Welcome to 2015! Your basement flooded…

L’Shana Tova, Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!  Now that we’re all caught up…

Well folks, there has been some radio silence over here for a while.  Mostly because there has been nothing notable to post about.  Don’t get me wrong, there has been progress, its just more in the academic sense than in visible improvement.  A plumber walking into the house remarked, “I think it looks worse than last time I saw it,” and that is where we stand.  We’ve been working on finishing the expletive-ity-expletiving electric for the house for about a decade.  You might respond, “But Kelsey, you’ve been working on the house for less than a year, so it can’t have been a decade.”  To which I respond “You’re a LIAR.”  So, for the last several months, anytime someone has asked me about the house my response has been, “well, we’re just about to wrap up the electric and then we can really move forward.”  That is still my response.  So, you see, nothing to post about.  Just waiting in purgatory for the one day I can stop cursing at wires as I drag them through holes in the wall, poke them through different holes in the outlet boxes, and then jab them into my fingertips as I try to tie the expletive-expletives together.

So why today?  Have I finally finished the electric?

Oh sorry, I was just laughing at that hilarious joke for a few minutes.  I’m back now.  No, friends, I have not, and may never finish the electric, however, we did have some new and different excitement today.  The titular basement flooding!!

Ah, the culprit. a 1-1/2″ split in the copper pipe.

A thoroughly soaked basement. Where that bucket is?  See how far it is from the back wall?

Here is that bucket you see in the other picture. It is about 20 feet away from where the leak was…and it is full to the brim.

Upon arrival to the house this morning, we hear a familiar and usually pleasant sound.  A charming waterfall.  Unfortunately, waterfalls are less charming in your basement.  Despite the water being turned off in most of the house, the one section that had water in it–thankfully it was before the meter, or our water bill would equal our remaining mortgage on the house–split like a banana and was providing and absolute deluge of water into the basement.  On the bright side, there is nothing of value down there, so there was really no damage.  The floor in the majority is either a raised wood platform over a mostly hollow area(obviously there are joists, but there seems to be some clear space where the plumbing/drainage is for the house), or very old concrete with enough cracks to drain with no real damage.  We were storing the house’s original trim down there, but it all seems fine with the rather pleasant exception of the paint, which is all bubbling off quite nicely.  Since we were going to sand it all off anyway, this is a very desirable outcome!

So once again, I hope to provide you with a good feeling of “Well at least I’m not Paul and Kelsey” to take with you into the coming week.  Even though the damage was minimal to nil, it’s still unsettling to find water rushing in to your basement.  And most likely, that hasn’t happened to you this week, so, rejoice!  Also, let this be a PSA to remember to check the insulation around your pipes, and if it isn’t good, either wrap heated tape around your pipes, or keep the water running very, very low anytime it gets below freezing.  Or else this will happen to you.

Here is the other side of the basement. This is a solid 65 feet away from the source of the leak. Also, its raised up, so it wasn’t just drainage that brought the water this far. IT ACTUALLY SPRAYED OVER 20 FEET to be able to soak this part of the basement.

A month or so later…

Hello again!  It’s time for another installment of Kelsey’s Questionable Choices!  (The lesser known but possibly more apt subtitle to my blog and life.)  When I last posted we had finished a beautiful Labor Day weekend; I was sure we’d finish our rough electrical in the next week; things were generally all pretty sunny.  But then there was  a camping trip, a wedding, and a family reunion, so smidgen less than a month and a half later, the electrical is not finished, but things are still in a relatively sunny place.  We had two weekends in a row to put some good time in, and that we did.

We have done pretty well in two short weekends, which I’ll detail in a minute, but I must say that my favorite part is that as I sit here writing, I think to myself “You know, if I really wanted, I could go to bed without showering tonight.”  This is probably the best proof of progress I can think of.  Now, by all means, I definitely should shower.  I would still definitely fall into the ‘grody’ column in most books.  The feeling I have is just the product of being tired and having much lowered standards of cleanliness. None the less, I am pretty sure this is the first time since owning the house…and probably a couple visits before we owned it…that I have left the house and NOT wanted to immediately dive into a vat of bleach–or soap at the very least.  Progress is sweet.

So people tend to ask now, what all is left to do?  I’ll start there, because the list is actually looking reasonable now.  I’ll also try to go in a general order of operations, but that is never really now things pan out.

1. Run electrical to the kitchen, bathrooms, hall lights, and third floor.  All in all, not a whole lot there.
2. Redo some stud work in the kitchen, and run new ceiling joists for future renovation.  This is a bit labor intensive and involves a lot of holding beams over your head while standing on a ladder, but not horrendous.
3. Tile the kitchen, hallway, and both bathrooms.
4. Insullate the walls and roof.  Yuck.
5. Plumb the kitchen and upstairs bathroom.
6. So. Much. Drywall.
7. Install kitchen
8. Refinish floors
9. Paint forever.
10. Those last two will likely flip in order since I’ve never been very good at coloring inside the lines.
11. Move

But realistically, thats it!  Now, drywalling will likely take us the rest of our natural lives, as will painting, but really, its kinda a manageable list!  Now you know what is left to do, so I’ll tell you what we have done the last couple weekends.

1. Lots of cleaning.  Having our very own waste management system figured out, we have cleared 98% of the plaster out
   

   If this doesn’t look clean to you, you have never been here before.

   of the house.  At least 98% of the plaster that is leaving the house.  There are not words to describe my happiness at that.  Our random piles of scrap wood have also diminished between being found useful and being sacrificed to Paul’s fabulous fire pit.  I am a bit of a scrap wood hoarder, being my father’s child, but I think we have a logical amount now, based on our upcoming needs.  We are still, for no real reason beyond not wanting to lift it, the proud owners of a very sad couch; it is now one of very few reminders that we ever had tenants.  The poop-dicks have disappeared, thus we are left with nothing but stubborn streaks of spray paint that just won’t sand off, a mere 1000 remaining cigarette butts that we continually find in improbable places, and the couch.  It’s almost like they never existed.  As I write that, it brings a tear to my eye.  Oh wait, that was sawdust. Never mind.

