Shortly after we moved into the neighborhood, we had one neighbor stop by with some banana bread that she made. It was so nice. Then, the next week, the homeowner’s association “welcome wagon” came to say hello as well! They promised us a welcome basket, which apparently they had run out of. Well, that was in November, so we kind of forgot/figured the basket wasn’t coming. Lo and behold… last Sunday the welcome wagon lady shows up with a basket! And not just any basket… a basket from A Southern Season! How snazzy is that!
We were a little disappointed to be moving to a neighborhood that had a homeowner’s association.. but, to some extent they are hard to avoid in this area. However, after going to the annual meeting last week, we pretty much learned it only exists for Purposes of Fun (holiday parties, community yard sales, etc.). Ding!
I don’t need to watch HGTV these days… I’m living it. lol.
Remember our guest bedroom? The one with the crazy stained/water damaged subfloor and the hole in the ceiling??
Well, it’s almost “done”! (However, it was not without a few arguments over the entire “smoothing” process… the repair made it that much more difficult!) The trim .. I will paint after the contractor comes to put in the new underlayment on Friday. Before I show the awesome wall color photo, let me share a new love affair with Glidden’s color-changing ceiling paint. OMG, amazing. We had first tried the Behr ceiling paint, which, I guess was OK but it was SO HARD to tell where you put the paint on. With the Glidden paint, it appears you’re painting the ceiling pink. Which, is weird psychologically but great for getting good coverage in ONE COAT (well, counting primer, it’s two coats). When you return to the room an hour later, it’s all magically evenly WHITE! Oak has become the local ceiling-rolling expert..
I do almost all the other painting tasks, but I have to applaud Oak on his abilities to evenly paint the ceiling. It gives me a serious neck and shoulder ache. The top (un-pink) part of the photo is where the hole WAS! whoot whoot.
One paint that we tried in this room that we did NOT enjoy was Zinsser’s primer. It was super super thin – even painting over the beige that was there left a very uneven color! The gray covered it, of course, but in the meantime we were almost dying from the uber strong fumes as well. We will be sticking with our Kilz, thanks.
Here are some “almost-after” shots (just imagine some nice shiny white trim instead of the sloppy edges.. haha):
Can you believe I painted the entire ceiling line without taping or any other tricky devices? It’s like I am getting some serious painting skills or something. I just don’t have the patience to do that with the trim. yet. For now, I will tape… 
You may be thinking… that dark gray is not a very Carrie-esque color. Well, it was some “oops” paint, which cost a grand total of $5 for the room. And, because this is the guest bedroom to some extent I do not want to offend our guests with a crazy wall color. lol. However… I have some plans on introducing color into the space (let’s channel my design buddy/hero David Bromstad..)
I’ll be back with the basement bedroom pictures soon. It’s completely done, but apparently I forgot to take some pictures. Whoops!
It’s not the painting that takes forever… it’s all the prep work. We have one bedroom in our basement that is going to be carpeted, so we had to do the work down there as well. I’ll try to take you through the process of that one room so you can see what we’re doing in each room.
Here’s a picture of the room post popcorn removal and smoothing. This is an arduous but considerably unphotogenic process. BTW, that crazy huge light (aka “the man light”) is by far, the single best investment we’ve made in tools (in my opinion). At least, as far as this ceiling stuff goes!
We also patch the walls and the wood trim. As you can see here, there were also approximately 823 holes in the walls. Apparently there was a bunch of stuff posted on the walls with push pins, or something. We also had to use a lot of wood putty on the trim work to fix cracks and other damage to the baseboard molding. On the crown molding, we had to fill the holes that were left by the nails in the original installation of the molding (um, wtf??) I guess we should just be happy that we have fancy molding, right? haha.
In the upstairs rooms, there is also prep work to be done on the floor. The carpets are taken out, but there are staples from the foam padding left. So, those get pulled out one by one. In this basement room, however, we just had rows of nails that went around the perimeter of the room. Those got pulled out with a pry bar and Oak filled the holes with cement patcher.
