House of Two Foo's - A PhotoBlog

My Name Is Mud(room)

2007-08-11T08:58:00.000-05:00

So, after having a few contractors come in and give estimates we had Jenn's Mom's friend stop by to take a look. He used to be a contractor himself and now owns a respectable Home Inspection business. His opinion was that the room doesn't really need that much work. Cooler heads have prevailed and we've decided not to fully renovate the room.

However, we do not lack for decisive action. After watching no less than four generations of mushrooms bloom and die on our wall, today begins our crusade to take back our mudroom by the cheapest and most effective means available. After I post this, we'll be heading to the good old Home Depot to retrieve the following: a large-ish can of Thompson's Water Seal, plenty of caulk, a second deck brush, a gallon of cleaning solution, gloves, safety goggles and masks. Mr Falcone (the home inspector) determined that some of our moisture problem stems from the fact that the brick wall on the back of the house (above the mudroom) was never sealed. The bricks soak up rain like a sponge and it goes right through to the plaster walls, thus giving our guest bedroom closet that warty look, among other things. Sealing the bricks may also help prevent some of the mudroom moisture. After giving the walls a good scrub-down, we'll caulk up all the open corners and seams of the room. If, after all that, it looks like it may need a new paint job, we'll do that as well...some time in the near future.

As for "further down the road", we plan to rip up the lumpy, sloped floor and build a new one ourselves. We've determined that the current floor has had that strange landscape since it was built decades ago. They probably just put walls up around an old, badly built back porch and called it a mudroom. With some help from a few experienced people we know (and anyone else willing to pitch in) we'll pull up the old, crappy floor and put in a nice new one. One that's level and has tiles, etc.

Well, we're off to grab the supplies. Wish us luck!

Disgusting Mudroom: Update

2007-07-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

So, I guess the last thing I talked about was the whole washing machine situation. That was eventually rectified, thanks to the good ol' Home Depot card and their "12 months no interest or payments" thing:

The moisture continues to be a problem though, as does the ceiling:

So much so, in fact, that we've found a new form of life had been growing in our house without our knowledge...

Oh, you can't see it? Here's a closer look:

Yes. Those are indeed actual mushrooms growing out of our wall. Needless to say, we are pretty thoroughly skeeved out. We've decided it's time for drastic action. We're going to talk to some contractors and get some estimates on renovating the entire room. We'll work out some sort of loan or financing or something. Next month, Jenn's car will be paid off and my old credit card debt, once so massive that its gravitational pull would bend light itself, will finally be no more. We'll have a good chunk of money every month that we're not used to having. We had originally intended to use it for new carpets and a new front door, but I think mudroom renovation has suddenly been driven home as a priority. Whatever, we may well just throw all those projects in the pot at once. Why not? Anyway, we'll try to keep this site updated with the proceedings. We're now hoping to be ready for some sort of housewarming-type party in October. We'll see.

Fun With Water, Part 2: The Big Fridge

2007-03-14T19:18:00.000-05:00

Now, let’s talk about the mud room, or as I’ve taken to calling it this Winter, “The Big Fridge.” I think I had mentioned it a while ago, but we’ve had two hand-me-down washing machines already. The first we got from my Aunt and Uncle Betsy & John Spina when they were emptying out John’s mother’s house. It was old, but it worked well and even had a fancy knob for the cycle selector for an added touch of class!

But one day, the agitator tower thingy in the middle of the washer decided to strip its gears and stop spinning. It’s possible that I overloaded it. Still, the circular part at the bottom still spun and it still washed clothes. If you look back towards the beginning of this blog, you’ll see I mention my good friend John McGarvey…the one who helped me out (immensely) with our kitchen. A few months ago, his grandmother’s house was being similarly cleared out and there was another washer up for grabs:

It’s just about as old as the first one, but it agitates, presumably getting our clothes cleaner. We hooked it up and after the first few loads, it started leaking water everywhere with each load…regardless of what water level setting I put it on or how much clothes I put in it. We figure something must’ve broken loose during transport, so I went back to using the first washer…even though it had obviously lost a good amount of oil…more than is pictured here:

Note the good amount of orange/brown ice in the bottom-right of that picture. I’ll get to that.

So, I switch back to the washer with the glass doorknob and it works fine for a month or so. Then a month ago I went to do a much-needed load of laundry. The washer fills up with soapy water…….and then promptly dies. It blew the circuit on the surge protector, so I pushed the button back in and tried it again. It just buzzed softly and remained still. $#!%@. So, I pull what feels like 200lbs of wet laundry out of the washer and put it in a big plastic bag and lug it over to my parents’ house (thankfully only a few minutes away) and finish our laundry there.

Now we have two dead washing machines in our mud room. Fed up with hand-me-downs, we go to Home Depot. The beginning of the year is a really bad time financially, what with car insurance, inspection (complete with new brakes!), oil heating bills, etc. on top of the new mortgage. Also, we owe a lot of money on our income taxes again. Evidently we weren’t paying for the house long enough in 2006 to put us over the standard deduction, and our modest raises bumped us up into the next tax bracket. Thankfully, we have a halfway decent limit on our Home Depot card and they were having a “12 months no payments no interest” promotion on all appliances. We realize that means we have 12 months to pay it off or else we get slammed with all the retroactive interest, but at least we didn’t have to pay right then. We got ourselves a new LG Tromm front-loader. Not top of the line, like my brother’s washer, but no slouch either. It should save us a noticeable amount of money on our water bill. Also it’s musical and friendly and plays a jaunty little scale every time you turn it on, which makes me happy. I can put a weeks worth of dark laundry in it, instead of splitting it up into multiple loads, or even our comforter! This is obviously the first sign that I’m getting “old” since I’ve never been so excited about an appliance before. Still, I appreciate it just as much from a gadget-geek perspective as I do from a domestic perspective, so I figure I’m not over the hill yet. It weighs your clothes to determine how much water it should use!! That’s just awesome.

We emptied the broken washer as much as we could with plastic cups and then sponges. There was still a little bit of water left in the bottom (seen here with a slight crust of ice).

A week after ordering the washer, it arrives. The two delivery guys bring it in using a fascinating system I’ve never seen before. They each have harnesses strapped about their torsos, and they each clip an end of a long thick strap to a spot in the center of their chests. This strap goes under the washer and they use it to lift it up and move it around. It makes it a whole lot more maneuverable than if they were using a hand cart or dolly. Neat. They took the watery washer away free of charge. The other one hung out in the Big Fridge until Jenn’s uncle Billy took it for scrap metal on Saturday.

The new washer has consistently performed beyond expectations. Except for just last week…and that will lead us into the topic of the erratic weather patterns contained within the Big Fridge.

Tuesday I went to do a little load of laundry. I opened the door to the big fridge and was greeted with a blast of moist air. This isn’t unusual in the recent Winter months. Sometimes you open the door and it’s like you just got hit in the face with a wet sponge. It was like that on Tuesday. I put the load in the washer and set it to HOT since it was towels or throw rugs or something. As it starts to fill, it sounds a little funny. I check the valves on the pipes and they’re definitely open and the HOT one is getting pretty hot. I shrug and head out of there. About 20 minutes later we hear a noise that may or may not’ve been from the washer. I check on it and it had stopped right at the rinse cycle and instead of displaying the time remaining (as it usually does) the digital display was blinking OE. Dismayed, I find the manual and it says that OE means there’s a clog in the drain hose or drain filter and we just need to clean it out. I go to check the grey corrugated drain hose and it’s frozen solid. I can move it back and forth, but there’s definitely ice crunching around in there. Now, it’s been a lot colder in there before and none of the other liquids in the Big Fridge have frozen, but I guess maybe it’s because the hose is next to a stone wall or something. The first thing I can think of to do is to put a space heater near the washer, but that was taking too long and wasn’t close enough to the hose. The only other thing I could think of was to get a funnel and a lot of hot water and pour it into the end of the hose, which I did. The ice crackled and slid back into the washer. I ran the load again from the beginning with hot water and everything was fine.

The mud room has me pretty confused, though. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the roof, but it’s wet in there almost all the time. I call the room “The Big Fridge” because it not heated. We put any extra drinks in there that won’t fit in the regular fridge and they stay pretty cold. Because of the incredible amounts of moisture, I sometimes crack one of the windows to try and dry it out.

