Friday

Took a vacation day today and started on the kitchen. What a mess.

I did get all the cabinets out and a few other things prepped and tore out also. The cabinets? horrible, I mean just nasty, dirty, and just.....nasty. I really don't have any more adjectives that come to mind other than the above. Behind and underneath was dirt, old tooth pics, dirt, broken plaster, and dirt. Did I mention dirt. Fine black dirt. The only thing that I can figure, is that when there was an old cook stove, and probably an old coal stove, is what all the fine black dirt I was seeing and breathing..soot! But anyway I got it all out. My sinuses are killing me.

I did sand and prime a good number of panels and started to layout the ceiling with getting 4 of the panels up on the ceiling before calling it quits for the night. The picture below is just some of the panels primed in the basement.

I finalized my cabinets and ordered them today, but it will be 2 weeks before they show. Overall things are coming together. A bit slowly for my internal timeline but physically I can only do so much.

Almost forgot, I did buy a stove the other night. I caught a sale at Sears and got a pretty good deal on a GE stainless model. Still absolutely blows me away the money they are getting for these things. Actually it kind of pisses me off, but I have dealt with it and moved on. I have bought 2 other homes in my past and never had to buy appliances, they always just came with the house. So I never really considered the cost until this time around.

Sorry to rail again about appliances.

Stimulate me

I received my "stimulus" (that's what we will call it) check yesterday in the mail. For those that haven't followed my postings religiously, and shame on you! I found out back in February that if you bought a house between April of 08' and July of 09' (which the law has since changed and has been extended) the government will allow a loan of $7500 for home improvement, and pretty simple payback period.
So I got my check and have been trying to get my crap together and formulate a plan. You would think that by now I would have had some sort of idea of what I want to do, NOT! Sunday I did do some tear out and kind of ran into some "issues" that put a bit of a dampener on what I had thought I wanted to do with the walls.
What I finally decided to do is bead board the walls up to the 8 ft level, then the remaining top 12 inches do a flat panel to the ceiling with a chair rail molding separating the two sections. On the ceiling I will also bead board with an alternating pattern in the center part of the room and a flat panel 16 inch border around the perimeter. The walls will be painted with Ruskin Room Green (egg shell), which is a Sherwin Williams color (but my designer, Home Depot insider, friend, insists that I use Behr brand paint) and a high gloss white on the ceiling. I think from the pictures Beth and I (mostly Beth, my insider) found and looked over of other kitchens it will turn out pretty groovy. Of course everything is subject to change and probably will.

An automated soda dispenser? and two lips

Sugar's morning baby sitter (grandma's house) was not able to watch her this morning. I had to leave her in the house all day and just wanted to get home and let her out so she could stretch her legs a bit before church this evening.

On the way home I stopped at McDonald's and grabbed a burger and was fascinated by the automated soda dispenser that was at the drive up window, truly a modern marvel. The order comes in, the cup holder spins and a arm pulls the cup and drops it onto this little conveyor, a handful of ice drops in the cup and then the soda. I must have been living under a rock because I have never seen this before. I think I pissed the girl off behind the counter because I just kept staring at the damn thing going through is routine and she kept asking me for my order. I don't think she was very happy with me. Small things amuse me I guess.

I really haven't done to much on the inside of the house at all since the weather broke. I mostly have been focusing on getting the yard in shape as much as the budget allows. It is slowly coming together but there is still allot to do in the yard after (same story) years of neglect. I will have my near golf course look in a few weeks though with some persistence. I'm just glad it is a small yard.

Today I pulled all this old cement edging out of yard, 6 wheel barrels full and edged all the sidewalks that have not been done in years, I mean years. That was a wheel barrel full of grass and dirt. I am just getting to old to do this kind of work and still move the next day. But on the flip side, all the hard work is done and I only need to maintain it now.

