Not so much

Yeah, I haven't really been doing anything. Me = Big slacker.

I did just a couple of things this weekend, none of which require pictures.

Here's all I did:

I took the Christmas lights out of the tree out front. I've been meaning to do that for a while now, but it was finally warm enough and I had the free time to get it done. It was relatively painless, but I haven't actually wrapped them up or put them away yet. I'm still not sure how well that will go.

I changed the bulbs out in the porch lights in front of the house. Replaced burned out and broken incandescents with CFLs. I don't really like CFLs, but they're more efficient and last longer. Also, they're getting to be cheap enough where you aren't even really spending more to get them than you would with incandescents. When LEDs come down in price a bit, I'll definitely be getting those.

I also added a Dusk to Dawn sensor to the back porch light. We go out so much at night with the puppy that it's nice to have one that will just be on for us. It's also nice from a security standpoint. I like my house to be well-lit on all sides all night to discourage anyone from thinking they can lurk on my property. I'm very much anti-lurking.

Additionally, I picked up some foam rubber pipe insulation. The inlet for the outside air to air-ify our furnace and water heater burners comes in at the ceiling of the basement, and is right next to some of our plumbing. I doubt that it will get cold enough in the utility room for those pipes to freeze, but I don't want to find out the hard way. A little insulation on those pipes will give me some peace of mind.

Finally, I picked up a garage door opener. We're still living the good life with a completely manual garage door, but all that's about to change. We got this bad boy: Chamberlain Screw Drive and it will solve that problem right up for us. People seem to like it and we got a great price on it at Costco. I haven't ever put one in before, but I have some friends who have, so I'm going to try to ply them with beer and food to get them to help me out. That will probably take me at least a few hours of work and will justify a whole giant blog post of its own, I'm sure.

So there you go. Not much actually done, but a little bit. This week there should be more. Thanks for reading!

Puppy Cuddles = Plumbing (under the right circumstances)

We got a lot done yesterday. By "we" I mean the people I hired to do the work. "We" meaning me and my dad, the normal "we" on this blog, spent a lot of time cuddling a puppy and chatting. It was not the worst day of working on the house ever by a significant margin. So even though we didn't do much, much got done. That's kind of a nice change.

Here's the list of what went down:

We now have water flowing to the master bathroom rough-ins:

Everything still just stubs out, but we're all set to go for when we put on fixtures now.

We also have the HVAC moved now. Instead of having a vent right in the center of the bathroom door (not ideal) we'll have air coming up through the base of the vanity and out through a grate on the kick plate. I think it's an elegant solution to a particularly sticky problem.

This is the gas outlet behind our stove. We now have the ability to do a dual-fuel range, which is exactly what I want to do.

This is the new port for the pipe. They put in the flexible gas line and it kinda winds its way around and over to the other side of the house. It should be pretty easy to work around, which will definitely be nice.

Last but not least, there's the shower rig. Those blue pieces are marking where our body sprays will be. When it comes time to tile around them and all, the blue tubes make sure we don't accidentally cover them up or anything. Then we pull the blue tubes out, put the fixtures on, and voila!

Okay, this is really the last. My wife had an amazing idea last night. I say it's amazing because it's something I struggled with when designing the bathroom. We have a linen closet in the hallway but not enough room for one in the master. I thought about closing off the closet to the hallway and opening it up in the bathroom, but we like being able to get to extra towels and toilet paper and whatnot without having to go through the master bedroom and bathroom. So Jenna suggested that we do double doors. One from the hallway and one from the master bathroom. I think it's a brilliant idea. It means we can get our towels without having to go out into the hallway, and a guest can get extra toilet paper without having to come into the master bathroom. What do you guys think? Is it just crazy enough to work?

New Year

Well, it's the new year now, and we're off to a good start: I have made a blog post. Rather, I am currently making a blog post. More accurately, I am currently making a blog post but by the time you are reading this, I will have already made a blog post and will likely be sipping a Mai Tai out of a coconut shell on a beach because that's how I spend my Monday evenings.

 fig. 1

Really, not much has happened. I did order the plumbing parts we need and set an appointment with the plumber for next week, so that will be good. We are also leaning towards finishing at least one room completely rather than let them all languish at a state of 95% for years to come. I'm thinking the hall bath and the guest room are ripe for quick finishing with minimal required effort and materials. I will keep you informed of our progress.

So anyway, thanks for reading, as always! I'll post up here as soon as anything exciting happens.

Christmas Break

I probably won't post for a while with the holidays and all, but I wanted to show you what we finished up last night:

From the door

Toward the door

With the rug we got for it

And finally

What it looked like when we started.

I think we made an improvement.

Thanks for reading and Merry Christmas, everyone!

Connect Floor

The title may be a bit of a stretch. I've done so many posts on flooring now, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything clever. So in that vein, here's another!

