Another room finally done!

Well, it's been a while since I've updated but let me say it was worth the wait - because another room is finally done! The Green Room, so aptly named because it has green carpet and partly green walls, has had its face lift completed! (though I should say over the years it's gone by several names, like the music room, the library, informally dad's office, and as of lately, my bedroom before I completely the master suite). It's been a few months since I posted about the green room but the lower walls have had their old lathe and plaster sheetrocked over, the small cracks from the foundation settling have been patched in the walls (or really, just on the south wall), the ceiling has been texturized and you'll never know where it's been completely replaced from ancient water damage (at least I think it may have been water damage - it's possible it could've been from the foundation settling).

Given that the original decor (when we lived here in the 90s) was a wallpapered top, green painted bottom, and wallpaper boarder acting as a chair-rail (below I have a small snippet of what it looked like), when it came to redoing the room, I felt it necessary to do something similar to the old look, given that I can't really change the green carpet and the old look made the green room one of my favorite rooms in the house. AND knowing that my wallpapering skills really aren't that great - well, let's just face it, it's messy - really messy - I decided simply to paint the room while giving it a similar feel, so I opted for a simple forest green color for the lower half of the wall while painting the upper half a light almond which was the closest color I could get to the old wallpaper my mom used twenty years ago. The wood work, which had been painted brown (who knows why given the wood matches the rest of the first floor wood work), was repainted so it matched the chair-rail I put up to act as the border.

And now I can finally say it's done, apart from some minor touch-ups on paint and the gas fireplace hookup which Dad will do on some trip down here. I do wish it was finished, cause it'd be so nice to sit by the fireplace while it snows outside - it's such a nice picture, isn't it?

<-- (Old wallpaper and border)

Another bedroom done

Just thought I'd update with some pics of a recent project I've finished - the SE bedroom. However, if I'm truthful there is one more thing that needs to be done - putting the ceiling fan and light back up, but I let the boss do that cause he took it down. :)

You may wonder why I picked gray for the wall color, cause honestly it wouldn't be my first color choice for a bedroom - but in an effort to keep the rooms somewhat connected via decor, the walls now match the bathroom walls, thus these two rooms plus the north bedroom which has the same gray accents as a wall border (which you can see on the door below) all match! The gray also comes from the slight gray/silver color in the second upstairs bathroom tile, which also includes a pink hue in the tile, so another reason for the north bedroom to be painted a light pink (also, the pink carpet also made that decision for me!)

I've also begun tile work in the shower in the hallway (second) bathroom, now that I've found more tile (and it was even on sale! Happy Days!). However, I did come across a slight issue. Once I put up the backerboard, which ended up resting on the shower basin's top edge, I discovered that there wasn't anything allowing the first row of tile to rest on while it dried because the tile now overhangs the basin. So I had to come up with a clever way to keep the tile from slipping while the mortar dried. Enter some 2x4s, wood laminate floor scraps, and kitchen Tupperware :) The only sad thing is that I can only do one wall at a time, but once all three sides have a bottom row, the rest of the job should go pretty quick!

More pictures :)

It's finished! The dining room floor, apart from trim and quarter-round being returned to their spots, is finished! I don't think I have to say anything more about it - the picture pretty much says it all.

I also thought I'd showcase some of the decoration I've done to the kitchen, since I've told some of you but have yet to post pictures, so here you go! I've always had a thing about sunflowers in the kitchen, so that's the decor I decided for in the kitchen. Because I couldn't find a sunflower stencil, I found a picture of one online, printed it off on file paper, cut out all the little sections (not that much fun), and began painting! Apart from some trim edging under the cabinets and around the doors (which need to be trimmed at the bottom to open), the counter-tops are the only project which still needs to be finished.

What is it about floors?

What is it about working on floors recently? My last post told about how the downstairs bathroom floor was done, and now I can report that the rest of the laundry room floor is now done too! Yippie! So on to the next floor! That's right, I just can't seem to get enough of working on floors. And so work began on the dining room floor today.

