Our Old House

don't stop believin'

the work continues ... and continues ... and doesn't stop. Monday night was shortened due to, uhh, certain extenuating circumstances (Colts game) but i still got around 10-12 SF down. Tuesday, just over 30 SF. Tonight was shortened a bit due to needing a Home Depot trip for some supplies, so only got about 18 SF. Since the dining room is essentially done, Chrissy went ahead and started the painting process there. The dining room is now about 80% primed, with a very lovely Pepto-Bismol pink color. I can't wait for the red to hit the wall ... it kills me to look at that all night. Sorry, keep forgetting the camera, so no pics yet. It feels really nice to know that the painting project is really getting underway at the same time as the floors. I feel like it reduces some of the pressure to get the floors done asap. Also today, UPS delivered our new light switch for the dining room. It's a modern version of the push-button switches, but with a dimmer switch on the bottom.

i'm taking tomorrow off work to try to take a dent out of the floor project. my goal is to get the sunroom done and about 5 or 6 feet further into the living room. i think that's fairly ambitious, but hey, i'm an ambitious guy.

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:41 PM 1 comments

horray for hardwood

we are back! let's see ... Tuesday we tried to continue laying floor. yes, tried. we got maybe 10 SF or so down and gave up ... the stupid retardo mallet kept coming apart. piece of junk. Home Depot was already closed, so we'd have to exchange it later in the week. Wednesday evening we traveled north to Chrissy's parents house for Thanksgiving. while there I went to the local Home Depot and they gave me a new mallet from another package. i tried to get them to let me buy the mallet from another nailer that is the type i like better ... they didn't bite though ... so we're stuck with the chinsy Porta-nailer mallet.

After much enjoyable eating and relaxing, we unfortunately had to leave on Saturday morning to resume our house projects. With the driving, time change, lunch, and waking up later than planned ... we didn't really get started until around 1. We got some floor down before Chrissy's brother and his fiancee arrived to help. Chrissy and Kim began painting our bedroom. There was some random blue paint we found in the house that we thought would work well as a primer. They got the whole room taped and primed by late afternoon. Michael and i kept going on the floors. With a couple hours of work after dinner, we had the floor to the point where we were just past the doors separating the living and dining room.

that evening, we also found in our mail ... a response from the previous owners on the floor issue. in response to our thorough, courteous letter ... we got a two paragraph insult back. they basically acused us of being horrible people. the letter was of very poor taste and was nothing but an attack on us as people. needless to say, they don't want to help defray the extra costs and time we are incurring. so, now we need to think about what we want to do. do we really want to try to recoup some of our money in small claims court?? of course, that pretty much bummed us out for the rest of the night. watching Batman Begins again helped a little bit ... i forgot how good that movie was.

Michael and Kim went home after lunch Sunday and we headed to the airport to pick up my mom returning from Florida (she drove my grandparents down for the winter). My brother Jim and his family were returning from Thanksgiving in Kentucky, so stopped by and picked up Mom to take her the rest of the way. After that, we were back at it. By about 10 tonight, we had the dining room 99.9% finished! Just a few trim-out pieces to go and creating the transition into the kitchen. At this point, we think we have around 330-340 SF down. That is around half of the downstairs. So, we're making pretty decent progress. I plan on taking a day off work this week to get a big chunk done ... with a goal of completing next weekend or early the week after. If things go smoothly, that may be do-able -- providing my blisters don't get much worse :-)

oh, and we've decided this is what happens when you work on your home remodeling projects for too long. so be careful out there when you work on your own projects.

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:46 PM 3 comments

keeping things moving

tonight i stopped at our friendly local Home Depot and picked up a Porta-Nailer 402 and some nails (gotta love buying new tools, i sure do). don't worry, the sign says your are getting the now discontinued model 401, but the actual box says 402 on it. after dinner, we went to the house and after figuring out how to load and use it, we put down just a shade over 30 SF of floor in about 2.5 hours. we think we can probably get that up to 15 SF/hour after we get more in the swing of things. the new nailer works really well. it has a ratcheting system that allows you to take a couple swings if it doesn't drive fully the first time. this is really useful if you are in a location where you can't take a full swing (near a wall, inside a door opening, etc.). with the other nailer, you had to really wind up and hope you hit it square in those tight spots (or pop a finish nail in instead). i don't, however, like the mallet that comes with it. the handle isn't as comfortable, the steel end of the hammer is shaped differently (worse in my opinion) and you tend to rip up the building paper when tapping pieces into place, and at one point the end just came off of it. i'm contemplating hunting down a different mallet ... but we'll see. it's not awful, i just liked the ones we had Saturday much better. we're hoping to put 35-45 SF down tomorrow night. well, my back is sore from bending over so much ... so i'm gonna grab the heat pack and rest a bit before bed. gotta track down a back brace i think.

