Five for Five!

This officially makes a post every day this week. This is mostly a planning post, but I thought I'd run it by you guys to see what you think. I've made a couple of floor plans that we could potentially use, and I wanted to get some feedback. Please leave a comment and let me know what you like and what you don't, and especially if you have any other layout ideas. I'll be continuing to work on this stuff, so any input is appreciated.

This is the one we're leaning towards. We get a good-sized shower, and get to keep the linen closet.

Here's another option. This one separates the sinks, and may feel a bit more open. What do you think?

Looking forward to hearing from you all! Thanks for reading.

Plumbing the depths

So the plumbers came over last night. This is a big step. They were actually very cool guys and I liked them right off. They didn't try to make the job sound easier than it seemed like it should be, and more importantly, didn't try to make it harder than it should be. The last plumber we had out made it sound like one of the labors of Hercules to move a drain two feet, and wanted between $3-4K to do so. That's part of why we were so wary about bringing someone else out. What if that was low? What if it ended up being more? It can get pretty scary.

So anyway, we had the guys out. They took a look at everything in the master and the hooby room where we plan to steal the closet space. They looked in the basement and on the main floor under the master bath. They took measurements, drew things out on graph paper, confirmed with us what we wanted, told us what they had been seeing in other homes, especially newer, higher-end homes. It was a good experience overall.

This is what we decided. We can't properly fit a large tub, two sinks and a "throne room" (our realtor called it a water closet, I call it a toilet room) in the space without extending out past the window in the master or farther into the hobby room. We don't want to do that if we can help it. We want a nice big bathroom, but we really don't want to give up our nice big master bedroom to get it. So, we're going to change the big tub for a big shower. It'll be smaller, more flexible, and certainly something we'll get more use out of. We have a tub on the top floor already, so that won't be an issue. We can also make a really fancy shower in there. Body sprays, a bench, two shower heads, pretty much whatever we want. I know there are people out there who won't live in a house without a tub in the master suite, but I'm imagining they're less common now than they used to be. Who has time to soak in the tub anyway? If they really want to, they can go soak in the tub in the hall bath without any problems. So there you go. That's what we've decided and we're sticking with it.

Anyway, on to other things. You know how I said we went to the basement? Well when we were down there, the plumber noticed our water heater.

Um...what's that down there at the bottom?

Leaking water? Oh come on!

Yeah, the water is coming from the top. He taught us a bit about water heaters, which was neat. Most water heaters will rust out and fail near the bottom. That's the catastrophic failure that floods your basement. That happens from too many heat cycles, the plumber told us. Heat cycles are when the water in the tank cools down too much and you have to crank the heat back up to warm it up again, or more importantly (from what I gathered) when you have people using hot water all at the same time. This is not what happened here. The water coming from the top is a result of bad water. Hard water, specifically. It eats away at the metal in the pipe through some kind of chemical process. I don't understand it, I just know that my water tastes like chlorinated feet. So now we need a new water heater. An expense we hadn't planned on, of course.

Still, it presents an opportunity, as so many of these things do. We can install a cool thing that will give us instant hot water whenever we want it, and be more water and gas efficient. A tankless water heater, you say? NO! Why do you have to be so wrong all the time? It's a tanked water heater with a pump thingy on it! The pump is on a timer, so you set it for the morning before you wake up. It gets to work pumping hot water into the pipes so you have hot water ready right when you need it. There's a crossover pipe that dumps the stream from the hot water pipe into the cold water pipe when the hot water pipe gets too cold. Savvy? There's a piece of pipe connecting the two (usually at the farthest point from the heater) and it will open when the water temperature drops below a certain point. So when your hot water gets tepid, it travels back through to the water heater to be warmed back up again. This is more efficient since you're raising water from "not warm enough" to hot instead of from "fresh from the mountain lakes" to hot. At least, that's what it sounds like. I'm not entirely sure how it works yet, but it sounded promising.

Also, I did a touch more painting. Not much, but just enough so we can hang our curtain and maybe see whether the patch I did will hold up under semi-gloss paint.

Meh? Not sure yet. It will need another coat, I think. I'm hoping it works out, and it looks sort of okay than it did before.

So anyway, that's what's up. I'm hoping to do some work on the floorplan for the bathroom and post that up here so you can see what I'm thinking about. Thanks for reading!

Some kind of record

Three posts in three days? This is astonishing. Look at how astonished I am:

By "astonished" I clearly mean "sexy." On to other things.

We finished up cutting in with the primer, and got it in behind the stove and fridge. I also got some in around the door so we can re-hang our bedsheet curtain and get some privacy. This paint is a semi-gloss, so it needs a couple of coats to get good coverage. I don't know why that is, but it seems to be the case every time we use a semi-gloss.

There's the patch after a little more finagling. Still not entirely perfect, but I think it'll blend in pretty well once we get everything painted. of course I'll take pictures and let you know, but I'm pretty excited about it. If the sponge/joint compound technique works well for these chips, I'll be using it a lot more instead of trying to tape and spray. That's great for the larger spaces, but the tiny chips really don't need that much work.

