Social Decline

While walking through Lowes on – oh, I don’t know – our hundredth trip, through the loudspeaker there was the little “ding, dong” with the soothing robotic voice saying, “Special assistance needed in lumber…” Matt looked at me and said, “Aww, they’re playing our song.”

That’s pretty much how it’s been, you know. A relationship that started with gourmet dinners, wine bars, cafe lattes, and picnics is now like, “Hey, help me carry this toilet to the dumpster, will ya? Watch out, it’s sloshy.” Such is the life of people dumb enough to spend their time fixing up houses, and fearless enough to think it’s fun.

At least there’s a Starbucks nearby, and an old scratchy Notorious B.I.G. album with a dinky boombox to play it on, to bring a little class to the operation.

Voyage of Discovery – Floor Findings

Step 1: Clean the place up and figure out what we’re in for. I arrived to the work site to find the dumpster already full, the carpet ripped out, and the carport “enclosure” torn down – Matt had been hard at work.

 

The next step is to figure out exactly how many layers of crap are under the linoleum in the kitchen and dining room, and exactly what kind of “Uh, ohs” those layers may be concealing.

OK, let’s see.  Linoleum. Then 1/4 inch plywood. Then linoleum. Then particle board the consistency of graham crackers. Then linoleum. Then, uh, oh.

In the photo above, you can see the old flooring coming up, with no small effort. Those layers were like a superglued sandwich of futility. We also removed the paneling from the back wall, to see if we could strip it all off and refinish the sheetrock. Now you can clearly see the line on the wall and floor where the house was added onto.

The verdict on the walls:  Don’t. Remove. Any. More. Paneling.

At this point I left town, taking my camera with me, and while I was away Matt finished ripping up the subfloor and taking out the kitchen cabinets.  It soon became evident that this house had had a plumbing leak (multiple leaks, actually) for a long, long time.  The water had worked its disintegrating magic on the floors and walls, as evidenced by the holes in the floor and the moldy, rotten sheetrock behind the cabinets.

It also became evident that the person who added onto this house may not have actually known what they were doing.

Uh, oh.

Introducing… House K

As if one project weren’t enough, now there’s another!  This one is actually Matt’s liability – er, project – with me taking on the role of Mere Hired Help.

Allow me to present to you…  House K.

House K is part of an affordable-housing development built by the Housing Authority in the 1960s. It’s in a quite lively working-class neighborhood only a few blocks from downtown.  Some of the neighbors are the original owners, and all have been excited to see this house revived. House K was bought at government auction after being foreclosed and abandoned for two years.

Someone had started (but didn’t finish) enclosing the carport, leaving a mess of soggy drywall and exposed wiring.

There’s a cute screened porch, but the stairs are rotten and it’s been primarily used as a dog house, as evidenced by the smell.

We have our work cut out for us!  Let’s take a closer look…

It has a basic three-bedroom, 1 1/2 bath floor plan, roughly 1000 square feet. The wall containing the fireplace and back door was bumped out about four feet at some point – the original floor plan (based on the other houses) shows those rooms smaller.

This is the living room, showing the front door.  As you can see, the house was originally full of stuff – that was a sad job, packing up abandoned belongings.  We have made efforts to contact the previous owner, with no response.

If you look at the ceiling, just above and to the left of the window, you can see dangling sheetrock from water damage.  This is the seam where the house was added-on-to.

Standing in the front doorway, you can see the dining area straight ahead, and the back door on the right.  Again, about four feet from the right corner you can see a water spot on the ceiling marking the seam from the house addition. 

The kitchen is in the alcove on the back left of the photo:

The kitchen is a simple galley in pretty bad shape:

Standing in the living room, you can see the hallway going off to the left, beginning with a nice-sized utility/laundry closet.

Then there’s a typical hallway, with a linen closet and two bedroom doors on the left, and the laundry, bathroom, and master bedroom doors on the right.

The bedrooms are small and dark, but that’s mostly due to the paneling – there are decent-sized windows to let daylight in.

The main bathroom is pretty small and dingy but might have salvageable fixtures…

The half-bath, on the other hand, is just a Sigh…

This little house has lots of potential, but since I’m writing this post a few weeks into the project, I can give you a hint that we’re in for some surprises.  Stay tuned…

No Gnus is Good Gnus

Does anybody remember The Great Space Coaster and Gary Gnu’s “Only TV Gnews Program Guaranteed to Contain No Gnews Whatsoever”?

Work on the house has slowed lately, with lots of cool stuff competing for time.  To begin with, it’s summer, and I have a new mountain bike, ’nuff said. 

In other gnus, I am thrilled to jump into my new role on Around the Yard, the lawn and garden portion of Today’s Homeowner with Danny Lipford.  To be able to write AND to play in the dirt is almost too much to comprehend.  I’m in the process of turning my professional world upside down, as I prepare to say goodbye to my psychotherapy practice, my good friends, and my business partners of six years. 

Gnaturally, that will take some getting used to.

In addition to this site, I can be found these days at http://garden.dannylipford.com.

Drainage Ditch Collapses Under Weight of Success

The universe is really looking favorably upon my little house, making up for the two-month ordeal with the landscaper (resulting in grass being planted in June, rather than April) with almost daily rain!  I haven’t even had to consider the ethical dilemma of breaking the water restrictions.

Success, though, turned out to be a mixed blessing (you hear that sometimes).  It was too much for my drainage ditch, which channels storm runoff from the street through a series of back yards and eventually into a creek.

Remember what the ditch looked like before?

And remember how it looked “After?”  All nice and rock-garden-ish?