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:34 PM 0 comments

down it goes

much has happened and we're finally heading in the positive direction on the flooring project! Thursday we finished removing nails, did final cleaning, and began shellacing (got a coat on the sunroom and about 3/4 of the living room). we think we were only slightly buzzed after the shellacing. the shellac (which i have learned is a very interesting natural product) is made soluable using denatured alcohol ... thus when it dries, much alcohol is vaporized. after a time, you get really sick (to the stomach) of the smell. it dries pretty quick though, so it's not bad once you get it down. the floors were really porous, so it went on at about twice the normal rate (thus i had to go buy more). Friday night we finished shallacing the downstairs (2 coats) and made final preparations for Saturday. the shellacing really darkened the floors ... as you can see in this picture.

Saturday morning, my uncle Wil and cousin Matt drove down to help begin laying the hardwood floor. after some planning, measuring and more planning ... we had most of the building paper down and the wood began to fly. Matt borrowed/rented two manual floor nailers from his neighbor. i had never used one before, but had heard they take quite a hit from the mallet to set the nail. this is true, you really need to wail on that sucker to make it work right. it took me a while to get the hang of it ... and still would have a few that needed setting from time to time. once you get a feel for it though, it's really not all that bad.

we worked until around 7 that night. we got about 160 SF put down. while the quantity isn't huge, it was some of the more difficult areas to get put down. getting things all planned out so that the floor was continuous through the living and dining rooms was tricky (but successful). we (well, mainly Wil and Matt) got the sunroom started also. this included another tricky transition ... as i wanted to turn the flooring the other direction and not use any molding to cover the transition. the result was great, it's going to be a seamless merger between the floors. most of the remainder of the downstairs will be really fairly simple. there are few things to go around and the initial layout is done. starting the upstairs hallway and the kitchen still need to be done, but we discussed some strategy before the experts left. i'm planning on buying a manual floor nailer Monday to keep moving. it's going to take a while, but i think Chrissy and i can move along at a good clip ... she was pretty excited to learn how to use the miter saw. i can't thank Wil and Matt enough for helping get things started and teaching me how to finish the rest. thanks for giving up your saturday to help guys.

so far, we are really really pleased with the results. the cheap oak is really looking great (our opinion i guess). there is a really nice mix of lengths (a lot more long pieces than i expected), colors, and textures ... character (which we like ... you may not). we bought 20% extra to account for some of the rougher pieces and waste ... thus far i think we're well under that. there was one bundle where about 75% of it was pretty much unusable due to a lot of splitting ... usually there are only one or two bad pieces (to much "character") though. most can at least be salvaged as a row starting/ending piece.

meanwhile, Saturday afternoon Chrissy prep-ed the upstairs bathroom and got it painted! the darker blue turned out great. she also cleaned it up as it was covered with the remnants of the electric project. we just need to do a little patching around the new outlet and some touch up of the lower area and the room is pretty much done for now. well, we will probably put new lights in too i guess, but that won't take long.

sunday we were out of town ... having a family Thanksgiving at, strangely enough, Wil's house. we had a great time hanging out with the fam. i'm not sure if i'll post again soon. we'll be working Mon and Tues nights, but be out of town Weds evening - Sat morning. we hope to get a bunch of hardwood down next weekend, so i'll probably update then. have a great Thanksgiving everyone!

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:45 PM 0 comments

a big pile of wood

last night we headed downtown to our local friendly Lumber Liquidators to order our new hardwood floors (in the middle of the horrid storms). tonight, the massive pile of wood was delivered along with some snow! the mudroom looks like a warehouse. there are some rough pieces (machine burns, open knots, etc.) and quite a few short pieces (less than 2'-0"), but in general we are happy with the condition of the el-cheapo wood. they had a picture at the store of a floor put down using the same material ... it looked simply unbelievable. i only hope our floor looks close to that good. also got some good news last night, my uncle and cousin volunteered to come down and help lay the floor on saturday! my uncle Wil (the one we went to the Grand Canyon with this summer) laid a bunch of hardwood at his house, so an experienced teacher will really help me a lot. it should also be a lot of fun working with them also.

