Garage - Complete

Work on the garage doors is finally complete. I had someone watching from a nearby palm tree while I sanded the last one. It's an Eastern Screech Owl, and it sat around all day.
















It has huge green eyes. This is a little while before it flew away in the evening.

I had to remove all the glass on all three doors. If your windows look like this after you paint, masking tape is for you.

Here's how everything came out. It took about a year, but all three doors look the same again. Next time I'll try and find someone who refinishes boats or doors to handle this job. I also cleaned up the driveway and sidewalk, and power washed the front of the house to get everything ready for paint. I won't be changing the color much - it'll just be a bit less white.

I've also been thinking about future projects while finishing up all this winter stuff. One of them is raising the ceiling in the living room, and I always wondered how high I could go. It looks like the answer is a bit above 11 feet at the high end. There really isn't anything up there besides some a/c ducts and wood to support the ceiling which will be going away.

It's also been time for cleaning. I haven't been able to take care of the white sectional in way too long. Leatherique cleaned it all up. It's the only thing I've been able to find that gets all the dirt out - even the stuff that's embedded in the leather. I tried to get a picture but it didn't come out very well.

We've been doing more planning for the kitchen and I've finally started marking the floor to see how everything would look in reality. We've already made a few small changes. The biggest change will be to add a pantry and knock down a large load bearing wall. The tape on the wall marks of two columns that will go in, and the white mark on the floor is the corner of the pantry. There are also a couple of dots on the floor for the center of the double doors and how far they will swing out. Next to the hallway are a couple of marks where I plan on installing a floor cabinet. I'm not sure if a wall cabinet will go in as well. This is where things like backpacks and purses will go to hide instead of out in the open.

We decided what to do with the doors. In this area I'll refinish the original doors, and the casing will be flat wood stained to match. Something that sounds so simple has been a huge problem for us to try and figure out but we finally know what we want.

This is what it'll look like in the living room. The wall in the living room is about 18 inches longer than it is in the kitchen. The opening between the living room and kitchen will more than double in size when you take into account that the white columns will be gone, not to mention being able to see between the area by the sink and the living room.

I'm going to spend the next month or so on winter tasks. The landscaping is halfway done as well as painting the house because I've finished a lot of the preparation work. Then I need to take care of a few things with the cars and truck, then plant a garden where a playground once was. After that it's time to move back inside and start pulling up the flooring in the entry and front living room. That's when things will really start to get interesting.

Poplar - Finished! Now, back home

I've been up to more than a few things since the last update. First off, I finished all work at the house on Poplar St. The driveway is complete and it here's how it looks.

Bricks starting to go in... music by Armin van Buuren at the jobsite.





















Halfway done.






















And, complete. It really wasn't so bad - this took just a few hours to do.

Here's how it looks from the other side.


There was also a problem with the door to the main bedroom. Somehow the back side was broken nearly completely off, and unfortunately I couldn't find a replacement at Habitat so I had to fix this one. It was pretty easy... cut a piece of wood to match what was missing (which wasn't even real wood!!!) and glue in place.

















Before.

















After. This is of course, before I painted it white and rehung the door.

There was also a problem with the heater over there and I called a HVAC place to change out the disconnect box. While over there I went up into the attic and looked around. Up there was an old wooden vegetable(?) crate and a small radio from the 1940s, along with an original light fixture for the bedroom. I'm going to grab the radio later today. It's missing the electronics but could maybe be repurposed for something else.

And... back to the house this site was SUPPOSED to be about. I'm hard at work on winter tasks and making pretty good progress on them. The middle garage door is finished now.

It went from green, to this... 

And finally this. Pay no attention to the writing on the driveway... I also pressure washed the sidewalk and deck, and decided to write a few things on the driveway while I was out there. 

Still remaining on my list of winter stuff to do is, 

- Stain the deck

- Refinish the last garage door

- Power wash the house, caulk and repaint all trim.

- Remove grass and black fabric from the landscaping, lay new fabric and put down river rock

- Repair our horrible front yard gate... easily the biggest eyesore in the neighborhood

Three of these tasks will take only a day or two, but the garage door and painting will take longer. Once THAT is complete, I get to start on the big project for the year. The kitchen/living room/whatever else comes along.

From a construction perspective, the best order to work in is to remove the flooring and subfloor from the living room, add a beam underneath for support and replace the poorly-designed, structural deck post underneath the house with a new pier, and then take care of all vapor barrier issues in that region of the house. Next up are new joists and then I can lay down the subfloor.

After that I'll move on to the kitchen, removing everything from in there and doing the same structural and vapor barrier work as the living room. Then the wall between the family room and kitchen will disappear, I can take care of electrical/plumbing/gas, put the walls back together and essentially build the kitchen back. Returning the living room to normal will come last.