The patcher is pretty easy to apply.. just like spackle or wood putty, you smooth any holes with it. In action:
AFTER all this work is done, you can finally paint. Which we have moved on to, but I will keep you all in suspense until we can do a “final reveal” (HGTV style yo!) More soon…
We didn’t encounter all that much wildlife at our townhouse, really. But, oh boy, since we’ve moved to this spread-out subdivision with tons of trees, we’re seeing all sorts of stuff. First of all, there are like a billion squirrels. They run around the yard, sometimes they chase each other, sometimes they are hunting for or eating acorns (which is so cute). Here’s one of them in action up on the grill on the deck:
But oh, that is not all… we also have these cute little husky birds that sit on the firewood pile that is out on our deck. They tweet excessively as well. After some research, we believe they are some kind of wren, probably a winter wren. Which, has me worried that they will be flying back up north as soon as the weather warms up. I guess we’ll see.
Apparently even NC is cold for the wrens.. because at some point, they found a way into our garage (OK, that’s not that hard for a teeny little bird considering there’s a hole in one of the doors) and decided to make a nest in our rag box. Then, every time we’d go to the slop sink they’d freak out and fly away. Oak managed to catch them in action one night:
Look all the way to the background and you will see our friend “Sir Fluffikins.” We have to figure out what kind of house he enjoys so we can buy or build him one soon!
Yep, that’s a picture of a toilet. Well, the toilets were yet another unique thing about our house. All of them were lacking in the whole “toilet tank lid” category. Which is extremely odd. What would you want with a toilet tank lid? Maybe they all got broken? Or they have some alternative use I don’t know about and got highjacked by the people that cleaned the house out?
You also can’t buy just a tank lid at the store. Nor, can you find one at the Habitat for Humanity thrift shop. Tragic. So, we purchased some nice new American Standard toilets from Home Depot. Surely they use way less water than the dinosaur 30-year old toilets that were there, anyway.
The toilet in the half-bathroom on the main floor is extra special. We figured since this one is the “high traffic toilet”, we would finally get and put in one of those crazy toilets that can flush 15 golf balls (or whatever that claim is..). Yes, we have the golf ball toilet. And let me say, I definitely notice a difference between the “flushing action” in the other, basic (read: cheaper) American Standard toilet we installed upstairs. I’m pretty sure the flushmaster could suck a small animal down the toilet in a single flush.
When my mom had a fish tank back when I was a little one, and a dead fish would get flushed, I’d always kind of have this fear that the fish would somehow revive itself and swim back up to the toilet to freak me out. If only we had the flushmaster 9000 back then, I’d be sure that the fish was truly gone forever.. haha.
I’m sure more on the bathrooms’ cosmetic makeovers will be posted in the future.. For now, they have the crucial functions established. Ding!
Well, we had to get a new HVAC system. What is HVAC you ask? It stands for Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning. In our townhouse, we almost never thought twice about our HVAC system, or what was going on with it. I’m sure you haven’t either unless it stops working! Well, now we have a (kind of) understanding of the whole thing.
Time for my very first disclaimer: No, we are not HVAC professionals. Read up on installing duct work in your own house on some other, more official web site, before attempting this yourself so you know the proper terminology (vs. my use of “that thingy.”) I also personally apologize for the “man project” nature of this post. Hey, sometimes you gotta do this stuff!
Our house is on a “dual zone” system. That means, we have two thermostats that are linked to completely separate systems. One system has the thermostat on the main floor and heats and cools the main floor and basement. That system has a gas furnace, which works, and a questionable air conditioner that we are worrying about in the spring. The upstairs system is based on a heat pump, which uses only electricity in an outdoor unit that resembles an air conditioner, and an indoor “air handler” that distributes the heated or cool air throughout the house. That’s what we got replaced – the old one had a host of problems – like flooding the ceiling in that one room. We were basically told by several people that it wasn’t worth fixing because it was old and crappy.
