Building Our Nest

When we were clearing out the nursery, I finally got around to actually measuring the dimensions of the room, the windows, doors, etc. So you can imagine my surprise at how wildly off I was when I created the previous floorplan for the nursery. Here’s what I had pulled out of my head:

This is how the room is in actuality:

It is actually much larger than I had thought and more square than rectangular. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the following things:

• We will be able to fit a rocking chair next to the crib against that wall
• There is room for an 8×10 rug rather than a 5×8
• Having just the far wall designated for built-in cabinets is plenty. Kelly convinced me that wrapping around the wall will just be more hassle than it’s worth and will inhibit opening the door all the way

Kelly has now gotten the skim coat on the ceiling. Next step, patching and sanding – then on to the window trim scraping!

It might seem kind of strange that “progress” to us means that we now have an empty room. But, progress it is, since the room we designated the nursery until now has been the craft/office/storage/”attic staging area” room. But this week we (especially Kelly) worked hard at clearing it out so that we could get started on the demo (scraping the popcorn ceiling, window trim and ripping up the carpet).

Here are some pictures of the cleared out room, ready for demo:

And this evening, as I was writing up this post, we had even more progress! Kelly got to work scraping the ceiling and it went a lot faster than he expected! All the bumps are gone and he says that he can’t see any cracks or seams on the ceiling, so he’s not sure why the popcorn was put up in the first place. (Hopefully, this bodes well for popcorn removal in pretty much all the other rooms in our house too…)

Of course, it made a huge mess in the room, but that’s just part of progress in any renovation, right?

Ellen hinted a post or two ago that I would be forthcoming with a great big story about the driveway gate project. Now that it is mostly finished (my projects seem to have a habit of getting about 93.54% complete) I will do an installment series about the process.

I’m breaking it down because, honestly, working in an aircraft hangar in the summer heat is frying my brain and body. I barely have enough energy to watch last night’s Daily Show, let alone do some creative writing about home improvement that sums up the project with a wry observation about life in these modern times. Maybe I expect too much of myself as a writer…

Speaking of heat, I had planned to get this project done before summer kicked in so that I could do nice indoor projects like trimming and painting the stairs with the air conditioner cranked way up. I am pretty seriously reality challenged when it comes to project time estimates, though. Cost estimates, too. The adage about everything taking twice as long and costing twice as much really is true.

The main reason the gate project has taken so much time is that I also have a habit of making things way more elaborate than they need to be. For instance, I decided that the thing to do for the gate was to do all the construction with joinery, instead of plain old angle braces and screws. I used blind mortise and tenon joints on the frame, tongue and groove planks for the fill that are nested into a groove running all along the inside of the frame. I knew this approach would take much longer, but it may have quadrupled the time I thought it would take.

Delays and postponed completion aside, I am very glad I chose to build it the way I did. The finished product is much more attractive than a run of the mill gate and I am very proud of my accomplishment. The whole reason I wanted to fix up a house is that it is leisure time for me. Not some task to be accomplished, or mountain to climb because it is there, or war to win.

Home improvement is one of the things I relish. It restores me. When taking time to build the world around me, taking time is part of the experience. It is both journey and destination. Taking time allows you the freedom to do the job right and enjoy the process. Delighting in a squarely hung gate door or the precision of my measurements (115″ opening filled by 114.75″ of gate, oh yeahhhh) is what I love about fixing up this house. Getting it right will always take longer than doing it just to get it done…

Look at that, I managed to write about life despite myself. Next time I’ll tell you the story about how I got started on the gate.

Kelly

Some of our blog readers have been in the house (even slept in the guest room), some may have seen the house tour video we made a year ago, but I just realized lately that some of my readers might have no clue how our house is laid out. So for all you readers who are wondering, I drew up some house floor plans recently (using floorplanner.com). Just as an FYI, these are so not to scale, though the proportions are fairly good:

The first floor

Major things we’d like to do on the first floor:

• renovate the kitchen from top to bottom
• as a part of the kitchen reno, move the washer and dryer upstairs
• the den needs a lot of work, including electrical and insulation, new carpet and some fresh paint
• strip and stain the built-ins in the butler’s pantry
• tear out and re-fit the pantry with better shelving
• new drywall and flooring in the back hallway off of the kitchen
• Pull up carpet in front hallway and install new a floor (the one place in the house that the hardwood is in horrific shape…)
• finish fixing the trim in the living room
• de-popcorn-ify all the ceilings that have it (this also goes for 2nd floor)
• possibly board & batten walls in the dining room?
• re-caulk and paint and finish windows (this also goes for 2nd floor)
• other things I’m probably forgetting

