Bumblebriar

As I’ve posted before we have had lots of projects going on.  We sped many up as the weather started to change.  One in particular as we wrapped up the painting was the windows.  All the windows in this house are made up of multiple panes of glass.  The panes are glazed in with window glazing, putty if you will.  As old as the house is, you can image what the condition of some of these individual window panes.  Of course the southern facing windows are the worst.  Many had been replaced over the years, regardless the weather had it’s effect.  

This is the back side of the house.  There are two bay windows and some french doors.  I had to start by cleaning them.  There was a lot of mineral deposits (probably from the well water), that neither windex nor vinegar mix would clean off.  I then tried a solution of CLR (yes calcium, lime and rust remover) and water and used a Mr. Clean eraser sponge.  It worked wonders, and did a fantastic job.  With them clean, we cleaned up the loose paint and putty with a wire brush.  Each of the panes is placed in the wood frame with little push triangles to hold the window in place.  There’s a small amt of glazing putty under the edge of the wood to create a seal, then you finish with a nice angled seal around the outside with glazing putty.  

I had to do just about every pane, yes it was a pain!  

And I know they aren’t perfect.  It’s a short term fix til I can replace the windows with the right window solution that preserves the look of the home, but improves it’s overall weatherization and energy efficiency.  In the meantime, we have lined all the drapes with an energy efficient liner, we have seen a great improvement in drafts and those chilly breezes.  We’ll look for improvements in the heating bil in the coming months as the true testl.  I’m pretty proud of the work I did and glad it’s done.  Now onto one of many inside projects.

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It’s been a busy summer!  Aside from my recovery and convalesence from some surgery – we had a big goal of getting the house painted.  We were so committed we invested early in the paint with a sale and rebate promotion at HomeDepot, even though we weren’t going to paint til late August.  But to take advantage of the sale we had to know what colors we wanted and we weren’t there yet.  It’s not like you can just pick any color and easily change your mind later.  Mind you I could easily change my mind, but I knew no way was my husband painting it again next year if I did, so a decision had to be made.  We wanted something traditional and comlimentary to the Colonial style home that it is.  I looked at too many chips and was just about to give up when I bothered to look at the paint brochure and there on the cover the whole time was a the perfect color combinations.  It had been in front of me the whole time!  

Our Inspiration:  This is a snapshot from the Behr paint catalog, and the paint pallet we went with for the house.  It’s a great look for a colonial style.  I would have painted our shutters this gray/black, but they are already a black plastic and I wasn’t going to mess with that.  It’s called compromise.

We love the colors, now that we knew what we wanted, buying was the easy part.  Then comes the hard work.  The house hadn’t been painted in years.  The last time, some terribly sloppy painters made a mess, painted brick, windows and even the roof.  They clearly didn’t know what they were doing (at least less than what we did).  I also suspect they were taking advantage of an old woman who didn’t know better.  She forked over the money and they did a quick spray job and left.  We had years of deferred maintenance to take care of and a shoestring budget to boot.  Over the summer my husband, scraped, sanded, cleaned and repaired the wood siding to ready it for painting.  We also had to repair gutters and downspouts and get as much paint off the brick as possible.

My husband is a real champ, he was actually looking forward to painting the house, he dedicated his summer vacation to painting it.  So when game day came around, we only had to rent scaffolding.  Again, homedepot is awesome, they have everything we didn’t.  We had to have 4 tiers because the end caps of the house were not reachable by even our tallest ladder.  We’ve done this before, our old house was an old victorian with a steep (and I mean steep) gable roof.  We had some pretty tall ladders to reach up there, evenso my husband hates heights, so the scaffolding offers far more stability, especially for his paint compressor.  We invested in a very nice commercial quality one years ago at the other house.  It has definitely paid for itself over and over again, not just for us, but for friends as well.

Everything went really well, the only glitch was the east side of the house, we couldn’t reach the wall with the scaffolding nor a ladder.  My husband had to resort to a really long extension pole and a lot of patience as he stood on the steep roof.  But it’s finally done.  We love it, we probably saved thousands of dollars doing the work ourselves (the royal “We” is employed here – I supervised and provided a lot of crucial project management, occasionally I did handle a paint brush).  It’s not perfect but it’s a major improvement.

Here is our After picture.

