That's what I'm talking about

We got half of the porch ceiling panels installed today.

Using this contraption which is called a drywall lift.

porch ceiling and powder room

On Monday we installed the first of the twelve porch ceiling panels. This involved me standing up on a ladder holding the 4x8 sheet of beaded plywood with my head mostly, but using my two hands to balance it against the rafters while Doug screwed it in place from the stepladder. The aqua/faded seafoam color looks really nice against the gray siding. I'll try to get a picture of it sometime soon.

Yesterday we attempted to put the next panel in place and this time I had to try to hold the panel up while standing on a wobbly stepladder. This did not work out, so we've borrowed our friend Buc's drywall lift again (my suggestion) and it should be much easier and more efficient to get the rest of the ceiling attached this way. Those panels are kind of heavy for just the two of us to deal with on a high ceiling that has quite a bit of slope to it.

Meanwhile, Doug saved the day with our powder room lighting problem. I had decided that a shorter version of the pendants in our kitchen would look really cute in the powder room. We've been using a lot of fixtures from this one series from Kichler in an attempt to get some consistency happening in all of the main parts of our house.

The pendants work perfectly over the island in the kitchen because they hang pretty much at eye level. Unfortunately in the bathroom the bulb was visible and the glare was horrible. We tried a bunch of different light bulbs and nothing worked, so I was starting to look into replacing the shade when Doug presented me with a globe that he had rescued from the basement of the old part of our house that we had to tear down. It had been sitting there in the basement the entire time we lived there and I guess the previous owners had removed it when they did their "country colonial" redecorating, probably in the late 1960's. This globe looks like it might be from the early 1900s.

I really like the fact that we now have an especially old piece of our old house incorporated into our new house, and look how cute it looks! It's even more adorable than it was with the scalloped shade. I think it looks kind of like an earring.

What I did on Tuesday instead of selling my bass....

Tuesday was a freakishly productive day. It started off with a call to my luthier in New York to cancel an appointment to put my spare bass on consignment which I had made just the day before. After he heard me playing it one last time on Monday night, Doug told me that I should really keep it and not think about selling it any more. I feel selfish keeping it because we need the money, but we have other things we can sell.

So I didn't drive up to New York. The weather was completely fantastic so I decided to get started painting the porch ceiling panels, a project I was NOT looking forward to at all. I was planning to paint each panel one by one on the porch, which would have taken days, but the weather was so nice that it made sense to do it out in the back yard. And since there was so much more space out there, it made even more sense to paint all 12 of them at once! So I decided to go for it.

First I set up some stuff to elevate them out of the grass slightly, and then I carried them all out there using one of those magic plywood carrying handles. I'm really glad it wasn't windy. It wasn't too bad carrying them that way, but my hands did hurt the next day. They are fine now.

After I finished all of the backpriming and the paint was dry enough, I flipped them all over and began to realize that there really wasn't enough time to finish painting all 768 square feet of paneling by myself by the end of the day. So Doug graciously offered to postpone his annual car vacation by a day in order to help me finish. It doesn't start until Saturday anyway.

So we primed the beaded part and got the finish coat on in just enough time for it to be dry enough to carry back onto the porch. And Doug carried them all back in while I gathered up the rest of the stuff. He's definitely in my good graces right now. And he'll stay there if we can install them on the ceiling as soon as he gets back from his trip!

They are blue because it is traditional for porch ceilings on old houses to be blue (like the sky) and that is the look we are after.

flooring and painting and doors, oh my

We've almost made it through the summer! It's actually been okay without AC because of our daily ritual of opening all of the windows for about an hour each night or early morning to get cool air into the house. The foam core panel construction retains most of the coolness until about 4pm or so. If we manage to get in this routine when we actually start living there again we'll be able to save big bucks on airconditioning, hopefully.

Today I'll be putting on a second coat of paint in my blue bass room. Tomorrow I'll be using that room to paint all of the upstairs doors that we installed this week, and then I'll install the flooring, which means that the painting and flooring in the upstairs will be completely finished! Of course we still have to do the baseboards and window and door trim, but whatever.

