A Good, Old Fashioned Disaster

See, when things go wrong, it is you housebloggers that I think about. A couple weeks back, we had a nasty cold snap. It was below 25 degrees for about a week here in Arkansas. My renter was good and left the faucets dripping, but when it's that cold and the house doesn't have real insulation, it just isn't enough sometimes. Oh, and the renter wasn't home when this happened.

They discovered it when the neighbors called because they were concerned about the lake in the yard.


Note, the builders of this gem of a house decked the floors with chip-board. On the upside, this probably saved the whole house from flooding. Once the floors in the bedrooms were ruined, the water drained straight through it and into the crawlspace.

Some of the tear out heaped in the carport.



Condensation on the ceiling from all that lovely moisture.

Oh, and did I mention that our insurance doesn't cover this kind of damage. Driving rain? Fire? Tornado? Yes. Burst pipe in the bathroom? No.

So, this is all out of pocket (and being documented for a monster tax write-off next year). So far, all new plumbing, new bathtub, new sub-floors (approximately 400-500 square feet), new carpet, new vinyl, new drywall, three new doors, and . . . counting.

On the upside, this should all be finished next week because I hired the whole bleeding mess out. See! I learned something!

But plumbing is still the Devil.

Almost Ready To Go

Minus scraping out the edges and corners so the sander doesn't tear up the baseboards and pulling a cluster of staples compliments of the previous owners, this floor is ready to sand after a couple heady hours of toxic fume inhalation.

Cracking the Whip

Sure, it's wonderful that you're home from work now. Why don't you work on the freaking floor while you're here?

Learning to Love My Heat Gun

So, I started in on the floors again. After eleven months of inactivity, it started again. Who can say why exactly? Fear? Loathing? Voodoo? Boredom? Hell, does it matter?

First, as the tumbleweed photo below indicated, I had to do a thorough cleaning to find the bloody floor. And move furniture. And this was just to finish the dining room floor, which is supposed to be finished for Thanksgiving. 2007. Just saying.

Really, I'm embarrassed at how quickly this went. I mean, I could have had this finished last year.

Here is the before picture of the unfinished portion of the dining room floor.


I finally put the old pine plugs Gary sent to good use. Thank you Gary!

Here is a gripping photo of a round plug in a round hole!

And a puttied round plug in a round hole!

And here is the money shot: the dining room floor with all of its sanding prep completed.

Of course, I missed a few spots. Details.

Since things were moving along, I decided to start on the living room floor. The wood putty I use is filled with all the marvels of modern science: carcinogens, toxic solvent, and other sixteen syllable compounds. I quickly deduced that mystery finish on the living room floor was shellac. The acetone and ethanol alcohol in the wood putty quickly reactivated it. Shellac is a lot better than lead based paint. Since I knew that it was shellac that I was dealing with, I could benefit from everyone else's houseblogging experiences. For once, I knew what to do. I dragged out my heat gun, near virginal in condition, and went to work on the shellac. Sure, I could have used the drum sander on it, but I'd be changing the paper every minute or two as the shellac gummed it up. At a dollar a roll for the sand paper, this will add up quick. I guestimate that stripping the shellac may not save me time in the long-run, but it's probably saving me $20-$30.

The shellac came right up. There appears to be three coats of it. The first is a light cherry color, the next layer is darker with an amber hue, and the final coat is a fugly poo-brown that is so dark that I originally thought it may have been paint. One wonderful thing is that they didn't shellac under the rugs, they just did the rooms perimeter. I guess they had different sized rugs over the years. The rugs seem to have gotten larger over time. This is how I can see all the different layers. Here is a picture.

Here is the next problem area. This corner is going to suck. Even after I strip the shellac, most of this section will have to be hand sanded since this corner is too small for a drum sander. Feel the pain.

Anyhow, more to come.

Omens of Things to Come

Or, a rare example of the Persian Cat Dust-Bunny Tumbleweed in its natural environment. Notice this fine specimens enourmous size.

More to come, cheers!

Another Hand-Job

That’s pretty well what you’re reduced to when there isn’t enough room for the usual acrobatics. God, it sucks. Mercifully, this little postage stamp of hell, our pantry, is substantially smaller than the laundry room. Think 15 square feet vs. 40 or 50 square feet. I don’t think I could stand spending that much time on my knees again.

Here’s our usual floor drill:

1) Patch holes
2) Wood putty
3) Scrape and sand smooth
4) Sweep, vacuum, tack cloth clean
5) Stain
6) Seal with oil based polyurethane (repeat 3 to 5 times as needed)

I’m thinking about starting next week. It’s as good of a time for a hand-job as any, isn’t it?