You can see here that the ceiling (or what’s left of it) can get really drippy.

This moisture collects on the ceiling and drips onto the floor (and the washer). When it’s really cold in there, it’ll then freeze to the walls and the floor. For example:

Not pretty. Therefore, cracking the windows don’t help all that much, since it serves more to lower the temperature in that room than to lower the humidity. Not that closing the windows exactly seals the room up, as you can see in this corner:

Yep, that’s light shining through the wall there. I definitely need to pick up some “expanding hole filler” or whatever you call it and spray that stuff in there real good. Or we just need to knock the room down and start over.

I suppose it’s possible that the moisture is just runoff from the window leak problem. It’s definitely getting into the door frame leading to the kitchen.

And then it drips onto our cruddy steps.

See? This is why we can’t have a housewarming party yet. I say that it’s possible that this is runoff from the other leak since it’s right near the kitchen window and right under the closet where we used to have a problem. However, even if weeks go by without any form of precipitation, this room will still be dripping. I can’t imagine this much water is waiting around for a week before ending up on my mud room ceiling…and then my floor. Now that it’s getting a little warmer again, I can see that the wooden boards of the roof are starting to actually dry out. That again points to my condensation theory. It’s like a cold glass of water on a warm day…but in reverse. However, it’s not that much warmer in the Big Fridge than it is outside on a cold day. I guess the difference between a 15 degree night outside and unfrozen water bottles inside is enough, though. I really don’t know. Also, I really don’t know how to fix it other than buying a dehumidifier (expensive?) or getting heat in that room (either expensive or dangerous if it’s just a space heater). Or would more heat make the moisture problem worse? What I need is a team of scientists to come and figure it out. Or a lot of money to tear down the walls and the floor and replace them with something better. The ultimate dream would be to open the crawlspace opening a little, pour some concrete on the floor of it and make it an extra storage space. Then make a new mud room with a new foundation that isn’t crumbling away, a new concrete floor instead of rotten and sagging wood and new walls where the only sun that shines through is coming from a window. And maybe a ceiling that doesn’t fall down and shower everything with mildew and mold. Realistically, we'll probably end up just doing a new wooden floor and tile over that, which I would imagine is cheaper than having someone do it in concrete. But we haven't done any serious research yet. Anyone have any suggestions?

Fun With Water, Part 1: The Leak

2007-03-14T18:59:00.000-05:00

Not much has changed in the intervening 2 months, so I figured I’d wait until I had something to say. The leaking problem has only gotten worse since I last posted, though there may be some hope of a happy conclusion.

Last time, I told you about O’Bannon Roofing’s shenanigans and how they essentially didn’t do the job they said they would and blew me off when I asked them to do it correctly. A week or so after that post, I called a new roofer called “4 Seasons Roofing & Siding”. We got an advertisement for them in one of those “Valpak” things you get in the mail with all the coupons, etc. They seemed to have their stuff together, the website was nice, the ad said they were part of the BBB, and so on. I called and left a message explaining our situation and got a call back in a day or two. The guy seemed pretty friendly and down-to-earth. He said that 4 Seasons does most of the roof and siding work when you get Home Depot to build you something, and they even did the roof on the dry cleaners at the end of my block. I explained the whole stupid history of my leak problem and he was pretty blown away. He wondered how it was that they “couldn’t figure out the problem,” since something like that would probably be pretty obvious to anyone who’s done roofing before. I told him that’s what I thought, but I’m not a roofer. He asked me if I wouldn’t mind letting him know who it was that gave me the run around, since he had a few roofers in mind that could possibly pull something like that. When I told him it was O’Bannon, he was shocked. He was under the impression that they usually did a good job and followed up on their work, and never would’ve thought they would pull stunts like that. He said that almost all roofers guarantee their work for a few years at least, regardless of whether the house changes owners or not (unlike what I was told by O’Bannon’s roofers, that once the house changes hands the guarantee is null and void). He said he was sorry I had so much trouble and they’d come out that Saturday afternoon after a job to take a look around.

So, that Saturday, I waited around until the sun went down and no one showed up. Still, he said that they had a job that would go until that afternoon and I figured maybe it went long and it got too late for them to come check it out and whadda ya gonna do? I called them the following Monday to try and reschedule the estimate and left a message with whoever answered the phone. After not hearing anything that week, I tried again. Left another message and still no call back. So, after numerous calls with no reply, we’ve simply given up. It’s quite possible that 4 Seasons Roofing seals your roof with a paste made of gold and crushed diamonds for a measly $5. We’ll never know, because they obviously don’t want our business. Which is too bad, ‘cause I had high hopes for these guys after talking to the main roofer.

So in the meantime, as those of you in the area know, we had some snow. Snow is not a big problem as far as the leak is concerned. Sure, it was tough to get our car out of it’s spot the first time we had that icy snow, since our street is curved like the top half of a large pipe. But a few good pushes on the back bumper and we were in business. No, the snow is no problem. The problem comes in when that snow begins to melt. We get a lot of direct sunlight on our house, which is awesome. Snow at the front of our house is usually gone by the end of the day as long as it’s a sunny day. However, that melting snow made our leak problem worsen tenfold. The bright side? The guestroom closet doesn’t seem to be getting wet anymore. The brighter side? We could finally see exactly where the leak was coming from and how it operates. And now you can, too:
This is the guestroom window as seen from the bathroom. You can see that the water first appears along the line indicated by the arrow. It’s evidently coming from the roof and running under the siding until it gets to the window. It then drips down the window and pools on the outer sill.

Some of it then seeps through into the inner window sill…

The rest runs right down the siding to the kitchen window (and wall):

That’s our doorbell next to “

America

’s #1 Hot Dog”. It still works, even soaked, and it sounds exactly like my sister’s grandfather clock. When we watch her kids, I always think there’s someone at the door once an hour. We need a regular “ding-dong” type of doorbell someday.

Anyway, so that day when the snow was melting, we had our own little disgusting waterfall right in our own kitchen. The wall next to the window was a little squishy as well. I told all of this to that roofer from 4 Seasons when he called that one time a day or so later, and he had a pretty good idea of what to look for. Maybe it was so easy of a solution that he felt my house didn’t pose him enough of a challenge and was unworthy of his roofing prowess. Oh well. I’ll keep my money, and here’s how…

Just this past Saturday, Jenn’s uncle Billy came by to take a look around. He’s done all kinds of contracting/landscaping type work, including roofing. He brought his bucket of “muck” and first took a look at the mud room roof. There wasn’t much there that looked like an obvious leak to him, but he patched a few areas with his tar stuff. The meteorological phenomena that manifest themselves in our mud room continue to be a mystery, but I’ll get to that in a little bit. We borrowed my next-door neighbor’s 40 foot ladder and Billy went up on the main roof to see how things fared there. He immediately went, “This is where it’s leaking, right? Right above the window?” I said yes and he said, “It looks like someone was up here not too long ago and did a real good job all around he roof except right here. They laid the tape down but didn’t muck over it. It’s like they just ran out of stuff and gave up and went home. I can’t believe they didn’t think this would leak!” So there was about a gap about a foot or so long without anything sealing the flashing to the roof and that’s probably where the water was getting in under the siding the whole time. I wish I had sent a camera up there with him, but I didn’t think of it. Regardless, he patched up the obvious oversight and a few other places and came back down. It did rain later that night, but I had a hard enough time washing a little smudge of that stuff off my hand. He slapped that stuff on real thick, so I’m not worried about it being washed away. We didn’t have time to clean up the kitchen window until the next day, so we’re not sure if it leaked that night. We’ll see when it rains this week. Everyone keep your fingers crossed!!

Same old, same old

2007-01-29T22:05:00.000-05:00

It's been a while since my last post, but not much has happened in regards to our house lately. The only noteworthy thing is the continuing water leakage problem...

I had mentioned that O'Bannon roofing came out and fixed our problem. However, on Christmas Eve morning, we found that we still were getting leaks in the same old places. I called and left a message and they got back to me a week later and said they'd send some guys out again. I waited over 2 weeks without any update, even with leaving a few messages about how we were still getting water in at the window and closet on New Year's, etc. I finally got a hold of the lady and she gave me the same "oh I just got the paperwork this morning" routine, and she told me that they looked around and couldn't find the problem. Then she said that they were out of ideas and maybe I should get someone else's opinion. Instead of arguing about it, I just said, "Uh huh, sure. Thanks anyway." I have no proof that they ever came out to the house in the first place, never having gotten any copies of this fabled "paperwork". But then again, I never had to pay them anything, so I guess I'm at an impasse there. Seeking any further action seems like more trouble than it's worth, since the leak isn't threatening to cave my house in...anymore than it already has.