The second floor

Major things we’d like to do on the second floor:

• Pull up carpet and refinish the hardwood floors
• Paint all rooms, fix trim etc.
• Turn the hall closet into usable space for stackable washer and dryer
• Renovate both bathrooms with new tile and fixtures
• Create built in storage in office/craft room (which will hopefully turn into a nursery soon)
• De-texturize Jack’s bedroom walls
• Have I mentioned the windows yet? Do you see how many windows there are in this house? That project alone will take forever… *sigh*

Oh, and of course, finish the stair project! Could our list get any longer? I really don’t think so… This doesn’t even include the outdoor projects (i.e. the jungle that is our backyard and the almost ramshackle-y two story shed that needs fixing up.) We seem to have been focusing a lot of attention on the outside – particularly the front yard – lately, but that’s just because it’s prime gardening season around these parts. However, another outdoor project got shoved to the front of our to-do list recently, so you can look forward to Kelly posting about building a driveway gate – whenever he finishes it!

By the way, if you’re a new(ish) reader of our blog, don’t be shy, say hi! What kind of projects do you have on your list?

Who wants to see some gorgeous wood on our refinished stairs?

You can see at the very top of the last photo that after the last coat of poly was dry, Kelly started covering the stairs over with paper, so that when we paint the risers, we won’t have to deal with cleaning up drips of paint. It started to hurt his back and knees, so he only got about halfway up the stairs.

But that was enough for me to start priming the risers and the trim.

This whole process of finishing the stairs is going to take a while, as it includes spackling, sanding, caulking, priming, painting, cutting quarter-round and installing it, painting some more…

But you can already tell the difference it is going to make:

While my parents were here in town, they wanted to help with the stair project. My dad helped to pull up some carpet during the first phase and then he waited for a few weeks while Kelly worked on the sanding part, which as I mentioned, took a lot longer than we had anticipated.

The plan was that my dad would come over in the morning after we had all gone to work and stain his way down the stairs and let it dry before we got back home from work. We had bought a water-based stain so that it would dry more quickly, and it really did! I was home from work one of the days he applied the stain, and it was dry by the early afternoon. And since I was home, I was able to get some pictures of my dad in action, working on the stairs.

One of the things we had been worried about was that the raw wood had some areas that were darker and some that were lighter, after sanding away the lacquer stripe. And even after the first coat of stain went down, you could still see some lighter areas:

But we shouldn’t have worried – after the 2nd coat of stain, the color was perfectly even and dark and gorgeous!

(yes, there are more posts coming! Next up: adding the poly…)

Sanding the stairs took a lot longer than Kelly had been expecting, because of that stripe of varnish running down the center of the stairs, that had been under a runner at some point in the past.

Kelly started in on the sanding a few weeks back, but quickly discovered that the varnish was gumming up the sandpaper pads for the circular sander he had rented. The smaller palm sander that he owns worked better, but using the smaller sander was taking forever.

After a number of hours and many more sandpaper pads, Kelly took the advice of one of his coworkers and used a lacquer thinner to help strip off some of the thick lacquer so that the sanding could go quicker. And it did!

So here are a few pictures of the gorgeous raw wood.

And get this! The treads going around the corner are one solid piece of wood!

Up next: staining the wood…

We began the process of ripping up the carpet on the stairs a few weeks ago, when my parents were in town. I was so glad to see that nasty carpet go.

And we were very happy to find good wood underneath all that carpet! We also uncovered evidence that the stairs had previously looked like what we want to do with them: stained treads, white painted risers.

However, there had also been a runner on the stairs, which meant that there was a thick stripe of lacquer on the treads, which made the sanding process a lot longer than we had wanted.

More about the sanding process in the next post!

We have already done quite a lot of work on the staircase refinishing project, including ripping up carpet, sanding and putting down two coats of stain. But before I blog about the process, I need to show you what we were working with in the first place.

Here are the bottom steps of the staircase, which are in the hallway off of the living room. Check out the cool bench seat! It currently holds a bunch of crap that we have thrown in there in tidying up before people come over to the house…

The paint is all peeling off, the carpet was horribly dirty and stained and generally, the stairs were just unappealing.

We have already replaced the faded red curtains that came with the house, painted a red accent wall next to the bench seat, hung some pictures and a coat rack and replaced the landing lighting. At this point, I thought we needed to catch the rest of the landing and staircase up with the other things we’ve done.