2. Walls!  Not the kind you can’t see through, but we built a bunch of walls!  We now have a slightly less open concept bathroom on the second floor. Also we have a new hall closet that helps frame around what will be a wet bar in our dining room.  Hooray!

This is what the bathroom looked like for a few weeks. VERY open concept. Verging on exhibitionist.  

Our now wall-ed bathroom. Still not hiding much, but better.

Not a great picture, but this is what will be the back of a hall closet.

3.   You can’t see them, but there are lots of holes and receptacles patiently awaiting wires.  Soon my friends.  Very soon.

The third floor ready to have the lights wired. AND SO CLEAN!!

4.   Lots and lots of sanding.  If I find myself standing still, it is now my goal to find something to sand until I think of something else to do.   Because when we sand, we can find wonderful things.

DAAAMMNN that is a FINE newell post.  I think that is the appropriate inflection for that sentence.

Who knew there was beautiful wood underneath the dirt and graffiti?!

So, slightly off topic, but generally about the railing, underneath the first coat of paint and a coat of some serious shellac, we found a coat of what looked like plaster.  Anyone have any idea what that was or why it was there?  It was just on the top of the wood.  I kept hitting it and thinking it was wood filler, but then mom realized it could be scraped off.  Thoughts?

5.  The holes in the floor from old duct work have been patched, save one or two.  Good thing we’re almost done with that, because we’ve used up nearly all of the floorboards that we saved from tearing out the kitchen floor.

Man, I should really post more often! I end up with waay too much to write!  Thanks for staying with me to the finish, those of you who did, and thank you for checking in!  We’re moving…inching perhaps…toward the home stretch!

-Kelsey

Rainy Days and Mondays

Hello readers! Whether you are here for the love of my inspired wit, or just a good case of schadenfreude, thanks for checking in!  Pictures will come along eventually, I promise.  

In a quick side note, please keep my mother-in-law’s family, the McBride’s in your happy thoughts and prayers. Her brother Gary has recently been sent into hospice care for his stage 4 skin cancer.  The family is devastated and trying to keep their time with him positive and comfortable.  They have set up a giveforward site to help the family out, and share Gary’s story.  Here is great way to help a wonderful family through a very difficult time.  

Now, back at the house, let me fill you in on where things were at the beginning of this long weekend. The kitchen floor had been removed and half leveled since Memorial day. We have had approximately 10% of our rough electrical run since about that same time. We had a new powder room framed in on the first floor, and had mostly sanded/demolished/removed/smashed most things that needed those actions. Also, the HVAC work was done, but we didn’t do that, so I can’t take credit. While that wasn’t nothing, it wasn’t a whole lot. Upon realizing that at our current rate of productivity, we would be finished and ready to move into the house approximately a week after our firstborn (who, just to be clear, in no way exists yet) would graduate college, I decided that it was time to carve out some days to really dedicate to the house. So I took some stay-cation days and schmoozed my mom and dad into taking some of their own and we set out for an extremely laborious Labor Day weekend.

And what a weekend it was! Despite the weather being…weather…we managed to keep things moving along. The first day felt a bit counter productive, since we spent it mostly redoing work I’d done, but things moved along quite quickly after that.  I dedicated myself to finishing the kitchen floor, Dad focused on plumbing, and Mom, as usual, picked a project aimed to make her slightly less distressed when she comes to the house. (She is slowly working her way inside. She started at the curb with the flower beds a few weeks ago, and this weekend she made it all the way to the front door. Thanks to Mom, we now have one of the nicer looking front doors on the street. That, combined with the flower boxes, makes our house look downright friendly!) Paul had two goals for the days he had (he couldn’t take off work, so he was only with us for the weekend).  The first was to make the third floor look ‘as good as the second’. That is a relative term, when the second floor has nothing but a floor, some studs, and a bathroom closed in by nothing but a repurposed tub surround. None the less, that is much better than the third floor was.  The second was to figure out how to get rid of all of the rubble that has filled our house again, but without getting a dumpster.  I’ll come back to this.

The best thing about having three extra days to work with, is that you can do more than just start a project. We actually completed some things!  CRAZY!!

My kitchen floor exists!  Now, its just a sub-floor, but I can walk all the way across it, and I’d have to try very hard to injure myself.  That is a big improvement!  

Our front door is no longer an egg-coated (don’t ask) icky red.  It is now a lovely charcoaly-bluish green color.  And the trim around is white, not dirt colored!  We even had time to paint the side doors!  

The plumbing is far from finished, but its started!  We have finished the drain pipes, although after a consult from a plumber today, we have to re-do one part to add a vent, but not too shabby!  We even got far enough to start running the supply pipes, but we didn’t get very far with that.  

As for Paul’s third floor, it came a long way.  It is still quite a mess, but that’s because it still had the most of the plaster left.  The plaster is off the wall and cleaned up, we just now have to figure out how to get it out of our house.      Which brings me back to Paul’s mission to get rid of junk in the house.   Anyone who has ever met Paul ever knows that he loves outsmarting the system.  It might be is favorite activity.  Doesn’t matter what system, he just wants to beat it.  This trait has really come out in dealing with rubble from the house.  This is largely because getting a dumpster is expensive, but I think a lot of it is just because he wants to.  He had systematically been sneaking out bags of plaster and lathe into our regular trash for a while.  When I say systematically, I mean he had worked out a system of maximizing space and minimizing weight calculated out to how many buckets he could fit per trash can.  It was more planning than I have ever thought to give refuse.  Unfortunately, you can only have 200 lb trash cans for so many weeks before the garbage men, probably checking to make sure they weren’t bodies, feel a need to open the can and see why it is always so heavy.  So sadly, one week we got to the house to find a still full, still heavy trash can with a neon green tag kindly asking us to not do that.  Huge bummer.  

