Day One-ninety-six: gardening

So we hit a little snag on the flooring that we mentioned before. The water-based finish has raised the grain in much of the house leaving a very rough almost sandpapery feel. Also, the satin finish has left the redone floor looking dull and lifeless. The refinishing company is coming back tomorrow to do a couple more repairs and to buff and coat with a semi-gloss finish. We know that the higher gloss finish increases the likelihood of seeing scratches, but we're hoping that it peps up a floor that in some ways doesn't look as good as did when it was covered in dust (that's not true but it seems like it).


Faced with such a dilemma, we did what many others have done, we gardened and tackled the overgrown vegetable/herb garden. This Chernobyl-like beast straight out of the movie "Little Shop of Horrors":

Turned into this heap (which in turn became 4 bags of trash):

And now looks like this, a well-tended and aspiring flower bed. Somewhere in England an old gardener is smiling. If the number of worms and other aerating bugs were any sign then the ground should be plenty fertile.

Day One-ninety-three: new floor

Actually it's not a new floor, but it looks like new. We had the original white oak floors refinished and repaired this week and the place looks like a million bucks. We're pretty sure this is the first time anything nice has been done to these floors since the house built. Here's the rather tired looking living room floor--dusty, scratched.

This is one of the bedrooms. The first owner had a couple small, yippy dogs that seemed only partially housebroken. This is the legacy.

But here's the same area after repairs and refinishing.

Similar transformation of this other corner.

Finally, we had the company replace a strip of maple that our long-departed contractors had installed as a transition strip. Six inches of maple didn't look right, so now it matches the two woods (maple and oak) better by using the same flooring that we installed in the kitchen. (That's masking tape in the middle to keep the finish from spilling over.)

Day One-eighty-nine: coda to yesterday

Yesterday we noted how painting trim is about as exciting as...well...watching that paint dry. Well, here's a short before-and-after addendum to show what we mean.

Day One-eighty-eight: past the six-month mark

After too many false dawns that we can count, we are officially in the home stretch now. This weekend was full of painting trim, staining doors, and sealing wood in the basement. The painting and sealing aren't very photogenic, but here's the progression of the doors (you have to look very carefully).


Here's unfinished, which is how we bought them:

This is with two coats of pine stain, it's a tad too orange for our taste.

And here's the nearly finished product. This has one coat of oak stain on top of the pine and will get one more coat before being declared "done".

We had a visit from a company that installs gutters (among other outdoor things) and improved the look and performance of our garage. No more water pooling along the foundation. Before:

After (the birdhouses conveyed with the garage and are used quite a bit by the locals):

Finally, remember when we emptied the vegetable/herb garden that the previous owner had planted? Well, with this temperate climate and us focused on the house, the plants took advantage to stage a comeback.

Day One-eighty-one: cleaning house

Before getting to the big stuff, here's a small update on a problem mentioned the other day. We had our plumber return to replace an outside faucet that was broken and leaking in the wall whenever we turned it on. Here are the old and new faucets. One lesson is that "frost free" faucets can crack like any other.

Six months into owning the house we're getting to projects that we thought we might tackle at the six month mark. (Of course, we thought we'd have all the month 1, month 2, etc. projects done by now.) Behind the sizable garage is a 12x12 metal shed. Both previous owners used the garage for working, so that may have necessitated the shed for things that you might otherwise have kept in the garage (e.g. garbage cans). Worse, though, was the bounty of firewood that surrounded the shed on three sides and used to feed the iron beast that lived in the basement and heated the house for decades. The previous owner was famous for taking fallen trees off the hands of neighbors, firewood almost literally falling into his hands.

So here's what the shed/woodpile looked like at 8am on Saturday. The crud you see inside the shed was mostly of our doing, the detritus of our demolition projects in the basement and efforts to clean out the garage attic (the light, weightlifting bench, and fan you can see).

Two and sometimes four people from a local haul-away company spent the next nine hours hauling away all this trash. The firewood alone filled 2.5 trucks and all the other junk filled another truck. Fortunately we all saved some dump fees when a neighbor across the street asked if he could have some of the wood. He got one truck's worth of the better (newer) wood. Buried deep was wood so rotten it fell apart in people's hands. Buried even deeper was a more unpleasant surprise--a nest of a dozen baby rats. Let's just say that we declined the offer by one of the more tender-hearted people to keep and raise the rats. By the end of the day all that remained was the metal from the shed that they'll take away today.

We took advantage of the haul-away guys being around to clean out the garage. It's a little hard to see from this dated photo, but one side was lined with shelves and a huge drawer/cabinet piece took up the whole back. 

The garage is pretty large so we didn't need to remove these items for additional storage, but the smell of musty mold/mildew coming off these things was pretty overpowering. With the position of the garage and studio, any time the garage opened it flooded the house with this odor. No longer. We did most of this with our trusty toolbox tools, but the haul-away guys were nice enough to let us borrow a sledgehammer and pry bar to tackle a couple of the bigger tasks.

Day One-seventy-seven: and the walls came tumbling down

Before we get to the destruction, let's start with some progress on a new project. The house had cheap, old, warped doors on all the rooms upstairs that we have replaced with nice, unfinished pine doors from Home Depot. Note the word "unfinished", which implies something must be done to finish them. A first attempt to use a clear varnish from an eco-friendly company was a disaster. The house still smells like the varnish even though it's been months since we tried it. So we returned to a company that's been a standby for years. The door on the left has a first coat, the other is still unfinished.

Meanwhile down in the basement, we used these tools:

to turn this...

into this...

and this...

Our new open-look basement is taking shape.

Day One-seventy-four: workin' for a livin'

Yes, that's a c deliberate reference to the old Huey Lewis song, we're in a time warp. Another weekend at the house and the progress keeps inching along.


What was originally going to be a pantry in the kitchen will instead be a cabinet in our bedroom. The cabinet's ready, now all we need is a bedroom. With this paint out, a number of items in the kitchen got another coat. That room is getting pretty close to showtime.

In the twice-done bathroom, we're nearing the finish line. This weekend we filled the sometimes large gap between the floor and the tub with grout to match the rest of the floor. It should all look pretty seamless once it dries.

In our "out with the old, in with the new" mode, the basement is coming in for some serious scrutiny. Watch this time-lapse evolution of a wall in the laundry room from this:

to this:

to this:

and finally today to this:

If you're wondering about the two steps forward, one step back approach to home remodeling, we don't recommend it. But if you're trying to address some problems that you would have at the outset if you hadn't had contractors breathing down your neck to make decisions, then this is a fine model. One thing we're doing in the basement to excise lingering odors is to replace all the smelly, unusual-looking wood. The new studs above replaced ones that look like this (a clean, new 2x4 makes a nice comparison):