houseblogger on bedrest = rehab nightmares

The absolute worst thing that can be done to a pregnant woman working on a house is putting her on bedrest. Especially if that bed is not IN the house she's working on. It's been almost three weeks now and I've been going insane. Obviously, I'm worried that we won't get the house done enough to live in before Baby 2 arrives, but I had begun to adjust to the idea of it.

I'm also worried that I've lost my housefixing muscles. Then there are all the unfinished projects to avoid thinking about. AND I'm worried, constantly, unreasonably, about the house. I have nightmares, of the late pregnancy variety, except they are all about the house.

Examples:

The carpeting dream. I dreamt that when we pulled up the carpet in the house, to reveal the lovely floors, there was more carpet, patchy, 1970's psychedelic, stained carpet, underneath. Shag, indoor/outdoor, etc. Like six layers. And under that was hideous linoleum. The last layer was glued down with construction cement that laid in huge blobs on the formerly pristine wood floors. I woke in a sweat, and spent several minutes calming myself down by recalling that I'd peeled up carpet corners all over the house just to assess the condition of the floors.

Next, the fire dream. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's had this dream during the rehab of an older house. I put it down to it being rewired and my being forced to not go out enough to be reassured by the house's quiet, unbothered appearance as I go by.
I've been tempted to get up and drive over to check on it more than once, though.

The flood dream. We've had lots of rain this spring, like most everyone else. The old dryer exhaust tends to collect water in rainstorms (this is on the List of Things to Fix), which isn't a problem as our cellar floor is actually graded to drain towards the drain on the downhill side of the house, and that water is a fairly small amount. But, I keep dreaming that the whole basement will fill with mud and water like a huge swimming pool, followed by the collapse of the house into the muck.

The vermin dream. Just a simple ick-factor dream, about finding a sudden, massive termite/ant/cockroach/rat/mouse/etc infestation that causes the house to become irreparably uninhabitable.

Augh. I'm off meds and bedrest on Thursday. Maybe I'll stop with the crazy, if I can at least get over there and finish painting the boy's room.

Pictures, and progress.

Or is that "Pictures of Progress?" I'm not sure. Anyhow, here are some images of what I've been ranting about recently. Updates to my in-progress phots are here.

First, I was talking about filling in the open archway between what had been originally intended as a den and the dining room, so that my son could have some privacy (and so that we could make use of otherwise wasted space). I wanted to do something really Stickley-style, like a fabulous built-in. We really don't have the money for that and all the other things we need to do first, so I had to figure out how to do this in a sympathetic, period looking style without spending any real money, as well as doing a temporary thing.

Why temporary? Well, in five or so years, we plan to have two bedrooms and a bath built in the cellar, for the boys, as well as a completely finished laundry room, workspace, and finsihed storage areas. When that happens, we can turn our den back into a den, and I'd like to be able to put in abbreviated Craftsman-style cabinets with square pillars inside that archway. So anything we do now is just set dressing.

Here's the before pic, with the PO's non-sympathetic solution (vinyl accordion curtains):




This is taken from the dining room, looking west into the den (my son's bedroom). Not pretty, but it worked for the PO, an elderly woman in need of constant care.

Now, a series of on-the-way-to-after pictures, taken from the same vantage point:



This is the built-in, mostly done. I think it looks fairly good, and is sympathetic enough to the original style of the house. It's naked, though.


This is halfway or so through staining it with Minwax Polyshades Satin in Old Maple. It looks like a good match, so far!


And this is the staining nearly complete, without the last trim pieces. I realized I'd have an easier time with the trim and stain if I stained the panel above the shelf, then applied and stained the trim sections. It still looks really good. I'm happy with is, and can hardly wait to see how the room looks all done.




This is a demo-in-progress image of the dining room bay addition. It's slightly less ugly right now, but we have some fairly major work to do here. First, we are going to put in posts and a support beam, as you can see some bowing where the bay was cut into the wall. There will be four posts, two at the ends, mounted flush to the walls, and two set in about 2' from the ends to create an open but divided space. There will be wainscot panels done in the same style as the archway fill-in in the bay, from the corners and under the windows, a built-in bookshelf under the center short window, and I'm going to build two window seats into the otherwise wasted space in the ends of the bay as well. I think this will all work together with the built-in panel in the arch, to increase the "Craftsman" feel of the house. I see a larger can of Minwax Polyshades in my future.

