Labor day labors

Well, we closed out the three day weekend with a solid day of work, and got another wall done. We'd hoped to have both sections of wall done, but that wasn't to be. We ran into a little snag when I realized I couldn't just carry the heights of the clapboard through from the front walls to the back, as there was a near 2" discrepancy. When two walls come together, a mismatch of a half an inch isn't very noticable, but if the bottom of one run is off by more than an inch or so with the wall next to it, it doesn't look great. So, I had to figure out where all of the existing stuff lined up, then figure out how to adjust in order to make it all visually close.

Well, I didn't really describe that well... basically I had to figure out how to adjust for my previous lack of planning, so it doesn't look too bad. The delay was worth it, though, as I figured out how to make everything work.

However, the delay also meant that we weren't done with the rearmost wall until after 8pm! The other wall still needs to have the window casing and trim stripped, then add the tarpaper and siding. Hopefully we can have all of that done in one day next weekend.

Realizing that there is no time during the day that the sun isn't shining on the front of the house, we've also agreed that we're not going to bother with redoing the front wall of the second floor (the last one!) until the weather gets cooler. That means after we finish the second floor bumpout, it'll be time to move back inside. Next step in there, demolition of the area around the steps on the second floor. We're not planning on doing anything there at the moment, but since we can't effectively block it off from the first floor, we need to do that demo now, or deal with a finished first floor covered in plaster dust later!

Another full day of work...

Today we had another full day of work, finishing up the first of three walls on the second floor bumpout. (outside the master bedroom) You can see it here as the wall with the window missing, to the right of the porch roof.

After finishing up this section, Grace got to painting some more new cedar clapboard, while I stripped the remainder of the old stuff that we've salvaged but not reinstalled yet. I think the new stuff that we bought today (10 pieces of 10' long 6x1/2" clear red cedar) should be good enough to finish up the two remaining sides of the bumpout, and the second floor front of the house. Once this is done, we're considering the outside of the house done... for now. What you can't see is the second floor of the office, that still needs to be done, but we can't see it, so it's not a priority... and the third floor sections. We're starting to figure out exactly what we'll do with that... all of the existing siding, which is diamonds and scalloped shingles, is old and cracked and will be replaced... with something. Exactly what, we don't know yet. I'll leave that up to Grace.

We'll be celebrating this Labor Day weekend by living up to its name... laboring away! :)

Nothing new this weekend.

This past weekend, Grace and I went up to visit her parents, and since the weather was so very beautiful, didn't exactly rush to get home. So, not a darn thing was accomplished on the house! We still have the wall on my side of the bedroom covered in plastic since it only has tar paper on the sheathing. Hopefully we'll get that fixed this weekend.

More pictures

At long last, I've uploaded some of the other pictures from the recent projects, including the spray foam and the new oil tank. Nothing earth-shaking, but at least moderately interesting!

Rain doesn't stop us, it just moves the activity.

Saturday was beautiful, and we got some good work done on the house. We moved on to the next section of wall, part of the bumpout outside the master bedroom. Thankfully, we don't need to reframe this window wither, so we were hoping to have the whole wall stripped, prepared, and siding reapplied by the end of the weekend, but several thunderstorms on Sunday kept that plan from being realized. We might not have been able to work where we wanted on Sunday, but that didn't stop us from working. We've accumulated a decent amount of old siding that was good enough to use, but for whatever reason, was pulled down and not put back. Most typically, it was rotted or cracked at the ends, but the rest of it was okay. Cut off the bad parts, and you now have a shorter piece that can be reused.

So, I set up a workbench on the front porch, and got out the infrared paint stripper, the scrapers, and the belt sander. I managed to strip many board feet of old siding, then sand it, then pass it through the window to Grace, who was priming the boards on all sides. This way, we both stayed busy and accomplishing important work on the house, even if we didn't get to do what we were planning. This will actually work out very well, since we'll be needing boards for the wall that we stripped.

It is so very nice to see the walls slowly transforming to the new color... I can't wait to see the whole house finally done, all one color!

Another wall is done

With the spray foam insulation done, the next step is to redo the stairs. We're not quite ready for that, so work on the house shifted back outside. We had started the second floor wall outside the guest room previously, and this weekend, we got the rest of the wood reinstalled and painted. Slowly, we're getting closer and closer to finished. (with the repainting of the outside, at the very least)

As usual, I took a bunch of pictures, but haven't done anything with them yet.

So much progress!

Well, I haven't been doing updates because I haven't been bothering to process the pictures that I've been taking (you know I've been taking tons of pictures) but figured at least a text-only update is better than nothing at all.