Paul, not to be so easily dissuaded, still feels confident he can get bags out in the regular trash, we just need to be sneakier.  So he’s set about finding things around the house he can use as space filler that will not add weight, so the can is full, but not as heavy.  However, that method will still take a couple months to get rid of just the small remaining amount of plaster and crap, and that just won’t cut it.  Thusly, Paul’s other project for this weekend because building a fire pit.  While we can’t burn plaster, which is sad, we can burn all of the lathe, and that takes up a lot more space!  Within one weekend, we burned through everything I can confidently call waste wood.  Cincinnati does have strict code against burning garbage, but the garbage men wouldn’t take it, so it clearly isn’t garbage.  I’ll assume that would hold up in court. 

Some really great things we learned this weekend:

The roof of our house has an awesome view of Cincinnati’s Riverfest fireworks show

Dad is a sufficient plumber

We didn’t do a terrible job leveling the floor (though we’ll see how tiling goes in a couple weeks)

If we had about a month off work to just focus on the house, it would probably be almost done.

Some less great things:

We don’t have a month off work to just focus on the house.

Measure twice cut once is for pros.  For me, its more: measure twice, forget what you measured, go back, measure again, cut, go to put it in, realized you cut it backwards, swear, put it in backwards and move on. 

Wood steps are VERY slippery when wet.

Falling on wood steps is bad for ankles.  (No trips to the hospital this weekend though, so that’s good!)

Rubbermaid trash cans should be kept at least 10′ from open flame

Flying ants REALLY like our house. (But in good news, they do NOT like Raid)

All in all, this was a pretty great weekend.  Work is much more fun when you get to put things back into the house, rather than taking them out.  I do not have any pictures presently because I forgot to get them off of my mother’s phone before she left, so we’ll have to hope she can figure out how to email them to me!  

Until next time (which is hopefully not as long as since last time) thanks for reading!  

Are you there, Blog? It’s me, Kelsey

We’re still hanging in there!

Hello all!  I can’t believe I haven’t written anything since Memorial Day!  It feels like that was just last week, but here we are, mid-July.   Once upon a happy time, I believed that by now, we would be happily moving into the house.  Also in this fantasy, world peace was achieved; unicorns grazed upon my beautiful, lush backyard; a glorious rainbow framed our view of the downtown skyline; and my house was full of perfectly trained, hypo-allergenic puppy and kitten maids who did nothing but sleep in adorable piles, play, cuddle, and clean my house all day….sigh….if only….

So back in reality-land, we have not yet achieved the puppy and unicorn filled dream world.  For a while this summer, it started feeling like we were never going to make even a remote amount of progress.  Every job, no matter how small, had at least 1,000 additional even smaller jobs that had to happen first, and before we could do that, we had to move the pile of stuff you had moved to that spot the day prior in order to clear space for the 1,001 little projects that had popped up that day. Finally, after clearing the space and completing 999 little jobs, I would realize that the tool we needed to finish that last job, that had really been our only goal for that day, was back in the apartment for some reason no one will ever know.  In other words, the past couple months were a lot like beating your head against a wall, but you find out when you go to beat your head that you have to build the wall first.  It has been extremely draining.  

Also contributing to the slow progress for the last couple months have been a number of much happier occasions!  To give out some quick congratulations:

Paul’s cousin Carried married her fantastic now-husband Adam.  It was a beautiful wedding for an amazing couple!  Congrats to them!

High school friend of mine, Sarah, is getting close to her wedding, and I was happy to be able to attend her bridal shower.  

Paul and I celebrated our 1-year anniversary by reliving our honeymoon in Estes Park, Colorado.

A view from the top of one of our hikes. Not too shabby!

We celebrated with some fabulous hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park.  We also got to visit my sister and her husband as well as greet good friend Stacey as she returned from deployment in Kuwait. From what she says about it, being a Kuwaiti sounds AWESOME, except for the part where you have to live in Kuwait.  

So after all of that, here is where our progress stood coming into this weekend:

• the kitchen floor is still half-leveld, half missing
• the holes for wiring are pretty much all there, with the exception of ceilings and walls that don’t exist yet
• 90% of electrical boxes are hung
• we believe all reachable poop-dicks are expunged.  We have not surveyed closely for this though.

Paul, demonstrating how to think on an imaginary toilet. More importantly, he is doing so in what will someday be the powder room! Yay new walls!

That was about it.  Which was really bumming me out.  Fortunately, with a vacation to calm me down, and a full weekend to work, we finally had a couple days where I feel like we got a lot done.  In two days, we framed in the powder room for downstairs, patched a few of the holes in the floor left from removing old HVAC ducts, and finally started really running our circuitry.  We had run wires between boxes so far, which is something, but definitely the easy part, so starting to move forward with junction boxes and really getting circuits put together feels REALLY good.  

That about sums it up for this weekend, but I feel accomplished…and tired.  We’ll continue with electric this week, and next weekend my parents are coming down, so the Hillebrand clan will be back in action!

You all have no idea how encouraging it is to me when you all ask me about progress, so truly, thank you for your support!  I would absolutely lose my mind through this process without this blog!

Curb Appeal, Betches!

This Memorial Day weekend was a time of pensive reflection for me.  Thinking about the fleeting nature of life, and how we must grasp every opportunity with the ones we love.  Remembering the bravery of those who fought for our freedom. What brought on this presence of mind and mortality?  Maybe it is a coming of age to a newer, enlightened self.  One who looks on Memorial Day not as just a three day weekend full of Macy’s sales and barbecue, but as a time to be truly grateful for the blessings of life and liberty.  Maybe it was standing over an open floor with nothing but shaky joists to stand on, having the motor coordination of a drunk grizzly bear, and wielding power tools.  Who’s to say?