Now for the view from my son's room:



This is the built-in on his side, about half finished. For practical reasons, I'm having to alternate painting and finishing his built-in furniture. There will be a desk built below the single shelf that divides his frog mural, and in that corner that's full of salvaged lumber for the project, there will be an open "closet" with a shelf at top and bottom for more storage. I used two layers of salvaged acoustic tiles (pulled from the ceiling of the MB) to give him some soundproofing so we don't have to be super-quiet when he's asleep. They will also function as a bulletin board, where he can pin things up.










These are all shots of the part of the paintjob that had to be done before I could get back to cutting and screwing things up ... er ... together. There will be clouds painted on the walls, and the ceiling will be a deeper, more vibrant blue with stars and a moon on it. I'm debating painting in a wainscot strip with related, A&C type elements. That will probably depend on the time available before we move in.

And, I still need a radio. The talking to myself is really out of hand. I've been talking to my tools ... more than usual.

Recycling = more beauty from ugliness

And it's almost free! If you don't count my time spent, that is. As I'm not gainfully employed at this time -there being no payscale for mothering- I'm not counting it. I'm literally making beauty out of ugly things, not just patching or covering it up, so I've got that to be happy about too.

I needed to create a fill-in between the den (which will become my older son's room) and the dining room, inside an arch, in such a way that it can be removed later but also in such a way that it looks like a built-in or other deliberate design element. The arch had already had awful vinyl accordion curtains screwed into it, which we reomved, so attaching a framework inside it was not going to create any more damage or future work. That was the easy part. It took about 3 hours, including measuring and cutting, and sifting through the demo'd out 2x4s from the old 70's drop ceiling for good lumber. Recycling phase 1.

Once I had the framework in, I stood around puzzling about what I wanted to cover it with. I looked over the hideous fake wood paneling we had ripped out, and noticed that the backs of the sheets (those not badly damaged or befouled by glue) were actually quite attractive, if I sanded off the product information stamps. I selected the two most attractive, cut them to size and tacked them up. Recycling phase 2.

Now what? "It looks like a big doorway with fairly nice plywood tacked across it. Hmmm. Better, but not the look I want." Thinking ensued. Some of those old furring strips were nice and smooth on one side, and if I pulled out all the staples and nails and scraps of polystyrene tile, might just sand up to something tolerable. Oh, and we did have lots of original salvaged mouldings of various types from demo'ing the old closet wall and making our bedroom large enough to use. Some of those looked promising. Like the casing from the closet doorway...

I sat on the floor after assembling all the likely pieces of wood and thought intently, then decided to go buy myself a drink. Not alcoholic, though I have certainly thought about that enough, between the house and general other drama. However, as Miller Time isn't for another month and a half, I must needs wait.

Back from my jaunt, I cleaned up enough furring strips to make vertical trim pieces on my new paneled wall, Craftsman-Style. I set a baseboard in, measured from there to where I wanted the "chair rail" (more like armpit rail...), and got out my handy wee saw. Then, with all five trim parts cut, I became distracted by a good idea. "Hey! What this needs is a mirror!" As we had one that had been hung on the bathroom door, that was actually less of a leap than you'd think.

Of course, now I had to figure out how to frame the thing. Originally I had meant to just use furring strips for all the trim, horizontal and vertical, but adding the complication of a built-in, framed mirror made that less than workable. Back to the casing from the closet door that was no more. Hmmm. Inside the closet, the casings hadn't been stained, but outside, they had, so I had some pre-matched mouldings to work with on my fakey-craftsman "built-in" piece. I think there may even have been a lightbulb hanging above my head. More measuring and cutting ensued, with me pulling the mirror down, measuring it, forgetting the measurements, and running back and forth between the mirror and my improvised sawhorses.

Eventually, I got the framing mouldings cut, and notched correctly for the mirror, and hung on my false wall. I even remembered to put the mirror in before it was all tacked up, and there was only one episode of not-measuring-correctly in the middle of it all. Recycling phase 3 was now complete.

Today, I got a wild hair to add a shelf above the mirror, before measuring and cutting the last several furring strip trim pieces, and that's what I did. There was a great deal of swearing involved, as I really needed more hands to do this, but the result looks good. I made that out of most of the old knicknack shelf the PO's dad had made 30-some years ago, plus the mitered offcuts of the door casings. Recycling phase 4.

