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.

Yesterday, the landscaping company delivered a truckload of compost and 3 pallets of sod, so today Kelly and Jack are hard at work laying the sod on the newly ivy-free dirt lawn. While they are working, I thought I would post some pictures of an interesting discovery we made after the ivy was removed.

Notice those two pieces of concrete bracketing the sidewalk? Yep! We unearthed some ancient planter boxes! They had been completely covered in dirt and ivy that we had no idea that they were even there.

Because we had already been thinking that we wanted to somehow flank the sidewalk with some kind of flowers or bushes (what we will do exactly is yet to be determined…) we will not cover them up with grass, but leave them as they are.

But eventually they will most likely be covered up with dirt again, as they’re buried pretty deep, and Kelly wants to make the border to the pathway be more organic, with curvy lines, not straight like the concrete planters.

A few weeks ago, Kelly’s mother gave him her Texas certified master gardener’s advice: if you are going to redo your front lawn this year, now is the time to do so!

Indeed, we have been dreaming about a new front yard for quite a while now. The yard when we moved in was totally overgrown with ivy ground cover. Actually, according to some of the current and former neighbors, the front yard has been that way for at least 25 years.

 

The ivy, Vinca minor, I believe, is an invasive ground cover plant that will take over completely. While when we first moved in, it looked quite lush and Kelly was excited to only have half a mowing job to do, we quickly grew to really dislike it. For one, you really can’t use the yard at all – no one can toss a ball around in it, or play in it, or sit and relax in it. Also, during the heat of this past Texas summer, the ivy all turned brown, dry and ugly. While it started to turn green again when the weather got cooler, we still hated it. It just looked ugly and scraggly and pitiful.

So this past Saturday morning, Kelly and I set out to attack the Vinca in the front yard and pull it out, roots and all. Kelly started pulling out the vines on his hands and knees, using an old steak knife to jab at the roots beneath the soil, and I used the rake to get the years and years of old leaves out of the way so he could see where the base of the plants were. After an hour and a half, we had cleared a section maybe 3 feet by 10 feet and began to despair that we would get the ivy removal done over the weekend.

That’s when we started to wonder whether someone might wander or drive by looking for work so we could get an extra pair of hands. Since moving into our neighborhood, we have occasionally been approached by some down-on-their-luck men who are looking for some odd jobs to do in exchange for money or food. We started to eye every truck that drove by to see if they were handymen.

Fortunately, not too long after that, a truck did slow down as it passed, and Kelly called out to the men in the truck to see if they were interested in work. They were, so after getting out and looking around at the job, we negotiated a flat fee for removing all the ivy and even scraping off all the overgrown brush along one side of the house as well.

They left to get their tools and when they got back it took them a mere 4 1/2 hours to bring the front yard back to dirt. This father/son team has a roofing business during the week and pick up odd jobs over the weekend. We were very impressed with the work they did and will most likely call them again when we need our trees trimmed, or when we tackle the jungle that is the back yard.

In the end, we were very glad that we chose to give up doing the ivy removal ourselves, given the amount of time it would have taken us, and the great job that our drive-by laborers provided. We are hoping to lay the sod next weekend, so having the job done in time is a big relief.

When we were in New Braunfels a couple of weeks ago, Ellen dropped by the Restoration Hardware outlet store and picked up a little something for the front porch to replace the horrible ceiling fan that was on the porch. I think this thing must be left over from when people used to sleep on the front porch back before air conditioning was invented.

Anyway… Ellen found this very craftsman style porch light on sale for half off. The house, especially the porch, has enough craftsman design elements that if we keep using this kind of fixture, it will help to define that style. There are also matching sconce lights that we can use to replace the two lights on either side of the door, once we save a few pennies for them.

I removed the nasty old fan fairly easily. There was one stubborn screw in the old plate that took about half of the entire project time to get out. Mostly because I couldn’t find my vice grips. I really, really need to clear out the workshop area and get it organized so I can find stuff. And build that spice rack…

I reused the screws to hang the new plate, adjusted the chain length so that the light hangs higher than the top of the front door but can still be seen from the sidewalk, wired it up (used the old wire nuts as they were still in good shape) and mounted the light. I needed to do a little tweeking and twisting on one of the chain links to get the light to hang square to the porch and then I was done. I even reused one of the bulbs that was in the fan light fixture.

I can’t wait for tonight to see how it looks in the dark!