I think I've determined that the mud room ceiling problem is one of condensation, since the water doesn't collect up there during or after rainstorms, but just mostly when it's cold outside. Maybe there's warm, moist air coming from the basement, through the under-kitchen crawlspace and into the cold mud room. Everything in there is moist, almost at all times. There seems to be a lot of condensation on the windows, as well. I crack them from time to time on a really cold day and the room tends to dry out. It may be time to invest in a dehumidifier, as long as I can get it to drain into the pipe that takes the sudsy water from the washer. Our first really, really big-time project will be to tear down that whole room and start from scratch. And do it right.

So anyway...if anyone knows a good, trustworthy roofer, be sure to let us know. We're waiting 'till next month to continue with a new roofer so we can make sure we have enough money to pay them in case it ends up being some astronomical sum. Let's hope not. I'm also keeping my fingers crossed and banging repeatedly on any wooden surface close to hand that we don't get a big snowstorm before then. It only seems to leak when the wind is coming from a certain direction during a rainstorm, so hopefully any kind of softly falling snow won't get in whatever crazy crack leads inside our wall.

'Tis The Season

2006-12-12T18:24:00.000-05:00

Yes...the season to forget online projects is upon us. What with the Marcellus/Waldron Christmas Kegger and shopping, etc., I forgot to update this blog with new roof news. Thanks goes out to my cousin John for reminding me at last weekend's party.

We had Kenny's roofer come out and take a look, and he had some opinions on the source of the water problem. However, he was somewhat amazed that I didn't call the previous owners' roofer to see if they guaranteed their work. I took his advice and called O'Bannon Roofing. They recognized the address and remembered working on a similar problem here not so long ago. I had to call them a few times to remind them I was still waiting for them to find the old paperwork, etc., but they eventually sent out a few guys. They crawled around up there and found the problems, which was nice. Then they told me that the work they did doesn't technically carry over to a new owner, which wasn't so nice. But then they said that since they didn't actually finish the job correctly last time, they'd fix the leaks for free anyway.

They fixed it a few days before one of those super-windy downpours, and we haven't had a problem since! Way to go O'Bannon guys! So, roof problem solved. Now we just have to replace that section of the ceiling and we're good as new.

I Don't Think Our House Likes Us Anymore

2006-11-15T21:39:00.000-05:00

So, yikes. At least now I can't say I have nothing to post about. We've got some serious looking problems here at the House of Two Foo's (Foo & Mrs Foo, that is). Rain has become our sworn nemesis and frequent tormentor. My digital camera's on the fritz again, so here comes another video. This time, I used my less fancy analog Hi8 camcorder and captured it using the marvelous little dynamo, the Adaptec Gamebridge TV. I'll let the video do the rest of the explaining...

P.S. - I just want to add that I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished here in this post. I shot this video sometime after 8:00 PM, captured it, edited it, converted it to Flash video, gave it the little buttons, uploaded it and fixed a dozen little mistakes I made along the way. It's now about 10:10 PM and it's a fully finished product. It's even well behaved...it doesn't start itself when you load the page, it waits for you, patiently, to hit the play button. Hm. Go me.

I guess that goes to show what a little motivation can do. I wanted to make sure I got this up on the blog tonight because there's really nothing I can do to make this house situation better at this moment and I feel like doing this is as close as I can get to doing something.

This is gonna be a tough few weeks. It's kind of a "when it rains, it pours" deal, here. Figuratively and literally. We were already completely wiped out, financially, when the laptop broke and needed to be fixed. Our 2nd wedding anniversary is Sunday and we took all of next week off (Thanksgiving week, so really just 3 days as far as A. Duie Pyle is concerned) and had all types of plans to go out and do fun things, etc., to celebrate. Now it looks like we'll be spending a week looking at a hole in our ceiling because at least that's free. But...as I said in the video, things could get a lot worse. The biggest damage is in a room we don't really live in everyday, so life can pretty much go on as normal once we get the stuff cleaned up. Still...bleh.

A House Is Only Done When You Run Out Of Money

2006-11-07T20:50:00.000-05:00

Well, $200 later, I have my laptop back, pictures and all. The Geek Squad really worked wonders, but I paid the cheap price! Thank goodness I know something about computers or else it'd be another $250 for them to install Windows XP, etc. on my new hard drive. Yikes. Evidently, I'm in the wrong business. Anyway, I'm back up and running again (knock on wood). Here's the post I wrote way back on October 20th:

I know it’s been a while…sorry bout that. We were so busy with cleaning up the house, etc. that once it got into a normal, livable state, we basically collapsed into inert, commplacent recuperation for a while. To end the cliffhanger, yes the kitchen is now complete, as these pictures clearly show. We can now breathe easily, cook for ourselves and even do wide socks-on-hardwood-floor pirouettes whenever we need to. The kitchen constantly astounds me with its wide open spaces and freedom of movement. Both of us can cook in there and not elbow each other until one gets fed up and retreats to the couch!

We did have some trouble with the stove the first couple of times we really used it. After being on for about an hour, it would really start to smoke. I’d open it up and find a puddle of black Godknowswhat on the floor of the oven. I’d use a damp paper towel on a spatula or a soapy sponge and clean it up and it’d be ok for the rest of the bake. However, the next time we’d use it, it’d start smoking again and the same stuff would be on the bottom of the oven. The ceiling of the oven didn’t seem overly grimy or anything. This happened a number of times, consecutively. We finally got around to running the self-cleaning cycle last weekend and I scrubbed the racks (which seemed to be dripping with whatever stuff was burning). We haven’t had the problem since, so who knows?

Anyway, the countertops turned out excellent. They really look great and I can’t thank John enough for his help and guidance. You’ll notice that we opted to put the microwave on a rolling cart instead of the non-sink counter. It takes up about half of the counter space and we couldn’t bear to part with that much. Now, if we want to use the microwave, we just plug it in under the sink, easy as anything.

Also, notice that the “Tuscan Kitchen” motif has pretty much taken shape…at least art-wise. We got the two cool pieces on the walls by the mud room door from Bed Bath & beyond and they seem to fit perfectly in Jenn’s vision for the kitchen.

The cutting board was a favor at Jenn’s friend’s wedding shower and also happened to fit right in. Perhaps someday we’ll do a tile backsplash on the wall above the sink, but for the time being, I’d be happy with just a little bit of lighting underneath the cabinets.

Also, I really wanted a trash can with a pedal, so we got this nice chrome one. It’s a little smaller than I’d like, but I’d like paying the outrageous price of the bigger ones even less. It gets the job done, hands free.

The bedrooms upstairs are also settling down into some semblance of order.

The guest bedroom at the top of the stairs has become a mostly organized office/retro-gaming repository, thanks to this nice piece from Ikea. Yes, it does contain a number of old game systems and games, dating back to the old NES with the original Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridge (and Light Zapper gun!) all the way through to the Sega Dreamcast. There’s still some more work to be done in there, but it’s now officially a useable space.

The master bedroom is also complete, with curtains, lamps and even a nice beachy picture.

Catastrophic Laptop Failure

2006-10-30T21:04:00.000-05:00

So, I was gonna finally get around to posting an update this past weekend. I had it all written up and the pictures were ready, etc. However, yesterday morning my laptop's hard drive decided it was time to suddenly and noisily die before I had time to back anything up. Most of my digital pictures are on there, my entire website, the book I'd been writing for about a year (the most recent version, anyway), work-related stuff, and so on. Lots of irreplaceable stuff may be lost forever. I took it to the Geek Squad in the local Best Buy. They weren't sure if there was anything they could do, but they said they had some tricks up their sleeves and charged me $100 to give it a try. No guarantees, though.

It's been a real busy couple of weeks with a lot of ups and downs, but things are finally starting to quiet down for now, so I should have some updates soon. I did get one thing accomplished today, though:

Kitchen? I've forgotten what the word even means.