also tonight, we removed all the old hardwood from the dining room (the last of the old hardwood) and pulled nails from about 3/4 of the floor (forgot the camera, so no pics today of the old floor or pile of wood). tomorrow we'll finish that and start the final prep work for laying new hardwood (cleaning and shellacing). i picked up some supplies for the shellacing and flooring Monday, including exchanging our ShopVac. ours has always had some sort of problem in the motor. after running it for a few minutes it would start to smell awful, like the motor was burning itself up. ran the new one tonight for probably 1/2 hour straight with no issues, nice. we are dreaming of the day, hopefully in about a month, where we can LIVE in the house and not have muddy boogers (from all the dust).

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:19 PM 0 comments

Project 5 Part 2: almost but not quite complete

well, we still aren't quite done, but we're really close. my previous estimates of completion were a bit optomistic it seems. but, a whole lot did get accomplished this weekend.

my mom, dad, brothers Jim and Dave, and nephew Bryce (Jim's oldest) arrived Saturday around 9. i had taken some photos of the urine damage in the sunroom, so mom and Bryce started pulling out the old floor there. Jim went around wiring up all the devices we ran wire to the previous electric day. Dave, Dad and I went about figuring out how to rewire the main level lighting. in the process, Dave found the source of the short we had been dealing with. it appears the light in the living room was partially held together with scotch tape. yes, scotch tape. now that's some genius work there. we did see some pretty sparks when he was taking the light down. we deciphered where all the lights and switches would be on the second floor and proceeded to cut out floor boards as necessary to gain access to that area. while doing this, we noticed that all the second level floor joists had been doubled up at some point. more on this later. there was a bit of a gap in the flooring at one wall ... many treasures were to be found laying on the plaster beneath (pens, birthday cards, film negatives, etc.).

once the wires were all pulled, Jim took over installing ceiling boxes for the lights while we moved on to getting wires to the second floor lights and switches. those were really easy in comparision as we could generally just drop from the attic down. the upstairs hall light was trickier, as it is a 3-way switch ... with the 2nd switch being downstairs. this resulted in a wire going from the attic, to the basement, and back up to the first floor switch. nothing like taking the scenic route.

mom and Chrissy repainted/caulked the windows from the attic dormer and spackled some holes about the house. Chrissy also took care of making us some great meals. after dinner, the lights went back in (including the new chandelier for the dining room). oh, and just because the package says 100W bulbs ... think a little bit and get bulbs that aren't so bright if there are 9 of them (i think airplanes started accidentally landing on our street after we turned the light on).

the crew was a bunch of troopers as they all kept working until about 10! dad and Dave went home, while mom, Jim and Bryce decided to stick around. Sunday, Jim did some final work on some switches and outlets, i did some insulating around exterior wall outlets/switches with fun expanding foam ... and we all tag-teamed the living room hardwood. by mid-afternoon we had it all out, including nails ... and a lot of cleanup done. we did find some areas where staining made it through to the subfloor -- so some shellacing there will also be needed.

this brings me back to the 2nd floor joists being supplemented. after pulling up the first floor hardwood, we noticed evidence of a previous wall (see picture). it appears that maybe there used to be a load-bearing wall and a partition wall there (making a hallway?). this explains the new floor joists (which span from outside wall to outside wall) and a seemingly useless beam in the basement. we can't quite figure out what the room would have been used for ... it was very oddly shaped. this would also mean that the double-doors into the dining room didn't used to be double-doors either. maybe pulling up the dining room floor will enlighten us further.

ok, so we have a little electric work left. we need to figure out how to get a new wire to the sunroom light (no access above), re-wire some lights and outlets in the sunroom, add an outlet to the downstairs bathroom, and add under-counter lights in the kitchen. not bad really, compared to what has already been done. it's very nice knowing that almost all of the wiring is now new. sweet. quite a project though, quite a project. i've added some pictures of random things to the flickr site if you are interested (including some stained floor pics).