The plans of the dining room have changed several times over the last several months. Carpeted when we moved into the house in 1990 (I think they were - we did re-carpet most of the house after we moved in so I don't really remember if it was carpeted), Dad decided that with hardwood floors being the current fad in the housing market we would remove the carpet in the dining room and see if we could refinish the original wood floor (which actually has a very neat design to it). So we rented a sander and let the work began. The'work' lasted about ten minutes. Apparently what ever type of varnish house builders in the late 1800s used on wood floors is really good stuff and lasts a long time, cause even with the coarsest grit we had on the sander (a 20 - the lower the number, the rougher the grit for those who aren't Tim 'Tool Man' Taylor savvy), the old varnish just wouldn't come up. We even had one of the pads get so hot that it melted onto the floor. Oops.

I even ran to the hardware store and got some chemical stuff that claimed to stripe hardwood floor varnishes. Did it work? Ahhhh, nope. So, needless to say the plan to redo the hardwood floors in the dining room quickly changed to 'How much wood flooring does Menards have left (to match what we put in the kitchen and nook)?' Thus, the covering of the wood floor with wood floor now begins.

Downstairs Bathroom - Welcome Back!

Well, technically the bathroom never went away and was partly functional while the floor was being redone (there was a toilet just no sink), but the good news is that the floor has returned! The once tiled floor - which was ruined after a sewage backup several years ago - now has a new OSB sub-flooring and a wood laminate covering! Yippie!

The downstairs bathroom was built in the SW room of the house, which while we lived here full time from 1990-2000 was used as a laundry room and storage/closet area, and the larger room now houses the bathroom and laundry room. And since the tile in the bathroom had to be replaced, it was just easier (in the long run I suppose, though it really doesn't seem like that while I'm working on it) to tear up all the tile and redo the floor.

A slight problem I encountered while preparing to lay down OSB for the sub-flooring was the original wood floor absorbing the water and moisture from the sewage 'flood' and thus expanding and not laying level. So, while I didn't really wanna get under the floor through the crawl space under the floor (I'm not a fan of spiders. My answer to that was the shop-vac and vacuuming all the spiderwebs before I got down there LOL *pic1*), I discovered part of the problem with the floor not laying flat - ended up being a support brace that was actually lifting up the floor and keeping it from being screwed down flat and level *pic2*. So after digging out the base and taking a hammer to the 2x4 support that was nailed in, I re-positioned it and screwed it back in place. But once that hour or two detour was finished, the floor laid down great and I was able to go ahead and get the OSB subfloor down in preparation for the laminate.

Luckily for me, since we redid the flooring in the breakfast nook and kitchen, the original laminate we put down was just about the right size for the bathroom and laundry room. Unfortunately, being a bathroom I had to break out the jigsaw to cut around the toilet, heating vent, and all the 'FUN' that goes along with laying floor! LOL

But needless to say, after two days of working on hands and knees, the bathroom floor and half of the laundry room floor is down and done! (apart from trim and threshold pieces) Now let the fun part begin: moving the washer and dryer so I can finish the floor!

Haven't I already done this?

Hey folks,

Been a while since I've updated the blog, but let's face the truth here: when you work on a house constantly when do you want to update the blog? Only when things are actually finished! Makes you feel good to see a finished product...and with this house that only happens so often.

One of the biggest battles with this house is the kitchen - isn't that the case with all homes? Having been built before running water and electricity, the kitchen isn't as big and convenient as most kitchens are today. First, lack of cabinet space. Not much I can do there. Secondly, new (few years old anyway) tile floor completely ruined. Now that I can do something about.

Having already put down some wood laminate flooring (below) in the adjoining breakfast nook (which was on sale but there wasn't enough for the kitchen too), the original plan was going to be fix the tile in the kitchen. But then I got to shopping at one of my favorite places and found some dark reddish-tinted oak wood laminate flooring (it's really not as red as it looks in the pictures at the bottom) on sale and BOOM! New plan gets put into action.

(old laminate)

Step 1: remove laminate put down months ago and relocate to laundry room and downstairs bathroom; remove broken tiles and rest of perfectly fine tiles in kitchen and scrape dried mortar off old kitchen floor

Step 2: drive two hours round-trip to pick up new laminate flooring (also bought on sale)

Step 3: lots of cursing and swearing as Dad and I discover why new saidfloor was on sale

Step 4: finish new floor in breakfast nook over weekend; finish new floor in kitchen few days later

Step 5: enjoy not having to step around broken tile as you admire your new kitchen floor :)

(new laminate)

Work Work Work

Well, on the last post I talked about the front fence going bye-bye, so I guess I should update you on that front. With help from my next door neighbor who had past experience, though he said he didn't, we managed to get the new fence up, minus the gate since I didn't have enough left over for the gate. So while I keep my eyes open for the fencing to go on sale at Lowes, I can admire what the fencing will eventually look like.