2006-09-26T21:51:00.000-05:00

Well, (knock on wood) the kitchen should be completed tonight. What a hassle this has been. It started on Thursday 9/14 when we ordered the dishwasher we wanted. We did our research on the intertr0n at home, went to the Sears in the Concord Mall in DE (home of tax-free shopping) and went up to the appliance guy and said “we want this one”. He rung us up and told us it wasn’t in stock and we could pick it up on Monday. Ok, great! That gives us all weekend to get the kitchen ready. The plumber comes and unhooks the sink on Friday and on Saturday Jenn and I go to Home Depot and pick up 2 new countertops, one new cabinet, one garbage disposal and one new kitchen faucet. My oldest friend John McGarvey shows up, helps us get the stuff home and he & I get started. Lemme see if I can find a “before” picture of the sink-side of the kitchen…

Well, you can see half of it here in this picture where Jenn looks like she watched the tape from The Ring. Just imagine that the other side of the cabinets under the sink are the mirror image of the side you can see next to Maureen there.

The goal is to fit the dishwasher in the space already allotted by the existing countertop. That way, we’re not getting any closer to the basement door so that someday when we finish the basement I can still squeeze a couch past the counter. We need 24 inches of open space in which to fit the dishwasher, so the idea was to cut out enough of the existing cabinets to fit it in. When the plumber first came to look at it, we discussed it and came up with this plan:

The small door/drawer section on the right is a foot wide. The large center section under the sink (with the 2 doors) is three feet wide. If we cut everything out but the small section on the right and replace the center part with a two foot section, we should be left with a two foot space! So that’s just what we did:

John put his contracting skills to work on cutting away the 3/4ths of the cabinet while I tried to get the old caulk off of the underside of the sink. With a little finagling we were able to save the right-most wall to cover up the dishwasher.

By the time he was done with that, I had realized that the underside of the existing sink was so rusted that it would be much better to just get a new sink.

It’s the cheapest sink Home Depot sells, but it’s nice and shiny, it’s deeper than the old sink and, y’know, it functions as a sink, which is really the only important part.

We called it a night and planned on starting again the next day. Sunday went a little less well. We hit a few snags and my Dad’s immortal song of universal truth “Nothin’s Ever Easy” was heard on more than one occasion. Still, we would finish the sink/countertop combo Monday night to get it ready enough for the plumber to do his thing on Tuesday.

So Monday comes and Jenn and I get in the car to go to my brother’s house to borrow my sister-in-law’s van. We call Sears to make sure the dishwasher is ready to be picked up and they say, “Oh, no. No, it won’t be ready until next Monday.” We look at the receipt and sure enough, it says 9/25. So, I call around to other Sears and no one else has the model we want and there’s no other model in that price range and color that have the features we want. So we return home, defeated and resigned to waiting a full week with a dismantled kitchen. During that time John and I worked on the counter top:

The new sink was going to require more space, but that ended up being a good thing. We nailed down some 1x4’s to secure all of the cabinetry together and that raised it up enough so that we could center the sink over the new cabinet with a minimum of invasive cutting. Also, it meant that the new countertop would be closer to the paint line on the wall (less painting for me = better).

Eventually, we combined the sink and the countertop...with sexy results:

On Thursday, the plumber came and hooked up the sink and the garbage disposal to save himself some work once we got the dishwasher.

As you can see, the dishes are already starting to pile up and we’ve only had running water in the kitchen for a day or two! The garbage disposal still isn’t hooked up, electric-wise, but the sink definitely functions.

So, yesterday we call up Sears again to make sure that our dishwasher is ready for pickup. We get Lisa’s van and pick it up from Delaware and bring it home. As we’re brining it in the house (it’s not really that heavy), we notice that the box is kinda damp. Actually, it’s really damp. We set it down in the kitchen and Jenn goes to open the box and the front panel basically falls off, as soggy cardboard tends to do. There’s all this water in there, seeming to come from the inside of the dishwasher:

Now Jenn’s worried that it was used and it’s a return or something, but the original book and tags and Styrofoam are in there, etc. Still, I call Sears again and ask the appliance guy if this is normal or weird or what. He tells me that it’s not supposed to happen and I should call this 800 number and get the delivery department to come take it away and get me a new one. I say, “ok,” and leave the plumber a message appraising him of the situation. I call the 800 number and they tell me that since I picked it up at the store, I should call the store and bring it back for a return. Guh. So, I call the store again and get a different guy. I explain the situation to him and he says, “Oh yeah. There will probably be some water in there. They hook them up and test them before they box them up. I’m not feeding you a line or anything, that’s truly what they do.” So as long as that’s true, I’m fine with that. My parents and my uncle Paul seem to think it’s BS and I should take it right back, but I waited almost 2 weeks for this dishwasher, and I’m not prepared to wait that much longer. I call the plumber’s emergency number to get his opinion before it’s too late to take it back and he says that any appliance that involves water is likely to have some left in it from the testing phase. Dishwashers usually don’t have that much water left inside, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. He was more concerned that it was leaking out from inside the dishwasher, but I think the front unlatched itself a little when it was laid face down. So there was a whole lotta hassle over something trivial, but whadda ya gonna do?

As the end of lunch is rapidly approaching, I’ll wrap this up. Our fantastic plumber should be finishing up his end in a little while and John & I will finish securing the countertop, etc. tonight. So tomorrow we’ll have a fully functioning kitchen! Not a moment too soon either, since the full week of fast food caused me so much gastric pain that I literally passed out driving home from work on Thursday. I was able to pull over in time, but still…scary stuff! But those details are better suited for another type of blog and aren’t strictly house-related, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ll make sure to post pictures of the final product later this week.

Oo! Before I forget, I have pictures of how the rest of the house is coming along:

As we’ve gone over, the kitchen is still a mess.

That same mess affects the dining room as well, as there’s a lot of kitchen-y things stacked on the table there.

The living room, on the other hand, is now pretty much in its final form. Most of the clutter has been removed, the bookshelves are full and the TV is finally set up, etc. It’s kinda funny how I have all these game systems, surround sound and an HDTV but notice the nice rabbit-ear antenna on the TV there. We’re going without cable for as long as we can in order to save money. I still have cable internet, so technically we won’t miss any important shows like Lost since I can just download them the next day, but we still only have the choice between nice DVD’s or fuzzy channel 10 on the TV.

Also, we need a proper lampshade for that lamp to the right of the TV. That one doesn’t seem to work too well.

Until next time!

Moving....bleh

2006-09-15T15:15:00.000-05:00

So, yeah. I haven’t posted in a while because we’ve been so busy moving. We’re not even done moving our stuff. You never realize the sheer volume of stuff you have until you have to physically move all of it to another location. Also, a queen size fold-out couch will always weigh roughly a metric ton. But before I get into that, let’s take a look at the final paint job in the smallest bedroom:

Pretty nice, right? Yeah, it’s really green, but I like it. We wanted a gender-neutral color for this room since it’ll end up being the nursery someday down the road. For now, though, it has a long single bed and will house a variety of stuff…musical instruments, etc.

The “Chocolate & Vanilla” room is now officially the “Neapolitan” room with the addition of nice-but-cheap bedding from Target. It serves as the primary guest bedroom as well as the office.

My computer/video editing stuff is now all set up in there, but this second picture shows how it looked in the middle of moving. At that point, my PC was set up on the floor…we had the cable guy come and set up the internet before we got a chance to bring over the desk.

I took these last pictures to illustrate the chaos of moving, but looking at them now I think, “Wow, that’s practically clean!” You should see it now. It’s a complete disaster area and it’s giving Jenn a daily dose of the cranky cringe until we get it straightened up. I give it a few weeks before we’re in any shape to have people over, live a normal life, etc.

That’s pretty much all I got right now. We’ve been actually living in the house all week and things are progressing slowly but surely. The next big project this weekend is to replace the kitchen countertops and re-work the cabinets under the sink in preparation for the dishwasher and garbage disposal that’re gonna be installed early next week. I’ll try to make sure to get some pictures of that action.

The Move Draws Nigh

2006-09-04T19:26:00.000-05:00

The painting is done!!!!!! Let's take a look at how some of the bedrooms turned out:

So here's the master bedroom. The wall the bed will be against is extremely purple and was originally dubbed "The Grimace" until my brother pointed out the negative aspects of naming anything in your bedroom "The Grimace". "Purplesaurus Rex" was deemed more appropriate. The other three walls are more of a lavender...closer to white. The overall effect is pretty nice, I'd say.

