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.

Productive garden + new apartment

It's been six weeks (and change) since we moved. We're happily settled into our closet (as I somewhat affectionately refer to our apartment) and brought the last carload when we came back on Monday. It contained, among other things... and also these...

which are the chairs and table that I decided to strip and stain shortly before we moved. Did I neglect to mention this project? Oops.

Though I'm fairly used to things going wrong at this point, pretty much everything possible went wrong with this project. In addition to my stripper chemical not working very well and it (of course) taking longer than I expected, the stain didn't take very nicely to the wood (probably due to the remaining bit of finish I couldn't remove -- refer to picture of chairs above) AND we got stuck in Texas for three extra days, which deleted my margin to finish the project.

So when we went back a month ago, I finished staining and put a first coat of polyurethane on things. (With the dry time, that was all I had time for.) This time, two more coats, then we brought it back. It's sitting on our deck to let things dry thoroughly, and so it doesn't gas us while we're sleeping.

It doesn't look as good as I'd hoped, but I don't think the average person would think it looks horrible. Except for that one chair. I'll put that in the corner where you can't see it. Also...I only did three chairs. I got so fed up that I decided to just skip the fourth. It's in the attic, halfway unfinished...whatever. Stupid project.

We finished a few other things around the house...painting the window that's been primed pink for a year, caulking some seams, painting around the front door...just little stuff. I have a few pictures (mainly flowers) to post...
Dwarf dahlias (above) and morning glories (below)
Giant sunflower + seeds
And here's Todd, holding the first apple from our tiny tree. This is his Red Delicious. I planted a Macintosh.

I also wanted to show you our new apartment. People have been asking, and this is definitely easier than emailing pictures.

So...you come up these stairs
and then turn left. In front of you is the bathroom and on the left of the little hallway is the laundry "room."

If you don't go that way, you make a u-turn and this is what it looks like...From the kitchen looking back the other way...
(That's our little bar counter in the left corner.)

Sorry that's so dark...
This is from the top of the stairs again. We have a nice little deck with a sliding glass door.
Lastly... my "office" which is a definite downgrade from my previous setup, but not that bad...
The pantry, which I LOVE...I've never had a pantry before. It's great to have a place to put stuff. (And stockpile.)
And the kitchen. Nice high windows face northeast and let in light all day. We also have nice views out the slider and to the southeast (respectively):

Playing with knives

This is what it looks like our our dining room window. The street sweeper actually came earlier that day. Talk about a thankless job.

It's officially fall here in Southern Oregon. Most of the trees' leaves have started changing color, late afternoons are chilly and nights even chillier, my office is crowded with potted plants that will be spending the winter indoors and we fired up the fireplace last night for the first time while we watched the Ducks wipe the floor with USC.

This afternoon I began work on fixing my office window. You might remember that it is falling apart...the glazing is cracked and old and the panes are dangerously close to just falling out. Naturally, I used a few how-tos from This Old House, located here and somewhere else I can't find. I scraped old paint and knocked off dry putty for an hour and a half or so, then cut myself with the very sharp knife I was using. I had it coming, though, and I've gotten pretty good at reacting quickly and calmly to accidental self-inflicted injury. Anyway, after that, the light was starting to fade and I was feeling pretty irritated, so I called it a day. Hopefully Trevor will be able to come and work on it sometime this week, while the weather's still sunny.

Last night, I worked on building a shoe rack for our "laundry room" (in theory it should be, but since we are still minus one washer and dryer, it gets quotes). I think it came out rather well, and it will definitely provide some much-needed relief from the shoe pileup. Cost: $7, not counting 2 hours labor.And another view...

Having Trevor's giant fancy new chop saw making it all but impossible to walk around the laundry room: not really priceless, but I'm glad he lead me borrow it.

Massive productivity with only one mishap.

As I probably have not mentioned, our friends from college (Kaylin and Daniel) are relocating from Alaska, and they're spending this weekend with us on their way to Texas. On Tuesday, we leave for Bend for a few days, and when we come back, we will be bringing my family with (they are here for vacation). There is nothing like knowing company's coming to motivate a flurry of activity. Here's what was done today:

1. Our awesome neighbors' friend cut down the cedar tree in our backyard. It was well on its way to dead, and it was also blocking a lot of sun from the pool. It was a real whopper, like 50 or 60 feet tall, and you can watch the footage yourself below. I am notoriously bad at calculating when things are actually going to "timberrrr" so of course I'm almost mid-sentence when I cut myself off to yell.



2. Look how cute our little garden is! I'm still waging war on earwigs and slugs, but my beer traps seem to be working. I've caught a lot of earwigs. Who knew frat boys and garden pests had so much in common?


3. Speaking of exploding plants, check out a) the raspberry


and b) our tomatoes, pepper and zucchini. They were but tiny starts just a short while ago....oh, they grow up so fast...
4. Lest you think I have only accomplished things inside, I give you this!

