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Sunday we decided to tackle a project that we’d been putting off for quite a while.
A couple of years ago we purchased a large entertainment center. It was a massive piece of furniture that we just barely got in the front door and that dominated the living room. Given the layout of the room, it could only go in one place, and that meant that all the furniture had to be arranged around the TV. In addition, when the afternoon sun came in the front window, it basically rendered the TV unwatchable (which, admittedly, was only a problem on a handful of football Sundays when the Vikings were nationally telecast).

Regardless, we decided that it made little sense to arrange the room around a massive piece of furniture that neither of us was terribly fond of, much less the television inside it that we rarely watched. So, a week ago Sarah sold the entertainment center via craigslist. We unplugged the TV and the stereo and put them in the basement until we could get a smaller piece of furniture that would let us arrange the room in a different fashion. We spent a couple of hours in furniture stores looking at entertainment centers that were smaller, but none of them were that interesting, so we decided to sit on the decision for a while and see if we could come up with a different scheme.

With the entertainment center out of the picture, the shabbiness of the carpet in the room really stood out. We knew it was shabby (the people who owned the house before us installed it), but with the entertainment center in the room we could never get excited about doing anything about the carpet. Yesterday changed all that.

We ripped out all the carpet in our living room and the hallway that connects the dining room, living room, the bathroom, the office, and our bedroom. Now that the carpet is gone, we can’t understand why we didn’t get rid of it years ago. It was all stained underneath and the pad was disintegrating in the high traffic areas. Where the pad was disintegrating it left large piles of dust on the floor. Once all the carpet was outside, we had to pull out the tack strips that held it down along the edges of the room and the staples that the installers used to fasten the pad to the floor. It was dirty, hot work, but the room looks so much better now that the carpet is gone.

My sister, Amy, is staying with us at the moment and she was a big help with the project. Having three people working on that project made the difference between getting it done in one day or having it linger over several.

Now that the entertainment center and carpet are gone, we’ll likely paint the ceiling, put up some more pictures, and have the floors professionally refinished. The work is far from done but at least we’ve started down the path.

If you want to see pictures of what we did on Sunday, check out this photo gallery.

If you’re ever feeling like nothing can get you down, pick up a scraper and a paintbrush and have a go at painting your house. That should bring you back to Earth in a hurry. After a long tough nine days, our house is mostly painted. Sarah and I worked hard on the preparation for days before a single dollop of paint was brushed on to the house. We scraped, sanded, swore, scraped, sanded, and swore some more. Finally, I blew a gasket and said, “Paint will go on this house today!” Not much paint went on the house that day, but some paint, all primer, did.

After that, we picked up steam, painting more and more each day. It wasn’t until the weekend, however, that the project really started running smoothly. Not coincidentally, that was the day my sister, Amy, showed up to help with the painting.

Amy may not much like the prep. work (who does?), but she has a knack for painting that neither Sarah or I possess. In the time it would take me to paint one short side of the house, Amy would paint almost all of one long side. Not only is she a fast painter, but she does excellent work with no drips or runs. I tried studying her technique, but came up empty. It didn’t appear that she was doing anything different than I was, but the results clearly said otherwise.

With the help of the One Woman Paint Crew we got two coats of paint on the vast majority of the house. We need to do some touch-up work in a couple of spots, and there are two very small areas that still need a second coat, but for the most part, the heavy lifting is over.

If you’re interested in seeing a small portion of the final results (I didn’t take much time to snap many pictures), the photo gallery has a photo or two that may interest you.

Sarah and I have been working for the past couple of days on the exterior of our house. We’re getting ready to paint, so that means lots of scraping, sanding, spackling, and swearing. Now, however, we need your help.We’re going to paint the house a combination of blue, yellow, and purple. The majority of the house will be a flat, blue that is darker than the current blue, but not anywhere near as dark as navy blue. Much of the white trim that isn’t around the windows will become yellow. The soffits will stay white as we’re going to cover them with aluminum soffits once we’re done painting. The window trim will stay white as that’s aluminum trim, as well. The front door will become purple, and the garage door may become purple and yellow, or purple and blue, or purple and blue and yellow.

