One Sixty: November 2006

It was Fancy Friday When I started this...

Welcome to another Fancy Friday. Normally at this time of the week, Mike and I would be gearing up for a rough and tumble weekend of work around the house.

But not this weekend.

Shocked? Well, I'll tell you what's going on. We finished the chimney last weekend. I raked leaves. Our carpenter extrodinaire TJ put in our new kitchen window. It was fairly productive.

But in light of the upcoming holiday and fast growing Home Depot credit card balance, Mike and I are taking a well deserved and neccessary break from home repair in order to catch up on our other other hobby - vehicles!!!

You see, last year round holiday time, Mike's '96 Tacoma ran into problems. Rather then fix it, we just stuffed it into the garage and bought a full size Dodge. (Cause you know we have the slide-in camper and the trailer and all - plus having a Dodge diesel is pretty fuel efficient for a full size truck - anyway - this is a tangent.)

So.... in order to pay off debt and have some money for the holidays and hopefully some for my beloved '78 trans am, which was so ruthlessly kicked out of the garage when the truck went in. (She needs two new doors, both inner fenders, a full weatherstrip kit, and one fender, plus motor mounts and a crud load of small niceities. Tangent 2. On a roll.... with cheese.) For these reasons and more, we need to fix the Toyota.

With a four day Thanksgiving weekend on the horizon, timing couldn't be any more perfect. So, we'll be spending our vaca in the garage. And hopefully, by monday, the truck will be for sale on our front lawn.

Ever so Toasty, There's Nothing Like Heat

So over last friday and saturday, as I prepared for our annual post-halloween bash, mike set himself to the psychotic task of making the heat work.

The chimney is not totally finished, but it was high enough to be considered safe. So Mike installed two new baseboards upstairs for the second zone and finished plumbing in the basement.

Upon first pressurizing the system, everything seemed okay - no leaks. Then, just a few hours before the party, as Mike fired up the furnace for the first time, a few leaks appeared in the basement. We had to call over our plumber friend Brian to bail us out, for which I am ever so grateful.

We got it working and the party was a success.

However, now we're having some detail issues. The thermostat seems to be hooked up backwards - the heat is hooked in to the AC. Which means, the thermostat thinks that the heat is air conditioning.... a slight problem.

Plus - we don't have the second zone thermostat hooked up yet, so the upstairs keeps getting super hot. Hopefully we'll be able to get these problems resolved soon and then take a breather for the holidays.

My home depot account needs to recover a little!!!

Blog Story

My now husband Mike and I purchased this quaint home back in spring of 2004 - our first home - and, being the handy folks we are, expected to have the entire thing renovated in about a year or so.

And here we still are... renovating away.

This house needed a complete overhaul. Its plaster walls were uninsulated, its attic floor covered in 2" of bat guano, its basement - dirt and snakes, its exterior - asbestos siding, and lead paint windows in every room. The electric had not been updated and light sockets hung bare from the ceiling. Plumbing featured cast iron radiators - and only one for the entire upstairs.

We began by gutting almost the entire house from top to bottom. (sans bathroom - we needed to pee) We rebuilt the entire upstairs, with a new floor (not new carpet or wood - the once unstable framing underneath) and turned 3 small rooms into two. We reinvented the downstairs by turning a closet into a hallway and eliminating interior exterior windows and doors from old half-assed additions.

New insulation, windows, electrical wiring (including phone and CAT-5 internet), plumbing and baseboards, and drywall were all added.

We purchased kitchen cabinets from a yard sale. (None existed previously.) Our families helped us replace and purchase new appliances including the once also missing washer & dryer.

Then we had the entire house lifted - straight into the air - dug out the dirt, and had a real basement foundation poured. We updated our oil tank and burner and created heating zones.

Outside, we took down trees and planted grass. We dug out an awkward hill to create a 2nd part to the driveway and used the rocks our house once sat on as a retaining wall. We electrified and repainted the garage.

And of course, we spent many an hour on finish work like paint, trim, closet doors, lighting fixtures, hardwood floors, curtain rods, dimmer switches, and many other things everyone else takes for granted. We are still working to complete all this final finishing, but happy to report that we are FINALLY nearing completion of all little things in all rooms!

In 2008 we began overhauling the exterior by creating a new french door entryway and building a farmer's porch and garage addition. We replaced our roof and then stripped off our siding and replaced with new clapboards. We then planted two new flowering trees and a maple in the front yard - our first major landscape purchases. I'm happy to report that here in 2011, the porch is nearing completion and the back yard is on the road to recovery with some new loam and grass. More plantings soon to come!

In 2012 we plan to attack the last MAJOR (emphasis on major) job in the house - the dreaded BATHROOM! We plan to first add a second bathroom in the basement. Then, demolish our current bathroom and rebuild it, adding a second bathroom on top for the upstairs.

And that pretty much brings you up to date. The battle continues day to day as we try and complete everything.