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 11:20 PM 0 comments

Project 2: 97% Complete

It's so close, we can almost taste it. well, it's that or the nasty urine smell we're tasting still. anyway, the cleanup portion of the garage removal is almost done. Saturday morning, Chrissy's brother Michael and his fiancee Kim came down. We did some mowing and raking of leaves and then began loading up the wood. I had borrowed Jon and Carrie's truck to make it possible. We got the first load ready and i drove it over to the Waldens, while the rest of the gang finished yard work and got some lunch. I brought Jon back with a chainsaw to cut down some of the longer pieces. Two trips later, we had about 90% of the wood over there. Jon and I started the fire on our first trip and Carrie had kept feeding it throughout the afternoon. We let it die down and cooked a couple brats for dinner ... mighty tasty brats. We decided that maybe tearing down the garage, hauling the wood, etc. was quite a bit of work for a few BTUs of heat to cook some brats, but they were good. Oh well. After eating, we started the blaze going again, but had to let it die down because of some strong winds. We'll have to head over some other time to finish the burning. It was a fun time ... we hadn't really hung out with Jon and Carrie outside of work, so it was a nice change of pace. We even took a minute to do an American Gothic pose in front of our fire (i think we somewhat captured the half-ticked off, half confused look of the painting).













Sunday after Michael and Kim left, we headed back over to load up the shingle mess. We stopped and bought a scoop shovel on the way over -- nice purchase, saved us quite a bit of time. We loaded all the shingles up and a few other bits of trash in about an hour. We were hoping to get the rest of the wood on also, but the truck was just too full for anything else. I plan on running this load to Waste Management in the morning and we'll load up the rest tomorrow evening for a Tuesday morning dropoff. Oh, and the leaves we raked yesterday ... waste of time. We had some intense storms overnight which made the yard look worse than when we started. We met a former neighbor of ours who was looking around her old house (currently vacant). She grew up in a house across the back yard (in the late 40s and 50s). She shared a coupe memories of our former homeowners from when she was a kid (before the area went downhill with all the rental homes). She was really disappointed with how the area had been run down but was happy that people who were going to restore the homes were now moving in.

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 9:53 PM 4 comments

updates

ok. what's happened lately? well, a few things. we received our rugs ... one Friday, the other Monday. they turned out great! these pictures hardly do the colors justice ... the lighter (goldish/ greenish) one just belew us away when we unrolled it. we went solely on these pictures so we never knew how well the real thing will look. we were very pleased. we can't wait to see them in the house.

last weekend went went to Chrissy's parents place. we visited her Aunt & Uncle on saturday which was a lot of fun. we hadn't seen them in a long time, so it was a really good time. they live on the northwest side of Chicago, so we stopped at Ikea on the way back. we made some great buys there. we got roman shades for the sunroom and the upstairs bedrooms (15 total). we got lighting for underneath the kitchen cabinets. and, we got a new entertainment center for the living room (sorry everyone, i think the concrete block masterpiece is being retired). best of all, ikea was celebrating their 20th anniversary ... so everything was 15% off! nice.

on the hardwood floor front, not a whole lot has really happened. we are nearly finished with a letter we will be sending to the sellers to see what they think about the staining. it's obviously a touchy letter, so we are really trying to get it just right (including enlisting the help of our friend Casey who is in his final year of law school). we're hoping they are willing to help defray at least some of the costs. we think it's only fair since they failed to disclose the condition.

we're still not sure of the exact course of action for the floors. there are 2 options really. tear out the old floor (on the first floor only) or clean it and coat it with shellac (upstairs has to be the shellac option, no subfloor up there and we think the staining is less significant). i got some advice from a professional "disaster" recovery cleaner today who suggested shellac because it seals completely, unlike paint which will emit some small amount of vapor. we're trying to figure out which would take longer ... cleaning and multiple coats of shellac ... or just ripping the old floor out. and we have to balance confronting the previous owners with our schedule demands ... we need to get moving on the floors soon so we can finish before we need to move in. but, if we tear into them, we're essentially destroying the evidence. we do plan on taking a ton of photos of course.

in other plans, we hope to finish the electric work the weekend of the 12th. my dad and bros. are going to bring down some tools for me to use on the floor ... so i'd like to get started laying new floor the week after that. this weekend we will be taking care of the garage remnants. we'll be having a massive bonfire out at the Waldens ... that should be fun! we hope to load up the shingles also and drop them at a transfer station on Monday morning. other than that, this week won't involve more house work. we have a recurring Bible study on Wednesdays, i'm out of town Thursday for a seminar, and a dinner/award program that night ... and then Friday we're having an all-day company planning session at work that won't end until Saturday morning. Chrissy's brother and his fiancee are planning to come down and help this weekend also. ok, back to working on the letter.

posted by Chris and Chrissy Miller @ 8:05 PM 3 comments