This Damn House

Woke up inspired this weekend. First step to do anything to this house is to clear out some space. Basement, attic and garage are all packed to overflowing. Simple gridlock keeps us from progressing!

Truth is, both the Mr. and I are packrats. Some gems you'll find in storage at This Damn House: a foam "flip chair", circa 1981, hasn't been used since the late 80s; three large boxes containing the Mr.'s beer can collection from high school (including a can of Billy Beer, I kid you not); a full slot car set, circa mid 70s (NOT bought on eBay; stored for 30 years waiting for little boys or girls to pass it on to); a TV that was cutting edge 30 years ago and last worked 15 years ago.

On my end, it isn't so much emotional attachment (no, really!) but an aversion to throwing anything away that might someday be useful. So, yeah, that digital camera is 5 years out of date AND has a cracked lens, but some tinkerer somewhere will surely find a use for the photosensitive internal element? And those "pictures" of cars constructed out of bits of junk, that's ART! Ugly art, to be sure, but, y'know, art! You can't just throw it out.

So first thing Saturday morning I enlisted one of my older sons to help me identify and photograph the biggest space-eating items in the garage (can someone explain to me how this mostly non-bike-riding family ended up with over 12 bikes?) and I sent out a note to our friendly local "re-use" email list.

The goal? Clear out the floor of the garage by next weekend!

Prepping for the Great Giveaway, Bay1:

Prepping for the Great Giveaway, Bay2:

Part of my goal in putting up this blog was to help keep myself motivated. If the whole world is watching I can't am less likely to slack off.

My life doesn't usually lend itself to large blocks of time working on house stuff, so I'm trying to squeeze little bits in here and there. Tonight, for instance, 15 minutes in the basement before dinner and another half hour after the kids went to sleep yielded a whole ton o' junk to take out to recycle. (This picture doesn't even include the 4 or 5 computer monitors, which I will wait for Mr. TDH to carry up for me.)

My friend Steph cleverly pointed me towards Staples, which recently introduced a computer equipment recycling program. $10 buys me a convenient drop-off location for a monitor, computer and associated peripherals. Save money over our town dump, which charges $25 for a monitor only at semi-annual hazardous waste pickup days; and saves time over the several free computer drop off places that are of course all located in extremely inconvenient-to-me locations.

Here are some of my favorite finds from this evening's spelunking basement cleaning.

Mr. TDH was a boy scout. I was a girl scout. We've both been carrying the backpacks we used in scouting in the mid to late 70s around for thirty (30) years.
A little metal man who hangs on a wall and holds a glass bowl that's supposed to hold...what, I have no idea. Where did I get this? No doubt a gift during my young and hip days, which means I've had it for at least 15 years.
A Time Machine. Not HG Wells style, but a "clock" consisting of marbles that roll around every minute. My mother gave me this for my children. Not my actual children but my hypothetical future children, before I had actual ones. The hypothetical children would surely have loved watching the mesmerizing clockworks. The actual children, however, would take the marbles out and run them around hot wheels tracks. No Time Machine for these kids.

Does everyone have crazy stuff like this in the dim recesses of their storage areas, or is it just us?

Part of the challenge of making and keeping our house in good condition is that none of our five household members are natural neatniks. The Mr. and I were able to sorta keep the house presentable before we added a gaggle of children to the mix. Now...it's hopeless.

Sometimes I worry that we are fundamentally broken, because everyone else's house we go into seems reasonably neat and tidy. Whereas ours...not so much.

But it also occurs to me that I may not see most people's homes in their natural state. Whenever we have guests, we tidy up. Of course, our "tidy" looks like other people's "hurricane just came through", but still... if we tidy up before visitors see the place, maybe other people do too. Maybe most people only show their true houses to their most intimate friends and relations.

If that's true, then I say, to heck with it! Let our true domiciliary natures shine through! Fellow pre-visitor-tidiers, do not be ashamed of your imperfect housekeeping! Let us expose our shameful habits to the light of day and show the world how we really live!