So, we have our new, lovely energy efficient model (for which we will get some major moolah rebates come tax season, and from our electric company.. which only slightly softens the blow of how much this crap costs). However, the technician that installed the unit said that the flexible ductwork that is used for the air returns left something to be desired. In fact, one of them was imploded (collapsed) and he couldn’t get a new efficiency reading on it to get us our happy rebates. This is the air handler up in the attic with the old, ghetto return duct:
Oak, being the frugal/clever fellow that he is, asked that we replace these returns ourselves. I don’t remember if we got a quote on having the technician do this, but I’m sure it would have been at least another $300 for labor costs. And it totally was NOT difficult! It didn’t even really involve any “man tools” – I know, bummer! After Oak found a place that would sell HVAC equipment to regular folks (as many will only sell to the pros), he bought some lengths of flexible ductwork, mastic (which is a special adhesive), special duct tape (not the gray kind we’re used to!) and uber long zip ties. That’s about all you need!
We did the short duct first. This duct goes from the right side of the air handler (the right vent in the picture above) to the return vent in the hallway. I’m only going to show the pictures from attaching one end because it’s basically the same thing at either end of the duct – one end goes to the air handler, and the other to the vent.
First, you must hug your duct. Oh, it’s lovely and shiny!
Now look at the awesome hole where your vent comes out. Wow. You can see downstairs! Next, apply the mastic to the metal circular part of the vent with a cheap, or old painbrush. Basically whatever you use is effectively going to be ruined. This stuff is super sticky, but spreads on like a thick paint. Go all the way around the vent:
Now, it’s time to attach the vent. Start by sliding off the shiny part and attaching it to the mastic. Then, affix a zip tie over the whole thing to really hold it in place.
Slide the shiny part back into place and you’re done!
Now repeat this on the other end of your duct. Pretty simple eh? The other duct (the one that goes to the bonus room) was a little more complicated because it was longer and involved climbing into another, less accessible part of the attic. Here’s Oak squeezing his way through :
And the shiny new, un-imploded vent in place. Our technician suggested running the duct under our hard ducts, which seems to work better than it going over the top like the old set-up did. Ding!
If you have any leftovers, you can fashion yourself an ultra-stylish robot costume! Just kidding. We actually had an entire length left over that we are going to exchange for some of the smaller ducts that carry the heat into the rooms. The ones we have work, but we can replace them for a higher “R-value” (ie better temperature retention). So, I may be returning with more HVAC fun in the future! Congrats if you made it to the end of this post without getting bored.. 
I think you may remember my mentioning of “doggie yum-yums” up in the subflorring in our hallway. Well, we are pretty sure that is also what caused these extremely rusty vent covers. Here’s the one in the dining room (aka our current bedroom.. haha):
Tres attractive eh? At first we thought perhaps they could be brushed and cleaned, but then after an inital attempt we decided to just get some new ones. Well, we can’t have a NORMAL vent cover that you can buy at Home Depot, it’s some specialty size. So these went nasty looking for a few months until we got the new heat pump. We asked that contractor to order us the new covers at cost from his HVAC supplier, but we’d put them in. Here’s Oak installing the new vent cover: 
He also cleaned out the vent with the shop vac before installing the new frame. We are now proud owners of not one, but two shop vacs. One ultra cute and handy Sears craftsman vac, and this huge uber-sucking dinosaur puppy that Oak acquired from somewhere in NY.. haha. Overall, although I didn’t really participate in the whole process, I’d say this was a simple project. Here’s the much better after:
Pretty! As long as you ignore the other flaws in the wall and severe need for a new paint job, we can admire its beauteousness. It’s really funny how holes in walls/ceilings don’t phase us anymore. Hole in the wall? Enh! Whatever! We can fix it!
Here’s the other side of the vent in the kitchen. I’m not sure what Oak looks so forelorn about. Maybe he already misses the rusty old nasty vent covers! (or not!)
