Category: home improvements

Apparently once I start on a “burning down the projects” kick, it spreads everywhere. I finally measured, cut, and painted the last of the trim yesterday afternoon. Working with the garage door open was quite pleasant – good light and a good breeze. It started to rain (and then started to POUR) while I was midway through the cutting, so I took out a sponge and “washed” my car with the rain water. You can’t use any soap here because the drains will contaminate the streams where the salmon swim. I emailed the car-washing czar in Kirkland and he said that I could wash with a vinegar/water mix (which I did), but when I followed up with the Redmond guy two months ago he essentially forbid all activities that involved removing dirt/pollution/pine needles with water as being completely toxic to the environment. My skeptical side is totally at war with my ecological and rule-following sides, and so I’ve now decreed as personal law that I can sponge off my car in a hard rain. Too much thinking about a simple rule.

The painted trim looks pretty, but I just can’t wait until it’s in the room where it belongs and the garage floor is empty!!!

I tidied up the ceiling edges in the family room while watching the Olympics last night. They really look great now. (None of the walls in that room follow right angles so I couldn’t use a square or tape – it all had to be done freehand, but I couldn’t be happier with how crisp it all looked when I walked in this morning. Perfect!!) I worked on painting trim, the mantle, and the french doors while I was on the phone with various family members this afternoon. Great progress. We have a few hours of measuring, sanding, and refining cuts in one of the evenings this week, and then maybe we can rent a nail gun next week to secure all of these trim pieces in place (all 81 of them), a few more daubs of paint over the nail heads, and then we will be done!!

Flush with future victories, and fresh off a phone call with my Dad, we started reconsidering room layouts. We moved the TV to the left of the (blue-tape-free!!!) fireplace, and put the couch and the armchair on the wall opposite.

Plus sides: uses the space well, no diagonal angles, puts the huge long wall behind the couches (and therefore broken up by furniture and our pretty lamps from my parents once we buy a new dining room chandelier), you can see the yard & fireplace from all of the seating, there’s room for a game table and reading chairs, if we want them, etc, etc, etc. It’s such an oddly shaped room (and we’ve been doing storage/demolition/painting/window work in it for so long that we’ve never had a chance to really gel with it. Plus, we unplugged the TV back in February since it was interfering with the (much more important) internet signal, and so we’ve barely used the room.

The major downside is that it is much, much more wiring work for Kevin, and that it has to happen in the crawl space. :-/ You can see that right now we’ve just strung a coax cable from our utility closet to the TV, and held it down to the carpet with blue painter’s tape. The final solution would involve punching through the wall by the fireplace and running the same cable under the floor.

But still, we’re both huge fans of the new layout. It’s a much better use of the room. We spent a few hours watching Olympics there this evening and kept remarking how much we liked it.

Meanwhile, in other house news, Kevin found a hive of yellow jackets outside our front door. I don’t know how we haven’t noticed them/been stung, since the hive is literally a foot from our major entrance/exit. In any case, Kevin was coiling a hose, got stung twice, and declared war.

At twilight, he decided there was actually still too much activity, so he waited to strike until after dark. Early signs look promising that he got everyone. It’s a pity, since I think that we’re pretty live and let live, but not on the front path. :-/

In the last of the Sunday night news, Kevin found a Shrimp Curry recipe in my new birthday cookbook, so I played sous-chef and chopped and he put together one of the most amazing-smelling dishes we’ve ever had in our kitchen…

What a great way to cap a cloudy Sunday of tub-cleaning, painting, sweeping, vacuuming, furniture-moving, Olympics, knitting, and a water change for the fish. 🙂

Want to see something exceptionally exciting?!

Why, yes, it *IS* a new energy efficient water heater!! With earthquake straps and an expansion tank, and pressure/temperature valves in all the right places!!! We’re completely delighted. The Town of Redmond came to inspect it on Friday, there were a few corrections that the water heater company made on Saturday – but now we’re (probably) just one follow-up away from being up-to-code and good to go!

For those of you who haven’t been following the saga, the water heater that came with the house turned 14 in May, according the paperwork duct-taped to the side in a plastic baggie. Our furnace (November ’93, according to its pedigree paperwork) shares ductwork, which needed to be brought up to code. The gas lines were out of date, and we had insufficient seismic support. Replacing the water heater was our first priority when we moved into the house. We wanted something energy efficient and with a long warranty. We started with Sears, bought a water heater, but they source out the installation to a local company that wanted to charge us $2000 to bring everything up to code. I spent two months trying to get our money back before I finally succeeded (moral of the story: avoid Sears, avoid Fast Water Heater Company). Kevin took mercy on me and took over, and we went through the guy who told us we were up to date and not to bother with a permit from the town (riiiight), and the company who special–ordered a water heater for us and then tried to install a different one and wouldn’t refund the money for the heater or the installation after the installer left with water heater in tow. We spent a few evenings roundly abusing the entire industry, threatened lawyers and small claims court (we got our money back), and leapt back into the struggle.

