yard work

serious blog re-invigoration this week. it seems that when you spend a lot of time working on house projects, sitting around is more rewarding than harnessing the interweb to rehash what you just did. on that note, check out our companion garden blog for a look at what's been going on outside the house.

say hello to our little friend:

gus the garden gnome, nestled amongst the herbs

Enter Here 2.0

So you’ll recall that Allie posted an entry in January displaying our valiant efforts to update the entry way…well, this past weekend we finally finished! Here’s what happened between January and now...

The floors

We were amazed to find out that the floors underneath the vinyl tiles were actually the same wood throughout the entire house. Why we didn’t really think that one through initially is beyond us, but we took the time to strip, sand down and put a new coat of sealer on the beautiful fir floors.

The walls

Ugh, I hate drywalling…maybe what I really hated was drywalling in such an incredibly small space. Anyway, in the previous post we had just finished putting up the new drywall. Over the next month I taped it and filled all of the holes.

What I don’t have is a good photo of the taping or texturing process. The taping was tedious and seriously took me days to complete. The texturing process was worse, although it was quick, it was disgusting. We sealed the entry way and bought a few of the spray texture bottles and proceeded to spray the ceiling and walls. In such a small space, the fumes overtook me and I got pretty sick. But I think I’ve recovered a bit.

Enough complaining. With the texturing done, we painted the walls a lovely green.

It then sat like this for about a month while waited for our new door to arrive. Once that arrived we had to seal it and wait another couple of weeks until we were ready to install it.

Here’s a before view of the door:

My coworker’s husband, Larry helped me install it while Allie was away for work.

Larry was very helpful and the door was installed in no time at all.

Finally, we decided we couldn’t stand it anymore and made a mad dash to complete the entry way. We put wainscoting, some nice trim and edging, and some creative knobs purchased from a second use store.

Note the orangish, red bench…Allie and I made that from scratch and our own know how.

I don't like spiders

So I did something this weekend that I've been dreading for a long time. I crawled through the crawl space to the far end of the house to affix a piece of plywood over a vent that's been disconnected. Our cats have discovered how to remove the vent cover and get down into the crawl space so this problem needed to be solved.

I don't know why I chose this weekend to undertake this task, but I did. I decked myself in all sorts of clothing, not know what exactly I'd find. I took a light and some tools to the far end of the house, crawling on my hands and knees.

I saw some interesting things...the base of our fireplace is a triangle - I'm kind of surprised by this for some reason. I found some dried up cat (or Opossum or Raccoon?) feces, and I found a hell of a lot of junk.

What I did not expect to find greeted me shortly after finding the spot I was going to attach the plywood. I laid down on my back and was facing up so I could screen the board in place and I noticed a little spider a few inches to the right of the board. It was very well lit and I noticed that it had a few little red dots on its back, oh and some of the dots actually made an hourglass! I quickly determined that it was a black widow (I'm a bit of an arachnophobe, so I know my species), but it was a bit more brown than I had expected, but I'm sure it was one.

The first thing I thought was...hmm, I should kill it since it's about eighteen inches away from my face. So I took my board and jammed it up at him, but I missed, he was in a little crevice, so I think I just irritated him more than anything else. He moved around a little bit, but didn't come out much further...thank god. I decided that I wanted to just get this over with, so I quickly screwed the board in place and got the hell out of there.

A short time later our neighbor stopped by and I mentioned that I had just been in the basement and saw what I thought was a black widow. He quickly mentioned, oh yeah, I've seen a lot of them out here, and you know it's surprising, because the type you find in Washington tend to be more brown! That's when I knew it was my arch-nemesis.

Anyway, I didn't take a photo while I was doing there - should have, but then again, I didn't want to be down there, nor do I really want to remember it.

living room 2.0

the lovely before/during shot.

so we finally managed to put up crown moulding in the living room. it required a trip to lowe's, truck rental (12 ft pieces just won't fit in the jetta, unfortunately), and some patient painting to get all the detailed dental work in the moulding covered. painful, but worth it in the end. the room looks much more finished. it only took us a few months to do it...after we did the dining room and bathroom. just the bedrooms, mini hallway, and entryway to go. and then, when we eventually tackle the kitchen, there will be that. but today, we are victorious. we have accomplished the many awkward angles and uneven walls of the living room!

brian handily nails in some moulding above the bay window.