Also, this!

No, it's not merely a towel, hook and vent cover. I hung the hook, so that we don't have to put our towels on the toilet while showering (just seemed more civilized). That vent cover has been waiting to go up since, umm, February, and I'm really glad that that's done. And the towel rack is basically the same story. When we discovered a hook on the back of our bedroom door, I sort of lost motivation to put up a towel rack. But again, in favor of looking civilized...

5. Don't have a pic of this, but I put up our new address numbers outside. They're pretty generic, just Times New Roman numerals in brushed nickel, but it's all straight and nice now. Those have been sitting around next to our front door since March.

6. Lastly, I hung the curtains again in the office. When my mom and I wallpapered two months ago, I had to take them down. Putting up a curtain rod is real pain, especially since I thought I'd be all tricky and hang them off the window to make the window look bigger (and not block light). Well, I miscalculated how long the rod was, and spaced the holders like four inches too far apart, so when I tried to hang it, the rod separated into two pieces. Ooh, I was mad. Mainly because now I have two holes in the wallpaper that are kind of obvious, which was EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid. And don't give me the "measure twice, cut once" baloney. I DID measure twice. Just not the curtain rod. Anyway, looks cute, huh? Kate gave me those little wooden boats, which I love.


And now really lastly, I leave you with a shot of the pool, patio and fire pit. Todd has kicked some serious algae butt in the past month, and our pool is now almost crystal clear. Major props to him.

What's new as of 3.22

Here's what we accomplished last week.

Busy work

I give you Exhibit A. I warped no fewer than five screws, trying to install the bamboo shade in the living room. They included the cheapest screws EVER and I ended up using some small ones I had left over from door knob installations. (I'm not sure what that says about my door-knob-installing skills, that I had leftover pieces...) Anyway, the shade is up! And the sheet, while quite a statement, has been retired.

The shade didn't go up without a fight, though. It is 71.5 inches, as is the space it went into. That's great, except the brackets on either side stuck out about a quarter inch each, so I had to use a variety of tools, including a saw, a box cutter, and something Trevor referred to as "tin snips" to hack the blind down so it fit. I prayed the whole time I wouldn't slice a finger off and have to drive myself to the emergency room. This whole process of measuring, drilling, hanging and hacking took a few hours, which was a few hours more than my time estimate of 20 minutes. If only I could get paid to underestimate things...

We'll also be putting curtains up. Print is yet to be decided, though I am thinking along the lines of either chintz or a formalish vine-y flowery print, the classification of which I am not familiar with.

In other news, our front door is now working. The knob had a rather unexpected design that the instructions failed to explain (once again, Kwikset gets a 0 out of 10 on instructions) but we got it worked out.

Other little things accomplished (none of which were exciting) were putting pads on the dining room table and chair legs so they don't scratch the floor to bits, and on the baskets in the bathroom, so they don't scratch the vanity to bits. I also made a pot of soup and cleaned the bathroom. Impressively domestic, huh?

Drywall!

Before we get into house progress, last night was the first night we had dinner that we cooked here! Since we still don't have a stove (no gas yet) I crock-potted a chicken (a whole one, which I've never done before...it was interesting...) with some potatoes and carrots and stuff. Other than being something of a small milestone (eating dinner other than takeout, frozen buffalo chicken strips, and toaster-oven fare of toasted cheese and...umm...toast) it turned out pretty good.

I spent part of yesterday trying round two of washing the windows.  A few weeks ago, I tried warm soapy water, which was a failure.  Yesterday, I tried a combination of baking soda and white vinegar, to remove what I believe are lime or calcium or something deposits.  No luck.  So after being green didn't work, I tried chemicals.  CLR has never failed me in the past, and I'm pretty sure you could dissolve your finger off with it, but it didn't budge the white junk on the windows.  Annoyed, I complained to Kate and Trevor while we were eating lunch.  Trevor took one look at it and stated that I'd have to razor it off.  Yippee.  I tried it later, and it worked like a charm, of course.  Now I have a few hundred square feet of glass to scrape with a razor.  At least some day the windows will be transparent, and not merely translucent.

Yesterday was also a big turning point in the appearance of the bathroom. Here's a little video detailing that:  
We helped Trevor (a little) with the drywall.  Hanging it was insanely hard; I would never want to meet a drywaller in a dark alley.  Between the drywall and the backerboard in the shower, it's starting to look bathroom-y.  Or at least somewhat less like a shack where the commode consists of a hole in the ground and a few leaves if you're lucky.

We're supposed to give the drywall screws another coat of hot mud, put backerboard around the window sill, and waterproof the living daylights out of everything before Trevor comes back on Tuesday.  And then, we tile!  A week or so from now, we might (maybe, possibly, hopefully) have a finished bathroom, and consequently, we will be able to move in!!

Are you sick of the bathroom yet? I am.

