Getting the floors moving along

Dale's back is still hurting - he's been going to physical therapy to get that muscle mass relaxed, and so our progress is still s.l.o.w.....but I did get the hardwood flooring section integrated:

We are planning to have a place where we can slide barstools up under the island, and I wanted the floor to be uninterrupted there.  We'd found some good match hardwood at Lumber Liquidators, and along with several other places in the house that will need patching, we bought one bundle so we could get an integrated look here.  We will be refinishing the floors at the end of the kitchen remodel, as it moves into the living room, so getting an unfinished floor will save us from having to run the sander up under the island so much.

We also had our stove delivered this morning.  My goal is to get the floors done this week while I'm on spring break, and also get the cabinets ordered.  Although progress is slow, it's moving along OK.

We did take a little drive around on Saturday. I'm trying to keep Dale moving so he doesn't get his muscles stiff from sitting in a recliner, so we did a trip to LACMA (Los Angeles County Art Museum) where I am a member, and he can come along as my guest.  I'm trying to work my way through the museum one trip at a time, without getting overwhelmed.  The last time I was there, I visited the two blockbuster shows - a Stanley Kubric exhibition and a Caravaggio exhibition that were both great.  This time we went through the modern and contemporary collection, and enjoyed seeing Chris Burden's Metropolis in action:

the little cars are whizzing around -- last time I visited, it wasn't in motion, so this was fun to experience.  We also had to walk under Levitated Mass, which is a fun experience as well.

While we were downtown LA, we decided to stop over and visit the little railroad known as Angel's Flight.  It's a railway on a pulley system, and we rode up:

Then walked around the plaza before finding a nearby Geocache and braving the traffic on the way home.  Other than that, we are trying to balance enjoying the time off and getting some work done on the kitchen.  We decided to scrap the arch, instead, we are going to build up the beam a little with some molding - watching one of our HGTV reno shows, we saw a really effective approach while keeping the beam straight across, and I think that'll suit our place better.  It's mostly about adding some interest to a pretty basic setup here.

Refreshing the patio furniture

Last year we made a 3 piece seating set for our patio.  You can see that process here.  After having guests out all summer, we never got around to painting or finishing the wood in some way, which of course, was something we needed to do to help preserve the wood.  So this weekend (while Dale's back is STILL keeping him from doing kitchen electrical), I went out and sanded it all down and gave it a coat of paint.  Here's what they were looking like:

Along with the wood getting weathered, the cushions were really faded from a year in the hot SoCal sun.  So I went out and bought some fun fabric and made new covers.  here's what the faded fabric looked like (You can see where this one had a pillow lying on top of it!):

Although I could buy sun-resistant fabric, I know that I like to change things up, and whipping up new covers with inexpensive fabric is a nice way to update the furniture each year.  That, and a quart of exterior semi-gloss paint and I can get a whole new look.  Last year, I thought I wanted them to be a dark red (well, that never happened!), but this year, I was thinking a nice black background with a blue batik style fabric would look cheery:

One thing I'm not sure about is the configuration - it's supposed to be set up as a U shape -- but I found that a little bulky.  I've got it set up as two independent pieces this time:  an L shape and a stand alone sofa.  I'm thinking of taking off one or more sides of the last piece -- still up in the air about that, but I'm not afraid to grab the sawz-all and lop the arms off if I think it'll work out better!

I have to recover some of these toss pillows, too - they worked great with the background of the cushions last year, but they clash a little with the blue. 

We really need a coffee table here, too -- so we could sit out here and eat out, now that spring is here!

Side Trip!

Our kitchen is in total disarray, but we took off to go to a conference in Fort Worth, Texas! I had a number of presentations to deliver, and was particularly excited to get together with my grad school friends.

 

my friends Roy and Moxie - Justin took the picture.

That was the highlight - alas, I wasn't very impressed with Fort Worth. We did have good breakfasts at the hotel, however...
  

Texas shaped waffles! Yummy!

One thing that we did enjoy was driving to Dallas and visiting the 6th floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository -- a museum that details the assassination of John F. Kennedy.  It was an interesting visit.

So naturally I came back to being behind on my grading -- which I am still busy catching up with.  And then Dale pulled a muscle in his back at work, so he wasn't able to do any of the final crawling around under the house so we can finish that.  Instead, we focused on cleaning up the junk pile and getting our trash organized.  Not the most glamorous of duties, but a necessary thing.