You might be able to see in this second picture that there's some drippy areas. Evidently the last owners weren't too careful with the paint, so any drips they left kinda become double-drips. Once we get furniture in there, it probably won't be too noticeable, though.

This third picture gives you a better idea of how that light purple color turned out. I enjoy purple, so I like the final result.

Here's the guest bedroom:

Now, we picked these colors based solely on looks. As it turns out, the names compliment each other...the dark brown wall is "Chocolate Sparkle" and the other three cream walls are "Vanilla Delight". We swear we didn't do that on purpose, but we're not above running with the idea. Jenn wants to make sure to put something pink in there so we can call it the Neapolitan Room.

I just realized that I never took any pictures of the small bedroom. It still has to be cleaned up, though, so I'll take some pics tomorrow. The wallpaper was surprisingly easy to remove!

We also attempted the faux finish we had planned for the kitchen. The idea was to "rag on" a caramel colored glaze over the yellow walls. Jenn, being the intelligent person she is, decided to test it behind the stove first. Judge for yourself:

Yeah. Meh. We scrapped that idea and shoved the oven back in place. The yellow is nice and bright on its own, especially when the sun comes in the kitchen window.

Still, we wanted to spruce up the kitchen a little more. Jenn thought the hardware on the cabinets were too generic, so we went to Home Depot and picked up 20 new handles. Here's what the old ones looked like:

Kinda blah. Just plain white tubes that blend in with the cabinets. Nice, but not...y'know...great.

Here's what the new handles looks like:

Ah, now these are nice. Classy like Ron Burgundy's San Diego. Of course, such a simple thing as replacing drawer/cabinet handles is not capable of being easy. As my Dad will inevitably sing during any given project "Nothin's ever easy, ever easy...". We started replacing the handles on the sink side of the kitchen. The existing holes were about a millimeter too far apart for the new handles to fit properly. Ok, no problem. I just grab my drill and widen one of the holes so it fits. I only have to do this for a few of them, so it wasn't too bad. 10 handles are now in place.

Then we go to try and replace the ones on the other side. The white handles there were identical at first glance before we went to the Depot to buy the new ones. However, all 10 handles on this side of the kitchen are smaller. By a quarter of an inch. Home Depot only carries our new handles in the one size. They probably have plenty of handles for sale that would fit these other cabinets, but none that will match the 10 we've already installed. Yeah. So, after consulting with my Dad (and being reassured that, indeed, nothing is ever easy) I caulked up on hole on each door/drawer and will spackle them in the hopes that they'll blend into the cabinet face after I drill new holes to make the new handles fit. The other most encountered reaction to this story is "welcome to the joys of home ownership!" ....thanks.

One thing that went well was the table we obtained from my Aunt Betsy and Uncle John:

This is it with the center leaf engaged...the process for putting it in is pretty awesome. I'll have to get a video of it and post it here. All the green stuff you see on the table and chairs is wrought iron, so it's all pretty heavy and sturdy. We're gonna repaint the iron black at some point soon and have already covered the fake pink marble with a tablecloth. With the addition of our current kitchen table, we may actually be able to accommodate enough people for a family dinner!

So, that's it for now. I finally figured out a way to stop that video below from automatically starting every time you load this page. I know it annoyed me, anyway. We're gonna start moving things in slowly throughout the week and should be moved in by the end of this weekend. Wish us luck!

Painting - Become the Flowmeister

2006-08-29T16:18:00.000-05:00

The painting continues unabated. My Dad has been painting the woodwork (baseboards, molding, etc) while we’re at work and thank God for that because painting that trim is extremely time consuming and aggravating. So far we’ve gotten the living room and dining room completely painted and the kitchen is almost done. With the new colors on the walls, this place looks like a totally different house. It’s starting to look like our house…and it’s actually “in the middle of our street”, so the song by Madness actually applies somewhat.

The painting actually started on Saturday, thanks to some friends that agreed to put in a grueling day of work for pizza and soda (and beer, but we didn’t actually drink any…we were tired enough as it was). However, my digital camera decided not to work that day (as is often its wont), so I took some video with John McGarvey’s Digital8 camera. I converted it to Flash Video, and I’ll attempt to post it here:

If it’s not working, make sure you have the latest version of Flash installed. It’s about 19 MB, so as long as you have a broadband internet connection it should play fine. The subtle differences in the white & off-white colors are tough to make out, but you get the general gist of it.

My family helped paint on Sunday and were an incredible help. We prepped the kitchen and got the first coat of yellow on it while my brother & my Dad painted the ceilings in the 3 bedrooms. I was feeling under the weather yesterday, so I settled for making sure the washer & dryer were hooked up and functioning instead of finishing the kitchen. I tested the washer and though there were a few snags at first, there were no catastrophic water-related errors in my washer installation. …which is always good.

I also was able to take some pictures yesterday. I banged on my digital camera until the battery compartment popped open and when I turned it back on, it actually started taking pictures!

Maybe you can see the difference in color between the ceiling and left wall here, but maybe not. Still, it shows off the nice shiny woodwork my Dad painted yesterday. This living room is now totally complete (though I may go through with a Q-tip and make every edge between colors perfectly straight).

You can definitely see the difference between the light wall and the white ceiling here. The brick red also turned out very nice.

Here’s my Dad washing out some brushes. The kitchen only has one coat of yellow on it here, but it still looks good. The plan is to lightly rag-on a caramel color to give the walls an aged look. We’ll test it behind the fridge or oven first, though.

This is the cold water line my brother helped put in for the ice maker in the fridge. It went really well and the ice maker works like a charm. These pipes leave a little to be desired…they’re not really mounted to anything as they travel down through the infamous crawlspace and into the basement. They may get replaced at some point, but that’s pretty far down the road.

I attempted to give you an idea of how the three colors on the first floor look next to each other here in these three pictures. However, the flash kind of ruins the effect. The last picture is done without a flash…and obviously without focus as well.

My wife Jenn and my sister Jen took some time on Sunday and painted this pantry/closet/thing using the colors from the living room. Looks pretty darn good if you ask me!

My Dad has offered to continue painting throughout the week, which will be an indescribable help. It’s very possible that the painting will be done by the end of the week and we can start moving stuff into the house over the 3-day weekend!

Crawlspace = Spookytown USA

2006-08-24T22:49:00.000-05:00

We were finally able to get into the house and poke around yesterday afternoon. We spent some time with my parents measuring the doorways, etc to make sure the fridge can get in (it can…with about a half-inch to spare). I meant to run through and get some “before” pictures and video, but we got caught up in other things. I should be able to do that tonight.

My good friend John came over and had a look around. He’s been doing contracting work off and on for a few years now, so he has some good experience in home maintenance. We got a better look at the mudroom floor…there’s four layers of linoleum, one layer of newspaper from 1991 and then moldy floorboards. We were able to get a view underneath the sloped and bumpy floorboards from a hole in the foundation outside. The wood around the perimeter of the mud room floor is pretty termite-eaten. So much so that a room-spanning metal support had just plain fallen out and now sits on the ground underneath the floor, split and rusting. John theorizes that this is why the back end of the room slopes so much. There’s not really much there to support it. That’s got me slightly concerned about bringing a washer into the mud room tonight, but it’s held together so far, I guess. Eventually, the whole floor will need to be ripped out, discarded and rebuilt. This time, we’ll make sure the floorboards are level and treated so that they don’t rot away and get eaten by termites like the current floor. We’ll add a radiator so that it’s no longer the only unheated room in the house. Then we’ll put down some nice tiles and pretty it up.

Another looming problem is the crawlspace under the kitchen. Our inspector had talked about there being “some wood” under there that would need to come out. That wood is pretty much termite bait and is basically inviting an invasion. Maybe I heard him wrong, but it seemed he was talking about it in a nonchalant way, like there were a few boards under there. No big deal.

Upon closer inspection last night, we saw that there’s an enormous pile of wood. It looks like someone ripped apart an entire room or two…wall studs, etc…and just dumped it all in that crawlspace. Ugh. Also, the pipes under the kitchen sink are pretty bad, including the pair of old pipes that were replaced but not removed. We were also thinking that the only place where we can install a dishwasher is where the other cabinets are…on the other side of the kitchen from the sink. All of this pretty much spells out one thing:

Someone’s going to have to go down there.

