Take My Breath Away

(Does the title give you a good Friday earworm? You're welcome.)

We've been moving stuff one truck-load at a time over the last few weeks, and we were SO EXCITED to go see the progress on the floors last night. 

The good news: our contractors had finished filling and sanding, and had applied at least one coat of the Swedish finish. (what is it, Swedish or Finnish?)

 Fir changes color when exposed to light, so I don't expect these colors to be as vibrant forever, 

but they're still gorgeous.

I'd forgotten we'd asked them to refinish the upstairs hall closet, so that was a nice surprise.

 The bad news: we'd of course done our research on what finish we wanted, but in the excitement, had forgotten there's a reason that Swedish finish (what is it...oh never mind) is banned in at least one state. We'd brought a load of stuff over with the intent to put it in the basement...but you could smell the fumes from outside the house. We braved them long enough to pop in and take pictures, but there was no way we could stay in for more than a minute or so. We ended up putting everything in the garage. According to the internet, the fumes are worst during the first 24 hours, but can linger for up to six weeks after, depending on the ventilation. We've got all the windows open, and will probably hang out (outside, of course) over the weekend with the doors open and fans going, but hopefully it will dissipate quickly enough that we can get moved in soon!

Grouting Day!

What is today? GROUTING DAY! 
What do we do on Grouting Day? WE GROUT! 
What do we grout? THE KITCHEN FLOOR!

Also, we sleep in a bit, but only because it's Saturday Grouting Day and such an exciting day deserves a wee bit of celebration. Sleep is the ultimate celebration around here.

No more chatter! On to pictures!

 

When we finished laying the tile on Wednesday, it was about ten o'clock at night, and in the last few sheets, it's definitely obvious. Okay, obvious to me. Jesse ensures me that it's barely noticeable at all. (Which I don't believe, since this morning he said my socks matched my shirt, when one was green and the other was gray. He may have been mocking me, though.) 

ANYWAY. We had to chip a bunch of mortar out from between the last few sheets, because sleep deprivation made us sloppy. And then we got to smear the goop around. 

Laying the tile took us about six hours, between cutting and chipping and, you know, going to work, eating and sleeping. Grouting the tile? Less than two. We originally thought the tiny tile would be a complete pain in the ass to deal with, but instead it's been surprisingly forgiving. A lot of work, but none of it difficult.

 

LOOK AT THIS! I'm totally in love with it. We used "pewter" grout, and I was afraid it was going to end up being more of a brown-gray, but it's a lovely dark silver color that balances the black and white tile perfectly. 

None of these pictures really do it justice. It looks AMAZING. The wood floor contractors start work on Monday, and I can't WAIT to see how great this little house looks when they're done.

 

Special Delivery

Look what came yesterday! It's the wood for the upstairs floors!

Mortar City Madness

The kitchen floor by the numbers:

Kitchen square footage: 230
Drywall screws: 530
Boxes of tile: 25
Sheets of Hardiebacker: 15
50 lb bags of mortar: 7
Home Depot buckets: 3
Drill bits broken: 2
Screwdrivers burned out: 1
Pairs of gloves worn through: 1
Painted-over mummified mice found in electrical outlets: 1

After spending virtually all of our after-work free time this week scraping, chiseling and sanding the linoleum and particle board off the kitchen floor, early Saturday morning (actual morning - we're Old People now, so no overnighters for us) we FINALLY FINISHED the demolition!

 The better the inside of our house looks, the more garbage ends up in our yard.

All that particle board? It's now outside in a pile. It'll go to the dump eventually, but right now we're really just hoping it doesn't rain. And that no one calls in a nuisance complaint for trash and debris. 

Or, for that matter, a noise complaint regarding my impact driver. The Hardieboard backer we're using requires 35 screws to hold it in place. The floor squeaks I'd been chasing around have been miraculously fixed with the backer board installed, despite my earlier unsuccessful attempts to eradicate them - my method involved tapping around with my foot to locate the squeak, then attacking it with eight or nine drywall screws. With the backer board, nothing is going to squeak, ever again. 

And speaking of squeaking - once we pulled out the fridge to pull up the particle board underneath, I noticed something small and gray lodged in the side of the uncovered outlet box. My first thought was that it was a misplaced cat toy or blob of flooring glue. Wrong on both accounts - it was a mummified mouse that the previous owners had PAINTED OVER rather than try to remove. "I'm taking a picture of it!" I said, to which my alarmed husband replied, "You're taking it outside is what you're doing."

