It's A Home Run!

Big Ed is finally retired! After moving to Washington, Ed continued to commute to California every week for work. Now, three years, nine months and two days later, he is home and able to work on his project as much as he likes. He's out there cutting tile as we speak..er..type.


I did manage to sneak in a day or two of leisure before he threw himself wholeheartedly into the job though. Ed's dad, Ed Sr. and his wife Elaine came up for several days and we had a wonderful, relaxing visit. Ed Jr couldn't help himself and snuck off once in a while to play with his tools, install the bathtub and get ready to paint. Before company left, we took in a dinner cruise on the Portland Spirit stern wheeler, out of Cascade Locks. If you ever get the opportunity to take this dinner cruise, do it. It's a beautiful view of the river at sunset.



Company left Saturday and Sunday after church we were rolling paint over primer. The entire apartment took a nice coat of Sherwin Williams Summer White, then the living area was given a glaze coat of Valspar Cliveden Leather which was a 6 to 1 mix, glaze to paint. Once the base coat of Summer White was dry, using a brush, I applied the colored glaze in a criss-cross pattern. Then I ragged and rolled the glaze with dry pieces of old t-shirt, and feathered the edges of each section with a small dry chip brush. It took forever and my right arm feels like it's been filled with lead.





But between the glaze color and the drywall texture, the walls look like old world plaster. And the Summer White which has a tan/yellow tint, now looks white. It took two days to do the living room and kitchen.


The bedroom and bathroom already have the base coat of Summer White, but will get a different color glaze. The bedroom will be Valspar Lobby Yellow, and the bathroom will be Valspar Linen Napkin. And of course, the beauty of paint is that if you don't like it, you can just get another color!



As I mentioned, Ed is already working on tile. Doesn't that sound easy? Did I mention the cement backer board? Did you remember there are no stairs? I have no idea how much a piece of Durock weighs, but I can guarantee that they are heavier than a can of paint! So he hauled the Durrock up the ladder and over the balcony. The shower, bathroom floor, front entryway and two front closets will all be tiled.
I go to town tomorrow with a huge list of stuff Ed needs to finish installing the electrical fixtures...a double poled switch, whatever the heck that is..
those poor guys at the hardware store see me coming and hide! Friday Scott the Cabinet Guy comes to measure for kitchen cabinets.
Think we can get done before winter?

Color My World

Last Monday, the finish coat went on the sheetrock, and we are ready for primer and paint. The finish coat upstairs is a Venetian plaster finish, which is lighter and a little more complicated than a skip trowel finish. It should trap and reflect light, and at this point the plan is to put on a base color and then a glaze coat over that.

So down to the paint store I went. Used to be, you'd buy a quart of the color you thought you wanted, take it home, slap some on the wall and it would be too dark, or too light and you'd go buy something else. Now you can buy several little cans for about $3.00 each and go home and toss paint everywhere! To create a Venetian plaster look I will paint the walls a base color, then mix the contrast color 5 to 1 with glaze, to just barely tint the glaze, then sponge and wipe the glaze with dry rags.

The plan is to paint the living areas a tan/toast color and the bedroom a very soft yellow.I decided to try different color combinations of base coat and glaze before painting half a wall the wrong color, so I made a color board. I brought home 6 little cans and went to work. These are Valspar colors. The good news is..it showed me what I didn't want. The bad news is, I didn't hit on any combinations that just wowed me. The light yellow is a good base, as is the medium tan, but I'm not happy with the contrast. Surely it isn't my technique!

I'm still working on trying color combinations and reading about the application technique, so if anyone has any advise please leave a comment.

We began painting the downstairs garage Sunday. We got it all primed, then painted with Sherwin-Williams Summer White. Looks good!

See that stove? That is my pride and joy.. a Magic Chef 1000 circa 1920s , six burner, two ovens and it's going in the new house.

Cute Factor: 11

I took off to visit family for a few days and Ed stayed home and worked worked worked. Now that the sheetrock is all up Ed corralled a few kind neighbors, Dennis and Mike, and put the last window in. He also finished the last shingles on the front. You know, the really high ones that have to be done off a ladder, each one measured and cut.

He also finished making the last of the outlooks and one or two honey-do projects for me. Thank you Ed!

The sheetrock crew from Redmill Drywall out of Vancouver finished taping and mudding the sheetrock tape, and the finish crew will come in today and complete the job. Very exciting! The whole place looks, sounds and feels totally different!

I picked up primer on my way home from the airport yesterday, and as soon as the finish coat is dry, we can start priming and painting the walls. Things are picking up speed.