In the meantime, we've been looking at ideas online for our beam, and I believe we are going to make a slight arch across the space, and build up the edges into some faux columns.  Something like this from Remodel-aholic:

 This is their 3-D model image - we really like the way they built a lot of character into a space that had none beforehand!  That's a similar challenge that we face - nothing remarkable about the bare space, and we like character.  So we're approaching how to adapt this idea into our space. 

In the meantime, we also went out and ordered our stove - we love the look:

And we are finalizing our plan for kitchen cabinets.  A trip to IKEA to talk with the kitchen planners and clear up some questions about particular cabinets.  We have to order in the next month so we can get 20% off during their annual kitchen sale. Score!

Hopefully, the next post will have some updates on our progress ---

Almost done with the utility moving

Because we're GENIUSES, obviously, we have decided to move every single appliance in the kitchen, which has meant that a lot of the work we're doing up to this point is happening in the crawlspace.  This week, we got the gas and electric moved, finished up the final plumbing, and should be ready any day to finish taking out the last of the cabinets and then actually begin putting things in.  Meanwhile, we're living like this:

Stove and dishwasher in the living room, delightful! 

There were several issues that complicated things - multiple changes made over the years, all of them kind of haphazardly done (adding a 220 for a stove at some point, even though there is a gas hookup, the completely crazy plumbing changes done to throw a random dishwasher in the mix, multiple cable hookups over time -I think every major cable company has done an install here, including a dish on the top of the house, none of which are functioning except the FIOS line).  Each trip under the house means a game of "can you see where this wire goes?" so we can pull it out and simplify the underworld landscape.

The great news is, we've decided 90% on our kitchen cabinet layout - just in time for the big IKEA sale.  And better news is, they don't require any purchase of appliances this year, just a straight "if you buy $4500 worth of kitchen cabinets, you get 20% off", which fits into our scheme perfectly.  So we'll also be ordering those soon, before the sale runs out!

Oh, and you can see the gap under the door above - we did get a visitor the other night, we discovered him while putting things away:

I think he was just as surprised as we were.  We caught him under a bucket and set him back outside.  And we've covered the gap with a rolled towel when we're not working in there!

cold floor Rx

Because we are putting in a marble floor, we were concerned that the floor will be cold on our bare feet.  Half the year, this will be a good thing, but the other half of the year, it will make it uncomfortable.  We don't want to put a heater under the marble, because this room does get a lot of sun since it faces south, and it warms up quickly.  The real concern is nights and first thing in the morning. 

Taking out the linoleum and underlayment, we can see sun through the slats of the subfloor.  We have a lot of ventilation under the house, which is necessary in this climate.  But - that means there are cool breezes blowing under the house when it's cold out - so we knew we wanted to insulate the floor.  Besides the open crawl space breezes, this house doesn't have central heat, and this space is the furthest from the floor heater.

Dale spent most of the afternoon today under the house.  Of course, there's always a bit of bad news when you go into previously uncharted areas, and he found that the old cast iron drainpipe had a small leak under the sink, very minor, and that pipe will be removed when we relocate the plumbing, but it's annoying.  We went through and repaired the termite damage, replacing the subfloor planks that had damage:

This area will be underneath a banquette along the south wall, so it won't have a lot of traffic across it, but it's ready to go.

We went with a recycled denim insulation - for a couple of reasons.  First, I like the fact that it's recycled and environmentally friendly.  no VOC gasses, and no fiberglass particles, which is particularly great considering Dale has to lie on his back and push it up and tack it in place with wire braces.  Nothing like getting a face full of itchy scratchy fiberglass.  Also, it's extremely easy to tear apart with your hands (yet, it's firm and not at all fragile),so cutting is not a problem.

I don't think it's just my imagination, but the room feels so much warmer even tonight!  Before he puts the backerboard underlayment, Dale is going to get the electrical, gas and plumbing relocated while he can easily access the space.  We're pretty happy with this, and we'll be insulating under some of the other areas in the house that are cold (in particular, our bedroom!).

and now, the floor

Finally, the wall is down and we could remove the temporary support.  The opening is so huge!  We hadn't had a chance to see it all clear without either plastic or the temporary support in place, so when we finally removed everything, we were a little surprised at how large the opening was!

Don't you love the precariously hanging fluorescent fixture?  That's gotta go soon enough.

Today, we got started on removing the floor.  We cut through the linoleum and the plywood, and then pulled it up in sections, so we exposed the subfloor.

Lots of nails to pry up and we had a chance to inspect the subfloor planks.  There  are a couple of planks we will need to replace, there is some termite damage.  In southern CA, it's extremely common to have termites, since there's nothing to kill them.  So it's not a matter of IF you have termite damage, but how much.  We have a very small amount in the kitchen, just in one corner, and it has all been treated, so it's not active.  We just need to replace the damaged wood.