There is an accent panel on the front of the house that previously was a dark blue. The dark blue accented nicely with the light blue and white that covered the rest of the house. The panel was covered in one coat of blue paint that was starting to flake badly. Rather than scrape the whole panel, we got out the drill and a sanding disc. After an standing for an hour or so in a cloud of sawdust, we removed most of the paint from the panel.

Now the question is whether or not we should paint or stain that panel. My initial thought was that if we were going through all the trouble of removing the paint down to the wood that we should stain it. However, now that all the paint is off, I’m leaning back towards priming the wood and painting it purple.

On the other hand, one of our neighbors walked by this morning and suggested that it would look really good if it were stained because it would look quite nice with the stone underneath and the garden in front.

So, we need your opinions. Should we paint or stain the panel on the front of the house? There are some photos in the gallery to give you an idea of what it looks like in its raw form with the garden in bloom.

When you’ve made up your mind, e-mail us and let us know what you think.

We have a new resident in our yard. A house wren adopted our back yard earlier this spring and has been singing his little heart out in hopes of attracting a mate. We’ve never had a house wren in the yard before, so it took some time before we could figure out what species of bird he was. It didn’t help that he is quite small, particularly quick, and notoriously shy.

However, his song is quite distinctive and enjoyable. He perches on top of the raspberry supports that I built earlier this spring and sings his mating song several times before moving on to other perches around the back yard.

House wrens are supposed to be relatively territorial, but he hasn’t kicked the house sparrows out of the bird house near our patio. They are still busy packing that bird house with straw, twigs, and pine needles. I suppose it won’t be long until they raise another brood in the little yellow house.

Our vegetable garden, such as it is, is finally completely in the ground (and I use that word loosely). Because much of our yard is shady for long portions of the day, we have very few areas that we can use as vegetable gardens. So, we have a collection of tomato and pepper plants on the south side of the house that keep one lone broccoli plant company. On the patio, we have cherry tomato plants, peppers, lettuce, and a bush cucumber in containers. Under a pine tree, and hence a partially shady place, we have some more cherry tomatoes, some volunteer cherry tomatoes, a volunteer gourd of some kind (it’s probably either pumpkin or decorative gourds), some zucchini, and some butternut squash.

The flower garden in front of the house always looks pretty bad this time of year. Everything is growing and getting bushy, but there aren’t many flowers. In addition, the tulips haven’t quite died back enough for us to pull their leaves off. Finally, weeds are growing up amongst the tulips. When we pull the dead tulip leaves off we’ll pull the weeds at the same time, but for now it doesn’t look very good.

Over the last week, Sarah and I invested some time getting rid of the old range hood in our kitchen.When we bought our house, it came with a 42″ wide stainless steel range hood. It was the house’s original range hood. The buttons to turn on the fan and light were sticky with grease; the light did not work; the fan worked occasionally and noisily.

The range hood had never, ever, been cleaned, so it had forty-five years of grease, smoke, and filth in it. The new gas cooktop we installed produced more heat than the house’s original electric cooktop which was also the house’s original cooktop. When we ran one or more of the gas burners on high, we had to be careful of the range hood because that ancient grease would liquefy (due to the higher temperatures produced by the new cooktop) and drip out of the range hood. Yuck!

A couple of weeks ago, during one of my many forays to local garage sales, I picked up a relatively lightly used 36″ cooktop for less than $20.

I’ll save you some of the details related to replacing a really old and disgusting appliance with a new one. During the process of replacing the hood we found a dead mouse and a variety of old dairy delivery receipts either in the ducting or behind the cooktop. We got up close and personal with some really nasty, and greasy parts. We cleaned, primed, painted, swore, drilled, sawed, swore, drilled some more, and finally got the new cooktop installed.

Once that was done, we ordered some textured glass from a local glass store to function as a backsplash. Some more measuring, swearing, drilling, head scratching, drilling, and the like preceded the final installation of the backsplash.

However, the project is now mostly complete. There are pictures of the final product in the photo gallery.

Sarah and I finished making a Leopold bench last night for our yard.I’d been mumbling about making some sort of bench for the better part of a year. But, beyond mumbling, I never did much about it.

Apparently, Sarah got tired of hearing about it, so she found plans for a Leopold Bench on-line and sent them to me.

We had a pile of 2×8′s sitting in the basement from a project that we had finished, so I started with those. They weren’t in the best shape as some of them had a bit of warping and what-not. But, what else was I going to use them for?

