Small Task Journal - 10/21/12

Things are slowly coming together. This morning I finished the last major paint effort on the living room (the beams in the ceiling). Painting the ceiling and the beams over yesterday and today made me realize that I really had the effort order on painting backwards. I really should have done all the ceiling work first - because now I have to do another touch-up pass on the walls and some of the trim due to white ceiling paint splatter (and a few missed trim paint spots).

Happily though, with the ceiling done, I can move ahead later today and tomorrow with the floors. I have to go to Home Depot later today to buy myself a sander, sealer and polyurethane to finish off the room. Tomorrow I plan on visiting a few local stores for lighting and curtain/blinds to see what people with a better design sense than me suggest. I am completely uncertain about curtains and not sure how I should handle the bay window (one big set of blinds/curtains or something for each window so that I can still use the bay's shelf when things are closed up).

The molding for the ceiling and trim along the sides of the fireplace and over the heating elements need to get done but those pieces will be painted first and then installed to save some headache. Also, if they don't get in by Sunday, its not the end of the world.

Its nice to see the room coming towards the home stretch. There will still be more to do on the room after Sunday - but that is mostly in terms of setting up shelving and maybe a bar (or at least a liquor cabinet.

Small Task Journal - 10/17/12

I've been stalled a few days on getting some minor tasks done. Originally, I had planned to get a lot done on Saturday but had to shelve those plans as a date got reschedule (and then... cancelled). Because of that, my motivation wasn't really there on Sunday but I got a little bit done towards the end goal.

As of this moment, the trim has been painted and both walls and trim have been touched up on spots where paint bled or tore from the wall when I was pulling the tape. I do have to hit a couple of parts of the walls with another coat as the prime is showing through in some parts.

This evening, I dug out some heavy blankets and stuff them in the windows while I worked on painting the bottom window panes. I am going to try to get both coats on by the end of the night and get the panes back in the window tomorrow morning.

The ceiling got a little attention tonight as well. There was a hook hanging from the ceiling that was annoying me so I asked Jay if he had anything to remove it. After trying various pliers and grips, he just snapped it off. I suppose that works. With the hook out of the way, a couple of holes in the ceiling were patched and drying.

At this rate, I am hoping to have the window panes and ceiling painted by the end of the week.

Small Task Journal - 10/11/12

This week, I've been trying to do something in the living room each evening. This usually means I get home around 5, get started on some project between 5:30 and 6 and wrap up my effort around 8. It helps me feel like I'm accomplishing something and keeps me from just being in front of the computer all evening (though, I do need to spend some time there to work on Cam and Mel's tattoo designs).

Last night was spent putting another coat of Normandy Blue on the walls of the living room. I have the floor covers down the night before and all I needed to do for prep last night was tape around the various casings. Ava was all about being there in an overseeing capacity, asking many questions (often repeating some) about what I was doing and why I was doing what I was doing. She was chased out of the room when I started painting.

The coat of paint went up quickly and easily. Most of the walls just needed a quick second coat to fill in spots where I had put the paint on too thin on the first pass. The sections that had primer on them I went a bit heavier on. Happily, I had bought the second gallon of the color and was able to finish the room with plenty of paint left. Tonight, I plan on getting a start on painting the casings. That should go pretty quickly.

As of now (not including my plans for tonight), I have the following left to do on the room:

• Prime Windows
• Paint Windows, Window Muntins, Casings, Baseboards and Ceiling Beams
• Paint Ceiling
• Install, Prime and Paint molding around ceiling
• Install, Prime and Paint molding around heating elements and fireplace
• Clean, Sand and Seal Floor

 Looking at that list, it still looks like a lot but each of those except for the floor are pretty simple things. I am hoping to have this list cut in half by the end of the weekend.

Small Task Journal - 10/9/12

The nice thing about deciding to do a one-year sort-of Open House at the end of the month is that it has motivated me to do work in the living room. Granted, by the time I get going at night after work, it is already decently late so I don't have much time to get work done, but I am working on getting to the goal.

Yesterday evening was spent working on priming the remaining walls that needed a new coat of primer as well as getting the easy faces of the woodwork prime. The hard stuff is still there to do (inside the casings mostly) but I am going to try to get that done over the weekend. This evening, I had started out planning on getting the walls re-painted but go distracted with dinner and emails so what I actually accomplished was not amazing by any means (laid down tape/drop plastic, took outlet face plates off and installed an empty plate for one of the outlets I have no intention of using).

