Some hard work, and the payoff!

So the last couple of weeks saw a flurry of activity at the ghetto house.  We found out on Thursday night that the appraisal was scheduled for the following Monday!  There was still a ton to be done, so we called in for backup and got to work. My folks and Erik and Jaycie showed up, and we got to work. There were a million little things left to do, and Erik spearheaded most of those - all of the little details that I just didn't have time to deal with.

There were only a couple of major chores left, flooring Eddie's room and painting the laundry room.

The laundry room project started about three thousand years ago, when Steph was running a daycare out of the basement.  We had a giant impractical and unused closet attached to the laundry room, and Steph wanted a sort of mini kitchen down there.  I knocked out the closet, patched the walls and floor, and found the leftover cabinets from somebody's kitchen remodel.  I installed the cabinets and did a few other chores, but then Steph closed the daycare, and the project just stagnated for a few years.  It was one of those eyesores that I just never quite got around to fixing.  The appraisal, however, became a powerful motivator, so I set Mom and Domenick (thanks for the loaner child labor, Jaycie!) to painting in there.

Nasty blue becomes cheery yellow - paint is magic!

Domenick managed to get paint in his hair - he looks good with blonde highlights:

Finally time to add countertop to the cabinets - give a kid a caulk gun and you never know what'll happen.  What could possibly go wrong?

Look!  More flat surfaces to pile crap on now!

The finished product - finally added that utility sink that I added the plumbing for 5 years ago...

Oh, and that ugly fan that's been uncovered in the kitchen for 8 years?  Yeah, finally found a cover for that, too:

And a year later, I finally trimmed out the sliding door.  Wouldn't wanna rush something like that.

Jaycie did some kinda magic to get the floor clean in the downstairs bathroom:

The other major chore we banged out was flooring, finally, in Eddie's room - this is vinyl plank flooring. It goes in very quickly and easily.  We'll probably do this in Naomi's room and the laundry room eventually.  It's a straightforward install.  Floating floor, so it's not attached to anything.  It still smells sorta like plastic in there, but it's getting better as the days pass. 

First couple of runs are in:

About halfway done.  It feels really nice underfoot.  It's got a little bit of give to it.

And now, a year and a half later, there's flooring in Eddie's room again. 

I set Dad to the unenviable task of reinstalling the register covers.  It seems simple enough at first glance, but it took a couple hours to get it right. 

Mom can't stand a dirty window, so she got to work:

The upstairs bathroom faucet was leaking, so I set Eddie to replacing that.  The cheap American Standard unit I'd installed a couple of years previous had rotted from the inside - running the faucet sent a stream of water down through the guts to the underside of the sink.  I've never seen a faucet fail that fast.  Then again, it was a third of the price of the Moen unit I replaced it with, so I guess you get what you pay for.  

Eddie learning the finer points of tailpiece installation.  "Dad, this sucks!"

Tada!

Steph, in the meantime, was furiously scrubbing and rearranging and tidying and generally making the place look better.  She even weedwacked, too!

Damn, but I loves me some landscaping chicks:

After 48 hours of furious activity, we crawled into bed and slept like the dead.  The appraiser showed up at 8:30AM Monday morning, and we started going through the house.  I was sure that the back of the house, which still hasn't had siding installed, was going to be a major stumbling block.  She took a quick look at it and waved it off as a cheap fix that wouldn't change the outcome much at all.  I was expecting a major grilling on all of the various details of the house, but it was a pretty pleasant experience, overall.  An hour later, she left, and a week later, we got the report.  The house appraised over 20% higher than we'd hoped for!  Woohoo! 

Paint party...

So this weekend we painted the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room and the hall.  Saturday was fairly uneventful - the kitchen got painted fairly quickly, which was a good thing, because the other rooms were a much more involved project.

I'm pretty sure paint is made of magic.  It really transforms a room, having everything be a single relatively uniform color.  The walls in our house have seen a lot of abuse, and they're not perfect, but the change from before to after is hard to overstate.  It's pretty cool. 

Step 1: Move the living room into the kitchen.

Step 2: Invite your rockstar parents over to help with the painting.

Mom re-staining the window trim:

My sexy-ass wife covered in paint and cutting in the living room:

My painting buddy is cuter than your painting buddy...

I didn't just boss people around this weekend, I actually got up on a ladder and did some actual work, too.  I even managed to not fall off the ladder, though it was sketchy in this bit. 

Dad slingin' paint - these guys did a ton of work, and easily took several days off the project.  It's interesting how much more work can be done with an extra person or two.  Everything just goes so much faster.  We had to borrow a bunch of stuff to do this - I have plenty of tools for me, but I'm really only set up for me.  Thanks to Pete, Heather and Steve, and my parents, we ended up with enough stuff to keep things going smoothly all day.

Mom:  Stop pointing the camera at me!

There was obviously some kind of moisture problem in the past, as the ceiling was stained in a couple places.  I never did find any problems in the roof or the attic, so I'm guessing the problems were a long time ago, but the ceiling was a mess.  I primed it with Bin to cover up the stained bits.

Rolling the ceiling once the Bin dried:

I had to tear out the shower surround at the beginning of the project, so once I got every put back together, I had to glue up the shower surround again.  There's no good way to clamp a large, wobbly panel against a wall while the adhesive sets up, or if there is, I haven't figured it out yet.  I resorted to an unconventional solution to my clamping problem - put some butt cheeks on it!

