Roasty toasty

My fireplace insert was installed yesterday. I love it already.


I played with programming it last night, and sure enough, it went on at 6am today. I opened my bedroom door to a balmy 68° and did not have to race to the bathroom to turn on that heater and the hot water to take the chill off the air. Ahhh.... the simple pleasures of life.

I should have a similar experience when I get home tonight and can't wait to sit on the couch in front of it.

I need to get a little doorway fan to push the warm air through the kitchen to the rest of the house, but that's a minor issue at this stage.

A paint job is only as good as the paint beneath it

Such was the sage wisdom I received from the kind fellow in the paint department at OSH this afternoon. This weekend's project was painting the back bedroom in preparation for moving the rest of my stuff out of storage this month. It will be the guest bedroom via an air mattress whenever the need arises.

In any event, I had not tackled this room for a very good reason--it was the dumpiest aspect of The Dump. Peeling paint, cracked glass in the windows, popped up floor boards, etc. It was also the first interior item on the list when it came to big remodel plans, so I just kept the door closed all the time.

Anyway, after a ton of paint scraping, spackling and sanding, I deemed it as good as it gets for a fresh coat of paint. I could tell the last paint job painted over chipped/peeling paint, so this is not a new problem for this tragic room, but I was determined to make the best of it and move along at a good clip.

Wrong.

Apparently when paint that doesn't want to stick to the layer beneath it gets wet with a fresh coat (primer in this case), it bubbles away from the wall and peels off on the wet paint roller. Yuk!

After scraping away of some wet bubbles of peeling paint and rollering very slowly and carefully, I decided it was finished and was hopeful that the primer would form some sort of flexible "glue" that would hold it all together when the real paint does on. I had to run to OSH for a few other items, so I decided to have a chat with Mr. Paint. I told him the situation and he grimaced and actually said, "Yuk," before dropping his bomb of a pearl of wisdom. No matter how well I prime that mess, it's still going to peel off.

I decided I will wait until next weekend to deal with the real paint. I'll keep an eye on it during the week and will remove any other bubbles or cracks/peels that develop. Ceiling and trim are all painted and ready to go. The wall color is leftover from the condo (two gallons never even opened), and is ultra-boring cream. Whatever--I'm using it up instead of sending it to hazardous waste, and I didn't have to buy paint (the mis-mix bin was not going to help in this case since the room is big enough to require more than one gallon).

In a more successful turn of events, Arturo came out to run the gas line to the fireplace and also removed the nasty old wall heater in the living room. He patched the wall, so I primed and painted it and am amazed at how much space I just reclaimed in my living room:

I can actually use that corner now! There is a little gap in the floor and baseboard, but I'm not going to bother fixing it at this juncture since that is where I plan to put my wine cabinet. I'm thrilled since that is one less piece of furniture being stashed in the "guest bedroom."

Looking back, I don't seem to have posted a good photo that includes the heater, so here you go:

Oh, you can also see the major improvement in the soot-covered bricks. Simple Green, a scrub brush and a bucket of warm water were highly effective in removing the soot buildup in preparation for the fireplace insert coming next week. After that is installed, I'll finally get around to painting the mantle.

Super Cute - Version 2.0

Almost exactly a year ago, I posted the first major transformation of The Dump--my super cute pink bedroom, which was the cheery retreat when the rest of the dumpiness got to be too much. I eventually had to give the twin bed back to the Blancos and hauled my queen sized mattress out of storage, and boy, was it ever nice to have it back.

This weekend I hauled the rest of the bed out of storage and set up my bed with it's true vintage-inspired bedding.

So, here I give you my super cute bedroom version 2.0:



The bed is much too big for the room , but it will have to do until I get the back bedroom painted and the windows repaired (found a great how-to article in This Old House that has fully empowered me to tackle that project).

the other major improvement of the weekend is that I scrubbed the heck out of the brick facade of the fireplace to prepare for the gas insert I ordered on Saturday. It's an amazing change. If I had known that Simple Green and some elbow grease would remove the soot so easily, I would have tacked it a long time ago!

Anyway, back to that insert...The wall heater in the wall between the kitchen and living room does not work, and a ton of heat escapes through my damper-less chimney. I was planning to cover the opening to seal in the warm air, but then decided I would take the plunge and get the fireplace insert now, which will act as the primary heat source for the living room and kitchen for as long as I live in the is house (eliminating the need for a forced air furnace). It comes with a programmable thermostat no less!

I need to book a chimney sweep ASAP and a plumber to run the gas line through the masonry and expect to be sitting in front of my fireplace all toasty warm by Thanksgiving. Now, THAT is what I call progress.

