Paver Project

Occasionally, one likes to exit ones home and step upon ground that is not mushy or wet or dusty, or that makes ones shoes track said mush or wetness or dust across ones home should one forget to remove one's shoes upon entering said house.

In other words: we've gotta do something about our lack of walkways.

For a house bounded tightly on two sides by a paved street, our exterior doors are  remarkably far from pavement. The back door requires you to trudge across grass (although that'll hopefully change once we get our act together and do the backyard already) that is often sloppy wet for days after a rain storm. The front door is the same, although the grass and weeds are patchy enough that it's more of a mud puddle. Exit 2-B was out the front door and to the left, jumping off the porch across the "side yard" into the street, but we just purposefully transplanted some big-ass plants to that spot to discourage people (read: us) from doing that. So it looks like we're gonna focus on the front walk.

We'd been holding back from putting pavers in mainly because Abby is frightened that the French drain I put in wasn't good enough. I'm only slightly offended by the notion... But not enough to overcome the knowledge that a poorly-done drain with pavers on top would be that much harder (and more expensive) to fix. So I was willing to wait.

After a few rainstorms with the new drain, most of the moisture was gone, but a big pit kept on forming right in front of the door-- the aforementioned mush. I realized, however, that the pit was forming because of a tiny hole in the (new) gutter, which was digging out the fresh, soft dirt underneath every time it rained, so regardless of the presence of the drain directly underneath, the water just pooled immediately. I was confident that with the pavers placed right there, a hole couldn't be drip-dug, and the water would disperse. Really, I was confident...

So we budgeted a whole day for the project. Saturday morning I ripped up the grass and weeds, and while Abby went to Home Depot to get a load of supplies, I dug. I was supposed to dig an 8-inch trough between the lines she had set; instead, it was more like a foot, so... We had to buy a lot more supplies. Five more trips to Home Depot later (not counting the truckload I had brought home Friday) we had 90 bags of paver base (which is basically crushed brick), 20 or so bags of sand, and 180 brick pavers-- small ones 9 lbs, large ones 14 lbs.

The project progressed pretty well, but not quite as quickly as we had hoped. All of Saturday (and all of Sunday) later, we were about 75% done. Midweek, maybe 90%. Abby did some sweeping of sand into the crevices a few times-- and still has to do some more-- but we're finally done, about ten days later. We actually got a lot of help from the kids-- especially Lola, who was tickled that  this crazy project meant she wouldn't have to trudge her bike through the mud to put it on the porch anymore. Isaac wasn't too thrilled about helping in ways that weren't "exciting," but we even got the attention of neighborhood kids, who helped lay some of the final bricks.

Where the kids really helped was in getting rid of some of the large dirt-and-rock pile I had created by digging (too deep). It was about three cubic meters of fill, and I figured I'd try to get rid of it on Craigslist before I paid someone to remove it. We had two bites immediately, and the kids helped shovel the stuff pretty enthusiastically into one of their trucks. Impressive! We've got about a third of the total pile left, and I'm kind of hoping I can wish it away...

But guess what? I was right about the French drain and the drip-digging: big storm came, and no water accumulating anywhere :)

We spent this weekend looking for some more vegetation, and lucked into two big junipers courtesy of our neighbors Cathy and Brian, who wanted to get rid of them. (Hope they survive the transplant.)

Regardless, look whose house is actually connected to the road now!

Digging up the mud.

Leveling off the mud

Pouring gravel for a runoff

Setting out paver base

Sand on top

And of course it starts to rain...

Buying pavers at Home Depot

My helper getting pavers out of Ganzo

Paying out the pavers

USING the pavers!

Voila! The finished product!

White on White

With Abby and the kids in North Carolina for the week, I've been left to my own devices. And that means, in the last four days, I've made three trips to Home Depot, spent fourteen hours painting, and have somehow reinvigorated our contractors. Don't ask me how on that last one, because if I knew, I'd kick myself for not having done whatever it was a whole lot earlier.

Just like Adam Duritz of Counting Crows,
I have stepped into a fog where no one
notices the contrast of white on white.

First off, what I'm doing myself. Painting. And more painting. We have about three miles worth of trim in our house, and all of it is plain white-primed wood, just ready to be finished. No idea why it was put in prior to being painted, but I'm not about to pull it off piece by piece in order to make the painting process quicker, as my cousin Tim the contractor suggests. (Tim the out-of-state contractor, I might add; otherwise, he'd be Tim my contractor.)  I know pulling it off would speed up the painting process, but I have nowhere to do the actual painting once that happens-- no basement, no yard that isn't entirely mud (and would therefore likely force me to clean the trim after painting it), no workhorse things (isn't that what they're called?) to set up on the street outside. So for this project, it's the slog of alternating between a paintbrush and a mini-roller, laying on the ground and climbing ladders and choosing a shirt to ruin with paint-- my old, huge Albany tee, in this case.

