Area Fireplace Finally Tiled

The tiles are finally installed on our fireplace! Hooray! Here's what it looks like now:



And to remind us what we started from two and a half years ago, here's a photo diary of the transformation...

Summer 2006-- white, white, and white:


Fall 2007--All that white paint is stripped off-- the mantle is salvagable, but the bricks are not


Summer 2008-- Non-functional gas logs taken out and fabulous wood-burning stove installed!


Winter 2008-- tile installation begins...


closeup of hearth tiles. (If all goes as planned, the previous hearth/slab of white marble will have a new home on my kitchen counter).


tile installation continues


Boy does the tile color NOT show up in a photograph.... but here's my attempt to show a little bit of the variation in color & textures. The tiles were handmade locally in London, Ohio. I had to seal the grout with a darker shade of dilute latex paint to keep it from being so bright that it washed out the tile color altogether.

Finally instead of an eyesore we have something nice to look at in our living room!

Area summer...

Just a few photos of where we are right now with the house improvements:

The oak flooring is all nailed in to the no-longer-stinky room, though we still have all the sanding and finishing yet to do.


I was at a standstill with the floor project, trying to decide how to proceed next, when our neighborhood got hit hard by some leftover winds from hurricane Ike, and we ended up without electricity for 10 days! Ugh!

Luckily it's back on now. And the silver lining to the windstorm crisis was all the firewood we salvaged from street corners-- I managed to carry it all up our hill and now we're hurriedly sawing and splitting it so it will be ready to use this winter!! Here's the first almost-cord we've got done so far:





Oh, and we're collecting all that wood for the lovely new wood burning stove we had installed into our fireplace last month!! Woohoo!!



Lastly, here's a gratuitous photo of happy Tom
:)

Stinky Room Update

I'm finally working on the house again and some of the neighbors have been dropping by to see what I'm up to. In the process they've supplied some partial answers to the mystery of the stinky room:

(To briefly recap, we originally thought our office room had a pet urine odor problem, but because the house had been a rental that ended badly with a lot of damage and other problems, we were anxious to find out the source of the odor and rule out the possibility of meth lab contaminants which can have a similar smell). From what I can now piece together from the recollections of neighbors, the last renters had a dog that they left in the house (along with most of their belongings and a huge amount of garbage) for a number of weeks after they and other various people staying there had moved out. Someone was coming by to feed the dog, but for weeks no one was cleaning up after it! It appears that our "office" room and the adjacent half-bath was the poor dog's lavatory during that time, and the floors (and whatever furniture was there) were completely soaked.

Ugh! I'm honestly amazed that the owner was able to clean up and hide the odor to the point where we didn't notice it until we had been in the house for a week or two. (And then of course once we removed the carpet it was much, much worse). Anyway, it's a relief to finally know the source of the stench.

Now, on to getting rid of the smell.... here's a series of photos illustrating our progress so far:

Here's the stinky floor last fall before demolition:

It's really amazing old growth pine-- most pieces were 14 feet long, from one wall to the other!


(The white parts seem to be spackle that someone used to fill in the worst of the termite damage before carpeting over it).


I had a plumber help me take out the toilet & vanity in the half-bath, and then I started chiseling up the laminate flooring in that room. (I tried using a hot iron to soften the glue which helped a little, but most of the laminate still came out in splinters, leaving most of the glue on the pine boards below).

Here's the room with 2/3 of the pine flooring pulled up. (Ignore that rectangle of parquet-- it's just on a piece of plywood that I pulled up from the living room, and I'm using it to keep from falling through the floor as I work).

In spite of the smell, I pulled the nails from the best pieces of flooring and found a brave soul via freecycle with more outdoor storage space than me who took them away to try to treat and re-use them. (:D *is happy to be saving trees*)

so.... with the flooring out, guess what? The room still reeked! So I'm currently busy replacing the most damaged (and stinkiest) pieces of subflooring.

So yeah, at this point I realize it would have been faster to have torn out all the subflooring and replaced it with particle board. D'oh! But I'm almost done and blessedly it smells MUCH BETTER and the remaining odor seems to be localized to a few of the really squishy boards I still have to replace!!

Here is the stinky subflooring I cut out waiting to go to the curb:



*waves goodbye to our stench* (I hope!) With luck I'll be nailing in the new flooring this week. :)

Area Knitting

Here's what I've been doing instead of working on our poor house:





My friend had a baby girl in November so I taught myself how to knit tiny hats and a sweater! (The friend runs a South Park website, so I was trying for a theme).

Area August Updated

Here's another catch-up post, featuring paint stripping and the arrival of a new Area Family member:

Area Cat, a.k.a. Dougal McKitty is a stray who showed up on our porch and adopted us in August.




Having a pet is a bit of a lifestyle change for us, and it has made things interesting on the house-project front. The new kitty is another reason for procrastinating the gaping-holes-in-floor stage of construction. The first time he discovered my basement work area, he managed to get a long strip of duct tape stuck to his hind foot, and promptly panicked and tore all over the house trying to to run away from it. LOL!