 So here's the room now.  We laid down a sheet of plywood on the damaged section so the cats will leave it alone.  Next, we are going to cut the subfloor right across the center of the room, so we can move the gas and plumbing lines.  After we took this picture, we marked out where the island will be, so we know where to have the kitchen plumbing for the sink and dishwasher come up, since they'll be in the island.  The gas line will be moved to where the dishwasher currently is.  Then we'll close the floor up again, leaving the stubs up, and then we can lay the underlayment for tile.

I worked out a plan for the tile -- it will have a pattern something along these lines:

It'll have a 21" border that has a variety of black, white, and mosaic border sections.  This will run all along the walls, with a black/white checkerboard on the diagonal inside.

  I'm anxious to get that started!

sneak peek

As with every project, as soon as we think, "we're almost done, just another couple of hours...." we run into all kinds of snags and unexpected complications.  Just when we were getting the beam all ready to go up, one little thing after another kept cropping up (split joists, bowed boards, electrical confusion), and what we kind of thought would be an afternoon job consumed the whole weekend.

Dale spent entirely too long with his head and shoulders in the attic space, with some odd splicing to figure out.  We had to cut a larger opening to sort this out, but it will be handy so we can access the wiring when we put can lights in the kitchen.

While Dale was working on electrical and constructing the laminated beam, I took down most of the kitchen ceiling tiles and the furring strips.  I still have a row or so to go, because this is where our work zones overlapped.

The ceiling itself is actually in a lot better shape than we'd anticipated.  There are small cracks, but no separation between the plaster and the lath, which is what we were afraid we'd see.  These small cracks are typical of plaster ceilings, and we can patch these up just fine.  There are a few small places where the plaster is soft, over the window and another small spot in the middle.  I also removed 3 layers of wallpaper on the window wall. 

We've managed to pile up quite a large amount of construction trash.  We got rid of all the bathroom construction trash over time, rather than renting a dumpster, and we'll get rid of this the same way.

So taking the wall down gave us a pile of 2 x 4s with a ton of nails in them.....

that we added to the boxes that are filled with the plaster and tile.  The trashcans are full of ceiling tiles and wallpaper scraps....

and we finally got the beam installed and the remainder of the old wall taken down.  The house is dusty, the floors are filthy and there's pretty much a film on everything.  But.... I don't have final photos because we still have the temporary support wall in place.  Dale got called to go into work this evening, so that last little step is still there before we can get a real feel for how it is going to look with the wall gone!

almost there!

s.l.o.w. p.r.o.g.r.e.s.s

I don't know if I can even call it progress, that's how slow it's going.  Dale had to work overtime all week and weekend (he worked over 75 hours this past week!) so when he came home each night, he sort of just took a shower then dropped into a chair for a couple of hours before going to bed.  And I've had the semester start off with all kinds of issues, so since we tore the wall down, nothing has gone on there.  Well, I did take down the plastic after cleaning up the rest of the plaster removal.

The cats are loving the open wall.  They see the horizontal braces as the ideal perch to survey the house.  I keep trying to knock them off so they won't get into more trouble, but they are persistent.






Because when Dale is home I can't even bang things around since he needs his sleep, I ran out to check out a tile shop in Orange County.  I am wanting to do a black and white checkered floor in the kitchen, but I don't want it to look all country, I'd like it to be a little more elegant.  I love this picture of a tile floor:

(from my Pinterest board on house ideas)

I love the black and white checkerboard on the diagonal, and the bands of borders around the side.  But I want it to be in a richer finish, so I went out to check out some marble.    I picked up some 12 x 12 tiles of carrara and nero marble for the field, and a couple of marble mosaic borders.  I laid them out and love the way they look.  So now I have to map out the floor and plan the design.  I am hoping to hit another shop this week to look at kitchen cabinets -- we are likely going with IKEA cabinets, but I'd like to see what other options we might explore before we commit.

Kitchen Demo

Last night after I got home from my long day of teaching, I picked up a couple of plastic shelves to hold our stuff, and unloaded all the kitchen cabinets on the demo side.  It doesn't look pretty, but we'll be living like this for awhile:

Yes, a classy look.  The cats will enjoy getting into everything.

This morning, Dale's job got cancelled because of rain, so he was eager to get started.  First, we took all the drawers out and doors off, then started swinging away with a sledge hammer!

Time out to put the doors and drawers out, and our helpers inspected....

Then it was heavy duty worktime, getting all the tile and wood framing out.