In preparation for the flooring in the blue room, Doug had to do a little remedial work on the subfloor to make it perfectly level. He used various pieces of wood that we have around right now to accomplish this and then he sanded it all flat. It was a grueling, tedious, and messy job, but he got it done. I love the fact that he used bead board for part of it. So fancy! But it's all going to be covered up in another day or two.

We hung the mirror in the pink bathroom. It goes pretty well with the lights and the faucet handles.

The electrician was here for a couple weeks installing all of the light fixtures and switches.

Early on in the lighting selection process I had no idea what I liked or wanted. My frame of mind was still in the stage where I was resenting the fact that I had to pick out lights at all. Anyway, I found a couple of bargains that didn't work out where I had originally intended for them to go, so we just put them in the various rooms upstairs. They look slightly on the flamboyant side for their locations, but they were cheap and we already had them.

Above is the green bedroom. The color didn't photograph very well - it's a little bit more of a deeper and clearer green than you see here. It looks really fresh and I liked it so much that I painted our closet below the same color. It looks very different during the day in the two rooms because of the natural light, but I really like it in both of them.

I finally figured out what to do with the gigantic tambour unit we got that was the wrong size for the kitchen. We hung it in the middle of the wall in our closet and we're going to hang double closet rods on either side of it. Doug and Cyndy's clothing will be well separated, which is excellent!

I got a chest of drawers from Ikea to slide in underneath which is just the right size, and I'll be able to close those tambour doors to hide the clutter. And the inside is divided down the middle which wouldn't have worked at all in our kitchen, but now we each have our own compartment for stuff. So we are definitely making lemonade from this situation. The color below is a little distorted - the real green is actually about halfway between this photo and the one above. I never thought I'd end up with such a colorful closet - it's pretty ridiculous, but also ridiculously pretty.

Also this week, Doug installed the front porch railings that I had finished painting a while back. But he didn't install the balls. I'm not posting an outside picture of his beautiful railing work until he gets those balls up.

So there!

Help me decide...blue chimney or yellow chimney?

BEFORE

We had this ugly vent pipe coming up from our microwave/range hood that needed to be covered. Originally we were going to surround it with drywall so it would have been yellow to match the walls. But then I got the bright idea of making a "chimney" for it that could be removed if necessary. I designed it and Doug made out of the beadboard and various mouldings that I had selected. I painted it to match the cabinets and I think it looks nice, but it might look even better if it matched the wall instead. That way there would be a nice horizontal line of color all the way around the tops of the cabinets. What do you think? I can't make up my mind. I guess I could always just paint it and find out. If you feel like it, leave me a comment with your opinion. Thanks!

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER, AS IT IS NOW

AFTER, IF IT WERE CHANGED TO YELLOW
(awesome photoshopping by Gene )

Speaking of nice even horizontal lines at the tops of the cabinets, the always gracious Kathy Schmick at Smoot Lumber came through for us once again. We installed the replacement cabinet for the too tall one that the cabinet company had sent and it looks so much better with the heights matching all the way around the kitchen. Unfortunately it's kind of hard to tell from this picture because we had to take out the refrigerator in preparation for coating the floor with a fancy super-dooper flooring protector called Bona Traffic. And the room is still kind of a mess because we're not finished with everything yet. But it's coming along.....

REPLACEMENT CABINET IN THE CORNER BY THE WINDOW

Oh, and I noticed that my cabinet color is very similar to Julia Child's kitchen cabinets in Julie and Julia, which I saw today. Isn't that nice? Maybe I'll take up French cooking as my next new hobby after I get tired of homebuilding. Oh wait, that's already happened. The cooking's probably also going to have to wait a couple more months.

Flooring Progress

I spent most of last week painting the front porch railings and Doug finally finished the sections that curve around to meet the stair railings. They are really cute and clever and as soon as they're up I'll post a picture. I still have to paint them so I'll be doing that as soon as my knees recover from the flooring work we did over the weekend.