Still, I had never really paid attention to what happens down there, so during a rainstorm, I slipped outside with my camera, and this is what I saw:

Holy Whitewater, Batman!  I know the storm drain catches both sides of the street, and who knows what else.  After a week of daily thunderstorms, this is what my ditch looks like.

All of the fresh dirt is gone (and grass, and burlap, and erosion-control mesh fabric, and two bales of straw – still in bales) – washed downstream like a lava flow from some red-clay volcano.   My rocks are lying in the bottom of a canyon. 

I don’t know what to do with it, and I’m irked that I can see it from my home-office window, which makes “denial” a pretty ineffective coping mechanism.

My Own Back Yard

When you move into a house that’s been abandoned for over 5 years, you realize just how quickly things go to pot.  Every square inch.  To pot.  Each time I complete some miniscule piece of the project (that probably takes 10 hours, five band-aids, four episodes of therapeutic rage reduction, three beers, and an Epsom salt bath), I comment, “Ahh, now it’s starting to look like somebody lives here.”

This place is so small (.22 acres) that every inch needs to be manicured – there’s no room for wasteland, but taming it has been an ordeal.  No offense to anyone who bush-hogs 50 acres for a living.  But I’m crawling around yanking things out by hand, usually by myself, and sawing things down that usually fall on my head, and it’s full of poison ivy, and it’s been over 100 degrees here, which at least deserves a “bless your heart,” don’t you think?

Of course, around here, “Bless her heart” is usually followed by something like, “but she’s dumb as a stump.”

Anyway, bit by bit, it’s coming along.  Here’s a shot of the back yard “before”:

And here’s the back yard today. 

It doesn’t look like much, but here lies several days of sweating.  Turns out, that overgrowth was concealing a large assortment of huge buried rocks – guess somebody wanted a rock garden, then forgot about it, perhaps as a sinister joke on the next owner.  I used them to pretty up the drainage ditch.

This afternoon I put down 10 bales of pine needles in the back yard.  I went with pine needles because I was getting tired of shoveling out dirt and mulch from my pickup, one sweaty metric ton at a time.  Compared to craziness such as that, pine needles are lightweight and really don’t feel much like work a’tall.

Outside makeover is coming right along!

By the end of today, I was so excited – I’ve been impatient to make enough headway on the outside of the house to be able to post some photos, and today I can!  After working half a day on a french drain and grading issues, I spent the rest of the afternoon putting up the rest of the exterior mouldings.  I’m so excited, in fact, that I’m going to ramp up the dramatic effect using some “before” pictures. 

This is how the house looked in July 2006, when I first bought it.

And this is the house in March 2007, after I (in desperation for some improvement) put up a salvaged storm door and new porch lights.

And… drumroll please…

This is the house, as it looks this evening, almost two years after that first photo was taken.  It’s barely recognizable to ME, and I live here! 

Shutters – Not Always an Open-and-Shut Case

Houdini says that “Black Magic” is the perfect color to paint shutters and front doors!  I did go with the “el cheapo” paintable vinyl shutters from Lowes.  I really wanted the solid cedar ones, but with my budget I have to pick my treats carefully.

It only took one coat of bonding primer, two coats of paint, and multiple coats of spackle and touch-up paint from where half of them were hung upside down.  Arggh.  It was one of those mistakes – at the end of the day, no less, while putting up the LAST shutter - that couldn’t have been more deflating if the whole front yard had opened up into a sinkhole.

But they’re all right now, and they look nice.  No amount of paint, and no type of paintbrush, would cover up the fakey-fake wood grain pattern (why do they make horrible fake imitations, instead of letting things be what they are?) – but I used Satin paint and it isn’t as obvious.

Digging for Trouble

Ahh, progress.  What you’re looking at is the Day Castle Moat, the two-inch-deep ring of water around my side porch as a result of my grading job.  The grading was supposed to “improve drainage.”

Oh, it improved it, all right.  It routed all the water to my porch.  The childish side of my anger wants to make it clear that I didn’t like this plan from the start, and I brought it up before the process, during the process, and after the process.  But all I knew was that it didn’t “look right” – that doesn’t get much credibility with guys on Bobcats; in fact, the landscaper’s response was “I think you’re overanalyzing.”  And besides, this was the “easier” way.  (When I’m writing a check with four digits, the word “easier” does not fall pleasantly on the ears).

Today I will spend the day remembering the way I do things.  Instead of paying someone (who is trained and experienced) to tell ME how to improve my drainage, I will be pounding wooden stakes into the ground, stretching out strings and line levels, determing exactly how many inches of slope I can get (guess what? none of those things were a part of the “professional” job), then pointing to the contractor and saying “I want you to fill it to HERE and slope it to HERE” and then watching until it is done.  At least, that’s the plan.  Currently there’s a slight problem with getting phone calls returned, which is posing the teensiest threat to my cheerful goodwill with the landscaper, who up until now has been very nice, showed concern, and has showed up on schedule (which does earn points, if you’ve ever worked with subcontractors before). 

All ye who rolled their eyes at me when I said, “I think I might rent a Bobcat and do this myself,” look closely at the Day Castle Moat and reconsider your reaction! 

New Front Porch

Remember that old front stoop?

Today’s the day for the front porch makeover.  I was intimidated by the prospect, but of course I tackled it anyway (you wouldn’t have me do it any differently, right?)  First to create the form, using a piece of flexible masonry siding and lots of strings to make sure it was level from side to side and sloping away from the door about one inch (for water drainage).

Then to get to mixing!  24 bags of concrete at 60 pounds per bag…  that’s, hmm, let’s see, 1440 achy back muscles and about as many skinned knuckles.

And it’s done! 

(I’m really thinking my exterior photos would be a lot less interesting if I fixed that crazy porch light that isn’t supposed to come on during the daytime).