My lovely wife also started priming the powder room, too. We got hungry and ran out of primer before we could finish, but it'll only take a little while tonight to wrap up the rest of the priming. Then, we can start painting in there. Woot!

So now, hopefully, we're ready to start rolling more color in there. We may have a fully painted kitchen and bathroom by the end of this week if we play our cards right. I'm really looking forward to it! Thanks for reading, as always.

Taken out of con-texture

I got paint last night. We intended to paint the kitchen our pretty blue color. Such things did not occur. You know why? Freakin' texture again. I swear that texture is the bane of a homeowner's existence. It's not that I was attempting to apply texture this time. No, I learned my lesson. I'm going to avoid that as much as possible.

What I was doing was removing texture. Let me show you what I mean. We had the handyman come in and patch a few small areas where texture had rubbed off. I looked at it and thought it wouldn't work. I'm a perfectionist in many ways, though, so I got multiple other opinions. Everyone else thought it would be okay. Here's what it looked like when I painted over it.

I don't know if you can really see it, but it's flat. Flat like there's no texture there at all. I only painted a small part of this wall just to see what it would look like, and it looks bad. It's a swatch of smooth in a sea of texture. Totally not cool.

This is another area where we had texture material filling in the actual texture. It starts about 5.5' high and goes all the way to the floor. Thankfully we hadn't painted over this yet, so I could still just scrub it away with a sponge.

Much better.

And this is what all that texture was meant to be covering. Very, very small chips of texture missing. I understand that you have to feather the new texture out a bit to get it to blend, but you don't need to cover the whole wall with texture to cover up tiny half-inch square chips. On the plus side, after having lived with the giant swaths of texture for months now, the tiny chips in the texture are bothering me much less than they were. I've also added some new tools and skills to my repertoire, so I think I can fix them much more easily even without the spraying. Here's an attempt on another part of the wall:

These are some pretty big chunks taken out of the texture here. I sponged off all the extraneous texture until I was left with this.

Then I used my torn up sponge (you remember that, right?) to lay some joint compound on here. I hadn't really thinned it, so it went on pretty globby. I let it set for a while and knocked it down. It's no perfect. but it is a significant improvement over the big flat area that was there before and the big chunks of texture that were missing.

Here it is with a coat of primer. The little circle on the left may need a touch of putty in it, but other than that, I'm pretty pleased. Maybe my makeshift sponge creation actually does have a use after all!

So anyway, that's about all we did last night. We scrubbed a lot of texture off the walls and pulled the mirror in the powder room to prep for paint. My loving wife also re-cleaned the powder room, which was a big job. That's the cats' bathroom so it can get a little grungy. Still, we got the paint for it and we're almost ready to prime. I think it will look like a whole new room in there once we get the new color on the walls.

I'll let you know how it all goes, of course. Thanks for reading!

Put on some paints

Woo-hoo! We actually did something productive with the house this weekend! You know all those "small" jobs I keep talking about? Well we finally decided to tackle a few of them. It turns out that painting with flat paint in anything less than full, blinding, noon-time-on-a-sunny-day type light means you can't see whether the paint has fully gotten into the texture. Here's a hint: it hasn't. So all the painting I did around the family room ceiling had to be gone over again. Still, it wasn't too bad, and when I was done and pulled off the tape, everything looked really good. here are some pics for reference:

The project sat here (paint on the wall to about 3" from the ceiling) for weeks. maybe months. Probably months.

Now, we have actual paint on the walls all the way up to the ceiling. Woot! It looks a lot better. I wouldn't have thought that such a relatively small amount of unpainted wall would have such a big impact on how the room looks, but it really does.

Just in case you think I'm cheating and only painted one corner of the room and then took a picture of that and told you the whole thing is done, this is a picture of the back of the room. See? Totally not cheating. I did actual, real work this weekend.

The part where I only painted one corner of the room starts here:

I actually got up on the big ladder with a can and brush and painted the corner. My wife was holding the ladder for me and made terrified noises every time I moved, so we decided it would be better to let my dad hold the ladder for me at a later date. Still, I'm glad we got one corner done. Again, it has a much larger overall effect than you'd think it would. I didn't tape along the ceiling and I was making a bit of a mess. I'm debating whether to worry about it. Going up there and just painting has taken me months to get around to, going up and taping and then going up again to paint seems extra unlikely. We'll see. I may just paint and try to keep it as clean as I can and see how I feel about it afterward. Then, if necessary, I can get back up there and touch up the ceiling color with a small brush. I think I'm going to need to do that anyway to cover up the mistakes the previous owners made with their "Red Red Wine" paint and those that we made with our neutral.

Also, we primed the kitchen. That and the powder room are the only parts of the finished house (not including the basement) that hadn't been at least primed. We're going to prime the powder room tonight and paint the kitchen.

First, we had to finish the caulk bead around the sliding glass door.

