Picardy Project

NOW We Can Check it off the List

2012-02-13T01:51:00.001-08:00

Saturday night we headed up to my dad and Wendy's to finally check the cabinet off the list, yay!!! Since we installed the cabinet my dad found matching baseboards at HD and installed them, so all that was left for us was building and putting in a cover for the subwoofer

Chris built a simple frame

And he stretched white fabric screen across it. After, he installed metal brackets on the back that would help the cover slide into the opening and hold in place with magnets.

When we got to their house Chris drilled out 4 holes, 2 on the top and 2 on the bottom

And then slide some powerful magnets into the holes he drilled (the magnets were super fun to play with because they were so strong - they could find the nails in the subfloor below the hardwood floors!)

Once the magnets were in place, Chris just slid the cover into place and the metal brackets on the back were held in place by the newly installed magnets, and poof! the job was done!!!

That little eyeball is an infa-red sensor so that my dad and Wendy can change all the channels and settings, etc. with the remote despite all the components being behind the cabinet doors

My dad and Wendy pushed the TV further back into the cabinet so you can see more of the counter top and so the TV doesn't look like it fills out the space so much

I'm super happy to be able to finally call this project done for dad and Wendy because it took us a loooong time to finally hop to it and get it built for them. They only stared at plywood subfloor, patched drywall and cords hanging everywhere for over a year...

It's been quite an amazing transformation from the old fireplace and weird nook

To now having two (totally awesome) built in cabinets :)

Thanks for being patient with us dad and Wendy :) and I'm so so so glad the cabinets turned out so well! :)

Hallelujah the Floor is Improved!

2012-02-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

That's right, we devised a plan, put it into action and improved the terrible stains, splotchy-ness and water drops that freckled our front room floor.

Let us be reminded of our shortcut inducing ugliness

I shudder.

We had a few ideas lined up for our plan of attack and although we tackled it apprehensively (and maybe not with the greatest attitude), attack we did.

First, we tried to sponge the floor to open up the grain

But damn that Zar stain. It was impenetrable. Stupid stain doing its job. Damnit!

Next up, SANDING

Now, of course sanding is necessary between coats, but we really sanded

We sanded over everything, but really tried to sand down the dark, splotchy areas and got things down a bit more bare in the hopes of evening things out.

When we were done sanding we broke out the sponges and sponged EVERYWHERE

Once the floor was dry we came back into the room with the screen and knocked down all the raised grain. Then it was time to tack cloth to get all the dust and sanding particles off. And finally, we were ready for round two of staining with the hopes of evening things out and the fear that somehow we were going to make things worse

Again, I've got no pictures of us doing the in progress staining as we didn't really have free hands, but just like last time we pressed that stain in and worked on 10-20 sq. ft. at a time. On this second round however we tried to wipe clean the darker areas a bit quicker and not let the stain soak in as much. As we wiped the excess stain off we also tried to pay really close attention to areas that were darker than the rest and we tried to wipe a bit harder to get some of the saturation out to make things more even.

When we were done, things looked OH MY GOD A LOT BETTER. The really stained area (previous stains on the floor we're guessing from peeing past animals that lived in the house) isn't invisible, but it's an improvement

But the rest of the floor? SO MUCH BETTER (the color is reading more orangy-red than it is in real life)

Chris and I were immediately relieved. It is not perfect by any means, but it is SO MUCH FUCKING BETTER (we may sand and stain one more time on two of the stairs, but that's super minor). We've had the windows open and the fan going to air things out, and as the color really soaks in, it's looking better and better

It is such a fucking relief, I cannot tell you. Chris and I were loathing this step all along the way, and after things looked like crap after this past weekend it really took the wind out of our sails. But after all the wonderful, nice things you guys all said, it definitely spurred us on and we feel so much better better now.

We're a little nervous about doing the poly this weekend because there is still room for error so we're not out of the woods yet, but we've definitely improved, so that makes us feel a lot better. PHEW!

Insulating the Front Room

2012-02-08T21:19:00.001-08:00

Our attic is large and expansive and so at some point we'd like it to all be insulated because when we use the heater all the warm air just flies up out of the part of the house we're occupying and into the spacious attic. We'll have to wait until absolutely all the wiring in the house is done (and I think we're about 95% there), but we figured we might as well insulate the part of the attic over the front room because we know we're all done with wiring that area.

We bought 5 big bolt packages of insulation for about $200 (yikes! but we later returned a bolt package so the total was $160.)

And while Chris shoved cellulose insulation into some wall bays in some not too convenient places, I got to insulating all of the ceiling bays

It was pretty convenient because the ceiling bays were only about 6 inches shorter than the bolts of insulation so I didn't have to do much measuring. And this area was also convenient to slide the insulation into because it had pretty good access

As I moved towards the right...

...it became more difficult because I didn't have great access to the main part of the attic so I had to climb back and forth from where my working area was (grabbing the insulation and cutting it) and then over to the ceiling bay I needed to lay the insulation into. It was hard because in this area of the house there are a lot of different angles in the roof line so you have to contort your body into some pretty interesting positions to make your way through the area while also making sure not to shove your foot through the plaster ceiling.

Thankfully, pretty soon after I started the not so fun area Chris was done shoving in the cellulose insulation and so he came over to help me. While I stayed over by the ceiling bays I gave Chris measurements while he cut things and handed them to me

With Chris helping it started going a lot faster (and there was a lot less cussing). It took about 90 minutes or so, and although the "After" pics aren't that exciting...

...it's nice to know that all 30 ceiling bays are nicely insulated. We certainly won't notice any temperature difference yet, but it's good to know that at least the process of insulating the attic has started. And because it's probably one of the most inconvenient areas to get to and work on, it makes it that much better that it's done.

Now, if only the floors were that simple...

When Staining Goes Wrong

2012-02-07T19:58:00.000-08:00

Ugh. I was dreading writing this post for the last 2 days because I'm still very annoyed and distraught about our floors. We've spent the past 2 weeks doing every little thing along the way to get our floors ready to stain, and finally, mid-day on Sunday we were ready to stain!

Before we started staining we thought about 2 things.

1) Should we pre-condition the floor? We did this when we stained the kitchen floor, but when I tested the stain this time around when we changed colors and brands I didn't pre-condition the sample and the coverage was great. Plus, when we went outside to look at the pre-conditioner it said to use water-based stain next, and our stain is oil-based. So....well, we didn't pre-condition.

2) To sponge clean or not to sponge clean? After sweeping, vacuuming and tack-clothing, the floor was pretty damn clean, but we wondered if we should use a really really really really lightly damp sponge and wipe clean the whole floor and then come back at it with the screen and knock down the raised grain. And then tack-cloth again. We were really close to doing this, but out of shear laziness I made the executive call and voted no, that the floors were clean enough (though we had cleaned here and there with sponges in the days prior here and there).

So we tested the stain. We started in a small area where our hutch would eventually cover it if things didn't go according to plan

It looked pretty, amazing, and wonderful, so we excitedly pressed on. We each started on separate ends of the room and used lint-free rags and really pressed and rubbed the stain in (per MacBeath's instructions). We applied about 10-20 sq. ft. at a time and then went back and wiped away the excess stain.

It all started off great. Both of us were really excited about how well the stain was going in (it really is so much richer than Varathane) and we loved the color. But after a little bit we started noticing that anywhere we had accidentally dropped a spot of water or spot cleaned with water days earlier the floor was taking it a lot more because the grain was more open. Oh shit.

I don't have any pictures of the progress because, well, our hands were covered in stain, but after the 90 minutes or so it took to get the whole room done we stood back and were really disappointed

In addition, the areas where there were previously stains (maybe animal urine from previous owner's pets?), the floor now looked really really splotchy. We were hoping that because the color we were using was darker that it would help to cover them up

I was totally upset and mad at myself. All along the way we had taken every single step to make sure that we were prepping the floors properly for stain and at the LAST SECOND we got lazy and we didn't do the final step to ensure that stain would have gone on even. I wasn't as frustrated for not using the pre-conditioner, but because we had spot cleaned with the sponge it had opened up the grain in certain areas and therefor made the stain spotty. When you run your hands over the wood you can feel the grain in the sponged areas and we really should have sponge cleaned everything (then screened, then used the tack cloth), but we were just too excited to finally be at the point where we were staining.

Sigh.

Now, three days later the stain is still uneven and splotchy because of the existing stains and sponged areas

Besides those areas we really love the stain: the color, the saturation and the quality, which makes me even more disappointed in the short cut.

Sigh.

The hopefully good news is that we've brainstormed some ideas to try and even things out and we're hoping in the next couple of days we can get some work done to try to make things look better. If not, I can at least know that a large portion of the floors will be covered with 2 rugs, so maybe we can just cover all of it...

Sigh. Again.

We're Testing Stains Again?

2012-02-06T21:25:00.001-08:00

Yup. That's right. We're testing floor stains again. It's not like I haven't already tested dozens of colors and combinations or anything when we started working on the kitchen over 2 years ago. But we've been really unsatisfied with the coverage of the water-based Varathane floor stain (very inconsistent color)

And the Minwax sealer is just ridiculously terrible. I mean, your toenail can scratch the shit out of it. Seriously

Now that we're ready to stain the floors in the front room we figured we might as well get the stain situation straightened out now.

I headed out to our go to hardwood store and resource, MacBeath in Berkeley for their advice. The guys who worked there all were not a fan of Minwax and said that they would never use it in their own homes. They said it was poor quality, uneven, and didn't give great coverage or protection. I hear lots of homeowners using Minwax, so I didn't know if we'd just had a bad experience or something, so I felt better when they said they didn't like it. I mean HATED it.

I asked what products they had and which ones they liked. We headed down the aisles and started talking about Zar. The salesman said the oil-based stain provided even, saturated and long lasting color. After talking with the sales guy for a while I decided to get a sample size of the Mocha stain and took it home

The first coat went on super smooth and even. I was immediately impressed

Our poor experience with Minwax and our Oak floors was that the grain soaked up all the pigment in the stain, and the rest of the wood didn't really take to the stain at all. This resulted in uneven color and a really jarring difference in color between the grain and the rest of the wood. But the Zar stain really coated the wood evenly and had a really nice saturation of color (BTW, no perk or anything from Zar or MacBeath, we just wanted to give our honest opinion).

I let the first coat dry and actually really liked the quality and color of the stain after just that one coat

But I figured I'd try a second coat to see what it would look like

I brought the sample inside to see what it would look like against the original stain in the house (top) and the Gunstock we used in the kitchen (bottom)

In the end Chris and I both liked the color with just one coat as opposed to two coats, so I think that's what we'll be going with when we stain the front room (and down the line the rest of the house which will include re-doing the kitchen).

As for the sealer, Chris has heard some really great things about Fabulon products, so that's what we'll be going with when we seal it. Hopefully this round goes better than Round 1 with Minwax and Varathane.

Getting Stain Ready

2012-02-06T06:54:00.000-08:00

Well, I now officially know why Chris and I weren't too thrilled to get started refinishing the floors: it sucks. After we'd covered the floor in our trowel on wood filler, the next task was sanding it all off. So we trekked on over to HD to rent a sander, brought it home...

...and got to work

After a few passes at a small sample area we cleared the dust (oh, and get ready for LOTS of dust) in order to see what it would look like once everything was sanded

With things looking like they'd end up being okay, from then on for the next 4 hours it was sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand sand (Chris with the finish sander, me with the palm sander), and holy crap was it a dusty process

But we finally finished all the sanding...

...and were left with allllll the cleaning that was needed to be done

First, we vacuumed in the hopes of getting at least most of the dust off the ground. Then, the plastic came down

After that came the horrible task of cleaning all the walls. And that sucked. The dust was so heavily caked on...

...that in some places we had to clean 3 times in order to get all the dust and haze off the walls.

Once the walls were (mostly) clean, it was on to the baseboards

We ran the sponge over them first, then came around with a scrapper and scrapped the wood filler off them

At that point we were pretty tired, so we called it a day and yesterday morning we woke up and finished things off. With most of the walls and baseboards clean, bits of dust had found their way back to the floor. I got the broom and swept everything, then we vacuumed...

...and then we used the tack cloth.

In the end we got to see how well the trowel on wood filler worked. While in most areas I thought it did a really good job, there were still a decent amount of places we weren't able to quite squish it all the way into

And we found about a dozen shiny nail heads :(

But, what are you gonna do?

It was a long long long long process. But at that point we were finally ready for stain

You Don't See that Everyday

2012-02-02T19:44:00.000-08:00

If you need any help with heating, air conditioning or plumbing, make sure to call this guy

Seriously?

Chris and I saw this amazing loading job when we were at HD on Wednesday. I know we've all seen some pretty questionable loads in various vehicles (Chris and I had a pretty exciting drywall load in his truck about two years ago), but this one takes the cake. We both just stopped and started laughing. And then obviously took a picture.

Floor Adventure Round 2

2012-02-02T07:42:00.000-08:00

When we last left the floors we had gotten most of the sanding done, but there was still some problematic areas over by the picture window. We've been working on sanding more and more and more and more. We finally came to the conclusion, that well, that area but the picture window really isn't going to get much better. Whether it is indeed damage by the sun, crappier wood, or just not great sanding by us (but we tried and tired and tried) that's just how it's just going to have to be

So we moved on and started tackling more things we had to get done before we were even close to stain ready.

