playing house. (part three).

10Apr09

So yes. I haven’t been posting lately. I haven’t been keeping up with the construction project on my blog. It’s not that I’ve forgotten about the blog– it’s just that we’ve gotten really busy with work lately, and after a full week of working, and then a full weekend of house constructing, sometimes I don’t get ’round to the blogging thing. I’ve discovered that, when you’re self-employed, building a business, and building your own house, sometimes all you want to do is something that doesn’t require much (if anything) of you. Often, that means thanking my lucky stars for a red Netflix envelope instead of working on the blog. Sorry about that.

It has been several months now since we had our friend Curt help us with drywall. It is nice to have a few expert friends that we can call upon when it comes to skills that we don’t actually have in-family. Before hanging the drywall, Curt and Jim strapped the walls, to help cover a multitude of framing “sins”– the legacy of a poorly-built building that we are trying to turn into a well-built building. (Another way of looking at this particular building project of ours is that we’re trying to put lipstick on a pig…) You can see the strapping in the photo below (the horizontal boards that are running in front of the studs). Per our usual style, we manage d to sift through the pile of boards in the yard and find some old flooring boards from our ex-kitchen to use for this job. (Actually, Jim did the non-fun job of sifting through the board pile in the yard– so thanks for that!)

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Tags: drywall, floating floor, paint, pergo

animal kingdom.

22Feb09

Your regularly scheduled post about the evolution of our “practice house” is being superceded tonight by a news flash: the critters are everywhere, and whenever you least expect it, the natural world is prone to pop into your day and remind you that humans are not the only critters out there, and we’re all just trying to figure out how to get by.

But before I get started on my story, I have a Rorschach test for you. What does the image below– a random assortment of ink spots– remind you of?

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Tags: chimp, Rorschach test, squirrel

playing house. (part two).

20Feb09

This is a continuation of my previous post, in which I explain how we’ve spent all our “free” time this winter turning a metaphorical rusty old Ford into a Lexus. We seem to have accomplished this by (metaphorically), jacking up the key, and rebuilding everything around it.

 

Below, is a picture that sort of shows what the place looked like before we started working on it.  Except that the space wasn’t actually as light-filled as it appears in this picture. Here, natural light is streaming into the space because we’ve removed part of the wall on the other side of the room to add a new window.It is difficult to tell from this picture, but the floor consisted of the world’s lumpiest concrete, painted grey.  When the former owners poured the floor, they clearly had no idea how to even screed a concrete slab, so they just made a half-hearted attempt to smooth it in a few places, and then left it to harden into a horrible mess.  In the interest of expediency, we considered just leaving the concrete floor as it was, and living with its gross-ness. However, as is usually the case with our building projects, “expediency” was quickly thrown out the window in favor of trying to make the place nice.

At some point, I was sort of annoyed at myself for not being a more skilled/dedicated photographer and taking picture that accurately illustrated the lumpiness of this floor before we covered it up, so that I could share it with all 6 of my  blog readers. But then I realized that maybe you didn’t need to get the full picture. I mean, I wouldn’t take a picture of my vomit and post that on my blog, would I? Okay, so I did share some pictures of Fluffy with you, but I have to draw the line in the sand somewhere. So– no close-up pictures of the concrete horror: you’ll have to use your imagination.

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Tags: construction, shed, subfloor

playing house. (part one).

13Feb09

We’re almost done with the “practice house,” as Luke has dubbed it. Basically, we’re building a miniature house in which we can pretend to be real homeowners, sans the Barbies.

At some point last summer, we realized that the big house project was not going to be finished within a reasonable amount of time. And we needed a place to live that wouldn’t involve squatting in our friend Kent’s house. In the back yard of our property is the world’s most crooked building. When we bought the place, it had broken windows and was filled with miscellaneous stuff that had previously belonged to a elderly lady with the same name as my grandmother. We named the building “the shed,” added our own pile of crap to the mix, and focused on renovating the actual house.

The shed really wasn’t worth considering as more than a place to keep the rain off a pile of junk. Until the sense of desperation set in. There comes a point in every woman’s life when she has to lower her standards and jump into action. This can happen at 4 a.m., when the paper is due in 4 hours, you and you realize that you can’t do research ANY MORE, but must start writing QUICKLY. You buy the Ford instead of the Lexus. Plenty of ill-conceived marriages have been entered into, due to this “desperation” phenomenon. Women end up settling for the chain-smoking, football addicted lout. Men end up settling for the nagging, shop-aholics. Neither party knows what to expect, but they figure, “what the hell?”