And there’s more to do:

We have the shutters up on the second floor, we have to locate or special order replacement shutters for the lower level (they’ve been gone for years) and a few odds and end things to resolve to say it’s complete, but the rains can come, the majority is done.  Hooray!  we’ll probably have to redo some stuff next summer, but the coat of paint will really help restore it’s life.  We have some brick work to do when my husbands friend has some free time (we take the help when it’s available!), we’ll be making some repairs and sealing the lower brick.  We also found once the rain really fell that some of the gutters have issues and we will be fixing those soon so the water doesn’t ruin any of our work.  Thank goodness we have tall ladders.

Now I’ve already started on some inside projects for the winter, there is plenty to do!  So stay tuned.

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After several weeks of rehab from a surgery ( a whole nuther story altogether for another day or another blog post – maybe), we are delving into more house projects.  The summer project we are taking on is “Paint”.  The house is in tremendous need of a good coat of new paint, maybe two coats.  It’s been a large white house for many many years.  White unfortunately collects dust and shows the years of grime and mold.  It also reveals the bad paint jobs underneath unfortunately.

We (I use the term loosely, I’m just bossing my husband around and assisting on select occasions – but I still consider it “hands-on”!) started with some big yard clean up, removing all the plants around the foundation.  It has a collection of old azalea, rhodies and camelia bushes that have grown to trunks near 10 inches around.  Some are probably near 70 years old we calculate.  

this allowed us to get up to the house to scrape, clean, and perform all the prep work, including cleaning out gutters and removing shutters.  You can see it took us a while to get to the paint part given the new growth of the bushes we left.  But summer was slow in getting here to Oregon.

We removed about 6 truck loads full of just yard debris.  It’s exciting progression on this long term project!

Next blog post – Paint!

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Several weeks ago I mentioned my new chandelier.  Sadly it’s been languishing near the door in the box, no time on my hands to put it together, also a little afraid.  I had never assembled a chandelier, I’m not that handy at electricity – I do make it a habit to avoid it when possible.

We started out by making sure to read all the reviews, there are many and they are very helpful.  I recommend checking out the reviews before you purchase any item, they are great tools for every buyer to be aware!  But they additionally provide valuable helps and guides for the post purchase assembly.  In other words I was aware of what I was getting into and I planned ahead.

We unpacked it!  and laid everything out on the table to assess how difficult this was going to be.  We pulled out the instruction sheet to do an inventory.   First off be aware that this is manufactured in a foreign land, one where English is an obscure language for sure.  The instructions were assembled very poorly, difficult to understand and Oh!  Surprise!  they were backwards, but I knew to expect this given the reviews I perused!

The pieces were all there, and there are a lot.  You will find lots of tiny crystals – not well packed, in fact it’s like a big bag of little glass jewels.  There was some chipping and some cracking, but nothing unusable.  Fortunately they send a few extra’s and I had plenty to work with plus a few spares left over.  So we plotted out our path and laid it all out.

First we had to attached all the crystals and as noted in the reviews, they are silver jewelry wires used, I tried to spray paint them in advance, I think that was a mess, so 50% of them have 50% of the brown paint on them, but it was barely noticeable – I think this is a smaller issue than others I encountered.

We also prepped for the anticipated “orange” plastic candle covers, and yes, they were “orange”.  We painted them white with some krylon plastic paint – which worked great, and we (I) started to assemble.  My biggest issue was how to prop and balance all the pieces while I was assembling so they didn’t bend or break.  For this I re-used the box and the brace that was inside for shipping.

First, all the crystals are attached as I noted above.  The tips of the chandelier are flanged and have a hole in them, you insert the crystal and thread the wire through and bend around.  Fortunately I already have a few lighting fixtures around to see what the technique is for threading and securing the crystals, this was time consuming but really the easiest part.    Once you have all the crystals on, you attach the wired arms and decorative arms to the base.

Again, I’ll say the biggest issue was balancing and propping up the thing, mid assembly and post assembly.   We had to go back and tighten, adjust and retighten the arms to make sure it was all balanced.  The electrical stage made us stall a week to make sure we did it right, but it ended up going pretty smoothly, especially since we were replacing an existing chandelier.  You simply gather and wrap the white wires around one end of the electrical supply line, and gather and wrap the black wires to the other.  The supply wire is already threaded through the pole and you don’t need to worry about which is which.  Luckily the ceiling receptacle was ready for the fixture, the new one weighing comparable to the older one, if not lighter.  We attached the wires (yes!  don’t forget to turn off your power at the box, and test it with a tester to be sure!!), did some wire management and then screwed the caps on.   We had to bend/adjust a couple of the candles to have them straight, but they were easy to fix and TA DA!  We are thrilled with the results!  What do you think?