Like all of the little crevices and corners we couldn't get the finish sander or our palm sander into

And the stairs

And now those stairs look mighty pretty

We also had to replace a piece of wood in front of the fireplace. The old one had split so we carefully removed it a little while ago. We measured for fit and then found that our new wood would be installed a bit proud of the old wood. The subfloor is a little wonky here so I think it's a combination of it being a high spot and also our new wood being slightly thicker

Good thing we have a planer! :) It made things a lot easier. If we didn't have one we would have had to take the belt sander to it over and over and over again, but with the planer we were able to slide it through little by little to take a completely uniform amount off and get it just about perfectly level with the old floor. Once we got that right, we slid it into place and hammered it in with finish nails (we could have used the nail gun, but we wanted round holes like the rest of the floor)

Then we went around the whole room looking for bare metal showing from old nail heads. We used a counter sink to nail them down below the top surface of the wood so our wood filler would cover it up and once all the floor was finished you wouldn't be able to see any sparkle of visible nail heads (I forgot to take a picture).

Then came time to screen it which involves using a screen-like sandpaper...

...and attaching it to a pole and running it over all of your floors. This fine gritted screen helps smooth the transitions between the different sanding methods used on your floors (between the field area and the corners and borders)

Then finally we were ready for the wood filler, hooray! (after vacuuming of course). We opted to use Woodwise Full-Trowel Filler on the floors. Instead of patching holes here and there you pour out a workable amount of the wood filler onto your floors and then use a grout float to spread it out all over. This fills all your nail holes, gaps between wood, gouges in the wood, you name it. It helps give a nice, clean, even surface across the entire floor. We hopped to it

It took the two of us maybe 45 minutes to get it all done, which is actually probably faster (and a lot less annoying) than it would have been to hunt around for every nail hole and putty it over. Once we got to the edge of the room and our butts started colliding I jumped out and Chris finished it up

We were hoping to be able to sand that same day so we brought in a fan to try to dry things out quicker

But things were still taking a bit longer to fully dry everywhere and while we were pretty sure it wouldn't take too long to get it all sanded, we didn't want to push our luck and have it take hours longer and be sanding at 10pm (no fun), so we resolved that we'd sand it this weekend. It's looking oh so inviting now though!

OMG the Weeds

2012-02-01T06:38:00.000-08:00

It's been just about 6 months since we laid all the weed block fabric, put rocks on top of it and basked in our pergola is done glory

We "splurged" (it was just the slightly more expensive weed block at HD, but by no means costly) for Easy Gardener Commercial Weed Barrier which claims to keep the weeds down for 30 years. Ummm, try less than 3 months

Yup, WEEDS FUCKING EVERYWHERE. Chris and I were totally pissed. It wasn't like we'd forked over any real substantial amount of money (just over $25), but it was really annoying to have bought something that only lasted 1/120'nd its advertised life span.

So we called them and said that we wanted a refund because they're product didn't actually work. They sent me an email on November 17th with an attached form I needed to fill out for them to process. It asked questions like "Describe the area you used the product" and "How did you prepare the area?" and "How soon after preparing the area did you place the fabric?" I was totally annoyed. I wanted to write: YOUR PRODUCT SUCKS: WE TAMPED DOWN DIRT, SPRAYED THE SHIT OUT OF IT WITH ROUND-UP, LAID DOWN THE FABRIC AND PUT 2 INCHES OF ROCKS DOWN AND WITHIN 3 MONTHS THERE WERE WEEDS ALL OVER. I kept it together and filled out the form and emailed it to Chris before I sent it to make sure I wasn't too mean (and I included a picture of when we laid it down and of the weeds now). And we waited. I've had the idea to write this post since then but it wasn't until YESTERDAY that we finally heard back from them, and I wanted to hear a response before I wrote about it. Well, the response is it took them 10 weeks to give us a refund of $26

I'm appreciative that we got the refund even though the amount of effort it took probably wasn't worth $26, but out of principal it was just really disappointing that the product SUCKED SO BAD. So, word to the wise: don't use Easy Gardener Commercial Weed Barrier. And maybe now I need to write to Round-Up too...

Sanded Floors Here we Come

2012-01-30T20:11:00.001-08:00

The time has finally come: we're starting to refinish the front room floors. Hooray! Despite that excitement, sanding them down has not been fun, I'm just excited that we're mostly done with the sanding because it is very not fun.

First up, clearing the room. We had accumulated a lot of crap in here (ladders, paint containers, etc.) so all that had to go out. Once we were left with just our weight machine Chris and I delicately slid it over to the office entrance and lifted, wiggled, shimmied and grunted it into the office

It came with a slight casualty

But that's nothing a little paint can't cure.

Next up was prepping the room. We set up the zip walls (and you can still see the turquoise paint at the bottom of the right one from our raccoon sacrifice)

We taped up the bookcases

And the light

And then we were ready to start (don't worry, we closed that door to the office)

At first we tried to be lazy and used 60 grit sandpaper on our palm sander to see if we could get away without having to rent a sander (we only had a layer of poly to sand off, not poly and stain)

But it didn't work super great so we quickly relented as we knew it was only $36 to rent it for 4 hours, so it wasn't a huge sacrifice or anything.

We had to decide, however, if we were going to use a drum sander or a finish sander. A drum sander sort of works like a giant belt sander and is a lot more powerful while a finish sander is essentially 4 orbital palm sanders working at a lower RPM, so it's a lot more delicate. Our floors are 5/16 face nailed, so we didn't have too much wiggle room in terms of accidentally sanding off a ton or accidentally chewing up the floors with the more powerful drum sander. Because we only needed to remove a light top layer of poly we didn't want to be too aggressive and accidentally hurt our floors and need to replace a bunch of boards. So we opted for the more delicate finish sander.

After spending 40 minutes at HD waiting to be helped and have our order processed by our least favorite know-it-all-but-really-doesn't-know-anything tool rental employee we returned home with the sander and got to work. Unfortunately for about the first hour I didn't help Chris much as something popped up with work that I had to deal with, but he mosey'd around that floor

He used 80 to start (in hindsight we should have used 60, but again, we were afraid of chewing up the floor)

Pretty quickly we threw it out the window that we'd only have the sander for 4 hours because we realized this process was going to take a lot longer than we thought. The poly that they used in the 20s is apparently amazing and so it was taking a lot to get it off

But we kept at it and Chris went over it and over it and over it with the finish sander and I came in with the palm sander (at 60 grit because I could be more methodical and delicate with the palm sander) and tried to get all the little grooves and other areas the finish sander couldn't quite get everything off of

Slowly but surely it started to look better

But again, not all the poly was off so around and around and around the finish sander went

(and I kept following around and around and around with the palm sander)

After about 5 hours things were looking good enough to break out the 100 grit. About 95% of the poly was off (it's still not perfect over by the picture window), but I hopped on the finish sander with 100 and went over everything again

And here's an idea of just how much sawdust was in the air during this process

Around 5:30 after being exhausted and frustrated (it was taking a long time) we resolved to call it a day. The floors weren't completely sanded and we'll probably give it another go at the area by the picture window with 60 grit and the palm sander to try to get the last poly off, but I think the floors look a lot better (and by better we of course mean completely sanded and bare, minus all the stains. Boo.)

But we were really tired. The finish sander is pretty powerful and heavy so it takes a decent amount of muscle to move it around the room. And my arms were in a perpetual state of vibration from the palm sander and my calf and thigh muscles were twitching from being crouched down for many continuous hours, so I think Chris and I deserved a break.

The area around the bookcases looks pretty bare and doesn't really need any more work

But the area by the picture window isn't looking as good (discoloration and a bit more worn)

We weren't quite sure if the sun had some effect on the wood, if there was more foot traffic over here or maybe we just didn't do as good of a job, but it's definitely something to tackle on Meryl + Chris vs. Sanding the Floors Day 2.

Ohhhhh. Ahhhhhh.

2012-01-29T19:51:00.001-08:00

Alternative title for this post: Meryl Should have Taken Better Notes.

You remember this light we bought a long long time ago?

That I worked on refinishing by spray painting it oil rubbed bronze about 2 months ago?

Well, it is FINALLY up in the front room, yay!!!! But it didn't come without a headache. I thought my brain took detailed notes when I took the light apart, but, I was wrong. One wouldn't necessarily think putting a light together that you had taken apart that didn't have too many parts would be that difficult. But an hour through the light still looked like this

Now, that sort of looks correct, but that stupid pipe thing coming out the top was still too long and so the chain part that attached to the top didn't screw down far enough for all the parts to not move around and wiggle a lot. I was starting to get really pissed off so Chris came in to help. We finally go the light put together semi-correctly (we couldn't figure out what to do with 2 parts, but the light seemed to look fine and was strong enough, so...) But when we tested out hanging it from the ceiling neither of us thought it hung low enough. So we had to take it apart again so Chris could rewire it with longer electrical (or you could splice two wires together, but that would look not so hot)

And then? IT WAS TIME TO HANG IT! As you can tell, I was very excited for this step :) It came with some headaches also (attaching the old escutcheon to the new light and the pitched ceiling was a tad difficult), but we got it up and it looks glorious!

Chris and I love love love it. The light actually went up about 3 weeks ago (seriously, no lie), but one of the bulbs didn't work straight out of the packaging (LAME) and so I didn't want to post pictures of it until we had gone back to HD to get more bulbs so it was lit in all its gloriousness :) But we kept forgetting the bulbs, and then I kept forgetting to actually screw them in, and then I kept forgetting to take pictures of it... BUT, now it's all working and it's amazing!

I'm really really happy that Chris likes it a lot too because he wasn't too keen on the idea of replacing the old one and getting a new one. I totally understood his reasoning, but the old light I didn't think fit the room as well (plus, we'll reuse it in the nook later when we refinish that room because an ugly ceiling fan is in there now). Chris gave me props for the light choice and I gave him props for waiting it out to see how it turned out and we gave props to the awesome light for lighting the room so well

As you can tell, we like it a lot :)

And now this room is really well lit, and that's a super great development because the old lighting wasn't very good. 4 new recessed cans (well, 5 if you count the $25 baby can in the relief area), 2 sconces and the center light all make for great lighting and a great front room :)

Now it's just time to finally get to those damn floors.

Our Sandpaper is Organized, Super Nerdy?

2012-01-26T18:15:00.000-08:00

I am a total big fat nerd because I like to file things. That's right, I ENJOY filing. Getting things alphabetized, color coded, binder tabs, labels, EEE!!! It just whips my heart into a frenzy. When we were shopping around on Black Friday this past November we hit up Sears because they always have awesome deals. They did in fact have one cool one that Chris and I caved for: A filing sleeve of sandpaper for under $10, and it came with TONS of sandpaper. Score!

And yes, you heard right that we purchased it 2 months ago. And you know what? It's been sitting on the work bench in the garage for all that time. Finally, on Sunday between chair coats while we were cleaning up and putting things away in the garage I decided it might be time to finally organize the sandpaper file.

I grabbed all our sandpaper sheets from the sandpaper drawer

The file had labels for 40 grit, 60, 100, 150 and 220

We had additional paper at 80 grit, 320 and 400

So I relabeled a couple sections (I made 40-60, 80, 100, 150, 200 and >220), and then I shoved all the sandpaper inside

Am I a total nerd because this folder just makes me so excited?

Look at that sandpaper drawer!

I may have to get some folders for the palm sander paper because that file folder just makes me too excited to not go on a sandpaper filing frenzy :)

How Successful is the Patio?

2012-01-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

I'm all about being honest when projects work and don't (because they certainly all don't go according to plan and sometimes you really fuck up), when Chris and I don't get along on projects (because I don't know any couple who has not thought about throwing a screwdriver at their partner during some project), and how much things cost (because I'm always curious how much projects or things that people buy or work on are). So, with that in mind, let's look at the patio.

I absolutely 100% consider this patio an amazing success

I love it. We play basketball on it. We hang out on it. Our friends who have kids have loved it (and their kids go running around playing on it which is totally fun to see). And it just looks awesome :)

However, there is one thing that isn't as successful: we have a low spot over by the garage

It's been raining a lot lately and so we've been able to see just how flat and level we were able to make things. When we started, the old patio was TOTALLY out of level: holes, divets, cracked concrete, you name it. We worked really really really hard to try and make things as level as possible throughout the whole process. And if we look everywhere else we were pretty successful, especially considering this was a project we'd never done and had no experience: we've got no other standing water

Because we're total goobers, when we saw the standing water Chris and I were both a little disappointed in ourselves and sad that we had this low spot

But we've got to really keep it in perspective: we started with a disastrous patio, we had never done a project like this, and there are no other low spots anywhere else over all 950 sq. ft. But I'm not going to lie, when we see that standing water it irks us a little bit. Oh well.

From Back Bathroom to Spray Station

2012-01-25T07:14:00.000-08:00

When we sprayed the cabinet for my dad and Wendy we got 3 chairs primed. 2 more still needed to get primed (we have 6 chairs total, but one was already painted). I brought them into my art room and got them all primed and ready

Getting the wicker painted was a little tricky. I needed enough paint on the brush to really get in all the cracks, but not too much that it dripped everywhere

The second chair was a lot easier (we still need to attach the arm rest)

And after about an hour or an hour and a half all the chairs were ready to get painted

We had planned to spray all the chairs on Sunday before the 49er game, but alas our plans were nearly thwarted when it started raining all day long (it was only supposed to rain in the late afternoon so we had figured we could get it done in the morning). Naturally we didn't decide not to spray, we just made a spray station out of our still gutted back bathroom. Duh.

We set up a plastic zip wall to protect the laundry room from getting any overspray on the walls, windows, washer/dryer, etc. And once we got it all set up Chris hopped inside and got to spraying while I stayed outside to make sure the plastic held tight and shuffled the chairs in and out to him

Getting the chairs painted wasn't too hard, though we had a to wait a while in between each coat (we put two on those babies) because it was kinda cold so the drying time took longer.

