Snuggle On Over

The new fireplace

Exciting weekend.

Javier (of JD Woodworks) built us a surround for the gas fireplace we bought as our mutual Christmas present. I'm amazed at how fast he works: on Wednesday, he came out to finalize the plan & the measurements, on Thursday/Friday he and his guys built it, and on Sunday, he installed it. Badda bing. Handsome, no?

The middle section, awaiting installation

Now I have to paint it (being the resident Painter Laureaute of Chez M), have a plumber hook it up, and get it tiled. And then--ahhh!--sweet warmth! Defrosting my poor chillblained toes. No remote control, unfortunately. We're going to actually have to get up, walk to the fireplace, and manually turn the thing on or off. Uf! Still worth it, though. Plus, it looks nice.

You may remember that in my original plan for the fireplace, I wanted it to go in the corner. However, our room is not very large, and when you add in the tile surround and mantlepiece, the whole thing would take up a really disproportionately large triangle of space. Plus, there was no room for a bookcase between the fireplace and the window--that was the clincher. So there was a bit of a design change, but I think it otherwise looks much like the plan, allowing for some adjustments in proportions.

While Javier was here, we also had him hang the last three antique doors from Mom & Dad. They still need more paint removed, not to mention staining and varnishing, but we wanted to have as much done at once as we could. Even in their present raw state, they look miles better than the dinky styrofoam things they are replacing. And the hinges--they look so much like real hinges.

Oh, yeah--and some day we need to replace the baseboards in the master bedroom. Kinda forgot about that till I saw this picture.

Meanwhile, in all things woodworky, Matt's been working on other baseboards around the house--he finished installing quarter-round in the dining room, caulked it in, and even painted it (he hates painting).


And, most impressively from a DIY perspective, he has begun hanging gutters on the house. We tested them this afternoon, and they transported water beautifully. The wooden windows and doorframes of our house will be so grateful.

Next step: trim ends and install downspouts.

I asked Matt if he had learned anything about hanging gutters to share with the blogly audience. He said:

(1) Be sure to give them enough grade or the water will sit.
(2) Drill and install the nails into each gutter piece before hanging.
(3) If you're working by yourself, hang each piece of gutter by its middle nail first.

So there you are.

Et voilà! Water coming out of the gutters (at the end, as is preferable)

Prettifying

This weekend we squeezed in some long-awaited prettification.

We bought some baseboards for the master bedroom. Unlike the front rooms of the house, with their 9" plank baseboards, the back rooms don't require freakishly tall moldings. Since planks-as-moldings have some significant problems (they're hard to cut straight and they're weirdly thick), we wanted to go with more traditional baseboards here.


As you can see, thanks to some holes and other imperfections in the walls, we did still need some height. And the fact that the ceilings are so high means that we need baseboards that are in scale. Below are the boards we ended up with. I think Matt's right that they're a little too elaborate for the style of our house, but there weren't any other >4 1/2" options.


We ran into difficulties cutting these boards, too--they're too tall for our miter saw, and, we realized, we're going to have to bite the bullet and replace a crunched piece of wallboard before trying to install baseboards there. As a result, we got exactly 2 pieces of baseboard nailed in; the rest to be added later after corrections and modifications have been made.

Death to Preval
I found the two missing air vents (master bed and study), so I decided to spray them to match the ceiling, as I had done with our other 5 vents. I got out my trusty Preval paint sprayer and... nothing came out. Change canister, repeat... nothing. Thin paint further, change canister, repeat... nothing. Blow out the plastic straw, disassemble the cartridge, and scrape out all orifices with a twig, repeat... nothing.

I know I've said it before, but this time the iron has entered my soul. No more Preval today, no more Preval tomorrow, no more Preval forever. The product is a menace. I ended up painting the vents with a brush, which of course means a thicker and more texturey finish than a metal air vent ought to have. Next time I need to convert a paint to spray, I'm going the whole hog and buying a sprayer and air compressor.