Tulipa, commonly called tulip, is a genus of about 150 species of bulbous flowering plants in the family Liliaceae.Tulipa, commonly called tulip, is a genus of about 150 species of bulbous flowering plants in the family Liliaceae. Tulipa gesneriana

I had my first pair of tulips bloom today. The PO had planted them all along the street and are really kind of just in big bunches. Dig a hole, dump a bag of bulbs, dig a hole, dump a bag of bulbs, repeat for half a block.
Tulips, that is like parakeets. It is one entity but has a plural name. I still think it is funny, and tulips, I see no semblance of two lips on this flower but I guess when it comes to latin all the words sound funny, like incontineticus butticus, or biggus dickus.

Come hell or high water, Sunday I am going to start the tear out of the kitchen. I have put it off all week and really need to get it going and done. No more excuses.
And that is what I did. I tore quite a bit out and made a mess again.
During my deconstruction, I found that the base boards where not in fact "boards" but a clay type of ceramic and in fact looks as though it was installed when the sub floor was poured. The house is not on slab but there is a layer of cement on top of the wood floor underneath. So it is a early version of cement board that was installed when the house was built.
What I found kind of cool about the baseboards, is that they are made of a clay type material and when you look real close, you can see sawdust was mixed into the material. Very well dispersed throughout the mixture, so I am not sure if it was a premix or something done on site.
What I also thought was neat is that the baseboards were poured and formed in place. The corners had wire mesh nailed into the wood with older style roofing type nails. Then the corner pieces were formed over top.
Had I known, I probably would have tried to clean them up and save them. But as I tore into the baseboards with my trusty flatbar and hammer is when I found out what I had broken into. And kind of to late. That's alright though, I will find something to replace them and no one will ever know except me and Sugar. Although she hears me cuss enough and just tunes it all out so I not certain if she knew what I was cursing about this time.

I have a friend that showed me a picture of a ceiling that is done in alternating patterns of bead board. I think it is pretty cool and will try and attempt the same style in my kitchen. Long story, but after I got into the first bit of tear out on the kitchen last week I found that the ceiling stopped where the cabinets met the wall, in other words it the wall and ceiling were not finished above and behind the cabinets. So I think the bead board will be a inexpensive alternative to drywall, less messier, less expensive than a tin product and just unique enough to fit me. It is going to be really cool and something that I can do myself. I really, really, really hate working with drywall. Which gives me a segway into the next part.
During the tear out today on the surface of the walls, someone covered the plaster starting at about 4 ft up and to the ceiling with a luan material, then wall paper overtop. Underneath the luan was the original wall paper that was installed. Kind of a vinyl type of wallpaper, and as drab a color as one could pick for a kitchen. The nice thing about the wallpaper and the luan? When I pulled it off the wall the paper came off with the luan and left the original skim coat of plaster underneath. Nice huh? Now? I am looking forward to putting drywall over all the walls to cover up all the disastrous projects that have taken place in the kitchen over the years. Oh yeah! taping, and sanding! I can't wait! Love it!

Saturday

I started to blow the kitchen out this morning. My original thought was to do parts at a time but after getting into the job, and thinking more about it. why would I want to make and clean up a bunch of little messes instead of just one big one? Kind of took my motivation away.

As I got more into tearing things out, I was running into one of those situations that required; if I take this out, I have to take that out first, and that piece needs to go before I take that out. So that was the clincher, I cleaned up and stopped the tear out.

Early this morning, 7:15 to be exact, the delivery truck driver showed up at the door to bring in the new refrigerator. I looked out at the truck, and it was a semi flat bed with a forklift hanging off the back. Since the refer is a return and not a "new" unit, Home Depot will only drop the unit off at the front door step. My "insider" at the HD talked to the driver earlier in the week and asked the him, if for a few extra bucks he would bring the refer into the house.
So "Jim" (that's what we will call him) pulls the refer off the truck and drives the forklift right up to the steps and drops the pallet on the porch. Then we begin to wrestle this monster off the pallet and into the door.
Ah! you thought that this was the end of the story? Nope! just wouldn't fit. Ok, lets take the hydraulic spring off the screen door. Alright Jim, push! shit! it is hanging on the door. Alrightly then, lets take the door off the frame. That did it. I flip Jim a twenty and he cleans up the pallet and the tie downs and jumps on the forklift back to the truck, and down the road to his next delivery.
The whole time Sugar is looking at us and wondering what the hell are you two crazy humans doing? After a few moments of quizzical looks Sugar went into the bedroom and jumped on the bed to take her early morning nap. Now this is not to be confused with her mid morning nap, or the early afternoon nap, or the mid, and late afternoon nap. Then we could take another paragraph about her evening naps.


