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!

Sill plate fun!

The last couple of weeks have been slower - lots of non-home repair activities going on, so I haven't updated in a while.  Basically, the drainage issues are fixed and the basement is dry, so I'm moving on to the interior.  The exterior isn't done, but it'll be OK for the winter. 

The stretch of rotten sill plate was the next piece of the puzzle.  The basic premise is pretty straightforward - build a structure of some kind to take the weight off of the existing wall, sawzall out the existing sill plate, smack in a new one, and then reattach everything.  Once again, lessons were learned, a few things got broken, a few mistakes got made.

On to the fun!

The first step in the process was to cut open the ceiling to expose the joists, and then I nailed in a temporary top plate. 

Next, build a temporary wall and smack it under the top plate with a sledge.  Here's what a wall looks like in handy kit form:

Assembled

and smacked into place with a sledge

The first lesson I learned was that 3/4" is a lot more than you can lift a house using just a temporary wall and a sledge.  My temporary wall showed its displeasure at the abuse I put on it by bowing seriously and refusing to go all the way to plumb. 

I ended up shoring it up with a floor jack, just in case.  Once that was in place, I started smacking in steel wedges and a prybar to give me room to get the sawzall in.

Pretty soon, I had one whole section removed!

For some reason, on this first one, I thought it necessary to take the old board out in relatively intact chunks.  (The next one, I just ripped it up with a bar and wedges and it went a lot faster...  Live and learn.)  To this end, I thought it wise to try to remove four-foot chunks.  To do that, I had to figure out a clever way to cut through the board, and the first thing I tried was a drill bit of suitable diameter.  However, after grinding it quite a bit against the top of the foundation, it pretty quickly stopped being a drill bit. 

See, it's supposed to have this shape:

But after a few minutes of high-speed grinding on concrete, it looks like this:

Eventually, I got the whole big chunk out, and it was time to put in the replacement piece.  Navigating long bits of lumber through the house is a pain in the ass - there's always something you don't notice in time.  After I broke a light fixture (and replaced it and hid the evidence), I got to saw this one to length...

After I smacked it into place with a sledgehamer, I had my assistant drill some holes in the new sill plate and the concrete:

More holes...

And screw in some tapcons...

Pretty soon, that section was done!

The next section to be replaced was on the end of the house.  Jim suggested that I'd be able to lift the house from the end using my existing temporary wall, and that the rigidity of the sheathing would allow me to remove the section on the end without further lifting.  He ended up being partially right - I could get about halfway down the wall, but not enough to get the whole bad section out.  I ended up knocking down my temporary wall and starting over.  I didn't think a temporary wall would work very well, as I'd be building it parallel to the existing floor joists, and it'd be hard to get significant lift on the exterior wall that way while still allowing me to get between the support and the wall to replace the sill plate. I decided that I'd be better off getting at the framing of the exterior wall and jacking that as directly as I could. 

My first step was to expose the framing in the end of the house and get a substantial hunk of wood under the top plate of the exterior wall.  I tied in to three other joists as well, to spread the load around better.  Sharp-eyed viewers will note that the big hunks of wood used here used to be decorative faux post-and-beam bits from the kitchen.  I guess it pays to be a packrat sometimes. 

Next, I hung a plumb bob off of it to help me put the jack in the right place.  I have no idea if this was smart or just overly anal - but I kept having images of fingers crushed underneath a wall, so I went with anal.

Next, I installed a similar bit at the other end of the sill plate, and installed a couple of floor jacks under them.  I found that I couldn't get the required torque on the wrench, so I stuck a 3 foot piece of black pipe over the end.  The guy at the hardware store called the length of pipe "A serious breaker bar.  Something will absolutely break."

Naomi said "Daddy!  That's a big wrench!"

Action shot!

The house lifted up without incident, and pretty soon, we had another 12 feet of sill plate replaced!  I learned a few things on this one - I brought the 12 footer in through the window, I didn't destroy any bits, and I didn't try to gently preserve the rotted plate I was removing.  This one went much faster than the first one.  Tada!

Then, I gently removed the jacks, and the house is sewn up once again.

Over the next couple of weekends, I'll need to replace the last little chunk of trashed sill plate, and then it's on to wallboard.