We completely finished the living/dining room and the kitchen. Doug also took care of some of the cabinet details that were related to the flooring. I did most of the measuring and cutting with the mighty miter saw. Our white oak floating floor is by Kahrs, for anyone who happens to be interested, and it comes in 8 foot lengths that sometimes snap together and other times need to be encouraged with a chunk of wood and a hammer. I dubbed Doug the "floor whisperer" because whenever I couldn't get a piece of flooring to fit together easily, he would come over, kneel down, and do some magic wiggling between the two floor pieces until they obeyed. Then I would walk down the length to flatten out the seam. While Doug was working in the kitchen I would cut the lengths for him and also slip in a few pieces in the living room. We ended up finishing both rooms at about the same time.

Tomorrow I'll wrap up a few painting details and hopefully get started on the Bona Traffic polyurethane coating for the kitchen floor. I'll be happy to get back to some low impact activities after all of the wood banging I was engaged in over the weekend.*

THE MIGHTY MITER SAW

LIVING ROOM

KITCHEN

*I'm quite aware that the more crude among you might be somewhat entertained by my choice of words. Go ahead, be entertained. You'll certainly be having more fun than I did!

foam core reality

I often feel like a hypocrite writing this mostly happy little blog about all of the wonderful experiences that we've had since we began building Doug's fantasy house. Now I know full well that I have been a participant in this venture, and in spite of the fact that I never ever thought it was realistic, it is as much my house as it is his and so it is as much my problem as it is his. It always has been.

I know that Doug believes with all of his heart that he wanted to do this for me and for us, or so he says, but the truth is I didn't want to do it this way for a number of really important and practical reasons. It has always made me feel uncomfortable. The fancy things in this house are inappropriate for our income level, especially considering the fact that Doug's insistence that we do it ourselves has enormously reduced both of our incomes. I've been absolutely miserable not being able to work the kinds of gigs I used to do. I loved my life before this house fiasco began. I feel like I've been sentenced to hard labor for three years - so far.

When we were deciding what to do way back in the fall of 2005, I wanted to have the insurance company do the normal thing, which would be to restore our house - that's what they were going to do. They said it would take six months. Our house was nearly completely paid for so we could have used a home equity loan to cover the additional costs of bringing the basement up to code and to get our addition finished in a minimal and affordable kind of way. And by hiring professionals to do the work, however sloppy that might have ended up being, as least we could get back on track as quickly as possible. It seemed to me to be the most reasonable way to deal with the aftermath of the fire.

We had a very nice life together before the fire. We both had gigs doing what we loved most - playing nearly every night and travelling. But we disagreed about what should be done about the house. I felt very uneasy about Doug's plan. I didn't want my old house to go away - I wanted it to be repaired, which the insurance company expected to do. His plan involved a lot of work for him, I mean us. I had just finished painting the exterior of our house a couple of months before the fire. It was not as much work as the first time I did it, but it was still pretty exhausting. I wasn't in the mood to do more, and why should I be? I'd rather live in an apartment than paint another house. I knew from years of experience how Doug's projects never seemed to get finished for one reason or another. And I knew that ultimately Doug would never be satisfied with anyone else's work.

I found myself not really trusting that it would work out with the two builders we attempted to use and I'm quite unhappy to say that I was right. I didn't enjoy thinking we were headed for financial disaster as we planned, well mostly I planned, this absurdly lavish house full of all kinds of ridiculous and amazing things that neither of us had ever had or needed before.

Doug, not surprisingly, was completely overwhelmed on a daily basis by all of the unnecessary complexities of being tour manager, a job we had mutually decided would be unwise for him to do again considering everything else we were suddenly having to deal with. It was impossible to talk sense into him when he made the decision after that, while I was away for several months, to be tour manager again after all.