I'll start with a few pictures taken on a random non-visitor non-tidy day here at This Damn House.

	First a picture of my very own office. I'd like to note that, whatever other cleanliness sins I have, I do not leave my wet towels on the floor. Instead, I carefully drape them over the first raised surface I see. Then, when I take my next shower, I can't find it, so I get a clean one, and drape that, too, over the nearest surface. In this way I have carefully blanketed most of my house in clean towels.
	Next up is our kitchen. The bright sunny ambiance is courtesy of a skylight (not shown). What is shown is the fact that it is physically impossible to keep our counters clear for more than 37 seconds. Seriously! I will be alone in the house, cleaning the kitchen, and clear the counters; I step out of the room for a moment, and when I return, they are covered with piles of dishes...sometimes dishes I don't even recognize. I'm absolutely certain there's a portal to another universe right in our kitchen, and some other family is depositing their dirty dishes onto our counters!
	Shown here is a combination bed room and office. Ignore the laundry and you'll note the gorgeous eco-friendly cork floors we installed last year, the tres hip Ikea bookshelves, and the.... What's that? You can't ignore the laundry? Well, are we just so special! Maybe I'll bring our readers to your house next time.

Having aired our dirty laundry yesterday (literally), I feel compelled to counter with a picture of our house at its best. It really is a nice house and when we tidy it, you can tell! (Note that the tidiness evident here is a result of a day's frantic cleaning, in preparation for the descent of a dozen of our nearest and dearest for last year's holidays.)

Meanwhile, The Quicker Fixer Upper project continues apace. I'm about 3/4 done with the brush hacking phase, and have managed to clear out a whopping 10 cubic feet or so of the basement.

Okay, now that my faithful readership has swelled to vast ranks (about 15), I can pose the question that was the real reason I set up this blog.

What should I do with an excess of trees in my front yard?

Having trimmed the heck out of the trees surrounding my house, I'm now wondering if I should go further and cut one or two down. Specifically, these two:

The one on the right was never planted, it was just a weed that kinda took tree shape. I'm not overly fond of it, but the location is nice, on the corner of the driveway. Certainly I won't be able to replace it with a prettier tree within my nine month timeframe.

The middle one is a birch that apparently some prior owner attempted to remove...the main trunk is now a stump amidst a cluster of mini-trees. Frankly, I think it's ugly, blocks the view of the house and of my beloved acer palmatum bloodgood (Japanese maple), barely visible in the background. I also think it makes the yard look crowded and less roomy.

But...y'know...cutting down trees. TREES! Trees are our friends! Maybe I'm being too harsh on these Deciduous-Americans. Maybe house buyers like a yard full of trees!

So tell me what you think (bearing in mind the goal here is to sell the house!) To cut? Or not to cut?

At least managed to get a trip to the dump transfer station recycling center in...

Apparently I'm not the only one with too much stuff...

I did actually manage to catch a handyman on the phone this morning and he said he'd call me back next week to schedule a visit. Still no luck finding a glass installer in our area. *sigh*

I don't think I've ever really explained the source of the blog name. It is mostly because that phrase is uttered at least once, and usually many times, during any project, big or small, whether done by us or a professional. There's nothing about this house that is standard or easy or straightforward.

Take, for instance, this project: the replacement of a front door light fixture (the previous one having been removed when we had our siding installed a couple years ago.)

How long would you think that should take? 15 minutes? 45 minutes?

Try two and a half hours including a trip to Ace Hardware involving including a heated discussion with a rude salesman.

But at least it is done, and once again, there is light.

It has been over five years since our youngest child was born, at home in our jacuzzi hot tub.

In preparation for his birth, we removed the standard aerator from the sink nearest the hot tub -- the one in the master bathroom -- and replaced it with an adapter that would allow us to attach a garden hose, which we used to fill the tub.

The aerator was removed, the tub was filled, the water heated. Time went by. I got pregnanter pregnanter. Eventually, the baby was born. Sometime thereafter, the tub was drained. The hose adapter remained on the sink.

