This Damn House

Lunch break: spent an hour sawing off ugly low hanging branches on trees that were crowding the yard and blocking visibility of oncoming traffic from the driveway. I'll get a picture up later. Right now I'm sitting buff at the computer willing the sweat to dry.

I'm so full of energy for house stuff right now (thanks, in large part, to this blog) that I'm having trouble focusing on my paying job. I've never been very good at that balance thingy...

Auugghhh. I knew it would happen. I'm losing momentum. The enormity of the task is wearing me down.

The worst part is that, having done all this work to get ready for some fixing of stuff, now I can't find the fixers. I was delighted to find a plumber easily this week, but my quest for a handyperson and a glazier have both been frustrating, with unreturned emails and phone calls, and being out of people's service areas, and having jobs too small, etc.

Help! Someone say something to keep me on the path!

Does the term "extension office" mean anything to you? Me neither, at least until I was Googling on soil testing and ran across this useful article , which says (among other things): "The first thing I recommend is that you check with your county's extension office...you can send [your soil sample] to them for analysis."

I found "my county's extension office" a little baffling ("extension" of what?), but as always, Google is your friend and mine, and I discovered that there's a nationwide program affiliated with (run by? funded by? I'm still not clear) the US Department of Agriculture called the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service. According to their website:

All universities engage in research and teaching, but the nation's more than 100 land-grant colleges and universities, have a third critical mission—extension. “Extension� means “reaching out,� and—along with teaching and research—land-grant institutions “extend� their resources, solving public needs with college or university resources through non-formal, non-credit programs.

Although I was briefly diverted learning about land grant institutions (does anyone else lose vast amounts of time following interesting but irrelevant information threads on the internet?), eventually I wound up at my handy-dandy local extension office's soil test site. Check it out - for $9 they will tell you (almost) all there is to know about the dirt in your yard!

And because I like to post pictures, here's one of a tray of dirt, gathered per the instructions and drying in the sun.

Ain't that the darndest thing? I love this country.

Anyone who has met me is unsurprised to learn that I am a staunch feminist.

This informs many aspects of my life, but perhaps most importantly, my parenting.

I try not to let social gender stereotypes limit my children. I knew when I had my sons that part of my responsibility was to nurture in them not only traditionally masculine talents -- sports, mechanics, cooking, singing, that sort of thing -- but also those areas traditionally reserved only for females.

I was determined that no son of mine would leave my care without being able to solve simple differential equations, wire an outlet, repair a leaky faucet or set up a basic database.

So while my husband takes them outside to shoot hoops, or teaches them his secret recipe for pan-roasted chicken, I strive to share with them my more girlish activities. We play chess, poker and Battleship together, work on our home computer network...and since the Quicker Fixer Upper Project has started, I try to include them in our home improvement tasks.

But...

Well, staunch feminism aside, I'm starting to question the basic assumption that children are blank gender-neutral slates onto which society projects its insidious gender role expectations. Because despite my best attempts, not one of my sons has shown the slightest interest in or aptitude for the womanly arts of plumbing, wiring, carpentry, etc. Not one can drive a nail straight.

When I was a little kid, I loved to go downstairs with my mother and "help" her frame walls in the basement or re-route the furnace intakes. My brother, of course, never cared about that stuff -- he preferred to hang with his friends playing baseball, puttering in the kitchen or reading Jane Austen novels -- but as an adult I had chalked that up to our traditional gender-based upbringing. Mom never really did encourage any interest he might have in those things.

So I dunno...can boys really learn to use tools? Or should I just give up fighting nature and hope they marry well and their wives take care of all those home improvement tasks?

How's this for rude? I leave you all hanging on several projects, disappear for a week, and then come back with a question instead of a report?

Well, reports and before-and-after pics coming soon, but in the meantime, help me solve the Hinge Mystery!

Our kitchen cabinets are lovely except for the tendency of the doors to fall off at random intervals.

Upon close examination I've decided the culprit is a few (okay, several) damaged hinges. (Could it possibly be because my toddlers' favorite pastime was banging the cabinet doors open and closed full force for at least 6 hours a day every day? Nah.)

So I'd like to replace the hinges. Rather than go through another painful and exasperating interview with the Helpful Hardware Guy I'm turning to you, my loyal readers, to give me any hints you may have as to what kind of hinges these are:

Are these mortise hinges? European hinges? Beveled hinges?

Manufactured in 1987 in West Germany.