After "Jim" left I pushed the refer into the frontroom. There is really no reason to put the refer into the kitchen with the pending demo on the calendar so I strategically placed it next to the couch in the front room in case I need an adult beverage it will be close at hand.
Not really, I haven't even plugged it in yet.

Breaking big rocks into little rocks

Not really, but some how over the years there migrated a few hundred pounds of cement and limestone into the yard. It was such a nice day today that I lit the rockets on the car and flew home to start a bit of yard work. Some PO planted Junipers and then ringed the area with the "stones".
The first pic is the area and the last is all the rocks I pulled out. The Honda is there for scale. Or is it the rocks are there for scale?

Tuesday

I thought I would start out working 0n the french doors tonight and maybe get some of the windows taped off before I started the stripping process. The first picture is of the door before I started messing around. So I started my messing around. I pulled the hardware off and really marvelled at the detail of the mortises. I don't want to take anything away from today's carpenters or finish carpenters, but you have to admit whoever did these sure did a great job and took their time. I mean the brass was in there tight. Pretty cool huh?




In the last picture you can see where I ran out of tape to finish off the window panes. Think about it 3 panes across, 4 high, both sides and 2 doors. That is 48 panes that need to be taped off. Really I probably don't need to tape everything off but I am a masochist when it comes to some things. But as I ran out of tape I was standing there looking at the cobwebs in the overhead joists and thought of the cool little heat gun that I bought a few weeks ago and never really used yet. I was also thinking of some of the other things you could use a heat gun for.
Like:
Making toast! everyone likes toast even Elwood Blues.
Defrosting a freezer
Ok, here is one! You only eat half a Ding Dong (I know, a stretch) but say your in a hurry and need to reseal the package to keep your chocolate jewel fresh for next time?
What if you wear Lee Press on nails? ( I don't) but you could heat it up a bit, and reform that plastic back to your finger.
How about creating a bunch of smoke from the melted paint, thinking your pretty smug about melting the paint off and the furnace kicks in and fills the whole house with that great smell? Now that is more of a reality than defrosting a freezer.

But I digress. Picture 5 is where I am happily melting paint and I hear a strange sound. Now there are tons of weird sounds that come from an old house and I really just thought it was one of my poltergeist (I don't care what you say, I have one, and maybe two that like to play pranks, knock things over etc.One I call Joe, the other? just "Knock it off") But anyhow what I was really hearing was the glass making a low cracking sound. I looked down and sure enough, crack! Ok, note to self, don't put the heat gun "on" the glass to get close to the mullions and fry the paint off. So fall back, regroup, assess the situation.

What I did do was take off all the paint around the door and far enough from the glass so as not to humor the gods with my stupidity.

It is kind of cool the way it peels up and then when the paint cools on the scraper it just crumbles off. Alot less mess than using chemical stripper. But I still need to use some stripper to clean up the mullions.

GE SXS

So I have this insider friend at the local Home Depot. I get a call and she tells me that they have this GE SXS refrigerator that is a return. So the story I was told by my "insider" is a guy buys this $1300 refrigerator, takes it home and finds out that it doesn't fit in the space that he made in his kitchen. So he brings it back to the store for an exchange and there lands in my lap a brand new Stainless Steel refer that still has the protective plastic film all over it and never plugged in. I really didn't think to much about it for a couple of days and wandered in to the store Friday afternoon to take a look. The damn thing was marked down to $818. Couldn't belive it. This almost ranks up there with the dryer I found at Sears a month or so ago. Again I could have been knocked over with a feather. I haven't seen even a black or white unit in this price range let alone a SS model. So I snagged this deal up and set a date for delivery.