In the past I've done a bad job of posting "before" pictures, so here are a few now.

This peninsula will go away. The stone flooring will likely carry forward from the kitchen to the front door (on the right)

We're considering leaving the wall oven in place and moving the refrigerator to the right of it. The cooktop will go where the refrigerator is, and the spot where the sink and dishwasher are will become a peninsula. I'm tempted to add a narrow, 4 drawer cabinet to the left of the dishwasher.

This is the view towards the kitchen from the living room. This wall will go. I'm ok with there being a header about the height where the one for the door/window is now since eventually the ceiling in this room will be higher anyway. The window used to look out to the back yard from the sink but now just goes from room to room.

Another shot of the wall that will be removed. There's a header in there somewhere for another window that was covered up when the addition was made.

We have a pretty good idea what kind of cabinets we like and are starting to work with countertops. We went to AGM in North Charleston to look around and didn't find a lot that both of us were crazy about until at the end, we saw this.

It has HUGE areas that just glow. We've never seen anything with color quite like it. Once we have an idea how much we'll need, we're paying for it upfront to make sure that we'll have it available. The slab behind this one has too much green to it; we like the front one much more.

The Driveway

I plan on finishing the driveway today. Everything this week has pretty much gone as expected, although I still need to spread one more load (about an hour) of gravel/sand this morning before moving on to the bricks. I could have bought it yesterday and driven home, but that would have saved no time whatsoever. Spreading it yesterday was not an option since I need to make this very level and there wasn't enough daylight left to be able to really see what I was doing.

So my plans for today are, get the base material and spread it, then move on to the bricks. The driveway is about 37 square feet per side, and a brick weighs in at 0.2 square feet each. This means I need 370 bricks. Each brick is 35 cents, so this won't be a huge cost. However, a brick paver weighs about 4lbs each. This comes out to just under 1,500 lbs so I'll have to make two trips.

Tomorrow I plan on starting/finishing the landscaping, as well as figuring out what to do with about a yard and a half of dirt that I excavated last weekend. I may build up the high side of the house to try and keep water from pooling up in the area but I have no clue what to do with the rest.

Pics to come once there is something more interesting than a pair of holes in the ground to post.

At home, I haven't really done a lot. Staining a little bit of the deck has been disappointing and I've really been focusing my energy on the house on Poplar St. The only reason I'm bothering to stain this 10 year old wood on the deck is because I'd like it to last just a few years more than it otherwise would have. I'm not ready to decide what to do with that part of the house and this will buy me a little time to figure it out. I'll probably keep the outline of the deck the same (The structure is fine) and drop it down a step. There's a strange step up/step down to go out the back door and dropping the deck a few inches should take care of that, in addition to resolving a small code issue since it's a few inches above the limit where it needs railing and a hand rail on the stairs.

I've decided that I want to go with a Miele dishwasher (translation: this will be in the proposal to the wife), and that it would be really nice to work with a kitchen designer to finalize the layout of this thing.

December Already?

I can't believe it's already December...

Not a lot has gone on at either house since the last update. I had to spend a lot of time catching a car up on maintenance so we could go on a road trip to Maryland over Thanksgiving, and since we got back I've been trying to get over a nasty cold. Every day I think I'm finally better only to realize that I'm not quite there yet.

I measured the driveway next door to the house on Poplar St since that's the design I intend to copy for ours, and dug out the two tracks that need to be excavated. This may be part of why I'm still getting over the cold... in any case I wanted to add the road base and compact it today but that's not really looking very likely because that would be hard work.

I can, however, do easy work... I already removed the paint from the bottom panel of the middle garage door so I can sand and finish that, and standing around with a power washer isn't hard work so I may clean the deck and stain it this weekend.

Pics to come if any of this happens...

Goodbye, Ghetto Fence!

I haven't been up to anything too exciting... mostly cleaning up and refreshing the place on Poplar St that I really didn't think would take this long to do. Things change once you find out how dirty everything truly is. The good news is that the interior is complete, minus replacing a bit of broken formica on a kitchen countertop.

I moved on to the outside this weekend. Most notably, I bought a power washer and completely blasted the exterior except for one side of the house that is difficult to get to. The deck was especially dirty but it cleaned up. There is a white film in some area... I'm not sure what it is but maybe it's the remnant of something someone else put down to protect the wood. It's 3 years old according to the date on some of the boards. The fence and deck need to be stained/sealed, which at first sounds like way too much effort for a place we'll be renting out but I want it to stay in good condition and last for as long as possible so I need to do it. Thinking solely in the short term leads to too many problems.

