A Prepped and Primed Porch is a Happy Porch

Steve and I have a nice balance as a team. Steve is very concerned with doing things precisely. I, however, have a more "good enough" attitude. Steve by himself could be driven to distraction by details. By myself, I would never take the time to do things properly, as long as they function. Together, we find a good balance of allowing for necessarily imperfect yet still high quality work.

The main lesson from this weekend's project is that any painting endeavor takes about 3x as long as I think it should.

Steve and I started by preparing our front porch and back steps for primer. This entailed sanding the entire surface and repairing imperfections with wood filler.

Steve sands the back steps:

I use a putty knife to apply wood filler (which Steve later sanded) to the front porch:

Next we moved on to adding some additional architectural detail to the front porch. We weren't happy with the appearance of the base of the old support columns.

Old column base (Steve is so disgusted, he can't even look at it):

Off to Home Depot. We found some pre-primed exterior grade molding that we really liked. Of course, to cut these things properly you need... a brand new miter saw!

Molding cut to size, Steve attached the pieces to the base of the columns with exterior finish nails (tapped in with his brand new nail set) and filled the gaps with wood putty. Much better.

These preparations completed, we swept the surfaces clear and were ready to prime.

I prepare a paint roller (using a lint roller to remove loose fibers so they don't shed onto the painted surface):

Priming the back steps:

Back steps complete (well, first coat anyway):

We ran out of daylight before we could finish, but here's the progress on the front porch:

I find the painting somewhat therapeutic and don't mind the work at all... but it does take a lot of time. We'll continue our work throughout the week to complete the priming.

We don't plan to paint the final colors until the contractor has completed work. The colors we have chosen are similar to those on the house already: a deep reddish brown for the treads and deck surfaces, a brighter maroon-ish red for the handrails, a dark slate-ish blue for the risers and some rail detail, a sage-y green for additional rail detail and a soft white for the balusters. The newel posts (currently that lovely shade of puke yellow) will be primarily white with detail of multiple colors (like the existing columns). We will paint over the old trim detail with our new colors, which should freshen everything up. We are not going to repaint the main house right away... but we'll certainly be saving up for that project to happen in the future.

Big Spenders

Today Steve and I purchased our oven/range and dishwasher. One of the guys working in our local Sears appliance department was a co-worker of mine when I worked there briefly ten years ago. He remembered me (at least vaguely) and helped us out with everything. One nice thing about salespeople that know you, and know that you used to work for the same company, is that they don't tend to pressure you for the "extras," which was nice.

Having spent our entire adult lives in places where things don't work quite right, we wanted our dishwasher and oven/range to be exactly what we wanted. So we splurged a little.

The dishwasher is a 24" Kenmore Elite. It has pretty good reviews everywhere we looked, but the thing that drew me to it most is that it's advertised as "virtually silent." Some reviews mentioned that the owners had to press their ears to the front of the machine to be sure it was, in fact, running. Our house is very small, and a noisy dishwasher would be a constant annoyance. So we're excited about that.

The oven/range is a 30" Whirlpool Double-Oven Freestanding Gas Range. It also has good reviews, and I was pushing for the double oven feature. It just makes sense to heat a smaller space, since Steve usually is cooking for just the two of us. Also, I thought it was neat that you can prepare two different dishes at two different temperatures at the same time without having to take up any more space than a standard oven/range. It also has streamlined grates that seem like they'll be easier to clean than the usual type. We'll see.

Thanks to signing up for a Sears card, we got 0% financing for 6 months, 15% off everything and free delivery. Seemed like a pretty decent deal. We're very excited, and I'm glad an old colleague of mine could get the commission. Our shiny new toys will be delivered next Friday.

Cabinet Improvisation

Steve and I decided to salvage one of the two existing lower cabinets (and its accompanying upper cabinet) to use until we do our grand kitchen remodel. Said grand kitchen remodel will happen... eventually... when we save up the money for all the finishes, and have lived in the house long enough to know exactly what we want.

The lower cabinet we wanted to save was missing two drawers, so we pulled two drawers out of the other cabinet. One drawer was a perfect fit for one we were missing. The other salvaged drawer was much too deep, but the other dimensions were a match. So, Steve got to cutting...

Perfect, of course.

Steve put in some small nails to reinforce the drawer. Two things to note about this next picture. First, he is being such a good boy wearing his hearing protection and safety glasses for the circular saw. Second, in the picture below he isn't hammering in one of the tiny nails. He is using a larger nail as a nail set, to recess the small nails. I tease him for his perfectionism, but he does do awfully good work.

And we have a complete set of cabinets (covered in the contractor's tools and supplies).

We will be sanding down, painting, adding drawer pulls and putting on a new piece of countertop when construction gets closer to completion. It'll certainly be interesting living in a kitchen with only one lower and one upper cabinet, but we've definitely had a lot worse. Our rental in the mountains didn't have any usable cabinets. At least in this kitchen, there's plenty of space to have shelving units for open storage.

The Great Unveiling

Ta da!

We have a backyard! It took a lot of work, but Steve and I finally cleared all the overgrown foliage. We even found a couple rose bushes underneath it all. The ivy will require constant effort to tame, but we're up for the task.