The underlayment went in pretty easily. We tacked it down all around, which we won't be doing in the future. The reason is that it seems to start bubbling and crumpling and stuff on us when we do that. What we're going to do from now on is to lay it out, cut it a little long, and tack it at the end of the room where we're starting. As we go, we'll push the excess out and eventually just cut it off of the end. That should resolve some issues, hopefully.

Not sure what we're doing here, but I'm sure we're working hard.

Confirming that our guides are square.

First row! This room is going so much faster than the previous room. We've gotten more comfortable with the tools of the trade and we've learned what we need to freak out about and what we can let slide.

Working our way out. The wood we chose seems to go beautifully with all of our wall colors.

Bit of a break. So I went into the basement and garage and pulled out all the actual trash that needs to go to the dump. Old toilets, destroyed doors, giant cardboard boxes full of styrofoam, etc. All will be going to the recycling part of the landfill or the trash area. The basement is like 10x bigger with all this junk out of there. It has enough room now in the main room to hold all the junk that was sitting in the front room for weeks on end. Everything is really coming together.

Part of the dump trip was tearing out all the remaining carpet. The stairs were a pain, but look so much better even with just bare wood. A coat or two of primer and they'll look downright snazzy.

The upstairs hallway looks better now, too. Really, getting that horrible carpet out of my house was the most important thing of all. It smelled and just made everything gross.

Back to the floor!

As we finish more floor, there's less and less floor on which to store our crap. So we had to transfer back into the room.

This was the hardest cut so far in this room. Why didn't we start in here, again?

And that's about where we left off last night.

Here are some extraneous pictures of the house:

That's pretty snazzy, I must say. Many thanks to my mom and my wife for cleaning and organizing in here!

Here's our mantel with stockings and all. The J and J stockings you can probably figure out, and A is for my brother-in-law. But what about that fluffy pink W stocking, you might ask? That belongs to this one:

Her name is Winifred and she's pretty much taken over our whole life. She's adorable, as you can see, and is just a bundle of puppy-style energy. She's having a great time with grandma and grandpa coming over to help with the house, but I bet she'll be happier still when mommy and daddy can relax on the couch with her some nights again.

Thanks for reading!

Clean Sweep

Well, we got everything moved into the new room, so now it looks like this:

Super cute! The wood floor is really nice, and this room is so much warmer than the Colonial Room for some reason.

We're finally getting almost the last of this hideous carpet out of our house! The only carpet left after this room is the hallway upstairs and the staircase. That will probably take a little longer.

We're getting much better at this now. It doesn't take long at all to gut a room anymore.

Gross. You can tell where the seams in the carpet pad were because that's where all the nasty stains actually got to the subfloor.

DEAL WITH IT.

This is the debut of the Back-Pacuum, which I'm pretty fond of. I can't help but think that it might work a little better if it hadn't been left outside to rot all winter, but whatever.

And there's the floor with a coat of Killz on it. I'm going to do another coat tonight, then tomorrow will be underlayment time.

Thanks for reading!

Yar, ye be walkin' the plank

So we've put in more work on the office floor over the past few days. Here's what has come of it:

We have a few weird-ish areas around the door and closet, but thankfully they were close enough to 45º that we could cut them without too much difficulty.

We're sneaking up on the closet wall here. Thankfully we've already undercut the door frame, so it was pretty easy to get the flooring underneath it.

We are definitely running out of space to keep our tools!

This was lucky. One of our boards fit perfectly so the end of it came right to the corner there on the left. If it hadn't, getting the board cut and fitting properly would have been pretty rough. Sometimes things just go your way.

We decided to finish out the entry first and then go back and fill in the closet.

So close now!

We had to rip a short board here. The walls aren't really straight, either in the horizontal plane or the vertical, so getting the wood to match was pretty tough.

Woo-hoo!

This was one of the tougher pieces, but the template we built for the underlayment really helped a ton. I'm never doing a project like this without templates again. It took a while to make, but it saved so much time and material later on.

Slowly filling in the closet.

We're to the point now where the nailer won't fit anymore, so we're drilling and nailing through the tongue.

Last row!

My finest moment. Ladies (and certain gentlemen) this is what you've been waiting for. First off, this is the last board in this room. Second, you can see my very cool little hat light. It's my normal flashlight I carry every day, but the clip can turn around to be used like this. It was incredibly handy. I suppose the fact that almost my entire hind end is hanging out of my pants might appeal to some as well. Mostly my wife.

All done!

Look how pretty! The foamy underlayment in here makes a huge difference. Walking around on the bare subfloor was incredibly loud and echoy. Echoey? I have no idea. It echoed a lot. In here now, everything is much quieter. Louder than on carpet, for sure, but very reasonable.

This is what success looks like.

With this room done, we're on to the colonial room! I'll keep you posted on progress there as well. Thanks for reading!