After all the spraying there were still some areas here and there that needed some touching up. Because most of the chairs have little tiny crevices on the arms, legs and backs and getting them painted with the sprayer was a little difficult, I touched them up by hand

And now, they're sitting pretty ready for me to re-install the butts! (which still means cutting a butt for two of them out of plywood)

Meanwhile, the gutted back bathroom/spray station looks like a fucking turquoise bomb went off in it

Maybe I should write a note to a future homeowner who may possibly re-gut the bathroom in 50 or so years that we used this room as a spray station and not to sacrifice some turquoise blooded raccoon?

The Herringbone is Here!

2012-01-23T21:55:00.000-08:00

I'm know, I know, believe me, I'm sorry that we didn't work on sanding the floors this weekend between working at my dad and Wendy's and working 1/2 day on Sunday to watch the playoffs, but OMGGGGGGGGG look at what I picked up on Friday afternoon

Look at that beautiful amazingness

It took a bit longer than anticipated to finally get it all home in our house and I normally would have gotten really pissed off the tile shop and called them and let them have it (or take Deb up on her offer to lay the hammer down), but 2 things stopped me, the first: oh. my. god. I. love. our. tile.

And the second: this place has really great customer service. Upon realizing that they messed up and only had 1/2 the order correct they totally admitted fault, apologized, reordered the tile, called to tell me the next day that the tile had been reordered, sent back an order when it arrived all cracked and then encouraged me to look through every sheet when I came to pick it up to make sure it was all okay and then replaced 2 sheets that I was nit-picking on that were a bit cracked and apologized again for how long it took. Seriously, amazing customer service. Good job Tez Marble.

But really, I can't stop looking at it

And another angle

How about another one?

Okay okay, last one

I just typed out 4 sentences and deleted them because I could not contain my excitement in how much I love the tile and there were typos all over the place. Eeeeeee! Maybe this will get us motivated to sand and refinish the floors. I hyperventilate thinking about how crisp and beautiful things will look with some great bright white grout. Bahhhhh!!!!!!

Ugly Fireplace->Weird Nook->Awesome Cabinet

2012-01-20T07:52:00.002-08:00

This past weekend Chris and I trekked up to my dad and Wendy's house to install the cabinet, yay!!! We loaded up the car Saturday morning in hopes of missing the rain

We were nearly 100% successful except some minor drops when we were about 3/4 of the way there. We pulled over to inspect things and make sure everything was covered well and by the time we got back in the car the drops had stopped, so all was well :)

When we got to my dad and Wendy's they had already cleared out most of the nook, and all that was left was taking out the giant TV

Once the TV was out Chris and my dad started work on taking out the little strip of drywall against the wall beneath the nook. It turned out there was a sheet of metal and a 2x12 behind it nailed in with about 3 dozen nails, but it finally all got removed (we needed it out to make room for the faux panel)

With the nook and drywall area cleared and cleaned we could do a dry fit of the cabinet to make sure everything lined up properly. We had ballparked for about 1/8" of wiggle room because we knew we could cover it up with the fluting but we needed to absolutely maximize every single inch of space to account for all the speakers and components my dad had

Dry fitting turned into "Well, that thing'll just stay in there" as we soon learned we had to shimmy, shove and squeak it into place because it was just about a perfect fit and there was no way we were really going to be able to pull it back out

Once that baby was in, it was in

Next up was dry fitting the counter top. My dad wanted it to have a few inches of of space in the back to provide ventilation for the components but to also be able to get your arm back there to potentially move cables around. We built the counter top a bit too deep, so we shaved a couples inches off. We also found out in the dry fit that it was a bit too wide

Building it wide was done intentionally because we always knew we'd be able to take the belt sander and sand it down to make it perfect (the walls are a little wavy and crooked). But once it got sanded down, it fit like a glove and our extra space in the back was plenty to get an arm back there, but not too much that the TV couldn't cover the gap so you wouldn't see it

When we knew the counter fit we took it out because we needed to drop all the components into each area from the top because with the face frame and door hinges some of the components were about 1/2" too big to slide through the front. We also worked on attaching the counter trim

After we dropped in all the components it was time to paint

The previous owners had left some primer in the garage, but clearly they didn't cover it properly

Nope, that's not quite what paint should look like. Yuckola. We scavenged around the garage and found some paint that would do as primer (we dropped the ball and only brought a tiny bit of primer for touch ups and forgot that the whole nook needed to be painted)

Dad and Wendy decided to paint the nook the same color as the walls in the room (Universal Khaki). Originally my dad wanted to paint it a darker color to help the nook blend with the TV, but after the cabinet was in place he liked the idea of the wall paint and thought it would look more seamless (yay!)

Next up, the fluting...

...and cove trim

...and wiring madness

And then came the absolute worst and most nerve wracking part: re-hanging the TV

We knew when we were drawing out the plans for the cabinet that the TV was going to be fitting very snugly and that there was a chance that we would have to raise it an inch or so. We had to make the cabinet a certain height to accommodate the center channel speaker and subwoofer, but we also had to leave enough clearance in the fixed amount of space for the TV to actually be able to be re-hung. It was the part of the installation I was least looking forward to.

Chris and my dad picked up the really heavy TV while I hopped on top of the cabinet (with Chris cringing in fear of me scratching it up) and tried to align the little screw holes on the back of the TV with the hardware on the TV mount and get it all screwed into place. The boys were grunting in exhaustion, I was sweating in fear, and after it was screwed in...it didn't fit. Grrrrr. It hung too low and the bottom of the TV rested on the top of the cabinet (don't worry, we had a towel down to protect it). So we had to reverse the process to take the TV down and my dad and Chris put their thinking caps on

There was only a teeny tiny itty bitty bit of wiggle room. If we raised the TV mount too high the TV wouldn't clear the top and be able to fit in the space, but we had to raise it enough so that it didn't sit on the cabinet. There was probably 2" of clearance on the top and we weren't totally sure how much it needed to be raised in order to not have it rest on the cabinet

In the end, Chris and my dad raised the TV mount 1 1/2"

And then it was round two of my dad and Chris holding up the super mondo heavy TV and me trying to screw it into the right place and not strip the screws. Round 2? SUCCESS!

And after touch ups and about a 25 minute freak out when all the audio worked except for the satellite (which we couldn't check before because the TV had to be installed last because the counter needed the whole nook space to be open in order to get it placed in the right way) the cabinet was "done!"

Now, I say "done" because we still have to make a speaker cover for the subwoofer (a white screened panel that will cover it so it blends with the rest of the cabinet), install the shoe moulding because the floor is a little wavy against the wall and doesn't line up quite right, and then install a bit of baseboards on the side from when we ripped out the fireplace. But other than that, it's looking fucking awesome!

And yes, in case you're wondering, that's four grown adults watching Over the Hedge together while my dad worked on fixing my computer for me

And boy oh boy do the two cabinets look snazzy side by side

And that, my friends, is how this room was transformed from Ugly Fireplace (that took up way too much room and was never used and was ugly)

To Weird, and also ugly, Nook (which sat in a state much like this - though I did paint the walls at one point - for close to a year)

To totally awesome cabinet (after a 12 hour day)

Not quite a finished check mark on the list, but I'd say a job well done!

Polka Dots and Soggy Socks

2012-01-20T05:34:00.000-08:00

After Chris' sawdust party we were well on our way to almost being done with the cabinet, which is very exciting, but there was still a bit of work to go.

Tuesday evening after work Chris and I worked on adding an extension to the counter top (we accidentally made it about 8" too short so we made an extension that you won't really be able to notice because it's in the back of the nook and the TV will hang over it and it will all be painted)

And don't worry, we slapped some bondo on that joint and sanded the shit out of it and now it's basically non-existent.

We also worked on attaching the faux drawers to the lower panel

Then Chris spent a little more time working on bits here and there while I found a warm retreat inside as I'm still a bit sick (it's been quite chilly in the Bay Area lately. And by chilly I mean cold for my raised in the warm and hardly ever under 40 degree central Bay Area weather. Yes, I know, totally spoiled)

Then Wednesday was the big day: time to paint! And luckily, Chris and I both had the day off. It had been forcasted to possibly rain (some "huge" storm that has yet to really role in minus some drops here and there). We were a little worried, but lucky for us there was nada rain. There was even some nice intermittent sunshine.

While Chris worked on attaching the panel with the faux drawers, drilling out where the hinges will go and other numerous small to do's I worked on setting up a paint station. We used to just use the sprayer willy nilly because either our patio looked like shit or it was just all dirt, but now with our glorious new patio we wanted to make sure we were really careful

I think the faux drawers look pretty good and I hope my parents add a bit of hardware to them to faux them up a little more

With the paint station set up we had just a few last tasks to complete before we were paint ready. We had to bondo and sand the faux drawer panel joint

We had to make the cut outs on the counter so the components can breathe

(that screen will go over the cut out and be painted the same color as the cabinet).

And then, it was time to paint

The primer went quick and so we brought out three of our future ticket table chairs that have been on our "get these babies primed!" to do list for some time (my wishlist for Thanksgiving weekend to be precise)

We were preoccupied with our excitement for how well priming was going, so we didn't notice the over spray from the sprayer. GASP! We had made a pretty kaleidoscope of baby polka dots all over the pavers, ahhhhh! We sprinted for the hose, a sponge and a broom and sprayed sprayed sprayed and scrubbed scrubbed scrubbed. When we stepped on the bricks there was paint all over the bottom of our shoes (duh!) and we got more paint on the patio, ahhhh!!!!! So we sprayed and scrubbed more. But by this time there was too much water on the patio and it started to flow back to the spray station, ahhh!!! So we looked at each other in nervousness and Chris pulled off his shoes and hopped on the soaking wet patio to broom off all the water

Sigh. True love. And I mean Chris' true love for our patio. He's stated numerous times it's the project he's most proud of to date so there's no way he wanted that baby painted in polka dot primer. After the polka dot and soggy sock fiasco we built a bridge over to the sprayer (which also got us over to the deck to get inside)

Now that both us and the spray station were safe it was time to get back to spraying (we kept the area around the spray station damp so any over spray wouldn't stick to the patio but instead sit on top of the water and then we'd broom it away)

The two color coats (a creamy white color matched to my parent's baseboard) took a bit longer than we had hoped with sanding between each coat and drying time (which took longer because it was cool). It was starting to get below 50 which is a no no for the water/oil hybrid paint so we accepted the fact that we couldn't get a second coat on the counter :( but everything else got two coats, so we still considered it a success.

With us not able to do any more painting because it was getting too cold for the paint, we started packing things up

3 chairs down!

And last night after work while I made dinner Chris sanded down the doors where the sprayer had dripped a bit of paint...

...and then put a second coat on the newly sanded doors and the still to be second coated counter top.

And now, we're ready for install!

We're Building Another Cabinet

2012-01-19T07:41:00.002-08:00

The first time building a cabinet at my dad and Wendy's went pretty well, so we're at it again!

This time it's for this little nook (another last year project we're finally getting to...)

The plan is to build a cabinet in that nook where the fireplace used to be and make it look like it was meant to be - a tough task because the nook is raised off the ground.

It all started again with a drawing. Well 2 this time because the build was a bit more complicated

The idea is to have the cabinet span the length of the open nook as 3 compartments: the two on the left and right will have doors and house all the DVD stuff, DirectTV receiver, stereo, etc. The one in the center will house the sub-woofer and some speaker I always forget the name of, so it will be open. Then, below the two doors and the speaker compartment on the section where the wall is we'll build a faux panel with 3 faux drawers (the drawing has only one, but we called an audible and made 3 because we thought it would look better) to make it look like the cabinet goes all the way to the ground instead of floating in the wall. The cabinet will be backless to allow components to breathe and so the cables can freely plug into other components in other sections. The sides will have fluting like the other cabinet and the counter will have 2 cut outs to also let all the components inside breathe. Whew!

Then it was time to start building

I wasn't nearly as involved in the early building of this cabinet because I was working on projects for my brother or sick. Boo. But in the last couple of days I've started helping Chris out.

Once most of the cabinet was built...

...it was time to start some of the finishing touches: cutting the fluting, sanding the bondo (face frame joints, door joints, etc.) and making the faux drawers.

While Chris worked on building the extension that the drawers will attach to I worked on sanding the cabinet, doors and fluting

Then it was time for Chris to break out the router and cut a nice pattern into the sides of the faux drawers

And you might be able to tell from the above pic that he got covered in saw dust

Good thing for the goggles and dust mask

With that, we called it a day on Monday (we came back from LA on Sunday, a day earlier than we originally planned so we could work on the cabinet). We knew we'd have about a day left to paint and get to the last little finishing touches (attaching the faux panel and a few other things) so it was definitely time to shower.

Starting to Prep our Ticket Table Wood

2012-01-18T07:12:00.000-08:00

With the wonderful reclaimed wood for our future fabulous ticket table purchased, I set about getting it ready to be planed. That included inspecting for nails, taking said nails out (although I still haven't quite gotten around to that one yet...) and cutting everything down to size.

A few evenings ago last week while Chris was working on the cabinet we're building for my dad and Wendy I started inspecting the table top wood for the best 72" to be cut down and used for the top (I actually measured out about 74" so we have a bit of wiggle room). Not wanting to start cutting everything down at night (the sun was starting to set) I just made markings of where the cuts would go

The "K" was written on the side of the line we would keep and that will also be the face that will be the top of the table. At the same time I also inspected for nails and marked off where we'd need to remove them if I couldn't do it easily right then

It was an easy task that didn't take too long and I was lucky that we installed a good outdoor light so I could continue working after the sun went down

With all the table top wood marked and Chris at a good stopping point on the cabinet we called it a night and resumed the next day. I set up a little work station

And got to cutting

I cut down 16 2x4's and 2x3's for the table top, and once they were all cut down to about 74" I laid them out to get an idea of what the top would look like (minus the glass and tickets of course)

Now that is a big, chunky, hulking table top! :) And it's actually about 6" too wide, but after things get planed and sanded it'll shrink down to size.

