So what have I been up to... well from looking at the last post anyway, I finished repairing the fence (boring, so no pictures of a fence minus tree here). I finished working on the installing the door/frame/casing to the bathroom and we spent mountains of time just unpacking and basically moving in. I also embarked on a stupid project to strip the paint from the garage doors... it was supposed to just take two, maybe three weekends per door but it turned into an entire learning exercise for what to do and what not to do to remove paint. The results will be wonderful and the other two garage doors will go much more quickly, but the first door took about two months from start to (almost) finished!
We came up with some great ideas for the kitchen redesign, and I was able to firm up a design for all the stiffening that I'd like to do to the foundation. I want to add four beams to cut the span of every floor joist in half. Along with this will come adding a number of piers, but it should make a huge impact on how solid the place feels. I also would've had some work to do in the kitchen in order to build it up to take stone flooring, and I might as well carry that over to the rest of the house. All that will need to be done before I can do any part of the rebuild phase of the kitchen/living room remodel.
And the last thing that we finished is making the address marker for the front of the house. Numbers are the same as DWR sells, since they changed them over to being made from aluminum vs. stainless steel. Where they came from, I'll never tell.
One more thing came along... since I don't have enough to do at this house already, and I have way too much time on my hands we are getting ready to close on a second house. This one will be a rental downtown. It's a craftsman built sometime around 1920. I like originality - it's not a post-modern mass-produced knockoff of a craftsman. It's the real thing, with tons of original character from the wood floor to the doors and hardware. The plan is not to completely redo this place. For now I'm planning on cleaning up, doing a bit of landscaping, getting new fixtures and blinds, and expanding the bathroom into an oddly-shaped hall closet. Kitchen rework, a bit of leveling and stripping paint will come at a later date. We'd like to have it no the market by February 1 (hint, hint for anyone who wants to live in Hampton Park Terrace...).
Here's how the bathroom door came out. Exciting stuff, I know... I experimented with building without casing this time around, just to see what all it takes. It was surprisingly simple - I just built a filler panel to go in the space above the door, and on the left/right sides it was a pretty good fit from the beginning and caulk was all that was needed to fill the gap. The master bedroom is now blue, just like our last house was. MUCH better than the horrible shade of purple that everything was beforehand. I'm probably going to replace all the doors when we really start redoing the place, but it's good to pick up a new skill here and there in the meantime.
Our second oldest project sounds so simple... just get numbers on the house so people can actually find it. Our address is a little strange compared to the houses around us, possibly because the people who built our house in 1959 are the ones who planned and built a lot of the others in the area. The lot is about twice the size as most of the others, but it's an older neighborhood and they vary a lot from one to the next. I couldn't just put the numbers on the house itself because they would blend in too much, so I built something that looked correct for the age of the place. The wood had to be cut, drilled, corners cut, edges beveled, and painted three times but the result is pretty nice.
Here's a picture from when I was almost done with the garage door. What I learned about removing paint... first off, don't bother with paint stripper if you have more than one coat to deal with. It can, however take care of two coats if they're thin. Work with a small area at a time, and don't let the stuff dry. The overwhelming majority of the doors were done with a heat gun since there were at least three coats everywhere except for the top panel with the windows. Since the wood wasn't varnished before it was primed, areas where paint was removed came out a grayish-white so everything had to be sanded. A quarter sheet palm sander sped this up and I'd have probably given up without it. That left behind the bare oak frame and cedar panels. I plan on going over it once more with fine sandpaper, and coating the whole thing with several coats of marine spar varnish to finish it off. That should leave the natural colors of the wood protected, and hopefully the only maintenance will be to add more every few years. The plan for working the other garage doors is to go just one section at a time instead of doing the entire thing at once.
Below is the rental house as it looks right now. Sometime next year it'll get painted. I'm not sure of what colors yet though. The part of President St that it's on is at the southern-most end of Hampton Park Terrace. When the national register surveyed the area some time back it was included in the neighborhood but since then that block fell off. I think it's an oversight since this block is on all the original surveys, and the legal description is something like Lot 1 as Surveyed by Hampton Park Terrace, Inc. / 1916, 1919. I'll deal with that more after I'm finished painting since I have a feeling that's a lot easier now than once it's re-added to a historic area.
A simple shot of the first floor, with the angle carefully chosen to keep the fireplace with a huge, ugly 1970s gas furnace that vents into the chimney out of the shot. Downstairs has two living areas (shown), a dining room through the french doors to the left and a kitchen. Upstairs has three bedrooms, a bathroom and linen closet. I think it's about 1,500 square feet. Anything made of wood besides the floor is covered with layer after layer of paint. I'm not really sure how to remove it from the french doors since heat guns and glass don't get along well.
So what's coming up next... for now I'm cleaning up the other house and that'll hopefully be complete in about a month and a half. Over here the next steps are to varnish the garage door, finish unpacking and moving in, add the two beams under the living room and master bedroom, and firm up the details about the kitchen renovation. We have a general layout figured out, but are unsure about some pretty important details. Mainly, what kind of appliances would we like, what type of cabinets, island/no island, flooring, and colors. The most logical order to go in is to demo the entry and living room first, add the beam under there and do subfloor repairs/strengthening, refinish and reinstall the wood flooring in there, demo the kitchen, do the other beam and subfloor work, then call a foundation company to level and re-shim the whole house. Then we can start reinstalling things in the kitchen. The subfloor and leveling stuff really holds up the kitchen work since that would surely damage whatever flooring we decide to use if we go in another order.
Lucky thing we're still in the planning phase, I guess...
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