This past weekend was *very* productive. I took Friday and Monday as work-from-home days because we had contractors onsite to do some work. Friday, we had the heating folks in to pull our nasty old oil tank and install a nice, new one. The old tank was 270 gallons and standing on rusting legs. The new one is 230 gallons, and standing on shorter legs, so visually takes over the basement far less. We had discussed converting to a gas boiler, but when we had the heating folks out to maintain the boiler, they checked it and said it tested at 85% efficiency... which is very high for an oil boiler, so there wasn't as much reason to go to gas. We did, however, need to replace the tank.

Saturday and Sunday, we cleaned up the first floor in preparation for the spray foam insulation, and did even more demo, clearing plaster and drywall off of the walls on the stairs going up to the second floor. Although it's a dusty, nasty mess, it seemed to be not as bad as in the past, I guess I'm getting used to it. Don't know what I'll do when all of the old plaster and drywall is gone -- beyond be VERY, VERY HAPPY.

Monday, the spray foam folks showed up. Now, we had already insulated with fiberglass insulation, but in discussions with John Gemmi, decided to pull that down and go with spray foam. If you don't know, spray foam is a rigid foam, much like the stuff that comes out of a can of Great Stuff, which seals everything up and actually lends structural rigidity to the house. It doesn't compact like fiberglass can, all in all, aside from the price (2-4x fiberglass) it's really, really good stuff.

However, it's a bit messy to apply, so the first thing the contractors did was mask off the entire first floor and the stairs going to the second floor. Made the house look like it was the set of E.T. (who remembers that movie?) with everything covered in semi-clear plastic. Then, they sprayed the foam on the walls with a spray guy which mixed the two parts as it blew it on the wall. The foam then expands, and dries in a couple of minutes.

As for the siding, we removed all the siding from the second floor wall outside the guest room, and stripped the good pieces. The idea being, the original boards were never back primed, and this way, they were easier to strip and sand, and we can back prime and paint them, fully sealing them against the elements. A little more work in some ways, a little less in others, and ultimately it'll be a better job. However, we last worked on that before we went to San Diego three weeks ago. Maybe this week we'll get back to that and finish it up. After that, it's only the front of the second floor and the bumpout of the master bedroom which need attention, and we'll be effectively DONE with the repainting outside! We'll still have a patch on the office (that we don't see) and the third floor, but for now that'll be good enough.

Back to painting...

Our longest ongoing project so far has been repainting the house. Not just slapping on another coat of paint, but stripping the old paint down to bare wood, then priming with a high quality oil-based primer and doing at least two coats of good latex paint. It's labor intensive and slow, but the results are excellent. This year, we're hoping to finish the project -- at least, the first and second floors. The third floor has a different type of siding, and we've agreed that it all needs to be replaced.

All that remains to be redone is the front and side of the guest room on the second floor, (you can see the front of the guest room in the picture to the right) as well as the bump out of the dining room on the first floor and the master bedroom on the second floor. Compared to the big wall we finished last year in terms of square footage, there is far less siding... but where the big wall had only three windows, the remaining walls have nine -- and all but one will need to be reframed!

It'll be a bit of work, just as always, but we've gotten pretty good at building window frames. Also, since 6 of the windows are on the second floor, and thus aren't as visible to the ground, we can use knotty red cedar for the casing. Down by the ground, we've opted to go with the clear red cedar, which carries a premium price... but without any knots, it gives a better appearance which holds up to direct inspection better.

It's always simpler when you know what you're doing.

This morning, John Gemmi stopped by to give me some advice. Our front door doesn't close quite right, and although I've reframed almost ten windows by now, a door is a totally different animal, and I wasn't really sure which way to proceed. Well, John stopped by before going to another customer's house, and we spent about 15 minutes looking at how it fit and what needed to be done, and sure enough, he made it seem very simple and straightforward!

Isn't it great how easy things can be when you know what you're doing?

Both Grace and I are very happy to work with John and his guys -- they're a great group and do the best work I've seen. That John is so willing to take a little time to stop by and help me figure out how to do some of my own work is just the icing on the cake!

Moved the electrical power supply

Hindsight is 20/20, so the saying goes.

When we did the Big Project, we had to upgrade our electrical service from 100 amp to 200 amp, which required the whole house being disconnected from the electrical supply and new, heavier wiring being run. That would have been the perfect time to relocate the power from the original location on the bumped-out section of windows by the dining room, but we didn't think of it then. No, it wasn't until well over a year later, when we were talking to our next door neighbors that Chris mentioned it would be nice to have the power moved to the other side of the house, since that's a less visible area of the house, and it would clean up the look.

Well, we thought it was a brilliant idea, but we'd already had the work done, and figured it would be prohibitively expensive. I wasn't even going to pursue it any further, but Grace suggested we have Wes Carver stop by and give us a quote. Wes came out and looked it over, and although it wasn't tremendously cheap, it was definitely doable... so we decided to have it done.

