It's always something

Oh, yes, before I forget, Happy Christmas.


We got the bedroom painted last night - well, sort of. We went into this week with the attitude that we'd get the house ready enough to "not get paint on the furniture or plaster dust in the food," as I said elsewhere. The bedroom is painted on all the walls that would be impossible or highly inconvenient to paint with the Great Bed* in the room. That leaves out the end of teh room where we still need to buy another can of spackle to level out the difference between the old closet, the patch where the ex-wall was and the bedroom walls. It's a nice soft, restful cloud grey, and I felt calmer just being in there while we painted it, or that could have been the fumes.

The ceiling isn't painted, but that's not just because of the strip of unfinished patching (though the rest of the ceiling is solid now, after we patched 1908039794856289 nail holes from the removal of the pasteboard tiles). It's also because, if we cannot get it satisfactorily smooth (which is unlikely just now), we're going to paper it with a grey and white marble-pattern paper and just go with it. I know, I know - people who paper ceilings to cover problems are evil. I should know. But it'll be a lot easier to paper than paint the ceiling after the big bed's in there - it makes fabulous scaffolding. And we have to live there, too. So that's my defense.

Here's the Cool Original Detail, before painting over:

It was a simple frieze of wreaths with ribbons, stencilled on the original thin layer of ocher yellow paint (probably milk paint), in green and russet. It was about 14 inches high.

Detail shot:

It's pretty, and it was a real pity to paint it over. At least we were able to document it.

Handy Tip For the Day:
Bicycle handgrips, applied to the non-business end of a paint roller pole really help with control when using it at full length. And you can't drop them paint roller downward when you're up on a ladder...

And now, to this week's installment of "I Thought We Bought That!" : We went to put the outlet plates on in the kitchen and discovered that we had somehow bought three times as many double outlet plates as we needed, and only one box of single plates. Which are all gone, having been installed elsewhere in the house, I guess.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I bought the outlet plates, and I distinctly recall buying the right number of everything. Well, back to the home store we go. Next week. Or sometime. We've got bigger fish to fry right now.

But our bathroom looks beautiful! Of course, I didn't take any pictures of that...

Scroogey.

We are within days of move in -the moving van comes on Wednesday-, and my heart goes pitty-pat, but not in anticipation.

It's stress. And possibly fear.

Read my wailing lament:
We have a huge pile -or two- of salvaged lumber that has to go to the basement, another pile of demoed plaster the size of a live bear, an accumulation of trash on the back porch that I have no clue what to do with (we have no trash service at this time, or trashcans, for that matter), and 3 rooms that MUST be painted prior to move-in (bath, master bedroom and kitchen). I'm sure there's more, but my brain is being kind and refusing to allow me to recall it.

On the positive side, where I'm focusing my energy to stay sane, we have all but completed the bath - it just needs paint, installing the glass shelves (6) and remounting of the light fixture and shower rod, and we're ready to go. The master bedroom is really almost done, we're stripping the last of the wallpaper today, and we discovered a Cool Original Detail under the last stretch of paper at the top of the room - a stenciled frieze of wreaths. The dining room ceiling is closed, if not pretty, and most of the wiring is really done. I got the kitchen cleaned up last night, in prep for painting and move-in.

The hardest thing, right now, is not doing the things that can wait right now - the frieze paper in the dining room, the desk in my son's room, the window-seats, the kitchen faucet. The only optional thing I did was spend a whopping 20 bucks on some cheap xmas stuff and we put a tiny, pathetic tree up. It's only 3 feet tall and looks overpowered by one string of lights and 18 ornaments.

I so desperately want to build those window seats. And do all the other things we must wait on. There is simply too much else to do.

So, we are only taking off Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and maybe not even Christmas Eve.

Grout and About

We've taken a hill, in our overall battle for the house. It took us nearly all night, but we stand atop this rise and can see the remaining ground ahead. We're that much closer to being able to move in, because, really, a functional bathroom is an admittedly necessary thing. Almost as much as heat.

After much trial and tribulation (every battery for the two drills was in need of charging, we had to mix the grout partially by hand, and really, where do you stand when sponging a floor you just grouted?), we finally finished grouting the bathroom at 1 am. We also finished the plumbing - almost. The toilet works, the sink works (after a last minute mad dash to Lowe's, an hour away, last night), even most of the plumbing involved with the bath itself is functional. However, there is, as anyone else who also chose the self-punishing road of home renovation will expect to hear, one part missing. That one part, typically, is something Utterly Crucial, i.e, the threaded connector that serves to attach the tub faucet to the otherwise hideous and unattractive pipe.