Ok, it was mostly the standing and walking over a missing floor bit, but I’d like to think there is just a hint of that whole enlightened self thing.

In addition to precariously balancing on joists, we had a lot of entertaining to do last week.  Meghan (my sister for those who really don’t know me well) was in from Denver all week and got to see and help at the house for the first time.  She was impressed by the remaining wall to remaining poop dick ratio.  It was high on the side of poop dick.  The next arrivals were my parents and Grandpa Younkin, who came down to join the fun.  Grandpa had the house cleaner than I’ve seen it since our one tenant who cleaned moved out.  (There was one, I swear.  The place would have passed a white glove test while he was there.  Still had lots of graffiti, but hammit it was clean.)  Next, the Stuckeys (who I will from now on pluralize as Stuckies because I like it and it just looks more right), stopped by on Friday.  Since Matt had his little giant-nail-in-the-foot-had-to-leave-to-get-a-tetanus-shot-OOPS incident, and Anne had a little-nail-in-the-foot-that-seemed-bad-until-Matt’s-giant-nail-in-the-foot incident, they are…exempted…from doing work, but they did stop by to see how clean it was.  Good thing they were there on Friday, because the clean thing didn’t last very long.   On Saturday, Paul’s parents came in to help out as well.  They had seen the outside of the house, and pictures of course, but they had never gotten to experience the real horror of going inside.  While it feels much better, and much further along to me, I don’t know if Paul’s mother totally agreed with that sentiment.  But they were both troopers about it and helped out on Saturday and Sunday.  We have some stellar family! 🙂

There were two major projects going on last weekend.  The first was continuing the task of leveling the kitchen floor.  As I am pretty sure I had mentioned in my previous post, the floor sloped in just about every direction a floor could slope.  The lowest point was about 4″ lower than the highest point.  I have an architecture degree, so I know that is bad.  Floors, generally speaking, are flat.  I’m glad I could use my high-minded, ivory-tower architecture knowledge to teach you all that today.  You’re welcome.

The other task was created and implemented by my mother, who, while she’s done very well, prefers to not be inside the house as much as possible.  Understandable.  She decided the front yard could really use some garden beds, and I gave her the strict guidelines of ‘do whatever you want, just don’t ask me questions.’  She ran with that, and created very nice planter boxes.  You’ll remember I have made some comments about making lots of rubble and not really having anywhere to put it?  I won’t go into detail, because it might not be strictly ‘up to code’, but mom managed to solve that problem as well.  Way to go, Mom!

If you are ever in the position where you buy the crappiest house on the street and your neighbors kinda hope your house might just burn down in the night, I strongly recommend putting some planter boxes outside ASAP.  Apparently having flowers outside is basically all it takes for your house to go from being the scourge of the neighborhood, to a lovely contribution to a healthy street.  No amount of work we have done inside has garnered more than passing conversation and a ‘good luck’, but having planter boxes, our house got compliments.  COMPLIMENTS!!!!

Ok, I’ve already written a lot, so I’ll summarize the outcomes of the weekend.

• The kitchen floor is half leveled, and subfloor is laid.  WOO!
• We have 2 planter boxes and the beginnings of an herb/vegetable garden to the side of the house
• I discovered a FANTASTIC way to remove texture from the walls of the stair well, which has led to the vanquishing of several poop dicks.
• There is now, to my knowledge, only 1 remaining poop dick in the house.  And it isn’t the living one.  Its the one written on the transom I can’t reach and therefore can’t do anything about right now.  Sigh.
• Our neighbors hate us slightly less.  Woo!
• We found our first interesting thing in the wall–a snake skin!  I thought it was cool, everyone else seemed disturbed that there was a snake in the house.  
• Paul got the remainder of the egg off the lower part of the house.  There is still some up very high on the house that will likely stay there until we can afford to replace the siding in a couple years.
• Oh yeah, the tenants had gotten the house egged in like, September.  That’s a dumb story.
• We have a new electrical service box.  Which means our house now has enough power to run a fan, a microwave, and a lightbulb AT THE SAME TIME!!!!  Crazy stuff.
• Because of the new electrical service box, we now only have 1 functioning outlet in the house, which has led to some creative methods for getting power around the house.  Again, they may not be exactly ‘to code’ so I’ll leave out the details.
• I have started playing a new shower time game called ‘dirt or bruise’.  Both sides put up a really good fight, but dirt usually squeaks out a victory.

I think that sums up most of the fun we had last weekend.  There was a surprisingly low injury count, given the fact that the kitchen floor was gone, so that is a plus.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll hope to have more updates soon!

-Kelsey

A Mother’s Day treat!

Well hello and Happy Mother’s Day to the mothers out there!

Its been a while, and there have been a few reasons for that.  The largest reason was a relatively small sticker on our front door with a very demanding “STOP” on it.  With our permitting completed, that finally came down a week or two ago.  The further delays were caused by a visit to my parents for Easter, my cousin Ian’s graduation in Chattanooga, and some amount of laziness.  We are also once again in a position where we have a house filling up slowly with debris and no dumpster to put it in.  However, all of those excuses were laid to rest this weekend, and we should be back in a more consistent work flow for at least a while now.

My mom and dad came down for yet another fun-filled weekend of grueling work.  I’m such a great daughter, my mom gives me mother’s day presents!  Or something like that…  Anyway, they were here and we’ve started tackling some more fulfilling projects.  Not that demolishing poop-dick plastered walls wasn’t satisfying, but now projects that we do will start making the place look more and more like some idiot might actually choose to live there some day.  I look forward to being that idiot.