After I was done with the table top I sorted out the other wood by section and went through those as well looking for nails and making cut marks

And then I started cutting them down to size as well (cutting them 1-2" longer than needed to be safe)

And soon, all the wood was cross cut

Now I just need to get off my tushy to rip all those nails out...

Have Tools, Will Travel

2012-01-17T09:24:00.001-08:00

This past weekend we headed down to LA to work on some projects for Chris' mom and grandma and to also pay Chris' dad a visit.

When we were there last Thanksgiving I happened to be sick also, so Chris worked away at replacing a vanity in Max's bathroom

And this time Chris worked on replacing the toilet in the same bathroom (it was leaking and the tiles were starting to crack and we knew there'd be some damage to the subfloor). Once the toilet was out we could better assess how bad the subfloor was, and I don't think it was as bad as we were anticipating, which is good news for a one day project

So Chris crawled under the house and added some structure

And then laid down some thin set and put down the tiles we were able to salvage

A few tiles cracked when Chris was taking them up, and so we had to make due with just some thin set down and hope that the new toilet would cover it

Thankfully, the new toilet covered about 90% of it and there was no more toilet rocking on a wavy, uneven floor (kitty approved)

There was a touch of thin set showing on the right side

But considering the project took us 3/4 of Saturday (of course we had to stop to watch the 9ers game!) and Sunday morning and we couldn't find tile to match it, I think Chris did a pretty awesome job. And Max is delighted with her new, soft close Toto toilet, so that's what matters most :)

The next day we headed over to Chris' mom's house. I was feeling better that next day so I was a bit more involved in the projects, which I'm sure Chris appreciated :) The big project was refinishing her front door

As you can see, whoever sealed it before didn't do a very awesome job. So while Chris was inside fixing her hot water pressure and figuring out how to install some future trim for her the next time we're down there, I got out the palm sander and went to town

I couldn't get in all the little nooks and crannies and sand away that reddish stain, but I think I did a pretty good job and Chris came in at the end to try to shove that sand paper into those grooves as well and got a bit more, so I think it looked good and ready to seal.

This time around Lisa decided to seal it without staining it, and I think it turned out a really nice golden, warm brown

I was a little nervous about how those reddish nooks and crannies would take the sealer and if they would stand out too much, but I think it looks really good actually and adds more dimension to the panels

Best of all, Lisa loves it.

And with that it was into the car, up 5 and back to Oakland and into bed (after a good shower though because we were covered in sawdust). It was a good weekend though. Lots of good visiting, great football (go 9ers!!!!) and a couple completed projects :)

Well, Half of the Tile is Here

2012-01-13T11:24:00.000-08:00

I apologize for my blogging absence. I have been hit with some strange illness that seems to be going around that's causing a horrible sore throat and just absolute exhaustion so the last two days I have been sleeping and doing little else. Bleh, I hate being sick.

I just wanted to pop in and share half of our tile order though. The tile place totally spaced and ordered us the wrong tile for the ground in front of the fireplace, so we'll have to wait another week or so till we get it. Boo hoo :( But, the tile on the fireplace surround is the same kind, just a different pattern, so you'll get the idea.

But before I get to those pics, I'll show you just a bit of fireplace progress.

We knew we'd have to paint on weld-crete to the existing stone and brick to help the new mud job properly attach to the old existing fireplace, and as I was getting ready to slather it on, some of the stone that was leftover from the demo I did was still chipping away and falling off. I decided to get out a chisel and hammer and bust more of it out to be safe and give us a really good tile job with no stone, mortar or old bricks giving way. The fireplace went from this

To this

With no more chunks falling off I cleaned things up with the vacuum and then a sponge and painted on the weld-crete

And Chris installed some metal lathe to help give the mud job strength and then started the mud job (we still have just a little bit to finish up on the left side)

Okay, NOW it's time to show you the tile :)

You may not find it quite as exciting as me, but OMG I'm in love.

Earlier I was thinking about white marble but Chris didn't like the idea because we've got carrera in the front bathroom and that's what we'll put in the back bathroom as well. So we headed out to a local tile showroom a week or two back and browsed around not really sure if we'd be buying anything that day, but I was eager to get my greedy little hands on some pretty tile :)

Immediately both of us were really drawn to the grayish, blue stone

And we thought it would fit in nicely with the room because the gray walls have just the faintest hint of blue to them and I really need to get away from my need of white tile :) It was love at first sight for us :)

The only bad thing? A pretty hefty price tag. At least for cheap-o's like us. The tile clocked in at $16 and $17 per sq. ft. We coughed a little and bit the bullet. We reasoned that we weren't getting too much and really, I don't think we've ever paid more than $12 sq. ft. for any of the tile in our house, so this ONE splurge was okay (and none of the tile for our bathrooms has been over $10 sq. ft.). But it was tough to choke down a nearly $400 price tag for just fireplace tile. Yikes

Now, this 2x8 tile will go on the fireplace surround and run vertically (you can see the hints of blue in the two outside pieces)

When we install it we'll stagger the pattern so all the seams won't line up, but that's obviously a little hard to show when laying them against the metal lathe.

The tile that will go on the ground in front of the fireplace is the same tile in the same size but in a herringbone pattern. Unfortunately the tile place ordered the wrong stone, so when it got there and was white, well, Chris didn't get to take home all the tile. Sigh... But it is exciting to get to have some of it in the house and see how it ties together with the two paint colors

I think it looks really great with the dark wood stain of the mantle too.

Well, I know I'm excited to see what the tile will look like installed, but we've got to get to sanding and restaining the floors before we get to tiling, but hopefully when our herringbone tile comes in that lights a fire under our butt to get to the floors because I don't think either of us are especially excited for it. Not that we don't want to do it, but for some reason we're both just sort of apathetic.

Now, until new tile comes and our floors are refinished, I think I need to take another nap. This mystery illness is killing me

Oh Yeah, TWO Check Marks

2012-01-10T06:16:00.000-08:00

We checked off two things from the list this past weekend: finally finishing fixing my mom and CBH's front stoop, and fixing their garage door. Yay!

When we were there working on the front stoop nearly 9 months ago (bad procrastination) we sanded down and repainted the handrail because the paint was bubbling, repaired some redwood dryrot and installed some venting

But there was still this piece of redwood that needed to be replaced

It was a pretty simple task. Chris cut out the wood to make an even surface to slide a new piece up against it

Then it was just a matter of cutting down some new redwood, installing it, putting bondo over the connection to help make it flush, sand, prime and paint

Good as new! :)

The garage door also needed some fixing because as you can see from this photo it's leaning to the left and dragging on the ground

This one Chris and CBH were a little unsure about how to fix properly. There were lots of things that could be done to modify it so that it worked, but obviously CBH wanted the problem fixed. Chris thought something was probably wrong with the brackets on the side that was slumped

So they took the bolts out, shimmed the door up a bit and then screwed them in a bit higher up on the door to lift it up

And then it opened!

But we noticed when we went outside that it still slumped on that side

And then we found the problem

The spring had busted and none of us noticed it. Well, there ya go. CBH set out with the spring in hand to a few hardware stores in the hopes that they would have something that would fix it. He tried a local salvage yard and totally scored when the owner told him a spring that looked exactly the same had come in a few days ago! And, when he asked how much it cost, the owner said, "How much do you want to pay?" Which is a bit startling, but CBH said, "$10?" (and the gentleman was very excited about that price.) Score! CBH brought it home triumphantly

The spring was installed (perfect fit) and Chris and CBH attached some bracing as well (to give the door some shear strength) and now, the door works like a charm

The new spring is working like a champ

Ahhh, the joys of checking two things off the list

And I'm sure my parents are happy we finally got these things done for them :) Now, if only we could get around to that garage roof...

Books Are Back

2012-01-09T05:36:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. We're all eagerly awaiting the tile arrival, but we still haven't gotten the call that it has arrived :( Believe me, I'm as anxious as you. I shall be making the annoying, "Hey, why isn't our tile here yet? I really really really really want it" call later today. But we have kept ourselves busy with other tasks here and there. For example, now that the front room has been painted all the books that were sitting in Chris' office can finally return

It wasn't too long ago that I cleaned off and reorganized the books, but I decided to reorganize them again when they went back this time :) Organizing is fun :) No seriously, it is :)

First up, the left bookcase

I dubbed this the entertainment bookcase: movies, TV, sports, and music. Into the room the books came

And then they started to get organized

I probably did the most organizing with these movie books. Before they were generally put into sections, but I got really nerdy this time and really organized them into categories: film reference, film history, film genre, film criticism, film music, studios, directors, film scripts and actor biographies and autobiographies. I told you I got really nerdy :)

And the two things that I wanted to stand out in this section were an industry journal dedicated to Chris' grandfather

and one of the books he wrote

Chris' grandfather was considered an expert in American film music and when he passed away the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences actually came and asked his grandmother if they could take some of his notes for their archives. Pretty cool stuff. I'm always sad that I never got to meet him as he passed away shortly after Chris and I started dating, but many people in his family say Chris reminds them of him and he certainly gets a lot of his love for movies from him :) A lot of our movie books are from his personal collection and it's nice to have that piece of him in our house.

The rest of the books went in much more simply because we didn't have nearly as many in any other category. I think the bookcase looks pretty good

Then it was on to the right bookcase

This bookcase was filled with history, politics, philosophy, religion, pop culture, biographies and autobiographies, our travel books and scrapbooks. Pretty much all the leftovers

I started with the travel stuff and scrapbooks (I like the make a book from all the trips we go on and that huge one is from our 3 month baseball road trip) because those were easier to organize. The history and political and philosophy books were a bit of an adventure (and Chris has a decent amount because he was a Poly Sci major), but I think it looks pretty nice (I crack myself up putting the little toilet I made in a ceramics class in the "historical criticism" area, hehehehehe)

Ahhhh, nicely organized shelves make my heart all aflutter :) Now, I gotta go make that phone call...

Howdy Painter Man

2012-01-05T21:23:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of work re-doing a freeway overpass that's on our way to and from our many HD trips and the other day we saw this artistic observer

A guy painting all the work that was going on (that day destroying the old overpass with GIANT jackhammers). It was a pretty cool thing to see.

$75 or Several Thousand. Whichever.

2012-01-05T07:26:00.000-08:00

It's finally time to build my sports ticket table, yay!!!!! (I'm not sure whether I have enough sports tickets to fill it, but I'm very very very close). Originally I had wanted to paint the table once we had built it and then have the tickets inlay'ed in it. But one evening as Chris and I were tossing around ideas about it (and I was trying to figure out what a dining room table was supposed to look like) Chris came up with the idea of using reclaimed wood to build it and sealing it instead of painting it so we could see all of the imperfections and signs the wood's past life. The idea immediately made me excited.

Because we'd be using great, old wood that had had a previous life I decided I wanted the table to be really chunky, hulking and solid. A big, beefy, wood table. You know, with a glass inlay in the center and 10 years worth of sports tickets sitting beneath it. Whatever floats your boat :)

After asking Chris construction questions, deciding what kinds of angles, trims and details we wanted I came up with a pretty simple design

The top will be constructed by 2x4's laying on their sides (with a routered out center to inlay the glass). The top will be 72" x 42" with the 60" x 30" glass inlay in the center. The "feet" of the table will be 2 2x6's sandwiched together with a simple design cut with a jigsaw to give it a little detail. The "spindles" will be 3 4x4's on each side with a chamfer cut on all four corners. The top brace will be 2 2x4's sandwiched together with a small detail cut out with a jigsaw. The entire table will be roughly 30" tall.

Armed with the plan we headed to a local reuse place we'd been to while we were looking for the front room light that had old lumber. We hit the motherload

Once we got there and started looking through the wood our plans got modified a bit. The top would now be constructed with 2x3's AND 2x4's, the "spindles" would now be old pieces of subfloor ripped down to 2x4 size and sandwiched together, and the top braces would also be subfloor ripped down to 2x4 size instead of using actual 2x4's (first because the 2x4 selection wasn't super great, and second because we became enamored with the old subfloor). We loaded up the truck with lots and lots of wood and held our breath to get the total......$70! Both of our jaws sort of dropped in excitement as we were anticipating that it would be well over $100. Exciting!

We came home and unloaded all the wood

As we thought about all the work that was ahead of us to sand all the pieces and get them to the correct width and size to match up properly Chris sort of waxed poetic about how cool it would be to have a planer for this job. We both agreed that it would be A LOT easier and pretty fun. We sort of laughed about it, "Haha, those things are just so expensive though..." And then we started convincing ourselves that it would probably be a great idea to get one! :) Oh jesus.

Sure, they're a bit pricey (the DeWalt one Chris had his eye on was about $400), but we've got plans down the line to build a cabinet in the TV room, build a coffee table, build a bed, build a cabinet for the laundry room, build storage for the hallway...and wouldn't it be cool to use MORE reclaimed wood??? Then we also forced ourselves to recognize that we'd been hoarding HD gift certificates for a long while now and seeing that this tool would be used to build projects for us but would ultimately be Chris' I said I wouldn't have any problem buying most of the tool with gift certificates if he paid the rest.