Pantry Stain Test

There was no planning, no fore thought. One day, I simple jumped up, cleaned out the pantry, sanded down the counter top, and stained it. The counter top was made with some of the leftover cherry wood flooring from the main hallway. The staining of this wood was an experiment of sorts. I was hoping that a year of "curing" might have conditioned the wood in such a way that I wouldn't have to use a brush-on wood conditioners when I did the hall floor.



Here is the cabinets et al after the staining. Sorry, I wasn't in my right mind, so I didn't think to take before photos.



And, here is the counter top after the staining, nice but spotchy. Actually, it looks worse in the photo than in life. While I'm okay with this for the pantry counter top, I would not be okay with it for the hall. Looks like I'll be adding an exciting extra step of prep-work when I get to the hall floor and the crown molding too.

Bugger.

Crawling to the Finish Line

The three-day weekend was nice. Aside from catching up on sleep and doing some fancy cooking, we didn't do anything too monumental. Well, there was one exception. We actually talked about working on the Devil Queen, specifically the dining room floor. This included a brief discussion of the pros and cons to laying a new wood floor over the old pine one. Even with us doing the installation, it would cost roughly $700 to $800 for a new floor. Having Kenny do it would cost roughly $1200. Refinishing the current one with a generous amount of wood-putty and patching would cost us roughly $250 (after we decided to disallow the cost of a knee replacement as a "construction cost"). We chose the cheapest route to finished.

Lots of prep-work will be needed. Bummer. Maybe I'll start on it tomorrow?

You know me, I just can't find enough excuses for crawling around on my knees, the harder the floor the better.

The Devil's Dance: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

It's progress, but we're way behind where we'd like to be. Fidge got poisoned, so I had to baby-sit (is it really baby sitting if it's your child?) Gideon while she waited for Allegra-D to get out of her system.

What is even worse is that I am indirectly responsible for Fidge's poisoning. The last two weeks Fidge has developed a really nasty rash. And it keeps spreading. Not poison ivy. Not hives, not pox, not a bite or anything else anyone could name. Finally, she went to the doctor and he didn't know what it was either. But, this didn't stop him from prescribing her Allegra-D, one of those stupid "miracle" allergy "cures" the pharmaceutical companies keep churning out. I guess when in doubt, assume its an allergy and bill their insurance.

Apparently, he gave her a dose high enough to treat a sperm whale. I not sure what exactly it did to her, but it didn't sound pretty. Something about a droopy eye and the other was dilated so wide that determining the eye color was a challenge. Fortunately, she sweated it out and got back to normal without visiting the ER. Nice.

What makes it even better is that Fidge finally figured out what was making her skin breakout, The Devil Queen. She's been scrubbing a lot of the walls and painting them for us, and she thinks she has an allergic reaction to the stuff. As a hypochondriac with a well developed collection allergies (oak pollen, old books, molds, dust, etc), I'm at a loss to account for what is getting to her. Maybe it's the paint?

So, since I was tending to the young master, I didn't finish off the master bathroom, the dining room ceiling, or sundry other projects. Even so, things must be going the right way. For the first time since the Norman invasion of England, my wife came home and was thoroughly excited by how the house was looking. And, another sign that times are changing, Gideon has stopped calling the Devil Queen "Monster House" and now calls it "Yellow House." That has got to be good, right?

Here are some pictures of what we knocked out over the last few days with a lot of help from friends, family, fiends, and hired help.

First we have our new cherry wood floors.

Second, a heavily primed master bathroom ceiling.

Base boards in the living room.

More base boards and window trim.

The dining room nearing completion. Note, more base boards.

Here is the pantry door and trim. We've decided to leave the beadboard walls and ceiling unpainted. We may go back and oil or clear coat the wood, but like the bare board look a lot.

Cabinets in the pantry. The counter top is left over cherry flooring. The weird strips to the left will be painted or stained to make them less noticable.

And we've been cleaning the place up too. Liz, our itinerate painter, wanted a good bit of our left over building materials, so Fidge hauled a truck load of that to her this weekend. This was a great relief for us. The Devil Queen is getting close enough to completion that all the construction materials, tools, etc need to find a new home. A lot of that has been ending up on the porches, and that just isn't cutting it anymore either.

We also traded Kenny some left over electrical supplies for work on the house, yet another good deal for everyone involved.

Anyhow, more to come. I've got six or more posts in the works to catch up on everything from the last week or so.

Good Feeling

One of the best feelings in the world is coming home from work and finding that things are getting done.

The master bathroom ceiling is nearly ready to prime and paint.

I know it's not much to look at, but here are the first to rows of the last floor I hope we ever have to have installed. I have high hopes that this will be finished today or early tomorrow.