Out with the old, in with the new Doors

These are the sad, sad doors that were on the house when I bought it. The back door was especially bad with an inch gap at the bottom that let in bugs, and with a window pane that had obviously been replaced poorly with a horrible caulk job (yes, tape and caulk were the M.O. of the previous owners - - what were they thinking?). Oh... and neither of the storm doors closed.

I got new doors from Home Depot and had a contractor install them and they look a ton better. The poorly painted red door is gone and although I kind of miss the smiley face that my friends painted on the inside, it's much nicer to have that streaky red paint all gone. My place is no longer the McDuplex! Hopefully I'll get rid of most of the yellow by the end of February!
Here's a picture of my new front door in the snow:

Dryer Vents... The Homeowner's Slinky

Imagine, if you can, using duct tape for its actual purpose… taping ducts! I did just that in order to prepare to use for my new clothing dryer. In the spirit of “what were they thinking” I must explain that I’m anti-tape right now because the previous occupants tried to fix EVERYTHING with tape. However, since duct work requires duct tape, I made an exception. The ducts from the bathroom exhaust fan and the dryer needed to be connected together to exhaust out of the house. Those were connected with a T-duct that was in inch too small in diameter. In order to remedy this, I bought the correct size T-duct connector (4 inches, in case you were wondering) and duct tape. Basically all you need to do is put the ducts over the ends of the connector and tape them down. It normally results in the whole connector being covered by duct tape, but there’s nothing wrong with that because it ensures that the exhaust is, in fact, exhausted from the house. 

Fun fact - - Duct tape was originally called duck tape b/c of its waterproof quality according to wikipedia.
Also, I must admit... even though dryer vent duct work looks like a slinky... it's not as fun.

Way ahead of Obama

If you read my old posts you would know that I've been trying to make my house more energy efficient. A couple of months ago I re-insulated my attic and I've also replaced windows and doors. I knew insulation was energy efficient... I had no idea it was sexy. - Check it out.

I can dream...

I was talking to a friend about how I joined the gym at work just after she had viewed this blog. She commented, "between the gym and redoing your house, you will have bigger biceps than madonna."

She may be onto something because a lot of the repairs are physically demanding. Especially sanding. At the very least, it's something to strive toward

The Living Room is livable!

Had to publish this picture so I could show off my floors again...

Once again my friends were a HUGE help! I was able to get the dining room and living room painted and organized. My friends even made it extra happy with a smiley face on the door (which will be replaced next Monday).
One friend and I were able to put one coat of paint on the two rooms in a little over an hour, thanks to a handy edging tool I got from Sherwin Williams and my friend's fast handy work with the roller. However, when we were done with the first coat, I decided it was too dark, so I took another trip to Sherwin Williams to get a small can of base white paint to lighten the paint for a 2nd coat. It's important to make sure you measure the same way each time you mix paint... which is just what I did and my 2 batches turned out just right (Goldilocks would approve).

After letting the 2nd coat dry for a little while, we ended up removing the paper/drop clothes from the floors and cleaning up the dust that had accumulated from all of the touch-up sanding jobs. By the end of the night we had placed the area rug in the living room, which took a lot of furniture maneuvering and measuring/cutting of the carpet pad to get it right. Once that was done we arranged the furniture and were exhausted, but extremely happy to have a comfortable place to relax. My friends were determined to make my living room livable... and I think it's appropriate that the orange paint on the walls is called "Determined Orange." It sets the mood for this whole fixer-upper project.

SLIDESHOW - - What a coat of paint can do...

Paint Progression of dining room and living room
primed dining room painted dining room painted dining room with orange wall McDuplex living room scraped living room wall painted living room with smiley door

How NOT to fix a hole in the wall.

When I took the baseboards off of the the walls in my dining room, I was able to figure out how the former owners tried to fix a hole in the wall. First, I came across a fistful of caulk. Caulk is NOT the answer to everything, but some people seem to think so. Secondly, I figured out that in order to keep the caulk somewhat in place, they filled a plastic grocery bag with paper towels and shoved it in the wall before covering it with caulk.

How I think you should fix a hole in the wall - - I removed the caulk-grocery bag-paper towel combo, got a wall patch, and used joint compound to cover the mesh/metal wall patch. Fancy that... hardware stores actually carry products MADE for repairing walls.

