I'll take extra TSP with my Popcorn, please.

We have the very last of the paneling and popcorn down! The dining room was de-paneled and popcorned this past weekend. Look how lovely the walls look. Apparently no amount of cheap 1970's fiberboard paneling can keep 30 years of raunchy cigarette smoke off the walls. That is what our new friend, TSP, is for. I went through 5 buckets of dirty water after washing the living room walls down with a mop soaked in TSP (tri-sodium phosphate). Don't drink it. Or let it touch your skin. As harsh as it is, I think we will need 2 coats of OIL based primer still! If you know me and my painting business, you know I hate oil based paints (for interior painting, not canvas painting of course). But it must be done. We have a 5 gallon bucket, I hope that will do.

We have figure out how we are going to open up the wall in between the kitchen and the living room, to create a modular bar. On the kitchen side we have our butcher block island, which we are going to add casters to, and after we cut out the "window" in the wall that connects to the living room, we are going to but the island up against the kitchen side of the wall, creating a pass-through window/bar into the living room. Eventually we will add a bar top in the same wood (that will be fun to find) as the butcher block, making it a built-in/but not really. Which is what we want. Options. Here is the cut out, in between support beams, keeping our costs low and sanity intact. The original idea was to take out the whole wall, but the 3 or 4 beams would make it very expensive to do, and somehow all this construction is costing more than we anticipated! Haha.

I faux-painted the really awesome rocks on the outside of the house with a combination of 2 different colored water-based stains + 1 color paint, which really helped. We want them to just fade away, and what they looked like before was not doing the trick. You can also see the patch I painted a milk chocolate brown, which will be the color for the stucco parts of the house. And when I say stucco, I mean crappy Tex-Cote from at least 20 years ago. I want to chip it all off the house, as it is chipping in some spots already. "What?!?!?" you say? Yes, Tex-Cote is chipping! But it has a lifetime guarantee, right? Haha, the website is down and there are long lists of complaints against the product online. The previous owners had the place sprayed to look like stucco by Sears, and they sprayed EVERYTHING. The house, the eaves, any exposed pipes, wood siding, you name it, it's got Tex-Cote on it. Well, except for the fabulous rocks. Thank god for that. It will look good, let's hope the fresh paint job doesn't chip off! We are going to patch it and make it stick again, we hope. It comes off pretty easily, I am scared that we are going to spend time a

nd money painting and the surface beneath will come loose. Ugh. But it will look good until then. Plan is to add white trim to the windows and eaves, and black shutters, with a red front door. Same for the back house and the garage.

Before After

Animal House

Sorry for the lapse in blogging, we have been doing work around the house that is a) not picture worthy, and b) not work to the house, actual work that brings in money!


On saturday we borrowed the neighbor's lawnmower and whacked the weeds down again. We are supposed to see some minor landscaping get started this friday, but in case that does not happen due to rain, we really needed to cut the grass, it was getting out of control. Warren kept trying to get out of it, saying that he didn't want to ruin the neighbor's mower by mowing over all the random crap that was in the grass...quick solution by Heidi...let's pick through the yard and clear out all the foreign objects! Foiled again, Warren. Get to mowing. Here are some cool things I found in the grass: several 4" screws, a poker chip and some kind of a screw-in table leg base. We mowed away the kittens playground. Sorry.

Speaking of kittens, they've really taken to the construction zone style of living that we are into now. Sonja here is poking around from the bathroom into the kitchen, making sure the old ball and tube wiring is ok since the wall has been torn down. And D.J. is relaxing on the ladder shelf. Thanks for the help guys!

"I get by with a little help from my friends..."

Saturday was the day that we got the most accomplished, to date! Susan and Corey came by to lend a helping hand, and we got the upper kitchen cabinet cases off the walls, readying the walls themselves for demolition. Here is the "Nail that held the house together". And, here is the first hammer to the wall...bye bye plaster! (and glue, and rot, and mold and bad old patch jobs).