So you can probably imagine how it went whenever I tried to suggest a more conservative plan for our house while we were out on the road that fall. He was so stressed out once again by all of his various duties that he wasn't able to seriously consider that it might be better in this particular situation to be practical and unambitious for once. He basically told me that what I wanted was not an option. "That's just how it is - we have no other choice." Nice.

So I gave up and went along with him and his fancy ideas. I hated myself for feeling so negative about "our" dream house. On the other hand I didn't feel like it was appropriate for us to have a dream house. Just a plain old house would have been fine with me. One that we could live in sooner rather than later.

I've always been completely happy living in a hotel or a cruise ship cabin. But since it seemed that I apparently had no idea that we could afford all this, or even how little time it would take, I decided that I would attempt to disguise my feelings of negativity as much as I possibly could and just devote myself to this lovely project known as Foam Core Fantasy until it drives itself into the ground. And I guess that is what this little blog is all about.

finally back to work

Not much has happened over at the house since I last posted back in March. I thought we'd get back to it as soon as I finished school, but alas, my whip-cracking attempts were in vain. That has been rather discouraging for the past month.

Finally this past week we have resumed work and I'm very pleased with what we have accomplished. I think what got things moving again was the fact that our replacement cabinet arrived and we needed to take down the one that was too big so that we could put the new one in.

It's pretty clear to me now what needs to be done when and in what order. If we actually see each little project through to the end instead of just flitting around, things will begin to seem like they are leading in a particular direction, in other words, our house might eventually be finished.

So this week I have been buying moulding and painting it and Doug has been measuring and cutting. It's been nice to ease back into working on the house without killing ourselves. We'll do some more of that later I'm sure.

Here are a few pictures that show some of the more recent developments. I found these two old leaded glass windows at an antique store for pretty cheap and they fit nicely into the pass-through and let a little more light in to our somewhat shady kitchen. Doug installed them and put the trim around the outside and I painted them.


I think we managed to get a sort of "old house" look by adding them in. You can click on the picture below to see the trim details. Doug did a really good job assembling it. I'm very happy with the way it looks and especially with the fact that it is finished!

This is the old too-tall cabinet. It's really nice, but it's HUGE and it was a different size from what we ordered. They don't want it back so we are going to try to figure out whether we can use it somewhere else. That yellow stripe is a packing strap so the doors wouldn't open while we were carrying it upstairs.

I don't know why my camera makes all of these colors look more vivid than they actually are. The upstairs certainly looks bright and cheery! It is, but not this bright. This is looking down the hall from our oh-so-purple bedroom. The purple is really not as scary as it looks here. The color actually changes and looks good in all different kinds of light.

The lights on the ceiling of our bathroom are kind of cool looking.

The lights on the wall don't match the ceiling lights at all, but they still look good together so it works out.

I just love my little round laundry room sink. It is the perfect depth for washing things by hand.

Next time I hope to have some pictures of the new kitchen cabinet that Doug installed today. It looks so much better now that the height matches the cabinets in the rest of the room.

Faucets!!!

Pat the Plumber came by and worked last week. We now have two sinks and one toilet that we can use. We've probably saved about $40 already from not having to go up to Starbucks to use the bathroom anymore. But now that I've said that, this bathroom reminds me of a peppermint mocha. This is the one where Doug picked out most of the stuff. He selected the cabinets, the countertop, the faucet, and the wall color.







Doug was nuts over these faucets. They are kind of cute. I think they look like airplanes. They are chrome - but the walls are so pink that it makes the faucets look pink too.

Master Bath version

This is a cross section of the upstairs rooms. It looks like a rainbow up there. To balance out all of this color I decided to paint the master bathroom gray.

It's getting there! But I'm hoping that since the weather has started to warm up Doug will start working on the outside of the house and keep at it until it's done. I've got lots of flooring to install and painting left to do while he works outside. Maybe we'll finish our various tasks at the same time. Wish us luck!

