This Damn House

The difference cutting some branches back around the yard makes is almost too dramatic to capture on photos.

People sometimes think of our house as having a "small" yard. The truth is we have nearly a half acre, but 1) it is oddly shaped, and 2) so overgrown that it feels small. We can't really do much about the former, but we can certainly about the latter.

I've always been cautious about trimming back. In part, because I like plants and, hey! more plants! But also because I know there are recommended ways of properly maintaining healthy blah blah blah, and I've never cared quite enough to learn about them, but felt worried doing it wrong.

Today, I was all about "screw wrong!" and I just hacked away anything that didn't please my eye with a wood saw.

Before and after...

Before	After

I love before and after pics, don't you? And here, for your amusement and edification, are some during pictures, too. (check out the huge brush pile! I see a massive bonfire in our future.)

Before:

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During:

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After:

The first tree is gone.

I tore it out by the roots with My. Bare. Hands.

Now I know my super power at last.

The good: a plumber came today and replaced the old, nasty, leaky drain assembly

with a spiffy new non-leaky one

The bad: Apparently the leaky drain assembly was only half our leaky problem. The other half is the tiling around the tub wall, which as you can see, could use a little work. Since the result in water leaking into our Cupboard Under the Stairs getting poor Harry's head wet

Which means the scary, we're going to have to hire someone to do the work, because there's no way in hell I'm re-tiling and re-grouting the bathtub. Just ain't gonna happen. And while we knew in principle we'd have to find someone to do work on our house, I've been stalling, because I just hate hate hate finding someone to hire. HATE! I always feel vulnerable, because I can't tell the sleazes from the good guys and I live in terror of getting ripped off.

But it has to be done. And sooner than later.

Pictures are worth N words.

The attic over the garage (note that at the start of the project, I couldn't actually get in to the attic it was so full, so the before pictures were taken while standing on the steps with my head sticking up into the room)

(The boxes in the first photo are all carefully stacked and stored empty boxes for moving, when the time comes.)

I love love love before and after photos. Sometimes I think this blog is just an excuse to motivate me to set up these contrasts that keep me so motivated and give me such satisfaction.

I hope you, dear readers, love them too, because here another.

Today, we turned this:

Into this:

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Just a quickie job today: pulling down a decrepit shelf that was built in the garage before we moved in.
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We are thinking of pulling down all the rest of the shelves, on account of they look ugly and block the window. But they are handy to have so I dunno...

So frustrated was I with yesterday's lack of visible progress that I spent much of my evening working on my sink, which yesterday at 5PM looked like this:

I did some reading on the net about caulking, and per instructions, scraped out all the old dirty cracky caulk, and discovered to my surprise that now the sink was no longer attached to the counter top, and could move above freely!

So back to the net to learn how to re-install a sink ("glue it down with caulk" apparently), and the application of nearly a whole tube of said substance yielded this:

Not perfect, for sure, but 1000x better AND I did it myself! Woo!

(Really, the sink was a practice run for the up and coming BIG project, recaulking the bathtub!)

I must be addicted to caulk fumes. That's the only explanation. While normal people were watching TV, tidying the house, or whatever it is normal people do after dinner, I was caulking the kitchen sink.

It didn't start quite as grungy as the bathroom sink but it was pretty nasty.

I didn't have any idea how nasty, though, until I pried out enough caulk that the sink could move (does this always happen when you decaulk a sink or what?) and slid the sink over an inch; then you could see what had been brewing under there.

As only a true caulk lover could, I managed to suppress my gag reflex long enough to thoroughly de-gunk it, then (on a tip from the Internet; that Internet, it's pretty clever) I taped around the sink.

And finally, my pristine and like-new (well, except for the remnants of dinner inside) sink.

Boy, was I bummed to wake up this morning to discover that last night's glorious caulk victory had turned, in a mere 11 hours, to this:

At first, I thought the caulk had separated as it dried, but careful examination showed that no, the caulk itself was intact, but discoloration (rust?) had leaked through! I was filled with despair until I noticed that the discoloration extended exactly across the front of the sink and halfway along the left side...the same location, coincidentally, that I had used the first tube of caulk; the places where I had used the second tube, of a different brand, were the same divine white they were when I went to bed.

Fortunately scraping out not-quite-set 11-hour-old caulk is a much easier job than 20 year old caulk-turned-sedimentious-rock, so I cleared it out, let it try, and tried again. Hopefully this time the pretty will last more than a day:

Lessons learned during this caulking session:
1) Use a caulking gun, NOT the caulk that comes in "easy to use" tubes. MUCH easier to control.
2) Use GE brand caulk instead of whatever-the-brand-was-in-the-tube-that-is-buried-under-a-half-bag-of-garbage.

It is kind of cheating to post before and after pics that were just about furniture re-arrangement -- that's nowhere near as cool as repair -- but really, The Project is about making the house salable, which means putting our best foot forward.

So, this combo office/bedroom was overstuffed and overflowing with furniture and books and the rest. So 1/3 of the books went to the giveaway pile, and 1/3 got packed into storage boxes, and the huge bookcase that visually owned the room got moved to the kids' room, and the result makes the room look about twice as big. I also shuffled out two smaller book cases, a file cabinet and assorted random stuff (I left the room messy for the "after" photo so that you could fairly compare oranges to oranges. Really.)

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We have in our house an odd little room that we call, for lack of a better word, the "entry hall". (In some previous life it was a dining room until half of it was co-opted to build a second bathroom by the previous owners. In order to make the space useful, we filled it with many shelves and cubbies.