Now that it's done, we're really happy with the results. Wes's guys did a great job with the conversion, mounting a main disconnect panel in the basement and running the power line back to the existing breaker panel... and the outside of the house now looks much cleaner. From our bedroom, we used to see a power line out of each of the three windows, with loops of supply cable right outside the center window. Now, that's all gone, moved out of sight, and it looks far better. Now, we can also properly fix the siding that had been obscured by the original power lines and meter.

A side effect is that the carraige house is now without power. At some point in the future, we'll be running a trench out to the carraige house to reconnect the water, waste, and electrical, but until then, the carraige house will just be a big shed. Not too much of a problem, but I will have to set something up so I can run an extension cord back there when I need power.

It would have been better to have moved the supply lines during the start of the Big Project, but oh well... I'm sure there will be other things we wind up re-doing as well. As long as the end result is good, we'll be happy.

At long last, back to working on the house

It's been a long time since we've worked on the house in earnest - probably November. It's been far longer since I've done any updates to the blog. This past weekend, we got back to working on the house with replacing two windows and redoing some siding on the first floor.... so I'm hoping that now I'll get back to regular updates on the blog, too. I've already updated the gallery with our most recent projects, so look for the blog entries soon, too!

New location for the house blog.

This will be the new location of our house updates blog. The old blog was tied to my other email address, so when I was signed into gmail, I would have to sign OUT of that, then into blogspot, then sign BACK into gmail... all in all a pain in the butt.

I looked, and I can't migrate my old posts from my old blog so I'll keep the other one around, I'll just be doing updates here instead.

That said, I make no promises about making updates with any regularity.

Another fine scrape

As I mentioned before, the First Floor project is on hold. Grace and I agreed that this time of year is best for working on the repainting of the house, so although our first floor (and, if you'll remember, our third floor) is a construction area, we're putting that work on hold to get the house repainted. It's not just a matter of using the nice weather... the wall we're working on now isn't well sealed, and during a particularly harsh rainstorm earlier in the year, I discovered water was getting behind the siding, where it wet the insulation. So, we kinda need to get the walls painted properly and sealed up tight.

We started on July 3rd and 4th, but didn't make too much progress, between getting back into the swing of the paint stripping and not having scaffolding. This weekend, though, we dedicated the entire weekend to stripping paint, and got the bulk of the single biggest wall in the house cleared off.


I have to send the Silent Paint Remover paint stripper back for some warranty work, (it's been heating a little unevenly) but that won't be a problem, as we'll be able to replace boards, prime good boards, and finish reframing at least one of the windows next weekend. Not having the paint stripper won't slow us down too much.


One thing we certainly learned was to stay out of the sun, if possible! We only worked in the sun an hour and a half on Saturday, but it wiped us out. Sunday we got an early start, worked until the sun showed up, then stopped for four hours to let the shade return. We got a ton done, and weren't totally wiped out at the end of the day.


The Outside projects gallery is updated with new pictures and comments, starting with the third picture on the second page!

You gonna put scaffolding on that?

Outdoor scaffolding comes in big sections... the sides are 5x5', and that's not something you can easily move around. Even though the rental place is only about two miles away, last year I drove to a friend's house in New Hope to borrow his dad's pickup, to get the scaffolding. A 22 mile round trip to get scaffolding 2 miles.

When it was time to return it, we decided to try out the roof rack on the Integra. It's only two miles, right? Turns out, with the bike racks, it actually works quite well. The only thing is, the guys at the rental place found this very amusing, to the point where they actually remembered us from last year. The guy behind the counter, though, didn't get to witness this, so when we ordered up two sections of outdoor scaffolding, he nodded to the car in the parking lot, and said:

"You gonna put scaffolding on that?"

When we got around back to pick up the scaffolding, though, we were welcomed back, and all the guys who weren't doing anything at the time came out to watch as we stacked four pieces of scaffolding on top of the car, then put four 8 foot crossbraces in the hatchback. One guy who was helping us stood back as I finished lashing it all down with the ratcheting tiedowns, and said:

"You know, that actually works better on there than many pickup trucks we see."

12 years old, over 200,000 miles, and it's still a great little sport utility vehicle!

Our Old New House is on the market again.

When we moved from a new construction house just outside of Doylestown to an old house in Doylestown, Grace took to referring to the first house our our "Old New House" and the borough residence as the "New Old House". At least... I think that's the way she said it. Coulda been the other way around.

Anyhow, our old new (construction) house is back on the market after three years. Click on the picture to see the listing.

** The house sold, so the link to the listing no longer worked, so I changed it to go to a gallery of the pictures I grabbed from the listing.

The really funny part is several of the pictures look like they haven't done a THING to those rooms beyond move their stuff in. Guess they liked what we did! They did finish the master bedroom, the only room we hadn't redone before we left. That's a running joke between us - when we finish this house, except for the master bedroom, it'll be time to move again.