The painting is satisfying up close, because I can see the paint going on wet, but frustrating from afar. That's because, after eight hours of painting on Saturday, I stepped back and saw pretty much no change at all. White paint replaced white primer. (At least all the furniture was moved away from the wall and my Albany shirt was sufficiently messed up, so I could prove to neighbors passing by that I had actually been doing something the whole day!) However, on day two, things changed. Only three hours of painting on Sunday left me with completed trim-- two coats-- throughout the entire upstairs. And since it's high-gloss, while you can't necessarily see the difference, you can feel it. Just run your hands across the door frame on the way to the kitchen, and instead of a blunt, matte surface, your hands are greeted with a smooth, cool surface that says "people might actually live here!"  Monday night I started downstairs, and after three hours I stopped, having completed a first coat in the bathroom and mud room-- that's it. Holy cow: whose idea was it to get trim?

This afternoon I'll have a choice: go back home and keep brush-painting the as-yet unpainted surfaces, or stop by Home Depot for a fourth time in five days to get a new roller so I can do the second coat. I tried the trick Abby told me about-- wrapping the roller in cellophane and sticking it in the fridge-- but rather than keeping it wet and usable, like the paintbrush, it just hardened the roller into a latexy rock.

"Now real people can use me!"

Well, while that excitement was forming in the refrigerator, something was actually happening just a 90-degree turn to the left. Yes, contractors were in our house, and they fixed the problem with the range hood-- namely, that it was positioned about nine inches above the range itself, so as to aid denizens of Munchkinland in their cooking travails, should they ever need to make use of our kitchen. In their defense-- the contractors', not the Munchkins'-- the range hood had been placed level to the bottom of the cabinets, so there was a pretty line from one side to the other. But then there was that whole pesky not-being-able-to-reach-the-back-burners issue to deal with. Rory called me at work, asked me a bunch of questions pertaining to the things on our list, and surprised me when he said he saw what I was talking about-- meaning he was actually at the house. His being sent out is probably a sign that I have pissed Mark off enough that he wants to shut me up, but I think that's a good sign. Especially since when Rory's on the scene, things get done.

It all probably emanated from my frustrated email last week.

Mark + Rory: What is going ON? No one has been here for at least ten days. Meanwhile, we're living in a construction zone, and people are downright laughing at us. We would be too-- this is beyond ridiculous. There is NO acceptable reason your guys were not here this week. NOT amused. We need action immediately on the items we emailed you with already three times. There are NO excuses. Gregory + Abby

I'm not usually an emphatic capitalizer, but come ON.  Actually, I bet it came from the fact that I copied Rory on the email, rather than just sending it to Mark; that's worked in the past, and I don't know why I had stopped doing it. Whatever reason, something was done yesterday, and a large piece of drywall was left on our front porch, so who knows what else they're planning for this week?

Other than painting and the stove, the only other movement on the house has been self-initiated. After seeing the constant influx of cricket spiders and regular spiders and fruit flies and now wasps inside and out, I made an executive decision to get us some pest management. Terminix came out and sprayed the place, and now there are clumps of dead little bugs in the corners of the bathroom that I have to sweep up every day. I was told to wait two weeks, then call for another round, at which point everything should be dead. The exterminator was amusing-- he started the appointment by telling us how he's pretty sure he and his friends used to get high in our house back when it was abandoned (then apologized if that offended us, which hopefully you know it wouldn't, especially since he's not the first to tell us he'd done that!), then told us our house had an inordinate number of bugs in it, finishing up by asking if he could grab a ziploc bag to take a few back to the office, since there was a specific bug-- teeny tiny white ones-- he'd never seen before. Always ones to be unusual, we are.

I also finished the row of bushes planted over the last two weekends by filling in the holes with nine bags -- 360 pounds -- of topsoil. The holes were the result of taking huge clumps of rock out of the bed. I guess I could have left 'em in there, but we want those bushes to grow, and I don't want rocks I left in the ground to be the reason all those bushes may get stunted. And as far as stunted bushes go, there's one issue I've been avoiding: our front yard.

