The Woody Housing Project

Part of owning an old house is knowing when to do the work yourself and when to hire someone to do it for you.  I’m still learning.

When I bought the house the front gable end and the 3rd floor window above the driveway were in rough shape.

Last year I rented some scaffolding and set it up in front of the house in an attempt to repaint the 3rd floor gable end.  It turns out that I’m not comfortable that high up on shaky scaffolding.  It was also too far a reach to be able to scrape, prime and paint properly.  The scaffolding went back and I moved on to other projects.

This spring I called the professional painters and finally got the job taken care of.  A Genie Lift was delivered first thing in the morning and the painter showed up shortly after.  The job was done in a day and was professionally completed.

Front gable end:

Window above the driveway:

This is another project that has dragged on way too long. As part of the renovation and restoration of the front hall and staircase the existing carpet was removed and plywood was laid down on the subfloor. We’ve lived with this plywood for about 4 years and now that The Lovely Christina is a permanent resident I figured it was time to cover it up with something respectable.

In the above picture you can see the top of my head as I lay out some thinset to complete the third quadrant of the tile floor.

The buildup of the finished floor is as follows:
1) 2″ tongue and groove pine (subfloor/original finished floor).
2) 3/8″ plywood glued and screwed in a 6″ grid (with additional screws in problematic areas).
3) Thinset.
4) Schluter ditra uncoupling membrane.
5) Flat-fill with thinset.
6) Tile.

The tile came in 12″ x 12″ sheets but because of the pattern we wanted almost every sheet had to be custom cut. It took us a full week with exacto knives, cutting mats, and a reference pattern to cut all the tiles and assemble them in place on the floor. As a result there are only six full, uncut sheets in the entire floor – they are in the middle of the border.

The tiles were then transferred and reassembled in a staging area on the dining room floor so that the base for the tiles (plywood, ditra) could be prepared. Each partial sheet of tile was marked with registration marks to avoid any problems when I installed the tile. As I laid down small patches of thinset Dad would hand me the partial sheets for those areas. It was a very slow and time-consuming process but I think the results justify the headache.

With some advice from our local flooring store the initial installation was only a portion of the floor to form a cross. This cross was painstakingly laid out and with the help of lasers was aligned perfectly with the three bordering walls, the foot of the staircase, the cold air return duct, the front door, and the prime meridian. Once the cross had been installed and had set Dad and I proceeded to fill in the four quadrants.

The tile/pattern we settled on after much discussion (arguing) is a classic 1″ ceramic hexagonal tile with a flower and dot border in the main area and a dot border in the closet. We’ve seen similar patterns in old homes for years and figured it would be fitting for our old home.

We chose a dark gray grout to avoid dirty grout lines. My fingers were stained for about a week afterward.

Only half of the floor in this room was tiled. The remainder will (one day) have hardwood installed. As an interim measure we chose a laminate floor from the Christmas cash-and-carry sale at the local flooring store. The nice thing about the laminate is that it will un-install very easily when the time comes.

Here is the finished product, with shoe moulding installed and painted and laminate floor in place. You can see part of the refinished staircase on the left side of the picture. This is one of the smallest, least-used rooms in the house but it has had the most time spent on it. It has been more than 5 years altogether. I’m looking forward to putting my energy into another room for a change.

Here is a view of the new flooring from the top of the staircase. In this photo you can see the refinished heating and return grates. The grates/grilles were spray painted gloss black while the interior of the ducts were painted matte black.

…just in time for Christmas.

Let’s think back to last summer… when we started to refinish the back steps…

After some pretty serious paint stripping, some repairs, some reinforcement, the patching of many holes and just a little bit of sweat, the stairs are finally done.

I painted them in the same scheme as the front stairs.

Which project to tackle next?

The living room floor has always been a little bouncy. The joists are 3 feet on centre and span 18 feet. Over the years the some of the bracing has been removed to make way for heating ducts and holes have been cut for plumbing and wiring. This summer, during a week of holidays I finally decided to do something about it.

The steel beam is 6″ wide, 6″ tall and 12’6″ long, supported on both end by jack posts.

Dad and I wrestled it into the basement and slowly raised it into place by stepping it up stepladders on each end. With a little help from Nicole we managed to get the jack posts under the beam and everything secured in place.

The living room floor is now nice and stiff. You can now walk across the living room without having the tv and all the lamps wobbling.

In our backyard is a very fruitful crabapple tree. Starting each August it begins dropping over-ripe crabapples, turning our backyard into a rotten, slimy mess.

The rotten crabapples embed themselves in the grass, attract flies and wasps, stick to the bottom of your shoes, gum up the lawnmower, and give the local birds, dogs, squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, and raccoons the runs (or the crabapple two-step as it is known around here).

To deal with this problem I pick up hundreds of apples every day for 3 months. This year I finally had enough.

You can see how large the tree is in the above picture. I can’t tell you how old the tree is but I can tell you that one branch of a fork 3/4 up the tree had about 30 rings. In my experience I have never seen a crabapple tree that has been allowed to grow this tall.

Our friends Keri and Chris were visiting for the August long weekend and volunteered to help me cut the tree in half, thereby cutting the amount of crabapples in half.