Of course, there are no pictures. There likely won't be until the thing is all assembled, possibly not until it's all stained and shiny, depending on whether or not I can be bothered to remember the camera. Hopefully my gestating offspring hasn't absorbed my very blue vocal expressions (also known in my family as "Carpentry English") too terribly much today.

And, yes, I still need a radio. The crazy is getting distinctly ... crazy.

It's like frosting a cake - a giant, inside out cake.

They (who are these people, anyway?) say that skimcoating "is like frosting a cake." I suppose that's great if you're any good at frosting cakes. I'm not - I have recently been converted to fondant for my son's cakes, and I'm grateful that there will be no more mangy peeling birthday cakes in my future.

However, it's also a lie in another way. It's only true if you are used to frosting enormous, inside out, square cakes, with windows and doors, using putty knives. That would be me. I'm really good at mudding, taping, skimcoating, plastering, anything that involves smoothly spreading some sort of pasty substance on a hard substrate. Cake, by the way, IS NOT a hard substrate, and frosting won't hard-set on you like plaster or stay workable for a long time like spackle.

So to continue the theme, I'm almost done frosting my son's room, as of last night. There is an incomplete ring around the top of the room left to do. The part that requires shifting the ladder every six inches or so. I got tired (lazy) and went home. The big news, though, is that now that there are some lights in the house, I can do some work at night. What a huge relief. More working time equals more time, and I can always get behind that.

However, I get a little odd when I'm working alone at night on a project. My mind gets bored, and I start thinking crazy things. Like coming up with a talk show in my head about house rehabbing and how it makes you crazy ("Tomorrow, on Rehabbers Anonymous, we'll hear about how fake wood panelling is the work of Satan, and we'll interview a couple who divorced over their house"), or inventing bizarre superhero names (The Night Spackler!).

I think I need a radio...

Beauty from ugliness

It's really amazing what a difference patching and applying a skimcoat over a cracked, be-holed, and befouled plastered surface can make. My morale went up about 10 points yesterday. My kitchen nears completion, and approaches paintability. As do my son's room and our dining room. FX's room, actually, is so close to completion that I think we might just get it done in the next couple of weeks. The ugly, dented and cracked outer corners in both dining room and kitchen look like new. I love patching plaster. The cleanup can bite my butt (I hate that part), but the process is a dream.

In other news, the breaker box is ready for installation, with its new home cut into the cellar stairwell wall. We have real outlets appearing as if by magic throughout the house (J and K have earned my finishing and structural carpentry slavery many times over with their help on this, and I think I promised yesterday to help K with a cheapo kitchen makeover this fall...).

There is hope in my heart! We may even move in before my next child arrives (I say that as if he's hovering in a holding pattern somewhere overhead, but he goes with me to the house every time...).

No pictures, as usual. I didn't think the changes would be so dramatic, so I didn't bring my camera.

Ambitious plans for making do

I am really beginning to thank my lucky stars for the time I spent doing theatrical backstage work. What, you may ask, does that have to do with rehabbing a house?

Actually, a great deal, if you have a lot of cosmetic oddness and no money to deal with it. Set, costume and prop design and construction (all of which I have done) really come down to creatively making things do what they aren't intended to do at all. Like turning plywood into a house in Venice, or making an axe out of wood, foam, paint and glue.

Take, for example, the nice, solid, dependable, MODERN, Andersen casement storm windows in our screen porch:



Nice enough, but they Really Do Not Go With Our House. I've been puzzling over what to do with them to make them work, without having to replace the things.

Today, I pulled an interior screen out and looked at the psuedo-mullions. They are made of plastic and they snap into the frames, so I should be able to pull them out and modify them (epoxy is my friend) to a more appropriate appearance.





That's my mockup of what they might look like. Hopefully. OTOH, I may just be able to make nice wooden ones, too. We'll see. It's a future project, probably won't happen until we've been there awhile. But now I think I can fix it, and I rest a little easier.

Kitchen! I am the Sticky-tile Empress!

What is she going on about? I'm really good at doing things with sticky tile (self-stick vinyl tiles for the normal people reading), many of which sticky tile was never intended to do. I've done my grandmother's bathroom, in such a way that it looks like we spent FAR more than 100 bucks on it. Mosaic, fancy cuts, etc. I get crazy with the stuff. It's wonderful when you want something to be temporarily livable/pretty until you can do the real renovations, and you've got a small budget.