And that's how we decided that it would totally be worth it to buy this planer

Isn't it preeeeeeeetttty? :) We used a Lowe's 10% off coupon that HD accepted and used a bunch o' gift certificates and then Chris paid about $100ish out of pocket for it. Score!

Now, that $400 (but Chris paid $100) planer tags on a hefty price to the $70 worth of wood table (but we need to buy just a little more wood for braces that we forgot about which we're figuring will tack on another $5 for a grand total of $75 on wood). And then when you think about the fact that a large portion of the table top will be made up of sports tickets to games me, Chris and my dad have been to...

...well, I don't even want to think about how many thousands of dollars all those tickets to all those games have cost. I would much rather like to think that this table only cost us $75 worth of reclaimed wood. It makes me feel a lot better about myself.

Adios Ugly Fireplace Stone, Plaster Stuff

2012-01-04T04:56:00.000-08:00

My wishlist was to remove the buckling stone, plaster thing area around the fireplace and retile

And after the walls and the none buckling area got painted, it made me want to remove it even more

And that fireplace screen? U-G-L-Y. We weren't quite sure how easy or hard the task was going to be, but one evening we just decided to try and take the screen off. Chris inspected things

And after a little muscle and teamwork to get some really old screws unscrewed we pulled that baby off

Then it was just a matter of removing the ugly, buckling park. I went out to the garage and got the roto hammer, one of my really good friends ...

...to demolish it

The first couple cracks at it were a little awkward and difficult as I was trying to figure out which angle to go at it and be the most efficient (and not destroy the wood mantle)

But once I figure out that it was best and easiest to use the chisel attachment of the roto hammer parallel along the buckled portion and then perpendicular to it down the length, the pieces came off in big chunks, and very quickly

I used this same strategy on the right side and I got it all off in seriously probably 2 minutes

I couldn't use the same strategy for the top, so I sort of just tried to loosen things up by making a few holes, then just seeing where cracking occured

Once the cracking started it was easy to go at the weak points to break things up more. The pieces didn't come off in as big of chunks, but it wasn't too hard

And pretty soon I got it all off and it was just time for clean up. It didn't look too snazzy after, but it's ready for tile prep, so that's exciting

All in all the task probably took an hour from grabbing my supplies from the garage to cleaning up and putting everything away, which isn't too bad at all

And now I'm VERY excited to tile. First we'll be refinishing the floors though, so we'll have to wait a little till we get to that step. I can't wait to show you the tile we got last week, but it was a special order item and we haven't gotten it yet and I totally spaced and didn't take any pictures at the tile showroom. Hopefully it comes next week!

The Best Craigslisters Ever

2012-01-03T06:22:00.000-08:00

Craigslist and I have a love/hate relationship. Sometimes I love it, but most of the time I get really pissed off at it (the callers who have not apparently read anything about your ad except your phone number because they ask every single detail you put in your ad, the people who call and say they're on their way and never show up, the people who try to haggle for the absolute best deal they can get and won't shut up about it...clearly I could go on). But sometimes, just sometimes, it works wonders.

Last week Chris and I were running errands looking for tile for the fireplace surround in the front room and he got a call for someone interested in our dirt

Yup, that pile of dirt that's been sitting on our front lawn for oh, maybe 2 months.

We'd been posting "free dirt" , "free dirt" , "free dirt" , "free dirt" for weeks and weeks and weeks with no takers (well, "interested" people called or emailed but nothing had panned out).

After Chris got off the phone he said some guy was interested in 3 yards and would be sending someone over. Red flag to me: no one seems to ever actually know how much 1 yard is, let alone 3 and usually when someone else is being sent over that's just a way they feel is nice to get off the call but not actually come over.

Sure enough about 90 minutes past and no one came (they were just a neighborhood over). And we thought, "lame." But then, just as we were sitting down to dinner the doorbell rang and it was the craiglisters in a Ford Ranger armed with buckets ready to haul some dirt away. And can I just tell you, I was terrible to think anything less of them because they were awesome. They took 3 trips over the course of 12 hours and took away ALL the dirt. And they did it so neatly. Neatly take away dirt? Look at the little pile they made so dirt wasn't all over the yard after their second trip

Saturday morning I left pretty early to go grocery shopping before Chris woke up and I encountered our newspaper on the lawn. I lazily decided I'd bring it in when I got home, but when I returned I found 2 things: our pile of dirt was no more!

And those sneaky amazingly nice craigslisters had even put our paper on the porch for us

Seriously? They are officially the best craigslisters ever. And our dirt is gone! Could they be my friend?

2012 House Goals

2012-01-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

Alright, it's time to publicly shout out our list of 2012 house goals in hopes that we might be more successful at accomplishing all of them than we were last year... :) Our list adds up to more than a year's worth of work, so, we'll see what happens

Here they are (you can click to make it bigger)

Just a few things that are on this list come from last year's list because we trailed a little off course ;)

1. First up, finishing the front room

We're getting close, but we've still got some biggish projects left - refinishing the floors, tiling the fireplace (which involves a bit of demo), building our sports ticket table, refinishing the chairs, hanging artwork...but at least we're done painting!

2. Building the back fence

That gross red falling over fence really needs to come down (helllllooooo goal from last year). Our neighbor is willing to split the cost of supplies with us, so that's awesome. And considering that we actually called her to try to schedule a time to get it done within the next month or two, we might actually get it done this year.

3. FINISH THE LAUNDRY ROOM DAMNIT

The laundry room has sat in this same unfinished state for almost 2 years now. We got the washer and dryer hooked up in the Spring of 2010 and then moved on. We wanted to finish in the first year we were here, then last year and now we'd really like to finally finish it. And as you can see, a lot of stuff needs to get cleared out in order to get that task accomplished.

4. Finish the back bathroom

We demo'd this back bathroom last year with the goal to finish it off after we finished the animal room, but clearly that never happened. The patio got us too excited apparently. There is A LOT of work to be done here, so I think our guess of 4 months to fix the structure, rough everything in, tile 5' up the wall and everything else that needs to get done (including busting a hole into the bedroom and installing a pocket door) is a safe guess

5. Earthquake retrofit

Because our house was built nearly 90 years ago, there are certain structural issues we've got to address underneath the house to make it earthquake safe. It withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake so we know it's built strong, but we'd really hate to have done all this work to it to have it topple over in another earthquake. That would really suck.

6. Front Yard

Yup, our front yard looks pretty pretty pretty ugly at the moment. What, you don't like our growing mountain of mushrooms? And our neighbors have been BEYOND nice and encouraging all along the way. But we'd really like to give them a pretty yard to look at as they drive by, walk their dogs or play outside with their kids. We've got plans to build a cool path up to the front of the house, we want to redo the porch area a bit, and when we do all the planting we hope to take out all the grass and be very low maintenance and go with plants that need very little to no water.

7. TV Room Redo

This was also on our wishlist last year and clearly we never got around to it :) This room doesn't need too much work (famous last words right?) The popcorn ceiling needs to be removed, we'll need to repair and skim coat the ceiling, there are some wall patches we've got to address and then of course paint. We'll also be building a cabinet in the recessed area where the TV is that I am super excited about, we'll also possibly be building a cool coffee table and we'll recover our super long couch (a hand me down from Chris' grandmother that was a hand me down from her mother, so we know it's built to last)

8. Hallway

This one is just a pipe dream because I think both Chris and I don't realistically believe we'll be able to get to it this year. But we can hope, right? We've got a corner cabinet we'd like to rip down (it stinks - literally, it smells funny, it's not built great and it's horrendously ugly) and build something in its place. And the wall closet with sliding doors certainly needs to be improved. After that, patching and paint will come easy.

And then there's the projects for other people we'll tackle.

For my dad and Wendy we're building them another cabinet for their TV nook (finally, and we're actually building it right now and hope to install it within the next month) and we've got to finish the space out so that it doesn't look like this anymore

And for my mom and CBH we've got to finish their porch repair (just a piece of redwood to replace and repaint), reroof the garage (a nearly 2 year old wish list project that we really have to crack the whip and finally get our butt into gear and get it done) and a small repair on their garage door.

Clearly it will be a very busy year. I'm hoping for 2/3rds completion. I can dream for 100%, but I think we're all trying to be realistic here :)

2011 House Goals: How we Stacked Up

2012-01-01T08:34:00.000-08:00

Well, we got a lot done in 2011, but we didn't really stick to the house goal list

As you can see, there aren't too many check marks.

1. Animal room and back bathroom redo

Clearly we got 1/2 of that project accomplished. The other half, well, our bathroom is still gutted. So...

2. FINISH laundry room

I'm guessing that because we still have the flooring we bought 2 years ago still sitting in it's packaging that this room isn't done. Just a guess.

3. Get house painted

Ooooh ooooh oooh we got that done!

4. Back fence

Uhhhh, nope.

5. Drainage issues in the back and under the house

It hasn't rained as much this year...

6. TV room redo

Unless you count this as redone? You don't? Oh. Well, then, no?

7. Build a fence for dad and Wendy

Thank god that's done.

8. Work on dad and Wendy's nook

Which I'm sure that meant finishing it out and building a cabinet for it (and by "sure" I mean I know that's what it meant) but we did build this cabinet

9. Fix mom and CBH's front stoop

It's almost done.

10. Reroof mom and CBH's garage

Nope, not even close.

But we did add a basement shear wall

And install his and hers pull up bars

You know, for those great, sexy dates with your husband when you do pull ups together (yes, that's my 60 year old step dad doing pull ups)

Now, there was something else we got done this year...oh right, the pergola

And we started work on the front room too

Oh yeah, and maybe this patio?

Phew, I was beginning to feel like a bit of a slacker. Then I remembered that the patio weighed in at over 200,000 pounds of work.

Maybe this year we'll stay a bit more on track :) (but most likely not) HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Painting was a Full Time Job

2011-12-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Painting the front room sucked. Chris wasn't looking forward to it. I wasn't looking forward to it. There was so much detail. We had FOUR different colors. And the room is pretty damn big. I've been known to second guess paint decisions, and there was no way that could happen with this room once the paint went on because Chris and I would rather sell the house right now than repaint that room (well, maybe not that drastic, but pretty close).

It all started out as fun and games when I spent about 7 hours painting the relief

And corbels

But pretty quickly after that it all went downhill. Chris spent 3 hours himself priming the ceiling (yes, each bay took an hour)

And it took the two of us 2 1/2 hours together to prime all the walls

It took me an hour and a half to paint the glossy white fireplace detail

And about 30 minutes of Chris' help and an hour by myself to get that beautiful gray around the fireplace

Chris spent 3 1/2 hours by himself painting the ceiling and doing some wall rolling

And we spent many other hours painting around the bookcases

Doing all the wall cut-ins, rolling on the wall color or cleaning up spilled paint

Whoopsie :)

But just how long did it take? Well, lucky for you I'm a crazy person and I wrote down all the time we spent painting to see just how long it would take.

Chris and I collectively spend 16 single hours painting. That's 16 hours by ourselves while the other person was at work or doing something else on the house. And we spent 10 hours together at the same time painting (and collectively whining. Well, maybe the whining was just me). In total, that's 36 single man hours spent painting that damn (but now beautiful) front room. Nearly a full week's worth of work spent just painting one room. Bleh. But, the room does look fantastic

I just won't be doing any painting for a long time.

The Front Room. Is Finally. Painted.

2011-12-29T07:42:00.001-08:00

Thank god. Because it took forever.

The first gray to go up on the walls was very exciting, and it came on Christmas Eve: the fireplace detail!

It's the same darker gray that's on the relief detail as well. And I love love love the color

OMG I love it. But let me tell you, that wall was fun, easy and fast. The rest of the room? None of the above. IT TOOK FOREVER. The first strokes of the lighter gray were painted on with much enthusiasm

And those first rolls?

Also very exciting. But by the time I got around the room to the TWO bookcases and the really really straight line I had to freehand paint I wanted to pluck my eyebrows out one hair at a time

And I'm sure Chris was having no fun painting the last two ceiling bays with the pink, I mean white, ceiling color

And again, all eyebrow hairs almost vanished from my face while doing the window cut-ins

But two pieces of exciting accomplishments that we tackled while painting were installing the sconces around the fireplace

And a new light (Chris' awesome idea) in the little relief alcove

But after alllllll the hard work - and you'll learn just how much in another post --> you know I like to ridiculously keep track of how long certain projects take (hello 50+ hours of tiling) - the room looks fucking fantastic

I personally cannot get over how great the fireplace looks (and I can't wait to add the tile!)

I LOVE the lights and I'm very happy I decided to paint the stems instead of leaving them white

The center light still needs to be installed (the escutcheon is a bit difficult)

But other than that, this room is looking pretty damn fantastic! Let's take another look at that fireplace

Ahhhhhh. Now we can basque in all of it's painted glory. (And for a paint resource if anyone's interested: the darker gray detail is Martha Stewart's Cement Gray color matched in Glidden Eggshell and the wall color is Behr's Ashes also color matched in Glidden Eggshell.)

2011: A Year in Pictures

2011-12-28T07:25:00.000-08:00

Last year I totally copied this idea from Robin over at 3 acres & 3000 Square Feet and I had so much fun with the idea that I'm copying her again :)

A year end summary in pictures by month always makes me feel better about what we accomplished this year, so let's have at it.

January - ripping down and reframing the horrible "addition" on the back of the house

February - we got the animal room looking more habitable by hanging drywall and finally getting ready for paint

March - the animal room really started taking shape as we worked to complete all the details

April - we built a fence at my dad and Wendy's that confounded our measuring capabilities. But it ended up looking pretty awesome

May - we worked on little baby projects while we secretly worked on a bigger one :)

June - we revealed we'd been working on getting the house painted and allllllll the projects that had to be completed before we could finally bring in the professionals

July - the house was finally painted!