Even though we haven't had much rain, and by much I really mean any at all (and to think the same time this year we had inches of water in the basement), I've been trying to figure out the gutter system for the house. Over the years Dad collected bits and pieces of vinyl guttering from store closeouts and sales (cause on sale is how this family rolls), so I've been doing my best figuring out where to put what and etc. I think I've figured out parts of it so far, and those sections have now been painted a dark maroon to match the trim on the house (since white just didn't match at all) and hopefully will get put up soon once I get some 2x4s cut to keep the angles just right when it's up against the trim and fascia. It's always something LOL.

Work has commenced on the green room downstairs. Adjacent to the living room on the west side, the green room is so named because it has green carpet and half the room is painted green. Got it? Unfortunately for me, the perfectly fine wallpaper was taken down in that room, leaving me to sheetrock the bottom half the chair-rail (which needed to be redone regardless, due to the cracks which occurred from the house settling on the foundation) and figure out what to do with the top half of the walls which had some smaller cracks here and there, the worst actually being a few spots where a noticeable bow in the plaster walls can be seen. Primarily wherever there is wood work, though I'm not sure why. Anyway, after two days of lightly mudding over the small cracks and patching holes, I gave the room a test run. The problem with mudding walls is that it's hard to tell if it's smooth unless there's paint on the wall, so after a coat of almond colored primer, I was able to see if the patch jobs held up and looked ok, and they do, so that's one small problem off my shoulders. I'll finished up with the painting, get some chair rails for the wall, and then the room will be done, apart from a new ceiling that will be texture sprayed on and done when Dad comes down for a visit.

The upstairs bathroom wall is done and it plus the floor is grouted. Looks pretty nice if I say so myself. Overall I've got three more half walls to tile, except two problems: 1) I've got to adjust two electrical boxes, but the only problem is that I can't get behind the wall to adjust them without cutting into the OSB and thus weakening the wall; 2) I've only got one more box of tile left. Oops. Looks like I've gotta go on the hunt and find some more. But apart from those tiny problems, the bathroom is done (if you ignore the fact I still have to tile the shower).

Where is the Summer going?

While we've only have one week of official 'summer', it's hard to believe at times that it's nearly July! And since I haven't done a very good job of keeping everyone up to date on what's happening with the McCoy Mansion, I thought today would be a good time to do so.

Currently the project outside in the mornings (while it's still a cool 70 degree range) has been taking down the north fence and replacing the 10+ yr old wood with modern plastic/vinyl stuff. Our neighbors to the east replaced our east fence a few years ago with a nice white plastic/vinyl

one, so we thought that by replacing the north fence which meets with theirs, it'd clean the place up a bit. The old fence came down quite easily - why is tearing apart so much easier than putting together? who thought up that? - I'm now currently working on laying out where the posts need to be dug and all that wonderful stuff that comes with putting up a pre-built fence. Boy, I can still remember that hot hot hot summer when we put up the 6' privacy fence all those years ago...

The in-house project lately has been a few things. My sister's and my's old bedroom had a few walls that needed to be redone, fortunately only the east and west walls, so after I tore off the once-perfectly-fine wallpaper which had been painted over, new sheetrock was been put up in that room and it's finally done and painted a very faint pink to go with the darker pink carpet. The closet walls needed to be replaced as well - didn't think some holes would probably be good in a closet even, but after a couple weeks of mudding, sanding, mudding, sanding (you get the picture) that room is done, the only thing needed to be done is some touch-up painting and sealing of the windows and a good cleaning of the carpet. (before/after pics below)

The second/hallway bathroom upstairs is coming along. The floor tile has been down for a few weeks now, but Lowes apparently doesn't carry much grout in-stock anymore, so I had to special order the color I needed, which is why I initially stopped working on the room. Meanwhile, backerboard went up on the walls and I have all but the east wall and a little bit of the top of the west wall to do tiling wise, and then I finally get to grout it! Yeah!

