. SOOOOO HAPPY.

Speaking of finds... Tina and I got up in the attic and found a shoe! I don't know who it belonged to, but they had good taste.

Inside the shoe you can still see the maker's mark:

I'm pretty sure this was made by the Hamilton Brown Show Co. I'm not positive, because it's tough to make out. But that company was huge at the time, so I think it's them.

Along with the shoe we found an empty box of earplugs! (eardrums?)

They were apparently made in 1923.

We're not sure why they were in the attic above the kitchen.

Look deep into my eyes... You are getting very very sleepy... You will come help us to restore the house... When you awake, you will not remember anything that happened here...

Tina spent painstaking hours unearthing the original sidewalk that ran along the side of the house. It was half covered with dirt and grass and such. It's in pretty bad shape, but we're going to research and see if there's a way to preserve it. It's pretty neat looking concrete. It was so bad that when she hosed it off it took some of the rocks and mortar along with it. Our lovely neighbor suggested to her that she was wasting her time digging it up, since it was put there sometime in the late 1800s. Ugh.

HEY YOU KIDS!!! GET OFF MY SIDEWALK!

Watch out - you might get what you're after...

2006-06-16T09:45:00.000-07:00

Last night Tina and I ventured further into the space between places, the floor between the 1st and 2nd, the doorway to a dimension of dust and spiders and bad wiring.
The Attic!

Acutally getting up into the original attic and looking in with a ladder and a flashlight, we don't see a whole lot of anything up there. Still lots of bad wiring but we couldn't see if it was hot because my touchless voltage tester is dead. We need a new one of those.

Tina was able to see the 2nd (missing) chimney as well, although I didn't see it while I was up there. The house originally had two chimneys - it shows this in the pictures we have from 1890. Now the house only has one (not apparently connected to anything!). We wondered for awhile where the 2nd damn chimney was. Now we know.

We also noticed random bits of fluff here and there, and what may have been insect pods. Along one wall of the attic we did see some insulation, but for the most part it's completely uninsulated. We have to fix that, but not before we fix pretty much all of the wiring. The wiring is in such sad shape, I think we're going to have to literally rewire the entire house. Unfortunately I don't know if we will be able to afford to do this before winter, so it may be pretty damn cold in the house this year. As it stands, we plan to get a few baseboard heaters to offset the cold.

The most disturbing thing we found in the old attic was a good deal of fire damage!
Up in the corner of the house - pretty much IN the master bedroom, there are a lot of blackened charred beams and board under the roof. We haven't heard any mention of any fire by the PO, so I'm assuming it's older than that. No way to tell really.
It looks like it burned awhile because the damage is pretty extensive and the wood is more than just soot-blackened. I'm not sure if we'll have to get in there and replace it (maybe when they do the roof?) or if it's been that way for 100 years and would be fine for another 100.
The fire is definitely intriguing to me. There was a fire in Brownsville in 1919 that destroyed a lot of buildings in the downtown area. We're only about 2 blocks away from downtown, so I wonder if our house was damaged by it. We may never find out, and I'm not even sure where to look. The Fire Dept in it's current incarnation has only been around since 1932 and I don't know if they would even have a record of their calls. The neighbor who has been there the longest has been in the same house in Bville for 30 years, so I'll ask him if he knows anything about a fire in the house.
Other than that, I'm completely out of ideas about where and how to find out what happened. Any suggestions are definitely welcome.

The new(er) attic was a little less traumatic, and we actually found some STUFF!
We found a good amount of wood up there, most of it looked like original siding and maybe even flooring. YAY!
There was also some newer crap wood mixed in.

We also found a coffee can that looked like it was from the 20s or 30s. I didn't pull it out and look for a date so I can't be sure.

Above the creepy inside hole/tunnel/alcove thing was a wall. I shined a flashlight into the holes and was sure I saw something back there. I was pretty sure it was a shoe. I sent Tina in to investigate - she's smaller and more flexible than I am. :)
She pulled out a shoe that appears to be from the early 1900s, maybe even 1890s.
It's in pretty bad shape, full of dust and grime and who knows what else because it's been more or less exposed to the elements every time the roof has been neglected for any period of time. There's a big tear along one side. But the inside of the shoe and one side that was covered is in suprisingly good shape! We're almost able to completely make out the name of the cobbler and something else as well. We plan to photograph and post that soon. Also going to research to see if we can pinpoint a date and where it came from.