We've seen some really amazing ideas for small urban backyard design in Sunset and Better Homes & Gardens, so we're looking forward to making the yard a great little place to hang out. Being somewhat of a low priority project (and the beginning of our rainy season not being too far away), backyard planting and design will probably not happen until next spring. Plenty of time for scheming.

Silver Claws

In the interest of preventing blog overload via giant post, I'll just talk about one house project Steve and I tackled last weekend. More updates to come.

Our house came with a clawfoot tub in surprisingly good condition. It was obvious, however, that it had been painted at least twice previously and the latest color didn't exactly thrill us.

We could have spent a ton of time and punished our lungs trying to strip off the old paint, but we decided to just try painting over the existing surface.

First, we sanded and vacuumed up the debris.

Then, I taped off the plumbing connections and edge.

Finally, Steve painted. By the way, we're aware that spray painting indoors is a bad plan. However, moving the massively heavy tub to a better ventilated location was not an option. It is so heavy that we could barely lift a side enough to jam the dropcloth underneath. We had decent airflow thanks to some open doors and were sure to leave the room as soon as we were finished.

Ever the thorough worker, Steve compensated for the dim light in the house by going over the entire surface with a work light to be sure no spots were missed.

With two coats completed, we were very happy with the result. The silver feet are definitely not as nice as if they were metal plated, but for $4, I couldn't ask for more. Besides, who is actually going to kneel down to inspect tub clawfeet anyway?

Who needs a floor in their bathroom?

A nasty case of strep throat left me feeling fairly pathetic last week, so I didn't get much done. I apologize to those interested in house updates for the delay. Following are photos from early last week. I plan to have more current pictures soon, as well as info on some projects Steve and I are working on this weekend.

Backyard cleanup is coming along. You can almost tell there were once planter beds here.

The bathroom floor was more heavily damaged than we first thought and needed new plumbing and support structure put in, so it made more sense to just tear it up. I commented that I thought it was kinda cool to have a hole in the middle of the house... but I suppose it's a bit impractical for everyday use.

Porch rebuild in progress.

Demolition

A little taste of demolition follows. Work is progressing nicely, and we're excited about everything that's being done. 

Over labor day weekend, Steve and I tackled the backyard foliage.
Steve cutting apart an invasive vine that had not only wrapped itself around water lines but continued to climb on to the roof and pushed a short way through a broken window and an attic vent:

 

 The roof of the bonus room after Steve finished his work:

The mound of plant matter resulting from our work (Steve actually cleaned up a lot of this while I was away last weekend):

 Demolished back deck (looks better already!):

Original flooring at the bottom of many layers beneath our former kitchen sink (the opening behind the sink leading to the laundry room will be closed off):

The bathroom was originally built having a step down from the level of the rest of the house, so oddly enough there were two levels of flooring in place:

Demolished front porch (partially rebuilt with 2x4's holding the original columns in place until rebuilding is complete):

Plaster removed in the kitchen to expose damaged lath:

Mail makes it official...

This arrived recently in the mail:

I know that this is old news, since (per the above) he actually graduated back in June. But it was still exciting to get the official piece of paper.

Scope of Work

My brother-in-law's comment on my "Before" post brought to my attention that I haven't really discussed the scope of the renovation our contractor will be doing in the coming weeks. I'm exhausted from hacking back the miniature jungle in our backyard today, so I'll just do the quick-and-dirty list form.

• Remove the rotted front porch and rebuild with same footprint.
• Patch holes in lath and plaster walls. Where plaster has separated from the lath, plaster will be pulled down and replaced with sheetrock.  
• Do some "lead paint remediation" and prime all the walls out in white.
• Make a new attic access with pull-down ladder. Currently, the only way to get in the attic is to shimmy through a very small opening in the kitchen ceiling by climbing a ladder placed on top of a kitchen cabinet.
• Reinforce termite-damaged support structure in attic and crawl space.
• Pour additional concrete pads to support a sunken section of the foundation (under the bathroom).
• Remove rotted subfloor in bathroom and replace.
• Repair broken window panes.
• Demo rotted back porch. We are not replacing the porch in favor of a more open feeling in the backyard. Steps will be built down to the backyard exiting the laundry room.
• Repair electrical throughout the house.
• Repair plumbing (water and gas) throughout the house.
• Remove damaged water heater (and accompanying space-hogging shed) and replace with tankless model. 
• Repair damaged siding. 
• Run a gas line for the dryer and replace damaged duct line.
• Fix drainage problems around the property.
• Remove alarm and motion detector wiring installed by the paranoid former owner.

I'm probably missing something, but that's the bulk of it. The contractor is only doing what our lender forced us to let them do to get our loan (since the house wasn't eligible for conventional financing, we had to get a renovation loan, which requires work to address "health and safety" hazards be performed by a licensed contractor). For instance, the contractor won't be adding cabinets in the kitchen. Steve and I want to do a kitchen remodel ourselves later, so we'll be repairing the existing cabinets for temporary use. We may also re-arrange the bathroom at a later date, but for now the bowling alley configuration will stay.

Once the contractor is done, Steve and I will do things like refinishing the floors, putting color on the walls and repairing the picket fence. We want to do as much work ourselves as we possibly can because, frankly, we enjoy working together and for us owning a home is really as much about having a hobby that we work on together as having a roof over our heads.