Semi-after photo

Well, I was not as productive last night as I had hoped I would be. I needed to run a few errands after work, and as such, only got the front curtain hung. So, I'm calling this the "semi-after" photo. Or maybe it's the "mostly-after" photo.

As I mentioned in my last post, I still need to work on the mantle this weekend. I used the power sander, but it has many layers of peeling paint that are resisting removal/smoothing.

I will swap out the switches and outlets, but that will require waiting until there is some daylight since I plan to turn off every switch at my electric panel. They are not labeled, and outlets seem to be linked in the darnedst fashion (as evidenced by what goes off when I trip one).

I'm also planning on painting the front door and closet door white, but will wait until a dry day to do that. Possibly this weekend.

Miss Kitty seems to be out of sorts since I removed her favorite chair (it was in front of the window thinking she might like to look outside like a normal cat). She'd stopped sitting on it several weeks ago and had resumed her bad habit of sitting on the back of the couch (it took me MONTHS to convince her that the chair is a better place for her). Soooo, I decided to reconfigure the TV placement to make it feel less cramped and didn't move the second white chair back into the living room. Anyway, when I left for work this morning, she was curled up on the floor even though there is a kitty pi (that she has similarly ignored, adored and eventually rejected) on the couch and another cat bed on the white chair. She's weird.

Painting is the new quad workout

I am sore. I am so sore that I groan every time I have to stand up. Apparently going up and down a ladder a gazillion times to spackle, sand, paint the ceiling (2 coats), cut in wall color at the ceiling line and then also roller on the upper portions of the wall (two coats for that too) is a mean workout for the quads to take for two days straight. I also have a sore right shoulder from the Painting Workout.

I know you were really hoping for some "after" photos today, but it's not 100% ready for the reveal. I need to get new curtain rods so I can hang them outside the window casing instead of on the window casing, and I'm also going to swap out the nasty, grimy light switches, outlets and related covers with some freshy-fresh white ones. Furthermore, the mantle was a bigger mess than I expected and needs a lot more sanding before it will be ready for paint. I will post a photo sometime this week, but you'll have to close your eyes to the incomplete mantle since I won't get to that until next weekend.

However, as a reminder, here is the "before" and the "way before." And for grins and giggles, here is what it has looked like for the past year (minus the holiday cheer--I'm just talking about the condition, furnishings and etc).

Oh yeah, I made cookies this weekend too. They offset the paint smell and also provided a good snack along the way. yum!

Ambitious this weekend

After being away the past 4 weekends, I'm REALLY excited about the opportunity to be home this weekend to tackle some projects!

Here's what's at the top of my list:
1) Fall gardening--I bought some bulbs while in Amsterdam and I want to get them into the ground. Also, all my summer bedding plants in the front are looking weedy, so it's time to pull them out. The same goes for the tomato patch in the back yard.

2) Paint the living room--I found a delicious golden beige in the the mis-mix bin at OSH earlier this week (more info about that fantastic resource in an earlier post). I painted some test squares all around the room and it's really quite wonderful--warm, tinted enough to look more than benign cream, picks up the golden tones in my curtains, throw pillows and persian rug, and only $4 for the gallon, which will be enough for my little living room. With white trim and the dark hardwood floors, I think it will look GREAT.

3) Repair some windows--After reading a how-to article in This Old House Magazine, I'm thinking I can replace some cracked panes, and reset some loose ones, which would make the back bedroom a bit more draft-free.

The big HOWEVER to all of the above is that it's supposed to rain this weekend and all of these projects rely on dry weather to a certain extent. Boooo! Knowing that, I'm leaning toward painting. The damp will make it slower to dry, but that's not as bad as gardening in the rain, or removing windows in the rain.

Or I may bake some cookies and sit on the couch knitting all weekend to have some chill time. Whatever I choose, I'll have some sort of progress pics on Monday, even if it is a plate of cookies and a sweater. :)

Still waiting

The Soils Analysis took 8 weeks instead of the quoted 4, and now Structural Engineering bumping up on it's quoted 4-week mark with nary a peep about progress. I had a long conversation with Architect Pete while at SFO waiting to board my flight to Amsterdam and he doesn't think the foundation work will be able to start until until the spring.

*sigh*

That means I have two options:
1) Spend another winter managing crawl space flooding with my submersible pump.
2) Invest in some drainage resolution ASAP even though it may get in the way of future foundation work.

Either way, I need to get some gutters up on the north side and definitely need to order my rain barrels pronto.