New Year's Resolutions

Yeah, I don't do those.

But there are some things I've been meaning to do so I find that January is a good time to start them.

• I'm going to cook more.  I'm going to focus on recipes that I can make multiple helpings of each Sunday, either to reheat during the week or to bake in smaller portions as the week progresses.  Over the past few months I have found myself unmotivated to cook as some of the things I am doing at school to improve the learning process are keeping me there until 4:00 many days.  By the time I do a quick errand or two I am getting home around 5:30 and there isn't much time to cook anything time consuming.  Pre-made dishes should resolve this issue.  I will post up the recipes I am trying on my cooking blog An Egg Without Salt in case you are interested.

• I'm going to up the home improvement level.  If you have been following this blog you have seen my efforts on upstairs rooms with one room finished, one room two thirds finished, and the hallway coming along nicely.  I also have an ongoing project in the downstairs hall.  I started stripping the painted over woodwork about twelve years ago.  That effort lasted a few months and the frustration level resulted in my abandoning the project partially finished.  My front hall currently has about half the original woodwork stripped (mostly), with none of it looking particularly aesthetic and none of it looking close to being ready to refinish.  After watching some Rehab Addict over the break I am going to give it another go.  Over the past two days I've mostly finished one newel post and gotten a little further in cleaning up the trim on a window (you can see pictures below of the two pieces I'm working on).  I have decided that I will stain them once they are stripped rather than waiting for the whole hall to be finished so that I can see some progress and what it will look like as I go.  Here's a couple pictures of the current progress in the hallway.

• I'm going to hire someone to come in and sand and prep the master bedroom floor for refinishing.  I'll probably still do the finish myself (depends on who I hire and what they are willing to do) but I can't have my bedroom down for a year while I putter at it like the other two rooms.  This way it will get done and I can move on to the other projects I have waiting in the wings for the floor refinishing to be done.

I think that's not a bad list and doable.  They are things I have been thinking about doing anyway.  We'll see how long the motivation lasts but I think small achievements will keep me going.  I don't do well with large projects with few milestones so maybe achieving small successes regularly will keep me going on these.

Oh, if you are looking for a New Year's Resolution, how about resolving to buy your stuff from Amazon.com using the link at the top right corner of my blog.  If you go to Amazon using that link you pay the same for all your stuff but I get a little commission from Amazon for referring you.  Win win situation.

Floor refinishing project update

If you've been following this blog regularly (hi, sis) then you have probably figured out that I am not the "stop everything else and get it done right now" type when it comes to home projects.  In February of 2013 I wrote a post about refinishing the floors in the upstairs of my 105 year old house.  I assume, although I don't remember exactly, that I had been working on that floor for at least four or five months at the time of posting.  It is now October of 2014, which means that I have been hard at work (figuratively) on this project for about two years. 

Last October I posted pictures of the finished back bedroom and since then have been working on the upstairs landing and the office.

In case you have been thinking about taking on a project like this, and in case you are not the "stop everything else and get it done right now type when it comes to home projects", I thought you might want an update, since it's been a year.  You may be wondering how close I am to finishing the landing and office (the master bedroom has some sort of weird glued in press-board tiles so will be getting hardwood flooring instead of refinishing).

I do, as previously reported, have half the office floor done, and I have also sanded and puttied the landing and most of the rest of the office floor. 

Today I took another major step.  I finished repairing the corner floor in the office.

Ta da!

Now all I have to do is finish the puttying, hand sand the 40% of the office that is not already refinished, hand sand the landing, and seal, varnish, sand, varnish, sand, varnish and it will be done.

Except for all the base trim which I decided to leave until all the floors are done.

And the master bedroom.

And the downstairs hall, the stairs, the living room, the front porch which needs all the flooring ripped out and replaced as well as jacking up and reinforcing the foundation by the front door, and the kitchen and upstairs bathrooms which need complete renovations, and the new garage that needs to be built so that I can tear down the eighty year old garage that floods every time it rains.

Good thing I have no plans.

Sorry, I'm not a Mercedes mechanic

That is what my response would be to a friend who said "My Mercedes needs some repairs and upgrades".

