Upstairs: The Next Frontier

I know it's been almost a week since my last post. We were gone for the weekend, and then I didn't really feel like writing. We have been covering a lot of ground, though. Here's the list.

1. Pool. 18 3/4-quart jugs of bleach last week plus 24 the other day have been dumped in. It's looking ever so slightly less green, and all kinds of good stuff, including algae-covered leaves and a dead caterpillar, has been floating up. Bimart still can't figure out why bleach sales are up 400%.

2. Yard. Yesterday we ripped out a few more dead camellia bushes, raked more leaves, and generally did more picking up. The back yard still looks like a warzone, but we can only do one thing at a time.

3. Lately, that one thing has been the upstairs. We put oil-based primer over the wallpaper of the landing a few weekends ago, and finished off the primer in the big bedroom upstairs yesterday. Today, we put the paint up. White suits this room very nicely, at least for the time being. The paint might not be the most dramatic difference for the room, though.



As you can see from the video, we ripped back some of that nasty old carpet to discover distinctly vomit-colored padding, beneath which lay beautiful red fir floors!!! (Sorry if the sound is weird on the video; I can barely hear it on my computer.)

So we went to town, ripping up that carpet and yanking staples out of the floor. Then I stuffed all the carpet and padding out the bathroom window upstairs, which was basically the icing on the cake. Please, have a look.

Somehow, our house manages to photograph exceptionally well. I can't figure it out. The floors do not actually look as nice as they seem to in the pics. But if they were refinished, they could be as drool-worthy as the floors in the office, which would be a lot more tempting except that I remember what a royal pain it was to deal with the downstairs, and I didn't even do most of the work. Plus I have no idea how you get a 400-pound sander up the stairs.

I digress. For now, we are going to get a rug to put up there, so it's a bit cozier, and a bed and some nightstands and a dresser. It will make a very nice guest room until we enter Phase II of renovation, which involves ripping out all the walls (which are fiberboard, which is composed of sawdust and glue and a lot of pressure to meld it together) and actually insulating the house. We do not have insulation currently. It's handy, if you like to freeze. Or have exorbitant heating bills. I don't really recommend either option.

Unfortunately, I didn't take a before picture. This (farther down) is from last April, when we first looked at the house. (It's not really that unfortunate, now that I look at the picture. What's unfortunate was that wallpaper. And the carpet. Ick.)

P.S. If you're wondering why Todd's home in the middle of the day, it's because lost his job. He's working from home now, which is rather convenient.

Decidedly late.

I had intentions of writing about all our adventures in houseland, but then upon returning from Thanksgiving in Chicago, I got a little busy. In the shuffle of moving, the video of the inside of the house got moved to an external hard drive, which is....somewhere. But here's what the outside looks like:

[

In particular, Trevor (Todd's sister Kate's husband, who also happens to be a brilliant craftsman and our general contractor) and I spent nearly a week acquiring a much more intimate knowledge of the then-unfinished red oak and red fir floors of this house than I ever had any desire to.

Trevor took the lead on the project, renting the machines, whining about how expensive they were and getting us a better deal, sanding for days, and applying the clear oil-based polyurethane we decided to go with. I pulled carpet tacks, vacuumed, helped sand, breathed a lot of fumes from our propane shop heater (these were the pre-heat 40-degree-on-a-warm-day days), breathed a lot of mineral spirit fumes, and pointed out puddles of poly as Trevor applied. After the sanding sealer was put down, we saw how the floors would look at the end. I was amused to discover that they look exactly like some other wood floors I'm familiar with: those of my parents' house.

When I wasn't breathing fumes and getting in Trevor's way, I spent my time in the back bedroom, an approximately 12x12 room that Todd and I will use until Phase II of renovation (the still-under-committee-review upstairs dormer window). The back bedroom sported at least three, and in some places four, layers of wallpaper. After doing my research, I tried several methods of wallpaper removal. In the end, I settled on a combination being the best.