In order to make it pretty, we got rid of many shelves and cubbies. (Contrary to the advice of my readers, I am pandering testing my marketing strategy by bribing volunteering our cat to help.)

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This is the most depressing Before & After post I've ever done.

To wit, my Caulking Project:

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Looks great, doesn't it? Yeah. But while I was down on my knees in my tub, I noticed this:

It's bad. You can tell because it says so, see? Also because what I thought was some adhesive gunk left from one of those non-slip tub stick-ons, which I was planning on removing with some sort of toxic chemical later, turned out, upon close examination, to be the bare ceramic of the tub underlying the tub glaze.

BAD! Bad tub, no tub biscuit! (And bad Mrs. TDH for putting those tub stickies on in the first place, lo these many years ago. My only defense is that re-glazing the tub is probably preferably to taking one of my kids to the emergency room for a cracked skull. But only just barely.)

So all my work is for naught; when I get the tub re-glazed they'll have to re-grout and re-caulk and so forth anyway. *sigh*

I haven't been posting, it's true, but I haven't been slacking. I've been spending my non-working non-sleeping hours finishing the bathroom (sans re-glazing).

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Another "do not", courtesy of the Previous Owner: do not attempt to hide an unattractive switch plate by scotch taping wallpaper to it.

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And while it is true that the switch plate doesn't pass the Martha Stewart Test, it's at least bearable (after a bit of cleanup)

(I do understand the PO's temptation. The switch plate provided as part of the installation kit for the bathroom's heat lamps (a lovely luxury) is a non-standard, what with the switch being oddly shaped AND horizontal. I tried to find a more attractive replacement switch plate, to no avail.)

Despite the bolt-sheering fiasco, this morning I took my shower in a lovely, shiny, non-leaky tub!

Nonetheless, I'm stomping around furiously due to having forgotten to take a before picture. D'OH!

You'll have to look at the removed pieces and interpolate how awful the whole thing looked.

What's gone:

What's here:

A few years back, we had a bathroom flood as a result of a wayward toddler. Most of the damage was in the basement, where the excess water filled the office 2 inches deep. We used the insurance money to buy ourselves an entire new basement room (which rocked!) but there's still some lingering damage, mostly in the bathroom itself.

Like this:

Other than a bit of operator error, fixing that turned out to be one of the smoothest projects I've accomplished in this house.

First pull out all the damage sheetrock. Oh look, it's only a foot or so up. That could have been worse.
Next, measure once, cut twice, ultimately yielding a nice fit on the patch.
Apply a little tape and joint compound, and, voila! one fixed wall! (Sanding and paitning TBD.)

If all the projects were that easy, we could be done with this project by winter!

She-ra pull up many root with shovel, bow saw and mean bare hands. The tree be my biatch, yo.

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I took a bit of a hiatus (3 months!) from blogging. Er...did anyone notice?

My excuses are a variety of personal and medical issues which slowed down progress on The Project, and a broken camera which interfered with project documentation. Plus about a month ago I noticed that I needed to have our house on the market, like, yesterday, and a general state of complete and utter panic overtook me.

The panic has helped motivated me to do a ton of little but much needed tasks...painting hallways, packing up excess furniture, etc.

But what I needed to kick my butt back into blogging gear was a major project to post about.

So, for your reading pleasure, I spent the better part of the last three days re-tiling our main bathroom. This involved detaching and removing the toilet and vanity, tearing out the existing tile, ripping up the water-damaged sub-floor, laying new cement back-board sub-floor, and the tiling itself.

I have a whole host of new "how not to"s to post soon. In the meantime, here is the bathroom we've been living with for the past 3 months. Note in particular the lovely duct-taped plastic sheeting:

Now we are living with this. Note in particular the lovely tile on top of which there's no toilet or sink. Form over function, baby, form over function:

Done!

Well, okay, not done. There's a socket acting up on the light bar, and a little spackle that needs sanding and painting, and I need to seal the grout, but...well...OMG this has been 6 month project.

	It started out just plain ugly. The silver and blue wallpaper really capped it.
	Normally I wouldn't fix something just because it's ugly but there's also some leftover damage from a plumbing flood a couple years ago
	So I'll fix the damage, but that requires I take down the wallpaper.  Well, no tears shed there.  Except...
	Pulling off the wallpaper pulls off chunks of rotting wall.
	And also reveals hidden mold.
	The walls are therefore dutifully repaired...but not before the process reveals water damage to the subfloor below the tile.
	In despair and distraction, we cover the mess in plastic sheeting and hope that it will repair itself over the following few months.  It doesn't.
	When we finally accept the reality of the situation, we pull out the tile, which causes the amazingly cheap ass fiberboard vanity to disassemble itself.
	So what started out as a little water repair ended up with nearly a full bathroom re-do!
	Wow! Why didn't we do this years ago?

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

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(formerly this:
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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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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)

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.

9 months ago:

2 days ago:

This afternoon:

I fall down go boom now.

The front stoop, before and after:

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Now to be honest, this pretty stoop was not our original plan. In the interest of both time and money, we had asked our neighbor/contractor to put in a simple cement block, perhaps topped with flagstone or pavers or tiles or something, for a cost of $600-800 or so. We wanted a second opinion though, so we found this guy who had a great rep and said he did concrete. So he came to take a look -- turns out he's more a mason than a concrete guy. His proposal -- complete with cut bluestone -- was definitely the more expensive option, by a factor of two. But it sounded great, and the end result looks great...and in the end I think when selling a house that the front yard and stoop make a lasting first impression, so I think it's worth it.

The realtors open house went swimmingly this morning, we hear.

To celebrate, here are some last-year v. today shots...

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We've come a long, long way, baby.