oh my good and fluffy Lord

I really don't have much time to write. We got home around half an hour ago (maybe slightly less), and the current plan is to go back tomorrow (early) morning and start painting like a fiend. So there may be no blogging for a few days.

I did, however, want to leave you with a picture.


Tonight, there was a hole in my kitchen floor.

Homestretch

One more work week! We move on Friday. We are so not ready.

No pictures today because I was too lazy to unload them from the camera on Sunday (read: I was too busy watching the Canadians forget how to play hockey). It's getting harder to remember what was done on which day because drips and drabs are being done on some (but not all) weeknights as well as weekdays, so here's a lowdown on the current progress, room by room:

First floor
Living/dining room: All walls have two coats of paint on them (one specific wall has three). The fireplace is done. The trim and windows have had one coat of paint and need another.

Kitchen: The walls have had one coat, but need another. We're going to wait until the hole in the floor has come and gone before continuing, in case touch-ups are needed. The passthrough painting is done.

Foyer and hall, including wall leading up the stairs: Done and done: two coats of crisp, white paint, and it looks so much better and brighter. Trim needs to be done, though.

Second floor
Hallway: Done: two coats of a beautiful vintage colour of blue with a dash of grey. It painted on baby blue. I admit I panicked. It's infinitely better now that it's dry, although I still do not regret not painting the foyer this colour. I love the contrast with the white.

Master bedroom: The ceiling and trim have both had one coat of paint and need another. The walls have not been done at all and still need to be given a once-over with Polyfill in hand. No new walls here, though, so no priming needed. This is going to be our priority going forward so that we won't have to sleep in paint fumes once we move in.

Second bedroom: Ceiling and walls have both had two coats of an adorable green paint and look beautiful. Trim still needs to be done, though. Very celebratory about this.

Den: Carpet has been pulled up, but walls and ceiling still need to be sanded and mudded at least one more time. We may be able to get it all primed and even a single coat of paint in, but we're anticipating that it won't be finished before the move.

Sunroom: This is a disaster zone. The grotty carpeting is still there, as are all the tools are top of it. Ooh, I have a picture of that! This is a few days old, but it still looks basically the same:


Less wood and more tools there now, I think. It will need a new insulated subfloor, then laminate on top, after which it needs to be painted because it gets a lot of light and the old paint job was really, really badly done. (I can still see the cedar panelling through the paint. That's how badly done it was.) This is going to happen after the move, no question, but hopefully soon after — this is where the books are going to go and I have a lot of boxes of those I'd like to unpack.

Bathroom: Well. The bathroom currently has: a tub, walls, a plywood floor, a working toilet, one coat of mudding on the new drywall, and plumbing hookup. It currently does not have: tiling on the floor, an additional two coats of mudding on the new drywall, tiling on the tub surround, new potlights in the ceiling, a sink, a vanity, glass on top of the half-wall, a towel warmer, or any fixtures.

It may get some of those things before the move (I am really hoping that all the tiling will be done), but the sink and vanity — while ordered — are not anticipated to get here until next week. And we haven't ordered the glass yet. So we're looking at an additional two weeks before the bathroom is fully functional, which is ... okay. The new toilet works great. There's a working sink and faucet in the kitchen and a shower stall in the basement, so technically we have the full complement. Just not, you know, in the same room.

I will admit, though, that moving that wall a mere foot (and taking down the tub wall blocking the window) has made a huge difference to the feel of the room. I know we don't have the vanity in yet, and that that will take up some of the space, but it still feels amazing and great and less teeny tiny crypt-like.

We were going to cut a hole in the floor this weekend to lower our washer/dryer through, but that was cancelled at the last minute due to a snafu by the Home Depot. (We should have anticipated this. They initially tried to deliver the things on January 20th instead of February, and there was a big to-do and hasty rescheduling over that, and the Home Depot computer system doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that lets you fix mistakes easily.) It has been rescheduled for Tuesday. There is an open call for manly men to help.

