Area yard gradually improves

Here's a picture post of some of my obsessive gardening this year:

This is my attempt at a kitchen/herb garden-- let's hope the elaborate series of wire cages succeeds in keeping the groundhogs and deer out!


Thanks to area husband carrying many many rocks across the street and up the hill, the back yard has a new (sort of) raised bed and a sunken rain garden (an attempt to keep standing water off the lawn)


Someone is still pitchforking up the lawn and planting new grass seed as it gets dark... (We'll have to cover every inch of the newly seeded area with a lightweight crop cover sheet or the squirrels will immediately dig it all up-- nothing else works to keep them off. Grrrr).



I think the obsessive gardening is starting to pay off-- the boxwoods in the front yard that were barely clinging to life when we moved in are getting big!

Here's the front yard 3 years ago for comparison-- I guess I need to update my blog icon. :)

And here are a couple photos of my lucky holiday weekend craigslist finds!


After all these years of waiting I finally found a buffet/hutch to fit in my dining room alcove. It's not the style I was hoping for but the price was right and it sure beats boxes piled against the wall!


I found this funky rug for the family room. it's fun to add some color-- we're still hoping to get the walls in this room painted sometime this summer :)

Insulation Added to Area House – Savings Ensue

The following is a guest post by Area Husband:

Last October we added insulation to our house, and ever since I’ve been wondering whether it was worth it. Sure it is more comfortable and less drafty at night, but will it result in a significant energy savings?

A bit of background: our house was built in 1925, and as best as we can tell the original house lacked insulation. A later owner added attic insulation, but by the time we moved in the loose fill that constituted the insulation was rated at an R-4. The Department of Energy recommends attic insulation to R-49 in our area, so we were off by about an order of magnitude.

Our first floor has a brick exterior and lathe and plaster in the interior, so no room for insulation. Our second floor has sloped ceilings and knee walls and a lot of dead air space between the interior and exterior. And then there is the poorly-insulated attic.

Fast forward. We used cellulose to insulate the attic to R-49, the second floor knee and gabled walls to about an R-20 and the crawlspace to R-30. The first floor walls are not insulated and have an R-value of less than 5. So insulation should help somewhat, but most of the heat is probably still leaking out the first floor.

Now to the heart of the matter—how much energy are we saving? To get at this question, you might compare our current energy usage to last year’s for an equivalent month. Since we use natural gas, the appropriate comparison would be use cubic feet per month. It would provide a reasonable approximation, but I think we can do better. One year will be colder than the other, thereby skewing the results.

So maybe we could compute an average monthly temperature for December 2007 and December 2008 and do a comparison that way? It makes more sense, but we face the tyranny of averages. For example, a month might have an average of 35F because most of the days were near 40 but there were a few days near zero, or most days were near 35. For heating a house, it matters. So I think we can still do better. I ended up computing the number of heating degree days per hundred cubic feet of natural gas consumed for a given winter month. Higher values indicate greater energy efficiency, because we are able to use the same amount of energy (100 cubic feet) for an increased home heating demand. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heating_degree_day)

Returning to the central question: did the insulation project result in a significant energy savings? The data indicate a 28% energy efficiency gain.

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Since I neglected to post this last fall, here are some photos of our insulation project:


"before" photo of un-insulated storage area behind knee wall


I furred out the rafters to add room for blown in insulation


Then I added sheet rock late into the night before the insulation pros arrived


The other knee walls (without storage closets) had holes cut through them. The insulation pro's son crawled through the holes to place a lining behind the walls to hold the correct thickness of blown-in insulation in place.


The cellulose was blown in through nifty holes cut into the walls (thus providing additional motivation to *someday* replace the ugly wallpaper).


And for a couple awkward "shed roof" areas, it was blown in through the downstairs ceiling.


here are the bales of cellulose being fed into a hopper. (We used about twice the number of bales that you can see here!)


...and up to the second floor where we needed it. :)


Oh, and lastly we took out the weird GIANT roof vent (that was non-functional as it was perpetually blocked by squirrel nests) and had three normal sized vents put in to ventilate our newly insulated attic.

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)