Today I took down a chain link fence in the front yard that had probably been there for 40 or more years. It was a simple task made more difficult by all the plants growing through it. The whole thing is gone except for two poles I'll need to borrow an angle grinder to remove because they're way too thick to cut with a hack saw. I'd dig them out along with the others but the sidewalk must have been capped after the poles went in and removing them would cause a lot of additional damage.

This is the most attractive part of the fence. Also, a reminder to beware of someone's dog.

This is the ugly, rusty part of the fence. It was going to fall down soon on its own anyway.

Altogether there are two reminders to watch out for a dog and a third sign to just leave. Not pretty.

The place looks better without the fence, but now that it's gone all the overgrowth that was hiding is now standing right out in the open. I'll cut that out tomorrow and Tuesday. I found a number of stumps and bits of things that are long gone, and that'll make building the driveway more difficult than I thought. The front yard must have been a real maze to get through in recent times because they don't look that old. I found the decorative scroll piece that goes on top of one of the gates and a lawn mower blade in the overgrowth. I have no idea how that managed to hide in there so long.

 

Looking better, but those poles still need to go.

The front yard without the fence or any signs that someone would just ignore anyway. It's too bad the old columns are no longer there anymore.

My plans for this week are to finish all the digging for the driveway and come up with some road base, and with any luck some of it will be in by next weekend. I plan on just copying the one next door so that'll make life a little easier. After the driveway is finished I can focus on the landscaping, which I need to completely rethink since apparently the large bush in the front yard doesn't make any flowers.I may steal a design idea or two from next door for this as well.

I checked out the house next door with all the outdoor ideas I plan on borrowing and was amazed. The person living there designed everything and did the work herself, and her craftsmanship and attention to detail are beyond words. The quality is well beyond what someone could readily find a contractor to do - a person would have to search out a contractor who was a true expert to pull off work even close to it.

There will be more to come soon, I hope...

Upcoming Plans - This Place and More!

I haven't wasted any time on getting started with the next small project around the house. It's nothing too exciting - last fall sometime I started stripping the paint from the left garage door and eventually finished it this spring or early summer. Now I'm working on the middle door. It's moving along much faster thanks to everything I learned with the last one. I'm also working on one panel at a time instead of trying to do it all at once.

This Friday we close on another rental house downtown. This one is not in a historic area but was also built sometime around 1920... my guess is no earlier than 1915 / no later than 1925. Based on the neighboring houses, it looks like one of many George Trescott built (his foursquare pattern like the one on President St is easier for me to spot) and he was active in the Rose Garden area this one is in. For whatever reason I never bothered to take a good picture from the street so these will have to do until Friday.

Here's the front porch, including a visitor who decided to come along to the inspection. It's pretty typical of bungalows in the area.

This is the living room - immediately to the left when you enter. I'll most likely change out the light above the fireplace but leave the fan alone for now.

The dining room - also with a fixture that will probably be changed out soon. The flag does not convey.

The kitchen. Small, but most importantly it's already been redone so I don't need to do much here beyond cleaning up.

The bathroom. To the left is a space for a stacking washer / dryer. They're all over Craigslist so it shouldn't be difficult to find one.

Facing the rear of the house from the deck. Nothing too exciting.

The back yard is surprisingly large for such a tiny (.08 ac?) lot.

The side of the house... nothing exciting going on here either.

Foundation - DONE!

It's been too long since I posted anything, but I've been busy.

Over the last couple of weeks I finally raised beams #2 and 3 into place, which means that the foundation in the 2002 addition of the house is finally reinforced. It's nice to not have to crawl around underneath the place for a change. That means that I'm ready to move on to a lot of other activities now.

I was originally going to move straight into redoing the living room and kitchen and then progress on to a couple of smaller things, but I learned something this summer. It's hot here. Really, REALLY hot. Outdoor activities like pulling out the endless number of weeds from the landscaping near the house and doing anything that involves movement is horrible. If I start on the living room and kitchen now I'll wrap up just in time to start the outdoor stuff in the hottest time of the year. Instead, I'm going to paint the house, take care of the landscaping and the other two garage doors before working indoors.

What this really means is that I'll be working on this stuff off and on for maybe 2-3 months if I take my time. It may not be the most interesting stuff to post about, but it's better than occasional updates with pictures that look like I took them from inside a cave. Speaking of, here are a few from the foundation work.

The red is from a marker - not because something bad happened.

The bottom of the joists aren't all even with each other, probably due to the moisture that built up from the insulation that's now gone. They're cupped slightly and I made shims to take up the difference between them.

This is the third beam in place. The sad thing about all of this is that I didn't use a drop light until the very end. I was just carrying a small flashlight with me. I also did all the nailing by hand, except on the last beam when I bought a framing nailer. I'll get loads of use out of that when we start moving walls around.