A lot has changed around the house now.  I’ll walk you through the house so you can get a feeling for the changes:

Starting outside, Mom decided that she wanted to do something to help our houses ‘curb appeal’ so she set to building a planter box in front of the porch.  She used some reclaimed wood (we’re so green…or we have lots of junk and don’t want to buy another dumpster…but it is at least one of those) to make about a 10’x4′ box that fits very nicely next to the stairs up to the porch.  It doesn’t have any plants yet, but it was a good reason to tear up the weed garden that was our front yard.   You go up the stairs to the front porch and go in the front door to see we have removed the wall between the first and second rooms on the first floor so we now have a sort-of great room.  It won’t ever be the much-desired ‘open concept’ those of us addicted to HGTV hear so much about, but its a little closer.  It looks pretty good for a room with no finished walls, a thick coat of plaster dust and dirt over everything, and a giant bundle of wires hanging down in the center.  That part looks a little rough, but its a pretty nice space.  Now walk a little faster and don’t look too hard at the stair well that remains the lone bastion of spray-painted nightmare in the house, and you come into the kitchen.  Now STOP because a lot of the floor is missing.  For those of you who haven’t been in the house, the kitchen has…a couple problems.  Most of them are not a big deal, however, the sloped floor was not in that category.  In most of the house, we plan on sanding down the existing floors and refinishing them.  However, we didn’t really want wood floors in the kitchen for practical reasons, and that was good, because once we got down to them, those were the only floors in the house that were beyond saving.  Now, I’m telling you this because it informs the ridiculous process that we have started now.  To put tile down, for those who don’t know, you need a very level floor.  Our floor was so sloped, it might have looked straighter in a fun-house mirror.  So, to fix that, we entertained a variety of options, all of them at least kind of awful to achieve, and so the method we settled on was, we figured, the way to get the best accuracy with the least work.  Seems reasonable to me.

We are going to tear up the floor down to the joists below, and sister level beams along side the existing ones, raising the floor up to the height we want.  So we started with that this weekend and it seems so far like it will work very well.  We haven’t gone very far yet, so check back with me at the end of the week and see how I’m feeling about it, but so far its ok.

Now, continuing our tour, since you didn’t step into the kitchen for fear of falling through the floor, take a sharp left and go out the side door to the yard.  You will see a stack of bricks that is a combination of bricks we saved from taking down the chimney in the kitchen, and a pile that was already in the backyard, but had been there for long enough that at least two honeysuckle bushes had taken up residence in it.  Paul (ever in battle against the scourge of honeysuckle) fought and won against these and the bevy of other unwanted growths in our backyard.  He and Round-up had a grand old time for the last couple days, so hopefully we’ll see the effects of that soon.  On the bright side, there are a good number of very pretty flowers that grow in our yard as well.  We could sell blue-bells we have so many of them, and our neighbors garden has sent a few tulips over our way as well.  Mom also brought us some Hasta and Coleus to put in the front planter, so we should have a decent looking yard when all is said and done!

Now, while you’re out in the back yard admiring the blue-bells and slowly dying honeysuckle bushes, turn around and look at the door into the basement.  You can’t tell from the outside, and you can’t use it because I haven’t put the hardware on yet, but that door does work now.  Dad and I put new hinges on so we have a functioning door to the basement.  Once I put the handle on…and replace the missing pane of glass.  You wouldn’t really want to go in there anyway, since the basement still looks like a horror movie, but it’s just nice to know you could if you were being chased by a ravenous, rabid poop dick and needed a quick escape from the back yard.

That pretty much sums up the work we did this weekend!  It was very nice to be back at it again.  It was also nice to have parents in town, and we had the added bonus of Aunt Melinda and Grandpa swinging through for a rest stop on their drive back from Florida.  Grandpa, brave soul, had seen the house when it was at its worst, and I feel a great compliment that he said he could start ‘seeing the picture’.  Aunt Melinda had only seen the outside of the house before, but she (and dog, Lucky) took the tour and expressed the appropriate amount of interest and enthusiasm.  She’s even going to join in the fun when everyone comes down for Memorial Day weekend.

I’ll update this with pictures and hopefully a couple more stories throughout the week, but until then, thanks for reading and I’m happy to have something to write about again!

Down with the Kitchen!

Ok, as you read this, realize I was writing it over 2 weeks, and I didn’t feel like going back and correcting my timeline.  So here is the cliffs notes:

March 29-30th:  Plaster hauling and de-bathrooming the kitchen

March 31st- April 1st:  Paul’s spring break, lots of plaster hauling.  Dad came down to help, we removed the chimney from the kitchen.  It was messy.

April 7th:  We received a stop work order from the City. Oops!   So with that…there might not be too many updates for a week or so…savor my long-windedness 🙂  Also, apologies that this whole entry is a bit scattered.  Thats what happens over the course of 2+ weeks.

Ever since we have known each other, Paul and I have spent spring break in Naples with my grandparents.  It is a tradition that started with a group of our college friends, and then carried on after graduation since Paul, being a teacher, still got a spring break.  It was always a week filled with beautiful sunshine, splashing waves, relaxing evenings at a Naples wine bar, and a much enjoyed visit with my grandparents.  This year, we decided it would be fun to trade that for a week of dirty, grueling, back-stiffening work.  Quite a trade. This week being Paul’s spring break looked a little less like a ‘break’ as some might call it and more like ‘more work than usual.’ Consequently, if you’ve been wondering about the radio silence from this end of the blog, whether we’d given up, sold the house on the black market and run off to Mexico or just had a busy week (or two…

Whose chimney is this?
Kelsey’s!
Who’s demolishing it?
Daddy is!
Daddy is such a good guy…
yeah…
(long running family joke; don’t worry about it.)