Anyway, I stuck it to the Awful Tileboard in our kitchen toady, and to the Hideous Vomit-and-Cream Formica counter, as well as to our floor. The floor was fairly normal and straightforward, and has come out BEAUTIFULLY. Here we have photos of my kitchen cabinets, just about complete:



That's the temporary, cheeeeep new countertop solution: heavy-duty sticky tile, with a couple of painted strips of mdf stop moulding.



It looked so sexy I had to get our new knives out (housewarming gift to ourselves) and make them pose against it.



And this is what the counter looked like prior to covering it up. Yes, it is in 3 pieces, for no apparent reason. I stabilized it with the painted moulding strips prior to attaching Ye Olde Sticky Tile. It came out great.


I must, at this point, add that I am Very Impressed with the latex surface primer suggested by some nice sales monkey at one of the big home-improvement stores we've haunted recently. It DOES actually help the tiles adhere. VERY WELL - so well, in fact, that there will be no repositioning of tiles. If you screw up, scrape the tile up and get a new one out. This means that my normally non-feasible technique of covering up hideous formica tileboard (done it before, natch) with sticky tiles is now much more practical.

Also here is a preview of my plans for the sink cabinet:




This will, of course require Even More Paint, plus more sticky tiles (I have those) and I have to make another trip to the hardware store to buy the right size nylon washers (so I can replace the drawer slide roller wheels and my drawers will hang straight). It's SOOOO obviously a mockup, but that still looks better than what's there.

You may have noticed some of the doors hanging open, above. There's a reason. The closure springs are mostly gone. A question, for anyone who may be reading this: Do you know of a source for replacement hinge-spring assemblies for old steel cabinets? I'm fairly good at research, but this has me stumped.

And now, for something completely different...

... I know I've been dropping hints about my mother's fabulous house pretty much all the time, so, as this is another Involuntary Inaction day wrt our little bungalow, I'll post some pictures of the Great Crumbling (not really) Pile. I'm thinking that I might do this on my off days, from now on, since this place isn't being blogged anywhere and I'm working on it for mom, since her back injury.

These were all taken in winter, hence the snow. I really need to get some photos of the inside and the outside in spring - it's really gorgeous now.




This is the house from about halfway down the lawn toward the road. Looks like a typical colonial/federal type house. It's bigger than it looks here - each of the 4 rooms in this wing are 20x20 feet, with very tall ceilings (10'+, with teh lower floor having higher ceilings than the upper by a foot or two), and the hall is a good 10x20, with a well-preserved formal staircase. Note to self: get pictures.

That funny little pseudo-antebellum semicircular porch is both incorrect (if you look closely, you can see the outline of the original front verandah on the walls) , and Badly Installed. It slopes toward the house (BAD).We have grand plans to rip it out and rebuild the original verandah, but that requires a jackhammer and money that's just not there right now.

We don't use this entrance much at all, as there is no path to it and the porch is horrible. That ought to change once we replace the missing, correct, USABLE porch.





This was taken after walking around that line of trees to the left in the picture above. This is a view around the side of the house to the remaining old barn (or older barn - it was probably built using older lumber from a now-missing structure), which Needs Help if it is to remain standing. There are plans to rescue it, as it's such a neat old building, and other than requiring some shoring (and sistering a cracked beam, and fixing a busted door, and...) it's still in fairly good shape.



This is a view walking around the other side of the house, toward the side entrance, now used as the main entrance. Here the beautiful original verandah is still in evidence, save for its brackets. In this wing is a large (20x40+?) lower room, and two upstairs rooms a narrow room (20x10) and a large room, probably intended to be the nursery (20x30).




We're walking, we're walking... Now you can see (nearly) the whole of the verandah. Also, you can see the kitchen addition (the short part of the house), and that it has FOUR chimneystacks. That does in fact mean 8 fireplaces and attendant flues. No, none of them are usable just now. LIning them is also on the to-do list. We are currently living above the kitchen, in a 20x30 room that pretty neatly holds most of our furniture.




Okay, this is taken from the corner of the kitchen addition looking toward the front of the house.

