Spring is finally here

It was a beautiful day outside yesterday so once again the guest bathroom floor will have to wait. We took a few pics of the yard. We have a looooong way to go with the landscaping but there are some nice things blooming.

The Wisteria is really starting to bloom, last fall I had to hack a bunch of it back to put the fence in.

Looks like we'll get some figs this year.

This is me in the Maple tree, there was a large dead branch that had fallen on the tree that needed to be removed.

Notice the Oak in the background of the second picture from the bottom. It doesnt look like it from the angle but even as high as I am I'm nowhere near the first branches of the Oak. That is one old, massive tree.

Automatic gate opener install

The automatic gate openers came yesterday, a day early. I went ahead and watched the install DVD just to be sure but everything was pretty straight forward. It was dark by the time I got it running so I'll be finishing the up the little things like cleaning up the wiring and installing the keypad today. Here's a few pictures of the system:



I still have to do some fine tuning. It's a pretty good system, the only thing I dont care for is the noise, it's a bit noisier than I expected. You cant hear it from inside the car though.

I also went to Ikea and bought the oak butcherblock countertops yesterday. I cant wait to install them. Here's a picture of one:

Guest Bathroom - Work begins

Yesterday I started on the guest bathroom. It still has it original floor and none of it is rotted, the bad news, it's very sloped. The wood is way too brittle to pull up without destroying it so I'm having to lay a new floor. Since we're running out of time on getting the house done I've decided to use the original floor as a sub-floor. I'll add shims to the low spots to level everything out. I hate to do it this way but I dont have a choice.

This is the room to begin with:



Before I could even begin on the floor I had to do something about the plumbing for the toilet. The plumbers used 3" Schedule 40 for the drain line. The problem with that is that the flange on many old toilets will not fit into a standard 3" toilet drain flange. The toilet going in this bathroom has an especially large flange on it. I'm having to go back and redo all three toilet drain flanges in the house because of this.

The way I fixed this in the main bathroom downstairs was to cut the drain a few feet back and use a 3" to 4" coupling, then run 4" pipe to a 4" flange. This wasn't a problem since the plumbing extends down into the crawlspace. The problem here is that there is no room for that. The plumbing is constrained by the 2"x10" floor/ceiling joists. Luckily I was able to find a 3" to 4" 90 degree elbow, the 4" flange will be attached to the elbow with a short piece of 4" pipe. Luckily, there will be just enough room since I'll be installing the new floor on top of the old floor.

The part circled in red is what I replaced, notice the 3" to 4" elbow.

The elbow from above.

With the plumbing taken care of I started carefully taking out the baseboards. This was a major pain as I'm trying not to get too much debris in the kitchen below which pretty much turned out to be an exercise in futility.

You can clearly see the kitchen below through the studs.

In removing the door sill I found more evidence that this wall was the original back of the house, the studs were cut off at the floor to make the door, this was most likely originally a window.

With the baseboards out of the way I cleaned up the floor and removed any stray nails in the way. I was now ready to begin shimming the floor.


The first step was to find the high point, this turned out to be the wall between the bathroom and bedroom(the original back wall of the house), luckily it's pretty much level all the way along this wall, from there it slopes down and to the right(if you're standing in the doorway). With stringline I measured the drop at each joist. The total drop ended up being just over 1 1/2" in the far corner. Using measurments at 3 points along each joist I cut the shims and installed them. So there is no confusion I write the measurement on the sub-floor and on each end of the shim as I cut it.


With the floor leveled I began laying the new floor.



Because of the shims I'm face-nailing the boards for the the extra strength the added depth gives. I'm using 8D cut-nails. You can really see how unlevel the original floor was because of the shadows in the second picture.

Hopefully I'll finish the floor today and begin demoing the walls and ceiling.

Master Bathroom update - Primer, finally!

I finished up the walls in the master bathroom yesterday. After the final sanding on the walls I caulked the cracks in the ceiling. I went through 5 tubes of the stuff.


John I feel for you man, doing this little bathroom ceiling was bad enough. I cant imagine having to caulk every ceiling in the house.

Once the caulk dried I hit everything with a coat of primer. The plywood is the base for the beadboard but being that this is a bathroom I primered it anyways just to be on the safe side.



Next I'm going to temporarily install the toilet then move on to the guest bathroom. I'm trying to get all the dirty work done first so I can get the floors done. then I'll come back and finish off the rest.

The guest bathroom needs a new floor, walls, and ceiling. The problem is the kitchen is right below it and there's no ceiling in the kitchen so I may have to install that first.

Automatic Fence Openers

Work is slowly progressing on the house. I've finished mudding the master bathroom but I still have to do the final sanding then prime it.


Our driveway gates started sagging so I had to add some bracing to them. I knew I would have to eventually do this when I built them but at the time the priority was just getting them up so we would have a fenced in yard.


The two diagonal boards greatly increase the strength of the gates. We're going to be installing automatic gate openers on the gates soon. Having to get out and open and close the gates anytime you want to go somewhere has become a major pain. Another problem is that when I leave I cant lock the gate from the outside so sometimes the gates blow open from the wind.