Bye McDuplex

It’s time to say goodbye to the McDuplex and paint over the red paint. In order to paint over such a dark color, we (some friends and I), first, had to prime the walls. A coat of pure white made such a difference. The whole room opened up and looked much more inhabitable. We hit a couple of snags in the priming process though. First of all we noticed some bubbling of the paint after putting the primer on it. I decided to start scraping those areas and the paint just kept peeling. We weren’t able to finish the priming because once the paint was scraped it needed to be sanded and smoothed with wallboard/joint compound before being primed. The pictures show what the walls looked like with the red paint and after being primed and scraped. Another snag was that someone had made some marks with a blue marker that refused to be primed over. It’s best not to write on walls at all… but if you are going to, please don’t use marker! It will either require sanding off or multiple coats of primer letting each coat dry fully (which takes at least an hour).

I wasn’t planning to do anything more than prime the walls this weekend, but my friends who were helping me were also willing to paint the ceilings. By the time they were done with that, I realized that the walls that I wanted to be my accent walls were done drying and could be painted my non-neutral color. Some people will baulk at such a bold color, but after initial apprehension we applied the orange paint, it dried slightly darker than it was in the paint can, and really does look good. It actually really makes me happy. We even painted a lot of the kitchen, which needed some sort of pick-me-up. Moral of this story, don’t be afraid of color. After all, it’s just paint. Unfortunately the yellow is still around and the horrid red door so my main level now looks like the warm half of the color wheel.

Windows are in and priming commences!

It only took the contractors a day to install the windows and they look MUCH better than the previous ones and they work really well. Hopefully they'll decrease utility costs too. Nonetheless, they increase the value of the house. The metal casing is gone and is replaced with primed wood, and the windows are vinyl and don't have mildew residue on them. Amazing!

My most recent project is getting the red rooms ready to prime. I've scraped, sanded, and spackled the walls and I've removed the baseboards. I'll write soon about the priming party I'm having on Saturday.

New Windows -- delayed

Thanks to Tropical Storm Ida, the rain will prevent my windows from being installed this week. Crossing my fingers for Monday. In humorous news, my brother -after having commented on the McDonaldsness of the current paint colors- asked if I was getting a drive-thru window installed. =)
The jokes keep coming.

Finished refinishing the stairs!

I spent a couple hours here and there sanding my stairs so that I could finish my floors entirely. Just so you could see before-after pictures of the same spot, here are the stairs before I moved in, and after I put a coat of sealant and 4 coats of varnish on them. What a difference!

New Windows!

Even though my walls desperately need a good coat of paint, I've decided to focus my energy and money into winterizing and greening my home. I knew that I would need to get new windows eventually, but the ones in the basement were original windows to the house built in the 1950s and had to go ASAP. I actually had to tape one of the windows so that it wouldn't open. Classy, huh?

I scheduled an appointment with my good friends Home Depot to get quotes on window replacement. They're getting installed sometime this week, so I'll post some before and after pictures.

Attic Reinsulation - muscle building, but dirty job

I researched attic reinsulation and found that foam insulation is the most energy efficient because it creates an air seal that blow-in and batting insulation do not. Although in order to do foam insulation in an attic, you have to create a clean surface. I spent my first weekend in my home being very itchy because I had to remove the old fiberglass insulation and a large nest. The insulation had obviously been there for a long time and the squirrel skeleton indicated that the nest had been too! I don't think I could have handled a recently dead squirrel and am extremely glad there were no live ones either! So there's looking on the bright side.

If you do choose to remove old insulation, make sure you wear long sleeves/gloves/mask and don't pack the bags full like I made the mistake of doing. Its too hard to get them out of the attic, and they're more likely to split and then you have to double bag them anyway. Just fill them 1/2 to 3/4 full and tie them tight.

The following Monday I realized that squatting in an attic for a weekend makes for a really good glut workout.

Here's a picture of my cleaned out attic


Using the spray foam insulation was actually pretty easy. I was lucky to have the perfect temperature day to do it (70 degrees) and my attic now looks like this:

It's M-F-ing Hardware Time

http://www.marriedtothesea.com/110109/HARDWARE-TIME.gif

If it becomes a shirt like this one - -
http://www.marriedtothesea.com/021506/booze-time.jpg
- - I think I'll be required to buy one.

Refinishing Hardwood: Sealant is potent

Sanding is the hard part of refinishing. It's time consuming and makes your skin really dry. Sealing wood, on the other hand, will put your nose into shock. Make sure that you open all of the windows and have a fan on hand when you are putting down sealant. It might even be useful to wear a mask.

