CLUE: in the kitchen with a crow bar

I'm in between major projects right now due to the fact that Liam has not had very much time to finish sanding the hardwood floors in the guest room. My goal of finishing the upstairs of the house by the end of fall is far too grandiose.

I have set my priorities for weatherproofing the house for the winter season ahead of us.

Time is flying by! This has been one of the worst summers weather wise we've had in I think years...the rain has just not let up. Cloudy with a chance of rain, almost every other day...and almost every weekend!

Anyway, we have a second floor balcony off of...our bathroom. We're settling to seal if off with asphalt roofing material, caulk it up, and expand the gutter area.

We have some serious problems with our eat in kitchen due to the water damage caused by this second floor patio's absense of roofing material and lack of gutter flow. The ceiling in the kitchen has of course been patched over and over, without attention to the cause by the previous owners. I can't believe people can be so ignorant, and so cheap. We're talking decades of neglect of the cause of this situation resulting in the rot of a beautiful large window.

We've already replaced the window. We are now resorting to removing the old window casing and rebuilding a new one.

It was interesting to pull out the old rusted pulley system with the 8lb weights inside, seriously rusted from water damage. It must have not been functioning for years. That is really ridiculous if you ask me.

My nerves are shot after having to tear out the whole casing, saving only the portion of the right side and thankfully the stool. The rest was completely rotten.

Here's what's going on now:









Up next, I will be knocking down the loose plaster from the damaged portion of the wall and ceiling to install drywall sections and or/ new laths where needed.

PRESENTING...

HERE YE! HERE YE!

The hallway is complete!!!...mind you, the quarter round is not in place yet, but it is indeed finished otherwise...mind you, the doors have not all been refnished, and the bathroom door is still busted...but it is indeed finished otherwise.

HOORAY! blow your horns, everyone!

The ROYAL PAIN would like to present to you this...ROYAL HALLWAY!

(I've been watching too much sketch comedy with Liam OR I've fallen to insanity over the labor of this job.)

new outlet in hallway

the old one looked pretty scary eh? look at that cracked casing on the the neutral line in the last image?

I'm very pleased that I was able to install a new outlet in the uptairs hallway. I don't necessarily need to replace all the two-prong outlets in the house, but this outlet was in really poor shape, very loose, and probably not very safe. For right now, I was not able to ground this outlet because we only have pvc piping in our basement, and I will need a professional to come back and fish down a very long grounding line, that he can then run along the basement ceiling and attach to one of the metal outlet boxes in the basement. If we are unable to reach a grounding location, as a last resort, a gfci can be easily installed in place of the current open-ground three prong. I feel confident that the new outlet is much safer than the previous outlet however.

The previous outlet had been installed upside down, which is the reason why plugs never really stayed in it correctly. I discovered that the reason for this was that the splice inside made it difficult to move the wires to the correct terminal sides. The wires in this box were pretty brittle and not in very good shape, but that happens when you have an outlet that's been tugged on so many times for so many years becuse it was loose in the box. The new outlet won't allow any tugging on the lines.

I did have to install the new outlet upside down. I'm proud that I was skilled enough to know that the terminals were previously reversed before installing the new outlet. It's really no big deal. We'll just have to plug things in upside down, but now the plug won't fall right out and the lines will not be at risk for further damage.

Cutting the wires, and re-strpping them allowed for a much more secure connection. I carefully wrapped everything with electrical tape and we now have a very secure, and safe three prong outlet. It is not grounded yet, but will cause no harm. We will not be plugging in power tools at this location which is the only reason you would need it in case of a dangerous malfunction, where there is risk of electric shock, and the circuit breaker would need to quickly shut down the line.

just don't tell that to the city...

Yards of Yardwork

We have really cleaned up our yard, thanks to a lot of sweat labor. Again, I wish there were more "befores", but I often forget because I'm too exhausted on these project weekends.

When we bought the house, I didn't even really pay attention to the fact that the yard was overgrown with weeds and stray trees. Last summer, we just couldn't care about the yard of course. We had to bust our butts on the inside to make it liveable before the Fall. Finally, this year we get to take pride in our very own big yard!

