Skylights, a Mermaid for Jackhammers, Jugs, 3 Floors and Surprsingly Pretty Red Flowers

To begin, we have all the flooring up in the kitchen and have reinstalled a plywood subfloor, ready for tile when we get to that stage. Warren pulled up 3 layers of linoleum and 3 layers of subfloor to go with them. Apparently the idea was (as many have done before) just to go right over the top of the existing floor...no one will ever know! Well, there was 1 3/8" of flooring in the kitchen. The wood subfloor we laid now transitions to the wood floors in the hallway and dining room perfectly, with out the big trip on the threshold. I mean that I would trip on those sections going in and out of the kitchen. Big time.

Our friends Kyle and Alicia just had a baby in March, and I painted the nursery for the, in trade for Kyle coming to take out the concrete all over our property. This is her sweet mermaid themed nursery. And, here is Kyle working the jackhammer. he taught Warren how to run one too, so between the two of them, we have a lot of rubble, but all the sidewalk things are gone, the old steps from the back doors, and the RV parking which will change into a vegetable garden when Ron gets his magic done.

Here are the surprisingly pretty red flowers. All of a sudden they were in full bloom, and they've not been watered or fed once. Well, it rained last week. So I guess that was it.

And, here are the "jugs". This classy wardrobe mirror with the sticker on it really says it all about the previous owners. So awesome.

Viola! We have a skylight. Not on purpose really. We took down the cabinets a while back, and now the roof is coming off, and since that section has a broken ceiling, we have a skylight. We actually are going to install Solar Tubes in the ceiling while we have the roof off, which will save on energy and bring in natural light which will really be great in the house.

Here is the roof coming off, in action! We were working in the office and this was going on outside the window. The neighbors LOVE us right now.

Blah Blah Blah

New stuff we have finished, or let's be honest...are working on still. The hallway has been painted, up to the point where it will now end. We have changed the layout of the house, so the door to the master will be about a foot into one leg of the hall, so that portion os much shorter, and what you are looking at here in the before/after shots is the pink walls and yellow ceiling of the previous owners all the way down the hall to the existing door of the master. A side note: I described the pink color on the walls as "pepto-bismo had sex with a dirty ashtray" to my cousin recently. It's a really disgusting color, and it has a 30 year glaze of nicotine. Which also made the ceiling color, whatever that originally was, disgusting as well. I TSP'd the walls and ceiling and then used oil-based primer, and then painted. In the after shot you see the ceiling painted white up to the point where the new door to the master will be moved to, and the walls are Dunn Edwards Terracotta Sand, same color we used in the back house. And, check out how the sand color we are using on the walls is similar to what used to be a white ceiling from the previous owners, the part I didn't bother to paint because I need to retexture it when it transitions into the bedroom. Wow, that's a lot of cigarette smoking in a hallway. What, was there a line like at a club to get in the door of the bathroom or something?

We have also been tearing up the kitchen. The walls are down to the studs, the floors are down to the original sub-floor (more on that in the next blog) and the bar cut out is started.

And we have cleaned up the floors a bit as we work, just so they don't get any worse. You can see that once they are refinished, they are going to look amazing. Original to the house, we are very lucky to have these floors, or I should change that to say that we will feel lucky when they are refinished. We have finally come to the agreement that we are hiring out that work rather than tackling it ourselves. Reality has set in.

We also took out the old floor furnace and Warren built the sub floor so that our wood floors can be repaired and replaced over that section.

Me, doing what I do best. Painting...not whatever you were thinking. The door had been a heavily stained and lacquered wood, that had to go. I do like the cut glass in the top though, not that I'd have ordered a door like that on my own, but since it's there, it's grown on me.

Tweaker Construction at your service, Ma'am.

To begin, I have not posted the amazing photo of our electrical box on the side of the house. The previous owner was "an electrical genius"...obviously. Yes, that is a dead mouse in the lower left corner of the box. He fried himself on a live wire. Tweaker Electricity.

And if you are following this blog and read the last post, you may be interested to know why the crawlspace under the house is my worst nightmare, taking 1st place, even over The Dump. This is why.

Here is a perfect example of what we call "Tweaker Construction". The previous owners went under the house, ostensibly to level the floors or fix something, who knows...and this is the amazing job they did. A chunk of a 2x4 on top of a broken piece of scrap wood, wedged in with a broken piece of concrete, with the HOUSE balanced on top of it. What the @#$%!!!!! These $&%*@#* idiots!!! We went to Home Depot and rented some jacks to jack up the house, and our neighbor Jim, who is quite handy and getting his contractors license went under and built the proper support. Interestingly, the house did not fall down during the earthquake we had on Easter. Maybe it was holding the place up, and we should have left it alone? They did live here for 30 years like this. Hmm.

On to something happy. I've gotten the dining room painted and the built-in cabinet painted and papered. I've been gushing about this Damask wallpaper I found and am using in the inserts of the upper kitchen cabinets. I have plenty, so I also used it to back the cabinet, which will look amazing when the kithcen is done, since we now also have the cut-out window started. I can see how it is going to play out when we are done. The house looks so much bigger!

We had Bill and Suzy in town over Easter weekend, so after golf, Warren forced Bill to do some work before it was time to get ready for dinner in Downtown Fullerton with the family. Bill got the fun, I mean it, job of Pressure Washing. If you have not had the pleasure, it's really fun, except for the loudness. It gets things so clean!!! And that's an amazing thing around here. Bill called the previous owners "animals". Hahahahaaaa.....

Welcome to The Dump

Ahhh, the lovely smell of The Dump. The beautiful creatures that reside there...it reminds me of the film "The Birds" which scared the daylights out of me when I was a kid. And the dump accomplished the same thing.

We had (have) quite a bit of construction trash to dispose of, and a lot of it can be put out with the trash that the city picks up, but some stuff they won't take. So off we went to the dump to get rid of "treated wood", drywall, etc.

The Dump terrifies me. If you know me well, you know how I obsess over trash and recycling. I freak out as the amount of trash that I personally create in a week, and I am very cautious about waste. I take the average person that doesn't care about it as much as I do, and then imagine their trash, then multiply by weeks, years, etc. and I practically have a coronary. Well, I got to see my nightmare played out. Welcome to The Dump.

I was unable to get a picture of the really awesome dude that works there and directed us to the spot in which we were to literally dump all our crap out on to the ground. To paint a picture, he was wearing one Dreamcatcher earring, a neon yellow vest and smoking a Marlboro Red, with out gloves on. You work at the Dump, dude! Wear gloves! And who knows what gases and combustibles are seeping into the air...maybe NOT the best place to smoke. But, I guess that is why you work at the dump, instead of being a CEO of a Fortune 500.

The huge trucks lined up as we left to get in and drop off who know's what freaked me out. The mountains of crap just piled up freaked me out.

I just decided that when we have kids, we are using cloth diapers. I already tote my own shopping bags everywhere. I am notorious for saving things to re-use, such as tissue paper and wrapping paper and ribbon. But I may get all crazy about it now. That place is my worst nightmare. Well, one of them. The crawlspace under our house turns out to be my WORST nightmare. Read my next blog to find out why.

The Money Pit

We thought it would be hilarious to watch "The Money Pit". It did make us laugh, because it hit all too close to home. We had to laugh, or else we'd cry.

Our favorite lines from the movie are the ones we've heard in real life:

"It's got a good foundation. As long as you've got a good foundation, anything can be fixed!"

"This house is going to be great!"

"It'll take about 2 weeks or so."

I do wish that crazy biker crew and their groupies would show up, like in the movie, and work on the house. We're getting a little tired.

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!