Also back in the wall was a box of what we believe to be earplugs. The label on the box says they were patented in 1892. That's only 2 years after the house was built, from the info we have so far. Neat! Picture of that is on the way too. The box was empty, in case anyone wondered if they were still good. :)

Finally, we found a piece of broken glass. Tina thinks it's the base to something, but it looks to me to be the top piece of a lamp, probably an oil or gas lamp. The glass is hand made, (you can tell by the imperfections!) and about the size of the top of a modern glass light cover you'd find on a chandelier.
Not terribly exciting, but somewhat neat. I'm still excited to see if we find anything else in the attic once we actually get in there to do the wiring. I'm also wondering if we'll find anything once we remove a wall or two.

The weirdest thing about the finds in the new(er) attic is that the shoe, glass and earplugs were directly above the ceiling of the kitchen. WTF?
We are also still not sure when the addition to the house was added. Even from up in the attic, it's hard to tell. Part of me is beginning to think it was part of the original house, because there's floorboards and siding up there along with that weird hole/tunnel/alcove bit that match what's on the house now.
I think we're going to have to get a contractor in here to tell us shit like that.

Hope this was entertaining. Back to work!

Two days, two days we said....

2006-06-14T15:19:00.000-07:00

It should only take 2 days to paint the kitchen, cabinets and all. Last night I finished the trim work and tonight Mike finishes spray painting the stove. Then I finally get to put away the kitchen! It's only Wednesday...only 3 days late...only more than 2 1/2 times the original estimate that I thought was beyond generous. This makes me a little concerned about the other projects we want to do. *shudder*

-Tina

House of Mystery...

2006-06-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

So last night after I finished the weedwhacking and Tina finished taping off the trim in the kitchen, we decided to get the step stool and flashlight and do a little poking around in the still unseen and spooky parts of the house - the attic(s). Yes, there are two. Sort of. There's an original attic that is over the upstairs stairwell and there is another attic/big empty space over one of the add-ons. As far as we can tell, they are not in any way connected. We have yet to determine who added the add-on or when. The outside of the add-on was done using the original siding for the house, so it's harder to date. Long story. More on that later.

I'm afraid of heights, so attics aren't real high on my list of fun places. We also have a spoooooky attic. You can prop up the door (ok, well the board that keeps the insulation and critters from overflowing into the house) and peek in, and all you see is spiderwebs, old wood and dark.
I grabbed a mini-maglite (Biggest flashlight in the house at the moment) and poked my head in up there.

The first thing you see with light is a maze of wiring. Some is new, but most is the old knob and tube stuff. There was a good amount of exposed wiring, which I hope is not hot, but the weird thing is that not only is there a single hanging bulb with a pull string switch - there's also 2 more modern inside type light switches. I have no idea what these switches are supposed to be controlling, nor do I know why they would put them in the attic.

Looking around, we also see a good amount of wood. Some of it looks like original tongue & groove flooring! I'm hoping there's enough there to fix some of the other areas of the house where it's either missing or damaged.
There's also some newer 2X4s and a bunch of other misc scraps... I guess this was as good a place to store it as any?
We're going to have to get up there and get an inventory and see what we can come across.

Finally, the weirdest part. If you look toward the main part of the house, you can see that this portion has been added on. The original outside wall is still visible, complete with attached siding. You can see where they cut through it and attached the add-on. Even weirder, there's what appears to be a tunnel or a box of some sort hiding back there, and it appears to be finished complete with ceiling and floor boards. This isn't a room, because it's maybe 3 feet high.

It also doesn't look like new construction and it doesn't look like something that would have been there when the house was in it's whole, unaltered form.

I have no idea what this is or why it's there, nor do I know why there's a 3-4 foot gap between the downstairs ceiling and the upstairs floor. And check out that spiffy knob and tube wiring!!

More pics of creepy attic stuff here: Tina's photo album

For now, the attic has to wait so unless someone knows why this shit is the way it is, you'll get no answers out of me!

-Mike

Here is the progress from the weekend...

2006-06-12T09:31:00.000-07:00

1. Weed whacking and mowing the jungle that is the yard.

I tried getting this done, but ran out of weed whacker thread about 2 minutes after starting. We picked more up so that will be done tonight dammit!