In our case, we settled for a twisted little building in the backyard. We believed that “things would work out.” We opened our hearts and our wallets to the crappy little shed, and we got to work. We were delusional. If we had known how long and twisted the road would be, we might not have started down it. We thought it would be a quick and simple job. The building already had basic wiring and plumbing. It had walls and a roof. All we’d need to do was replace the crappy masonite on the walls with some drywall, add a few fixtures and outlets, and start moving in, right?

Oh, the tangled web we weave. Here’s the real story:

First off, the windows were broken and very crappy. We had the old windows removed from the eviscerated kitchen, so we thought we’d throw those in. Simple. We began by removing half a wall…

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Tags: shed, windows

powdered donut.

13Feb09

There is drywall dust in my eyebrows. And in that funny fold that makes up my upper ear flap. There’s drywall dust under my cuticles and stuck in the dry wrinkles of my elbows. Let’s face it, I look like a powdered donut. I neglected to take any pictures because I forgot my camera… plus I dislike pictures of myself, even in more flattering circumstances that don’t involve my entire body being covered with white dust.

I spent the day sanding drywall. I had intended to just quickly knock off the worst of the ridges before we moved on to priming the walls of our little apartment. But things got a little out of control. Unfortunately, I have a nearly infinite ability to obsess over repetitive tasks. You can call this a love of meditative tasks, or you can call it latent Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. I prefer to think of it as a love of meditative tasks, because if my health insurance company knew about my tendencies, I’d be likely to lose my coverage. I also like to knit, and have discovered recently that taping & mudding drywall is a task fairly well suited to my obsessive / meditative personality, along with weeding gardens.

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Tags: drywall

house progress good. blog progress bad.

31Jan09

So, I’ve been a bad blogger recently. I really enjoy blogging, but I’m not always the best at multi-tasking, and doing the things I want to do despite all the busynesses of life. But I’m working on that.

We’re almost finished with the little apartment we’ve been fixing up in the back yard.  Which means that soon we’ll be able to stop commuting 1/2 hour each way to work on the house.  I promise to post some pictures this weekend.  For the moment, we’re off to work on drywall … we’re leaving as soon as I manage to drag Luke away from his little lathe project in which he is building a tool to fix the timing on his latest acquisition, a Volkswagen. See? We have a lot of catching up to do…. I’ll be back soon!

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winter is killing us.

16Dec08

Winter is upon us.  You know it’s official and unavoidable when you realize that you haven’t felt your feet for 2 hours, or when your husband spends the entire day trying to get a few vehicles started with an alarming array of battery chargers, block heaters, trips to the auto parts store, and unabashed swearing.  You know you’re in trouble when the battery in your car freezes, when your bedroom reaches 45 degrees (not kidding), and you discover that your snow shovel has frozen itself to the tundra.

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Tags: drifts, misery, snow, winter

pics of progress.

26Nov08

I recently wrote a post about Luke & I dealing with the depression resulting from our un-ending house-building project. Our depression, combined with the world’s longest case of the flu, is the reason that I haven’t posted anything to blog recently. Except for the weekends when we were coughing up green phlegm (and one mini-vacation weekend that we spent soaking in the Mt. Princeton hot springs), we’ve still managed to keep working on the neverending project. Because, well– we don’t have a lot of choice, quite frankly, if we ever want to have a place to live. We do enjoy working on the house (usually)– we just don’t enjoy the constant pressure to keep working, keep spending money we don’t have, and never have any time to relax. So here, for your voyeuristic pleasure, is a medley of pictures of our recent progress.

We worked on several fronts simultaneously, so these are not necessarily in chronological order.

This is Luke’s brother, Olin. He’s the one wearing a respirator. You can tell it is Olin because it says so on the sleeve of his Leadville 100-mile bike race sweatshirt. (“I rode the world’s most hellish 100-mile mountain bike race, and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt?”) He is holding a contraption that we invented in the depths of our garage, using the following everyday items:

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Tags: big dig, concrete floor, photos, quarry, trench