It's my blog, and if I want to post a picture of a 

mummified mouse, YOU CAN'T STOP ME.

I really really wanted to sew it a tiny dress and pose it like one of the creepy naturalist dioramas at Paxton Gate, but I also really really want to stay married, so...the mouse was properly disposed of. Sigh.

After working twelve straight hours on Saturday, we'd only gotten about a third of the backerboard mortared into place. On Sunday morning, Incredible Builder Mom showed up like Prometheus bringing fire and sustenance to the shivering cave dwellers, and informed us that not only was our mortar way too thick, the directions on the mortar package, despite having dire warnings about adding too much water, were really more like guidelines than actual rules. As such, we'd been working with mortar the consistency of cold congealed oatmeal, and it needed to be more like chocolate pudding. No wonder we had blisters and incredibly sore arms! 

It just looks like I'm attacking Jesse with mud. 

With Mom's invaluable help, we got the rest of the backerboard down and taped, and ready for the tiling to begin. 

 All taped up and squared up for layout.

Jesse was the mortar mixologist. 

This picture was taken approximately 45 seconds before my cordless drill started smoking. 

Apparently 50 lbs of mortar is too much for a tiny drill motor.

Sadly, it's much much harder to mix without the drill.

Laying tile with STYLE. 

We got INCREDIBLY LUCKY in that not only is the kitchen itself mostly square, 

so was the island, and the edges will only require very minimal cuts. 

Here we are, working on tiling ourselves into a corner. 

And this is where we called it quits for the day.

IT'S GOING TO LOOK AMAZING.

We're not done yet - we still need to lay out and cut the tile along the very edges, but we're 90% done with the tile itself, and the kitchen already looks about a thousand percent better. Although it's going to really suck to grout, the tiny mosaic tiles were very forgiving in terms of placement, and we knocked out seventeen boxes of tile in the space of a couple hours. 

On the agenda this week: 

- Delivery of new wood for the upstairs floor

- Lay out, cut and mortar the rest of the kitchen tile

- If time permits, finish stripping paint on garage door windows, cut remaining boards and finish garage door

The last part is sort of critical, because Dad's coming home this weekend, and he's going to want his miter saw back to finish Mom's greenhouse, and I am going to cry. Seriously. I may need to stand on the deck, forlornly waving a white handkerchief as he drives it away. 

For next weekend: 

- Grout! We're going to be grouting until our arms fall off. Then we're going to grab the float with our teeth and grout until those fall out too. SO MUCH GROUT.

Land of the Free

Since Portlanders are largely hip to recycling, a common way to dispose of unwanted things is...The Free Box. The Free Box is the best thing in the world. Cleaning out your garage, and don't want to lug it all to Goodwill? Put it all on the curb, slap a "Free" sign on it, and it'll be gone by nightfall. Scrap metal? It'll go so fast you'll hear a sonic boom. Clothes? Half my wardrobe was free. Housewares? Fully two thirds of our furniture, most of our plates and cups, most of our knicknacks...all free. And when we have things to get rid of? They immediately go in a Free Box. 

Give to the Free Box, and ye shall receive from the Free Box. It's all about karma. I take my Free Box karma very seriously. I've fed it well, and been well compensated in return. 

So, given that it's the beginning of the month and people are moving, and it's sunny outside and people are cleaning out, the pickings lately have been extremely good.

For instance, our amazing Craigslist discovery last week:

It's a scavenger's paradise!

Craigslist is a brilliant invention. Someone wants to get rid of things? I want to acquire things. And last week, I was looking for...things...and I stumbled upon a listing for salvage wood. The owner of this house, built in 1893, is doing a major renovation, and had a huge pile of lumber that was up for grabs. We happen to need some salvage tongue and groove fir flooring, so our contractor won't have to use new fir when he patches our downstairs floors. Since our Free Box karma was sufficiently high, we found more than enough usable pieces, as well as a few chunks of cool old-growth beams and 2x4 sections that will surely come in handy for something. 

Among the debris was also remnants of the original fabric wallpaper, but it was too crunchy and fragile to save.

A couple days later, I even found a fantastic old dresser. (No picture. I, um, forgot I was supposed to be blogging.)

And finally, I met Jesse at the house last night, and he'd gotten me a present on his way over:

Where's the beef? Oh, right, it's...not free.

