The Semi-Reveal: New Windows!

So a few weeks ago, this happened:

In the rest of the house, we now have new windows! In case you're blind or not particularly observant, the left one is new and the right one is old. Little bit of a difference, huh?

Dining room, obviously not finished and the shot's pretty blown out.

Same, but you can see the muntins better. House looks much cuter from the outside (or it will when the siding is fixed).

The living room is AMAZING. We left the shade down all the time because the window was so gross and etched, which made it even darker than that room is already prone to be. It's nice having it up. I have to figure out how to trim the shade because it fit the six-foot height of the old window. The new living and dining room ones are more like four and a half feet tall.

And of course, my favorite: the office. I love looking out the window at the trees up the street while I'm working on the couch in the afternoon.

These are also triple-pane windows, which should be extremely energy efficient and (we're hoping) cut some of the road noise when they're all sealed in and finished.

Salvaged Wood Delivery

It's not every day that your contractor delivers a trailer full of wood for your salvaging, reclaiming, pilfering convenience. Or that he helps you pick through the wood (which was on its way to the dump in his trash trailer). I think he thinks I'm crazy, though he did note that replacing this redwood deck cost over $400 in lumber, which means I hit the jackpot: A ton of 2x6 redwood that's mostly in pretty good and perfectly weathered condition.

 Also salvaged the same weekend from a local lumber yard (where I know the guy on duty did think I was nuts for fishing out scraps and asking how much they were). I think he felt sorry for me on account of my evident mental instability and gave them to me for free. That piece of true 4x4 is for my kitchen table (currently in development).

 He saw scrap lumber, I saw lamps. Potentially very bug-infested lamps, so Todd bug bombed them in the pool shack to ensure no creepy-crawlies came to make their home in my guest room. The texture on these is super rough and really awesome.

 I've made it as far as removing a ton of old rusty nails and screws from the wood and giving it a good scrubbing to remove loose dirt, moss and other substances of which I have no need to know the nature.

 One other suuuuper exciting thing about the above picture: SAWHORSES!! I bought some folding aluminum sawhorses at Lowe's a few weeks ago and LOVE them. I'd been needing sawhorses for a long time and decided that this was a good time to make the investment of $34, knowing there was a lot of baseboard painting in my near future. It was a good call.

OMG we have a garage door

On the spectrum of posts that I put on this blog, there are some pretty piddly ones. I painted something, I screwed a vent cover into the wall (wait, there's one of those in this post...), I planted tomatoes that are producing the most miniature of all pink brandywines ever seen on planet earth (this is actually happening and it's super sad). 

This is not one of those posts. No, my friends, this is the post where I tell you that WE FINALLY GOT A GARAGE DOOR!!!! GAH. It was installed today and it opens and it closes and we have garage door clickers for our cars. It's also super smooth and quiet.

If you have been reading for a very long time and have a questionable level of confidence in our abilities to finish what we started, you might remember that our garage hole looked like this when we bought our house. Well, technically the people who lost the house took their tarp with them, so we just had a big hole. NOT ANYMORE!!

Here's another big accomplishment. We had this attic access in the upstairs bathroom and mulled over for months how to fill the hole. Finally, I measured and ordered a big cabinet from Home Depot (which repaid all my spending over the years by giving my credit card to criminals...thanks a lot, guys. I digress.) Then I spent a few months mulling over how to secure it while leaving the attic semi-accessible. So, a semi-permanent installation. Sometimes I work slowly.

Two weekends ago, I cobbled something together using a few leftover hunks of 2x12 I've had for about two and a half years, just waiting for the right project (packratting pays off) and a lot of 3-inch screws. A lot. It is fairly level, but since the walls are kind of goofy, a lot of caulk is also going to be required to finish this one off. 

Here it is trimmed out. I primed it this evening but my phone died so I didn't take any pictures of the primed door. It's ok; not perfect but decidedly better than a gaping hole into the untamed frontier of the attic. After much consideration, I decided it'd be better to just frame the whole thing with casing instead of trying to do baseboard around the bottom. I'm not a great finish carpenter.

Ok, now, about that vent I screwed into the wall. This was actually kind of a pain and I felt pretty clever after I was successful. In the guest room, the drywall doesn't extend enough around the vent cover to give much to sink a screw into, so I had to drill through what I believe to be a flange around the register behind the drywall. I tested my little theory and was met with (rare) success. Now we don't have to warn guests anymore that if they hear a loud crash right next to their heads at night, don't worry, it was probably just the vent cover falling off.

The other attic door that'd been haunting me is also headed toward being finished. I added the decorative shaker-style trim to this door and have been slowly working on the mud to finish the drywall patch we added above it. You may remember before that it looked like this. I primed this tonight too but it needs more wood filler and sanding before I can paint it. The mud needs to be finished before priming, painting and then installing casing.

And now for fun, a few shots from Dancin near Jacksonville.  

Pretty decent wine and great flatbreads. Nice way to spend a Friday night.

Tune in next time to hear about the other REALLY BIG project that we're finishing!

My nemesis, the staircase

Once upon a time there was a dreadful old house with a hideous staircase (in a house purchased by two 20-somethings who probably should have run screaming from it).

It had weird, western-themed wallpaper, a sturdy but utilitarian railing and carpet that looked like someone had cruelly skinned a muppet turtle and glued it to the floor. There really are no words to describe whatever that thing is hanging from the ceiling (and may still be there but under a giant and temporary paper lantern).

But we primed and painted and ripped out the turtle muppet carpet. Several years later, we ripped out the primed and painted walls, had the floors finished and had drywall put in, and last week I sanded, primed and painted the railing.

 SOO much better! (These are just the primed pictures; the paint looks a lot smoother and more consistent.)