Someone’s going to have to physically squeeze through that small opening in the mud room and get under the kitchen. Now, the hole isn’t too bad, but the last time I checked I’m not the trim teenager I used to be. If it was high school me, it wouldn’t be much of a problem. The crawlspace is pretty deep. You can probably almost stand up under there. If you can get in, that is. And it seems like getting out might be even more…challenging (panic-inducing). John will probably have no problem; he’s kind of a lanky guy and keeps himself in pretty decent shape. But, as he says, it’s my house and I should probably have firsthand knowledge of how it works. And he’s absolutely right. I’m almost offended that there’s a part of my house that I don’t have access to. I’ll be sitting in the kitchen like some Edgar Allen Poe character being driven mad by the secret under the floorboards. What if there’s a minor plumbing problem under there? I shouldn’t have to call “Skinny Plumber” and have them charge an arm and a leg for something John and I could do on our own.

So, it looks like I’ve finally found something to motivate me into getting off my butt and exercise. I figure that wood has been down there since at least 1991, probably a lot longer, so it can wait a few more months while I drop some unwanted flub. In the meantime, we’ll either have to get a more expensive portable dishwasher or we’ll just have to eat off of paper plates for a few months. …or wash dishes in the sink, I guess. Who wants to do that, though?

Maybe when we finally rip up the mud room floor (probably at least a year or two from now) we can somehow widen the crawlspace opening. Maybe put in a little Being John Malkovich door and really clean it out and make it more storage space or something. At least make it more accessible…especially with all the plumbing, gas & electric that runs under there.

I just came back from picking up a few things that my Aunt Betsy and Uncle John gave us…a bed, a side table, a washer, etc., but I’ll try and add some pictures to this post as soon as I can.

Cardboard Chaos

2006-08-20T12:13:00.000-05:00

As of about 10:30 AM Friday morning, we are now officially homeowners! We've given the previous owners until Wednesday to get everything moved out, so we still can't get in there and get started. So, you know what that means! More packing! Thankfully, Ken is letting us stay in the apartment until the second week of September, so we can move at our own pace. Painting will come first, though, starting this coming weekend.

Since Jenn said we don't have any pictures of our apartment, I took some time last week and got some shots of every nook and cranny of this place. Now, of course, we were in the middle of packing last week (and still are) so the apartment is somewhat of a mess. Actually, that's a massive understatement. Still, I refuse to hold anything back or contrive some pretty falsehood to make this documentation of our move look presentable. To use a now ancient hip-hop description, I'm "keeping it real".

Let's start in the living room. Here's the view from where I'm sitting now:

The DVD shelves have been cleared, but the TV stuff is still put together. That's a necessity that will only be moved at the last minute. I guess the sword should be packed...haven't really thought about that. Meh, I'll just toss it in the car for one of the trips back and forth.

On the right is the front door and that opening on the left is the hallway to the bathroom & bedroom.

Now, I'll turn to the left....

That room over there is the dining room/office. Notice the Guitar Hero box is still accessible. You never know when you might need to rock out at a moment's notice. The PS2 is packed, but in such a way as to be easily un-packed in just such an emergency.

Let's get a closer look at the dining room/office....

This is the "dining room" half of the room. All the fancy glasses and china are now packed up in those boxes on the shelves. The table is my parent's old kitchen table from back before they got their kitchen re-done. That cabinet on the right was pretty convenient for storage, etc.

Let's see the "office" half of the room....

There's my dual-monitor PC (all ready for video editing just in time for me to have no time to use it). I had to have somewhere to put my anime wallscrolls. I don't watch much anime anymore, but Cowboy Bebop continues to be the best series I've ever seen.

Let's turn a little more to the right to see the rest of the "office"...

Not much else to say about this that isn't obvious upon first glance. More anime and geeky stuff. And a wine rack.

I'll turn a little more to the right again to complete the 360 view...

There's the rest of our china, which is now carefully packed away. You can see here back into the living room and there's the entrance to the kitchen. Let's see what kind of mess is in there, shall we?

Here's our little kitchen...though not as little as the one on the 2nd floor in this building. The stove is a pretty nice size and there's an actual dishwasher!!! That's something we'll need to get for the house ASAP. Until then, it's paper plates and red cups all the way!

Let's step in and get a closer look...

Now there's a familiar sight. A sink full of dishes. Like I said, these pictures will show it like it is, pretty or not.

Notice the big old picture of my niece Paige on the fridge. I believe that was left in the apartment when my sister's mother-in-law moved out. It's a cute picture, so we figured we'd leave it up.

If we turn to the left, we'll see the back door...

Or half of it, anyway. That's the door we use most, since we park out back. The bar that holds that curtain there keeps bending more and more and we can't figure out why. Weird.

Let's take another look at the living room...

Yeaaahhhh, look at that! And to think we still keep running out of boxes. This was last week and it actually looks a little more organized now...but not much.

At least the window treatments still look nice. I'm sure Jenn has plans for them in the house.

Here's a shot from the hallway. Not much else to be said about that.

Let's turn around and see what this hallway is all about...

If I could get these pictures to stay side-by-side, you'd get a good idea of how the hallway looks. Sadly, I'm not all that good with web stuff and can't interpret the html code enough to get it to do what I want. ...actually, lemme try a little Photoshop experiment. This should give you better idea....

Close enough. Anyway, there it is. I'll now turn around so you can see the other parts of the hallway...

The trumpet there was once Jenn's grandfather's (on her mother's side). It's pretty cool and obviously pretty old. There's even a band aid patching up one part of it!

Let's get a closer look at it from the dining room...

You can see into the bedroom a little here. The bathroom is on the right side of this part of the hallway.

This picture of Jenn was drawn by a man on the streets of Salzburg, Austria during her trip to Europe in high school, 1994. Pretty damn good. It cost about $30 in francs or marks or whatever they used in Austria back then.

Let's take a look at the bathroom, then....

If anyone's seen "Clerks: The Cartoon Show", you may recognize the Bear Who Drive Car. "Who is driving?Ohmygod, Bear is driving.How can that be?!" Good stuff.

After all that talk about not holding anything back, I'm gonna have to break my own rule. You won't be seeing the turquoise bathtub. Not only is the color just plain wrong, it's also not that clean at this point.

Here's some more of the bathroom...

It's a little small, I guess, but it gets the job done. Again, it's nowhere near as small as the one on the 2nd floor here. Yikes!

And now, the bedroom.....

Wow, what a mess! Notice the exercise machine. It doubles as a clothes hanger!! We really got our money's worth out of that thing! We do actually use it from time to time, but obviously not enough.

Here's what it looks like from the machine's point of view...

Holy crap! I thought that first picture was bad! It's a nice deep closet back there, which is good since it's one of only two closets in the whole apartment.

Wait a minute, what's that fuzzball in the closet?

Raven is an opportunistic cat. She's normally not allowed in the closet, which is why she gets in there whenever she gets a chance.

I'm not really what you'd call a cat person, but I gotta admit she's really well behaved...yeah, ok, and cute.

Here's a few pictures of the bedroom taken from the closet:

...and from the bed...

I was able to pack all those stuffed animals into one box! Good for me. On the right, you can see half of one of my grandfather's last paintings. It's a nice desert landscape that I had requested. I have a few of his paintings and his old piano to help keep his memory alive in our house.

And to complete the 360 view of the bedroom, here's the hallway view from the bedroom...

So there's the real (dirty) tour of our apartment in the middle of the throes of an ecstasy of packing and disorganization. This is pretty much how everything stands right now. On Wednesday, I'll make sure to take some pictures of the house, since it'll be the first time we see it completely empty. My brother Bill will show me how to run a water line to a fridge with an ice maker that night, so that may make for some interesting photos. The fridge gets delivered on Thursday and we should be buying the paint on Thursday or Friday to prepare for the painting party on Saturday.

Keep an eye out here for more updates!

Wow, man...the colors.

2006-08-13T22:16:00.000-05:00

Ok, I'm gonna get a little fancy here and give you a way to see the actual colors we're considering though Behr.com.