At this point, we now have all the necessary things done. Much of what's left to do can be worked on after we move in, if need be. We are, realistically, two workdays (paint, plaster, tape and spackle, and maybe stripping the rest of the bedroom walls), and a cleanup day away from moving in. Christmas is now a realistic goal.

We find out next week when Chris goes. I hope we do get moved in before then.

How We Came to Rootabaga Country

As a little girl in coastal California, I fell in love with Carl Sandburg's Rootabaga Stories. I loved the open plains dotted with little towns, full to the brim with fields of corn and wheat and beans and squash, with barefooted children in overalls running home from school to help with harvest. I loved the magic of that wonderful fairytale land, with its oddly named towns and strangely named people. The funny stories as well as the sad ones have resonated with me in a way I can't even really express. I've been dreaming of this place that was like Oz, but more real, nearly my entire life.

Four years ago, my mom bought a house in southern Illinois, which is also called "Egypt" for its grainbasket reputation (and possibly where that famous term -too rude to mention here- for the middle of nowhere originated). We're from here, semi-originally (at least since the middle of the 19th century), and Mom has always wanted to move back to where her mom grew up. So she did - she fixed up and sold our little farm on the Mendocino coast, packed up everything and trucked it across the country, doing it all ourselves, because we are those sort of people.

Mom's house is a massive, crumbling pile of bricks, surrounded by trees, on the edge of a town with a name that's truly unique - it was named after a town in Scotland, but we spell it differently. There is no other town with this exact name, and the whole place is full of towns with odd names: names of foods, names of people, grand and ambitious names, and names that seem like they were just nicknames for a spot in the road until someone painted a sign to hang on the way into town. This end of the state has a couple of big interstates, but mostly it is cobwebbed with tiny rural highways, graveled roads, narrow cuts that were clearly made for a Model T to pass another Model T, and you sometimes feel that you are goign back in time as you drive down a little road with a cornfield on one side and little green hill with a little white frame house on the other.

Two years ago, we moved here. I loved the snow in winter, the silence of it as it fell on everything like an insulating blanket. I was enchanted by the burgeoning life of spring, little frogs leaping in the growing grass and the awakening of the bees. Then we suffered through an oppressive humid summer accompanied by the stressful yet lazy songs of cicadas, and went on into a changeable autumn, not unlike this one, that runs hot to cold, punctuated by rainstorms that blot out everything around us.

There is so much green here, so much life, it is like places farther down the great rivers, but not so dripping with sweat. This country is all about the growing of things, and a little of the taking of things out of the ground. It's slow and quiet, gentle and neighborly. No high-speed city life is here - you have to drive to St. Louis for that, as well as any unusual shopping needs. The fastest, or slowest, thing around here is often the train.

A few weeks ago, I realized I had come to Rootabaga Country, or a part of it, or somewhere nearby. I think it might have been when I was working on the historical society website, organizing hundreds of old photos in the archive, and I found myself staring into the faces those same little kids in their overalls, looking ready to run home to cut the corn down, or bring in the cows. It might have been when I walked my little boy to school along a gravelled drive for the first time.

Maybe it was really the day I saw the dragonflies dance in the fading autumn sunlight last year, or when I saw the bees break off to go somewhere new. It might have been the day I found a large praying mantis sitting neatly on my lampshade - they always sit neatly - delicately eating some little bug. Possibly it was the day I looked out the back to see the woodchucks - three of them - eating the fallen persimmons and apples in the grass. Or, really all of these things and many more.

I'm in love with this place. It's easily as magic as any I read about as a child, and the people, well, they aren't any less interesting or freindly.

I think we might stay.

LIfe intrudes. How rude of it.

I've been nowhere near my house for over a week. I had to deal with actual real-life things instead.

I have been finishing up the historical society website (well, version 1...) that I mentioned some time ago, and getting it ready for uploading. My older son is sick, and my younger one is demanding. I suspect a growth spurt. My husband's work ... well, we'll just say it sucks right now.

And Dad had to go back to California. He called a little bit ago to tell us he'd gotten in fine, from the In-n-Out Burger in Gilroy. I'm jealous - we haven't had In-n-Out since Chris got out of the Marines. I told Dad I wanted a 4x4 Animal Style and an order of fries the size of my head, but he doesn't think it'll mail well at all. Especially not the shake that's mandatory to wash it down with. My tastebuds are homesick for California, if that's possible.