Some of my friends would say "I'll give you a hand, I've been working on Mercedes for years". Then, as we worked on my Mercedes, they'd say things like "Do this" and "Now do that". I, thinking that they knew what they were doing, would do this and that. Occasionally they would hit things with a big hammer, leaving dents in the car. I would feel bad about saying anything because they were helping me when I needed help.

What should the correct response be? Well, the title, of course. No, I really have no idea. I might be able to figure it out, but it will be poorly done, much of it will be sub par, and some of it will just be flat out wrong.

So just because it isn't a Mercedes, but is, in fact, the walls of an antique house, why should your response be any different?

Me: I need to do some renovations to my old house, specifically moving a door and squaring off a hallway.

Random friend: No problem. I can help you with that. So and so was a contractor for thirty years. I'll bet he'll help.

Perhaps the answer should have been "I don't really know how to do that".

So why the post now since this "hypothetical" conversation happened over ten years ago? I am doing one of my famous renovation projects and am patching in some drywall I had to cut out. The wall is freaking curved! Yes. Curved! The studs don't line up. They are different widths. The house was built with rough cut lumber so we had to rip 2" x 6" boards to 4". Well, apparently we didn't rip the boards to 4", we ripped them to somewhere near four inches. Close enough, right? NO! Aaaaahhhhh! Installing the new piece of drywall, which is only 31" wide, and there is about a 3/8 inch bow. Cracking drywall pieces, screws ripping right through when the pressure gets too much, etc.

If anyone is around and I suggest doing a project on the house, shoot me. Right then and there. Just shoot me. I'll sign whatever you need to keep you out of trouble.

Oh wait, did I mention that the house is over a 100 years old? EVERYTHING is a freaking project. Disregard that last sentence. I can't afford the medical bills for the number of times I'd be in the emergency room.

Home Repair and Restoration

As some of you may know, I have an antique house. Not the legal definition that says that a car is antique if it is more than thirty years old, but a real antique house. Built in 1909 by John Cain. I love it. No closets to speak of (except for the ones tucked in under the eaves which you have to be a Yoga expert to get in and out of), hardly any storage space for anything, but it is a cool old house.

So, what do you do if you have an antique house? Why you restore it, of course. For example, you might decide that the front hall would look better if all the beautiful antique wooden trim wasn't covered in layers of white paint. Wait, turns out that "layers" means about thirty, all of them soaked into the antique woodwork. You try heat guns, sixteen kinds of chemical stripper, hours of backbreaking really boring labor, and at the end of it all, you have stripped about two thirds of the woodwork and it all looks like crap. Paint won't come out of the little crevices, curved surfaces in the trim now have little splinters sticking out where your scraping tools dug in to the 100 year old wood, and the grain of the wood still has a whitish paint residue (although apparently I can cover that with a gel type stain when the day finally arrives). Now I am really bored with stripping wood and I still have a long way to go. That project gets "postponed".

Wow. That is ugly linoleum in the front porch. It is pulling up and looks non-antique. I think I'll tear it out. Hey, look. When you install linoleum you first glue down plywood to create a nice flat base for the linoleum. Well, the plywood is uglier than the linoleum so out it comes. Check it out. A giant hole into the crawl space under the house. Well, a piece of the plywood cut to size and then hidden by a strategically placed loveseat should do the trick. Maybe I'll ask my neighbor, who is a contractor, for a bid to replace the whole floor in the front porch with nice new wood or something. That was last year. I guess he is really busy.

Hmm. That old carpet looks like garbage. I wonder what is underneath it. Torn up, stained, scratched fir. I guess it could be sanded. Read all about it on the interweb and it turns out that sanding floors is actually not that easy and amateurs routinely ruin perfectly good floors. Well, I guess it could wait until I have money to hire a professional. But wait, that other carpet also looks like garbage (and is really gross due to a particular roommate). I think I'll tear it out. Hmmm. Read sentence four above in this paragraph.

Sensing a pattern? I am super good at tearing out old crappy stuff. Not so great at redoing the stuff I expose with my tearing out. Maybe I should buy a new house with new everything. Wouldn't have the character but I wouldn't currently be sitting here typing in order to avoid having to actually restore something since apparently that isn't one of my strengths. Oh well. Soon it will be winter and I will only be home when it's dark. None of this will show quite as much once that happens and I won't have to worry about it until next summer.