They're gonna have to dig it up. And someone's gonna have to pay. A few weeks ago now, Mark was telling me that he was fighting the inspection issue with the county, because the inspector had looked at the retaining wall, regardless of their records. Rory concedes that he probably should have called to follow up with the inspector, who had been there to look only at the footer, but that he definitely had done the inspection. I didn't believe Mark 100%, but I do trust Rory. Thing is, Mark mentioned the inspection while noting he had explained to the inspector how it "would be unfair to have to charge the homeowner $4000 to re-dig."  No response from me, other than quiet bewilderment. So Rory mentions this time that they had feelers out to get quotes on the dig. So that sounds like they're at least trying to get the cost down... But I feel we shouldn't have to pay at all. It's not our fault, and although I'm now unconvinced that it's entirely the contractors' fault, it's not our fault. Similar to how I expect not to have to pay for the patching of two spots in the porch roof where recent downpours have revealed leaks, this was not a repair job-- it was a job from scratch, and we shouldn't have to pay to fix their mistakes.

But something tells me what I think ain't what's gonna happen. Sigh.

So for now, I'm gonna focus on painting enough that it looks like something was actually done when the fam gets back, and hoping the contractors do enough that it can be a decent surprise to both me when I get home from work every day and Abby on her return. Hey, stranger things have happened. Like, for instance, work restarting this week.

Pipes, Paint, and a Plymouth

We had a bunch of visitors this week, which is why I didn't have much of a chance to write anything, even though we actually came to the house three times in the last seven days (and have the pics to prove it).  On Friday we had our first repeat out-of-town visitors when the Stewarts (Laura, Brian, and Katie) came down from Buffalo for the weekend.  Laura had been clamoring for a Bungalow visit since their first stop by last year, and I don't think she was disappointed-- although the usually bustling atmosphere almost left me a liar when we arrived and only two guys were working.  I had just been telling Laura how the workers are constantly going, and of course we get there and the place has crickets chirping.  But it was just a lull in the action, because within five minutes a truckload of gravel arrived and suddenly a half-dozen people surrounded it with shovels.  Vindication!

Shoveling gravel

Lola with Katie Stewart, surveying the gravelly hole on our porch

In the days leading up to the Stewarts' visit, the contractors had unearthed (literally) a problem while excavating under the porch.  Seems the stone wall serving as the retaining wall was not in any condition to be kept there.  Initially, it looked like after firming it up, they'd just build a stronger wall in front of it, which would basically take ten inches (at least) away from the space.  I was bummed, because the whole space is only about five feet wide, so those ten inches took nearly 20% of the reclaimed room away.  Not to mention, the bathroom and guest room would be that much more cramped.  However, as a surprise (of sorts) the stone wall was completely removed, the porch kept up on jacks, and a new retaining wall was on its way.  The gravel was being poured through holes in the now-taken-up porch floor into a two-foot trench dug all the way around the excavation, with rebar going in afterwards for a new front foundation.  My ten inches has been saved!  (Also saved were the beautiful stones in the wall-- all native to the property-- that we plan on using for landscaping once all's said and done.)

The channel for our new front foundation wall.

Pouring gravel into the foundation channel

Inside, the temporary flooring on the ground floor has been removed so the plumbing (all $15k worth) could go in.  Now you can see the big PVC pipes underneath the floor joists, all set to carry our waste water to the sewer.  (I think Isaac got a kick out of the idea that water from the toilets would head under Lola's room and not his...)  Rory tells us the sewer piping is all done, and all that's left is the actual connection and meter outside.  One problem we did discover was in the upstairs bathroom, where Abby & I think the pipe for the toilet's not placed correctly.  We had planned a 4-foot-wide shower, with the toilet between that and the sink.  However, the shower's been roughed in to be only 30 inches wide, so the toilet's really close in.  The four-footer was supposed to be really luxurious, and 30 inches is basically as wide as an interior doorway.  Needless to say, we're going to try to make sure the toilet pipe is moved at least an extra foot, if not two feet, further away.  I have put up with eight years in a claw-foot tub, and I want my luxurious shower stall!

PVC piping under Lola's bedroom floor

Other news?  The two-story window complex (how else would I refer to it?) in the Great Room has been rehabbed and reset in the wall, and it looks fantastic.  One of the windows was open and letting in a great breeze, which was welcome since the temperature was teetering between hellfire and damnation that day.  Each new piece of the Great Room reminds me why I love this house-- I could just spend all my time in it once I'm there... SO happy we chose the layout that allowed it to be fully opened.  In fact, the other night while laying in bed I confessed to Abby that I was having misgivings about even putting a TV in the room, because it was just so pretty.  It doesn't really fit having a TV, but I don't want to spend evenings downstairs in the family room once the kids are asleep.  Well what do you know: Abby already had planned for that, and is fully intending for us not to have the TV mounted on the wall as we had originally planned, but instead to buy a doohickey that would raise and lower the set so it can be hidden behind a chest of drawers when it's not in use.  That's why she gets to plan the layout, not because of any feng shui business!