Because frankly, this staircase is horrible and needs major work:

So, here is the plan. The staircase treads we will refinish in a nice walnut color, and we will paint the risers white. Sort of like this:

Picture from Apartment Therapy

We are also planning on painting the rest of the walls a light gray color, and keeping the trim the same bright white as the risers. Kelly and I are still debating on whether to paint the trim detail on the banister around the bench seat with that same gray with white trim detail. I’m for it, Kelly isn’t sold yet. We’ll let you know how it goes…

I [Kelly] asked a guy I went to school with (a friend from junior high and a classmate all the way through college) who is a landscape architect what he thought would be the best grass for our situation. That situation being about 70% shade and hot as the inside of a toaster oven in the fifth season in Texas, other wise known as August.

For those who don’t live here, August really starts in mid May and usually doesn’t end until the final bits of September and often runs right into October. It doesn’t get hot like Arizona hot. It just gets stiflingly warm and then stays there. Maybe a ten or fifteen degree difference between three in the afternoon and three in the morning. Temps during the waking hours average around 90-95 for several months on end. It works on you like a water torture or like adding a pound a day to a weight on your chest. The first cool breezes from the north are oh so very refreshing. We really love the coming of Fall around here. And, according to my state certified master gardener mother, Fall is the time to sod a yard in Central Texas.

Anyway… so I asked my friend about the best grass for the area and he said there are two choices. St. Augustine and Zoysia. He said that St. Augustine is a water hog and is prone to disease, even though you’d think with a name like that it would be perfect for the fifth season. I also remember as a kid that, even though it looks nice, it is kind of prickly and not pleasant for little ones to roll around on. And in case you didn’t know, we plan to roll around on some grass with some little ones some day, so you have to think about these things in advance.

The Zoysia (pronounced zoi-see-uh), has a silly sounding name but is a hardy grass from Asia and requires very little water. It is thinner and softer so it passes the crawling-through-the-grass test. The only caveat is that we were told to expect to pay one-and-a-half to two times as much for it. I called Barrerra Landscaping and Supply and they had it for only 50% more than the other stuff, so hurray! Ellen and I added three cubic yards of compost, since we got a deal, and I called my buddy Josh, who has a huge gas powered tiller he said I could borrow.

All of the stuff showed up on a Friday afternoon and Jack and I got to work spreading the compost right after dinner. Wanting to get the compost spread before morning, we worked until about 9:30pm by the light of the front porch and with headlamps strapped on. One of the neighbor guys said we were “hard core” for working in the dark. The thing is, once the grass goes on palettes, it has to come back off within a few days or it kills it. No time to waste waiting for light to come back in the morning.

After a mug of hot coffee the next morning, I filled the last low spots with the remaining compost and fired up the tiller. What a beast! That thing chewed through the ground like it was a stale Oreo cookie. The awesome thing is, in addition to several inches of fresh compost, the ground had been covered in leaves every year for over 25 years while that Vinca vine was on there. After mixing it all together with the tiller, we have tons of great soil just waiting for the sod to be laid down on it.

Next step? SOD IT! Sorry, couldn’t resist. Jack would bring me sod rectangles from the palettes and I would carefully remove any last debris from the soil and smooth it out level with my hands and then put the sod in its place. Really, that is about all there was to it. It is just that there was SO MUCH of it to put down! We spent the rest of Saturday getting the smaller patch of grass done and then had something or other to do that afternoon. As a result, less than half of the grass went down on the first day.

Sunday went about the same at first, but my brother Skip came over to help out, so things went a lot faster. Ellen had to work Saturday, so having her help as she lugged the grass patches over to me as I placed them was great. With a larger crew, we worked at a much better pace and most of the rest of the front was done by dinner time. A happy surprise was that we seemed to have about 25% more grass than we estimated it would take. I don’t know if the sod company just tossed on extra grass since the sodding season is pretty much over or if my math skills need serious revision. The upshot is that we had enough left over to do the side yard and the “tree lawn” as folks from Northeast Ohio call the little strip of land between the sidewalk and the curb. I love the term and have willingly added it to my vocabulary. Most of the extra sod went down Monday night after work.

We have been watering regularly, but not too much, for a couple of weeks now and it really looks nice. Some of the tips are starting to get higher, but I have been told not to mow for quite a while. It seems that the the roots grow about the same as the blades and stop growing when the blades are cut. The longer we wait, the better for the roots.

Lots of folks from the neighborhood say it looks great and they always ask what kind of grass it is. I smile and try to pronounce it properly, but I always get a puzzled look and a “What did you say?” in return. I don’t care what it is called, I’m just glad to have a pretty lawn and no more vines.