Here is the model number if anyone is interested: gsh25jsxss

I really have not done to much on the house the last week or this weekend with family in town and Easter. Hopefully I can get back on track this coming week and get more trim stripped and sanded.

Tuesday

Haven't done to much the last few days, but I did manage to get 13 pieces of trim sanded, stained and finished. I have only put 2 of the pieces up back around one of the doors.
Sorry to be so boring.

Slide Show

All I did tonight was play around with the slide show at the bottom of the page, added more pictures, did some stripping, and some staining. That's it. Sorry uneventful night.

More Kitchen pics

Here are a couple more pics of my kitchen layout. As I get more of the plans scanned in I will add them to the blog. I am getting pretty jazzed about this project underway, Beth did a great job putting this all together.

Now here is another picture you can put your own words to. I like:

Man I am feeling gassy after eating that cabbage.

Feel free to copy and paste the image on your site and add your own caption!

Snow and a Kitchen

This is the view that greeted me Sunday morning after a snow storm blew through late Saturday night. Very pretty with all the trees covered. And the cool thing was the 6 inches we received was mostly gone by late afternoon. About 1 pm in the afternoon I cold hear loud "plops" outside. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what was going on. When I glanced out the window I didn't see anything, then a HUGH pile of snow fell out of the sky and "plop" on to the ground. Gigantic piles of snow were melting and falling off the Norwegian Pine I have out in the front yard and onto the ground. I swear if a small pet of child was standing out there, and got nailed by one of these "piles" they would have been flattened!

Here is a CAD of what the kitchen is going to look like. I will upload more as I get the docs scanned in.

Maezies Parish House

Maezies Parish House is my friends blog about redoing an old Parish house and the Church in front of it. Her and her brother have been into the restoration for 3 years now. Although they are just getting the blog going they have tons of pictures and videos that they will be adding to the site soon.

Here is the link below.
http://maezies.blogspot.com/ .

Tea Room

The second bedroom is now officially The High Country Iced Tea room. That is the two colors that I ended up painting the second bedroom this weekend, High Country, and Iced Tea. I am very happy with the color combination. I still have some trim painting and general cleaning up before my brother gets here next week for a visit.

Sorry for the crappy pics. But I only have a camera phone and that is the best it gets for awhile until I win the lottery, I am sure that I have the winning numbers this time! Oh wait you HAVE to BUY a ticket to win?! What kind of crap is that?

I also did a bit of an experiment and painted the crown the brown color that I had mixed last week. Looks ok.

The green is gone.

Also did allot of stripping again today and a whole bunch of sanding to do tomorrow.

My visit with the OCL

I had a treat tonight (no not another story of Ding Dongs, although I did treat myself to a couple this evening) I was able to visit with a fellow re-habber that bought an old church and parish house. Very cool place, I wasn't thinking and did not take any pictures. I was so enamored by the whole project (well ok I got to talking to much) and lost track of time. Not only did they buy the church and parish house but the church came with a working pipe organ and a baby grand looking piano. Pretty neat. I wish I knew how to play, it would have been great to play Phantom of the Opera, or a baseball song.
There is a turbine under the pipes that air up a bellow and then somehow by pressing the keys it allows the air to come out. I didn't really climb around in the pipe room but you could hear the turbine whirring below. On the wall behind the pipes written in pencil was a list of dates and names of the guys who came and tuned the organ. I think the earliest was around 1923 and the latest was 1948. Again I have say pretty cool.
The entire inside ceiling of the chapel is all tin ceiling (steel actually) and in remarkable shape. So can you imagine being in a "house" with 20 + foot ceilings and a pipe organ cranking out tunes?!