It is actually a good thing I didn't get to painting tonight as I discovered a need to rewire one of the outlets - I managed to trip the breaker while plugging a light in, which leads me to believe I need to rewire things and double check the ground (and maybe clip the extension box around the outlet a little).

Tomorrow, once I get the outlet fixed up, I'll dig into painting.

Small Task Journal - 10/2/12

I am trying to get myself on track to have the living room done for the 1 year anniversary signing. I want to be able to say, on October 28th, "Yes! It took me a year but I finished ONE ROOM!"

This means that September is going to be full of work. The big tasks are out of the way and now its just details to be done. The walls are insulted, the sheetrock is hung, the windows are installed and the trim is up.

For my first Small Task entry, I'm going to cover the little bits I did yesterday and today:

• Put in the screens in the Window casings in preparation for removing the windows for priming and painting soon.
• Primed two of the four muntins for the two windows (I call them grills... but some people get annoyed at me when I do...)
• Sanded the bottom of the bay window where water from plants (previous owner) had caused the existing paint to bubble up. Also, applied putty where needed on the bay window.
• Jay pitched in and went around the trim with the putty filling in the deeper nail holes and gouges from my amateur efforts at hanging woodwork.

Not related specifically to renovations - I did also pick up the pool toys and put them in the shed (have to remember to get out there and bring the Super Soakers in before the frost). The pool is going to be closed tomorrow and I didn't want the folks doing the closing to be tripping over things. I wish I had more time and better weather this past week to vaccum out the pool as well - but September's been rough and I'm willing to pay them a bit more to not have to deal with that headache myself.

Barely a Journeyman

It has been quite a while since I posted an update on the renovation efforts. That is due in large part to a lack of motivation on my part. This summer has been somewhat miserable heat wise which provided little motivation to work on the house (but plenty of motivation to be lazy around the pool).

Now that the summer is pretty much on its way out, I was able to motivate myself to get some renovations underway. Mom and Dad were planning to come down to visit around my birthday and offered to help me install a new pair of windows in the living room while they were visiting. To prepare for that, I had to make sure that the walls were sheet rocked, primed and painted. As I've mentioned in other posts, I had difficulties picking the colors for the walls I am working on. I get nervous about how the whole room will look in that color. I did decide on a color eventually - going with a color called Normandy (it is kind of a Battleship grey/blue).

(Not the actual color as it looks on the walls)

Mom and Dad were down starting on my birthday (Thursday) and Dad wasted no time in diving into a project. One of the light switches was giving me problems in the living room so we spent the afternoon figuring what wires went to want outlets and everything got wired up! Some of the wall did have to get taken apart in the process, but nothing a bit of primer and paint won't fix.

All day Friday and Saturday was spent installing the two new windows and getting the detail trim around the windows and doors in the living room installed. Thanks to all of their help, I am one step closer to having the living room completed (and at least partially competent at installing windows, we'll see how well I retain everything when I go to install one on my own).

Is it weird to say the work on the house has been going both slow and fast?

In the middle of April, Mom and Dad came down for a project weekend. I suspect Dad was wanting some bigger projects to be ready to roll than what was accomplished but I am over all happy with what we managed to get done. By we, I mean more Mom and Dad than me - the weekend before was PAX and I was suffering through a combination of lack of sleep and some bug I had picked up, presumably, at the convention.

Despite being under the weather, I did get a good amount of the sheet rock up on the walls in the living room. Over Saturday and Sunday, Mom, Dad and I got the joints taped and compounded added. It has taken me until just now to get the second coat on the joints. While here, they did some work on the bathroom upstairs (the shower is now sealed and usable) and Dad addressed an issue with a burst pipe out by the pool (a pool service was coming the following week to open the pool for the season and I needed the pipe fixed). I do feel bad about all the work the did compared to what I did, i should have pitched in more - taken some Day-quil and OJ and pushed through the cold.

Dad and I took a trip down to Lowes on Sunday to pick up a few supplies and get some estimates on windows. This trip gave me a lot of the information I was having a hard time getting - first in how I should measure the windows and second in what I should be looking for. Compared to the quote I had received from Home Depot, what Lowes was offering was a better deal (price was a lot less without the install too) but I need to go to Home Depot to see how they compare on just windows.

The past couple weeks have been me trying to get my weekend routine as a home owner figured out. How often do I need to mow the lawn? How much time do I dedicate to pool maintenance? What do I need to do to keep the lawn, plant beds and pseudo-garden alive? I think I've gotten at least a template figured out, I haven't had enough weeks to see how well it runs.