Sidebar: On the cute factor scale, these little guys are about an 11. They come through the yard with Mom on a regular basis. They ignore all the construction noise..go figure.l

Sheet Rocks!

Sometimes you are money ahead by paying the pros to do their job quickly and efficiently. We decided to sub out the insulation and sheetrock. We could do both jobs ourselves, but insulation is just about the ugliest job..ok the second ugliest job. The ugliest job is crawling under the house to fix a sewage leak...but I digress.

Two guys showed up to insulate the downstairs garage and upstairs apartment. It's summer here, and while summers are normally mild, we are currently having the worst heatwave in recorded history. They went right to work. Wearing sweatshirts taped at the wrists, beanies, dust masks and goodness knows what else, they worked like madmen all day. They finished the whole thing in one day. Amazing.

The first thing I noticed was the difference in sound. Sounds are softer, and it doesn't sound like you're talking in a warehouse. Because the walls are more defined I also get a sudden sense of the actual size of the rooms.

Chuck-the-Building-Inspector came out and gave everything the seal of approval, and we called the sheetrock guy and gave him the go-ahead.

Three hours later, a big crane truck arrived in the driveway with a load of sheetrock.

"Gosh," I thought to myself, "I hope they know there aren't any stairs to the upstairs part."

No worries. Two guys jump out of the truck and run up the ladder into the apartment. The truck driver gets out and gets up into a jumpseat for the crane and starts pushing buttons faster than a 12 year old boy with a video game.

He scoops up a big stack of sheetrock and swings it over to the window opening and takes it right up to the very edge. Then the two guys inside start hauling the 12' long pieces of sheetrock inside and stack it up. Twenty minutes later, they were all done and gone.

Monday morning bright and early two more guys show up to start putting up sheetrock. Within 3 minutes of the truck pulling in, they are slapping that stuff up and screwing it into the studs like nobody's business.

Now it's hot...really hot..Monday hit 103 and muggy, and yesterday was 106, a record. Those two guys worked like demons the whole time.
But it's all done. The garage looks so good, even before it's taped, that it'll kill me to park the car in there.

The upstairs has been transformed. The sheetrock on the barrel ceiling makes the room. It didn't come out clearly in the picture, but when you stand at the entry door, there is a sweeping sense of openness and space..even waves, because the barrel sweeps from west to east.

Now don't think Ed was sitting the shade sipping a cool beverage while this was going on. Oh no! That's my job! No, he was out on the roof, in the sun, which put the temperature where he was working at about.... oh,,, 110? getting shingles in those teeeeny corners. No big deal..it's a small space to get done, right? Guess again. There is nothing to stand on except searingly hot shingles that are melting. He's balancing at an angle on a steeply pitched roof. Each shingle has to be measured, cut, and nailed, all without dropping a tool, raising blisters on asphalt, or falling off the roof. By the second day he made a board to lay over the shingles for footing. The board was covered with heavy plastic liner fabric so it would reduce slipping. Did I mention heat stroke? It was a brutal day..actually three days. My guess is..he was ready to go back to his day job.

On Your Mark, Get Set...

Ed finished the Trex deck two weeks ago, and I forgot to post a picture. That darned stuff is really heavy! Hopefully it will last forever, especially since it is on the "weather" side of the house.

Things are starting to ramp up now that the holiday is over. There will be a delicately timed string of events sometime at the end of August and into September. We have to finish the apartment, still without stairs. The doublewide has been sold and will be moved. At that point we can build the stairs to the apartment, get the rest of the interior finished, and move in. While all of this is going on, we will be living in a 5th wheel, generously lent to us by a neighbor.

In a perfect world, the apartment would be all done, painted and finished just like on one of those home improvement programs on TV. I'd just have to show up with an overnight bag and toothbrush and just make myself comfortable. In the real world, the mad scramble has begun and won't be semi-normal until almost Thanksgiving, which is the four year mark since we moved up here, and 18 months since we started the garage/apartment phase.

The other night we made a to-do list and time-line. Wow...what a reality check! We're in a time crunch and we haven't even started the clock!

Insulation

Sheetrock, order wood stove, removed deck from doublewide

Install front window, choose tile, paint, flooring

Prime/paint interior, seal/stain interior wood trim

Finish electric fixtures

Install flooring/tile, buy fridge

Measure for cabinets, install bath fixtures,buy countertops

Balcony rail
August 25: Doublewide moved!

Build stairs

Install cabinets,countertop

Install kitchen appliances

Furniture

Sit on deck and enjoy fruits of our labors

Ed retires mid-August...thank goodness!