(and send money)

Laundry Room Picture

It's hard to take a picture of a small room - all of the angles get distorted. Anyway, here's our laundry room so far. Just waiting for that washer and dryer to magically appear. I guess we'll have to buy them first though.

Notice the little 5 gallon hot water heater in the lower left corner. We'll have instant hot water upstairs because Doug hates waiting for the hot water to arrive when he's about to take a shower. I told him that's just how it is when you have a two story house, but he thought this would be better. Hey, it'll heat the laundry water faster too!

And don't forget, we have this thing down in the basement that uses the warm outgoing waste water to preheat the incoming cold water. Wait, does that mean all of our cold water is going to be lukewarm? Will I like that? Will I have to waste energy making ice to cool off the lukewarm cold water? I don't like ice cubes in my water. Well compromise is what it's all about. And I'm good at that.

Anyway, I think Doug did a beautiful job installing the cabinets, countertop and sink, all from Ikea. And the walls are a very pleasant color for peaceful laundry activities. The color is called "Sanctuary."

okay, here are some pictures

Building a house and working on a masters degree do not make for an ideal combination of activities. When they offered me an assistantship last May I told Doug that I couldn't bail on the house - it would need to be finished before I'd go back to school, or take a cruise gig, or go on the road, or anything else that I'd rather be doing. But Doug told me I should take it because there was no way we wouldn't be back in the house by August (last August). I never learn, even though I always sense these things deep down inside.

Anyway, things slowed down a lot last fall because I wasn't over there cracking the whip as much. Doug neglected the outside of the house so we sitll have this nonsense on the back of our house, of which I am very tired.

CLICK THE VIDEO BELOW TO SEE WHAT IRRITATES ME

Okay, enough nagging and griping. I'm just exhausted from taking 10 credits this semester and staying up until 3AM a couple nights each week just to get some painting done. But at least now I'm finished with my recital! As of last week. Next up is the big term paper.

Anyway, here are some pictures:



This is looking down into the basement from the piano room floor which Doug decided to tear out and do over because the floor was not level and it was also kind of bouncy - not a good subfloor situation for a grand piano. It took him a week to fix it and it feels very solid now.

Way back in the summer of 2007 Doug put a deposit on a very unusual looking piece of Cocoa Onyx. We have since learned that onyx is not a practical choice for a bathroom countertop. Next he had his eye on this piece of granite, from Brazil. Our cabinet door is there next to it. I thought hmm, well that's fun... I'll just leave it at that. It's kind of flashy but it would have looked nice with the aqua colored paint I had selected for the walls. Fortunately Doug decided that maybe it was just a little too wild and I was quite relieved when he selected a very tasteful brown and white marble instead. But then he decided that he'd rather have pink walls in there (I'm letting him "design" some aspects of the guest bathroom). So pink it is. The bathroom looks really good, but I haven't had my camera over there when the light's been right to take a picture of it.

This is why I hadn't posted any new pictures after we got our kitchen countertops installed. Not very photogenic, eh?

Our new refrigerator arrived yesterday. It sure is big and white. As you can see, there is an issue with the cabinets that will need to be solved soon. We also recently got our stair railing installed, which you can see in the background. It's really pretty and old-timey.

We'll be putting in subway tiles for the backsplash under the windows and the microwave. Other than that cabinet situation, things are looking good!

This week I painted the laundry room with the paint I had purchased for the guest bathroom before Doug decided he wanted to change it to pink. Anyway the laundry room now looks as good as the bathroom would have. I love the color. We got cabinets, a countertop, and a sink from Ikea for a really good price. It's a very elegant laundry room. The only things it lacks are a washer and dryer.

Tonight I painted the master bathroom. This is really weird but I decided that gray walls would look good in there. There's a lot of white tile and that keeps the gray from looking gloomy. It's very calm and old-fashioned looking. I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

Meanwhile Doug was downstairs painting the bathroom of his shop. I suggested that he use some leftover yellow paint we had. There was also a half a can of pink paint left over from the guest bathroom. So which color do you suppose he selected for his machine shop bathroom? He's so metro....

burned out

Wait, that already happened. Look at me.....cracking jokes about the fire, at my own expense. Expense is certainly an appropriate word to use right now. Anyway, I really am burned out - as in extremely tired of the last four years of house insanity. This project was not my idea and I'm ready for it to be over.