In the past two days, the space that once housed the tub, toilet and vanity has started looking like it might actually be a bathroom once again. Yesterday Trevor laid cement backer-board on the floor, so the sub-floor is covered, and those chilly crawlspace drafts we loved so much have been eliminated. Here's how things are looking, as of this morning.


As things go, though, he had to bust out the window in the bathroom to replace it, so we covered one draft hole and made another. At least he's supposed to be done with that today.

The window (and the door/window combo in the office) presented some issues. The flashing is pretty deep underneath the siding, and apparently our house had gigantic (like 8-inch-wide) trim back when it had wood siding (it's now covered by aluminum, and the two layers is why we think we are sidestepping $300/month gas bills). I was only around for part of the window removal, but there was lots of grunting and muttering and cries of "oh, for the love!" so I got the idea it wasn't going the greatest.

On the topic of the window, Trevor dug it up at Lowe's...another hit! Without time to special-order one, we were going to have to go with one that was 4' high that someone had laying around, instead of the 3' that the current space is, which wouldn't be a problem, except that it had to go down, not up. So what I'm describing here would have been a 4x3.5' space, clear glass (as opposed to opaque for bathrooms), starting approximately a foot above where the tub ends, right in the middle of the shower to the back yard. I mean, the important thing is that your knees are covered while you're showering, so at least nobody sees that when they're looking through that back window. Yeah. Good thing we found the other one. We're planting some bushes that will both shade the air conditioner (thus reducing the load on it and allowing it to operate more efficiently) and obscure the view into the shower without blocking the light, which is so lovely from that southern exposure.

I put the second coat on the formerly green dresser (picture included).  In typical fashion, I was lazy and didn't paint the feet.  I don't even know why.  Now I have to figure out what to do about that.

I'm not going to say I'm crazy about the color, but I do like it. It's somewhat more gold than I would have liked, but I think it looks good with the blue. That's a good thing, because a) I am NOT sanding, priming and painting it again, and b) I am really excited about my vision for the dining room. (The plan is to put in a chair rail, paint an intense royal blue below the chair rail, paint Great Hall Cream above the chair rail, and then stencil this damask pattern in royal blue on the cream. Then crown molding, of course. Probably Behr Antique White like the rest of the house, but maybe something a little more true white.

Demolition Barbie: Sledgehammer and Crowbar Included!

Remember how I mentioned a few days ago that we were going to redo the bathroom? Well, it's underway. Here's a little video of what it looked like before (that's right, there's a....um...next step. Not an after. Yet.)



Sorry that it's sideways. I couldn't really get the right angle landscape...It's totally good for you to bend your neck like that. Ask any chiropractor....

Later that afternoon, my hands were throbbing from holding a hammer for so long and kept pinching together like crabs with muscle spasms. And this is what I'd accomplished:

Basically, I eat 2x4s and plaster for lunch. Cat, be sure to mention to your chauvinist friend that I am rather handy with a sledge hammer.

While I was at work smashing the bathroom to bits and throwing it out the window, Trevor the Great was in the next room over, ripping out the old sliding glass door that closed crooked and was so dirty it wouldn't get clean. (That's a special kind of dirty, for those who don't know. Specifically, this kind of dirty doesn't respond to any cleaning efforts, regardless of the quantity or variety of chemicals used.)

Before:




Again, sorry for the rotation. I kind of suck at this. Be sure to notice Trevor making a war-face as he attacks the frame of the door. We discovered flashing on the door (and by "we" I mean "he," because my understanding of flashing has little to do with siding and whatnot) and he had to use his Sawzall (excellent tool, by the way) to saw around the frame of the door. He was less than pleased about the situation. But nevertheless, the door was gone before lunchtime. And before dinner, this is how it looked:

I put the deadbolt and the knob on today, and it's not trimmed out in the picture either.  I'll take another shot tomorrow.  It's kind of dark out now.  I'm not wildly in love with how it looks, but it's definitely an improvement over the semi-translucent door that was there.  This has actual light shining through.

While I was installing the deadbolt (tricky thing, and the directions were just pictures.  Not helpful, Kwikset!) Todd and Adam worked on cleaning the gutters and getting rid of the satellite dishes (two...who needs two?) on the roof.  We took the plastic covering off the fireplace (which was up while Gary was banging around in the chimney.  We didn't really want a bunch of ash in the living room) and I vacuumed out the firebox, opened the little door on the outside of the chimney, and shoveled out another four gallons or so of ash.

Fast forward to a few hours later, and you find me, sitting on the couch in front of the fireplace.  Now, I know this doesn't sound like a big deal, but it kind of is.  This is the first time I've sat around and done something other than scheme for the next project or make a list of stuff to get from Home Depot.  It's starting to become home!

I'll sign off tonight with one more video.  This is a definitely outdated tour of the inside of the house, before the floors were even done.  I'll post a more current one soon, but here's a "before":