I kept sweeping and cleaning as we went, I hate it when things get piled up.  After we got the cabinets out, we took off the crap tile from behind the stove.  It had this nasty creosote kind of adhesive holding a melamine panel up.  yuk!  The not-so-fabulous 70's tile was really awful, too.  We also took a few rows of the ceiling tile off -- not the whole thing yet, because that will create a mess everywhere, but that'll come off soon enough.


At this point, we decided we could go out and eat a big lunch so we could work all afternoon demolishing the wall, and also pick up some boxes to put our broken plaster in and more plastic to partition off the area so we don't have a house full of dust.  Then we got down to business.

It's VERY satisfying knocking all that ugly stuff down!  and when we could see all the way through, we realize how nice this going to be!  of course, the plastic is up so we can't really get a full feeling, but the kitchen itself is enormous now.

So this is what it looks like now.  Dale has to work again tomorrow morning, so this was a good place to stop for now.  We swept and mopped, and we can walk through a opening we made.

Tomorrow, we hope to get the ceiling cleaned up around the wall so we can see if it really is load-bearing -- we thought it was, but after checking the rafters, we may actually luck out and not have to go with a load-bearing beam after all.  Hopefully, but we want it to be structurally sound, so whatever it takes.  There is a beam across the entry, so we plan on matching that, anyway, it might just be that it's more decorative and less structural.

Well, that was a long break from blogging....

So - in the past month, instead of blogging and working on the house, I've been quite busy traveling, finishing up the end of the semester, getting ready to start the new semester, and enjoying a bunch of family time.

First, we went to Indiana to spend the holidays with Dale's family.  It snowed the day we arrived, to his great happiness, and snowed 2 more times while we were there. More happiness for Dale, less than ecstatic for me.

That's the view from my daughter's driveway after the first snow.  The picture below is during "the blizzard," which was over-rated.  8 inches, but not too horrible.  Lots of blowing snow.

While I was out visiting, my daughter Leslie and I did a bunch of work on the baby's room - we painted the walls, installed molding, did some sewing -- it was a regular craft-o-rama.

She found this picture on Pinterest (left), and we did a dragging technique on the walls with a bamboo colored glaze (right).  The colors in the picture inthe right are a little off, they're closer to the ones in the inspiration picture, but it was hard to catch a good photo at night.

We also made the curtains, the banner, and several other small projects. 

Then we flew home around new year's day, and a week later, left for a conference in Honolulu, where the weather was more to our liking - around 75-80° each day.  We went with our dear friends Herbert and Eric - Herbert and I both presented at the conference, and then spent the rest of the time doing the tourist things!

The view of Diamond Head from our room - -a cheery sight to wake up to each morning!

We hiked up a slippery, muddy slope to view Manoa Falls -- great memories, even though we were filthy by the time we got back to the car!


We also got a great view of the city from the hills.



And the view from the plane as we left --

As soon as I got back, I had a few days to do laundry and clean up before I headed up to Santa Maria to help my niece clean out my sister's house, so she can get it up for sale.  Lots of packing and sorting, but we got most of it done.  We will probably meet up again in a month to have a yard sale to get a lot of the extra stuff taken care of.  I got home late last night.

Sooooo....we're back and now the other fun begins.  We are going to work on getting our kitchen done.  First step, knock out the wall between the kitchen and the living room.  This morning, I got the furniture moved away and removed the paneling from the wall.  Here's how it looked back when we closed on the house, and now...

OK, not an improvement yet.  But we need to get this off and then start removing the plaster.  Getting the room ready for all this mess means taping it off with plastic and trying to keep the mess contained.  I figured if I got the large sheets of paneling off first, I could get the room taped off easier.

As far as plans for the room go, we're playing a bit by ear.   We want to get this wall opened up, then do our measurements and get things planned.  Doing a lot of work on old houses, you learn that you get a lot of surprises any time you check into the walls, and I don't want to have all my plans based on something that can change at the last minute.  On the other side of that wall is this:

So there's a gas line and electrical at least.  No HVAC in this house, so we don't have to worry about that at least.  But it is a load-bearing wall, so we have to put a beam across the span. 

We're not in a big rush. Again, the bathroom took months, so will this.  I have a high tolerance for living in chaos, and I have a lot of things going on at work this spring, so we're going to take this one step at a time.  We have some cabinets in mind, and some ideas for the flooring, but we'll see how things progress as we go.  I want to move the sink to this side of the room, in a center island.  But I want to try out the sizes before I commit.  So we'll build some temporary structure to check out and live with it a bit. 

But...one tiny step forward!