First right click here and "Open in a New Window."
Once you've done that, click on the big "Start ColorSmart" button. That opens up a new window.
Once that's open, choose the first option "Color name/number"

That will give you a space where you can enter in the name or code for a specific color. I'll give you a list of those codes, and all you have to do is copy and paste, or just type them in! Let's go:

Hallways = 350E-1
Living Room...

Front & Back Walls = 420F-6

Left & Right Walls = 420E-1

Dining Room...

Front & Back Walls = 200F-6
Left & Right Walls = 280E-1

Kitchen...

Base Color = 350B-5
Rag Color = 280D-4

Large Bedroom...

Accent Wall = 770B-7
Other 3 Walls = W-B-220

Small Bedroom...

Top Half = 450D-5
Paneling (Bottom Half) = W-D-420

Master Bedroom...

Accent Wall = S-H-660
Other 3 Walls = 660E-1

These colors may change once we get in there next week and get a good look at everything. Still, I think everything'll end up looking really nice. On a related note, we'll need all the help we can get when it comes to painting time! We're looking to start on Saturday Aug 26th. Of course, that's the same day as our big family reunion, so Jenn & I sadly won't be able to make that; and I realize that means we won't have family help that day. Still, I hope we can get as many friends together as possible that day and have a paintin' party! Beer and food will be provided...although most of the beer should wait until after the painting is done (drunk painting leads to lotsa mistakes, in my experience). Drop me a line and let me know if you can help! Thanks!

Inspection

2006-08-13T18:26:00.001-05:00

The house we're moving into is almost 100 years old. However, it's in incredible shape! 2004 must've been a good year for the current owners. In that year they replaced the entire roof, got all new windows, new first floor carpets, a new heater and had all the lead paint removed from the house. Currently, the only pictures I have of the house are the ones my brother took during the inspection. Let's take the tour!

Here's the front of the house. It's the one in the middle with all the people on the porch.

And, yes, that's our car there. The one without the hubcaps. It actually has two, they're just on the other side. If I had thought about it, I'd've parked facing the other way.

So, take notice that Jenn's dad (in the blue shirt) is sitting on a bench that's attached to the porch railing. Plenty of seating for front porch gatherings. Also, notice the walkway to the back yard. No driveway or off street parking to speak of, but that's a small price to pay for all the positives to this house!

Now, let's go in the front door...

The door you see leads to the dining room. The door you can't see (just off the right edge of the picture) leads to the living room.

The stairs that lead to the second floor are carpeted with a dark brown carpet that also covers the floor of the upper hallway. It's not too bad, but it'll probably get replaced with something lighter someday...the usual neutral beige carpet color, most likely. The ceiling of the stairway slopes up at an angle for a few feet before going straight up. This means that a large portion of the 2nd floor hallway ceiling is high above the steps. That'll be real fun to paint. Roller on a pole, anyone? The really tough part will be doing the edging. We may have to get creative with scaffolding or something. Yay.

Anyway, more about the entranceway. The floor of this first hallway is done in a rather nice laminated hardwood (so is the kitchen, but I'm getting ahead of myself). The hallway seems plenty large enough to get all of the large furniture in...couch, piano, etc. Good stuff.
Let's take the first right and see the living room...

There's me trying to get out of my brother's shot. Yet my lack of exercise betrays me and I'm too slow to get away. Anyway, here you can see the doorway to the dining room. The living room is a good size. Maybe not as big as the one in our apartment now, but it'll serve its purpose (at least until the basement gets finished! Ooo...again, getting way ahead of myself).

The dark brown carpet makes another appearance here. Combined with the unbelievably blue color on the walls, it ends up making the room pretty dark.

Although, if you take a look at this next picture, maybe that's a good thing...

Yeah, given a lot of light, that blue really jumps out atcha. More on the existing colors in a minute. From this angle, the door we just walked through is now on the right. The windows there look out of the front of the house. Notice the white mantle on the left wall. The wallspace below it was once one of several fireplaces that existed in this house at one time or another. Still, it makes a nice little shelf to put pictures on, so it stays.

Next to that recliner, you'll notice a covered radiator. That's right, folks, we got oil heat. It's supposedly pretty efficient, but oil costs an arm and a leg these days. The radiator heat also means that there's no existing ducts to be used for central AC. That'll probably cost a pretty penny as well if we ever want to put that in. That's probably a long-term goal, so we'll get by with window units in the meantime.

Now lets do a 180 and get a good look through that door to the dining room...

Wowee! That's some color scheme, isn't it? Taken separately, they're not so bad, but look at them all at once and yikes. Don't worry, that's the first thing to go. We're going to paint the whole place before we move anything in. The walls you can see here and the opposing walls will be done in the main color, while the left and right walls will be done in a color closer to white. I'll give you specifics about colors in the next post.

Since you're looking at the dining room, take notice of that door with the glass window on the left. It's a pantry, and evidently a pretty deep one at that. It goes back further than you'd expect. The large piece of furniture closer to us is in the spot where we plan on putting the piano. Then, closer to this blue wall is the the hallway entrance.

Let's get a closer look at the dining room...

Seems pretty spacious to me, though I'm used to a dining room doubling as my office here in the apartment.

On the wall you can't see, to the left, there's another white mantle and another radiator. Again, it seems like there used to be a fireplace in this room. The story goes that originally, this house only had the two rooms on the first floor. The living room and a kitchen. In the 20's, what is now the kitchen was added as an addition and this room became the dining room. I don't know if there was actually a fireplace here, or if there was some sort of wood burning stove, but there's three chimneys on the roof. Maybe the stove chimney was converted to a fireplace in the 20's and a new chimney was added to the new kitchen. That's what the inspector seemed to think...something along those lines. Anyway, now there's another shelf where we can hang stuff, so it's ok.

Let's turn around again and head into the kitchen...

Yep. Pretty much Creamsicle orange. No problem, it'll be painted over to serve Jenn's vision of a Tuscan kitchen.

Man, is it roomy, though. Like I said earlier, the floor is done in a very nice laminated hardwood. There's not a whole lot of cabinets, but you can see there's plenty of room to add more (over the fridge, for example).

Speaking of which, the fridge is not staying. That's a pretty big priority, so we're getting that ASAP. The stove seems pretty new...you can kinda see the green digital readout there. There's no dishwasher, so some of the lower cabinet/drawer space will have to be sacrificed to install one.

The door behind Maureen leads to the mud room, one of the major selling points for us. Before we check that out, though, let's see what's behind us...

Jenn just got a voicemail message. It was just some little girl with an upper respiratory problem saying "seven days". Musta been a wrong number.

Behind her you see our realtor Lee standing in the doorway to the dining room. The door behind me leads to the basement.

This picture really illustrates how sunny and bright the kitchen can be. Look at all the light that comes in the window to shine on the kitchen table. This is gonna be a really nice, friendly and welcoming Tuscan kitchen.

Another thing you may or may not've noticed is that all three of these first floor rooms have ceiling fans. They seem to provide pretty good lighting and will come in pretty handy in hot weather since we'll probably only be able to afford one big AC unit in the living room. Thank goodness there's a nice flow through all three rooms. Anyways, let's pull another 180 and step down into the mud room...

I guess the owners were in the first stages of packing...there wasn't this much stuff in here when we saw it the week before.

Anyway, you can see a little bit of the back deck from here. Also, as high as the ceilings are in the other rooms, this is even higher since you have to step down into the room.

The floor seems to be one big sheet of linoleum, but that's not the most important feature of the floor. Not only does it slope considerable towards the back of the house, it's pretty lumpy all over the place. The inspector seemed pretty worried about a specific spot, right in front of that back door, that seemed extremely soft. It definitely gives underfoot when you step on it. He said it could either be water damage or termites. Neither is good, but the latter is somewhat distressing. Yes, we did get a termite inspection. The place passed and the certificate said "No visible termite infestation or damage"...visible being the operative word. No one seems to know what's under that linoleum...whether it's wood or air or dirt. The only way to find out is to rip it all up...one of the first big projects we'll have to tackle after we get all settled.
They're taking the washer but leaving the dryer. Thankfully, my Aunt Betsy and Uncle John have a washer they can pass on to us. We also have another dryer offered by my sister-in-law's sister, just in case this 13 year old one decides to give up the ghost.

We'll check out the basement in a second, but first let's step outside and see the back yard...