The old versus New

Thanks for reading!

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We’ve been doing a lot of painting lately, trying to clean up the hallway and get it livable.  That means no cardboard and tarps on the floor, no paint buckets stacked in a corner, all the trim, ceiling and walls neatly painted.  It never fails, we get about 80% done and “Surprise!” some new project appears in front of us.   Just as I was about to finalize the room, I realize that just under the surface of the old paint seems to be bubbling in a small area.  I take a scraper to the little tiny area to clean it up and CrUmBLe! (I’m not sure to phonetically replicate the sound, but it was terrible).  The area expanded from the size of a quarter to now half the wall.    I’ll post pictures as I tackle this project this weekend, in the meantime – my beautiful chandelier must wait to be assembled and installed.

And I used Zemanta with this post, testing out the link to “paint” above and the related articles and the image – did these enhance your visit to my blog today?

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I think I may have mentioned that I recently decided to purchase my mothers home.  Our family moved into this home when I was 14.  Life was different then in Hillsboro and lots has changed all around the house.  But for the most part the house and it’s grounds remained largely unchanged and somewhat unkempt.   We knew before we moved in that the floors really needed to be refinished.  The problems ranged from scratches, to worn finish to significant pet damage.   And we are talking about 4700 square feet of this – all over the house in varying degrees.

Fortunately the floors themselves were of high quality old growth hard wood, an indestructible Oak.  So we had a good foundation to work with and in some places, sanding itself couldn’t make it any worse.  So we began.

I had some experience with refinishing a floor.  We had done it years earlier for my mother in the same home, but that was like 25 years earlier…  a lot has changed, from equipment to products to use.  And my memory isn’t that clear, so I needed a refresher course and my husband has no experience with this kind of thing, but is a hard worker and is very strong.  I usually get to play the brains and he is my brawn!

(this is my husband doing his research)

1st DO YOUR RESEARCH:  The internet is a great place to research.  It’s alive with content suited to almost every project you have.  We watched a few folks adventures with refinishing floors.  We also talked to anybody who said they had done this before.  We wanted to learn and anticipate as much as possible.  We found the most helpful people, were the technicians at Home Depot tool rental.  They instruct you on how to use the tools and equipment, but they also can provide a bit of guidance.  We were initially planning on using the large upright drum sander.  After the guy had talked with us a bit – he showed us the big machine with the 4 orbital sanders, it practically floated across the floors – huge difference – Like in Gorilla vs. Guerilla (see Capt’n Ron!).  Home Depot will also help you figure out what materials you need, with a simple deposit, you have your equipment and more than enough supplies, and you true up when you are done – take more than you need, no extra trips to the store for what you forgot.

DON’T PLAN ON ANYTHING ELSE:  1 make sure the rooms are empty, I mean empty – it’s so much easier, 2 it’s going to take longer than you thought. We split it into projects.  The entire Upstairs and then the downstairs, 3 wear dust masks, and just know it’s really going to be dusty, add your goggles and clothes you don’t mind getting dusty.  I really mean dusty – everywhere, every nook and cranny.

We were so amazed and excited at how beautiful it turned out.  The newly exposed wood – was exquisite – you almost didn’t want to put a finish on it.

And there was something for everyone to do.  While my teenage son looks like he’s just standing around – we found cord management a big need – and my teenager is good at just standing around.  Fortunately the sander is loud and you can’t hear the whining and complaining.

IT WILL BE DUSTY!:  A lot of sweeping and wiping and sweeping later (did I say it would be dusty? yes, it’s very dusty).  but you have to have a clean surface, you can then apply the stain.  We picked an Early American stain, given the house is Colonial style.   Again, the folks at Home Depot were very helpful.  Expect to get dirty during this part.  You apply it, but you also have to wipe it down and remove the excess and it’s stain – you get dirty.

Then we let it dry for over 24 hours, then it was time for the Polyurethane.  This is not for the faint of heart and you can’t be in a hurry.  In the Dining room, I had to redo the floor because of some bubbling – that meant sanding again, redoing some stain – it has to be even and then reapplying the poly finish (lather, rinse, repeat).

But was it worth it?  What a difference.  We love the floors, the biggest thing was – have an empty house and don’t push yourself to be in a huge hurry.

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