So that was the tired me talking. I love our house and it is going to be amazing. And it will all be finished soon. How soon I couldn't tell you, but I can definitely say that it will be relatively soon.

There has been a flurry of activity during the past couple of weeks. We work really slowly and carefully because we are not professional housebuilders and we want to do it right in spite of that fact. When we have people coming in to do some of the stuff we are usually either one step ahead of them or two steps behind where we ought to be. That is both stressful and embarrassing, yet fairly typical. It is almost a relief when somebody says they are not going to show up because it gives us extra time to get caught up.

So after the radiant floor heat mats were installed, Cyndy got right on installing the floating wood floors. It's a pretty simple operation because the pieces just snap together. The ends get trimmed with a miter saw. No real skills required. Here you can find a picture of her handiwork.

Doug finally realized that Cyndy was not making it up when she mentioned two weeks, I mean two months, oops I mean two years ago that the subfloor in the piano room was creaky, bouncy, and felt kind of weak. Doug pretty much blew this off until two days after the floor heat people arrived from Georgia, at which time he decided that the subfloor needed to be removed and replaced. Now typically this is the kind of thing you would do before the wallboard is installed instead of waiting until three weeks afterwards. I guess I'll just leave it at that. It was a difficult project, was very messy, and took a week for him to complete.

Cyndy was not able to continue with her flooring project due to certain complications not of her choosing, but is looking forward to resuming this as soon as possible. Painting, an activity that she very much enjoys, is also on the immediate horizon. Why is she referring to herself in the third person all of a sudden? She does not know. Maybe she is having an out-of-body experience, possibly a sympathetic reaction to the out-of-house experience with which she is all too familiar.

The tile people came. They did a fantastic job. The bathrooms are beautiful. So are the floors in the laundry room and the hall. Sorry I (Cyndy here, I'm back) don't have any photos. I'm way too tired to post any pictures right now.

The kitchen countertops are stunning. Doug will no longer be allowed in the kitchen after we move back in. I've got to protect those magnificent countertops that he picked out. Can you believe it? Actually he ended up picking out all of the countertops in the entire house - in the kitchen and both bathrooms. What is up with that? I approved of his choices, except for the expense.

The electrician is supposedly starting his final batch of work tomorrow - putting in all of the outlets and light fixtures that we've had sitting around for the past year. That will probably take at least a week the way things seem to go around here.

I started back to school yesterday. I already feel a million times more energetic because the time spent in school is time I am not working on the house, abusing my hands and my back. What a relief!

The work we are doing right now is so much more visually rewarding than most of what has happened previously. I'll try to get some new pictures up soon.

another productive week

There was a lot of new stuff happening this week at our house. We finished installing our kitchen cabinets with the invaluable help of our friend Buc.

On Monday Peter and Bridgette from Speedheat arrived to begin installing our all-electric radiant floor heating system.



They threaded the wires that were going to be under tile by hand.






They used pre-made mats to go under the wood floors and then covered them with underlayment, which is what you see on the bottom half of this picture:

They are smiling because they have just finished wiring our entire house. And we really enjoyed having them here this week! We can't wait to feel that lovely warmth oozing up between our toes.

Peter and Bridgette from Speed Heat

Our tile installers began working this week too. The stuff that they have done so far looks wonderfully clean and precise. I'll put up some pictures in a few days.

Tomorrow Doug is going to be levelling the floor in the piano room and I will begin installing the floating wood floor. Our house is getting less and less dusty, which mean less and less vacuuming for me!

Next week the tile work will continue as will the floor installation, and the countertops are due to be installed on Thursday. Yaay! Things are really shaping up.