Building new walls

This is an update post from a project that actually happened back in September: it's just taken us awhile to get the photos off his old phone (hence the weird blue quality all these pics seem to have).

Anyway, at left you will see what south wall of our garage looked like. In fact, just to close on our house for insurance, Dusty had to head out there and whack a few nails into the rotting siding to make sure we would have coverage! Aside from being a HUGE eyesore, we wanted to make sure and replace the siding on the garage before the snow hit and run into moisture problems. Ah yes: this was when we thought it would be an easy afternoon project...

What you can see on the right is me and an ax tearing down the boards behind the siding: not only was the siding shot, so was all the wood behind it, including almost all the studs. Yup.

So our quick house repair was quickly turning into an all-day project that would involve the rebuilding of this entire wall.

Thankfully, Brandon came over when he received our distress calls: we were pretty far over our heads as far as building know-how. But after another quick trip to Menards (and a few subsequent visits to Ace Hardware), we had what we needed to get the job done.

On your left you can see the new studs in place. The center of the wall had sagged 2 inches so we had to jack the roof up before getting the studs placed. Then we added our wood sheets and finally the siding. I spend the following day putting two coats of paint on the siding and picking up the lumber scraps around the yard.

Looking back at these pictures, it's pretty amazing to me that we were able to essentially tear-down and completely rebuild a wall in just one day. As a testament to our efforts, we still have a massive wood pile from all the rotten siding and boards we pulled down from the original wall. It gives us a strange satisfaction whenever we have bonfires to exact our revenge for a lost weekend.

Drywall is the Devil

Continued from before, the biggest project we had to tackle over the holidays was the drywall in the computer room. At right you can see Dusty removing the remaining portion of the ceiling. When we bought the house, there was a significant portion on the eastside of this room that had the drywall sinking/falling down. From the look of it, they must have jigsawed together the ceiling using weird-shaped left-over drywall from the walls. Not being achored correctly it was no surprise that the ceiling was falling.

So, we tore down the section that looked least stable and figured we could just get it hammered out in a weekend. This probably would have been an easier task if we knew what we were doing, but oh well. Aside from covering the whole house with a fine layer of drywall dust, we found this horrible mummified mouse in the ceiling (bleck!). After what seemed like forever, we finally got the ceiling peices drilled in, mudded, sanded and textured. What a massive pain in the ass: I can't imagine doing this for a job!

Well, I figured since we had the whole room tore apart for the ceiling, I might as well just paint the walls since I'd been chomping at the bit to do something about them since we moved in. As you can see: who ever lived here prior thought that this fleshy-peach color would be the most inviting color for people when the entered the home.

I went with a nice demin blue color for the room: figured it would work well with the browns in the kitchen and be a nice soothing color for the computer room. As you can see in the photo (Dusty at his desk working on some elctronics), it looks pretty nice! Another idea we had was to take the once peach-colored door (yes, they decided to paint the door the same color as the walls) and cover it in chalkboard paint. We LOVE chalkboards (I think we have 3 in the house) so it will be another great place to put notes and doodles.

I like how you can't even tell in this picture that we had to repair the ceiling! The texture is a bit different if you look, but the room finally looks pretty good! Next step in here is going to be to pull up the gross carpet and hopefully put down some tile: being the high-traffice zone between the entry-way and garage, I think tile might be the smartest choice. Stay tuned for more updates - I've got lots more tooms to paint and make-over ; )

Kitchen Make-Over

I figured it had been awhile since I last posted, and since Dusty and I have been hard at work inside the house, it was time for some recent updates!

I wrote on our chalkboard my "holiday home repair wishlist" since I assumed being cooped-up all winter would mean some great opportunities to hammer out some home-repair projects!

The biggest problems we'd had were in the kitchen and computer room (the small addition room that connects the old part of the house to the garage). So let's start with the kitchen:

Basically it wasn't too bad: the white walls were just really dirty and seemed pretty stark next to the blueish-washed cabinets. I felt like we could make the room feel "warmer" with a nice brown color. Initially, I picked up a kind of sandy brown color which, next the the cabinets felt too close to the same color.

Not wanting to go back to ACE Hardware to admit that I didn't pick a good color, I scoured the garage to see if we had something on hand from this summer's outdoor painting adventures that could work.