Then we painted the edge of the tape for the family room with neutral, then primer to seal the edge and give us a nice, clean division.

Ugly kitchen color is going...

Going...

Gone! Well not really, but mostly. We still have to move the fridge out and prime behind it, but that's it. Everything else has been primed.

Look at this lovely wife. She's tiny enough to stand up on the counter and paint without having to crouch over. Super cute.

originally we were thinking of using the "Misty Surf" from the upstairs hall bath for the kitchen as well, but it just doesn't look right down there. Too gray and too green. The blue on the right is actually the Blue Cornflower from the colonial room upstairs and we like it a lot more. It looks good with black appliances, white woodwork, and the whole house neutral.

It even looks good with the oak cabinetry. Once we get the whole room painted, I may change my mind about the color of the cabinets.

So there you have it. An actual, real blog post about actual, real work we did. I'm really excited about it, and we're motivated enough to keep going for a while. I think having the kitchen and powder rooms painted will really help the main floor feel more finished, too. At that point it's really just larger projects like floors and countertops and the like. And since we have the plumber coming, we may soon be able to start working on those, too. I'll keep you posted, as always. Thanks for reading!

Gah!

Yeah, it's been a long time since I posted. I just haven't done much, and I'm a little hesitant to keep posting "nothing yet" posts. Unfortunately, this is very nearly another one, so I hesitated to write it as well. We didn't make any big progress on anything, but we made some progress on making progress on something, if that makes any sense. I went to Service Magic yesterday to find a plumber to get an estimate for the master bathroom. The guy called back and seems like a really cool dude. If the estimate goes well, hopefully we can get rolling on this project shortly and really start making progress on the bigger projects in the house.

The reason I've been dragging my feet on this one is sort of silly. I hate calling contractors. I hate trying to figure out who will be good based on nothing but a name in the phone book (or the online equivalent) and I hate setting up a time for them to come out and give estimates. I hate wondering whether I'm getting a good deal or whether the guy will bail on me when he gets a bigger project offer. Really, I don't like putting the future of one of my projects in someone else's hands. If it's me doing it, even if I don't really know what I'm doing, at least I'm in control. I can keep working on it until it's the way I like it, or tear it all out and start over if I need to. It's slower, but it's less stressful for me. I know, these feelings probably make me a control freak. This is not new information. I just want to get the house done, and since this one task is holding up everything else, I just needed to bite the bullet and get it done. That's the real reason why we haven't been doing much else. Even though there are other projects we could be working on, psychologically for me this is the next piece and I really didn't want to do the work.

On a much more productive note, I felt great after making the call. I felt like I'd made an important step, and it was inspiring. Isn't that always the way? The thing you're dreading isn't as bad as you thought it would be and when you're done you wondered what the big deal was? That's exactly how I felt. So I got home and started taping and painting the top edge of the wall in the family room. I didn't get enough done for it to be worth taking a picture, really, but I did make some real, solid progress on a project. Tonight, we're going to finish the paint in the family room (maybe even re-doing any small patches of texture that need it) and start priming in the kitchen. It's one of those small projects that we could have had done weeks ago if only we'd had the will to work on it, but I'm feeling willful. When we're done with paint in the family room, then we can start on the floor in there. I'm going to hold off a little on it, just to see what the plumber says about the bathroom. Since the master suite is above the family room, he may need to take out the ceiling to get at it. If that's the case, I want the old laminate under the hole, not our beautiful new hardwood.

Anyway, thanks for your patience and thanks for reading!

Status...or Stasis?

Just a quick post to let you guys know I haven't forgotten about you all. We've just been crazy busy doing stuff every night this week. Our friend's b-day (all the sushi I could eat +1), trivia and harmonica class, and our book club. We're very busy people. I suppose we could be making much faster progress on the house if we gave up some of our social schedule or something, but I'm pretty happy with how everything's going.

We haven't made any real progress, but I just have to say that the addition of those cabinets has changed the whole dynamic of the kitchen. Things that had to be squirreled away in the tiny cabinets above the fridge-where even I had to use a step stool to get to them-are now in much more accessible spaces. We can also move some things out from the pantry and make more room for food. The big appliances, like the slow cooker and the electric skillet, will have to stay there, but the rice cooker, the crock pot, the blender, the food processor, etc, can all be moved to where I can grab them out with little issue. We've also managed to get things to a place that makes more sense. Plates, bowls, glasses and water bottles are all on the bottom two shelves of the new cabinets now, so they're easily accessed. Storage and cooking containers are going to be in thecabinet near the stove, since that's where we generally need them. I don't know if you can tell, but I've put a lot of thought into these cabinets. I would even go so far as to say that I've fantasized about having them and about how efficient and shiny my kitchen would be once they were installed.

So that's really it for now. Not too much else to report. I think I'm going to adjust some sprinklers tomorrow morning to catch the parts of the lawn that are looking a little yellow. If I remember to do so, I'll take some pictures of that so you can see how that whole process goes. Thanks for reading!