(Note: for the benefit of any Feds who may be trolling the backwaters of the internet in search of potential domestic terrorists, I meant "Death to Preval" in the rhetorical-flight-of-fancy sense, not in the stockpiling-fertilizers-and-disassembled-cell-phones sense. Peace, out.)

Bit... by... bit...

Matt installed our new fixture in the bathroom. It's brushed nickel--so nice! And it matches our new facet, our stylish drawer pulls, and the frame we bought empty that will someday hold a mirror (picture to come later).

We still need to buy glass shades for the fixture, a mirror for the frame, a vent/light combo, and to refinish the tub. I'm kind of amazed at the quantity of work we've lavished on the bathroom. How, after this much money, energy, and love, the thing has the nerve to not be finished, I'll never know.


Here Matt is after having moved the electrical box. You can see the white strip where the hideous old wooden bar of "Hollywood-style" lights used to be. (By "old," I mean from 1985. Not "old" in the sense of charming, quaint, or delightful.)

Weed barrier!
While he was wrestling with that (and an intransigent project it turned out to be--apparently, the colors of the wires are all wrong, making hooking them up a real challenge) I worked on putting down more weed barrier. Our gazebo is ultimately going to have an herb & wildflower bed around it. For the moment, it's mostly just got the ratty leftovers of the rest of the garden--the sickly Will Flemings we brought from Wolverton, a pitiful convalescent Climbing Peace (we don't even like hybrid teas) and a miscellaneous collection of sulky rosemary and reject peppermints and lemon balms from Matt's old nursery.

Hopefully, the weed barrier will give a little assistance to some of our weaker plants. If nothing else, it will keep the area a little tidier until we can begin to work it properly. Next spring: larkspur, poppies, basil, and oregano!


We also have a half-hearted little bed with a few roses by the light pole. I weed-barriered that, too, just to tide it over until we can really kick it into shape.


Finally, here's Matt's little hobby greenhouse, built right on top of our horrible oubliette.

Pre-Parental Frenetic Burst of Activity

So Mom & Dad were coming into town to check out our progress on the house. Seemed wise to actually have some progress to show them.

So for the past months, we've really moved into high gear around the place. The initial goal was to have achieved a state of doneishness wherein all essentials would have been completed, and only fluffy stuff--like replacing ugly light fixtures or installing a ceiling fan on our porch--would be left to accomplish at our leisure.

To be specific, this was my initial goal. Matt, who is able to learn from history and thereby avoid repeating his mistakes, was well aware that I was cosmically, wildly, ludicrously delusional to think we had the time or money to accomplished everything by late August.

Consequently, instead of installing all of the needed baseboards (in the master bed, study, and hall), we contented ourselves with the baseboards in the dining room. Instead of installing the rest of the flagstones for our patio and weeding, mulching, and edging all of our beds, we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for having (mostly) completed the front-side bed, a long, L-shaped number that encloses what I like to think of as the Croquet Lawn. Instead of refinishing both the tubs, I half-finished the guest tub, leaving it in a state of sticky incompletion. (That darn epoxy still hasn't dried in some places.)

Still, we worked our little tails off to get this much done, and what we did really does make a difference, especially in the dining room. (Making baseboards out of planks, by the way, is not for the wimpy, especially when both the walls and floor waver wildly all over the place. 10 x 1s don't exactly accommodate themselves to the vagaries of turn-of-the-century construction.)

Nekkid walls. Note the handful of turquoise spacers, leftover from our bambooing days.

Ooooo! Lovely new baseboards! They currently look one stage better than this pic: all the gaps have been filled in with wood putty, and they've received a new coat of paint.

Mom & Dad were very sweetly complimentary about everything, in spite of its half-finished state. They kept saying that they were amazed by how much we had achieved, which was very gratifying. Apparently, The Family at large (whom they have been visiting recently), were also surprised and impressed by the quantity of work I've been doing, particularly work involving power tools. I'm not sure that their amazement entirely redounds to my credit, actually. I admit, yes, I am kind of bone lazy, and yes, I'd twenty times rather ply a book or a computer mouse than a shovel, but that doesn't mean I'm incapable, particularly when properly motivated (as when a gun is pointed at my head or I am confronted with hideous mint-green paint day after day). Harumph. They should have seen me with that nail gun...