The other visitor we had this week was Abby's Uncle Jimmy, who drove his gorgeous 1939 Plymouth all the way up from Tennessee to visit on his way to an antique car show in Pennsylvania.  We dropped by the house with him last night before introducing him to sushi-- which he amazingly enjoyed.  (He may have lost of bit of luster among his fellow East Tennesseeans by doing so...)  He was definitely tickled to see the house, which he's been hearing about this whole year, and had fun exploring the place and looking into the windows of the neighboring places.  Oh, and the owners of the windmill next door had better watch out: Jimmy says in case of a storm, he's running over and jumping into your cellar. :)  And one more thing: when we went to the house with Jimmy, we noticed it had been painted!  No trim or anything, but the Tadpole Green's up, and we love it.

Jimmy with the newly-painted bungalow and his 1939 Plymouth

So there has to be some negative news in there, right?  Yeah, well our homeowners' insurance expires at midnight tonight, and we won't finalize our new policy until tomorrow morning, so we're going to have something like a twelve-hour lapse between policies.  You may remember Travelers so unceremoniously dropping us last month.  Well, since then I've been calling around trying to get someone to take us, without any luck.  This past weekend, our old State Farm agent sent us a letter trying to get us back, and I decided to give them a call.  The agent was nice enough, and worked to see what she could do for us, but in the end said we were a "builder's risk" and gave me the contact information for one of her colleagues that did that kind of high-risk insuring.  She called yesterday and said we could finalize things today, but her colleague (are you following) made a mistake by calling my cell phone this morning, leaving one message at 9AM, and never calling back.  (FYI everyone: I work in a SCIF, which means I can't have a cell at work.)  So I didn't get the message until I turned on my phone in the Metro after 5PM.  Argh.  First thing tomorrow, and hopefully nobody burns down our house tonight.

Excavation and an Acadian. Maybe.

For those of you who have been here from the start, you may remember that our front porch is built on top of nothing.  Literally, nothing.  Not on top of dirt, or stone, or rock, or, I dunno, quicksand?  Nope-- nothing.  We found this out when our home inspector pretty much fell through the porch and said the equivalent of "um, hey guys?  I fell through the porch into nothing."  Except with a French-Canadian accent.  (I think he was French-Canadian, although I may be imagining things...)

Where the possibly-Acadian home inspector fell through the porch.

What you could see of the dirt under the porch, originally.

Looking down into the abyss, under the once and future porch.
This is the laundry room and guest room you're looking at.

For some reason, the front of the house is perched on a bunch of load-bearing two-by-fours, while the roof is held up, via the four front pillars, by an underground stone wall, unconnected to the two-by-fours.  Over 115 years, this setup has allowed dirt to seep in.  How much dirt?  Well, here's how it looked last week:

Once we got down there, this is the mound of dirt.
The porch is up top, and you're standing in what will
be the downstairs bathroom, looking through the
guest room and into the laundry room.
Notice the lovely load-bearing walls on either side.

Anyhow, I had the brilliant idea that we should excavate the whole thing and expand into that space.  We're pretty much not allowed to do anything to the house because of historical rules, but they don't care what we do underground, so as long as we're on our own property, theoretically, the sky's the limit.  (Or the opposite, really.)  This week they've started to excavate, and have hit a few small snags.  First off, there's apparently a lot more dirt down there than they expected.  $4000 more, actually.  Yeah, I know.  They were unable to use a big machine to do the digging, because the porch above would not support a machine. (Recall, if you will, the Quebecker screaming.  "Mon dieu! Zut allors! Et autres phrases francais!")  So everything had to come out by hand.  If you ask me, $4000 means everything came out with tiny spoons, but that's neither here nor there, and look what a great job they did, spoons or no spoons:

All excavated!

We had to go to the house this afternoon to meet with Sheyy for loan stuff (another story completely), so Mark and Rory wanted us to come over to talk about a few things having to do with this lovely excavation.  Lovelier than the $4000?  Maybe...  Anyhow, it looks like the wall to the right, made of lovely stones, is also pretty much useless.  No way we can build a real wall against it, let alone expect it to keep out any kind of moisture.  (Luckily it's been pouring, so we can see how much water we might expect in a non-hurricane worst-case scenario.)  So we have to put a moisture barrier all the way around, then build a cement-block wall in front of it for stability before we frame it out and put drywall in.  All in all, we're losing about ten inches of space from that side. Putting quite the squeeze on the guest room, that's for sure.  