[Edit: Okay, further research on cabinet and hinge vocabulary reveals that my cabinets are framed, my cabinet doors are full overlay, and that the hinges are fully concealed self-closing European style hinges which are cup mortised on both sides, which is to say both the door and the frame have round cut-outs so the hinges mounts flush to the wood. Unfortunately, knowing this doesn't help much, as Teh Intarnet seems to think such a thing doesn't exist. The most prominent makers of this type of hinge are Blum and Grass, but all their hinges are mortised on only the door and surface mounted on the frame. ARG!]

[Edit 2: The nice folks at Hardware Source identified the hinge maker for me as Mepla. Unfortunately, the products shown on their website are similar to all the other European style hinges, in that there's a cup mortise on the cabinet door (like these), but none on the face frame; it's just surface mounted. I think replacing the hinges with something like that would just leave a gaping hole in the frame. ARG!]

"They" being the hypothetical buyers of my house and "it" being all the work I'm doing!

Sometimes I look at the wonderful, beautiful improvements we are making to the house (like the bathroom tile) and I think: why didn't we do this years ago, when we could have reaped the enjoyment of this feature, instead of the next people to move in.

The answer, of course, is that I'm just not willing to put that much work into aesthetics or even minor conveniences. I never did care that much about looks! But selling my house is important enough that I am willing to do it to improve its marketability. But oh man, while I'm down on my knees with the trowel in hand for hours, I'm sure wishing I'd done it 2 or 6 or 12 years ago.

The great irony is that I'm just perfectionistic enough to do the job to a quality level the hypothetical new owners will never know about. They will never know that I ripped out plywood to put in cement backboard because it will last 10 times longer. They will never know that I carefully cleaned grout off every tile, even those that will be forever hidden by the (new!) vanity.

I think I just don't want "previous owner" karma haunting me for the rest of my life.

If ripping up 3 layers of flooring wasn't crazy enough, we've also decided to pull out a large custom built cabinet that has been in the house since (as a tag behind it said) 1988. The cabinet was kind of nice but it was in less than great condition. More importantly, it cut out a huge amount of the floor space in the dining room that we (and hopefully prospective buyers) want back.

Of course, it's This Damn House, so no project is as easy as you'd think. But...now I fear we may have bitten off more than we have time to chew.

Beind the cabinet there's 1/2 of a sort of false wall.  The cord you see goes to a light switch installed in the side (outside) of the cabinet which controls the dining room light.  It looks like the easiest way to fix this up is to frame and hang the rest of
the wall.  Maybe.

Below the cabinet is the supporting 2x4s nailed to the floor.  The hard part here is that the lateral 2x4s extend the full length of the cabinets, including under ones we are keeping.  So somehow we have to cut them in place and pull them up.  how the heck we gonna do that?!

And of course there's misc. aesthetic issues, like needing base trim around the new wall and existing cabinets.

It's not a pretty situation for sure.  :-\

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.

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.

As long as the revolution involves a lot of sawdust.

 |

(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

]

5 days till market, and counting.

On Friday, our friendly local staging consultant came by, courtesy of our realtor. she spent nearly 2 hours walking through our house with us, telling us "all shelves and storage should be 30% empty" and "put a throw rug here to help guide people into this room this way instead of that...maybe a dark red to pick up the bricks" and "you can make that table look smaller by putting a large bowl of fruit as a center piece".

The heart of her advice was: people don't buy houses rationally -- "this house suits our family's needs" -- rather, they buy the house because it suggests a lifestyle they would like to have. So stage the house to pander cater to people's fantasies. The living room, for instance, should cluster around the fireplace, not the TV, because even though in real life people will focus on the TV, they like to imagine themselves clustered around a fireplace. Hide the meds -- people aren't sick in their fantasies -- and show the sporting goods -- "when we move into this house, we'll be healthy, active people!"

Two bits of advice caught us particularly off-guard.

One, the big room in the back with the gorgeous windows -- which we use as a kids' bedroom/playroom -- we should stage as a recreation room/great room/family room. I objected on the grounds that 1) our kids need a place to sleep, even while we are selling the house, and 2) making the house a 2 bedroom drops its market value precipitously. The compromise was that while the room will still serve as a bedroom, both practically for us and for the purpose of listed as a 3BR home, we will decorate so as to suggest a great room. We tuck all the bedroomy looking items way in the back...and front and center we add some chairs and couches (clustered around, yes, the fireplace) and adult-oriented artwork (not "adult", just not primary colors of zoo animals :-). Two rooms in one!

Two...the room we carefully cleared out to make our brand new gorgeous dining room she doesn't actually buy as a dining room; it's really more like an eat-in-kitchen. So on her suggestion we moved the dining room back to where it's been for the last 10 years: in the living room. But we artfully arrange the furniture to suggest two rooms -- living room and dining room (again with the living furniture clustering around the fireplace). So now we have this odd but endearing layout:

Surprisingly...it actually works!