They have almost finished the parish house and should be able to move and make things livable in the next few months. Or maybe I am just being optimistic for them and being overly hopeful.
I almost forgot, what is OCL??? The original Church lady of course! If you live in a church you have to be a church lady right? There is just no getting away from that.

First weekend of Spring

I am going to start again with weather, but after months of zero temperatures I have to keep crowing about the beautiful weather we have been having again. But I spent most of the weekend in the house sanding, stripping, pulling door casings, and painting. Well I did clean the house and do laundry.
I took some advice from a friend and decided to try something different. I had originally planned to pull all the crown moulding down and just replace it with something different/new but Beth suggested that I keep the crown painted. I took a piece of the door casings that I just re-did late Friday night into the store and had them run the color match for a gallon of paint. It really turned out pretty good and I painted the bit of crown in the entryway.

The last two images are of the door casings and door frame that I completed and reinstalled Saturday. I am digging the color combination of the frames and the Butterscotch Candy color of the walls.

My great friend (Beth) who works at Home Depot pulled a rabbit out of the hat and totally came through on a kitchen design that has just blown me away! I wish I had a scanner so I could get them (the print outs) online for you all to see. It is quite fantastic and she put allot of thought into the whole presentation. I am REALLY jazzed and can't wait to someday get that project started! She basically took a look at the kitchen, a color swatch from the Craftsman period, threw in some glass tile back splash, shaker style cabinets, bead board and BAM! came up with an awesome layout. Very cool Beth! thanks! Really, I am stoked about it all.

The best for last. I discovered a new energy food, most would say junk food. These little chocolate jems come wrapped individually and in a box of 12. What am I rambling about? Hostess Ding Dongs of course! I got a craving the other night watching TV and had to have a sugar fix that left me in a trance for something sweet. I was cruising the aisle at the local grocery store, you know one of those little mom and pop places that try to carry everything?

All the aisles are just jammed with a lots of bits of all kinds of products and it drives you crazy trying to find what you are looking for. Come on, you know there is a store near you that is just like I am talking about. Everyone knows everyone and the beer and wine is located in aisle one just as you walk in the front door?

So I am perusing the energy food aisle and felt these little boxes beckoning me to the end cap on aisle 7, Scott! I heard them say. That was it, I came home and gorged myself, sat and ate 6 in a row! I had a pile of empty wrappers all over the couch when I was finished? well damit! I felt good about it afterwards! Not an ounce of guilt.

So your sitting there asking yourself ( I know you are) how can a grown man eat 6 Ding Dongs and not weigh 800 lbs? I don't' know either but that question fall in the same category as to, why have I lost almost 50 lbs in the last few months without trying? One of those mysterious things in the world that science has yet to solve.

I do have to add that the quality control Hostess has for these little hockey pucks is fantastic! I am on box number two now and they all have the same great chocolaty taste as the first one I opened a week ago!

How is that for a bizzare rant? Hostess Ding Dongs!

I bought some heat

The neat thing about re-doing an old house is some of the new toys you get to buy. I have been looking at a heat gun for a few months and finally busted loose with the HUGE tax refund I got from the state of Illinois. A whole $45! but at least I didn't have to pay this year so I can't complain. Haven't tried it yet but it looks cool and I hope that it helps with some of the paint stripping that I have been neglecting. It really sucks doing but I try to keep telling myself that in the end it will look nice and the next owners will more than likely paint over it all again because (in a Betty Rubble voice) "white looks so clean!"

I had the electricians save me some of the "cool" electrical pieces that they took out of the house when the re-wiring was completed. The first is of a switch (pic 2 is a bit better) that was used for turning on the lights when I went to go squeeze my fat arse up the hole into the attic. The three other parts are for a light socket.

A wow Sunday

Again it was a great day here. It is so refreshing to just be outside and "doing things" I mean I stood in the yard this morning and thought, what can I get into today? Well I tore out the bushes of course! If you look at picture one from yesterday and picture one from today there is a large patch of empty space that wasn't there before. Those juniper bushes just took away from the house. I added another two piles of stuff and another bag of leaves. Twelve bags in all. Amazing all that "stuff" came off this little yard.