Ah, the Free Box. We will have to donate generously during our move to repay all this wonderful bounty.

Doors, Floors, Chores and More!

Okay, first of all, when I decided to start a renovation blog, that decision occurred when we were not actually renovating. Now that we're right in the grimy thick of it, I am exhausted. I don't remember the last meal we've had that wasn't takeout. I don't want to remember the last time I vacuumed the apartment. Finding my USB cord to download photos from my phone? Just...hasn't happened. I told Mom last week I have no idea how she and Dad managed to build a house, work their jobs, and raise two stubborn kids. "That's why it took twenty years," she said. Touche, Mom, touche. 

Rather than recap the last two weeks (two? wait, what? when did that happen?) in infinite detail, I will instead give you the glossy highlights. Mostly because even with photos, I'm not sure I could tell you what happened yesterday, much less last weekend. 

First, and foremost, has been my big project, the....

Doors

I have expensive taste. We all know this. I am also very set on getting my way. Combine this with two years' dreaming about the perfect house and almost no budget, you have a recipe for frustration. We need a garage door. (As my sister pointed out, the blue tarp-door-monstrosity - while thus far effective - is not really the armored car of doors.) A cheap aluminum door starts at $800. The lovely carriage doors I want start at $5000 and just go up from there. 

When I saw those prices, I'm pretty sure I Hulked out into the Incredible Builder Girl right there in the aisle at Home Depot. As Incredible Builder Girl, I am thoroughly convinced I can do anything, and do it perfectly, for almost no money. (Incredible Builder Girl has some issues with reality. Luckily, she is married to Gently Practical Guy, who specializes in saying, "Are you sure that's a good idea?") We were THIS close to settling on aluminum. 

But then Incredible Builder Girl surged back, and remembered the wisdom of Incredible Builder Parents: it's just a stick. It's just several sticks, put together in a specific pattern. And Incredible Builder Girl has an engineering degree, so she knows where the stresses occur on the pattern, and how to mitigate them. And Incredible Builder Girl has been salivating for an opportunity like this for her entire life, a chance to prove she's really worthy of the title. 

The inspiration 

(source: Pinterest)

The reality 

(source: our back yard. Go ahead, be depressed.)

We did not buy an aluminum door. Instead, we, erm, liberated a good portion of my dad's power tools (we brought pizza!), and then spent an entire Saturday driving around three counties (yep, count 'em: Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington) collecting building supplies. 

Figuring no one knows carriage door hinges like the people who sell horse tack, we first went to Coastal Farm and Ranch to check out their hardware. They had a small selection, but it wasn't exactly what I was looking for. (Neither was I looking for the baby rabbits they were offering. SO FLUFFY. Unfortunately - or fortunately - Gently Practical Guy prevailed. ) Onward to Building Materials Recycling LLC, which is my new favorite store, despite being about a thousand miles away from our house. If we ever need windows or trim or old wooden ladders (yes, yes and yes!) this is definitely the place. 

God, I love a good warehouse.

We bought a lot of things, but not as many things as I wanted. Sighhhh.

Sunday, being the traditional day of rest, was spent hanging out with friends and watching them scrub the gunk off our floor. Thanks guys!

Heated construction started bright and early on Memorial Day. In order to make the new doors, I wanted to either salvage the old frame or use it as a template, which meant that when the tarp door monstrosity came down, the garage and its contents were completely unsecured and open to the alley (albeit behind our chain link rolling gate). Even though we weren't really storing anything valuable in the garage, once it was open, I didn't want to leave until we could lock things back up. 

Timberrrrrrr! And good riddance.

This definitely wins the award for Best Use of Spray Foam 

Insulation as a Structural Adhesive.

This is my new impact driver. (God, I love my impact driver.)

 My lovely framing assistants, Jesse and Faith!

Putting on the plywood backing, and starting to strip the paint from the old windows.

During construction I learned two lessons. First of all: kerf. This is the bit of wood that's taken off by the saw. I have always been advised to measure twice and cut once. By midafternoon on Monday, I was ready to scream. I was measuring things four and five times, making the cut, and then finding I was an eighth of an inch off in one direction or another. Apparently, depending on which side of your measurement mark you cut, the kerf can make your piece of wood larger or smaller, leading to bouts of frustrated swearing and mildly alarmed husbands. So. There's that. 