), it is the latter.  (Even if I marketed the house as a meth lab we couldn’t sell it for enough to make it across the bridge to Kentucky.  So, alas, we carry on.)  And this week, that involved a lot of literal carrying.  Mostly buckets of plaster, some lath, some brick; really a little of every type of building material you can think of.  Whatever it is, we (‘we’ being a misnomer really as it is neither inclusive of me or you, and really was just Paul, my dad and a little of my brother) carried it down three flights of stairs this week.  Lucky Paul got to spend every day of his spring break doing just this, joined for a couple days by my father who was nice enough to come down to help out.  Now, with all this work being done, you’d think I would have been anxious to update you about it, and I would have been, if I had seen any of it.  While Paul and my dad worked all day, I was at work, and by the time I got off, they were exhausted, so I didn’t end up doing very much or seeing what had been done.  I’m quite a helper.  Paul, being the ever-positive glutton for punishment that he is, still enjoys all this.  We both do, but it has been admittedly easier on me.  Anyone who knows Paul well probably isn’t shocked that he is getting a serious kick out of doing hours and hours of manual labor for his spring break.  He’s kind of sick that way.

Now to catch you up on our progress:

Two weeks ago (wow, I’ve been really negligent of this blog!) we decided that it was time to tackle the kitchen, which had stayed relatively untouched thus far.  This involved removing a full bathroom and a pantry closet.  Yes, there was a full bathroom in the kitchen, because…why not? While Paul and I attacked the remaining plaster and lath on the third floor, Adam (my brother for those who don’t know) took on the bathroom.  I could go into some detail here, but frankly, it was over 2 weeks ago now, so details are slightly fuzzy.  The walls were a bear to take down, and there was a dropped finished ceiling inside that housed about 5 cubic yards of really old, very dirty blow-in insulation.

It looked about like this:

In addition to the lone bastion of insulation in the whole house, we also found a number of critter nests in the kitchen walls.  This is one of the first times we have found a more current issue with the house.  So far everything has been a previous problem that had been fixed, but the holes along the foundation (though they are about 10′ off the ground) probably should receive some patching.   Unless we want to find a way to charge rats rent, which I think will prove difficult.  I’ve learned more than I expected to about what different animals nests look like.  Most of them really just look like piles of leaves, but the objects you find within the leaves are telling.

This one was a squirrels nest.

In rats nests, I found a bunch of peanut shells, which I thought was comically stereotypical of them.  Squirrels apparently have a penchant for gathering ribbons, or at least I assume from the variety that I found in the nest on the top floor.  Other than that, I’ve just learned that they are REALLY good at packing leaves into spaces.  What took up about 8″ of space between studs, somehow managed to nearly fill a trash bag.  Its just damn impressive.

When dad got down in the latter half of Paul’s spring break, they tackled a lot of little things like more plaster chipping and hauling; met with the HVAC guy, (our new BFF); got the plans to the building department and about a zillion other things it would have taken a long time to get to.  The kitchen went from relatively untouched to completely emptied.  Not a bad week’s work!

Its not a terrible time to have to stop work because we are finally almost done with demolition.

This kitchen is now bathroom and chimney free! That will make placing our $600 kitchen (fanfare) much easier

The major things we have left to get rid of are the upstairs bathroom and the rooms that housed the old monstrosity of our HVAC vents.  Since we don’t want to get rid of all of the HVAC until we know if anything can be used, and we don’t want to remove the bathroom fixtures right away (for what should be obvious reasons) both of those things can wait a little while.

Now I should get back to what I have been putting off by writing this entry, and that is fixing our floor plans so I can submit corrections to the city and get back to work soon!

Until next time,

Kelsey

The 435 Legacy Strikes Again

A LOT to catch up on, so who’s got the time for intros?

As I alluded over the weekend, the demolition party was a huge success, with a couple small glitches

Before…(just for a reminder)

here and there.  The good news from Saturday:  a huge chunk of demo got done.  There is absolutely no way Paul and I could have gotten even close to knocking all of that out by ourselves, even if we’d started the second the tenants left.  Also in the good news category, we successfully (eventually) collected all of the parts to our $600 kitchen (just imagine a little fanfare every time you read that.  That is how proud I am of my $600 kitchen. (fanfare).)

We worked from about 9 AM-10 PM on Saturday and then from 9-3 or so on Sunday.  Between that we managed to remove everything from the first two rooms of the first floor, and make huge messes everywhere else.  Fortunately, in demolition, messes are generally good, other than all the nails sticking up.  We probably should just give people tetanus shots at the door for a couple weeks.  In bad news from the weekend, we aren’t done yet.  So that is a bummer.

So now, standing inside the door, you can look through 3 walls, which is pretty cool.  If you’ve never

…AAAnd after!

seen a house taken down to studs, its amazing to see just how little really holds up your home.  We are a little disappointed at the lack of interesting things in our walls.  We found one soup can label circa 1980, and a can of miller lite, presumably from the same era, but other than that, a little on the dull side.  Still holding out for a hidden treasure, but there really aren’t walls left that could be hiding things anymore, so its looking doubtful.

 

Our “poop dick” count in the house (give or take the rat–we haven’t seen him for a while, so we’re hoping that poop dick eradicated itself) is gradually shrinking.  One would think that with no walls left, they would have to be pretty much gone,

This is just inside the front door. No more plaster! Yay!

but one would be wrong.  Poop dicks have managed to manifest in creative and seemingly impossible to reach places.  Some of them are in places where–given the assumed intoxication level of the authors–I am surprised we did not find the shattered remains of what was a person.  They were committed to sharing the good word of poop dick.  So sadly, we are not yet poop-dick free, but I think were now to a number that could be counted on two hands…and maybe a couple toes.