I have no thought on what I am going to plant in the bushes place. But my thought is when I get rid of all the neglected parts of this house, I will have a blank slate to work with we I do decide to make a change.

Nice day.

I was FINALLY able to get outside today! What a great day.
Now the side yard is pretty small and the first picture really doesn't show a good view, but wat I wanted to give is a visual of that I cleaned ELEVEN (11) 30 gallon bags of crap from a small area. Leaves and shit (seriously, dog crap). I spent 2 1/2 hours raking and another hour cleaning up. I also trimmed the lilac bush and pulled 2 more bags of leaves and sticks from that project and another 1 1/2 hours.



The last pic is another hard to see (sorry for the shitty photos today) I was looking at the driveway and there are parts that have sunk, and over the years PO's have just added more and more blacktop. When I was looking down I saw that either the driveway was brick, or over the years they threw in some bricks to keep things shored up.

Day 55

Day 55 at sea, still no sign of land, running low on water and food..................
Not really, but the electricians are still not finished. I am sitting here in the dark eating Triscuits, string cheese and watching Ghost Hunters on TV. Kind of dumb huh? At least when I wake up from nightmares tonight the cheese will keep me bound up enough and not have the shit scare out of me.
I came home at lunch and the kitchen was a total disaster with wires hanging and out everywhere and all kinds of debris all over the floor. In defence of the electricians they did clean up pretty good by the time I came home after work. But I still feel that it will be the end of the week before things are totally done.
Next project? Back to sanding I guess.
Oh I did turn off the damn Ghost Hunters, it was creeping my out, that and Sugar started dreaming and growling in her sleep.

Here is a bit of boasting again, and has nothing to do with home restoration. I made the local newspaper today http://www.newstrib.com/articles/business/business-daily/default.asp?Article=2E4DEF07E68D81CEE7AAAA5AD22254FCE6B95700F21DE395 I think you need to register to read the entire article. But to summarize my employer is a participant in the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve and supports those of us that served and are serving in the Reserves and Guard. Pretty cool program, but the biggest thing is it educates employers on the law as it pertains to their employees and being called up for active duty. It also gives us guys a big sign of relief to know we still have a job to come back to after dodging IED's and bullets for 12-15 months at a pop.
Thanks LKCS! www.lk-cs.com a good company to work for if I say so myself!

Even more rain

The weather seems to be to subject around this area allot. I think that there is just not that much going on in peoples lives that the weather is a unifying experience. Hawaii and the Indian Ocean are the only two places I have been in this world that weather doesn't come in conversation. Why? it never changes! always the same. In Illinois? it changes, of course in Texas it always changes.
There is my segway for this post, weather. Rain and more rain and the basement is leaking. Some time back in the day drains were put in the basement floor, good idea and money well spent. But in my "clean" room it has been the scene of the most water activity. It flows out the door and under the wall, which I am sure the bottom sill is rotted out. I am looking at the floor and you can see where the "they" ran the tiles for the drains. In pic 1 you can see the line the tile runs.
I really got tired of vacuuming the water up and started looking this evening and thought I would break out the drill and masonry bit and doing some exploratory drilling. Right on! I hit the clay tile first penetration!(ha ha, he said penetration). So the more holes the better right? I drilled a little farther into the room and just hit concrete. And where I put in my impromptu drain was the end of the tile. But it did the job and sucked the water right down.


This is a picture of where one of the electricians stepped on the ceiling and fell through a bit. Not a big deal but I have a hole where there wasn't before.

Poor Sugar, she got a bath last night was bouncing around and acting fine. We went outside to go pee and she just froze up and stood there looking at me. Seizure again, She made it back to the front door and laid down. I coaxed her into the house and onto the bed for the evening, I wish there was something I could do for her. Today? she is fine, being Sugar. She does have the cuteness thing down don't she?