Thankfully, we had nearly half a gallon of the dark chocolate brown paint from exterior trim which I thought might be a good fit for what we were looking for. I have to admit: I've never been a fan of dark colors in the home since I think they can often give a room a sort of ominous or claustrophobic feeling, but it was worth a shot.

It took two very solid coats to cover, but the effect really gave the small kitchen a nice cozy, inviting feeling. I ended up using the lighter brown up above the cabinets to continue to emphasize the high ceiling in the room; I also used the same light color to accent the archway into the living room and cover the hideous fleshy-pink color connected to the computer room (see next post).

Next few renovation plans for the kitchen will include new countertop, refinishing the horribly scrached wood floors and possibly some tile backsplash! Got a few more pressing items on my list to hit first ; )

Been a busy month, so I figured I was well overdue for an update! 4th of July weekend marked the beginning of this painting madness. I thought that if I could just get a BIG chunk of the house done that first weekend I'd have everything done in a few weeks. Which seemed like a good idea if I didn't do anything else with my spare time! Even now, we still have some painting left to do - mostly the high-up areas where I'm too short or scared to reach, or parts where we need to replace the siding. At the very least, the parts that face to the street look up-to-snuff and are dramatically improved. I know it's a bit like only styling the front of your hair since you can't see the back, but I can live with it for now.

Hopefully, despite my crazy schedule in the coming weeks, we'll be able to pack up all the paint and brushes for good and call this project done before Sept. 1st. Which is why I figured I'd better get cracking right away on my next outdoor project! I've been dying to do landscaping since we moved in: once upon a time this house had a phenomenal yard, and now it's overgrown with weeds. I wanted to wait until we were mostly done with the painting - so as not to stomp down all our hard work trying to paint - but I couldn't resist when I stopped at Shopko and I saw that they had perennials 80% OFF!!!

So on Friday, I got to be the crazy lady with two shopping carts full of plants at Shopko, giddy that a dozen of them only cost me just over $50. Then came the hard part: weeding.

Mars came over to help me pull all the weeds out and till up the soil. Whoever lived here before either dug the plants out (as evidenced by gaping holes in the landscape) or cut them off cleanly, leaving beer-can sized stumps sticking out here and there. We were able to remove all said stumps except one, which ended up breaking one of our shovels in half and then bending the second one to a point where I'm unsure if it could be called a shovel anymore. After much hacking and whacking, we decided to just plant something in front of it and hide it. Not perfect, but it works: you win this time stump.

Anyway, today I got up nice and early for the next step in this fun process: laying down the weed block and mulch. This is probably an easy task, except that HGN.com got this great idea in my head that you can use old carpet as weed block.

Brilliant! I thought, since we had two huge rolls of old carpet in the garage waiting to be hauled to the dump, what a great way to re-purpose that carpet. So I got out my utility knife and cut/tore pieces and laid them down. Huge pain in the ass by the way. And despite the two massive rolls of carpet, I ran out halfway (as well as ran out of mulch) and had to use the regular plastic sheeting anyway. So I'm going to go-ahead and lie and say I planned it that way as an experiment: time to see which one will be more weed infested in two weeks!

I think that HGN.com and all those home improvement channels, shows and DIY things are a bad influence for people like me: no one should be spending their whole summer working on projects like this and enjoying it! I mean, I wouldn't say it's fun to break two $15 shovels on the same stump, but there is a strange satisfaction in driving by my house and knowing that I'm the reason it looks like a cozy little home (well, Dusty too). Maybe that's the sense of self pride you get from investing in your own home.

Or the delusion you have because you don't want to fathom how much money it's taken to get there. Either way, still feels good at the end of the day.

Extreme Make-Over

So I've come to the point in the summer where I've convinced myself that we're ready to paint the house. This personally, has been one of the very first things I've wanted to do: our house is right on 26th street - a pretty busy street in town - and I hate that you can see the chipping paint and faded siding. Plus, being gray with green trim, it blends in with the trees a little too well - might as well have been camouflage.

Now that I've set the date in stone and have my heart set on giving the house a face lift, I'm kind of stumbling on what exactly we'll be painting this house!

Normally I shoot from the hip with colors, but I realize that I probably don't want to screw up the outside of the house - it's a little easier to paint your bathroom an ugly color and just keep the door closed. Since my house was build in the late 20s in a craftsman-bungalow style, I tried doing some research on what colors houses were generally painted. But, I decided those looked bad (lots of gray and greens, which makes sense, right?).