Now to the title of this entry (and on the subject of poop dicks), as I have mentioned, and as you could have guessed from the pictures, our house had a reputation.  We were aware of this, but the full extent of  our house’s infamy is still being made known.   Yesterday, Paul was at the house working when there was a knock on the door, which is unusual.  He went down to answer, and there was both a University of Cincinnati and a Cincinnati Police officer at the door.  Also unusual.   Then they said that they were looking for one of our ex-tenants and it made a lot more sense.  Apparently he or she has a warrant out for…anyone want to guess?  I’ll give you a second…

 

Tagging!  Shocking, said no one.  So we informed them that they had moved out, blah blah blah, the Cincinnati police officer went on his merry way, however, the UC officer stuck around and eventually asked, “I know this is weird, but we’ve (campus police) been called to this house so many times, and it was always for such ridiculous things, we’ve always wanted to know what the inside of this place looks like.  Can I see your house?” Apparently the police (campus and city) were called so many times that they knew not just our tenants, but our names as well.  So, in the interest of salvaging our reputation from the mire of “the Outhouse”, Paul let the police officer come in and wander around.  He was probably a bit disappointed that he wasn’t seeing it in its fully-spray painted prime, but at least his curiosity was satisfied.

And on that note, I will go to what is probably the last segment of Wisdom from our Walls, as the Walls are really not there anymore, so I would have to memorize the statements and they really just aren’t worth the sacrifice of brain space.  So here is some knowledge to forget:

“Lick here”  I couldn’t sadly; it was above my tippy-toe reach.  I’m sure it would have been great though.

“The bass master general advises you to drink while pregnant to strengthen your child’s liver.”  Sound advice with a strong basis in reason and biology.  There were several iterations of this statement, all equally rational.

And finally:

“Don’t be a dick.”  Eloquent and succinct.  Words to live by.  Unless you, like my father, go by Dick.  In which case, keep on keepin’ on.

Now I will lead into my new segment, replacing Wisdom from Our Walls:  The rational adjustments of the brain and body during construction.  Also known as The lowering of previous standards of comfort.

– The brain stops acknowledging hammers as noise, and begins accepting them as a melodious hum

– The standard of “clean enough to eat with” is drastically lowered

– The standard of “clean enough to eat off” is drastically (possibly dangerously) lowered

–  Eyes adjust to operating with the functional equivalent of a boatload of plaster dust in them

– The concept of something being “out of the way” ceases to exist. Everything is in the way.  The floor is in the way.  You are in the way.  Also ceasing to exist: object permanence.  If you lose sight of your hammer, consider it gone.  Its probably buried under that wall you just tore down.

More to come, and before I ramble  on into tomorrow, I’ll say goodnight and thanks for checking up on us!

-Kelsey

 

 

 

D(emo) Day!

It was the day of the much awaited Demolition party today, and I am mentally and physically exhausted!  This post will be far more entertaining if I wait until a time when my brain works again to write, so I’ll give a quick play-by-play:

 

-Got the dumpster

-Realized that the dumpster (30 cu. yards) suddenly seemed woefully undersized for our undertaking

-Mom and Dad arrive

-Started taking stuff we’d already pulled off the walls to the dumpster

-Home Depot run #1; “borrowed’ some stuff from Paul’s school to help; Schulhoff’s tool rental

-Got back to find that mom had already managed to hit herself in the face with a hammer (or debris, or something.  She has a habit of this.)

-Found ice for mom

-Decided a first aid kit would be a good idea (it was)

-Adam and Katie show up

-Wall smashing

-Joshua, Lindsey and Daniel show up

-Wall smashing

-Matt and Anne show up

-Wall smashing

-Geoff shows up

-Wendy shows up

-Wall smashing

-Home depot trip #2; Paul, Adam and I embark on a journey to acquire the kitchen we found on craigslist, that was mostly successful, but involved the worlds most angering game of tetris and much, much angst.

-Meanwhile back at the house, Foot+nail=tragedy=tetanus shots for Stuckey (No good deed goes unpunished)

-Dawn and Alison show up

-Tetris with the kitchen continues and we finally declare defeat and go home sad, knowing we have to go again tomorrow

-A now very hungry, very crabby Paul and I return to the house to find a nearly empty first floor, which helps significantly with the grumpiness.

-Home depot trip #3 to return the truck rental

-Due to the now improved condition of the house, a rat decides that it is now fit to live and and takes up residence behind our tub on the first floor

-Rat is promptly named PoopDick

-Order some delicious Adriaticos and enjoy a beer.

 

And that takes you up to about a half hour ago!   Thanks a whole whole bunch to everyone who helped.  I’m off to stand under hot water and see if it is possible to de-cake the plaster from my hair.  It may not be.

Pictures and more detail to come!

 

-Kelsey

Sad news, Bad news, and…I can’t think of a catchy rhyme, so I’ll just say Good news.

I would like to start off on a completely different, and much more serious note.  Yesterday Paul lost a beloved aunt, Cynthia Fiol.  I would like to ask for prayers, thoughts, kind wishes, or whatever you are comfortable with for Paul’s family and especially Cynthia’s immediate family.  She leaves behind a husband, Jeff; her children, Carrie and Jared; and her mother, Beverly.  It was relatively sudden, so the family could really use some strength through this.   Cynthia was a strong and loving woman who will be greatly missed.  I will always remember that at the first big family functions I went to with Paul, she made a point to talk to me and treat me like family.  I have a tendency to be a little reserved at things like this, and she sat by me and explained who everyone was and how they related to the family.  It was such a kind, accepting gesture.  I understand that most of you don’t know her, but if you feel inclined throughout the day, please perform a kind gesture for someone else to honor this great woman.

And now back to your regularly scheduled program.

Yesterday I got to spend nearly the whole day at the house, which is by far the longest I’ve ever gotten to spend there.  The part of the day that I wasn’t at the house, I was going out to Newtown to look at a kitchen–a whole kitchen, counter tops, hardware, sink and everything except appliances–that a guy sold on Craigslist for $600.  I’ll attach those pictures because I’m ridiculously stoked about this deal. I don’t even use the word stoked.  That’s how big this is.