Speaking of the garden, with the risk of frost gone, the planters are now out on the stone wall at the edge of the pool. The peas have started to grow up and are the biggest of the plants now. Broccoli sprouted last weekend and there were a couple of shoots of spinach today. Everything else hasn't show much of anything yet - some may take long to germinate I suppose and some may have been planted too deep. We'll see what the weeks ahead have in store for everything.

And so the gardening begins...

With the last week being unseasonably warm and this weekend playing at being just spring time, I decided to break out my green thumb. We'll see if it proves to be competent at gardening or merely gangrenous.

I haven't done a lot yeah, but I have started the cleanup of the front yard. There are a few piles of leaves, sticks and other tree debris scattered around now waiting for me to pick them up and bring them to compost out behind the backyard.

The newest additions to the landscape have been planted. I bought six blueberry bushes, a pair of raspberry bushes and a ton of strawberries for the front yard.I know it might be a bit early, as there is still a chance of frost looming, but its been nice enough and the plants seemed to be managing well enough outside at Home Depot (both the strawberries and blueberries were blooming).

My bucket of Heirloom seeds arrived last week and yesterday I bought a few different planters so I could start getting some of those seeds growing. The bucket has a pretty wide variety of plants but for the first go at this garden, I think I am going to play it safe and go with more basic veggies (tomatoes, lettuce, a few squashes). I'm also going to see if Luke and Ava want to pick some seeds to plant as well - give them something to do here other than playing Team Fortress 2 or watching Elmo sing the same songs over and over again.

My last purchase, that I haven't done much of anything with yet, was a package of wildflower seeds. Not quite sure what I want to do with them yet but they seem like a good low-maintenance solution for filling in portions of the property that look empty.

Garden State

Ever since I bought the house, I've been running through my head what I want to do with the property outside of the house. I pretty much decided that, with a few small exceptions, I wouldn't be touching any big landscaping projects for the first couple of years here - focus on the inside. However, there is a lot of opportunity here to do some amount of gardening.

Since it's been getting warmer, I've been looking at the yard and flower beds and thinking about what I could do with them. I'd really like to be able to get rid of the ornamental plants all around the house and find interesting, attractive, provisional plants to replace them with (in addition to having a traditional garden plot in the back corner of the back yard). I just recently bought a "Bucket O Seeds" - which has a ton of different types of heirloom garden seeds.

Front Yard

• There is a bed the runs the length of the retaining wall from the top of the stone steps to the end of the driveway. I am thinking that would be a good spot for a line of blueberry bushes with creeping strawberries to act as a cover fill.
• Around the boulder in the front yard, I am considering some sort of thorn berry. Either Raspberries or Blackberries. I prefer Blackberries, but Raspberries are less vicious with their thorns so that may be the deciding factor.
• The brick steps at the end of the retaining wall either need to be torn up or turned into a planter bed. Not really sure what I'd want to go in there, but a low growing herb that obeys boundaries might be a good idea there.
• The beds directly in front of the house are probably going to remain untouched. There are several big rhododendrons along with some sort of ivy covering the ground. I would like the ground cover there to be something other than the ivy but I am not sure what would be good.
• The "Heart Shaped" bed at the end of the driveway is another mystery. It has a tree at the end but I am not sure why type - we'll see what it flowers with. I wouldn't mind getting a fruit bearing tree in there - would be nice to have apples at the end of the drive. For ground cover, was thinking of some sort of flower mixture but again, if I can get something there that bears fruit, I would prefer it.

Backyard

• The back right corner of the back yard is going to be the "official" garden plot where I'll be planting various veggies. It gets a lot of sun, so I'll have to be careful about not planting some of the more light/heat sensitive stuff back there.
• The back line of the property would also be a decent place to plant some grapes. Get some trellis for them to grow on and get the potential benefit of them acting as a privacy screen at the back of the property.
• My next door neighbor warned me that he's spotted woodchucks in both his and my backyard in the past, so I'll have to keep an eye out for them.

Nothing like a New Chimney

It's been over a month now since the contractors came and repaired my chimney. They did a great job of it and were, happily, very unobtrusive about it. Even when I was here while they were working, noise was minimal and anything that needed clean up was localized.

Now, the chimney is nice and crisp looking and, most importantly, attached to the side of the house! As part of their work, the contractors replaced a handful of roof and siding shingles and then gave the entire exterior wall a wash and a fresh coat of stain/paint. It looks great.

As another plus - they brought a dumpster that they couldn't even begin to fill 1/10th of. This meant I got a free rubble run and was able to get rid of all the carpet and refuse from the bathroom that I had stored in the shed and what I had torn out of the living room up to that point. I got very close to filling the entire thing on my own.