Time went by. We pulled out the hot tub. We rebuilt the damaged floor underneath it. We re-carpeted the room. Our youngest baby went off to preschool. The hose adapter remained on the sink.

Time went by. We decided to sell the house. We started a blog. We refurbished the master bath -- caulking, stripping, painting, cleaning, grouting. But still... the hose adapter remained on the sink.

Today, after my hot-tub-born baby donned his backpack and boarded the school bus to take him to his 14th day of kindergarten, I removed the hose adapter and replaced the aerator.

Nothing better can happen all day.

Have you ever said to yourself "Self, you really need to get more exercise." And then answered yourself "Yes, you do, but how can you possibly have time with all this house work you have to do?"

Fellow selfs, fret no longer. The trick is to simply choose the right sort of work.

I tested this theory today, a beautiful late summer day in New England. For a half hour, I attacked a variety of overgrown trees and weeds with my handles, shovel and bow saw. During that half hour, I checked my pulse. The result: within a short time I was into the target heart zone for a woman my age -- 120 bpm -- with a peak rate of 160 bpm.

So now I'm fit as a fiddle and the bushes in front of the big bedroom look much better.

You know that old saying "Measure once, cut twice?"

Yeah. Don't do that.

Does this image look familiar to you?

If so, you are a mom who spends waaaaay to much time working on her house.

we had the most productive weekend ever! I ache in every bone and muscle in my body, and maybe some that aren't in my body. I will write it all up soon, but for the moment, let me just say how much I appreciate cheap labor.

We've had these wooden barrel-style planters on our deck since...well, before we moved in. They were looking kind of worn down, so I was trying to decide whether to give them away or toss them. So I lifted one and discovered that they were pretty much held together by dirt, roots and wishful thinking. there was no bottom left at all.

The kids neatly stacks the remaining bits of barrel and the rocks and emptied all the dirt into a wheelbarrow -- mostly Thing 1 and Thing 2, but even Thing 3 got into the game.

We'll see if we can chew it.

One of the sorest points of This Damn House is the lawn yard. I won't bore you with the long and sordid history of this particular piece of earth (except to mention that Jimmy Hoffa is involved), I'll simply tell you that out of the halfish acre of property we own, about 20 square feet is covered with lush rich lawn. For the rest....well, it turns out if you mow weeds, it looks pretty good from a distance.

The one landscaper who would return our calls quoted us about $10,000 (that's "ten thousand dollars", in case you miscounted the zeros) to replace our sorry excuse for a lawn with something more...grasslike.

That's some mighty rich grass, we thinks to ourselves. How hard can this really be? It isn't like you have to have a Master's degree to install a lawn.

So last weekend we rented a Vermeer shredder-chipper from Home Depot, and turned our pile of dead brush (occupying about 72% of our back yard) into a pile of mulch (soon to be occupying 100% of a neatly laid mulch bed around the western edge of the yard).

Next weekend the plan is to hope our soil samples come back quick, rent a tiller, buy some top-soil and "amendments" and turn the yucky "lawn" into vast expanses of brown fecund earth. The following weekend? SOD!

But now I'm reading up on lawn installation (isn't "installation" a weird word to use in gardening? I keep looking around for a blue progress bar) and I'm tortured with self-doubt. We have to grade the lawn? Remove every stick and stone? What if the first frost hits before the sod roots? What if one strip of sod dies and we are left with a brown streak down the middle like a six inch valley through the middle of my soul? What if there's a bump in the lawn, and the new next door neighbors who just teleported in from Privet Drive sue us for lowering their property values?

Who are we to think we can take on a $10,000 ("ten thousand dollars") task in three weekends, anyway?

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.  :-\

Sorry, kitteh, it's covered with Hardie-backer, and by this time tomorrow, God willing and the creek don't rise, it'll be covered by ceramic tile.

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.

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.

Some of you wanted to see how the staging consultant turned our kids' room into a family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room.

Kids' room:

Family-room-and-oh-by-the-way-the-kids-sleep-here-too room:
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