This is the part that sold me. this cabinet alone, if we had it custom made, would probably be upwards of $1000 on its own, not including the granite that CAME WITH IT! GAAAHHHH

Sadly that oven was not included, but basically everything else was!

So that was a good morning.  It will take a little creativity to make a 9x 12 U-shape kitchen fit into our 16×16 box, but hey, I have an architecture degree, so rearranging smaller boxes inside a larger box was like, 1/2 of my college projects.

So that is our great news from yesterday.

After going to see that, it was off to work at the house.  I have now removed all of the trim I can reach, which is a disappointingly limited amount for someone who is 5’1 and some change in a house with 11′ ceilings.  A ladder or two will be very important in the coming months.

Removing things in the kitchen revealed some interesting challenges.

First, I had known there were tile floors under part of the kitchen, but I didn’t know how much.  I decided to find out by tearing up the plywood sub floor underneath the laminate in the kitchen.  Remember when I said if you’re going to do bad work, you should do it poorly?

Yeah, I still stand by that.  However, the person that laid this subfloor felt that it needed to stand the test of time, so (s)he used approximately 10 3-1/2″ decking screws per square foot.  Awesome stuff.  Now, most of the time when the previous owner ‘screwed something in’, most of the screws weren’t doing anything, so when something had 20 screws, only 4 of them were in studs.  This floor however, he seems to have decided that finding a joist was important.  So after about 2 hours and draining my drill battery twice I had removed about 10 screws out of…a billion.  So I still don’t know how much tile is down there, but I assume its about a 10’x5′ area based on what I’ve seen so far.

My way of dealing with the frustration of all this was to take it out on the downstairs bathroom walls.  Paul had been at a Teach for America conference all day, and when he finally got in he found me sitting proudly in the wreckage of a kitchen.  I imagine it looked (and felt to me) a lot like when you come home and find your dog sitting proudly in the fluffy remains of a toy that she has vanquished. Only in my case, the fluff was remnants of 30 year old fiberglass insulation.  Its a good thing that we were already planning on moving that bathroom, because the bathtub had been leaking pretty badly.  There was no standing water, which was good, but the boards were damp and I could scrape out the wood easily with my pry bar.  Not a good sign.  If we hadn’t removed all of this, we would have had a very nasty mold situation pretty soon.

When Paul arrived, we set about removing the trim from the second floor, and then we moved up to the third floor, which has been relatively un touched so far.  Its nice going up there because the tenants obviously didn’t spend much time there, so it is less of a wreck than the other floors.  I apparently forgot to go up there when I was cleaning out junk, because one of the rooms still had a ton of clothes lying around. Oops.  We get to add 2 trash bags and 3 pairs of panties to our running count, so now we’re at 8 trash bags of tenants crap, and 10 pairs of panties.

The light colored boards you see in the roof are held up by about 3 screws each. Awesome!

In our exploration of the third floor, we realized that one of the current bedrooms used to just be an open landing, so we decided to change it back to that.  We’ll lose a bedroom, but we plan on adding one on in a couple years when we put on an addition over the kitchen for a roof deck.  Also, there are currently only 2 of us, so a 4 bedroom house is a bit excessive.  We have beds for 3 bedrooms, so now we’ll have the appropriate amount of furniture.  We also opened up the ceiling on the top floor to see what we were dealing with, and what we found is a little troubling.  We will definitely need to add a joist or two to the roof, because there had in the past been some serious water damage, and 2 of

I left Paul alone for 5 minutes and come back to find a whole wall missing. Should have seen that coming.

the old joists were rotted away.  The previous owner did re-brace the joists, however, he only overlapped the new joist with the old about a foot, and only has 3 screws holding them together.  I’m not exaggerating. Three.  He had more screws holding down a 2’x2′ piece of plywood that actually had gravity on its side.  I’m a little amazed that the inspector didn’t fall through the roof when he went up to look at it.  On the bright side, there is no new water damage under the roof, so while he didn’t support it AT ALL, he at least made a  water-tight roof.  All this was a little horrifying, but again, this is why we are gutting the place now.  Better to find this out and have a little added cost up front than have, say, the whole back of the roof collapse.  It also doesn’t have any cross bracing, and I can already see a couple of the joists beginning to twist a little.  Word of wisdom to the previous owner…

Hey buddy, maybe next time, hire out the roofing  job, okay?  Also maybe hire out drywalling. And everything really.  Please don’t do any work yourself ever ever again. Love, Kelsey.

And on that note, its time for Wisdom from our Walls!!  These are getting harder to come by, but there are still some gems to be discovered:

“A walking sailor is a sober sailor.”  Once again lowering the already VERY low standard of expectations for this house.

“I once worried I didn’t know my name. I Have No Name”- anonymous

There was something very sweet about hummingbirds and the beauty of life, but it was quite long and rambling.  Something about hummingbirds being free of time, and life is beautiful.  How anyone had that thought while in that house is beyond me, but kudos for the positivity.

In other fantastic finds, we came across someone’s dream journal.  Rather than scanning and posting their actual dreams, I’ll sum up.  #1, she was sad that some guy didn’t hug her and cried a lot.  #2, she was stuck in a towel and couldn’t find a place to change.  I’m no Freud, but I’d say she as having relationship problems.  And also felt an overall lack of privacy.  Understandable when she lived in a house with a  hole in the side of the bathroom wall and very few intact doors.

We found some old tiles on the second floor. Thankfully the hardwood floors are still there underneath!

That about sums up our house for the weekend, so I’ll put up some progress pictures and call it a day.  Thanks for hanging in there, this seems like its been a long one!

Kelsey