Here are some photos of the lawn after the weeding, and thatching. We took down the large tree beside the garage. It's down to the stump now and we're going to have professionals grind it up when we have the trees trimmed back from over the garage. (up next on the list of yardwork) I'm so proud of Liam taking that tree down. Can you believe, he did it himself?

I'll have additional photos soon. We still need a wheedwhacker to clean things up. We'll be doing some more landscaping, mulching along the fence in the back, and river-rocking beside the air conditioner and garage.

Since these photos have been taken, again we've taken the tree down to the stump, and stipped a broken fence down to the posts. More photos soon!

The front lawn has been treated with fertilizer, and looks much better already.
The backyard is still a jungle as far as the weeds that pop up after we mow. We'll be fertilizing the back as soon as I can figure out how without one of those green push carts? because of course we're lacking in that as well. (I'm going to try the free-cycle or craiglist for weedwhackers and fertilizer carts!)

This yard is going to be in top shape by the time fall rolls around this year!

We're planning a BBQ perhaps for August!

Driveway Make-Over

Liam and I are working on our curb appeal. Hopefully this will help our market value in order to eventually take out a home equity line to do major renovations on the bath/kitchen this winter. We were unable to get approved for one so far, due to the number of foreclosures in the area leaving our house under value even after $20,000 in repairs.

(sigh)

Well, it makes me want to work that much harder.

As far as the yard goes, I've started small, and will work my way around the yard.

One of the first eye-sores when driving into our drive-way were all the wild grasses and weeds along the side fence. Liam and I sprayed them with weed killer probably two months ago, and then dug them up a month later...but then another month went by and the weeds began popping up again. I finally had it with the weeds, and dug them all up again on Tuesday. It took me about three hours.

I decided that I would need to lay down something to prevent weeds from growing back along the fence. I searched forums and came up with the "newspaper method" for underlayment to mulch and river rock. That sounded a lot easier than cutting up plastic sheeting or stapling down landscaping fabric. It also sounded much more economical of course, and not too bad for the environment afterall.

So, Tuesday night Liam and I picked up a couple bags of whatever they had at WalMart. We discovered some Lava Rock and some really nifty rubber mulch. Rubber mulch doesn't weather like regular mulch, so supposedly you don't have to mulch every year, it's also 100% recycled material, and does not mold or rot. It's soft, and doesn't cause splinters. It's also resistant against WEEDS! I thought well that sounds terrific.

It gave me some ideas. I did a test run with the Lava Rock (a red earth tone rustic rock) and the rubber mulch in red as well. It looked great, so on Wednesday evening, we picked up a load of Lava Rock & rubber mulch.

Today is Thursday, and I've spent several hours today papering the old weeded area, with newspaper and water (so it wouldn't blow away.) then installing the Lava Rock and rubber mulch.

It looks fantastic! I have to say that I'm not really a red person, and wasn't even sure if I was going to like the red, but after seeing it all layed out...it adds a lot of drama, a lot of elegance and richness to the lawn already. Now our driveway is more GLAM, like riding the red carpet.


















Hopefully this will actually last the entire time we live in the house, so I never have to do it all again. I have faith in this rubber mulch! Again, I wish I had a better extreme before and after. The weeds used to be 2 ft tall there. Oh well...you can imagine.

I'M BACK!

It's been about a month since I've updated this blog. I'm going to get back on it. Liam and I are still working hard on the house. I'm also working hard on my business. That leaves me really no time for much else.

The weather was crumby for a lot of June. It was difficult for me to find the motivation to do a lot of the things I've wanted to do, but now that it is July and summer is flying by, and the weather is looking up, I'm back in business with the yardwork.

I still have not finished the hallway upstairs which is really bugging me. It's really really close though. In June I completely remodeled my business and it was a huge painstaking process that took me weeks into the month to complete. It has paid off though. My business has grown a lot in one month. Before I knew it however, June was over too fast, and I still had many projects with the house left hanging.

The sunshine is great this week for working in the yard, so I'm taking a pause from my shop to work full time in the yard and I hope to accomplish doing a lot of things to make our lawn look really great. That's important in this housing market here...when our house is only worth $68,000 to drive-by appraisers (sigh) The thought of that has made me want to work that much harder to work on our curb appeal before the Fall.

I will update with photos as soon as I find a moment!

Thanks for the support!

Sincerely,
Chelsea