The guest room has been off and on, largely because I've been prepping to texturize the ceiling and do knockdown on the walls. Again, this means a lot of mudding and sanding to get it smooth and level, which if you've ever done is a giant pain in the butt! The heavy duty respirator mask I wear gets very hot and I'm always having to clean my safety goggles which honestly never seem to do much - I usually end up soaking my contacts overnight whenever I do a whole room sanding, because the dust just gets everywhere. Even the compound mud that says 'dust-free' -don't buy it cause it's not dust-free (however, I will say there's less dust with that stuff, but there's still dust either way you go. but for a less-hassle cleanup, the dust-free stuff works probably the best)

Another wonderful advantage to living in a small town and still knowing people you grew up with is that you can hire their kids to come and work for you! Old family friends of ours, the Wilsons, who daughter Rene was one of my parents' gymnasts, has kids who I hired to come and clean the backyard, largely rake leaves and do the stuff I could do but don't want to spend my time doing. They all seemed very eager to clean out the old cement pond in the backyard - they want me to fill it up and put in goldfish. I have to fix some of the cracks in it, but I told them that's what I always wanted to do, even when I was there age growing up in the house, but I'm still not sure how long the goldfish would last - I never could keep those little goldfish alive for longer than three days. Maybe if I get some of those bigger ones they'd live longer. Who knows. Another great thing about having the Wilsons help me was they were more than eager to shovel off the grass and dirt that had overgrown the brick patio on the east side of the house. It looks like a completely new yard on the east side. (this is a situation where I wish people would do just a little work to take care of something really neat) There's still a little cleaning I need to do, but it'll be a great place to cook out once it's all done.

More pics and stuff to come later...

Wonder what 65mph winds can do?

Well, in Kansas we say if you don't like the weather, wait 24 hours and see what happens. And Friday was no exception. Thursday was a nice day, high 60s I think, but come Friday we had a high of 45 degrees and winds out of the NW at 35-45mph with gusts up to 65mph and trust me, they were definitely that! Friend of mine clocked the wind outside of Alden (which is 5 miles NW of Sterling) at 62mph and I truly think they got stronger as the evening went on. At the college track the old high jump mats blew halfway across the football field and up into the opponents' stadium and nearly into the parking lot. The baseball diamond's tarp got picked up and blown up and halfway over the foul ball safety net - several guys tried to bring it down, but I don't know if they had any luck. Needless to say, the wind advisory warning was pushed forward from Friday evening until Saturday morning...I don't think my storm windows stopped rattling all day.

And as for me, I woke up Saturday morning to find a shingle on my front yard. Then another. Found two in my backyard. And sure enough, I looked up on the northwest side of the house to find about 15 shingles either missing entirely or ripped in half. Fortunately for us we still have a few bundles of shingles from when we roofed the house years ago, so I spend a beautiful Saturday afternoon (of about 70 degrees) repairing the NW corner of the roof. Easy peasy though (just as long as you don't fall off the roof).

A Busy Busy Worker Bee

So lately things have been busy all over the house, from working on the new dining room wall to preparing to tile the second upstairs bathroom to hanging sheetrock on the ceilings to killing off some of the grass (which has been overrun by crab grass and sticker patches), the main street mansion has been continuing to crawl towards that finish line and 'For Sale' sign.

Another weekend has come and gone, and with help from Dad we were able to finish up both upstairs bathroom ceilings from my last post. One project that neither Dad or I had ever done or attempted to do was texturizing ceilings with a spray gun. But as there's always a first time for everything, and fortunately for us, the whole texture process was pretty easy - minus a slightly sore neck and shoulders from holding a spray gun connected to an air hose with a gallon of water downed mudding compound. Thank goodness for Google - LOL - since it gave us an idea of how much to water down the mud and then knock it down, which we actually didn't do. Both of us liked how the mud came out of the gun with just a little bit of texture without being knocked down (which is basically just taking a large mud scraper or taping knife and smoothing the mud out; you can Google it too!) so we just decided to shoot it and leave it. I'm not sure if we'll even paint it, since the mud dries in a slight grayish/white color. The other nice thing about the spray gun is that it covers in one coat and goes up pretty quick.

Dad also likes to add things onto my 'to-do-list' (as though I don't have enough to do!), his biggest one being new sheetrock on all of the ceilings. The master bedroom ceiling has been sheetrocked and now awaits to be textured. We began hanging sheetrock on another bedroom, which was actually the room we tested our texture gun on. That way we didn't have to worry if we screwed up or it didn't work LOL.