In any event, a good time was had by all, lunch came up beautifully, to be frank, if immodest (grilled chicken and polenta with blackberry-nectarine salsa, tomato gratin, and Spanish potatoes. Tasty!) and we had a very nice time showing everything off and visiting.

Now we need to schedule some more visits quickly before we run out of steam.

In Which I Finally Face Down the Baseboards

And Other Minor Domestic Catastrophes

We got off to a slow start this weekend, but we got a fair amount of outstanding chores done. We tentatively nailed the first pieces of baseboard to the wall in the dining room, put another coat of paint on the master bathroom door, painted and reinstalled the AC vents, and did some much-needed organizing in the study.

The AC Vents
That doesn't actually sound like that much, but as ever, the Quest was beset by complications and setbacks. The triumph is in the rising above, not so much in the actual achievement. The painting of the AC ceiling vents, for example, was made difficult several times over.

1) We had uninstalled 7 vents back in March during the wild flurry of painting, 5 of which I tracked to 3 different locations; the remaining two are still AWOL.
2) Only 1 of those vents had any screws with it.
3) I decided to use this inexpensive little product that turns your normal paint into spray paint, hoping to avoid a repeat of the shutter-painting nightmare that so traumatized me back in May. So of course, the trauma just took a different form. I bought two cartridges--one for the tub epoxy and one for the vents. First the one didn't work, then the other didn't work. Then I tried the first one again and it still didn't work. So I played around with the second one, pulling out the plastic pipe, twisting the nozzle, twisting the base, and it still didn't work. Finally, I put the first one back on with the pipe from the second one--and it worked! Why? I don't know!

Evil paint sprayer by Preval

Naturally, when I went back to apply a second coat, both cartridges utterly refused to play. I tried all the tricks from the first go round to no avail. So our air vents only have 1 coat of paint--so sue us. From the ground, they look fine. Before I try to epoxy the tubs, I'm going to look for another brand of sprayer. This is much too complex to mess with when trapped in a tiny room with wickedly toxic brain cell-killing fumes.

Interestingly, the struggled didn't end with the painting. Screwing the darn things back in was equally vexing. I ran to Ace (fortunately, only about 5 blocks from our house--we've saved a lot of money in gas thanks to that Ace) to get some replacement screws (FYI, air vents require "sheet metal screws." Word to the wise, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation). I guess they were either fractionally fatter or slightly longer than the originals, because I actually couldn't get the little beasts in, and it took Matt a good 45 minutes to handle the 4 vents he ended up working on. (I did do the master bath all by myself--go Melanie! That was the one with the original screws, and they twirled right into place, easy as pie.) He kept trying different screwdrivers, a drill, a ratchet with a screwdriver attachment (which he later threw out in a fit of fury--apparently, it was nowhere near capable of the project with which it found itself tasked). The tools mostly let him down--I think it was his sheer determination, liberally greased with sweat, that ultimately forced the screws to submit.

So that was fun.

The Baseboards
Then we turned our attentions to the baseboards, which had just this morning received their final coat of paint. Okay. This is slightly complex. We were putting down baseboards to span the junction of our kitchen and our dining room. Now, the kitchen has old-style baseboards, like the living room. About 9 inches tall, nailed directly to the studs, with the wallboards resting on top of the baseboards, which makes the ~3/4" baseboards appear to be about 1/4" thick.

The dining room, on the other hand, has wallboard (almost) all the way down to the floor. It had cheap, modern plywood baseboards that were only 5" tall. We needed to replace the kitchen baseboard because we had torn it up when we attempted to remove it for the benefit of the tile guys. And because of the gaping hole, we needed to go with something that was at least 9" tall. We wanted the dining room to match the kitchen, since they're joined, but the dining room is ~1" lower than the kitchen and has walls all the way down.