Back to the Website of No Sleep. I think I'm going to name my webdesign company "Sisyphus Productions" - after all, who better do the work that just has to be done over and over again? Mom and I have been throwing around slogans, but I'm so tired right now that I can't recall any of them. Pity, I really thought they were hilarious at the time. That may have been sleep deprivation, though.

We're Different Here

Some girls call Mom for cooking advice; "Hi, Mom? What makes your gravy taste so good?"

I call home for ... help with obscure restoration and construction techniques; "Hi, Mom? Did we buy the right kind of mortar for this job? The label says..."

We're definitely a bit on the odd side.

In other news, the plumbing revisions are Just About Done. We expect to have the bath ready for fixtures tonight - And the water back on! It's essentially waiting on me, as I have to finish mounting the tilebacker boards before we can do things like putting the toilet back.

The plumbing revisions include, by the way, repair/replacement of the scary rubber hose that formed part of the kitchen sink waste pipe, and relocation of the showerhead to point above my husband's when the tub basin height is calculated in.

It's progress, and I'm not sure I trust it. Don't pinch me - I don't want to wake up.

Renovating the Blog

I'm thinking that, now we have accomplished something (Power! Which means we can turn on the gas soon - Hot Water!) and are approaching done-ness on several others, it may no longer be simply depressing to have a project tracker widget on here. So I might just add one. One of those bars will be labelled "moving in" as I think it will take us a few weeks to really get settled.

Also, I was watching HGTV and the DIY network and thinking (this gets dangerous, what with the smoke pouring from my ears and all) about doing a weekly how-to feature on here, just give me something to do while feeding BabyJames other than watching tv. It would be more of a "how I did this" with step-by-step instructions for those who might be facing the same things. Like how to live with (or just plain refinish) old steel kitchen cabinets, doing a successful wall application of stickytiles, or faking a built-in. Stuff like that. The temporary stuff, the superficial stuff, the decorative stuff.

In other news, DOver books emailed me that they've got some new Architecture books out. Go take a look. I've already spotted at least four that I want, and only one that I need. And they've got a 25% off sale on as well.

houseblogger on bedrest = rehab nightmares

The absolute worst thing that can be done to a pregnant woman working on a house is putting her on bedrest. Especially if that bed is not IN the house she's working on. It's been almost three weeks now and I've been going insane. Obviously, I'm worried that we won't get the house done enough to live in before Baby 2 arrives, but I had begun to adjust to the idea of it.

I'm also worried that I've lost my housefixing muscles. Then there are all the unfinished projects to avoid thinking about. AND I'm worried, constantly, unreasonably, about the house. I have nightmares, of the late pregnancy variety, except they are all about the house.

Examples:

The carpeting dream. I dreamt that when we pulled up the carpet in the house, to reveal the lovely floors, there was more carpet, patchy, 1970's psychedelic, stained carpet, underneath. Shag, indoor/outdoor, etc. Like six layers. And under that was hideous linoleum. The last layer was glued down with construction cement that laid in huge blobs on the formerly pristine wood floors. I woke in a sweat, and spent several minutes calming myself down by recalling that I'd peeled up carpet corners all over the house just to assess the condition of the floors.

Next, the fire dream. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this dream during the rehab of an older house. I put it down to it being rewired and my being forced to not go out enough to be reassured by the house's quiet, unbothered appearance as I go by.
I've been tempted to get up and drive over to check on it more than once, though.

The flood dream. We've had lots of rain this spring, like most everyone else. The old dryer exhaust tends to collect water in rainstorms (this is on the List of Things to Fix), which isn't a problem as our cellar floor is actually graded to drain towards the drain on the downhill side of the house, and that water is a fairly small amount. But, I keep dreaming that the whole basement will fill with mud and water like a huge swimming pool, followed by the collapse of the house into the muck.

The vermin dream. Just a simple ick-factor dream, about finding a sudden, massive termite/ant/cockroach/rat/mouse/etc infestation that causes the house to become irreparably uninhabitable.

Augh. I'm off meds and bedrest on Thursday. Maybe I'll stop with the crazy, if I can at least get over there and finish painting the boy's room.

Pictures, and progress.

Or is that "Pictures of Progress?" I'm not sure. Anyhow, here are some images of what I've been ranting about recently. Updates to my in-progress phots are here.