Another issue is the bathroom.  The downstairs bathroom is in the corner of the house, in an addition that was put on several decades after it was built-- I think in the 1920s.  Anyhow, this is the one area of the house we couldn't really get into well the whole time, because the floor was unstable.  So we learned that apparently our architect also couldn't really get into it either; apparently he just estimated where things were by measuring the outside of the house and doing some math.  Now we find out there's this strange 6-inch half-wall running the length of the bathroom, and a load-bearing pillar smack-dab in the middle of it all.  After a bunch of thinking, we came up with a plan we hope will work, which basically involves moving the bathroom sinks from one wall to another, and having to deal with the fact that instead of a mirror over one of the sinks there will be a window.  With a HUGE ledge of about 18 inches.  That we can't really put stuff on because the window opens by swinging in. 

Positive: We found that, under the stairs and behind the mudroom-to-be's walls there's this oddly shaped circular space where we may be able to tuck our water heater.  (FYI, we're getting the kind that has no tank, but heats on demand.  It saves a whole bunch of energy when you're not home for a while, which kinda happens sometimes...)  

Notice the curve of the circular staircase at left, and the
strange space between that and the load-bearing walls at center.
We'll be able to do something with that, but we're not 100% sure what.

Negative: We found that having the boiler (which is also the air conditioner) in the center of the downstairs is just not going to work, and it won't work in the mudroom either.  Unfortunately, this means we're likely going to have to put it on top of the upstairs bathroom, which means we'll be losing some of the airspace we had gained in the Great Room.  The upstairs bathroom cuts out into the Great Room right now, and although the space above it is useless, it feels luxurious, and it also shows the gorgeous original rails along the wall.  Now, that will likely be boxed in, and we will probably lose most or all of the storage space behind the rails and above the window boxes to large duct work.  Better that than having huge bulkheads running through the house, but I'm still bummed.  I asked Mark to see if there was any way they could still finagle some storage space up there, and to see if we could get some faux rail to match the part that will be blocked.  Just have to make sure the MHT folks don't see the word "faux" anywhere, because that's something likely to make them kvetch.  (Tiny positive: because the AC unit was moved from downstairs, we will no longer have a weird closet opening up into the middle of the family room, and Isaac's closet can be much bigger.)

Unfortunately we're going to be re-losing the space above the bathroom cutout,
and most or all of the storage space behind the rails around the Great Room.

These developments are the first of what I'm sure will be many (hopefully not too many) unexpected on-the-spot changes, difficulties, and expenses for this project.  This week was kind of a shock to us, because it's been the first with out-of-pocket expenses, as opposed to the regular expenses which are already counted into our mortgage payment.  Had to pay the first $7,500 for the plumber to connect us to the water and sewer mains on Saturday; he starts Monday.  And had to pay the first $5,000 to the contractor for the excavation and a whole bunch of other stuff having to do with the excavation, such as removing the concrete-slab foundation under the half of the downstairs bathroom that has it (the rest of the house rests only on dirt) because with the foundation the ceiling will be less than seven feet tall.

However, at this point at least, it's still totally worth it.  It's fantastic to arrive at the house and see double-digits of people working (actually working, not just sitting around, either), and machines humming and people on ladders and piles of trash and NEW STUFF going in.  Yeah, nerves are being wracked, but so far so good, I think.  Abby?  Well, she's a bit more nervous than I am.  Or maybe I just hide it better...  But remember, comparatively speaking, this job is going swimmingly.  Swimmingly, I say; swimmingly. (And now for the pictures I promised the other day, of all this new stuff.)

If you look closely, you can see new cedar shingles and the new porch roof.
Oh, and the picket fence is gone!  Watched them tear it right off.

Look at the new flashing!  So crisp!  And not rotting!

Finally they've removed the Great Room windows for rehab.
These are the pieces de resistance for the room, along with the
vaulted ceiling. I CANNOT wait to see this completed.

And the removed Great Room windows from the outside.
Love the patchwork look the house is getting, with the new
taking over the old.  And notice the old paint is mostly gone.

Traveling salesmen?  Oh, please just step over here!  Whoops...
(Best part of this picture is that someone painted over the incorrect
address that been on the house, over the mailbox.  It used to be right,
but not for the past decade I guess.  And everyone, from the water company
to the US Postal Service, was very confused by it.)

Porch Roof Work

Thought you might like to know that now, if you are ringing our doorbell at the bungalow, and it is raining out, you can safely put away your umbrella.

BEFORE: Looking up THROUGH the porch roof

AFTER (or at least DURING): Looking up AT the porch roof!