They did also finish the basement, and it looks like they did a good job. I had talked about doing that while we were there, but never got around to it.

Funny, though, both Grace and I said it brought back memories, but neither of us had any desire to go back. We like our new, old house. :)

First floor project on hold...

Well, according to our plan from earlier this year, the First Floor project is now on hold. Of course, we had hoped to be much farther along at this point, but that's always the case.

The reason for our pause on that project is we slated July and August as the time that we would pick up last year's project, namely repainting the house. We've started, breaking out the Silent Paint Remover and the scrapers. This weekend, we'll get scaffolding, but so far we've already done about 25% of the large wall we finished off with in November. Grace runs the heater, and I scrape. I've picked up a 6" variable speed grinder, so I can resharpen the scrapers at the end of each day, so they're good and sharp for the next day's work. I can even give them a quick resharpening when we break for lunch.

Only problem is the SPR is heating unevenly. I contacted the manufacturer, and they replied very quickly with some possible problems. I looked, and discovered we're still within the 1 year warranty - by exactly one week! So I think we'll be using it this weekend, returning it first thing Monday morning, and hoping for quick turnaround. We might have to find other stuff to do, but there are two windows on that wall (possibly three) which will need reframing, so we'll stay good and busy if we can't be scraping paint.

A little time off

Not much being done on the house recently. Last weekend we spent some time with Grace's folks and managed to just take it easy. I got up late, did a little work, had breakfast, then napped until almost noon. That was NICE! Before we left, though, we managed to pick up another 18 foot 2x8, and sister another joist, this time completely on our own. I've got some pics from that one, just haven't posted it yet.

This past weekend, Grace had a personal trainers' seminar in Rhode Island, so I tagged along. I snuck into a couple of sessions, and the info they were sharing was REALLY interesting. I can only imagine how good it is if I knew everything they were talking about, like Grace. She was really excited about some of the stuff she learned. When I wasn't sneaking into the seminars, I was walking around Providence, and taking pictures. Got some good shots, pared the 200+ taken down to 75 (yeah, I know, still a bunch) which I posted in the gallery.

On the house front, we're starting back up this weekend, but the First Floor project is going to be on hold for now. We still have to finish repainting the house like we started last year, and now is the time to get back to work on that. Hopefully, working together, Grace and I will make quick progress. Unlike the first floor project, stripping paint and repainting isn't rocket surgery, just takes some time and effort. I've learned how to resharpen the scrapers, too, so that'll help immensely.

Oh yeah! One more update on the house... we finally had a tile guy come in and tile the backsplash in the kitchen, and it looks GREAT. Have some pictures of that as well, just haven't posted them either.

Fan guards are there for a reason...

We've got a fan set up, circulating air around the cedar for the windows. It's an old floor fan, and the protective basket that goes around the fan blades got damaged, so I took it off. Well, just in case you were curious, those guards really do make a fan safer. I've managed to get my hand whacked by fan blades twice this weekend, and both times drew quite a bit of blood.

Also, despite working (very carefully) inside the main circuit breaker panel to run new circuits, I managed to get a "tickle" from the fan motor when I reached to switch it off.

Like Dad taught me, "once you don't respect this, it'll kill ya". I guess I respect the circuit panel just a little bit more than this silly little fan. Both can still hurt, though, so be careful when you're working with stuff, even if it's not quite mortal danger.

This weekend, electrical work.

With the cedar for the outside casing on the windows still drying this weekend focused us on electrical work. I transferred switches from an old metal triple-gang box into a nice, new plastic quad box, ran wiring for the light in the dining room, and moved the location of the smoke alarm.

The quad box comes from our plan for the wiring. Two switches control lights in the kitchen, because there's no room for them by the kitchen doorway. Then, we have one switch for the chandelier over the dining room table, and one which will control the lights on the stairs to the second floor. The wiring for the kitchen circuits is already existing, since it was all redone during the The Big Project (which is starting to seem like not such a great name because our current first floor project is also pretty darn big) but I had to transfer it out of the nasty old metal box. The wiring for the dining room was all removed during demolition, so that's all new, and I'm also taking the opportunity to split the first floor into a 20-amp circuit for outlets and a separate 15 amp circuit for lights.

While we've got the ceiling off, I'm also going to redo the circuits for the second floor, and I got a start on that one, replacing fifteen feet of cable with 6 feet of new cable. For some reason, the old wire ran several feet out of the way, extending the length of cable needed. Very odd.

The nicest part is having a real light in the dining room area. It lights the area up far better than the 100W floor lamp we've been using.

Undercabinet lights in the kitchen

This isn't recent but my mom had a question about our undercabinet lights in the kitchen, so I created a new gallery for it. I haven't done proper descriptions for each picture, but there is a description for the gallery and summaries for each picture.