We're looking at the Mighty Mule system for the openers. We'll be buying the FM502 kit two extra remote control openers, two push button openers(for inside the house), and a digital keypad. The keypad is nice because you can give family and friends their own PIN number for access. The system is low voltage which is a plus. We'll also be getting two of the push to open adapter brackets since our gates open out.

The system looks like it will be plenty strong, our gates are well below the weight and length limits of the kit. Has anyone had any experience with this brand of gate opener before? Or the website I linked to?

The greenboard is finally up. I had a few other projects sidetrack me otherwise it would have gotten done earlier.



The second picture is the dresser that I'm going to make into a double sink vanity. A large antique mirror will hang on the wall above it with a sconce on either side.

One of the projects that sidetracked me was finishing up some wiring jobs. The wiring had to be run for the bathroom sconces. I also ran the wiring for the back hall chandelier.


I'm going to have to go with a larger canopy for it since the box shows. The chandelier is from the 1880's.

Today I'll start mudding the master bath, once the first coat is up I'm thinking of starting on the kitchen ceiling. It needs to get done before I start in on the guest bathroom floor, it's directly above the kitchen.

Here we go again

Every time I think I'm done with all the demo work I find something else that needs to be demo'd. The master bathroom walls were in a lot worse shape that I originally realized. Instead of wasting a ton of time fixing it I decided to just rip it out and put up greenboard.

Last night I got the plaster and lathe off the walls, went and picked up some greenboard, and partially insulated.

I love this shot, the sconces on the lathe remind me of a haunted house.

Today I'll finish the insulation (R19 on the outside walls, R13 on the inside), hang the greenboard, and start mudding.

Upstairs hall sconces

I finally finished the wiring for the upstairs hall sconces. It was no picnic either. I just hope the wiring for the sconces in the rest of the house goes smoother. All they need now are the candlestick covers and replacement crystals for the missing ones. Here are a few pictures of them on in the daytime and at night.


At night we dim them down very low and it's like having a night light in the hall, perfect for those 2am trips to the bathroom.


I got a really cool electronic dimmer switch for them from Lowes. It was $30 but well worth it. Instead of just turning the lights on and off it fades them in and out.


Today I'm going to wire up the sconces for the master bath and start repairing the plaster walls.

Master Bath ceiling is installed

I finally finished installing the master bath yesterday. I had run out of boards the night before and had to wait until morning to prep more of them. Here are a few pictures of the prep process.

This is my salvaged woodpile. I wish I had a shed to store this stuff in.

First the boards are laid out on the sawhorses to dry. Then I scrape them down to remove the loose paint.

I then spray them heavily with a bleach solution to kill the mold. After letting it sit for a while they get sprayed a second time then scrubbed with a scrub brush. they are then wiped down and allowed to dry.

Once they are dry they get primered on both sides and allowed to dry.

Once the boards were dry I brought them upstairs and finished hanging them.

R30 installed.

Ceiling installed.

Next for the ceiling I have to wood putty the larger cracks, then caulk and reprime before I can paint it. I'll probably take care of the walls first though.

Bathroom ceiling update

As is par for the course, the bathroom is not going as quickly as planned. The other day I went to prep the reclaimed 4" T&G for the ceiling only to find that it had a lot of mold on it. I'm having to store it outside since there's no room in the house for it. I had it covered with hplastic but obviously it didn't do much good. I set up some sawhorses and laid the boards out on them to dry for a day. Once they were dry I scraped all the loose paint off of them, sprayed them down with a bleach solution then scrubbed them with a scrub brush. After they dried I painted both sides with Kilz2 primer and let them dry.

Yesterday evening they were finally dry so I started hanging them. It's a really slow process, I have to juggle the board, hammer, hammering block, and the nail gun all at once to get it hung because the scaffolding is too far down to reach down to pick something up while holding the board in place.

R13 is as thick as I could go in the sloped area. R30 will go above the flat part of the ceiling.

This is as far as I got last night. I would have gotten farther but I had to go back and correct a screw-up. I forgot to measure from the beginning of the sloped ceiling to the break where it becomes flat and place the boards so that they matched up exactly with the break. The last board before the break ended up about an inch short. That's a little too thin to try to rip a piece to fit so I ended up lowering the flat joists an inch to meet the boards. It's not noticable and was a much quicker solution than taking all of my work down and starting over.

Once the ceiling is up I'll give it a light sanding, caulk the joints, give it another coat of primer, then paint. After that I can move on to the walls.

During the time that I was waiting for the boards to dry I rewired the sconces I mentioned earlier. Everything electrical had to be replaced on them, they were in sorry shape. I've ordered some pretty cool black and gold candlestick covers for them.


I still have to run the romex for all the sconces, it's not going to be fun for the ones at the top of the stairs. there's no room in the ceiling for me to run it there so I'm going to have to come up from the crawlspace below. We bought a really cool electronic dimmer switch for them, when you turn it on the light gradually brightens. I'm hoping to have them wired up before the weekend.