We spent most of Tuesday cleaning up in preparation for the insulation guys this next week. All the old bits of wood, sawdust, wrappers, empty soda cans, plywood cut-offs, all had to go downstairs, then into various trash/recycle piles.

After all the sweeping was done, things looked pretty good.

Downstairs, in the garage, the same thing had to happen. Almost everything had to go down to the barn, and Ed's 71 Boss 302 Mustang, actually had to go....eeek...outside! Everybody worked together to get it all straightened out...well, almost everyone.

Yes, Mittens and Midnight, scourges of the rodent and bird populations, killers extraordinaire, were exhausted by all that mousing and stealthing. Poor things.. it's a tough life...

Removing the deck from around the doublewide is primarily my job. I had taken down some of the rail already and I started on the floorboards. It is nice cedar decking, so I'm taking out all the screws and stacking the wood. I have the floorboards that border the spa off, and will work on the frame this afternoon.

I am waspophobic..an irrational fear of wasps, not so irrational when you've had a nest of those bombers from Hell swarm over you! Ohhh yes...I've seen them hovering about, trying to look innocuous! I'm not fooled by their casual and seemingly uninterested demeanor. Anyway, I take off a few boards, peek around looking for a nest, take off a few more boards, peek again..you get the picture. I'm pretty sure they either have a nest inside the spa (unused) or between the spa wood and fiberglass. Either way, I don't want to stress them out, so I work pretty gingerly around

the area.

All Hands On Deck

We were having a house full of company for July 4th, so one of the priority projects before that was to clean up outside. Boy, does the stuff accumulate at a jobsite! One seriously full pickup truck full went to the dump. The dump, like everything else, is an hour away.

Then since the grass was growing faster than a baseball player on "performance enhancing supplements", Ed wanted to mow it again before fireworks. That always takes a day and a half.

We had a fallen tree to saw up and get out of the edge of the pasture, then split with the log splitter, and stack. I think we have enough wood now for the next two winters.

Poor Ed...his mind and heart were on the construction project, and the other chores kept getting in the way.

Before Ed could resume shingling he had to build the deck at the back of the apartment, which meant he had to construct a drain pan to drain to downspouts, then put up Trex deck over that. Still can't put up the rail because the deck is still our only egress.

He is also going to drop the soffits (!?) down to be the same level as the balcony so that the lower porch/patio..whatever..ceiling is all one plane. Does that make sense?

Then back to shingles. My son in law, Dan, arrived before the holiday and the guys couldn't stand to sit around when there were nails to drive, so up they went. They got all the outlooks hung, which are stained cedar, and got the shingles completely done on the one side. It is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, it is also the side that is hardest to see...plus, the scaffolding is still up.

In the interests of time (and the fact that insulation and sheet rock are not fun), we decided to sub out those jobs. Insulation guy comes next week, and we've been taking bids for sheetrock. In real life that means that pretty much everything has to come out of the garage.

Once that is done, things are going to go in fast forward and I'll be going crazy. Plus the doublewide is sold and I have to get everything out of that by mid-August. Part of selling the doublewide is taking down the deck that surrounds the west side. Busy busy busy!

Kids, Don't Try This At Home

The immediate goal is to get the shingling done up to that green trim board. That's pretty much the first floor. We want to get that done by Fourth of July. Unfortunately we ran out of shingles mid-Tuesday, and wouldn't get a delivery until Friday.











Friday the truck rolled up and dropped off three huge pallets of shingles, enough to finish the garage and start the house. Of course, that means there will be one more thing stored in the barn for a while. Maybe we need a bigger barn....



Trying to help with the shingling is still an awkward task for me. I tried to do some while Ed was gone and couldn't get the rows to match up. If I measured from the universal standard mark it read one thing, and if I used the ledger boards to measure, it said something else. Then just to see if I could, I marked a shingle and picked up the skilsaw to see if I could cut it by myself. How hard could it be? Ed makes it look so easy. Cutting the shingle is one thing, but the torque when it started up bucked that darned thing right toward my ankle, and I decided I needed to cut my foot off less than I needed to cut shingles.It got easier when he was home. It still took me forever to put up a row, but I did put up a row.

Now kids, don't try this at home. Leave this to Trained Professionals:



Things are getting tougher because the rows are getting higher. So Ed started putting together make-do scaffolding.

Which brings to mind the thought...if you use more than five ladders to build your scaffolding, you might be a redneck. In fact there are actually six ladders, one set of actual scaffolding, four 2x12s, and a bunch of shims.





By yesterday evening, we pretty much had the first floor done, one shingle at a time. I don't even want to think about what has to happen to make the second story accessible for shingling. Do they have parachutes at Home Depot?