The current owners built this deck instead of paying a professional, but it's really put together well. You can see the railings curl up a little at the ends, but that's really the only problem we could find. It's sturdy and level...and a nice place to put that patio furniture Jenn's dad gave us.

The yard itself is a pretty good size and seems relatively private. Behind that storage shed is just a bunch of trees and other vegetation. I really don't know what's up with that dog house on the ladder in the neighbor's yard. They do have a dog (a very nice and well behaved cocker spaniel) but it didn't seem like the type of dog to want to jump up there and walk along a ladder to it's house or carrier or whatever it is. The whole back yard is fenced in and there's a wooden gate that leads to that walkway to the front of the house. Looks pretty much dog-ready...too bad we won't be for a good while. *Sigh*...someday. Enough of that. Let's go back inside, and through the kitchen to the basement...

Not much to say about it. It's a regular old basement. The stairs are sturdy but extremely worn. The owners have had this place since the mid 90's and have never gotten any water down here. The inspector was stunned at how dry it was, actually.

The eventual plan is to finish the basement, of course. Tile floor, drywall, drop tile ceiling (I guess), etc. The only issue (aside from money) in my mind is how to work around the oil tank (behind the tan cabinet in the first picture) and the heater (blue box on the left of the second picture). I'd really like to put in a powder room down here someday, so maybe I can put it back there between the stairs and the oil tank. Who knows?

The heater itself is only 2 years old. The reason you don't see a hot water heater is because it's a small blue tank set into the ceiling above the regular heater. It's "Summer/Winter Heat," meaning it stays on all year long. The hot water is run through the heater itself...it only takes a second to get hot and you never run out of hot water! However, that means the heater gets turned on every time someone takes a shower. I assume that it doesn't do anything with the radiators in the summer, but it does spell more oil consumption throughout the year. Still, it supposedly uses a minimal amount of fuel and shouldn't impact the overall cost by much. We'll see, though.

Basement, schmasement. This post is already long enough, let's go to the second floor!

As we ascend the steps from the front door hallway, the first door you see is what will become the guest bedroom.

Pretty good size, nice closet, etc. I think we have an offer of a twin bed, which we'll put in here until we get a full one. We'll most likely have couples staying in this room more than anything else, so a twin bed really won't do. Still, a free bed is a free bed, and it'll definitely get put to use in the small bedroom (which we'll get to soon).

Not much else to be said here. There's some good neutral carpet in this room, so that'll stay where it is for a good long while. Let's get out of here and go to the next door: the bathroom...

Pretty nice bathroom. The blue color is fine with us, especially after all the bright pick and blues we saw in all the other houses in the area. The fixtures are relatively recent. The toilet is from the 80's, so it could be worse.

There's a window on that left wall that looks out onto the back yard. I'm never sure what to think about bathroom windows, having grown up in a row home with a windowless bathroom (only a skylight). Still, the bathroom in this apartment has absolutely no circulation whatsoever, so a window will probably be a welcome change. Also, it'll always remind me of one of my favorite Beatles songs, so that'll be nice. As long as some rich girl doesn't come in through it to steal a copy of my book or to stalk me or something, that is.

The wraparound shower is neat. Let's hope I still think so after showering in it everyday.

The next room after the bathroom is the small bedroom...

This is the only room in the house with wallpaper. It'll go, of course. On the wall to the right (outside the edge of the picture) is a door leading to the master bedroom. This will serve as an office for now...my computer will go here, etc. When the time is right, this room will become the nursery. It's small, but it should be able to accommodate my desk and a twin bed.

We'll get rid of the wallpaper but keep that white chair rail, or whatever you want to call the lower half of the wall.

Interesting side note: there's small pipe that runs up the side of the wall just inside the hallway door. The inspector said that it's connected to the gas system. Gas lamp maybe? Did they still use those in the early 1900's? I dunno.

Now for the last room on our tour, the master bedroom...

The leftmost door behind me is one of the closets. The middle door leads to the hallway and the wide-open door leads to that small bedroom. The door on the far right is one of two closets on that wall. They were built out from the wall, which leaves an alcove in between. The right closet (not pictured) actually overlaps a window a little bit, so it's moved out from the front wall by a foot or two.

Again, the carpet is a nice neutral color. Hopefully we can find the same exact carpet when we do the hallway and stairs.

The first thing that struck me about this room was it's size. It seems large, but I guess it isn't any bigger than the bedroom in our apartment here. I suppose the high ceilings add to that effect.

We plan on being in this house for about 10-15 years. We also plan on having about 3 kids. So, once they're a bit older, we'll probably wall up that adjoining doorway for everyone's privacy.

So, that's pretty much it. That certainly was a lot of typin'. Hope you enjoyed the tour, and check out the next post for our color choices.

Previously on....

2006-08-13T12:44:00.000-05:00

So, here we are. I guess introductions are in order. I'm Matt Waldron...

This is my wife Jenn...

And, uh, this is our cat Raven...

Jenn and I have been living in an apartment building owned by my brother-in-law Ken for the 1.75 years we've been married. (She's actually lived here for a few years.) In this time, we've been able to pay a good portion of the debt that has crippled us for years. Taking our improving financial status into consideration, we decided that this summer would be the best time to buy a house.

We had already turned down an offer from my Mother-in-law's friend. This woman's mother was moving out of this nice twin house and she wanted to make sure that it went to a nice young couple that would take care of it. However, the price she really wanted was about 40K more than we could afford, and no legal amount of seller's assist would bring it down to our level. More than that was the fact that the roof needed to be fully replaced within 3 years and the hot water heater in the basement had recently exploded, filling the basement with about 8 inches of water for over 24 hours. The likelihood of mold becoming a new freeloader in the house was pretty high. If we had gone with that house, we'd be a whole lot poorer than we are now...and would be for much of the foreseeable future.

So, we started seriously looking at houses for the first time on July 8th. It was the weekend after that long week full of rain we saw here in the Philly suburbs in early July. We saw 6 houses that day...5 of which were row homes in various states of disrepair or mold infestation.

Now don't get me wrong...a row home is fine (row home/town house/cluster home/whatever). I lived my entire life up to college in a beautiful row home and never voiced any complaints (except maybe about the walls being pretty thin). I love my parents house and I attach no stigma to that type of home (of course, it's not like I can afford to, anyway). However, most of the homes we saw that day were cramped and dark with damp, foul smelling basements. Some of them had finished basements with powder rooms, etc, but they still seemed to need a lot of work...or mold removal. Some were still wet from the rain a few days before. That's never good.

One house seemed to have been rented out to a few people that may have been going through a rough period in their lives. The basement there was pretty bare except for some randomly sawed off plumbing sticking up from the concrete floor. It had a room in the back where they evidently kept a dog. Its chain was still there, wrapped around the door jamb through a ragged hole in the wall. It was obvious that the dog constantly chomped at the doorway and wasn't very well house broken. Upon inspecting the inside of that room, we saw a hole in the one wall. We tested it, and sure enough it was perfectly fist-sized. It was not a happy home. Also, it definitely had Wacky Shack stairs into that basement, a la the Simpsons where Bart and Milhouse buy that factory.

So, most of the houses were a disappointment and we started to wonder if we'd ever be able to find an acceptable house within our price range. Then we saw it. I think it was the second or third house we saw that day, I'm not sure. It was the only twin house in our price range within our defined area, so we figured there must be something horribly wrong with it. As it turned out, though, the house ended up being very charming and extremely well-maintained! We finished looking at the other houses, unable to stop unconsciously using the twin as the basis for comparison. When we got home, we both agreed that we'd probably never find anything quite that good in our price range again and decided to make a move on it the next day.

And here it is, almost exactly a month later and the closing date is at the end of the week! Holy crap, we never realized this kind of thing could move so fast. So now, we're in a frenzy of packing, often forced to shun any and all social contact. But more on that in a later post.

I'll end this first real post here. I have a few more on the way (with many more pictures) as I try and catch up to present events. This blog is really meant to be a record of the move from our old apartment to our first house and the subsequent improvements made to said house...mainly to keep our families updated and to have something cool to show our kids years and years from now (assuming Blogger doesn't get dumped by Google before then or whatever). If other people enjoy it or get some helpful info from it, then so much the better.

Test

2006-08-09T16:43:00.000-05:00

I am testing my new blog.