And we also decided, what the hell, let's throw the 2011 house goal list out the window and work on our patio and pergola!!

August - we finished building the pergola in the backyard!

And I finally revealed the Animal Room Before & After

September - we were finally done with digging and got started loading in the pack for the pavers

And just like we threw the list out the window, we did the same thing again and decided to work on the front room

October - we decided that ripping up our whole concrete patio and tire tracks down the side of our house wasn't enough and that we should rip up the driveway too

November - we finally finally finally finished the patio and had our Before & After reveal

December - we spent most of the time working on many projects here and there in the front room, but spent most of our time trying to figure out how the hell to overcome the strange mismatch texture that resulted from repairing our canvas walls and decided to just retexture the whole thing

Now, let's hope we get LOTS done in 2012 so we can show even more projects completed! :) And tomorrow I'll reveal some wonderful front room gray! We're almost done painting, 2nd coat here we come!

4 Kinds of White

2011-12-27T08:18:00.000-08:00

We've been busy bees painting in the front room and it finally looks like progress had been made, yay! Christmas Eve we spent nearly the entire day painting 4 different kinds of white on the walls and ceiling. Can you handle that excitement?

First up: the bookcases

Let me tell you, painting two coats of Behr Ultra Pure White Semi Gloss in those 2 built in bookcases was not fun (usually we don't use Behr, but we already had it from past projects so we decided to finish it up)

White number 2? Chris finished priming the other two ceiling bays with our Glidden primer

And once he was done with that he started painting the ceiling color, Glidden's "Ceiling Paint" which is a bit more flat so we like that it doesn't have much sheen

And oh yeah, it goes on pink

But the most exciting white we painted? The fireplace detail, eeeeee!!!!

OMG the beautiful difference that high gloss makes :)

I painted a bit of the detail on the lower part as well

Look at the difference between the gross dirty white before and the new high gloss white

Marvelous!

(we're hoping to demo that remaining non-high gloss white area and tile it because it's buckling)

And more exciting news? Gray has finally made an appearance! But I'll save that for later this week, we've got to get back to painting! :)

Happy Whatever You Celebrate!!!

2011-12-25T07:53:00.000-08:00

It's December 25th: Christmas, smack dab in the middle of Hanukkah, the day before Kwanzaa starts or two days after my beloved Festivus (for the rest of us, hehe). We hope that whatever you celebrate today, last week or next week, that you have a very happy and joyous time and that everyone has some great time off :)

Two years ago I instituted a Christmas tradition for Chris and I: as a divorced kid Christmas was spent going around to many many many houses (which was wonderful seeing everyone, but also very tiring) and now that we have this house renovation thing going we're always working, so now we spend Christmas DOING NOTHING. We don't go to anyone's house (sorry parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles...) and we don't do any work (Chris tried to convince me last night that I should just allow him to install one of our can lights --> NOPE!). We sit on the couch, bake yummy goodies, order Chinese food for dinner and watch movies and football allllllll day long :) The only house related thing we do is plan. We plan out our projects for next year, and this year I'll also be working on a few drawings of another cabinet for my parent's we'll be building as well as the table we're building in the front room. We also work on our year end Top 10 movie lists. But no WORK. Planning is fun :)

We did paint in the front room yesterday, so I can't wait to share our progress next week. Until then, that couch is calling :) and I'm sure you've got lots of presents to open :) HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Soon to be Gray, but Right Now Blue Walls

2011-12-20T06:22:00.000-08:00

Yesterday after work we got A LOT done in the front room, and it's very exciting :) We taped and started painting the bookcases

They got a coat of primer (even though there was really nothing to prime over) and then they'll get painted Ultra Pure white.

While Chris was finishing up the bookcases I got started on allllllll the cut-ins. I started using the white primer but I could BARELY tell where I had painted because the fast set joint compound dries basically white (normal joint compound dries a bit yellow so it's a lot easier). We dropped a bit of the wall color into the primer to tint it just a tad, and that made it easier to tell where I had already painted

There were lot and lots and lots and lots of cut ins: the baseboards, around the fireplace, around the fireplace detail, around the windows, around the corbels, at the ceiling line, beneath the outlets...OMG.

We decided that because the walls will be a darkish shade of gray it would probably be best to actually use a dark base primer so that the gray would cover better. Chris went out to the garage to get our blue deep base primer to roll on the walls (and do the high cut ins I couldn't reach) and I stuck with my white/light gray primer

And we just mosey'ed around the room

Originally I thought we'd sand and refinish the floors before we painted because I didn't want to have to clean the walls twice, but Chris assured me that the sander we'll use doesn't create a lot of dust (it sucks it up), so we figured we should just paint now. And it really was as much work as we thought it was going to be: it sucks

We got it about 90% (of just the walls) primed last night (the only thing that's left is the tall wall above the relief) but it took the two of us 2 1/2 hours together and Chris another hour by himself (I was finishing up some work and then was making dinner). Yuckola. Once all the primer is done we're going to paint the area around the fireplace (the high gloss white should be painted before the wall color so that if we make any mistakes we can prime over it before wall color goes on to avoid flashing), then paint the ceiling, and THEN paint the wall color. It sounds like such a daunting task at this stage, but any color on the walls is exciting!

Paint Ready

2011-12-19T05:57:00.000-08:00

This weekend we got the front room paint ready, yay!!! In order to get all the way there we had to do lots of little things that neither of us were really particularly excited for.

First off? Finishing the texture! We only had 2 more ceiling bays to get to and Chris hopped up on the ladder and got it finished off

While he was working on that I walked around the entire room and scrapped it. When applying the texture some areas are a bit higher and there are sometimes little accidental clumps of joint compound, so I went around and knocked everything down that was too high

The next morning we knocked down the texture in the new areas that Chris had applied texture to, and then we were finally done with texture, woo-hoo!

But the fun certainly wasn't stopping there.

Next it was time to "clean" all the floors. We didn't spit shine them or anything, but joint compound had fallen on clumps on the floor here and there and all the dust from knocking down the texture was making us track little joint compound footprints throughout the house, so it was necessary to do at least minimal cleaning.

First up was cleaning the baseboards so we got a nice clean cut in line

Then it was time to sponge the floor (and this is after a round of sweeping)

We fiddled around on other house tasks while we waited for the floor to dry, and then it was time to clean the walls, bleh

Cleaning the walls is not fun, but absolutely necessary after joint compound. When you sand or scrape there is dust left on the walls that if you paint over will not make your paint bond very well to the walls resulting in a paint job that really won't last well over time. The trick is to take a barely damp sponge (not too wet or else you disturb your joint compound) and run it over all the walls to pick up the dust

Chris and I went around the room in opposite directions while we sponged the walls and met in the middle. Then, when it was time to do the upper walls and ceiling he climbed on the ladder (even on the ladder I can barely get the center peak of the ceiling) to clean while I stayed on the ground handing him clean sponges and moving the unused ladder in front of him to climb up when he was done with each area

It was a good system that let us get the walls and ceiling cleaner, faster.

Once the walls and ceilings were clean (hooray!) it was time for the last step --> cleaning and emptying the bookcases

Which actually took a bit longer than either of us thought because we have a lot of books (and these are just the ones in the front room)

Once all the books were off it was time to sponge the very dusty shelves

And THEN it was time to declare the room paint ready!

Christmas on Picardy Drive

2011-12-16T07:33:00.001-08:00

It's that time again: the holiday lights come out and make our street sparkle!

Our street has been putting up holiday lights and connecting lights from house to house as a "friendship chain" since the Depression and when we were in escrow over the 2008 holiday season I drove by to see what we'd been getting into and I fell in love. I LOVE all the twinkly lights!

Each year Chris and I have dutifully hung up lights and it always gets me so excited :) I thought I'd go all out this year, but we just didn't have the time and our front yard still looks like poop, so when I was staring longingly at all the fun decoration ideas at stores, Chris assured me, "Next year, we'll get all this stuff next year."

Last weekend we brought out our lights

(see what I mean when I said our front yard looks like poop?)

We had to throw away 3 strands of lights because they were broken...

...AFTER ONLY ONE YEAR OF BEING USED! All this made in China crap is really pissing me off. We might splurge and buy LED lights (hopefully we can snag them on sale) for next year. Our neighbor has them and he really likes them. Does anyone have good, reliable twinkly light suggestions?

Luckily we had enough in our bin to get all the way around our house and so Chris climbed up the ladder and used our trusty tool to help him hang them: a screw on the end of a 2x4 (seriously, it's works amazingly, especially because our house is just a little tall)

And I hung my $9 wreath I made by getting stuff on clearance from Michael's (score!)

Then all the neighbors flipped the switch

And the parade of cars visiting has started

I love that so many people come by our street to check out the lights, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside :) Not all the houses are lit up yet, but usually by the week of Christmas about 90% are, which is pretty awesome, and that's when there are lots of visitors. Christmas Eve you could probably walk down the street faster than you can drive it. It's awesome.

My favorite view is the one from our doorway because we're super lucky to have the tree that the city of Oakland lights...

...is right in front

HAPPY HOLIDAYS!!!

Mud and Texture

2011-12-14T07:48:00.000-08:00

We've been busy worker bees in the front room this past weekend and the last few days. After my shoulder started to feel better I was able to crawl back on the ladder to help Chris finish skim coating the walls. Applying the mud directly overhead still bothered my shoulder a bit, so I concentrated on the walls and Chris worked on the ceiling

Once Chris got the skim coat done on the ceiling and the tippy top of the peaked walls that I couldn't reach/hurt my shoulder...

...he moved on to starting to apply the texture on the already skim coated parts while I worked on completing the last of the skim coat on the walls

Chris is a pro at applying texture to match the existing plaster in the house

And the great news is that he's almost fully complete with the first layer of texture on allllll the walls and ceiling

We're hoping that by the end of the weekend we'll be done with the 2nd layer of texture and ready to get started painting! And my oh my what a daunting task that'll be. Oy vey, the cut-ins...

Our Bathroom Floor is Pretty Again

2011-12-12T06:08:00.000-08:00

We weren't super thrilled with our bathroom floor and grout sealer that we used a year ago, so it was time to give it another whirl

Marks easily showed up on the tile and the grout was a bit difficult to keep clean (but that's also what happens when you use white grout).

I cleared everything out of the room, which included taking our corner storage cabinet out and oh my lord the amount of dust underneath was not a pretty sight and I'm embarrassed to show the picture, but hey, dust happens

After the room was cleared I swept and then sponge cleaned the floor, making sure to get all around the nooks and crannies of the toilet because it gets a little tight over there but I wanted to make sure everything was nice and clean.

With the room clean I brought out the sealer

Chris had heard some good things about it and bought it online. I always like seeing "heavy duty."

Sealing the floor is pretty easy, just annoying to be crouched on your knees. I poured the sealer in a disposable bowl, broke out a brush and painted on a thin layer over the entire floor. I let it sit for about 10-15 minutes per the instructions and then I got out a clean towel and wiped the floor clean. There was a little bit of a residue left behind (I think I left it on a bit long) but I just wiped a little harder in those areas and it came right off. The instructions said you could spread on another thin layer, let it sit for 2 minutes, then wipe it off with a white, nylon rag to get the leftover residue off, but we didn't have that so I just wiped harder and it seemed to do the trick.

After I was done with that, the instructions said to not walk on it and leave it be for 6-8 hours

It was good timing because I did it in the late afternoon/early evening the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and Chris came home shortly after and we went to dinner and a movie, then left it overnight, so it got plenty of time to cure.

And the next day it looked sparkly and good as new

Easy peasy.

Veggie Garden 2.0

2011-12-09T04:50:00.000-08:00

We finally got to planting our second veggie garden. It's December yes, we know. But this just wasn't looking great anymore

It's not a great feature on the back of the house

And because the backyard has been looking a lot nicer nowadays with our wonderful patio, we thought it was about time to clean up veggie garden 2.0

And that was a dirty job

And once that yucky plastic that we laid down months and months and months ago to kill weeds was rolled up and disposed of (stinky. dirty.) we weeded. Because we have killer weeds here

Soon the weeds were pulled

And we tilled the soil and added some more good stuff

And we got to add some of our homemade compost and mixed that in too

Then we got to planting the veggies. I picked up potatoes, peas and broccoli at the nursery. They said based on our climate these should do okay, so we'll see how things go.

The taters go in

Then we planted the broccoli seeds and plopped in the peas and called it a day

Big improvement!

Now if only I could get around to weeding and pulling out the dead plants from veggie garden 1.0

Not so pretty. Let's go back to veggie garden 2.0

Ahhhhh, much better.

Tag! I'm It

2011-12-08T07:20:00.001-08:00

Robin from 3 Acres and 3000 Square Feet tagged me to be a Versatile Blogger!

