On the pegboard

I forgot to include a picture of the pegboard side of the garage with my previous update - so before I begin with our updated to-do list - here's a taste:

Before

After

Now on to the tentative to-do list for 2009 -- sure, we're getting a late start but... well - we just don't care anymore! *cackle*

Lingering Hurricane Katrina repairs in blue.

1. Replace main circuit breakers on outside of house (DONE.)
2. Brace kitchen sink in some manner other than that which was used by the 'professionals' to brace it. (DONE.)
3. Install threshold/transition between William's closet and his bedroom.
4. Replace light fixtures throughout upstairs.
5. Install ceiling light fixtures in game room/library.
6. Have skylights tinted to prevent upstairs hallway from melting.
7. Build a rabbit hutch.
8. Install dimmer switches on various light fixtures throughout the house (because we despise overhead lighting otherwise).
9. Replace rusted french doors on back porch.
10. Replace rusted ceiling fans on back porch.
11. Install ceiling fans on front porch.
12. Repair rotten column trim.
13. Repaint living room.
14. Reinstall a door for the guest bathroom.
15. Install a/c registers upstairs where the last crew not only failed to do so but also lost at least one register in question and all of the screws. Ugh.
16. Replace windows. All of them.
17. Paint the ceilings. All of them. House-wide. Ugh.
18. Make the roughed-in horrible storage room into the bathroom it was intended to be.
19. Remove broken grout and replace with caulk in all of those areas where some bonehead grouted up to dissimilar surfaces.
    
20. Touch up kitchen grout with stain (No - we never actually finished the kitchen floor. The kitchen floor made us insane. I don't want to touch up the kitchen grout with stain. Ever. But I'm putting it on this list because it just seems like I should.)
21. Replace disintegrated chandelier in foyer.
22. Paint stair rails and banisters.

Of course there's more to add to this list when everything is checked off. There's always something to add to the list when everything is checked off.... This is the nature - the very essence - of homeownership, is it not? It has certainly defined our homeownership experience thus far.... And if we're doing it wrong - it's too late to tell us now.

More to come.

Big plans - little budget

Early this past weekend we had decided that our dream of a decent-sized demo in William's room - including removing an existing wall and extending the room back parallel with the existing dormer was out of our reach mentally, physically, and financially at this particular time. We then considered scaling back the project to include simply modifying the existing wall to accept a recessed desk/hutch brainstorm...

But of course before planning anything which would require cutting studs and reframing - we needed to know the answer to the all-important home improvement question: "Hey, is that wall load-bearing?"

Dave took the plunge and squeezed himself into our tiny little hole in the sheetrock to have a look around. (I'm glad at least one of us is not claustrophobic.)


The answer was a resounding "Yes, that wall is indeed load-bearing." It's so easy to get turned around when you're trying to simply imagine the structure of your house with only the visible interior walls to give you clues. I would guess that lots of folks get into trouble with this one. We weren't at all thinking about the fact that although the wall appears to be interior -- it is technically an exterior wall -- nestled back quite a few feet behind the visible slope of the roof -- but still quite exterior... and most definitely involved with the support of the roof itself.... How I'm not sure - Dave's the engineer in the family.

"Oh no! A load-bearing wall! Whatever will we do?"

We're not interested in reframing to redistribute the load and tempting Murphy and his law anymore than he needs to be tempted....

So William's bedroom project is being scaled back even more to paint, baseboards, flooring, and fixtures. We took our first wobbly steps toward that end Saturday afternoon.

In my experience, the first visible sign of a home improvement project in progress is when the area being improved looks 100 times worse than it did before you started.

William was only six years old when he moved into this room just over four years ago.... And, in case you were wondering, little boys are hard on drywall. The walls are littered with holes and scrapes and gouges -- meaning lots of extra wall prep. Plus - the chair rail we removed was apparently heavily caulked to the walls and didn't come down quite as clean as we would have liked -- meaning more extra wall prep.

When the walls are ready (which may be a few more days) we'll move straight into priming... After which I'll get to pick out paint yet again. William wants camouflage-painted walls. I do not.
Therefore, we're going to try a compromise by doing a subtle faux texture using something like jungle camo colors on the walls. Maybe.

Updates to come as we make progress. :)

Cool On

Remember the other day when I said there were no projects planned other than moving those irises? Well, I lied. It was unintentional.

A few minutes after I published that post the guys from the A/C place dropped by to install the new thermostat that we've had on order for a while.

It's not a fancy programmable thermostat -- as we don't actually need such a feature because someone is just about always home during the day. However, we had one of these installed upstairs several months ago when we had the a/c unit replaced - and we love it. With the old thermostat the upstairs was always either too hot or too cold... and the unit was running almost non-stop. Yes -- high power bills. The new thermostat made a big difference... and has already made a difference downstairs over the last few days.