So, some cutting, sanding, staining, and assembly later, we have a pair of Leopold benches. Yes, I wrote a pair. We’re giving one to our friends who are leaving Madison for Vermont.

You can see the new bench below sitting next to Ira’s pen in the back yard.

We spent some time on Sunday working on our house again.Sometime later this month, we’d like to blow a fair amount of cellulose insulation into our attic. However, before we can do that, we need to ensure that adequate ventilation will still get from the soffit vents into the attic.

By using air channels and baffles, we can prevent the insulation from falling onto the soffit vents, and still get air from the soffit vents along the roof, up to the ridge vent. Unfortunately, we cannot reach the soffit vents from inside the attic due to the roof’s very shallow pitch. So, we have to work on the problem by removing the old soffit vents from outside the house. Then, we have to insert the baffles and air channels through the hole in the soffit, and secure as much as possible before replacing the soffit vent cover.

The soffit vent covers are original, which means they are over forty years old. Many of the screens on the vent covers that were designed to keep bugs out of the attic had completely rusted or rotted away. The screen that covered the outlet for the kitchen exhaust fan was almost completely caked over with grease.

Sarah really got us motivated to out there and tackle the problem. She figured out how to craft baffles from cardboard to hold back the insulation. She also took the lead in getting the soffit vents down.

While she was doing that, I was monkeying around on the roof. I put a pair of chimney caps on our chimneys. Those should help keep wind, rain, debris, and critters out of our chimneys. Wind and rain had been real problems. Sometimes, we’d get water in the fireplace, even with the damper closed, as rain water would run down the chimney. We had a fire on Friday night, during a severe rain, and the rain put out the fire on the right-hand side of the fireplace. Hopefully, the chimney caps will prevent that from happening again.

After I finished that, I climbed down and helped Sarah with the soffit vents. Between the two of us, we got a little over half the soffit vents replaced/upgraded in just a few hours.

If you visited our house in the past, you more than likely could not help but notice that we like to use brightly colored paint on the walls.All of the rooms in the house were reasonably colorful…except the bathroom.

The previous owners of the house apparently were either blind, or blind. They somewhat inexplicably painted the bathroom a mottled dark brown with pink accents. The shower surround is a dirty white; the tub is reddish pink. The floor is a stark white linoleum. The wood is all oak. Obviously, given that color scheme, one would naturally gravitate to mottled dark brown with pink accents. (?!?!?!?!)

To make matters even worse, they painted the ceiling the same color. So, not only was the bathroom a horribly ugly color, but it was really dark.

In addition to painting the ceiling, they painted all manner of surfaces that are not usually painted, including parts of the shower surround, the vanity, and the heating duct. But, they didn’t paint behind the toilet tank. They also, didn’t remove their towel racks from the wall, they just painted around them. So, if one were to remove the towel racks (which we did because they were incredibly ugly, cheap affairs), one would be left with cream colored spots on a mottled dark brown wall with pink accents.

Sarah and I had discussed painting the bathroom several times, but since it would mean putting it out of commission for several days, we just never got started on the project. We did buy paint for it, but even that wasn’t enough of a kick in the pants to get the job done.

Monday, I grew fed up with walking into a cave everytime I wanted to use the bathroom, so I started the unpleasant job of painting the whole thing a new color.

I had to remove all the towel racks, dissassemble the toilet (so I could paint behind the tank), cover all vanity and shower with plastic drop cloths, and all the other prep you would normally perform on a room targeted for painting. In addition, I had to wash down the walls and ceiling with a bleach/water solution to kill any mildew resident on the mottled dark brown with pink accents paint.

Sarah spent the first part of the week at Effigy Mounds National Monument, so I was the only one inconvenienced by the bathroom disassembly. Fortunately, we have a toilet and a sink in the basement. Unfortunately, we don’t have a shower. That meant that the longer the project went on, the smellier I got. By the end of the project, I was making an effort to avoid other people because I figured that if I could smell myself (which I could), then my B.O. must be completely off the scale.

In total, it took me just short of three days to finish the project. Six coats of paint (two primer sealer coats; two coats of ceiling paint; two coats of wall paint) were used to banish the mottled dark brown with pink accents to the dustbin of history’s incredibly bad ideas.

"What are the proceeds of a four hour garage sale we had on Saturday?"