(Unmanly men are welcome, too, as are women, but I make absolutely no guarantees that you won't be relegated upstairs to help me paint. I would actually be very grateful if you were, to be honest, because there's a lot of work there. Also, this is not in any way an implied or explicit endorsement of current gender norms. It is, instead, a bow to reality, because you may have noticed that I have not been allowed to help with the building or take-down of walls. This has not been a personal choice, and I am not un-irritated by this.)

So, tonight we paint, tomorrow we open up a hole in the kitchen floor and close it, Wednesday we paint some more, Thursday I pack like a fiend, Friday we move (and terrorize the cats), and Saturday ... Saturday I am thinking about going climbing. And maybe having dinner in a place that doesn't have an order counter and looks at you kind of funny if you try to get take-out.

weekend 2 (days 8 through 10)

Important things first: my Chinese New Year socks!

I finished these a couple of weeks ago (before the renos started), but saved them as my article of "new clothing" for the new year, as per tradition. They were the only new thing I wore this year — I spent most of Sunday painting in a very dusty house, so it seemed silly to wear new clothes just to change out of them.

These are Malabrigo Socks in the stonechat colourway. The yarn is lovely, but thinner than Socks that Rock — maybe even thinner than Koigu. But the colour is just fantastic.

Okay. Now on to the stuff you're probably interested in.


This weekend, we split into two groups: the boys, who spent their time on the second floor either putting up drywall or mudding it, and ... well me, who spent my time on the first floor painting and/or patching up plaster. I am a novice spackler, but I think I missed my calling in life. I am good at this. At least — I am yards better at whoever did it the last time, because OMG they did a crap job. The bar was set low, is what I'm saying — which I guess mutes my triumph somewhat.

Nonetheless. Moving on.



Crew 1 put up insulation in the den. No, there wasn't any there before, and yes, it is an exterior wall; why do you ask? This shot was taken from within the bathroom, an angle you shall never see again, because ta da!:



Crew 1 also built the bathroom wall. I'm sure the neighbours are über pleased.


Pierre, after sanding the drywall in between mudding stages, looking very pleased and very dusty.
Meanwhile, Crew 2 painted most of the first floor. I had a friend help me prep on Saturday, but he got co-opted by Crew 1's need for mudders. And another friend helped me on Sunday, but I was all by myself on Monday. It wasn't too bad, actually — the space is small enough that we kept getting in each other's way on Sunday.

This is what the living/dining room looked like before:


Sort of a greyish off-white with greyish-purple trim. Here's a close-up of the brick fireplace:


I concede that it doesn't look too bad in that picture; the direct sunlight really improves it. Trust me, though, it was bad. Lots of people have commented on how they like the brick wall in the kitchen; nobody has commented on how cute the fireplace is.


And here is what the whole kit and caboodle looks like now. (These pictures are really driving home the amazing effect that direct sunlight has on things, by the way. In person, the house looks so much better — cleaner, fresher — with the new paint job, but the absence of cool morning light makes it look drearier. Trust me when I say that it's really not the case.)

Two coats of white on the left side walls and over the fireplace (as well as on the fireplace), and one coat so far of the gray on the right. The gray is actually bluer than I anticipated, but it's very nice and I do love it. The white is fairly crisp, which is just what I wanted. The white in the kitchen is creamier (it is, in fact, called "Creamy White"), and I did the first coat of that also. The plan is finish off the two coats this week, and get started on (if not finish) the trim — which will also be a crisp white.

Meanwhile, Crew 1 (i.e., Pierre and his father) changed the drain pipe in the bathroom yesterday — vitally important — so we are moving ahead on this whole "working bathrom" pipe dream of mine. I am also hoping to have a floor in there, soon. Most of the second floor bedrooms have been drywalled, and are in various stages of mudding; I am also hoping to be able to start painting the second floor this weekend, if not tomorrow.

Oh, and also, I think maybe tomorrow, we are cutting a giant hole in the kitchen floor. We are taking delivery of our new washer and dryer on Saturday.

days 3 through 5: plumbing + drywall

No post yesterday because Flickr was behaving badly. At any rate, we are proceeding apace, even if the results are less visually impressive than last weekend's endeavours.

(Not that I'm not grateful. Plumbing may not be impressive visually, but it's oh-so-important in a working bathroom. Which — by the by — we do not yet have, but it's a dream of mine.)