In spite of the kitty's help, and some time away visiting family, I managed to get a lot of paint stripped off of the living room beams and doorways.

Here are the beams before I started:



And here they are at various stages of completion. (I can only do an 18 inch long segment at a time, because it's so hard working over my head on a ladder).






This is a more detailed view of a beam with paint stripped off. Unlike the woodwork in the dining room and around the doorways, it hasn't been mangled and never had the original finish scratched off with an angle-grinder. I'm reeeeally hoping I can get away with refreshing the finish without having to sand it down and start from scratch! *crosses fingers* I'm about halfway done with the stripping, which should be the hardest part. :)



Here's more paint-stripping progress in the living room/entryway:



(note drips of yet another kooky paint color that was once on the walls and/or trim)

Area July Blogged Belatedly

Oops, I can't believe how long I've managed to neglect the blog! Here's the first of several catch-up posts, (I hope). First, here's what happened with the floor repairs and the garden:

In July I used a birthday gift-card to buy plants for the back yard!



We got a Japanese maple (near the center) and a lot of ferns and perennials (that don't show up so well in the photo). This area was long-neglected and filled in with invasive honeysuckle and garlic mustard when we moved in. Tom cleared the worst weeds and I've hauled countless bags of peat and mulch up the hill and into the back garden, so hopefully the soil is on its way towards being a little less cement-like, and by next year when these plants fluff up it might start looking like something. :)

Also in July I finished adding new flooring and sub-flooring to repair the hole in the dining room.



We tried out a couple shades of finish for the floor on some scrap pieces of flooring, and the tinted shellac layers (covered by water-based polyurethane) look like they will do a pretty good job of hidinig the differences in grain between the brand new unfinished oak boards and the 80 year old boards. (Here's the test strip sitting on top of the repaired area. The top two rows are new boards and the bottom rows are old. The left side has 3 coats of walnut-tinted garnet dewaxed shellac, and the right side has 2-- I think we're going to end up going with just 2).



However.... I decided the rest of the floor repairs and refinishing are just going to have to wait until I see the overall condition of the living room floors (i.e., liberate them from underneath all that green paint), and see how many of the original floorboards I can salvage for patching the holes. My method of feathering the new floorboards in with the old in the dining room was successful enough, but WAY too tedious and time-consuming to ever use again! (And coming from me, that's saying a lot!)

what's wrong with this picture?

I've been working on replacing a small section of hardwood flooring in the dining room that was an old duct patched with plywood. I figured it would be good practice for the more extensive floor repairs in the living room. So I bought some new 2 1/4 x 3/4 inch red oak flooring to fill the hole and feather in with the surrounding floorboards. The new and old boards' tongue & grooves fit together beautifully. The only problem is, when I line up the tongue & grooves along the length of the new and old boards, the tongue vs. groove on the ends of the boards don't match.

The original flooring in the house seems to have the ends of the floorboards milled backwards. (That, or each board was upside down when it had grooves milled into the underside???).

What the hell? Has anyone else heard of this happening?

So I guess this is why there was no apparent attempt by POs to make the newer hardwood on a third of the living room feather-into, or even line up with, the rest of the flooring in the room!

(Here's the living room now, with the bulk of our furniture crammed into the corner with the previous-owner-repaired flooring section that isn't painted green)

And here's the lovely line down the middle of the floor with misaligned (though exactly the same sized) boards:


So even though my original flooring is a standard size, I am not going to be able to use new flooring to make repairs and feather it in with the older floorboards the way I planned. (I'm tired of making splines and new grooves at the ends of the new floorboards to make them fit-- it's way too much work, though I am loving my $50 craigslist table saw :)).

This means a major change in strategy for re-doing the floors. I guess the new plan is to rip out some of the old living-room boards to patch the duct-holes. (I had hoped to use a few new boards to patch the duct holes before I had to start tearing up three quarters of the living room floor). Among other things, this means more of our floors are going to be torn up at any given time and we'll have to huddle against the walls for fear of falling.

Area window trim is finally up!

A generous neighbor with a nail gun helped me get the refinished trim back onto the window. Yay!

(I have no idea when I'll get to stripping and refinishing the actual windows, but ignoring that for now, it's so nice to see another part of the house re-assembled!!!!)




Also, I'm working hard on the floors this week-- mostly I'm concentrating on paint stripping, getting started on repairs to the flooring and subflooring, and trying to acquire the necessary tools via craigslist.

I pulled the laminate parquet flooring off the hallway to reveal more painted hardwood and a layer of glue. (So far the paint + glue is coming off much more easily than the paint in the living room-- maybe because there are fewer layers?

here's the hallway-- the laminate now starts at the entrance to the kitchen. :)


soon-to-be-removed paint/glue on the hallway vs. living room floors