I climbed the tree with my trusty electric chainsaw (don’t laugh, it gets the job done) and cut the branches as Chris directed from the ground. I took out about six smaller branches on my way up and then removed three large branches (about 10 inches in diameter) from the top. The picture above shows the tree with one of the three large branches remaining. This picture reminds me of something Dr. Seuss would draw.

The completed pruning job.

Pruning the tree was relatively easy… cleaning up was not. All of the activity of pruning knocked a few thousand crabapples to the ground all at once. We made one dump run with the truck fully loaded and I’ll have to do another run this weekend to clean up the remaining brush.

For your viewing pleasure I am pleased to present the very first Woody Housing Project video. If you listen carefully you can hear the smart-ass comments made by The Lovely Christina and Keri.

A special thanks to Chris for working in the hot sun on his vacation and to Keri for documenting everything for me.

This post is about a project that has been long overdue. In preparation for the impending homecoming of The Lovely Christina I decided to freshen up the master bedroom with some paint.

Since we bought this money pit I have treated the master bedroom as a sanctuary – the one room that was off limits to tools, dust, dirt, shoes, etc. It was nice to have one room that I could retreat to when the renovations seemed to never end. The downside to this is that the room was neglected – aside from a thorough cleaning when we moved in nothing had ever been done to it.

The before pictures were taken before we moved in. I tried to take the after pictures from the same angle for a better comparison. (From looking at the after photos it appears that I have an undiagnosed inner ear disorder – I may have to look into that.)

Standing at the closet, facing the front of the house. The old wood stove was recycled long ago.

The trim has been pained white (three coats to cover the brown) and the wall colour is “Promenade” by Behr.

Standing at the front window facing the back of the house.

The closet was painted a chocolate brown and had new hardware installed – the paint was left over from one of my Dad’s projects.

This was just a lipstick-on-a-pig job – a stop-gap measure to get us a few years into the future. The real renovation of the master bedroom will be a massive undertaking because it is a room full of cover ups:

• there are at least two false ceilings;
• the walls have been strapped and covered with horrible paneling;
• the baseboard has been installed on top of the original baseboard
• the chimney has been veneered with new brick;
• the hearth is a mystery;
• and the carpet that you can see in the photos is the second layer of carpet and at least the fourth layer of flooring.

…but these are all adventures for another day.

P.S. – thanks to Dad for helping me paint, Mom for making the lunches, and Ted the Angry Zombie for the grunts and moans of encouragement.

I went to visit The Lovely Christina last weekend and when I came back the new shed was painted.

When we moved in there was a very old shed. It was rotten, crooked, and housed numerous small animals but it was ours. It kept (most) rain off our garden equipment but that was about all. I was perfectly content to live with it a few more years but then my parents offered to replace it as a Christmas present and I jumped at the opportunity.

I tried to find a photo of the old shed in the many hundreds I have taken here over the years but I can’t seem to find a good picture of it. I always seemed to try to leave it out of the frame and as a result I have many pictures with a small portion of the shed but no pictures of the entire shed.

This is the best I could do (I know, I know, I should have taken a picture before we destroyed it):

The old shed was taken down on Friday night and loaded in the truck for an early Saturday morning dump run. With a couple of well placed sledge hammer blows the old shed came down surprisingly easy. Dad, Jim (neighbour) and I made short work of the demolition and truck-loading – I think we spent more time loading the truck than doing demolition.

Quote from Jim: “Jeez, you only seem to be happy when you’re destroying something”

Saturday was a write-off because it rained all day. Dad and I started early Sunday morning with the foundation stones and by the end of the day this is what we had. Please note the heavy clothing my dad is wearing – the sun never came out, the high was 7 degrees, and it SNOWED!

We started again early on Monday (Victoria Day) and were able to wrap it up by about 6pm. The sun was out all day with a high of 17 degrees – we were wearing short sleeves and shorts. It’s amazing how much the weather can change from day to day.

The old shed was 8′ x 8′ and the new shed is 10′ by 10′ – there’s a lot more room inside – it’s very luxurious.

There are still a few things to do with the shed. I have to build a counter inside along one wall, buy and hang hooks for all of our tools and put a coat of paint on the shed. If the mood takes me I might also install a window and a flower box.

All-in-all it was a very good holiday weekend. Got lots done, got plenty of fresh air after a long, hard tax season and now it’s time to go to sleep.

P.S. – Did I mention it SNOWED!

Sometimes things don’t get done as soon as they should.

If you dig deep in your memory you may recall the Great Insulation Party of 2006. If you remember that then you may also remember the Great Dining Room Ceiling Painting Ordeal of 2006.

I had such a bad time painting the dining room ceiling that it took 27 months for the memories to fade enough that I felt I could tackle the living room ceiling. If you’re saying to yourself, “how bad could it be” please read the post about painting the dining room ceiling.

Now it’s done. For good. I’m not painting it again. Ever.

Isn’t it pretty?

It seems that I might have had a little too much time off before Christmas because on the 23rd I got a little bored and decided to make curtains for most of the windows in the house. I made six altogether for:

1) the window at the top of the front stairs,
2) the laundry room,
3) the two windows in the living room,
4) the dining room, and
5) the green bedroom.

I worked like a man possessed and finished up about 10:30 on Christmas Eve.

At least I’m productive when I’m bored.