So here are 7 random facts about me

1. What's the sitch with my job sitch? I always read blogs and wonder what people do for their "real life job." Well, my real life job is a lot of jobs. I like to affectionately call myself the part-time job aficionado, and here they are: 1) I work contractually for a professional organizer. Sound weird? I used to think so too, but let me tell you, nothing gets me more excited than a label maker, things in alphabetical order, hanging file folders, closets in color and shirt sleeve length order...so it seemed only natural. 2) Shop manager for my mom's awesomely amazing greeting card company Bean Up the Nose Art where I do graphic work for her, keep track of her inventory, filing, sales, etc. and have fun being creative with her and supporting her super awesome business. 3) Designer/Project Manager for my brother's real estate company. We've fixed up and now manage an apartment complex in San Francisco and I've been in charge of that and I'm also going to start managing the bookkeeping of a few portfolio properties. Lastly, 4) independent contractor for the Oakland A's (and sometimes Raiders). I LOVE this job because the A's are my absolute favorite sports team. I work for a department called Diamond Vision that runs the big jumbo tron in the stadium and my jobs are to run the head shots, advertising stills, in game videos (I can tell you who wins the dot race!) and the slo-mo replays. It's pretty awesome. Though sometimes my co-worker Art gets a little bored... (that's us on 80s day, I'm running slo-mo)

2. I LOVE watching me some movies. Chris and I are movie dorks and we love going to the movies and watching them at home. My goal is to watch 100 movies in the theater a year and Chris' is to see 300 movies total. Here are my top ten, in alphabetical order of course:
Boyz N tha Hood: amazingly wonderful
City of God: I remember watching this in my apartment my sophomore year of college by myself and being mesmerized
the Departed: Yes, that's right I picked this Scorsese movie as the best, but it's fucking awesome. I always want to kick someone's ass when I hear "Shipping up to Boston"
Ferris Bueller's Day Off: something about the parade scene always brings tears to my eyes, it's perfect
Field of Dreams: my sentimental favorite movie
Godfather 1 and 2: they count as one movie obviously. Michael is the greatest downfall of any character in movie history. I mean really, who is better?
Hoop Dreams: I challenge you to watch this movie and not sob. I've only watched it one time because it's too emotionally draining, but so wonderful at the same time.
It's a Wonderful Life: If you don't like this movie, I don't know if we can speak anymore
the Little Mermaid: I cried and cried when I was little at the end of this and my grandma asked my why. I replied, "She doesn't get to be with her dad anymore." It still makes me cry.
Psycho: the best Hitchcock, though Notorious is a close second. And Rear Window.

3. About 6 years ago I had knee surgery. I played soccer for 12-13 years when I was younger and my senior season in high school I started having lots of knee problems. As the responsible athlete I was I didn't go to the doctor because I was afraid something was wrong and I didn't want to not be able to play my last season. So finally 2 years after that I was still having problems and I finally went to the doctor and I had to have my plica (a band in your knee) removed and I also had some minor cartilage damage. It really made me feel inadequate and terrible athletically about myself and I didn't actually regain full strength back until about 2 years ago. Now I run allllll the time and I love it. And the best part, no serious knee problems anymore! (though sometimes I still have to ice)

4. I'm afraid of the dark. And windows at night. And I don't like mirrors. Yup, that's right, I'm afraid of the dark at 26. So what? :) I've never fully recovered from my (very responsible) after school program showing us It when I was 7 years old I guess. And for some reason windows at night make me feel like someone is looking in at me and I get all freaked out. And mirrors? I don't know about that one. But the only ones we have are in the bathroom and one on the back of the office door (which is always open so you can't see it if you close it), so I don't have to deal with walking by and being freaked out that someone is in the reflection that shouldn't be. I know. This is totally strange.

5. I'm a little obsessive compulsive. On the list of my weird tendencies: I will never set the alarm to rounded off time (if I want to wake up at 7, I set it for 6:58), at the end of the shower when I like to stand in the warm water I'll count to a prime number, the toilet paper has to run out and not in, I do the laundry because as mentioned before the shirts have to be hung "properly," when the silverware goes in the dishwasher every silverware spot needs to have 1 in it before additional ones start going in...seriously I could go on forever, but I'm sure this is very boring

6. I never liked Christmas until recently. I hated the forced cheer and merriment. I love my family and I always got bothered that this was the time of year you were supposed to want to hang out with them because I like hanging out with them all the time. Also, when I was little, as a divorced kid Christmas was a field trip - mom's house, dad's house, grandma's house, grandpa's house, other grandma's house...by the end of the day it was exhausting. But now, my family has sort of embraced our dislike, and now like, of the holidays by doing nontraditional things at whatever time in December is convenient for us (this year, our Christmas is this Saturday) like playing at the amusement park or gambling at the race track

But the best Christmas tradition? Chris and I don't do any housework (though we may plan) and we don't go to anyone's house, we just stay home and watch movies all day long and order Chinese food for dinner. It's marvelous. And now I love Christmas.

7. I have the best family ever. Seriously. I am an amazingly lucky divorced kid with 2 sets of parents who enjoy each other's company and hang out with each other. My moms and I planned my brother's wife's bridal shower together and my dads used to walk around the track together at my soccer games and yell really loud. My brothers may have peed in my hairspray or scared the shit out of me when I was taking out the trash when we were little and then locked me out of the house, but we get along a lot better now :) And my newer family? Christopher. He is really the best guy ever and I'm super lucky to have someone who's just my buddy. I think that's why we work well together - I just love hanging out with him. Not to mention he's super handsome :) And supportive, endlessly curious, very smart, funny...he's great. And I am lucky to have him and my wonderful family in my life who I love to hang out with

(image from True Photography)

So there you have it, my 7 facts. Thanks for tagging me Robin! And now, I'm going to tag 15 others! (and some are the same as Robin's because we're both cool like that):

86'N It
DIY Diva
Turtle House
Russet Street Reno
Tar Paper Crane
Hip House Girl
Just a Girl with a Hammer
DIY Insanity
1924 Cottage
Brick City Love
Our Castle
Adventures with the Henrys
Bean Up the Nose Art
Luke and Claire
Jackie and Brad

Mud Shoulder

2011-12-07T06:18:00.000-08:00

We've all heard of Tennis Elbow, but I've apparently developed a strange home renovation related ailment now known as Mud Shoulder.

As we've worked on patching all the holes we've created in the walls and ceiling in the front room from fishing out drill bits, repairing canvas and any other fun adventure, we realized that it was going to be just a little difficult to texture everything to match the original walls. Especially because the original walls have a very sparse, appears-to-be-rolled-on texture that we were a little unsure how to duplicate

And if we could possibly find a way to sort of match the original texture, we were still afraid that it wouldn't look close enough and you'd really be able to tell where all of our patches were.

We tossed around a few ideas but finally settled on the one that would create the most work, but would result in the most uniform texture: doing a skim coat on all the walls and ceiling and then applying the same texture that's on all the other walls in the house. Yeah, not fun.

We were really already part of the way there with all the patching all over the place

(like our temporary can lights?) I mean, really, at this point, what's the extra trouble?

Chris got on the ladder and applied tape to places where cracking was occurring, and I followed behind him on another ladder and applied the mud

Once all the cracks had a coat (one that set up in 45 minutes), we came back around and started applying a skim coat E-VER-Y-WHERE. It kinda sucked

OMG the mud horror.

Sunday we woke up ready to mud mud mud mud mud that ceiling and the upper walls

And I got about 45 minutes into it (Chris was working on some electrical), but my shoulder started really hurting

Apparently spreading quick set mud directly above your head on walls and a cathedral ceiling for 2 days isn't so great for your shoulder. So I was relegated to sitting on the couch with a ice pack wrapped around my shoulder like a relief pitcher watching TV. I can't complain too much as sitting and watching football isn't too terrible of a punishment :) But those ceilings and walls need some evening out...

What a Relief the Relief Didn't Take Long

2011-12-05T18:27:00.000-08:00

I was not really looking forward to painting the relief in the front room because I feared it would take a very long long long time

But it was actually quite easy, and it looks crisp, clean and very snazzy now.

First up the relief area got 3 coats of white (I was actually amazed that it took 3 coasts instead of only 2, but there was still wall color peeping through after 2)

(sorry for the super shaky pic)

I sat on the relief painted white for a week or two, and then finally decided it was time to do the detail work. We won't paint most of the room until after we've refinished the floors, but this area is a small detail and the dust from the sanding will be easy to clean off quickly.

I brought out the ladder and climbed up with my quart of darker than the rest of the room paint and a teeny tiny detail brush. The first hour was slow going at first, but then I got into a good rhythm

The first coat took me about 2 hours, one on each half of the two sides

The next day I climbed back on the ladder for the second coat. That second coat covered really well and in 90% of the relief you couldn't see any white popping through, but my teeny tiny brush didn't provide the most even coverage so I had to touch up here and there on a 3rd go round.

Once the detail of the relief was painted I painted the small amount of wall around the archway the same color. The alcove around the relief and this bit of wall will be painted the wall color in the rest of the room, but I thought painting the border of the relief the same color would look nice. The first coat took about 45 minutes, and the second about 30. And soon the relief wall looked awesome

It only took about 5 hours total for all the painting of the relief and around the relief, which is great news because it wasn't super fun getting that teeny tiny brush in all those nooks and crannies and having your face smashed up against the wall so you could make sure your lines were smooth and accurate. But it does look pretty :)

My corner is pretty messy

But when I paint the rest of the walls with the wall color I'll clean that up and make it neat and tidy.

Because the relief didn't take too long I figured I might as well paint the corbels now as well. The corbels are currently painted dirty white

I repaintedthem high gloss white. I cleaned them off, then got out the paint brush and climbed up on the ladder to put a coat on them

Again, I painted them a little messy (like the corner on the relief wall), because it'll be easier to make a nice clean line when I get to the wall paint. It'll put a coat of primer over it first so that there's no flashing because of the finish difference as the walls will be eggshell.

In the pic below the corbel on the left doesn't have the white paint, and the one on the right is newly painted. You can't tell too much of a difference in photos, but there is a big difference in person. I love the new, white gloss paint

The first coat on all of them took about an hour and a half because getting in all those nooks and crannies took a bit of work. But the second coat (to make things nice and even) took about half as long. And I love the way they look!

I knew painting this room would take a long time because of all the details and cut ins, and so far I've tacked up 5 hours (relief) + 2:15 (the corbels). It'll be interesting to see how long all the paint takes. Little by little by little.

Front Room Electrical: Not So Easy. Or Clean

2011-12-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

It all started Thanksgiving weekend when Chris got his 6' bit stuck in the wall. We're (I mean Chris, I'm just the assistant when it comes to electrical work) trying to rewire the lights and outlets in the front room because they're knob and tube and they need to be updated. The plan was to run the romex from the attic down to the outlets, but that has proven to be a bit difficult.

Chris took his trusty 6' bit and drill into the attic in an attempt to drill a hole through the fire blocking and cross bracing, and then fish the wire down to the outlets. But along the way much time was spent cursing and the bit fell into the wall. Whoopsie. So we did what anyone else would do. Buy a new bit. I mean break a hole in the wall and fish your bit out

With the bit retrieved and better access to the inside of the wall (because we made a hole) we tried again to drill through the fire blocking

But it wasn't really going well. At this point we'd spent a decent amount of time, cussed a lot, and busted 1 hole in the wall and we still didn't have the romex at the outlet. Not wanting to throw any tools through the large picture window, we moved on to another project for the day and picked it back up the next day.

We resolved that on this second go round we would try to run the cable from under the house. The alternative was to bust more holes in our walls to get around all the blocking, and well, we didn't really want to do that.

We started by removing all the old outlet face plates, hardware and boxes. The old boxes were quite a headache to remove because they had metal clips on the side that got hammered into the wood

So, again, we did what anyone would do and brought in the grinder to saw through the metal clips of the old boxes and then pull them out with pliers (and do not worry, the electrical was switched off to all these outlets so we wouldn't have another incident)

Pretty pictures :)

With all the outlets now "safely" removed, Chris crawled under the house to run the wire to each outlet. I stayed in the room to direct him to each outlet, drill pilot holes so he knew where to drill to feed the wire, and pulled and cut the wire at all the outlets. It was a dirty job for Chris - you know it's love when you're boyfriend spends 2 hours under the house laying in mud and he lets you have the clean job :)

At each outlet I drilled a pilot hole at the base of the baseboard (at 2 outlets there were already pilot holes). See the little tiny hole on the floor right in the center of the outlet?

Then Chris would then know exactly where he was in relation to the outlet and then he'd drill a hole to feed the cable (this one was weird and had to go through a floor joist because of the step down in this room, but most of the others went through the bottom plate)

We'd feed through a second wire, and then Chris would run that second wire under the house (stapling along the way) and to the next outlet, where we would repeat the process

We worked well and fast together (considering the working conditions for Mr. Christopher) and after about 2-3 hours Chris got to crawl out from under the house. Doesn't he look so handsome? (and deserving of a shower?)

Basketball is Back

2011-12-02T07:54:00.000-08:00

Now that the patio is finished, we can play basketball again! The other day after work we played for about 30 minutes or so (before it got dark and before I accidentally killed my brother's fish while he was out of town - I sobbed I was so distraught. He and his wife were very understanding).

Chris and I played H-O-R-S-E. Well, actually I got to spell out H-O-R-S-E-B-A-C-K, but Chris still won. Damnit.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Dolla Dolla Bills Y'All

2011-12-01T04:02:00.000-08:00

Alright, time for a detailed budget breakdown on how much this 220,000 lb, 940 sq. ft. adventure cost

Our numbers are rounded off and sometimes approximated, but it's a pretty damn close approximation.

First up: disposing of the concrete. In order to get rid of the concrete we had to rent a jackhammer twice (at $65 each)

We rented a dump truck for $300

And we paid $380 for fees in dumping concrete (we could have saved about $200 if we had discovered Inner City sooner as their price per load was $25 as opposed to $100 at Aman).

Luckily we never had to pay to dispose of any of the dirt we dug up because we found uses for it alllllll over the yard

But we did spend $100 hiring help to get the dirt finally all level.

So next up on the purchase list was getting all the pack into the backyard and tamped down.