The butt-cheek clamp in action.  Does Bessey make one of these?

Step 422: Start cleaning up the wreckage. 

Hey look!  A yellow bathroom! 

A side note about paint and light: In the store, under industrial lighting, the paint looked almost hay-colored.  Once we had it up, it turned out to be much brighter and much more obviously yellow.  In the pic above, on the left side, it's a traditional 4 foot fluorescent tube.  In the center, a pair of compact fluorescent bulbs.  On the right, in the shower is a halogen bulb.  What struck me was the wide variation in color - the area lit by the compact fluorescent bulbs is almost orange, and the other two areas are distinctly different shades of yellow.  

We still need to do some more painting; the stairwell isn't done, and the trim needs to be re-stained or replaced in a few places, but now the majority of the upstairs has been repainted in the last year.  If we ever manage to actually finish this project, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with myself.

The latest news...

Seven months have come and gone since our last post.  Four of those were for a really lousy ski season, and in the last three, we've been really busy. 

The interior is pretty much done.  Wallboard is up, paint is up, trim is up.  The only remaining thing in what will soon be Eddie's bedroom is flooring. 

Wallboard went in without a hitch.  I've gotten pretty good at mudding and taping, actually, so it's going a lot smoother now.

Almost there!

I sanded and re-stained all of the trim and the doors while I had it all down.  Sadly, my faithful Makita sander finally self-destructed after 20 years.  The pad broke apart while I was sanding. 

 

A quick trip to the hardware store and I was back in business.  This time in Jim Rundall-approved DeWalt yellow.

 

While I never had any problems with my trusty old Makita, this one is actually a much nicer tool - it has far less vibration.  My fingers didn't feel numb after using it for an extended period.  It also has adjustable speeds, a built-in dust collection thing and it came with a jazzy tool bag to store it all. 

The next thing to go in was sub-flooring.  For reasons I've never been able to figure out, when we moved in, the laundry room floor was maybe 12 inches above the concrete, with a step down to the mudroom, then a step down to the floor of the playroom, and finally another step down to the floor of the hall and the downstairs bedrooms.  Over the last few years, we've been establishing a single floor height in all of the downstairs rooms.

Once again, the Subee proved quite capable as a pickup truck - 8 sheets of subfloor fit nicely on the roof while 30 some-odd two by fours fit in the back. 

Subfloor went in quickly with the help of my minions:

In the meantime, I was busy installing an overhead light.  Because I'm so damn smart, I ran the wiring before I sealed up all of the various ceiling bits.  Because I'm so damn dumb, I forgot to mark which set of joists I ran the wiring between, so I had to tear into the ceiling to find the wire.  Happily, I got lucky and got it on the first try. 

 Tada! 

   

Next, I set Eddie to repainting the radiator covers.  He used to be fascinated with my respirator; I couldn't leave it laying around, cause he'd run off with it.  It turns out that the only cure for temptation is to give into it - after several hours of wearing the respirator while spray painting, he's completely and utterly cured of his fascination with the thing.

Naomi, in the meantime, I set to reinstalling the hinges for the various doors I'd pulled off. 

That's pretty much the end of this project, at least the interior.  I even moved the cable modem back to its normal home after it's year-long dangle:

The only thing left in this room (aside from some cleanup) is flooring.  That probably won't go in until after vacation, but it should be pretty quick.  We're close to putting the wraps on a year-long project, and I'm looking forward to moving on to the outside of the house. 

While we've been working on this project, the real estate market has gone down the tubes, and the interest rate is now very, very low.  We've decided to refinance the house.  This means that we'll have an appraisal sometime in the next 4 to 6 weeks, so we've ramped up a lot of the work to hopefully get this place looking more appealing to an appraiser.  This means we're repainting a bunch of stuff, and generally trying to pick off a lot of low-hanging fruit.  Steph took over painting in the kitchen, and I started in on the upstairs bathroom. 

The kitchen just needed some masking:

Relocation of all of the little stuff, including the stuff needed to cook lunch:

And then it's time for paint:

Steph kicked ass on this project.  Despite not having a lot of experience painting, she jumped on this project like white on rice, and got the kitchen painted pretty damn quick. 

The bathroom, on the other hand, with its horrible 1970's popcorn ceiling, needed a little more love. A little bit of spraying, followed by a lot of scraping:

And all of it came right off. All over the floor.

And maybe a little in the bathtub:

On the plus side, cleanup isn't as bad as you might think.  It cleans up easily enough with a dustpan and broom.  On the down side, the ceiling is of course over the entire room.  This means that everything in the room gets pretty damn dirty.  And I can't leave this room torn apart for too long - it's the only shower in the house, so it has to be up and running for showers every day.  Progress here might be a little slow. 

We popped into Home Depot today to get some stuff, and I grabbed a sample can of a nice coral color that I really liked.  I threw a little of it up on the wall to see how it might look:

My bride, always subtle, took a quick glance at it and immediately declared:

"I hate it.  It looks like vomit."

Back to the drawing board. 

In the next few days, there's a bit of wallboard work to be done in the bathroom, and lots of prep throughout the house for a painting party this weekend.  Stay tuned!