Now, some historical info- this house was built in 1857 by a Mr. Wolfe for his sister and brother-in-law (the Tuckers) to live in. It's a virtual copy of several l-shaped Shenandoah Valley Federal houses, though it is in southern Illinois. We suspect that it is actually a copy of an older house in that area.

Most of the rooms have been at least partially restored, but the nursery is the last one, and we have a good deal of tuckpointing (on the chimneybreast) and replastering to do yet in there. There is still, thankfully, quite a bit of the original woodgraining left in the house, though the PO did sand/refinish some of the floors (he was VERY good at structural repairs - we have him to thank for having a new roof, sound foundation and non-collapsing, non-sealed chimneys-, and admitted himself that he wasn't suited to restoring the interior).

Besides not having any images of the interior yet, you don't see the l-shaped back porch (there are four doors that exit onto this porch from the main floor) in any of these pictures. There's also a 3/4 cellar under the kitchen and part of the main house.

And, this is just down the road from my little 20th century house. Very handy!

Comments encouraged ... and now enabled

I just went and checked my comment settings. I had NO IDEA that the default setting only allowed other Blogger users to leave comments (slaps head).

If there's anything you wanted to tell me, I've fixed that now. I did turn on word verification, though, just in case some enterprising spambot wants to make life tough.

Back to work.

House Rehab Illustrated

I finally remembered to bring the camera. Included herein are images of the kitchen, so far; before/after images of the front door; some cool Basement Archaeology shots; and other things, with my typical boring narration. Oh, and please pardon our dust and construction debris. Everywhere.

And Now, to the Pictures!

First, the kitchen, before:





Bleh. Notice the grimy blue carpet. It's glued down ... with wood glue.

and so far:







The cabinets are being painted flat black (blackboard paint), with silver lower doors, and Safety Red drawers and upper doors. I cleaned the chromed handles, which are all the same for the main bank of cabinets (BTW, magic eraser sponges work great for this, with a bit of degreaser for the greasy parts - my friend K. thought I had replated them!), then picked out the six most worn ones and sprayed them black with epoxy paint. Those six went on the matte silver doors, and the cleaned chrome ones look wonderful against the red painted drawers.

We plan to do the same to the sink cabinet, but it involves a bit more work to take apart. Plus we need to buy more paint...

I am really loving how the cheapo sticky tiles are making the old floor look larger. It's not ideal, and not period to the house, but we'll have a kitchen we can enjoy until we can do better.

And now, the Original Front Door (now the living room interior door), with Icky Kwiky goldtone lockset:




and without:







The paint is pretty bad, yes, but cleaning the hardware and making it pretty can wait until we're in the house. Removing the offending modern lockset prior to moving in could not wait. And it still looks better than it did.

I'm no Indiana Jones, but I did discover some cool stuff in the cellar.

For example, when you look up and you aren't busy being terrified by Horrible Old Wiring, you can find some bizarre things, like an old Esso sign being used to fit the new ductwork under the original coal furnace heat vent:









Plus, I think the part that was cut out is leaning against a wall elsewhere. Neat.

Now, I know it's not cellar related, but do you remember these?



They are the access panels for the bathroom plumbing. Which has no cutoff valves. None. Zip. Nada. I have no idea why you need access panels if you have no cutoff valves. Yes, they are on our to-do list.

Anyway, those panels? They're made of another old sign:




I think the rest of it has been used to make the interior cellar door solid, and that's a whole entry all by itself. Anyway, get a load of the name - "Critic Feeds" :D

Back to creeping around in the basement. I stuck the camera through a hole I punched in the plastic stapled over the access to the foundation of the dining room bay, adn I took some photos, to see what was there.

I found an old porch swing and some mouldings:



God knows if that thing can be saved, but it's pretty cool to find it at all.

and what probably happened to parts of the original kitchen cabinets:




Yep, that's what they are. I don't think they are salvageable. Makes you sad, too, doesn't it? At least I will have references to use when we do get around to doing the Big Kitchen Renovation.

And finally, to close, here's a couple of images of the old (but not original) coal furnace:





It's still hooked up to the flue, but obviously hasn't been used for decades. That first photo is its tag, which is on the back. It's probably a 1930's model, judging from the styling.

More photos later, but this is a good start. I still haven't found any stamping, but I'm too pregnant to fit through the attic access panel, which is where i'm most liekly to find marks.