Are you with me so far? Solid and lower in the dining room; big gaping hole and 1" higher in the kitchen.

So we wanted to stick the new baseboards below the level of the kitchen tile so that it would have an unbroken profile from the kitchen to the dining room, despite the 1" step. However, we had ended up leaving the baseboard in place during the tiling once we saw that there was nothing but a void behind it--we knew it would be a long time before we'd get to the baseboards, and we didn't want varmints strolling into the kitchen through the hole. Consequently, the tile guys tiled in the baseboards.

So in order to have level baseboards, we had to dig out the pieces of baseboards from below the level of the tile.


We weren't really sure what the approved tool is for this kind of work, so we approached the job with an enthusiastic eclecticism: we had two hammers, a crowbar, a chisel, a stout flathead screwdriver (the same that we used for prying up the ugly tiles in the bathroom), a power screwdriver/drill, and a crowbar.

I can now conclusively report that none of these was the right tool for the job. I drilled little holes in lines to try to weaken the board; Matt chipped into it with the screwdriver, I nibbled away at tiny sections with the crowbar... Progress was glacial. We hacked and banged and pried for about 45 minutes on a 7-foot section before we finally prised the last bit of baseboard out of the floor.

And, of course, crowning irony, when we dropped the board into our painstakingly carved-out trench, it was too short to cover all of the hole.

So we're going to have a drop-off in baseboard height after all at the junction of the kitchen and dining room. We also need to buy a different kind of nails--the ones we have that are long enough have great big honking heads. In addition, the wall flexes in slightly at the juncture, which means that the dining room baseboard is both lower and more protuberant than the kitchen baseboard. We want to ease that transition with some quarter round or similar. Uf. Always with the complications.

Everything Else
On a happier side, we roundup'd the bermudagrass in our flower beds (that environmentally friendly approach that we tried with the plastic didn't work for crap. There were a couple of patches of very lightly scalded leaf tips, and that's it. It was time to bring in the chemicals.) Mulch didn't work, plastic didn't work, hoeing didn't work--but I know roundup will take the little stinkers out, and that's wonderfully satisfying.

We also staked several of our baby trees, which have been listing drunkenly for the past month and a half. Matt thinks they would have righted themselves with time, but I was afraid they'd just harden in a depressed slouch.

And I touched up the "Nurtria" paint in the kitchen and dining room. Looks much better now that all the scratches and scuffs from swirling the furniture around for the past two months have been covered.

So, no project really completed, but at least measurable progress on several fronts. And I don't think I'll be afraid of baseboards again. Compared to the misery of slowly chipping tiny shard of baseboards out of my floor, nothing else the house can come up with in the way of baseboards can be much of a challenge.

No Pix Today

So it's been a while, not because we haven't been working hard (oh, we have!), but because I lost my camera's battery charger in Louisiana, and replacing it hasn't been as high a priority as procuring various doo-dads for the house. I kept thinking it would turn up and waiting to post till I could provide pix. I've finally recognized the inevitable and will be getting a new charger for my faithful and hard-working camera soon.

Meanwhile, here's a text update.

Most exciting (for me): I learned how to drive a riding lawn mower! The Vests very benevolently gave us one of their spare riding lawn mowers, which has been something of a salvation for us. After all, when you own a substantial spread like we do, a push mower just doesn't make the grade! (I speak jestingly, but it's actually the sober truth. Even on the riding mower, it takes well over an hour to mow our little almost-half-acre. With a push mower, it takes the better part of a day.) It was actually rather fun--the wind in my hair, the smell of cut grass, and when you're done, a real sense of accomplishment. Come next weekend, however, when the heat index is in the 100s, I'll probably be singing a different tune.

