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...

Master Suite

While I've shown pics of the updates to the bathroom, I realized I didn't put up any pictures of the master bedroom renovations over the last month (or two). Thus, here you go! At first I only thought that I'd have to replace the southern wall, but it turned out that as I tried to strip off the old wallpaper that the north wall too needed to be redone, and instead of patching it I just put up new sheetrock up over the older stuff. With a few more minor touches and some paint, this room will just about be done.

New Wall for the Confessional

The upstairs hallway has a unique closet - it was once a confessional! As far as we've been told anyway. However, despite this neat aspect to the house, there was one slight problem. As with several other places in the house, the back wall had several years of water damage to it, which of course led me to go ahead and replace it. My daddy always told me if you're gonna fix something, might as well do it right.

So the last few days have been not only finishing up the last details of the new walls in the master bedroom (largely mudding touch-ups), but also tearing down the wall behind the closets (no fun) and replacing it, mudding, sanding (even more no fun), finally painting it and putting it back together. With this done, I can turn my work to the adjoining bathroom.

2nd Floor Renovation Update

Hey y'all,

It's been a busy week for the house, particularly the master bathroom and the upstairs hallway. If you recall from the Nov 15th post on the hallway, I had a bit of an issue when I ran out of the tabs needed to put up the ceiling - somewhat important when you still have about four feet to finish. After a couple of attempts to create my own tab-like thingys, my luck struck gold when the manufacturing company told me they'd send me some more tabs for free :) So on Wednesday my tabs came via Fed-Ex and guess what project finally got finished? (well, almost) I still need to buy more trim for it, but overall, it's up and looking good.

As for the master bathroom, it is almost finished! The floor tile is down and I grouted half of it Saturday. I have about 6 or 8 tiles to stick up on the exterior shower wall, which I plan to have finished tomorrow, in addition to putting the toilet back now that the stool area is grouted. After the tile and grout is finished, I have some more trim to put up around the edges and touch up on some of the paint, then overall the bathroom will be finished. We're still decided what to do with the ceiling and I'm hoping to find a cabinet to put under the double sinks - if not, I'll have to try and make something that will finished that look off.

This week will most likely be spent finishing up the bathroom then turning my attention to the bedroom itself. I've decided to sheetrock over the north wall instead of trying to patch it - it will take less work overall instead of patching. Getting the sheetrock up the stairs is a challenge, but once it's up the easy part begins.