Next on the list was to demo out the closet in the master bedroom, ready to frame in the 2nd bedroom into a master closet for our room and a large walk-in "butler's pantry" (I'm using that term because Warren's parents do...but where is our butler? Jeeves? Where are you?) The second bedroom was somewhat useless, being very tiny, so we bit the bullet and changed our 3 bedroom/1 bathroom into a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom (well, the second bath will be added in a few weeks after our new roof is installed. When I say "a few weeks" I mean "sometime in the future, I really have no idea") plus a large working pantry and usable closet. Apparently ladies in 1945 did not have nearly as many shoe boxes as I do, and only needed space for 4 plates and a frying pan. We need some space! So Larry and Warren made some space! They are striking what is now known as the "Daddy Said..." pose. If you want to learn more about that phrase, come over any day to work on our house and we can educate you. You may turn in to an Electrical Genius when the day is through.

Larry schooled Warren on the art of framing before he had to take off for the day, and lucky for us Holland and Andrew arrived just in time. Andrew helped Warren bust out the framing for the Master Closet/Butler's Pantry. I dig the Ray Ban's.

Susan was able to get through the wall from the bathroom to the kitchen...Hello! We are replacing the walls in both the kitchen and the bath, they were both damaged beyond repair when we took the paneling off. I believe the previous owners just slapped up paneling any time there started to be an issue with a wall. Paneling = Band Aid in this house. Well, till now. We like to just scrap all walls that are damaged, or that have WEEDS growing inside of them! I was getting through the wall in the kitchen that backs up to the yard, and found dead weeds growing up through. Nice. The demo continued all day, with Andrew figuring out how to work "smarter not harder". He really sped up the demo process.

Warren to Holland: "Your man is a machine!"







Here is our kitchen as of now!

And, we can't leave this part out...the bars are off the windows! Neighbors stopped by in the evening to congratulate us on the new look. Corey spent a good part of the day power washing the front of the house and taking bars off windows, and one neighbor didn't even know there were those sassy 70's rocks on the front of the house until now, they'd been covered in dirt and overgrown ugly Bird of Paradise and Rubber Tree plants. Thankfully Ron has better landscaping ideas than that! I am going to start staining the rocks with better colors, and hopefully we can get started on painting the house soon! And new windows. And get the landscaping started. And the new roof. And paint the picket fence white. And. And. And. And. And........

Holy Sink!

It's friday, and tomorrow we have a few helpers coming to assist in demo'ing the walls and floors in the main house! Then I can get the walls re-drywalled and put the cabinets back in. Here we have 80% of the cabinets down and ready for paint. I am going to spray them, and then apply a tan antique glaze, and then on the uppers insert a wallpaper damask design. I can't wait!

We took the sink from the Main House and are going to set it into the counter in the Back House, since we didn't want to purchase a brand new sink for a renter, as it will probably sustain damage. It's sitting in the yard while I soak it in CLR and Comet. The previous owners really banged up their stuff! Nothing was ever cared for. I don't know how these people lived like this. I mean it...how did they not die of dysentary or E Coli? Everything is filthy. Even DJ thinks the sink is disgusting.

And, DJ really likes being outside! Here he is playing with the shovels. Meanwhile, Warren is playing with saws! He You-Tubed instructional videos on how to cut out a sinkhole and is going to use his circle plunger attachment and a jigsaw or maybe the reciprocating saw to cut the hole for the sink. We *should* have the back house kitchen completely done, hopefully tonight, maybe tomorrow. We have to patch some drywall cuts that the plumber had to make, so it depends on how long that takes. Back to the damn drywall. Ugh.

Twice the Light

"Can you turn on the light for me? No, the other one." This stacked light switch situation pretty much sums up what this house was all about. Everything was sloppy, lazy and crazy. Good thing our trusty cousin Sam is going to teach Warren the ropes of minor electric repairs...so that we can fix all the stuff that "Daddy, the 'lectrical GENIUS" did in the house over the years. Also, check out the paneling that was installed in the kitchen. Wow. That's gone already, but it still haunts me.