Also in the garden: We've begun a mulching and edging project that we will complete in installments over the next month or so, a few bags of mulch and pieces of edging at a time. We've had, due to time and budgetary constraints, to throw a lot of plants in the ground without prepping any beds for them, and the bermudagrass has been throwing a fiesta amongst our shrubberies. Now that most of the big projects are out of the way, we have begun to turn our attention to the Burmudagrass Problem. We've cleared and mulched and edged a little corner chunk so far. Modest but satisfying.

Our roses are mostly chipper and bloomy, especially The Fairy, Cramoisi Superieur, Wild Blue Yonder (warning: highly doctored photo--is nowhere near that blue), and Comtesse du Cayla. Our ginkgo, on the other hand, just sulks and mopes and looks chlorotic. And this even though we haven't had a summer this cool and wet since the Cretaceous, when Texas was covered by the Tethys Sea. Ingrate.

On the arboreal front: we've planted 2 lacey oaks (Quercus laceyi/glaucoides), 1 red oak (Q. texana or Q. shumardii?), 1 bur oak (Q. macrocarpa), and 1 white oak (Q. alba), as well as a pear and 5 desert willows. We still have a couple of palms to place (Matt got all of these super-cheap at the nursery), and we need to acquire a baldcypress and a 'Little Gem' Magnolia. And at that point, there will definitively be No More Room at the Inn.

Matt's big project: He's begun tearing down shed #2, the one that covers the hideous oubliette. I particularly regret our lack of a camera for this project because seeing the shed half-stripped is kind of impressive. Especially as he's only given it 6 or so hours of him time. Man vs. shed: one man, one crowbar, one victor.

On the inside: I caulked the bejeezus out of our clapboard hall closet (two tubes of caulking, and there were some spots that I never got to) and finally painted that sucker. This was two weekends ago; I still have specks of latex in my hair. Having a place to put our sheets, paper towels, and light bulbs really made a difference in terms of organizing the rest of the house.

In the bathroom: Matt wrestled with our leaky master bath toilet, not with complete success. He has now replaced a valve, the wax ring (twice), and added a "superflange" (sounds a bit like a blaxploitation movie, no? You'd think it would fix our leak and come with its own matching Cadillac). To no avail. We may have to call in a plumber and/or replace the dratted thing.

(Camera is back in order, so I'm adding in pix--MU 30 Aug 07)
Hall closet with copiously caulked gaps

The baseboards: We bought a couple of 10 x 1 planks to use as baseboards in the kitchen and living room, though we haven't yet worked ourselves up to installing them. One of the complicating factors is that we are trying to match the original baseboards in the kitchen and living room. The problem is that the original baseboards are 1-1/2" thick planks nailed directly to the studs with the wallboard resting on top of the baseboards. The thickness of the wallboards makes the baseboards appear to be only 1/2" thick. For a variety of reasons, we won't be able to replicate this unusual relationship between baseboards and wallboards in the dining room, nor will we be able to find planks that are 10" tall and only 1/2" thick. What this means is that we're going to have very weirdly thick planks as baseboards at the bottom of our walls. So you can see why we've been procrastinating.

Upcoming projects: Next week I plan to order faux (i.e., plastic) plantation blinds for the living room and master bed. No more tissue paper curtains! Maybe a few more of our neighbors will drop by once our home has adopted a more reassuringly middle class appearance. If we don't need a plumber, we may also spring for some new (brushed nickel!) drawer pulls in the master bath and a spray bottle that I can put our ceiling paint into to aerosol-ize it and spray our (disgustingly dingy) AC vents. If only I'd known about this product when I painstakingly hand painted the bathroom shutters with a weency plastic brush with split ends!

When the camera is back in operation, I'll work on the promised Manor/Elgin profile.

Onward and upward!

Vital Stats

There are a number of, well, numbers that I'm going to need to be able to access as I make purchases for the house. Just so I always have them handy, I'm going to put them here.

In addition, I'd appreciate it if my friends and relatives who like antiquing could keep an eye out for antique 5-panel doors (doesn't have to be oak--fir or pine is just fine) for us. Our house came with one original 5-panel door (at right), a smaller, plainer version that leads to a closet, and another 5-panel door that had been modified to hold a glass pane where two of the panels used to be. The rest of the doors in the house are a uniform hideous cheapness--dinky little hollow things that feel like they're made of cardboard. Why anyone would replace a lovely, solid-wood door with that ghastly flimsiness, I cannot guess. Anyway, we'd like to replace them back again.