We purchased 13 yards of pack from Larm's (our local landscape place) for $705

And an additional $140 spend on the remaining 3 1/2 yards from Inner City, which included an $80 delivery fee. We could have saved another $300 or so dollars if we had discovered Inner City earlier and gotten all of our pack from them, but we actually liked Larm's pack better.

And while we were working on all that pack we had to rent a plate compactor 4 times

And at $75 each time that came in for a total of $300. We could have saved a ton o' cash if we had tamped by hand, but, well, we'd probably still be working on laying all the pack if we'd done that.

Once the pack was done it was time to finally get to laying the pavers, yay!!! And who would have thought base sand and edging were so expensive?

$580 expensive.

And then, there were the pavers. We used about 4,400 of them

Which came in at about $1880 (and that included the delivery fee from HD). But, we also got to subtract $130 when we returned a bag that contained base sand and all of our pallets.

The final steps tacked on just a bit more. The polymeric sand?

About $200

The one more final dusty plate compactor rental?

Another $75

And finally finally finally? The sealer

A hefty $150. Yes, gasp, I know. But, we really really really like our patio and the thought of it getting stained or fucked up in any way scares the shit out of us, so that $150 gives us peace of mind.

Let's total everything up.

$130 (jackhammer)
$300 (dump truck rental)
$380 (concrete dumps)
$705 (pack from our local landscape place)
$140 (pack from Inner City)
$100 (hired help)
$300 (plate compactor rentals while laying the pack)
$580 (base sand and edging)
$1880 (pavers)
-$130 (base sand bag and paver pallets returned)
$200 (polymeric sand)
$75 (the final plate compactor rental!)
$150 (sealer)
which all comes to a grand total of: $4,810

Yeah, that's a lot. But when you clock it in at 940 sq. ft., it comes in at about $5.12 a square foot. And when you count all the rentals and dumping fees, it's not terrible. Plus, our neighbor came by and said he got a quote to get his driveway ripped up and get his driveway and tire tracks down the side of his house redone as pavers and he got quoted $5-$7000. And that's just driveway and tire tracks.

It was a hefty price tag, a ton of lifting (well, tons and tons and tons), but we're so so so so so happy with it

Before & After: The Patio

2011-11-29T07:12:00.001-08:00

Yay!!!!!! I am so excited to write this post for two reasons: 1) it means this project is DONE DONE DONE and 2) I'm so excited to show you amazingly patient readers some awesome before & after comparison shots. Now, without further ado, let's get down to business.

When we first moved in our patio was cruisin' for a bruisin'

And our garage didn't look so hot either. But my oh my has that view evolved. First there was the concrete

And then there was dirt, pack, sand, blah blah blah. But now, there are PAVERS!

And the side of the house, that's a mighty fun comparison as well. Here it is when we moved in

That look has had a mighty evolution as well. Here it is when we powerwashed

And now it's nicely painted, yucky old concrete removed and beautiful pavers installed!

I don't really have a great one of the driveway before, only after we did our first ripping up of it (and the pavers were already laid behind it)

But now that view looks mighty pretty :)

Now, for some more shots that have no specific "before" to compare it against, but I just love our pavers too much not to show :)

The sealer we used gives a little sheen

But more importantly it protects the pavers from future stains and helps shed water.

We've got a nice, even playing surface to play basketball at now

And a nice, large, but not overpowering area to just hang out

I am SUPER happy that we didn't do the tire tracks down the side of the house to the driveway like the concrete used be. I like the seamless, clean look of the pavers all the way down the side

But the most amazing part? I just can't believe we're done with the project. It's amazing to look back on the pictures of ripping up the first bit of concrete, shoveling all the dirt, running over the pack with the plate compactor...it's pretty unbelievable how much went into getting this patio done, but I am just so so so so so so so happy with how it turned out

Yay!!!!

Now, no more heavy lifting for a while.

Holy Jebus, Thank God it's DONE

2011-11-28T05:09:00.000-08:00

FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY the final step, yay!!!!! Tomorrow I'll get to show you fine, wonderful, awesomely patient folks the Before & After of the patio. But first, let's go over the sealer that took forever to get done.

First, we had to get the patio clean. Because we've been parking the car on the driveway and walking on it, it's gotten a bit dirty

So we bought this cleaner

And got to work cleaning. Chris kept the patio damp

And I took the scrubbing broom and scrubbed scrubbed scrubbed

Cinderelli Cinderelli :)

Around the area where we drilled for the gate latch it didn't do a super great job of cleaning the first time around. See the haze?

So I scrubbed again

And after Chris hosed everything off we had to wait for 2 days while the sun shined on it and dried everything out. We had originally thought we only had to wait 12 hours, but the container actually said 2 days with sunshine or FIVE if there was significant cloud cover. That got a big huge gulp of anxiety from me because I REALLY wanted to get this project done. We were super lucky that the only really cloudy, rainy day of the weekend was Thursday though, so when we cleaned the patio on Friday we lucked out with sunny skies the rest of Friday and all day Saturday and Sunday, yay!!!

So yesterday afternoon we brought out the sealer to complete the final step!

I actually wasn't super thrilled with the job the "cleaner" did

But what are you gonna do? The sealer we put on will help protect the patio from future stains, so that's what counts.

We poured the sealer into a bucket, brought out some rollers (1/2" and 3/8" nap - the 3/4 made the sealer bubble and streak a lot on the pavers) and rolled it onto the pavers

We only had one roller extension, so Chris was the lucky one who got to use it, while I maneuvered around the patio crouched down. But he did spend 3 hours crawling around under the house working on some electrical (which I'll fill you in on early next week), so I figured it was fair :)

It was a really easy process, made much more fun by listening to Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me on podcast (it won't dry this dark)

It didn't take too long, perfect timing actually because after about 45 minutes the episode of Wait Wait was over and we were just rolling on the last bit.

The instructions said to let it cure for a few hours without any foot traffic, but we'll leave it all day today as well (we parked Chris' truck on the street instead of the driveway) because we're paranoid. I am SO excited that this project is finally done, and I can't wait to take the After pictures tomorrow morning and share them with all of you!

We'd be REALLY Thankful if there was no Rain

2011-11-24T10:46:00.000-08:00

There are many many many things to be thankful for on Thanksgiving: good health, a fun house to live in and work on, great supportive family, a pretty handsome boyfriend who I have fun hanging out with (although I sprinted away to write this post as he was rolling his eyes at me...), BUT I think I speak for both Chris and I when I say we'd be really really really thankful if the crappy weather took a break

Please no more sprinkles, misting, or just water coming down from the clouds in general. We need no rain and 12 hours of no rain so the pavers can get dried out enough before we seal them and we really want to seal them so we can FINISH. THIS. PROJECT.

Thank you.

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving. Off to paint the relief in the front room and watch some football because that's what holidays in this household are about :)

Refinishing So Far

2011-11-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

Many of you amazing readers voiced your excitement and opinions about the lights we chose and the fabric and chairs we have planned for our chair refinishing. I'm not anywhere near done refinishing the lights or chairs, but I thought I'd give you folks an in progress update about how the projects are going because your excitement got me excited.

First, the lights.

After we brought them home I cleaned cleaned cleaned them and then I started taking them apart for the spray painting

Once things were all taken apart...

..it got taken out to the garage for spray painting

Everything got 3-4 coats of Rustoleum's oil rubbed bronze, and they're still sitting in the garage like 3 weeks later

I should probably get my act together and put the lights back together and take them back in the house...

Now for the chairs.

Each one got a trip outside to get cleaned, the seat removed and sanded

This chair came with no seat

This chair's arm rest has broken off (nothing a nail gun can't solve)

And this last one took a looooooong time to take apart

The seat took awhile to get separated from the chair because I had to take off EVERY SINGLE ONE of those fabric tacs. It was not a fun job. When I got them all off it revealed a wicker seat that was broken, so I'll have to figure out how to make the seat part of this chair work

We're still brainstorming about how to cut the seat portion out --> how it will be shaped, attached and to what extent it'll come to the edge.

With all the seats detached (except for the two we need to cut)...

...I took off the old seating fabric because it smelled musty. That involved many staples being ripped out (this is just from the first seat)

But after the fabric was off, it was time to recover them

And here they sit in all their pretty flowered glory waiting to find their place back on repainted chairs

Now we just have to get the sprayer back out to get them painted. Hmmm, maybe a Thanksgiving weekend project. What do you say Mr. Christopher? :)

TBDBITL

2011-11-21T07:51:00.000-08:00

This past weekend we couldn't work on finishing the patio because we went out of town for a little long weekend vacation! :) Chris and I are really big sports fans, and last year we went to the UC Davis v. Sac State rivalry football game at Davis' new stadium (Chris is a Davis alum and I attended), and we thought it would be an awesome idea to go to one big college football rivalry game a year. We love college football and we thought it would be a silly and fun tradition. So this year we decided to go to Penn State v. Ohio State. Not a huge nationally known rivalry (like say Yale v. Harvard, Ohio St. v. Michigan, Alabama v. Auburn, Cal v. Stanford...) but our really good friends went to Penn St., we wanted to see a game at Ohio State (we'll see OSU v. Michigan in Ann Arbor) and we really wanted to see Joe Paterno coach. Well, that last one didn't happen...but we had a totally awesome time!!! Columbus, Ohio is so cute and everyone was super amazingly nice.

We left really early Friday morning (like waking up at 4:30am early, yuck) and got to Columbus at 3:30pm which was good because we got to fiddle around the city that afternoon and evening. We went to a park and saw La Grande Jatte as a topiary garden (and as one of my favorite paintings, this was awesome!)

We drove around downtown (I found this little corner hilarious because it was like a mini Time Square)

And drove by the Capital (a tradition of mine and Chris' whenever we visit a capital city)

And then headed to German Village and stopped by the famous Katzinger's Deli where we picked up the most AMAZING olive oil I have ever had. I don't know anything about food (I always giggle at the way they talk about food on Top Chef because I have no idea what they're talking about) but seriously, this olive oil was bombtastic

We drove around a little more and then ate dinner at Eddie George's Grille which was crazy busy, tasty, and a fun experience because it is definitely a college favorite restaurant and bar. We headed home to the hotel after and sat in bed and snacked on our freshly bought bread and olive oil while we watched TV :)

On Saturday we woke up bright and early and spent the morning and early afternoon walking around the Ohio State campus. These people take their football seriously (and we come from a town where people dress up in basically Halloween costumes every Sunday home game). We had lots of fun touring around, checking out the campus and talking to many friendly fans (you could totally tell we were from California as I was wearing my A's jacket and Chris was wearing a Cal sweatshirt and there was red everywhere)

When it came for game time our seats kind of sucked (obstructed view much?)

I was annoyed because when I bought the tix it said nothing about an obstructed view on them, but we had a good time anyway. We got there early enough for all the pregame festivities and saw the band perform which was totally fucking awesome. I love the Cal band and have never seen a college marching band better, but I gotta say, the Ohio State Marching Band really is "The Best Damn Band in the Land" (TBDBITL as they're affectionately nicknamed). They do this "script Ohio" routine that was amaze-balls where they spell out Ohio in cursive script while they're playing. It blew my mind and Chris has a video of it where I am seriously freaking out

It was amazingly glorious. They did it pregame and then did it again at halftime to honor Dr. Woods (we couldn't figure out who he was) and they have never done it two times in one game, so we felt excited :) Dr. Woods got to "dot the 'i'" which is a really big deal and when he did TONS of flashes in the stadium went off and everyone erupted in applause. It was really cool to see.

The game was totally fun, it wasn't too cold and Ohio State almost came back, but Penn State pulled out the win

Despite our very last row of the stadium seats, Chris and I had lots of fun

We also like to make crazy, spontaneous, out of the way detours on trips we take (like when we visited Vermont for Chris' birthday and then decided to drive to Portland, Maine on the last day for lobster) and so it was only fitting that yesterday we decided to drive 2 1/2 hours to Cleveland before our flight to make some pit stops. We visited Kent

and saw the May 4th Memorial which the university does an amazing job honoring.

Then we stopped by Cuyahoga National Park to see Chris' old stopping grounds

And then we headed off to Cleveland to visit the A Christmas Story house and museum and take the tour

It was actually kind of a strange experience. The house isn't in the greatest area and a lot of the homes are really run down. It is amazing the seriousness of the movie that people on the tour take and it was really interesting to see everyone recreate all these scenes and moments from the movie. Chris and I actually had more fun watching everyone than we did touring around the house.

After, we tried to find food and eat in Cleveland, but apparently the entire city proper basically shuts down on Sundays when the Browns play and we couldn't find parking anywhere. It was actually really frustrating. Cleveland reminds me a lot of Oakland and Chris and I were eager to eat and spend our money there (even a little bit), but we were seriously basically prevented from patronizing any restaurant. It was kind of lame. Everything was either closed or you couldn't park anywhere (they shut down nearly every street meter on game days apparently). So we drove outside of town and found some local chain that was famous for its wings and had motorcycles hanging from the ceiling (I was a fan of the twirly straw)

It was a fun experience nonetheless as the Browns fans watching the game (on every single TV in the restaurant but 1, I was afraid to ask them to change one of the TVs to the Raiders game) made it very entertaining.

After that, it was time to zoom back to Columbus where we turned in our rental car, hopped on our 7:30pm connection in Chicago (with 25 loud and talkative 17 year old girls) and got home last night at about 11. It was a eventful and busy trip and loads of fun. Columbus was a really cute city and we had so much fun discovering the campus. People were so nice and Chris and I had an awesome time just hanging out together. It definitely makes me excited for where we pick next year...

Now, time to finish that patio!