Lesson two: old buildings. We were SO GOOD about making sure the doors were square. We even took apart one of the frames and redid it from scratch when it didn't perfectly meet my L square. Those doors? Not a degree off 90, on any corner. They were PERFECT, and yet every time we held them up against the garage, the frames were flush to the bottom and gapped at the top. The hinges just wouldn't line up. Did it occur to us that the garage was crooked? Nope. Around 7:30 we eloquently and profanely called it a night, and screwed the damn things together and then directly to the garage. 

The only way they're getting in is if they have my sawzall. And they can't ever have my sawzall.

Still not ideal in terms of daily storage, but a much more effective burglar deterrent. 

Later that week, someone asked us if our indeterminately-aged garage was square itself. Oops. Upon further investigation, it is most definitely not, and neither is the concrete beneath it. Most plansets have "Adjust to field conditions" on them. Our whole house is apparently becoming a field condition.  

After another weekend of work, the doors are now up, and even function as doors. There was less swearing, and more sawzall. (I love my sawzall.) We ended up getting new hinges, since the hinges we got at the warehouse, while definitely strong enough, required too large a gap between the door frame and the garage. I even got some of the fancy hardware at Home Depot to spruce it up a bit. 

Almost done!

After much scraping and the welcome infusion of a heat gun (I love my heat gun) I finished stripping one of the windows, and got it in place. Yes, it doesn't have any glass. Apparently the temperatures required to boil paint off of wood are also the temperatures at which glass easily shatters when gently touched with a paint scraper. (And let's face it, I'm...not gentle.) We will be adding opaque acrylic later. I'll continue the cedar panels around the the window, but right now, the floors take priority, and the garage will have to wait. 

Whew. Now it's on to....

Floors

After letting it marinate in the garage for a couple of weeks - we specialize in avoidance around here - we finally took the carpet, padding and all the, ah, feline-anointed baseboard to the dump. SEVEN HUNDRED POUNDS OF CARPET AND WOOD. And now it's gone. Woo-hoo!

Proof that the carpet really is almost as old as I am. And not in a good way.

Tada dump tada dump tada dump dump dump...

We discovered there is at least one place in this world that smells worse than these carpets. Yikes.

Git 'er dun!

And buh-bye.

Since the west end of the living room was still a little funky - and not in a musical way - we liberally sprinkled baking soda on the subfloor and let it sit for a couple of days - more avoidance, there - and then scrubbed it with vinegar. Remember when I said pulling up the carpet padding was the most disgusting thing I've ever done? I lied. This was gross and wet. Mud, made from twenty-five years of sifted dirt and sloughed-off skin cells. Yecccch. 

The cable installation guy didn't even blink at all the white powder coating the floors. 

I worry for his health.

Floor goo is icky. That's why we made our friends help clean it up. Thanks, Jonny!

Only the bravest of men vacuums that goop in khaki pants.

Once the mud was scraped up, things looked much much better. So much better, in fact, that we called our flooring contractor and asked if he could just refinish the wood, instead of replacing it. He's incredibly wary about the whole thing - his previous work seems to have been in high-end condos, so he keeps saying, "You know it won't be perfect, right? It's going to have scratches and dings and stains I can't get out, right? It's not going to be perfect." And we're okay with that. We know it won't be perfect - it will have character. People pay big bucks for character. And at this point, we'll be thrilled just to move in. 

What you can't see is how it doesn't smell like cat.

There's still a bit of a funk to the room, so I'm liberally dousing the floors with enzymatic cleaner as a final resort. We're pretty sure the cat urine is gone, and any residual odors will go away when the floors are sanded and sealed, but...better safe than sorry. Half of the funk could actually be the kitchen linoleum that's also being torn up, too. 

Ahh, the kitchen floors. The previous owner had laid down cheap wood-look laminate over the original 80s linoleum, probably just to spruce things up for the market. Jesse pulled up all the laminate, and it joined the carpet during the dump run. We looked around. None of the building material reclamation places would take anything other than new, unopened boxes of laminate. 

How it looked before we took possession.

Jesse taking a well-earned break from scraping.

So now, we're pulling up the linoleum, and trying to get it done in time to put tile down this weekend. The new wood for the upstairs floors is being delivered next Monday, where it needs to sit for a week acclimating to the house's ambient temperature and humidity, and then our contractor will be back in the following week to install the new flooring and refinish the existing. Our goal is to have the tile done this weekend, so the adhesive and grout can cure before getting stomped on. (We are nothing if not ambitious.)