So now I'm looking online and seeing what strikes my fancy. Right now, I'm kind of leaning towards warmer colors since our lot is so shady I feel like a dark and dreary house blends in too much. I really like the dark trim with the red accents on this house (at right). It's not a bungalow-style, but it has similar woodwork treatments on the gables; I like how it draws your attention to the woodwork without looking too busy.

This other picture (below) I like because I think it looks warm and inviting; I also really like the red/rust accents. I have always wanted a big red front door: I'm not sure where it comes from, but I always felt like red doors were very welcoming on homes. Must be the influence of all those colonial-style houses I was around growing up ;)

For now, I guess I can still run though ideas since I have another week to make up my mind: the plan is to start Sunday and through the next week start tearing the siding off the south side of the garage and fix the gutter. Then power wash and scrape the whole exterior, as well as fill cracks, caulk windows and replace any rotting woodwork. Then we should be ready to paint.

And don't worry, right now the plan is to just paint the front, west and south side since we've got two windows on the east-side that need to be replaced. It's a little crazy, but I think if we can get this one BIG thing done, we can kind of kick back for some of summer and work on the little projects. Like trying to fix the dryer...

Spring has somewhat begrudgingly arrived in Sioux Falls, so this last weekend when it was sunny and nice, I splurged at the lawn and garden center and blew way too much dough on plants.

My number one task was to get our window boxes filled with something better looking than dirty and leaves. I decided on geraniums since they're bright and hearty, and then added in some dangly filler plants to make them look a bit more dimensional. Now I've just got to remember to water them everyday since they seem pretty sheltered under the overhang.

My next project in the yard was to find a spot to put all the flowers I had left from my window boxes! I had completely overestimates how large they were and had to find a spot for the rest. So, I decided to weigh my options.

Whoever lived here before evidently loved their bushes so much that they dug them up and took them with - as evidenced by the random holes in areas that would ideally house a bush or shrub. The most obvious spot was by the front step where some hostas were attempting to grow. Using random bricks I found in the back yard (which believe it or not was the perfect amount), I made a little flower bed in the front yard.

Best of all, I got to put out my little frog: he has batteries and makes croaking sounds whenever the little sensor in his mouth sees movement. Makes my day.

One weird thing I found looking for bricks was this one random one, painted white with the word "Salamander" on it. Besides just being random, I thought I'd check and see if there was something to this strange duck. I looked online to see where on earth a brick like this would come from. Aside from lots of pictures of salamanders, the closest thing I could find was that there was a Salamander Brick Company operating in Woodbridge, NJ at the turn of the 1800s. I don't know if this brick comes from there or not (no other markers), but I made sure to include it in my flower bed arrangement! If you can find anything further about said mystery brick, let me know!

Anyway, next step on the home-make over process it to work on the next big project: the kitchen.

That's more like it: we've finally reached the point where we've got artwork on the walls, so it's starting to really feel like home now.

I felt bad for everyone who came to our open house last weekend since we were still kind of unpacking and putting stuff away (if I recall, Dusty was still putting blinds up in the living room when people stopped by!). Regardless, we had a great turn-out and an even greater time partying with our friends: who could forget a night full of the Riverside buffet bucket, a human pyramid and a bacon bikini. Coolest. People. Ever.

Today was my first weekend that I actually was able to roll my sleeves up and work on the house. Dusty spent the week working on some plumbing issues (like our whimpy shower) cleaning the floors. So I decided to tackle our scary-looking yard.

Aside from all the branches, leaves and pods in our yard, there is also a strange growth of numerous plants that I'm uncertain are weeds or decorative plants. Thankfully, the one thing that appears to be growing like crazy are the ferns. In face, there are so many sticking up their curly little leaves that they are pushing through the walkway and bricks on the little patio.

That being said: if anyone wants a fern, let me know and I'll dig one up for you ; )

After mowing and raking and picking up a 100 branches and sticks, I decided to celebrate my hard work by purchasing a little portable fire pit with some of the gift cards I was given at our house warming party (thanks Cameron, Val, Dale and Nadine!). It's not the best thing ever, but I know that I'll get to have some sweet revenge tonight on all those pesky sticks I had to pick up today as I roast marshmallows over them!