First, I was talking about filling in the open archway between what had been originally intended as a den and the dining room, so that my son could have some privacy (and so that we could make use of otherwise wasted space). I wanted to do something really Stickley-style, like a fabulous built-in. We really don't have the money for that and all the other things we need to do first, so I had to figure out how to do this in a sympathetic, period looking style without spending any real money, as well as doing a temporary thing.

Why temporary? Well, in five or so years, we plan to have two bedrooms and a bath built in the cellar, for the boys, as well as a completely finished laundry room, workspace, and finsihed storage areas. When that happens, we can turn our den back into a den, and I'd like to be able to put in abbreviated Craftsman-style cabinets with square pillars inside that archway. So anything we do now is just set dressing.

Here's the before pic, with the PO's non-sympathetic solution (vinyl accordion curtains):




This is taken from the dining room, looking west into the den (my son's bedroom). Not pretty, but it worked for the PO, an elderly woman in need of constant care.

Now, a series of on-the-way-to-after pictures, taken from the same vantage point:



This is the built-in, mostly done. I think it looks fairly good, and is sympathetic enough to the original style of the house. It's naked, though.


This is halfway or so through staining it with Minwax Polyshades Satin in Old Maple. It looks like a good match, so far!


And this is the staining nearly complete, without the last trim pieces. I realized I'd have an easier time with the trim and stain if I stained the panel above the shelf, then applied and stained the trim sections. It still looks really good. I'm happy with is, and can hardly wait to see how the room looks all done.




This is a demo-in-progress image of the dining room bay addition. It's slightly less ugly right now, but we have some fairly major work to do here. First, we are going to put in posts and a support beam, as you can see some bowing where the bay was cut into the wall. There will be four posts, two at the ends, mounted flush to the walls, and two set in about 2' from the ends to create an open but divided space. There will be wainscot panels done in the same style as the archway fill-in in the bay, from the corners and under the windows, a built-in bookshelf under the center short window, and I'm going to build two window seats into the otherwise wasted space in the ends of the bay as well. I think this will all work together with the built-in panel in the arch, to increase the "Craftsman" feel of the house. I see a larger can of Minwax Polyshades in my future.

Now for the view from my son's room:



This is the built-in on his side, about half finished. For practical reasons, I'm having to alternate painting and finishing his built-in furniture. There will be a desk built below the single shelf that divides his frog mural, and in that corner that's full of salvaged lumber for the project, there will be an open "closet" with a shelf at top and bottom for more storage. I used two layers of salvaged acoustic tiles (pulled from the ceiling of the MB) to give him some soundproofing so we don't have to be super-quiet when he's asleep. They will also function as a bulletin board, where he can pin things up.










These are all shots of the part of the paintjob that had to be done before I could get back to cutting and screwing things up ... er ... together. There will be clouds painted on the walls, and the ceiling will be a deeper, more vibrant blue with stars and a moon on it. I'm debating painting in a wainscot strip with related, A&C type elements. That will probably depend on the time available before we move in.

And, I still need a radio. The talking to myself is really out of hand. I've been talking to my tools ... more than usual.

Recycling = more beauty from ugliness

And it's almost free! If you don't count my time spent, that is. As I'm not gainfully employed at this time -there being no payscale for mothering- I'm not counting it. I'm literally making beauty out of ugly things, not just patching or covering it up, so I've got that to be happy about too.

I needed to create a fill-in between the den (which will become my older son's room) and the dining room, inside an arch, in such a way that it can be removed later but also in such a way that it looks like a built-in or other deliberate design element. The arch had already had awful vinyl accordion curtains screwed into it, which we reomved, so attaching a framework inside it was not going to create any more damage or future work. That was the easy part. It took about 3 hours, including measuring and cutting, and sifting through the demo'd out 2x4s from the old 70's drop ceiling for good lumber. Recycling phase 1.

Once I had the framework in, I stood around puzzling about what I wanted to cover it with. I looked over the hideous fake wood paneling we had ripped out, and noticed that the backs of the sheets (those not badly damaged or befouled by glue) were actually quite attractive, if I sanded off the product information stamps. I selected the two most attractive, cut them to size and tacked them up. Recycling phase 2.

Now what? "It looks like a big doorway with fairly nice plywood tacked across it. Hmmm. Better, but not the look I want." Thinking ensued. Some of those old furring strips were nice and smooth on one side, and if I pulled out all the staples and nails and scraps of polystyrene tile, might just sand up to something tolerable. Oh, and we did have lots of original salvaged mouldings of various types from demo'ing the old closet wall and making our bedroom large enough to use. Some of those looked promising. Like the casing from the closet doorway...