Warren has been demo'ing the bathroom, and when he took out the vanity, he just tossed it out the back door, and it completely exploded! There goes our bathroom, we can't WAIT to get the nice new stuff delivered from Home Depot, we just have to get the room in ship-shape first, which poses a problem. My Uncle Dale came by yesterday to check out the place and possibly measure for his tile work, and we all came to the conclusion that we need to demo the plaster walls in the kitchen and bathroom (Susan, we are going to save some of that for you this saturday, yay!) as well as the floor in both rooms. So, we are a little ways off from having the new bathroom. But, it shall be done...some day. See Warren below, cutting out the portions of the wall with his new Reciprocating Saw, and you gotta love how they just slapped the vanity and plumbing right over the open, exposed wall. I guess they ran out of ugly paneling when they got to the under portion of the vanity. Oh well, it was behind a mostly closed door, so who cares if the wall is open? Whatever.

Warren took out the lower cabinets because they had been installed right over the linoleum floor and the wall paneling (as well as tiled over the paneling, I have mentioned this in a previous post), and cleaned up with the shop vac...to the tune of approximately 12 Rats Nests, and 6 dead mice. But he just told me it was hard to tell because they were petrified and in broken pieces. So that's awesome. I did see a little mouse scurry across the living room of the main house, which we have had to use for storage of items that won't pick up smells too badly, and run into a little mouse-hole under the built-in cabinet in the dining room. So, I poured a bunch of Rat Poison down the hole and shoved a piece of broken 1/4 round trim in the hole so they couldn't escape. I hope the hole goes down to the crawl space under the house, not directly under the built-in. We shall find out soon, if it starts to smell. I hope the kittens take care of the rodent problem soon. They need to earn their keep!

And here is a photo of the Master Bedroom Floor, after we scraped the asbestos ceiling and removed the 30 year old carpet. All I have to say is...who died?

Welcome to our Blog Cabin

Richelle and Larry came last weekend to lend a helping hand, Larry has all of our crown molding and baseboards done in the Back House, and Richelle got on Cabinet Scraping Duty with me. Good times. Check out the glue residue from the paneling we took dow. Yes, the paneling that was installed BEFORE they put in the lower cabinets, so we have to take those off the wall to get the rest of the paneling off. Oh, and also the kitchen tile (demo'd) was also installed OVER the paneling. Ugh.

Warren, learning a new trade. We have completely demo'd the bathroom, as it is a disgusting mess, and we have all new stuff waiting to be delivered soon. But we have to do the ground work first, which is dirty and no fun! Well, he looks like he's enjoying it, actually.

The kittens are officially indoor/outdoor kittens now, and LOVING it! DJ made it up to the roof, they've both been in the crawlspace under the house and up in the attic of the Back House, and all over the yard. Mud is a new favorite toy.

I find myself just wandering around the house with a scraper and a crowbar, looking for things to demolish. We have scraped the (asbestos filled) ceilings in the Main house master bedroom and one of the 2nd bedrooms, the upper kitchen cabinets are 75% scraped and sanded down, and we've ordered the very cool Damask wallpaper that I am going to use as an insert on the uppers, as they are different door styles than the lower cabinets. Rather than try and make them match, I am going to go with it and make the best of having 2 different door styles, and I think it will look very funky and cool when I am done. You know how I do my magic.

Here's a good shot of our HUGE driveway and garage. We have just recieved a set of landscaping plans from Ron, as well as some room additions/revisions, so the property is going to look very different when we get to that part!

Ron (Senor Bond) sent over his go-to guy, Manuel, who is practically family, and he set his guys to work on trench digging for our plumbing needs, and clearing out the old landscaping, which consisted of overgrown azaleas and birds of paradise. The neighbors LOVE us already, and we haven't really done much to the outside of the house yet. We've met a couple diagonally across the street from us that have filled us in on the crazies that lived here before us, and how the entire neighborhood had a party when the house sold to us. We're under a lot of scrutiny, although we've been told the bar has been set VERY low, but they're all checking out what we are doing.

Here I am demo'ing the really awesome paneling that was installed horizontally in the hallway, only to reveal that we have Plaster Board rather than drywall. What a joy!

I'd love to blog all day, but I've got some cabinets and paneling that need to be taught a lesson.