Since we decided rather abruptly that we wanted the tile done before the wood floors were started, we needed to actually FIND tile. Our requirements:
- Available immediately
- Available in a large quantity, since our kitchen is ~225 sq ft
- A design or pattern that fits the era of the house
- As cheap as possible. Borderline free. Preferably something the store pays us to take.

Originally, we'd been thinking wood, but since we're not redoing the entire downstairs, tile is much much cheaper, and I'd started daydreaming about something like a classy slate-gray herringbone:

Guh. So pretty. (Source: Pinterest)

Unfortunately, with our timeline (tile must be available immediately), and since all the dedicated tile stores close before I get home from work, our only store option was...Home Depot. And Home Depot does not carry gray slate rectangles as part of its open stock. They did have large gray porcelain rectangles, but they were way too modern for the look I wanted. 

In the end, we decided on this:

Mom recommended we avoid white tile, small tile and mosaics. 

Naturally, we went for all three. (Source: Home Depot)

225 sq ft doesn't seem like a lot, until you realize it's 25 boxes of tile.

Then, you become those people asking to buy ALL THE TILE. YES, ALL OF IT.

625 lbs of tile in the back of a truck. Thank the fluffy baby Jesus for trucks.

We are by no stretch of the imagination restoring this house to be historically accurate - we want it to be our home, not a museum - but this tile is still appropriate for a house built in 1923, and plus, it's going to be super cute. Yes, this is what I do now, making baby noises at tile.

Since neither Jesse nor I have ever tiled before, we're enlisting the help of a master tiler: Incredible Builder Mom. When I called to ask her if she'd be willing to help us this weekend, she squealed. God, I love my mother. The last time I heard her make that noise was when I called to tell her we'd gotten engaged. (This gives you an idea of how important renovation is in my family culture.) 

So, there's our weekend. Sound like we've been busy? Well, we've also been up to...

Chores

Everyone's continually told us that owning a home keeps you busy. Oh lordy, yes it does. But luckily, we have the most amazing social network to help us. In addition to our out-of-town friends Jonny and January, who stepped in to scrape vinegar and baking soda goo off the floors, we also have a Guardian Lawn Angel:

Is it inappropriate to say that my gay friend is an 

absolute expert at making straight lines?

Janet is fierce about edging. We had no idea. And our new yard represents a vast, untrimmed paradise for the edging-obsessed. 

Faith, Jesse and I are much less yardwork-inclined.

Two weeks ago, our dear friends Faith and Janet showed up and proceeded to beautify our front yard. Tragically, Janet's beloved electric edger ran out of juice, and she was forced to abandon the project halfway through. This past Sunday, we woke up to a frantic text: Can we finish edging your yard???? And by the time we got to the house, our Fairy Yard Mothers were already hard at work. I do not have a picture of them working because Janet was kicking up rocks and dust with the edger, and I decided my time was much better spent working on the garage doors than playing paparazzi. 

We have the tidiest lawn on the block!, and the best friends in the world.

Thanks, my lovelies!

Meanwhile, earlier in the week we'd discovered that in one of the upstairs bathrooms, the sink was leaking around the drain. (We'd hoped to make it at least a month without any plumbing issues. No such luck.) 

What's the issue? Well, for starters, the gray pipe was connected to 

the black pipe with duct tape (which we promptly removed). 

I'm no plumber, but even I know that's not up to code.

So we took a picture of the whole apparatus, drove it to Home Depot, and handed it to the nearest orange apron and said HELP. And the orange apron pointed us in the right direction, and four dollars and change later, we had some parts and a general idea. Jesse did the install, and there was NO MORE LEAKING. Voila!

Think that's all? HA. We are crazy, busy, industrious people. We are also dearly in need of a nap. But there's still...

MORE

But not much more. 

We took a break from renovation to see X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was awesome. 

Just not as awesome as the Transformers dinosaur in the lobby, though. 

Here, we model the latest in home renovation fashion. 

I bought a pair of overalls. Jesse is right - they are incredibly comfortable. 

(But he's always right.)

Whew. Is that everything? I'm sure I've forgotten something. I'll try to be a little better about posting on a regular basis but...we're constructing. And sometimes that takes precedence to taking pictures and then writing about said construction. 

Cheers!