This Damn House

It didn't take me long this morning to run into my first snag.

The problem:

Dagnabit. I knew I should have gotten that 19 inch tile cutter. "You should really get the 19 inch tile cutter" I said to myself. "But my tiles are only 13 inches wide," I answer, "and the 19 inch tile cutter is nearly twice as much." "Well...okay, I guess," I grudgingly concede.

Failing, of course, to realize that after the bathroom project, I would eventually end up doing the kitchen, with its non-right angles.

...The solution:

Cut the tiles in half. Now I have 6.5 inch tiles instead of 13. Works like a charm.

And now, time for a lunch break.

Yes I look straight, but looks can be deceiving.

You think you know me so well. We've lived together for 10 years. You walk through me a dozen times a day. You cook your meals here, wash your dishes. You visit me in the morning to get your coffee, and late at night for a midnight snack. And all along you've never thought to ask whether I'm straight, never measured me, you just assumed.

If you do that, you find out the hard way when your assumptions prove false.

PS: Don't assume the tile cutter is straight, either. Sure, it looks like it cuts at a 90 degree angle, but how can you be sure it isn't 89.5, or 91?

I'll get back to the tile story later. Today, picking up a loose end from last week: the under-cabinet disaster.

I went to bed full of despair. I woke up full of despair. I waited with my children at the bus stop, and probably would have been full of despair if I hadn't been full of freezing because it was a meeellion degrees below zero. While at the bus stop, I chatted with our neighbor. He's a small-job contractor, and he re-did our basement when we had a plumbing flood.

So we chatted and after the bus left with our children, he came into the house and viewed the situation and said "No problem. I fix. $600."

This morning he came over and started the job. Now it looks like this:

Or this

Wait. What's with that corner there...

There's a door behind the cabinet.

Wait. What?

On the other side of that wall there's just this closet.

It's a double depth coat closet, which always kind of confused us.

And there it is. That must be where the original door went!

The origins of our Very Strange Floorplan begin to reveal themselves.

The secret door is gone forever. Or until the next owners decided to re-do the dining room...

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(formerly this:
)

I'm happy to report that this

became this

with the help of this

and now the whole thing looks like this

(Actually it looks better than that, as I've cleaned up the grout since then.)

And last week it looked like this

And the week before it looked like this:

Still to do for the kitchen floor: scrape smeared grout from walls and cabinets; seal grout; finish caulking; figure out what to do about floor edge at step into mudroom.

I declined to go through The Door. On one hand, yes, it could have been a gateway to a Narnia-esque utopia. On the other hand, my life-movie is likely to be rated R rather than G, and thus the door may lead to something more Neil Gaiman or David Lynch than Lewis Carroll or CS Lewis.

It shouldn't surprise me then, the day after blocking off The Door forever, I pull up the carpet in my bedroom and find this:

Perhaps the house will keep offering me opportunities to delve into The Space Between until I accept.

This time, I'm afraid, I'm too busy painting trim before the new carpet arrives on Thursday to explore.

Finally, a quick and simple project.

Remember The Door?

Our neighbor-contractor-guy covered up the ugly exposed cabinets with leftover oak veneer from the cabinet we took out. But there wasn't quite enough to cover the gap between the cabinets, so I cut a small piece of cement backer board leftover from tiling the kitchen and attached it, which nicely covered the gap but was ugly in its own right.  Plus, the removal of the cabinet had dislodged and broken a couple of the tiles that had already been in place.

20 minutes and $12 worth of materials and wham-bam, tile wall!

If only all the projects (or even some of them) were this straightforward.

This morning I was interviewed by Al Vuona's The Public Eye program on WICN, a public jazz and folk radio station. I spoke as a representative of Sawyer Hill EcoVillage (my own life isn't interesting enough to draw 35,000 listeners for a half hour, for sure. :-)

Mark your calendars: the show will air on Sunday night, March 16. If you don't live in the Boston area, you can listen on WICN's website.

Or...you, my faithful readers, can get an exclusive preview here.

Well.  We've finally done it.  We've finished a room.  All this time and all these projects and only now did we actually finish a room.

Other than dusting and cleanu-up, there's really nothing left to be done in Bedroom 1.  Wow.

So, finally, a true before and after.

The day the Project started:

After some cleanup and clearing out one bookcase.

After clearing out two bookcase, installing new carpet, painting ceiling, walls, heat register and trim, restaining the wood, washing the windows, some re-arranging and a really, really thorough cleaning (in both its empty and re-moved-into state):

Before (at project start)
During (formerly "after")
Really after

Wouldn't remind repainting the chipped up basement floor though...

You know those tasks that terrify you?  The ones you've known were coming for months or years, and fill your days with dread and your nights with terror because you just know they are going to be hellishly hard?