2. Making something to hold the firewood and moving the wood from being scattered across the driveway to one neat spot near the house.

Not a damn thing done on this. It's in the works for the week.

3. Prime the kitchen and paint the trim something quite obnoxious. This is not the permanent, this is just to amuse ourselves while we work on the rest of the house. We have to get at least one room de-old-ladied just for sanity’s sake

We've primed and painted the entire kitchen at this point. We have some cut work on the trim left to do tonight and the kitchen is done.

4. Also in the kitchen, get rid of the disgusting under counter coffee maker from 1972 and install a temporary shelf in that area to put the microwave on.

Ok, this is done and slightly different. Coffee maker is gone, shelf is installed but the microwave doesn't fit on it due to restrictions from the cabinets that it is attached to. So the toaster oven will live there with the microwave on the counter underneath.

5. Final item in the kitchen, move the credenza I used to put the snake on into the kitchen for more counter space and paint it the crazy color to match the temporary kitchen.

This has been put on hold until we get the livingroom slightly organized since it's almost impossible to get to the credenza at this point.

6. Put plans together for the shoring up of the living room wall and built in entertainment center including pricing out the materials and tools.

We actually have a good game plan for the livingroom. We spoke with our across the street neighbor and he's going to help us get that done either by going through the subfloor and putting the beams into concrete footers in the crawlspace or if we get lucky, the original joist that the beam was connected to is still there and we can attach the support beams there.

7. Get washer and dryer working. Washer is finally working after getting some new hoses because our old ones decided to be leaky bastards. We got the exhaust tube for the dryer last night only to come home and find out the plug for the dryer does not match the outlet. We’ll need to get an adapter this weekend.

We had to get a new pigtail for the dryer and after much calling around and bugging the neighbor behind us, I finally got the new pigtail installed. We finally have a working laundry room!

8. Take inventory of the entire house

a. where outlets & light switches are
b. what windows need to have the weights fixed
c. what windows need to have the locks replaced
d. what windows need to have nails and/or paint removed
e. what windows need to have storm windows
f. what windows need to have screens
g. what wood we are saving/removing paint
h. measurements of each room for floor plan

This hasn't been touched yet, on schedule for Tuesday.

Tonight we should be able to have the weed whacking and kitchen done to the point where we'll take some more pictures so everyone can get a good look at what we've done so far. The best part of the entire project this weekend?

WE HAVE 2 WORKING WINDOWS!!!!!!!

That is all.

-Tina

And we are starting with this why???

2006-06-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

There is a monster list of things that we need/want to do to the house but prioritizing them has been kind of difficult. We've already gone a little off plan (not bad for only 1 week in the house).

Here's what we've done so far and what's in the works for weekend:

Weed whacking and mowing the jungle that is the yard.

All complete sans one section to be completed this weekend.

Making something to hold the firewood and moving the wood from being scattered across the driveway to one neat spot near the house.

To be done this weekend

Prime the kitchen and paint the trim something quite obnoxious. This is not the permanent, this is just to amuse ourselves while we work on the rest of the house. We have to get at least one room de-old-ladied just for sanity’s sake

To be done this weekend

Also in the kitchen, get rid of the disgusting under counter coffee maker from 1972 and install a temporary shelf in that area to put the microwave on.

To be done this weekend

Final item in the kitchen, move the credenza I used to put the snake on into the kitchen for more counter space and paint it the crazy color to match the temporary kitchen.

To be done this weekend

Put plans together for the shoring up of the living room wall and built in entertainment center including pricing out the materials and tools.

To be done this weekend

Get washer and dryer working.

Washer is finally working after getting some new hoses because our old ones decided to be leaky bastards. We got the exhaust tube for the dryer last night only to come home and find out the plug for the dryer does not match the outlet. We’ll need to get an adapter this weekend.

Take inventory of the entire house

where outlets & light switches are
what windows need to have the weights fixed
what windows need to have the locks replaced
what windows need to have nails and/or paint removed
what windows need to have storm windows
what windows need to have screens
what wood we are saving/removing paint
measurements of each room for floor plan

Breathe

Mike will probably be posting later with photos and witty commentary. I'm pretty much the dry get it done type of person.

-Tina

Piccies to tide you over

2006-06-08T08:17:00.000-07:00

Later today I should be finishing the last post.
In the meantime, MORE PICTURES!!!!