Our favorite feature is something that's really useful when the weather is changing (i.e. when the weather is bizarre) between seasons -- the thermostat automatically switches from cool to heat or vice versa to maintain the temperature that we set. Our second favorite feature? The display lights up so that we don't have to turn on the hall lights and wake up peacefully sleeping children to change or check the thermostat. :)

The downside? Now we have to break out the paint to touch up around the thermostats.....

The hole in the wall

It always starts with a hole in the wall. A little hole at first. Then the hole gets bigger. Then other holes appear simply because it seems wrong to stop at one. Then everything goes crazy and carpet and trim gets ripped out... fixtures are removed... paint buckets start getting slopped around. It's madness! Madness, I tell you!

Oh but wanna hear something really scary? There are actually two holes.. in two different walls... in two different rooms at this moment. I feel chaos approaching!!

And now I'll stop being borderline psychotic and explain.

You may recall the mysterious water-stains throughout the house from previous posts. (If not.. try here and here.) During my most recent blog-silence, Dave and I have been snooping around the house systematically poking holes in walls and ripping stuff apart in search of the sources of the water. We found a few.

Leak/ceiling stain number one in the dining room is coming from somewhere around the dormer in what was previously William's room but is now something of a storage room while we plod through upstairs repairs. The dormer is surrounded by blank space located directly above our front porch. There is no attic access to this space -- which makes monitoring for leaks a wee bit tricky. Ah but being fearless in the face of intact sheetrock and the prospect of possibly unnecessary repairs -- we promptly cut a cute little whole in one of the walls of the room to get a look at what lurked behind. You know what we found? An enormous amount of space!

We were told when we were looking at this house years ago that the previous owner (also the subcontractor) had some sort of pathological fear and/or dislike of 'angled walls' and therefore designed the upstairs in such a way that all walls would be perfectly vertical without sacrificing any square footage. As a result - our roof is a 12/12 pitch and an obstruction to local air traffic.

Ah but we kinda like nifty 'angled walls' and can't help but dream about extending that bedroom wall back.. back... back... adding some space and architectural interest -- and getting a chance to get a good look at where the water is coming from. Of course it would be a lot simpler to just patch the hole we cut and move on... But we're way beyond simple over here.

The beauty of it is that George's room has exactly the same layout as William's former room AND we have the good fortune of having a roof/dormer leak in that room as well which results in the ceiling stains in the girls' downstairs room. We didn't cut a hole in any of George's walls though... Someone else did. And it was totally unrelated to the dormer leak.

Sandwiched between those two bedrooms is the bathroom. As I've mentioned before - all of the plumbing backed up during Katrina.. even flooding the upstairs bath with icky icky water. However, that bathroom has remained at the very bottom of our repair list. Until this weekend when Dave removed the toilet and ripped up the curling linoleum. I can't even begin to describe the stench. Just. Ew. A glimpse of the wood subfloor leaves us with the impression that we'll be replacing at least sections of it before putting down a new floor.... And we also discovered that the old toilet had been leaking all this time -- possibly accounting for several of the ceiling stains in the foyer downstairs.

These explorations still left us with one unsolved water stain. This stain appeared in the middle of one of George's bedroom walls - discovered when we removed a picture to set up the bunk beds. Since the water stain seemed to be directly behind the shower in the bathroom -- we called in the plumber this afternoon to check the whole thing out for us and take care of any plumbing problems before we start rennovating the remaining three upstairs rooms in earnest.
The easiest way to check for plumbing problems was to, of course, cut a hole in the wall -- thus the creation of George's hole. Luckily, I think... No problems with the pipes could be found. Unluckily, this leaves much of the water damage to that wall a mystery. However! We did find that the tub/shower unit itself (one of those one piece acrylic/fiberglass units) was actually leaking and most definitely causing the balance of ceiling stains in the foyer downstairs. Add 'replace tub/shower' to the list of things to do when repairing the upstairs bathroom.

It's mildly daunting to continue to find non-Katrina related problems to fix as we get so close to actually finishing the Katrina related problems. But Hey! We've conquered much more. Just time to crack out the hammers and crowbars and the digital camera once more.

Irrigation Day

What better way to spend a nice summer day during a drought than to have lots of people with scary equipment come over to rip up your yard -- and install an irrigation system?

The guy we talked to a couple of months ago regarding installing a system for us has finally gotten the time to begin work.

I honestly thought that this would be an exciting enterprise from start to finish... I expected joyous anticipation and sweet dreams of not dragging hoses around or dead spots where hoses never reach.... And maybe - just maybe - I'll get to all the joy and dreams... later.

For now though I am cringing with every swing of the pick axe or swish of a shovel as the existing flower beds get an extreme makeover and the gorgeous lawn starts to resemble a mine field.