and the fun job of caulking. oh it's fun.
so much so that i appear to be flipping off the moulding.

a bench built for two

thanks to the extreme carpentry skills of brian's mom's cousin dave, we are now the proud owners of a a lovely bench. house builder by day, bench builder by night, dave handily built us some awesome new seating for our porch. farewell, lawn chairs! (they've at least been set aside in the basement, until actually needed come summertime).

here it is hanging out in dave's shop.

no nails - he notched out all the fittings

(ok, that's not technical carpentry language)

and even pre-drilled some holes for us.

not only is the bench aesthetically pleasing, but it is also environmentally awesome. it's made of salvaged redwood from the old deck railing at the lubansky's montana home. dave planed the wood, designed the bench, dry-fit all the pieces, and showed us how to assemble it while we were in the bitterroot over christmas. yeah, he knew it wouldn't be able to fit into the jetta as a complete project. so we put it together when we got home and have been enjoying it ever since.

thanks dave!

our creative use of climbing rope to clamp the pieces together.

yeah, it really shines against the pink back drop.

enter here

so, we decided to take apart the entryway. and apparently, we shall slowly rebuild it. here's how it went down.

friday evening while hanging out in front of the television, a conversation about what to do with our weekend sparks up. oh, i know, we could get to work on the entryway. we could rent the truck at lowes, buy up some sheetrock and crown moulding (another household-wide side project). we can totally do this. let's start by prying up the vinyl tiles. ps - original wood floor under there! this was an exciting, yet frustrating find...as we assumed our refinishing adventures were over. now, we're hopeful of what may lie underneath the disgusting kitchen floor tiles.

mmm - varnish. look at the bright side,

at least it has likely protected the floors for the past 100+ years.

saturday morning, we headed to lowes and picked up the goods, then got to work deconstructing the little entryway. enter plumes of plaster dust.

green plaster, slats, and the door that we hate, but have yet to replace.

look - here we are hard at work!

several hours later, we emerged victorious, or at least slightly so. the plaster was all gone. just the good old slats were left. next up, drywalling the ceiling.

small room plus high ceiling made this an extremely challenging task. with one failed attempt and one lost piece of sheetrock, we were a little more generous with our cuts. we shimmied the next piece up...almost to its resting place (this was a serious test of arm strength), and with the help of the bottom end of a swiffer, we got it into place. seriously. it was kind of insane and highly awkward. but we got it up there and then brian put in part of the new light fixture.

ceiling!

no, we did not get ourselves a new coffee table.

on sunday, we finished up with the drywall. after we got in the pieces above the doors, things moved much more quickly, and our confidence with cutting the sheetrock grew. next up is actually taping and mudding the walls. then on to wainscot, trim, moulding, paint, and more.

here's a horrid shot of us in the newly drywalled space (that's right, it was so bad that i felt compelled to turn it into black and white and blur it a bit). the space is so small and tall, this is all we could come up with. i'm assuming the plaster fumes meddled with our decision making.

Baby it's cold outside

We have come to discover that the downside of being a homeowner is that things break and well, you can usually live without whatever broke, but it's usually a painful experience. Case in point, a 45 year old furnace doesn't put out much heat, but it does create some. When said furnace breaks down, it puts out zero heat. This isn't usually a problem in Seattle, where winter temps hover in the mid 40's, but of course this happened right at the beginning of Seattle's first cold spell of the winter. It got down to the 20's at night and not much warmer during the day.

Now, Allie and I are pretty stuborn people and we both didn't want to be the one that stayed home from work to meet with any kind of repair person, so it was a game of chicken to see who could stand the cold more. I'm not sure who broke first, but it was me who stayed home bundled up to meet the handful of repair men to pass through. Short story is that a part had broke on the furnace that would cost roughly $2,000 to replace. It made no sense to fix that part only to have the same furnace back in use, so we splurged and got a new one.

We're very happy with the new one (it's a Bryant) and even more thankful for the nice bonus the government will be giving us for purchasing a more efficient furnace!

The old furnace. It was speculated that this guy was roughly 45 years old and was originally an oil furnace that had since been converted to burn gas. Estimates were that this guy was about 50-60% efficient, meaning that 40-50% of the energy the furnace used didn't make it into heating the house.

The new furnace. Pretty fancy huh? This one is about 95% efficient - that rocks!