MyPhotoAlbum free photo and video sharing

Where to begin?

2006-06-07T16:54:00.000-07:00

So much stuff has happened in the last few days, I don't even know where to start.

We finally signed on the house on Sunday.
We were supposed to take possession at 5pm PST.
We showed up at the house after checking out of our hotel at 7PM PST.
The PO was still there, and still packing her stuff with the help of her grandson.
She still had stuff in the house and she still had stuff in the locked shed, for which she had lost the key to the padlock...
So here it is Wednesday and there's still a locked shed. It should actually be empty when we get home tonight. *crossing fingers*

Once we moved in the few things we had with us, we crated the dogs and left for Home Depot!
At Home Depot we got a metric fuckton of stuff:
4 wheeled wheelbarrow because Tina is a klutz.
Garden claw thingy.
Mulching lawnmower, gas powered.
Weed eater, electric.
uhhh... Work is over. Time to go. TBC tomorrow.

Ugh

2006-06-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

This sucks. Despite taking something to help me sleep I'm completely wired up.

I'm so excited about tomorrow (today!) that I could puke.

Tina's in there all cuddled up sleeping like a baby and I am having to keep myself from pacing.

I can't wait to be in our house. I'm excited about things I haven't cared about in years.

Today we signed papers...

2006-06-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Today we signed the papers on our house.

After some research in the local museum, we discovered that the house was built in 1890 by Francis Marion Jack.

The house hasn't changed much since the 1890s, based on the photos we saw at the museum. We are supposed to be able to get copies, and the current owner has also set aside a history of the house for us along with some photos as well.

We took some pictures when we stopped by to look at the house today.

This is the view from the front of the house.
There is a couch on the front porch with a for sale sign. We bought the couch too. $35!!!

This is part of the garden and the fire pit.

This is more of the garden, the pond, the storage shed and the side porch stairs.

This is the side porch of the house, mostly obscured by trees. You can also see the front door and a wide view of the garden and yard.

This is the left side of the house.

This is the back of the house.

We should be taking possession of the house this Sunday. I'm so excited.

Unfortunately we don't have any money to jump in and start doing the myriad of things that need to be done, so for now we're going to have to focus on planning and preparation. When planning is sufficient, things go easier anyway.

More information and photos will be posted to these pages as we get it! I'm hoping that we'll be able to get some of the historical stuff up here soon too!

This is the house Jack built...

This is not an update.

Shake for me girl, I want to be your back-door man!

All ready to go!

It's happening....

Workaholic

Ouchie

Sometimes jury duty works out

See...I promised!

It time to ressurect this thing...

Wow...it's been awhile since I've posted

Doom, Gloom and the Black Room

Nothing like waiting until the last minute

Progressing slowly but finally going somewhere

Big changes are a-coming

Progression

The sounds of nice weather

Please dry out!

As promised...

Yes...I remember how this feels now...

Welcome to summer

We're in the papers!

Awesome or SERIOUSLY AWESOME?

Holy crap what a gorgeous day!

Before

After

Cold, Wet and Miserable...

Weather is starting to break

Finally, something to report!

Commenting issues resolved

Still going...

Sorry to keep you in suspense

Will it ever end?

More poowater...

Ah, the joys of home ownership...

It's been a long time...

The history of the house is being revealed!

Livingroom Demolition Phase I

Finally!

A little batty and a little cranky

Blah

Yes, I know, it's been a while

Day 5-ish (of 3) of the Laminate Flooring Install

IT'S DONE!!!

Day 4 (of 3)of the Laminate Flooring Install

Day 3 of the Laminate Flooring Install

Welcome Visitors!

Day 2 of the Laminate Flooring Install

Day 1 of the Laminate Flooring install

THE FLOOR DOESN'T SQUEAK!

*twitch*

How Dare They!

In-a-gadda-da-vino baby!

It's alive!

ALIVE!!!!

Dark Angel of Frenzied Loppers!

Woohoo!

Yep, we're slackers....

It's official

Sometimes working with an old house is no fun...

Quick update...

History's Mysteries

No People Under the Stairs

Progress we've made and stuff we've found!

Watch out - you might get what you're after...

Two days, two days we said....

House of Mystery...

Here is the progress from the weekend...

And we are starting with this why???

Piccies to tide you over

Where to begin?

Ugh

Today we signed papers...

twitch