We lost about half a day in there because they cracked the drain pipe and it had to be repaired. This means that the toilet had to be taken out early, and the floor ripped up. Which is good, because now we get to replace the part of the floor that was rotted. (I assume we would have replaced it at any rate, but at least now we know.)

The offending drain pipe.

Yes, this has a great deal to do with the non-working-ness of the bathroom. The toilet has been put back on, though. That turned out to be a priority, probably because my father-in-law has been living in the house this past week and infinitely prefers indoor plumbing to the alternative.


The master bedroom now has a ceiling. I believe it even has drywall, at this point. And yes, it also has a fireplace. Decadent, I know. It doesn't work, though. The previous owner jammed a block of foam up the chimney. No joke. She did it on purpose.


They rented a lifter from Home Depot to drywall the ceilings. This strikes me as so eminently practical and normal that I'm kind of wondering why they used a sawhorse to stand on when installing the insulation.


They have started removing the icky carpet in the den. In the previous owner's defense, we made it icky by taking out a wall right next to it, and then using the room as a demo dump for a while. It's kind of hard to recover from that.

You'll note that the carpet was apparently installed without an underpad, and directly on top of hardwood. Why? Because the seller's son probably "installed" it himself. I told you that that was going to recur.

Also, please note the new wall of the bathroom (which is about a foot removed from the old wall of the bathroom) and — exciting! — the presence of a proper GFI plug in the bathroom. I know! IN THE BATHROOM! It's like we don't want to be electrocuted or something.

So that is where things stand. Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for the time table, today and tomorrow are rest days because we have other, previously-planned things to do. We pick up again this weekend — the new ceilings and walls have to be mudded (yay?), and the first floor walls spackled and then painted. At least that's the plan. We shall see.

Before I end off, though, here's the most important picture so far:


Yes, that is a giant BAG OF COOKIES.

It turns out that, not only does Peak Freans have a factory outlet where they sell giant bags of cookies, but it also exists right near the closest Home Depot to our house. Pierre made an initial reconnaisance mission, and now we shall never go hungry for cookies again.

I am so moving to the right neighbourhood.

DEATH TRAP

DEATH TRAP. Right.

So, when we bought the house, we noticed that it had somewhat ... odd .. ceilings.



It turned out to be cardboard tile. We thought that they might be asbestos, but it's just cardboard.

There was also cedar panelling, also objectionable, in this room — the den, by the way — as well as in the other spare bedroom. We were pretty sure we wanted to change both things, but we weren't sure what was above or underneath the various objectionable content, so we had a little look-see on Day 1 (Saturday) before determining the full extent of our demolition involvement.


And that lead to the discovery of what is now popularly known amongst us as THE DEATH TRAP!

Normally, if you want to insulate something like, for example, an attic, you cut a hole into the attic and blow that insulation in. Or, if you have no attic access and/or little cash, you layer some insulation with a vapour barrier and maybe some flame retardent above gyprock. But you don't, for example, put in regular Styrofoam, because it is toxic when heated, even if it is wrapped in plastic, and regular Styrofoam has no flame retardancy. Neither does plastic. And if you have no choice, then you don't, for example, cover it by layering a structurally-questionable wood frame under it as "support," and then after that you certainly do not, for example, glue cardboard to said wood frame. Because what would happen, if there happened to be an electrical fire because, for example, whoever converted the knob-and-tube wiring seemed to have forgotten what he was doing half-way and so your remaining KnT sparked a fire, the thing that you didn't do would use the cardboard and the wood for kindling a toxic sludge that would rain down on your head, and you probably would not survive. For example.

At this point, we decided that the full extent of our involvement would the utter and complete removal of the DEATH TRAP. The toxic sludge sounded decidedly unpleasant, you see.


My father- and brother-in-law, removing the plastic covering.

And underneath the cedar panelling and the DEATH TRAP ceiling, the room turned out to be ... lemon yellow.


Which was a little unexpected, but not nearly as surprising as the bright electric blue of the other room.