I'll put the dimensions we're looking for below. If you come across any for a reasonable price (less than $90--I've even seen them for as low at $55 online), I'd be very grateful if you'd give me a call. We probably won't be able to afford more than one at a time, so this will be an ongoing project.

Similarly, we're looking for nifty antique door knobs. This house, which has 8 interior doors downstairs, has only 1 original doorknob (see left). We adore old doorknobs--so much personality!--so we'd like to replace the dismal modernities with something a little older and more interesting.

I'm not very picky about these, just so long as they're old and don't have paintings of pheasants on them. They don't need to match each other or anything. I do prefer dark metal finishes, however. The house is from ~1910-1920, so knobs from the early 20c would be ideal. I don't think we'd want to pay much more than $35 for a door knob. Again, if you see anything you think I'd like, please let me know. Thanks antiquers!



Master bath hardware: 8 knobs, 2 pulls

Air intake vent - 14 x 30"

Bathmat - max. 40.5" w


Baseboards
Dining room - ?

Kitchen - ?

Master bed - ?

Study - ?

Master bath - ?

Guest room - ?

Guest bath - ?

Memorial Day Weekend

Matt & I had a busy Memorial Day weekend. We finally tackled some of those tiresome, awkward sorts of tasks we've been putting off for a while. We rolled the master bath walls for the third (and final) time, primed the trim, and painted it. We painted the interior of that cabinet I had forgotten to paint. And we also opted to paint the miserable wall linoleum to match the trim. Not sure if it's a viable long-term solution, but it'll do for now.

Freshly painted master bath

In the living room, we (mostly Matt) finished off the edges of the bamboo floors and installed quarter round. On a purely cosmetic level, we brought in a palm and hung the Mexican star Matt gave me years ago when we were living in that weency little apartment in South Austin. Those small changes really make a difference in pulling the scale of the room together, I think.

The living room, embellished

Needless to say, much remains to be done. We ordered a countertop for the bathroom, which should arrive in 3 weeks' time--we'll have to uninstall the old and put in the new, along with its new sink and a faucet. Matt needs to reinstall the toilet, left off by the tile guys. We need to paint the tub and surround with that epoxy finish. We need to buy a new mirror and a new light fixture. And, of course, I need to make the valance, with Ladonna's help. In the long run, a new shower curtain may be in order, as well. However, the paint and the tile were a huge step, and we're able to go back to using the tub qua tub. ("Qua"?!? I must be feeling nostalgic for academia. "Qua" is one of those pointlessly jargony words I once promised myself never to use. Eh well. Perhaps if I apply a metric I could leverage my vocabulary using measurable benchmarks to maximize productivity. Yech. I'm in a whole new world of jargon in the private sector.)

In the living room, we need to do substantial touch-ups to the baseboards and quarter-round and finish hanging the chain for the Mexican star (we ran into difficulties with an insufficiently manly ceiling hook). And, of course, procure some window treatments not held on with tape. The remaining projects in there are long term: make some drapes, re-cover the ottoman with the drapes from the old house, frame some prints, and either buy a sofa cover or a new sofa altogether, budget allowing.

New baseboards for the kitchen and dining room are probably our next big weekend project. Since our walls aren't actually attached to the floor, the absence of baseboards means that any and all creepy crawlies can stroll into our house at will. Mr. Gorbachev, build up that wall! Doing so will almost certainly compel us to get the furniture into a stable configuration, a project with a whole list of sub-tasks unto itself (move Matt's computer, drill a hole through the wall to route the phone connection from the dining room into the study, clean out the wetbar cabinet, move the unhinged study door that's been sheltering inexplicably in the dining room for weeks, &c., &c...). Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting that room somewhat tamed.