…and they have rounded third plate and are sliding home!

At this very moment we have a “Sheetrock Specialist” in our house texturing our walls and getting them ready to be primed and painted!! Woo! Hoo! This is the final stretch folks. So here is the line-up….Sheetrock textured, paint on walls, cabinets in kitchen, install floors and move in…hopefully all before July. Sounds like a heavy load but I am ready to roll my sleeves up and jump in. So, what have we been doing this past month you ask? Weeeellllll......Matt has been a busy, busy bee. The house is completely sheet rocked thanks to Matt, Paul and Sally who logged in many hours on the weekends and after work to get the house ready to be textured. He also has been working tirelessly every day after work installing the following retaining walls. Here is a before and after picture:

As you can see in the pictures we ripped out the fence with the dead vines on it and put in the retaining wall with steps.

Here is a picture of the side of the house as well, where he put up some more wall.

Here is Matt putting up ceiling sheet rock with the handy-dandy lift thingy we rented...let me tell you, ceiling sheet rock is darn heavy! And Matt was doing this all on his own...isn't he wonderful...awwww.....

If you look in the background of the picture you can see the window that we framed in as a pass-through window onto the front porch. We are still waiting for this and the sun room windows to come in. The window is directly above the stove in the picture, we are not going to cut it out until the actual window arrives to lessen the increasing number of bugs we are collecting in the house.

And now for the sheet rock pictures! First up is the Dining room looking towards the kitchen:

These are our new windows that are looking out onto the front porch. To orient yourself you can kind-of see these windows to the left of the picture above.

This is the Living room looking out towards the Sun room and conversely the Sun room looking out into the Living room in that order:

This is the Sun room looking out onto the back yard...notice there are no windows...yeah...I noticed that too! They are supposed to come in this Thursday...but that is what they said last week. I am beginning to feel that this is their stock answer. But when the windows come in imagine a beautiful stain glass window of an ocean scene with a sea turtle in the middle window.

Lastly, this our beautifully sheet rocked spare bedroom with it's new window! Sorry that the picture only shows a corner of the window but in the previous blog you can see the big hole we cut for it so you can imagine the window in all it's glory.

This weekend is paint, paint, paint. As soon as the texturing is done we will be priming the heck out of the house and I will be whitewashing all wood on the ceilings and walls to help brighten up the place. I hope my whitewashing skills are up to par! Before I whitewash I took a few pictures of what the wood looks like. Keep in mind that this is after I already cleaned and sanded the wood...it was pretty dark and greasy looking. These pictures are of the loft and the master bedroom.

Stay tuned because I have a big surprise for the next installment!

Digital vs. Film

Grrrrrr...

Not his fault by any means but unfortunately we do not have any pictures for this months post because all were erased on Matt's digital camera. I have to admit that my Dad has drilled it into my head that you never throw out any pictures without having a back-up i.e. film or copied on a a hard drive so I assumed that they would be downloaded onto the computer before being deleted. Now look who is the ass! But I assure you I will have new pictures up soon. All rooms are finally sheetrocked, there was a bit of a window dilema but it led to us getting a new window in the guest bathroom so all is good in the world. More to come!

Cheers!

The Winklers and a red door

So it looks like I am more of a monthly blogger as opposed to a weekly blogger, but that just means I am spending my time working on the house right?

We have finally framed in all the new window holes and our brand new, double pane, Mercer gridded windows are on their way (actually, by the time I post this blog they will have already arrived, but that is for a later time). Sally and I put this big hole in the house all by ourselves! Because we had to rip some of the siding off while cutting the hole for framing, we decided to replace a lot of the damaged pieces of wood. Originally there was a door to the back deck in the guest room, but the door was old and about to fall off it's hinges, there was no water seal, and the door frame was all rotted out, so we decided that a big 4' x 2' window would be better for a bedroom...don't you? Here is a picture of what the door looked like, and here is a picture after cutting for the window.

Sally was a champion siding "putter-upper" and here is the finished product...Ta Da!

The Winkler's (Mom & Dad) came down for a day to put their due diligence in. My Dad was great at getting us wired for the 23rd century, so that in the event that Matt and I will ever be able to afford the top of the line electronics we are completely wired for it! Thanks Dad! Mom is a master painter and helped to primer all of our newly installed siding, and helped to install our new locks. We can finally lock every door in the house...yippee! While everyone else had their special skills it seems as though mine is putting red paint on a white door. Matt and I decided in our infinite wisdom that a red door would be really cool...little did we know how many coats of paint a red door need, nor was I aware that you have to wait 8 hours in between each coat!!!!! But when all is said and done we now have a red door and it only took me 9 coats of paint and about a month to finish.

The Winklers were not the only family to come and lend a hand in the month of March. Fred and Ellen Oaks also stopped in to clean house and lend a bit o' muscle. Fred had much advice to impart to us and was able to salvage some Pergo that was in the original house to line our closets! If you can take your eyes away from his bulging biceps for a second you will see Fred is standing on the newly (re)laid Pergo

Finally I leave you with a picture of Cy, our Psychologist, Interior Designer, Plumber, Electrician, Sounding Board and all around great guy without whom we would never have attempted to take on this monumental task. Thank you to everyone who has help physically and mentally, we can finally see the finish line and your cheers only encourage us to work harder.

The ecstacy and the agony

Today the house defeated me. I started the day with so much optimism, but as the day progressed my glass became half empty. I had visions of a shiny new red front door, two newly installed pre-hung doors and crayon free wood in the master bedroom.

First the wood bondo never dried overnight so when I went to sand it down all I got was a gummed up sander, so scratch that off my list.