Yeah.  My personal bugaboo was the beams holding the windows in the kids' bedroom.  They were stained and streaked and looked terrible.  but they are 15 feet high.    And over a newish carpet.  And before re-staining, they would need to have the existing stain somehow removed. 

So much was my dread of this project that 1) I procrastinated on it for years, and 2) I was so deeply in denial I failed to take any good "before" pictures.

But at last, the time arrived, and the time was this last weekend.  Saturday morning at the crack of dawn, we relocated the children and their furniture, laid down embarassing amounts of plastic on the floor, and began the long, tedious process of removing the stain.

The 72 hours following were too horrible to detail here until I process it in therapy and the Xanax kicks in to stop the panic attacks.  It was every bit as awful as I thought it would be and moreso.

So let me just present an "after" picture.

And here's a handy "how not to" tip for you:

No matter how much you object to using nasty stripper chemicals that release toxic VOCs into the environment, do not buy the eco-friendly non-toxic biodegradable citrus based stripping gel / floor wax / dessert topping.  Otherwise you will find, after spending 2 hours applying the gel, 4 hours letting it eat your wood, 4 hours trying to remove it with sponges, scrapers and steel wool, and 2 hours trying unsuccessfully to apply the stain over the remaining dessert topping residue, you will eventually declare defeat and buying different nasty VOC-releasing chemicals just to get the damn stuff off.   So, your choice: nasty toxic chemicals and a quick, easy job; or nasty toxic chemicals and a long, horrible, stinky job.

As long as the revolution involves a lot of sawdust.

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(In the meantime, we might as well have our hardwood floors refinished.)

[ETA: And while the area was clear, I quick-as-a-wink painted the ceilings, walls and trim in the small bedroom

]

Do you know the best part of hiring a professional for a job?

Someone else does the work for you! How cool is that?!?!

We are definitely going to have to try that again someday.

Before:
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Afer:
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(Props to LS Hardwood Specialists for a job well done)

Once upon a time, this house had a dining room. It also had just two bedrooms and one bathroom.

This much we've deduced through close examination of our very odd floor plan.

Some prior owner decided to make it a three bedroom, and attached the third bedroom onto the end of house, requiring a strange and twisty hallway be built through/between the existing bedrooms to get to it.

Another prior owner, or perhaps the same one, decided the house needed a second bathroom as well. The only spot they could find to put it was smack dab in the middle of the large dining room. Leaving behind a much smaller dining room. Sort of.

"Dining room" was generous even before they added the Looming Cabinet.

.

The end result was a room too small and cramped to be a usable dining room, and too far from the front door to be a foyer. For lack of a better term, we not so affectionately referred to it as "the entry hall": apprximately 50 square feet of space whose only purpose was the acquire cruft.

Now at last, having finally erased all traces of The Looming Cabinet (and The Secret Door behind it), I present to you:

The inaugural meal in the New-to-us Dining Room:

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(That's Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, if you are curious)

Wow. This is really happening.

We have set a "go live" date: April 10. (The Mr. and I had a long only slightly heated discussion about whether to go for April 3 or April 10, and eventually settled on April 3...only to find that our realtor couldn't do it then, and the whole thing was moot. Ah well.)

That date is the "realtor open house". Three days later will be the public open house.

So now we have 17 days left to finish whatever we will finish, and spit shine the whole dang thing.

Eeek!!!

9 months ago, the area behind our garage looked like this:

6 months ago, it looked like this (note the green sludge):

Thanks to a loaner power washer, it now looks like this:

Sorry, that's all you get tonight.  Pretty much every waking moment is currently being spent on either paying work or house prep.  No time for blogging, alas.

As if the sod we laid last year wasn't bad enough.

What price my conscience?

Mulch is good. Mulch keeps the soil moist and your plants' delicate roots warm in the winter. It prevents weeds and reduces erosion. And if it's organic mulch (rather than, say, gravel) it composts itself right there in your flower bed, adding its life force back into the system.

Here in New England we have an abundance of nature's own mulch: leaves. In our case, pounds and bushels and heaps of oak leaves. year after year, I raked leaves into the flower beds, spreading them around and patting them down to ensure an even coat. On top, a crisp, crunchy brown layer, reminiscent of bread crumb topping on a casserole. On the bottom, the moist fecund layer of decomposition.

Except that piles of leaves don't look like mulch / compost to your neighbors and potential buyers...they look like trash. They say "someone lives here who doesn't take care of her flower beds."

So this weekend I hauled out a metric buttload of oak leaves, both crispy brown and soft fertile black, and replaced them with shredded bark from some pine trees from who knows where, which had to be delivered by truck and then distributed by shovel and elbow grease. They too are breadcrumbs atop an eventual layer of composting ambrosia, but with a much higher carbon footprint and wear and tear on my back.

What's the point?