I sat on the floor after assembling all the likely pieces of wood and thought intently, then decided to go buy myself a drink. Not alcoholic, though I have certainly thought about that enough, between the house and general other drama. However, as Miller Time isn't for another month and a half, I must needs wait.

Back from my jaunt, I cleaned up enough furring strips to make vertical trim pieces on my new paneled wall, Craftsman-Style. I set a baseboard in, measured from there to where I wanted the "chair rail" (more like armpit rail...), and got out my handy wee saw. Then, with all five trim parts cut, I became distracted by a good idea. "Hey! What this needs is a mirror!" As we had one that had been hung on the bathroom door, that was actually less of a leap than you'd think.

Of course, now I had to figure out how to frame the thing. Originally I had meant to just use furring strips for all the trim, horizontal and vertical, but adding the complication of a built-in, framed mirror made that less than workable. Back to the casing from the closet door that was no more. Hmmm. Inside the closet, the casings hadn't been stained, but outside, they had, so I had some pre-matched mouldings to work with on my fakey-craftsman "built-in" piece. I think there may even have been a lightbulb hanging above my head. More measuring and cutting ensued, with me pulling the mirror down, measuring it, forgetting the measurements, and running back and forth between the mirror and my improvised sawhorses.

Eventually, I got the framing mouldings cut, and notched correctly for the mirror, and hung on my false wall. I even remembered to put the mirror in before it was all tacked up, and there was only one episode of not-measuring-correctly in the middle of it all. Recycling phase 3 was now complete.

Today, I got a wild hair to add a shelf above the mirror, before measuring and cutting the last several furring strip trim pieces, and that's what I did. There was a great deal of swearing involved, as I really needed more hands to do this, but the result looks good. I made that out of most of the old knicknack shelf the PO's dad had made 30-some years ago, plus the mitered offcuts of the door casings. Recycling phase 4.

Of course, there are no pictures. There likely won't be until the thing is all assembled, possibly not until it's all stained and shiny, depending on whether or not I can be bothered to remember the camera. Hopefully my gestating offspring hasn't absorbed my very blue vocal expressions (also known in my family as "Carpentry English") too terribly much today.

And, yes, I still need a radio. The crazy is getting distinctly ... crazy.

It's like frosting a cake - a giant, inside out cake.

They (who are these people, anyway?) say that skimcoating "is like frosting a cake." I suppose that's great if you're any good at frosting cakes. I'm not - I have recently been converted to fondant for my son's cakes, and I'm grateful that there will be no more mangy peeling birthday cakes in my future.

However, it's also a lie in another way. It's only true if you are used to frosting enormous, inside out, square cakes, with windows and doors, using putty knives. That would be me. I'm really good at mudding, taping, skimcoating, plastering, anything that involves smoothly spreading some sort of pasty substance on a hard substrate. Cake, by the way, IS NOT a hard substrate, and frosting won't hard-set on you like plaster or stay workable for a long time like spackle.

So to continue the theme, I'm almost done frosting my son's room, as of last night. There is an incomplete ring around the top of the room left to do. The part that requires shifting the ladder every six inches or so. I got tired (lazy) and went home. The big news, though, is that now that there are some lights in the house, I can do some work at night. What a huge relief. More working time equals more time, and I can always get behind that.

However, I get a little odd when I'm working alone at night on a project. My mind gets bored, and I start thinking crazy things. Like coming up with a talk show in my head about house rehabbing and how it makes you crazy ("Tomorrow, on Rehabbers Anonymous, we'll hear about how fake wood panelling is the work of Satan, and we'll interview a couple who divorced over their house"), or inventing bizarre superhero names (The Night Spackler!).

I think I need a radio...

The Dance of the Overflowing Toilet Fairy

Well, that pretty much sums it up. Between 1 and 3 I was fighting a flood of sewage and cleaning my bathroom. The management says that our toilet "does not overflow" (REALLY?) , but can occasionally "back up or drain slowly because it's last on the sewage line". Pah. They just do not want to hire an actual plumber, cheap ba$tards.

Pardon my crabbiness. I'm tired and I smell like poop, despite an hour scrubbing with bleach and soap and hot water. It tends to cause moodiness. :P


The last time they came in to 'fix' the toilet they tried to blame my son for the plugged up toilet. He was 3 months old at the time. I suspect that there are tree roots (perhaps from the large eucalyptus right outside the window) involved in the sewer line. I also suspect that a chronically regurgitating toilet is a violation of some housing code.

But what do I know? I'm just a girl.