Next I tackled the wood in all the bedrooms. Cleaning with TSP is no easy task, especially if what you are cleaning is on the ceiling! There are a bunch of "lovely" crayon drawing all over the walls and ceilings - don't ask me how they got there - and I spent the greater part of my day scrubbing them off. Crayon is not so easy to scrub off wood. After a few aggravating hours and 3 stubborn stripped screws later I decided to move on to project number three, and allow some of the masterpieces to be enjoyed for a few more days.

Last planned project for the day was to install the pre-hung door. Luckily today was a beautiful day so we did not have to contend with the rain but even on nice days a pre-hung door still takes three adults 2 hours to install. On the bright side we did get the door in and insulated today, but we are leaving the second door for another day!

All in all only one of my projects were accomplished, but to end on a happy note our roof has been sealed and we no longer have any leaks! Yippi, bring on the sheetrock!

More to come.

Empty House

Whew! A month has past and it still feels like we just bought this house, but looking at it from the inside you can tell a lot of work has been put in. I have put in a solid two weekends of work, but Matt and his mom Sally have truly paid their dues. They both get home early and on most days run straight to the house to tear something out, clean out a newly found rat nest or patch up a hole in the wall or flooring. I tell you, they are two extremely dedicated renovators!

I on the other hand am dreaming about cornsilk colored walls, brand new furniture and high tech kitchen appliances. By the way...if anyone has a food processor collecting dust in a closet I will be more than happy to take it off your hands! Unfortunately my dreams will not be realized until a long way down the road.

So what have we been up to you ask? We have ripped down all the ceilings, and let me tell you that is no glamorous task, this house had sprayed in insulation in the roof...imagine pulling down a ceiling board above your head and having what looks like old, moldy, grey pillow stuffing fall down on you! But oh no...that is not all that falls down! We had dead rodents fall on us, blocks of wood almost knock us unconscious and hundreds of old rusty nails come raining down. We were completely covered from head to toe in clothing, fiber filter masks on our faces, bandannas and goggles, which of course were fogging up and limiting our vision to that of a glaucomic old grandmother. Once all the insulation had fallen we of course we had to scoop it up off the floor into endless black garbage bags and then tote them to the dump. Needless to say this was my least favorite job. But Matt and his dad Paul had fun in the ceiling beams once eveything was cleared so not all was lost.

My most favorite job would have to be tearing down walls! Smashing a hammer into a wall has such therapeutic qualities. Along with the ceilings we have torn out all the fiber board and ripped down all the wood paneling, save the wainscoting. All linoleum has been torn up, the kitchen is completely empty except for the stove and we have even torn down an entire wall, opening up the kitchen more. The first picture shows where the wall originally was and the second picture shows it magically gone!

Last weekend was pretty dreary; the sun barely poked his head from under his covers before deciding to let the rain substitute for him today. So what better thing to do than cut a big drafty hole in the side of your house?! Yup, that's right we decided to create a new door going outside to the back deck. Paul, being the fearless leader cut right thru the siding without any reservations and presto! We have a door frame! Sally had picked up two beautiful pre-hung doors from Home Depot the week before, and all we had to do was insert into newly created hole, easy right....Wrong! Turns out it takes a little bit longer to install a pre-hung door than what we had anticipated and four wet, tired and cold people don't really work together nicely as a team under these conditions. Luckily, the door will fit in the hole eventually; in the interim we have a very attractive piece of plywood keeping the critters out.

"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction" as Newton so wisely observed, so to counter balance our door defeat this weekend we bought 1,320 square feet of bamboo flooring from Costco...Have I mentioned how much I LOVE Costco?! Only in America can you find a jumbo Super Store that carries a life time supply of Dixie Cups and a complete bedroom set all in one location! At the moment Costco Santa Cruz is carrying Golden Arawana Quality Bamboo Flooring for $1.96 a square foot. As you may know, Costco is one of those, buy it while it is there, type places because you may never see it again. So we bought our dining, living and sun room flooring and it is all sitting in a beautiful golden pile waiting for the day it will be walked upon. I guess going green doesn't always have to break the bank!

In the words of a great philosopher "ta, ta for now!"

The new house

Matt and I have bought a house. I would say a new house but considering the house was built in the 1940's that would be a bit of a lie. Most of the original houses out here in Ben Lomond were built as summer cabins and our house is a prime example of that. All expenses were spared during the building process. For example all the walls are fiberboard, if you don't know what fiberboard is think really thick cardboard, there is no insulation in the walls and all the windows in the house are single paned. There are leaks in the roof, the floor coverings are old - we found 4 layers of linoleum in the kitchen - and the electrical is a little on the scary side. But for what it is worth this is our house and we are in love with it.



The entire house is around 1,300 square feet and is located on 1/3 of and acre on flat sunny Ben Lomond land. Technically there are 3 bedrooms and a loft, but one of the bedrooms (pictured to the left) will make the perfect sun room so we are converting it. The room has large windows on three walls and french doors leading into the living room. Can't you just see this room filled with plants and sunlight?


The ceilings are all wood panelling as you can see in this picture of our living room. The wood panelling is too heavy to be on the ceiling so the previous owners "fix" was to nail 2x4's directly on the wood for support! The wainscoting will get to stay because we like it, but the ceiling is all coming down to make room for some sheet rock and insulation. I can't wait to start tearing down walls and giving this house the much needed love that it deserves.


Matt and I are going to be as Eco-friendly as we possibly can afford, unfortunately being Eco-friendly these days means forking out a lot of cash but we are going to try our best. Hand-me-downs and recycled goods are the best way to reduce waste in our landfills so once we have time to sit down and map out what we will need I will post a list.
Deconstruction starts soon and more pictures to come!