Of course, the vast majority of items we had for sale ended up in Goodwill’s hands after they didn’t sell. I’m astonished that no one wanted to purchase a roll of gag toilet paper for $0.50.

The dishwasher that was installed when we bought our house left a fair amount to be desired. It was almond colored, while everything else in the kitchen was either white or stainless steel. The diswasher was loud; so loud I could hear it from any room in the house. It didn’t get the dishes very clean. Many times, our glasses were left with particulate matter in them, so we were washing our glasses by hand. Sometimes, the detergent dispenser on the door failed to open during the wash cycle.So, it was not necessarily a fine piece of dishwashing engineering that occupied a space in our kitchen. Two weeks before we left on vacation, Sarah and I threw up our hands in frustration, and visited a local appliance dealer to purchase a new unit.

As with all things, the new unit arrived two days before we left on vacation. So, this morning, we wrestled the old beast out from under the counter, and wrestled the new beast in.

If you’re truly interested in seeing levels of filth that you wouldn’t otherwise believe could be possible in your home, pull out your dishwasher.

After unhooking the old one and carting it outdoors, we got down to the serious business of getting the new system installed. Fitting, shimming, fitting, shimming, cursing, leveling, testing, swearing, leveling, testing, attaching, and the like took up the next hour or so. Finally, the new, functional dishwasher was installed. It will be great to not only have clean dishes again, but be able listen to the radio while the dishwasher is running.

Having spent the better part of two days insulating the skylight wells in our home, and having found little information on-line regarding the process of insulating skylight wells, I will share my experience below so that others may benefit.The biggest problem that I encountered while insulating our wells was that the pitch of the roof on our house is very shallow. As such, it was impossible for me to stand up in the attic, so I spent all my time on my hands and knees. This meant that all my movements from the ladder up to the attic to each individual well had to be carefully planned and slowly executed so that I didn’t put a foot through the ceiling of the rooms downstairs. The very small space also meant that I was not able to reach what we call the "front" of each well. The front of each well will have to be insulated by blown-in cellulose insulation.

I used 2" thick rigid foam insulation on our wells. Each 2" of thickness gave us an R-value of 10. So, by applying two layers of 2" insulation, I was able to get an R-value of 20 on the well walls. This is less than what our attic will ultimately possess, but it is a better R-value than the rest of the attic currently has.

If your skylight wells are all the same size, and in the same position relative to the roofline, you can save yourself some time by making a few template or pattern pieces. Then, you can cut all the pieces you need at once without trekking up and down the ladder between pieces every time.

Make measurements of the pieces you’ll need before installing the wells, if possible. This means making measurements of what is, essentially, empty space bounded by framing materials for the well walls. However, it will be easier to make these measurments while standing on a ladder inside the wells (before the well walls are installed), than it will be to make these measurements while crouched over in the attic.

Use rigid foam insulation on the well walls unless you have a fully framed structure into which you can put traditional, rolled fiberglass insulation.

Use a foamboard adhesive to affix the foam insulation to the well walls. Don’t just use Liquid Nails or another construction adhesive. These will eat away at the insulation.

Use a respirator while crawling around an attic filled with loose fiberglass insulation of unknown vintage. Using a respirator will also prevent the adhesive fumes from scrambling your brain.

If you are insulating the wells in the dark heart of winter, keep the adhesive warm (60-70F) until you are ready to use it. Warm adhesive is easier to squeeze out of the canister with a caulking gun.

Buy more adhesive than you expect to need.

Buy more wood to lay down in the attic that you expect to need. The more wood you put down in the attic to support your weight, the easier it will be to move around.

Sarah and I got many home improvement projects done or started this
weekend.

On Saturday, we replaced a hollow-core door between the
kitchen and the garage with a pre-hung steel door. On Sunday, we
replaced the (leaking) plumbing under our laundry sink with a set of PVC
replacement components. The previous owners reacted to a corroded pipe
(i.e., the pipe walls in the trap had corroded through) by wrapping the pipe
in electrical tape. I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine how well
that worked.

We also replaced some cabinet knobs, put in some
insulation in the basement, patched a broken window in the rear door of our
garage, and did some other miscellaneous chores. After all that was
done, of course, we got to shovel five inches of snow off the walk.

We’re looking forward to the weekdays now when we can take some time off.