After peeling off as much dry paper with a putty knife as I could (which was remarkably therapeutic), I scored the surface with a PaperTiger so that the solution and steam could penetrate more deeply into the paper. Then, following Mom's advice, I mixed up a batch of warm water and cheap fabric softener. The problem with this was that my solution was originally too weak. You'd probably want a 1:1 or 2:3 ratio of water to fabric softener. This I sponged onto the roughed-up wallpaper. Sidenote: this is pretty messy work. I used long dishwashing gloves and put down drop cloths. When buying drop cloths, buy thick ones. I got a few that are canvas on one side and pvc-rubber on the other. The paper and glue that comes off the walls is messy and gloppy, and it makes cleanup easier if it's not all over your floors. I tried to work in sections of about five lateral feet at a time (we have eight-foot ceilings) and not work too far ahead of myself. If you bite off more wall than you can chew, it just ends up drying before you get there. No harm done, just a little work wasted.

After letting the fabric softener solution soak for a few minutes, my Wagner Steamer was boiling and spitting water everywhere, so we were ready to go. (Another sidenote: I thought I'd be smart and mix a little fabric softener in the steamer. It kind of worked, but it dribbled tons of water everywhere. I figured it wasn't best for the baseboard or the carpet, so I quit. If you're on a tile surface though, you might consider it. I also don't know if it could break the steamer or not...try at your own risk.) I used the large steam plate most of the time (about 8"x11") and held it to the wall for 20-30 seconds. The key here is working slowly. We used the mini-steamer (which Todd referred to as "purse-sized") for trim along windows or small areas; it works much faster because it's more concentrated.

For cleanup, I found it worked best to a) wear gloves when picking up all the wet, gloopy wallpaper, and b) leave it overnight to dry a bit and do cleanup in the morning when you start again. I know it runs contrary to cleaning up messes after you make them, but if you can do this, it makes the whole thing more pleasant.

After the walls were done (two weeks after I started; it was probably about three or four full days) I wiped them down, knocked off any leftover bits of glue, spackled all the holes, opted to leave the quarter-sized chunks of plaster that had fallen off the top of the ceiling on one wall in favor of crown molding, and prepared to paint.

Here's what that looked like, pre-paint. Wahoo!!



I put on my painting clothes and marched down to our friendly Home Depot. $85 later, I was headed home with brushes, rollers, two gallons of gray Glidden Gripper (tinted for dark colors), two gallons of Behr flat enamel in Sailboat, and grand plans of having a painted room by sundown. Life happens to plans, though, and Todd and I were happy to have gotten one coat of primer up by bedtime.

Primer-ed, the room looked like this:



One coat of paint in, we were all a bit worried. The supposedly navy Sailboat looked like this....



I was still happy though.

One week, three rollers, and an extra gallon of Sailboat later, we were positively ecstatic to have a room that looked something like we'd envisioned. Several lessons learned:

1. They tell you to tape off trim every coat. We cheated. We did every other. I got away with this by using a very sharp utility knife to razor the edges before taking the tape off. I don't exactly recommend this method, but if you're impatient and ok with a bit of imperfection, then it'll be just fine. I can't even see where I did it now.

2. Paint in daylight, especially with dark colors. There was blobby paint, visible only after it was dry. This I remedied with a little 150-grit sandpaper before the last coat. Everything looks great now, but you just can't see what you're doing without bright natural light.

3. Just use new rollers. Maybe I'm the dummy here, but it seems like we made a bigger mess trying to save our rollers.

In the rest of the month or so since we closed, Trevor has redone the fireplace with red brick (that we got a great deal on--clearance!!), our chimney guy, Gary Matheney of Jacksonville, OR, has been hard at work fixing the chimney and replacing the flue liner, Metal Masters installed our new gas furnace and air-conditioner, the floors are dry, we moved all our stuff in the weekend before Christmas, we're buying furniture, our electrical service was upgraded to a 200-amp breaker box (from a 60-amp double-tapped fuse box), and we have a local phone number. I also cut down a dead tree (which our wonderful neighbor chopped up for us), we raked several months' worth of oak leaves, bought and painted molding for the bedroom, ordered a new door for the crooked slider, and we almost installed a new front door. We've been busy.