Fourth try was apparently the charm, though, since Brennan gave us the lowest quote by many hundred dollars, gave us a heater with a 10 year warranty and good efficiency scores, and did a great job installing it. Our permit inspector likes them a lot as a company and said we got a great price. All’s well that ends! 🙂

But that’s not all! While I was at home on Friday, we also had insulation installed!! Hurray! Our house (built in 1975) still had the original insulation (some sort of sawdust mix in the attic, the insulation equivalent of cardboard). There was also an addition (the family room that we’ve been working on for windows, trim and carpet…) built at some point in the 80s, but the geniuses who installed insulation in the crawlspace installed it upside down. So, we had people remove the reverse-insulation, install R-19 insulation (fiberglass batts) under the entire house, and blow in R-30 insulation (fiberglass blow-in, looks like cotton) into the attic above the fishroom and bedrooms. Yay!! We are now at the max R factor recommended for our area!! Last year, I cringed when the furnace went on. I could just picture walking outside with infrared goggles and watching all of that nice hot air funnel out of the roof in an orderly column into the sky. Now, no hats indoors next winter? 🙂

I would have taken pictures of our pretty new insulation, but I’m not so much of a crawl space or attic person… instead, “oooh”, the water heater expansion tank:

So, THE most exciting things this week are insulation and water heaters? All sorts of things we’ve done have seemed like things that adults do (get jobs, pay bills, get married, buy a house). But to define happiness for the week (more like the month!!) as a new water heater and good insulation? Incurable adulthood. We are now old. 🙂 Rock on.

We’ve had stacked trim just sitting in our garage for a few months now. I needed to rip 12 of the boards down to width, and the guys at the lumber yard were quite clear that the only way to do it was a table saw. We both researched, but the things are expensive, you have to store them, and there are safety concerns… Brian suggested way back in March that I look around at local places and see if someone would do the cuts for us for cheap. Sounded like a plan, but it took me a while to find a place. Meanwhile, there’ve been stacks of MDF blocking all the space in our garage.

Something finally clicked this week, and I found Hardwoods Supply online: six minutes from our house, open on Saturdays, and willing to make 21 10′ cuts for me.

I loaded the wood into the car, drove over, unloaded, they cut it up, reloaded, drove back and got everything restacked in the garage by the end of the dryer cycle (40 min). Nice. A very, very good use of $30. (And the guys were great. The one ringing me out was tickled at how mortified I was when I signed my maiden name on the credit card bill — I haven’t done that in months.)

So far I’ve managed to cut 12 pieces to their proper size. I have about 35 pieces to go (25 are straight cuts, the rest mitered), but all of a sudden I’d had enough fun for one afternoon, so the rest of the cuts and the painting will have to wait till tomorrow. Still, it’s a great start.

Painting the first batch of trim – this is the stuff we were able to salvage from the room before we started the walls and the windows:

Next steps: buy the rest of the trim, measure it out and miter the edges, and then another round of painting…

Here’s the shopping list (all 41 items of it):

Not the smallest task ever…

I was in the mood for a project when I got home, so I finally tackled swapping around some of the units in our closet. (This is one of those posts where I am VERY proud of home improvements that I can’t take good photos of…) The house came with some sort of pretty nice IKEA closet organization system. The sections are each 38” wide, plus there’s a half-width one, and a set of shelves built into the wall. One of the 38” wide cabinets is only 2/3 of the normal depth and holds shoes (until today, just Kevin’s) and has mirrored doors. Three sections and the little half guy belong to Kevin, two sections (that actually form an L) and the shelves are mine, and there was a no man’s land section in the middle across from the door that neither of us wanted/managed to claim. Here’s my side before:

And Kevin’s side before:

The no man’s land wasn’t particularly attractive, and obviously it didn’t take advantage of the space. The floor-to-ceiling shoe cabinet with the mirrored doors filled up a huge portion of the doorway, and it was hard to get far enough away from the doors to actually see yourself in the mirror. The closet is truly enormous (we think it’s a converted fourth bedroom), but it was kind of claustrophobic and more functional than pretty.

Once I figured out that the shoe cabinet was the same width as the other cabinets, the solution became obvious: I moved the shoe cabinet shelves and door to the no man’s cabinet, then redistributed the other pieces. I took the sliding sock rack, removed the grid insert, and moved that over to my L sections so that I’d have firm surface other than the floor. I removed the slide-out pants holder completely. I moved the clothes bar back 6″, so that we can still hang things flat behind the shoe racks if we want (remember that the shoe cabinet was only 2/3 depth). Both Kevin and I have put our shoes in the cabinet (along with our ski boot bags), so I was able to move my hanging canvas shelves down to the lower bar, where they’re less noticeable. And now the room is so much better! And, SO much lighter – I didn’t realize how much moving the mirror would brighten things.

Also, we now have a 20″ x 42″ corner next to the door with nothing in it. We were pleasantly/extremely surprised to find the wall behind the shoe cabinet in actually decent condition – we’ll still have to do some resurfacing and repainting, but it’s limited to a 6″ band across the longer wall – really minor compared to expectations.

And now we get the fun of deciding what to put there – definitely something on the wall (maybe a mirror, maybe décor?), and then storage of some sort. With perhaps a pretty vase on top. I’m leaning towards deep shelves that we can put baskets of things in. In any case, it will take a little while to raise funds and make decisions – I’m seeing lots of browsing Crate & Barrel and Etsy in my future… 🙂 Wish I could say I minded!

In other news, I’m investigating wheelbarrows and compost. I’ve found good leads on both fronts, but if you have any Seattle-area recommendations on what/where to buy (or not!), I’m all ears!