After putting on the sealant, I used put on three coats of polyurethane varnish using a varnish brush. I recommend 4 coats of varnish though.
Here's the result of hard work

Refinishing Hardwood Floors: Getting Water Stains Out of Hardwood IS Possible

I was really discouraged when I removed the varnish and there was a huge, dark water stain in the middle of the living room floor. It was at least 2ft by 2ft. I checked with a variety of people who all believed I would have to tear up that hardwood and lay new in order for there not to be a stain. So, I did what any Generation Y-er would do and I googled it. Finding a solution wasn't that easy. The results said to use "oxalic acid crystals (available at paint or hardware stores)" or bleach. Well, bleach doesn't work... so I went on the search for oxalic acid crystals... that don't exist!
I ended up asking the workers at Home Depot if they knew of ways to repair the wood. They, too, were at a loss. But one worker recommended that I consult the carpet and flooring place just behind their store. When I got there and asked, I received a look of pity ("Sad, poor girl has a stain in her hardwood.") followed by a look of confusion ("What in the world are oxalic acid crystals?"). The manager decided to answer the question that had plagued us and he googled oxalic acid crystals. Apparently they are used to whiten teeth "like hydrogen peroxide." He apologized for not knowing a way for me to get the stain up, but little did he know a light bulb went off... "Why not try hydrogen peroxide? What do I have to lose?"

After quick stop at CVS to get a large bottle of hydrogen peroxide... I poured some onto a rag and placed it on a small section of the stain, weighted it down with a container, and left it for an hour or so. It took a little while to dry, but amazingly the dark water stain was gone from the spot! It was the happiest moment of my floor sanding experience... other than being done of course.


Moral of this story: Dark water stains can be removed with hydrogen peroxide.

... A word of warning though - too much hydrogen peroxide treatment might cause the floor to slightly yellow, so be patient.


My apologies for not having before-after pictures. I'm sad I didn't take any... but take my word for it... it was an amazing transformation!

Refinishing Hardwood Floors: Getting to Natural Wood

I know it's tough to focus on the worn hardwood in the picture when the paint is so horrid, but try to draw your eyes away from the yellow and red paint that has given my home the nickname McDuplex and see the "before" pictures of the hardwood floors. I closed on the home 11 days before I needed to move in, so I got to work right away on the floors. Refinishing floors kicks up a lot of sawdust that I didn't want on my furniture and other belongings after I moved in. Can you blame me? I immediately rented a floor sander for the weekend, and sand is what I did. Luckily for me I had a friend who wanted to learn how to refinish floors. He was willing to help me remove all of the old varnish and sand the floors to the bare wood. Not only is it quicker to do projects with others than doing it all alone, but we had fun with it. We decided that the 100lb sander wasn't sufficient weight to make the sandpaper effective so took turns riding the sander to add plenty of extra weight. Keep in mind that this might compress the pad in between the sander and sandpaper too much, so it would be a good idea to get an extra thick pad or get an additional pad to switch out when you are renting the floor sander.
It took a lot of sandpaper... and 30 grit sandpaper may seem too rough for wood (40 grit for a belt sander), but it was the only paper that would remove the varnish.
Recommendations:
Get a lot of 30/40 grit sandpaper!
Other needed items for getting to bare floors are:

• a push broom (also called a shop broom)
• face masks - there are special sanding ones and you'll need plenty
  
• sanders, of course - get a belt sander and a large floor sander
• a sanding block for hand sanding the corners
• while discussing sanding by hand, I highly recommend getting work gloves
• sandpaper - as I said, lots of 30/40 grit paper, but you'll also need 60 or 80 and 120 once the varnish is gone
  
• a shop vacuum and filters
  
• rags and mop/bucket for clean up
• friends to help =)

The shoe molding in my house needed to be replaced, so I also needed hammers to pull it up. It made sanding a lot easier too. But it's up to you to assess the quality of your shoe molding and to decide whether you want to replace the shoe molding (also called quarter-round).

Every thing I read says to get goggles, but I found that they fog up so perhaps glasses are better. Otherwise your eyelashes have to do all of the work... like so:



But... After a lot of sanding, your floors will look like this:

How has owning a home changed your life?

I was asked this question less than a month after going to settlement and a week & a half after moving my stuff in. However, I still had an answer:

1. I've gotten less sleep. I spent a lot of late nights trying to get the house fixed enough to move in... mainly because of refinishing the floors, which will be a series of blog posts in the future.
2. And I've spent a lot more time at Lowe's and Home Depot.
3. I also could have added that I will learn a lot about home improvement in the next year, so I decided to become a blogger and share that knowledge.
4. Finally, I've already learned that my fingernails will be shot since I'm going to be doing a lot of sanding and cleaning... hence the name of the blog. Until my fixer-upper is repaired, I will be breaking fingernails and undoubtedly more fastener nails just as I did when I removed the shoe molding. (first helpful hint - invest in a pair of work gloves and a good pair of rubber gloves)

Welcome to my blog. I hope you will find it useful.