The craft room was the second (after the laundry room) to get painted a COLOR! I got to do this painting around the first week of December, after Thanksgiving. Exciting! It is nice to feel when one room is “done”, even though, I still have to touch up the trim, paint inside the closet (I’m trying to figure out what color to use..), and paint the window. Oh well. Rolling the walls is by far the most exciting part, but lasts the least amount of time. Why is that? Grr!! Here’s a peek at the color, poppin’ white baseboard trim, unpainted beigy colored window, and the new ceiling light fixture. There was a ceiling fan in this room before that has since been moved to the master bedroom – I felt no need to have a fan blowing all the papers around my craft room, thankyouverymuch!
My first attempt at window painting is currently in progress in the master bedroom, which should basically conclude the painting in that space, then I’ll move back into do this window.
I hope everyone is having a healthy and happy 2010!
Our yard has all sorts of interesting debris. Things like old bottle caps, random pieces of trash, and the like. Well, to some extent we can understand that type of thing, because stuff can get blown into the yard from recycling piles and whatnot. However, this most recent discovery is just downright odd. Evan found the following two GLASS PYREX BOWLS while he and Oak were out leaf-blowing:
How exactly these ended up in the yard, I don’t know. Maybe they had plants in them at some point? Maybe they were used as outside dog bowls? Maybe they were to collect rainwater? Instead of questioning their existence, I washed them (as they were covered in dirt… you can see in the picture, I had started to rinse them off and then decided to take a picture). They’re as good as new and are now in our cabinet with the rest of the bowls. Oh, bonus!
The house is on a septic system – not a completely foreign concept to Oak and I, having grown up with them, but we certainly had never had one in our adult lives. One thing we did know – whatever you put down your sink, ends up in the tank. Certainly with all the painting and other messy projects we’ve got going on, that can’t be a good idea. So, Oak and his dad got the idea to put in a slop sink.
<Begin major undertaking>
It all started with choosing a sink from the Miller’s yard (yes, there were 2! haha). Of course, we had to have the bigger one. Yes, it was rusty but let’s say SOLID CAST IRON. Holy moly. Second nice part: FREE! It went on the back of Oak’s dad’s truck (along with many other acquired “treasures”) on our way back from Thanksgiving. Here’s a picture of the BEFORE:
Overall, it was rusty and grungy from being outside for who knows how many years. But oh, we had plans. Somehow, I got the job of refinishing the sink. Lucky me. It was actually pretty fun and involved the use of some MAN TOOLS (grunt grunt Tim Allen style). Here I am brushing off rusty pieces after my first rough attempt with a hand wire brush:
But oh… you don’t have to do it all by hand, oh no. It would figure they make a wire attachment that goes on your drill! (LeRoy alumni: Yes, that is my extremely fashionable, 11 year old marching band sweatshirt. Unfortunately it got demoted to my home improvement wardrobe. It’s very warm though! I also wear my super old glasses should any random particles decide to fly at my eyes and damage my beauteous new ones.)
Here I am cranking up the corded old grandaddy drill (which occasionally sparks.. whatevs) with the wire brush attachment. It made short work of the uber rusty corners:
The sink itself was the most simple and shortest part of the entire process, but unfortunately we didn’t capture the other fun on camera. Oak and Evan got to dig a drainage trench in the rain for the sink yum-yums to go into, while his dad did the neato fedito custom plumbing job. A few days later, we ordered drainage stone and Oak and Hwa filled in the trench with the stone. I believe the stupid stone was the most expensive part of the project, but we got some nicer pathways and widened driveway out of it too. I missed out on this part – being at work among various other things, but it definitely was a back-breaking activity that probably would have been too hardcore for wimpy ol’ Carrie anyway.
The sink got installed into place before I had a chance to put a second coat of paint on the outside, but you get the idea – here is the sink in its place in the garage:
Another coat of black paint on the outside, and it’s good to go! Let me tell you how awesome this is. No more painting for hours, getting to the kitchen sink to rinse your stuff out, only to discover that the sink is full of dirty dishes! (How annoying is that!) Also, the sink has HOT water so you get a toasty retreat from the cold garage as well! Ding!