Another item that went on Dad's check list was the destruction of the fireplace's chimney in the master bedroom. Situated between the two west windows, the chimney had been blocked off ever since we first moved into the house in 1990, and it stands out about a foot or more from the wall (and a foot and a half wide). In order not to have too much wasted space - and given the fireplace isn't usable in it's present state - Dad decided to have me tear down the chimney. Which honestly wasn't too bad, given that it's old bricks and they come apart pretty easy once you take a hammer to them once or twice. The bad part is the clean up! Hauling bricks isn't fun and there's no way of getting around it! But, on the bright side I've begun to board up the wall where the chimney was so pretty sure I'll have a master suite to move into (and then the work begins in the green room downstairs...)

And on a more successful note, I won't have to worry about anymore duct work being destroyed in the attic - with the help of a live animal trap, I got the squirrel that decided to call my attic home. And for those needed to catch some, peanut butter and peanuts will do it! So far, haven't had anymore unexpected visitors...

A Family Effort

For those of you who have remodeled a house on your own, you quickly find that there are plenty of projects that require an extra set of hands. As was the case with this weekend's projects - ceilings! I don't have to tell you that old houses - with foundation problems - will eventually have problems with the ceilings (and walls and floors and etc etc :) In particular, the master bathroom was in serious need of repair, but the problem is how to repair it. The easiest way overall was to put up new sheetrock over the old lathe and plaster. Of course one could always patch up the cracks then texture it or popcorn it, but the problem with that solution is that in old houses like this one, they actually put a wallpaper like material on the ceiling over the dried plaster. And unless you can pull all of that off, there's no point in trying to texture it with joint compound or popcorn because the paper will suck up the moisture and peel off (trust me, experience speaking here). Thus the only real course of action is to put up new sheetrock. And boy isn't that fun...

While this is the easiest solution to a cracked and falling ceiling, it requires a little more help than my two own hands can muster up. Enter - my dad for the weekend :) With the master bathroom being probably the worst ceiling in the house, that was the first project we needed to tackle in the 72 hours while Dad was here. However, because the walls & ceilings are angled, we first needed to drop the ceiling down a few inches so we could match up the new walls on the angles to the ceiling itself. Enter another slight problem - using a stud finder with lathe and plaster doesn't work all that well, thus it's the time consuming action of trial and error with a drill and screw to find the studs. But once studs were found and furring strips attached to the ceiling, my job started with measuring and cutting out the 1/2" sheetrock that was to become the new ceiling. A day later, it's done! At least, that part of it - mudding and sanding are still to come, which means a few more days of sore shoulders and a neck!

The next big issue to tackle was the ceiling in the second bathroom upstairs, which fortunately for Dad and I is much smaller. That ceiling only took a few hours, no furring stripes needed (though I still have some smaller parts to screw up). The next job will be to put up new sheetrock on the cracked and water damaged walls, then a new tiling job.

The last job Dad and I tackled into the late evening last night was the dining room wall. The west wall, after years of the foundation settling** (see footnote), had cracked and bulged out considerably. Fortunately, the only thing holding it up was the fantastic wallpapering job my mom did years ago when we first moved into the house. But with nearly ten foot ceilings, this was no small job for me alone to do. Usually, when putting up new sheetrock - either over the older wall or after tearing down the plaster - I pull off the door & window trim and baseboards. No easy task given the fact the baseboards are 8 inches high and have a high tendency to break in half when trying to remove them. Note - when the builders put it up initially, they didn't want them taken off!

Once the walls were up, one last thing Dad wanted to tackle, and consequently giving me one more project to add to the already growing list. With the demand of hard wood floors in today's housing market, Dad wanted to see how rough the original hardwood floors in the dining room were. While the entire house has wood floors (some more finished/polished than others), we had them all re-carpeted when we bought the house back in 1991. So, with fingers crossed, we pulled back a section of the carpet in the dining room to discover that overall, the wood floor is in very good shape, despite needing a good cleaning and some small nails and staples (holding down the carpet tacks and padding) removed. Lucky for me, I don't think the floor will need to be sanded, only polished and maybe re-stained in some areas to match the original coloring of it. While it will be different to walk into that room and have no carpet, I agree with Dad's idea that the hardwood floors will add more appeal and value to the house in the long run.

And so the work continues...