(Yes, the ceilings are a bit destroyed. When the Styrofoam was removed, some of the plaster came raining down on people's heads. The holes in the walls are not the fault of the panelling; that was Pierre trying to figure out what on Earth was going on with the wiring.)

And so, a total expansion of our plans and $900 later, we're going to get new ceilings. Yay?



As of yesterday, both the master and second bedroom have their insulated ceilings. And the den-bathroom wall is back. I asked if the bathroom seemed more spacious, and the response was ... "Well, yes, but that might not count because the wall is still open." I'm told the neighbours have finally let down their blinds. Good. (Yes, the two are related. I'll let you figure it out. Hint: the bathroom has no walls and the den looks straight into their dining room. Oh yes.)

Days 1 & 2: bathroom

It feels like it's been forever since the New Year. January went on for about a thousand years, and now it feels like it's been February forever. As I told Pierre yesterday, I am obviously living in a time-free zone. I have no idea what's going to happen three days from now, a week from now; everything feels kind of unreal. Unfortunately, I am not that person who thinks that this is freeing. It is not freeing. It is distressing and difficult and I really want to stop cramming my days to the fullest. Days are not meant to be crammed thus.

That being said, we are going to the TSO again on Thursday, because they are playing Beethoven's Fifth and there are a lot of things I would be willing to cram into a day for that.

Such as, for random example, walking into my brand new (to me) house and looking at my erstwhile bathroom through the den:


Obviously, I am starting from the middle of the story — sorry. Let me back up.

...
Uhm, we bought a house.

The strangest thing about buying a house is — well. There are a lot of strange things, actually, and I think I was officially declared The Difficult Customer Of The Week at my bank branch last week, so ... maybe that's not the best phrase. Anyway, the odd thing about buying a house (and lots of people do this too, it's not just us) is, you buy this house. And you buy a house you like, because obviously you don't spend that much money on something you don't like. Or even love. So you buy this house that you like, or even love, and so obviously there can't be anything too excruciatingly distasteful about it because otherwise you wouldn't like (or love) it, but — you buy this thing, and the first thing you do is to take everything down. It's a little bit insane.


The bathroom did not always look like this.

In fact, it used to look like this:



Clean. Functional. A bit small, but in full working order, albeit with a few oddities, like — why is the pedestal for the sink not flush to the wall? (Because it was probably installed by the seller's son-in-law. This answer is going to come up a lot, by the way.)

Unfortunately, I can't really show you the rest of what the bathroom looked like pre-reno, because that was the only picture I could take. I backed up, used my wide-angle lens, but wide-angle lenses are useless when all you've got is a straightaway. There is literally no more of the bathroom, no extra space hiding behind the door or something. No. The open space in that bathroom is, literally, the width of the door. And if you think that's nice and roomy, I suggest you go stand in a doorframe and imagine that there's a wall trapping you in it.

Precisely. So we're expanding the bathroom, the only way possible: into the den. Hence, lack of wall.

On the first day, we took out the plastic surround lining the tub. I hate those things — when we were looking at houses, I would press them and some of them would be spongy. Now there are a lot of textures possible in bathrooms, but spongy is not a good one. So we got rid of it, and while we were at it we got rid of the shower wall holding up the shower head, too. It was blocking the window.


And my price for all of that that was spending a day and a half chiselling adhesive (those white circles) out of the wall.

Well. Marcus helped too.



Meanwhile, some very obliging friends took down the aforementioned wall.



Along the way, we dug through some very entertaining history. That bathroom used to be a darker blue. And before that, white. And before that, floral wall paper, and before that, it had linoleum tile. I know all this because we ripped all of that up. (You can see the various sampling above the sink in that picture. By the way, that sink is no longer there, either.)

By the end of Day 2 — otherwise known as Superbowl Sunday — we had dismantled most of the bathroom.



(Actually, that picture is inaccurate. By the end of the day we had taken out the wood frame as well, so it's an utterly open space. I didn't get a chance to take a photo, though.)

After two days, our house was lighter by this much:



No, that's not all bathroom stuff. In fact, only maybe about a third is (that white stuff on the right is the tub surround). The rest ... well. I'll tell you that story tomorrow. It has the words "DEATH TRAP!" in it.