Yes, yes, it's been too long

Sorry we haven't updated the blog in a while. A good friend died unexpectedly, and it really took the wind out of my sails. And the holidays are always a distraction -- good in this case.

We're back on it.

We decorated the new porch with festive garland, lights and a wreath. Next year, it will all be white and even prettier -- though we really loved coming home to this anyhow. Four snows so far (ack) were picturesque, if a bit of a pain.



We installed a new lighting fixture outside at the end of the new sidewalk. That's also where the incredibly ugly gothic house numbers had been, so we gave those an upgrade as well.



This fixture is on a dusk-to-dawn sensor, which is nice security. We also put its larger version (the same one on the front porch) between the garage doors. It's on a motion detector, so we have light when pulling into the driveway. And thanks to our parents' generous Christmas gifts, we even got ourselves garage door openers -- a very welcome luxury, to be installed when it warms up a little.

The library shelves have been done for a bit, but you really have to let paint cure a long time to make sure books and other objects don't stick. However, Jeff took advantage of the open storage to sort some -- not all, but some -- of his t-shirts.



That's just wrong.

Then there was the not-quick task of installing all the doors in both bedrooms, then putting up all-new crown molding, raising the old baseboards, installing cove at the bottom, and caulking and painting each and every seam. Also not quick work.

The new Ethernet line to the library lets us plug the computer right into the wall with no ugly modem or router in sight. Love that.

And now we have the library pretty much done. The brown chair and ottoman from my old living room work OK, but they're a little too big. We have another smaller chair in the basement that needs to be re-upholstered, but its size will likely be perfect.



It's pretty nice sitting in the chair watching a movie on the computer screen. We hope to get a bigger monitor before too long.

The guest bedroom is similarly done. That was a bit more of a challenge to furnish.

The bed is an antique one from Jeff's great-grandfather. It's an odd size, so he had a new mattress and box spring made for it a few years ago. Problem is, the box spring (the shallow kind) is really too large for the frame, and it had cracked one of the legs. Not a good fit. So it needed to be altered.



Jeff went to work gluing and clamping the damage while I dismantled the box spring to cut it down about 3/4 of an inch.



Let the glue dry overnight and tried fitting it back in. Still too big. More chopping. And yet again a little too big. So after the third try, the room is done.



The kitties approve of the twin ottomans at the foot of the bed. (And no, I have no clue why Blogger is rotating that image -- but maybe they'll fix it. I'm not the only one this is happening to.)

This will be a very welcoming guest room, we hope. A couple of details still need fixing, like the single drape panel that's cut a few inches too long (how annoying when you buy premade drapes) and two oak pieces that need to go underneath the exterior door thresholds. But we're 95% there.




All that remains upstairs are the doors to the laundry, some minor paint touch-up and re-smoothing the ceiling in the bathroom. Then we move on to installing the new hardwood steps, and we can focus on downstairs.

Turning colors with the season

Not a lot is progressing inside, but the exterior is a whole new house now.

Our neighbor Tony and his crew got started painting during a sudden chilly snap last week. That makes for good house painting, apparently. Temperatures in the 50s with low wind are best for them, and that's exactly what they had.



We actually dipped below freezing two nights, so I pulled in the last of our grape tomatoes and bell peppers. They, um, didn't taste very good this late. Oh well.

The house is sided with T1-11 plywood siding, which has four-inch vertical grooves cut into it and a rough surface. We find it very appealing, but ours had the original paint job on it, we think -- and it was very, very tough work for the crew. In fact, the house soaked up twice as much paint as we estimated it would. However, that's a good thing, because that means the siding is literally saturated with the very high-quality acrylic in Lowe's Valspar Duramax paint.

Because the painting was so much more work than Tony's guys expected, I decided to go ahead myself and rip off all of the shingle siding that used to look gross underneath the windows. Glad I did that, because it was an enormous factor dating the house right back to 1979.

Among the many reasons you don't want shingles on your house: mud daubers love to build nests behind them, as I discovered when pulling them off.



Apparently this kind of wasp isn't aggressive at all towards humans, but I'm still absolutely petrified of them.




All the shingles gone, with the original siding still underneath and continuous. Add in a bottom line of the 2 x 8 cedar and cut off the vertical trim that used to go to the bottom of the wall, and we have a house that looks somewhat timeless.



Bit of a difference, huh? We really can't wait till the porch can be painted (actually stained) white. But we have to wait another five months or so to let the treated lumber dry out sufficiently to hold the stain properly. Doing it too early can make for bad adhesion -- and we want to do things right.






Oh, and the trees and other foliage are gorgeous all around the lake. Hope to be getting back on track inside soon.

"Close" is in the eye of the beholder

So I said on the 14th of September that we were close on the library. Well, all things are relative, aren't they?

We would have been well and fully done by this time, I'm sure. But as we've come to expect, life got in the way.

In the form of this.



Long story short: Installing the baseboards in our bedroom, we evidently put a nail through a pipe in the bathroom wall. The nail goes in and seals the hole, until it rusts through some weeks later. So we came home a couple of weeks ago to this gaping hole, filled with dozens of gallons of water from the out-of-control leak all day while we were at work.

Also meaning we had to tear a huge hole in our bedroom wall for the plumber to work.



All fixed now.



And the library shelves are all finished and the crown molding installed too.



Plus I ran cable through the walls to get phone and computer network cable installed where we'll want a desk. Why not, when I'm tearing things up anyway?

Ready to move to the guest room. Stayed up till 1 a.m. today getting the popcorn scraped. And a nice bonus for once: The single wall of wallpaper was installed with a very water-soluble paste that came off with no struggle whatsoever.

However, the wall had always had a strange lump right in the dead center. In fact, it's obvious the textured wallpaper was installed expressly to "hide" the lump -- which it didn't do one bit.

Always realizing the cause might be a lot stranger than I thought, I dug in. I didn't bother to try to strip a section of wallpaper around it, which was a good thing. A 3-by-4 foot section was pretty much all torn up, as though the top layer of drywall paper had been removed. Jeff theorizes they had something glued to the wall, and I bet he's right.



Let's cut away.



And what I discover when I get inside the wall:



Look at the stud closest to the camera. Your eyes aren't playing tricks. It's been cut in half and then sorta-kinda put back together, with a huge bend outward.



In close up. This is one of the more bizarre things I've ever seen. I have absolutely no idea why they would have done this. Especially strange is the little nail seemingly attempting to hold the two pieces together. The pencil line you see is where it needs to be in order to fall in line with the rest of the wall. It's an easy fix with a swipe of the circular saw, and an easy patch.



And that's all done. Time to smooth and paint. Then trim, then floors, then doors, then baseboards.

Then the laundry room gets its doors and everything receives a final once-over. And then upstairs is done.

Small update, big changes

The shelves are pretty much built now. All pieces are cut except for the six vertical frontpieces, which can't go in until the shelves are all installed.



I don't have a wide enough lens to get them all in, but you get the idea from the terrible photo.

Wet and too wild

We are well into the work on the library shelving. We started out here after the KC Deck Builder guys got the new window into the north wall.



This room's a lot more open and airy now. The whole thing will be lined with bookshelves when we're finished (which is soon). The ceiling's all de-popcorned and smoothed -- definitely our best job so far.

Unfortunately, we were sidetracked. By -- all together, now -- another flood. The worst one of the year so far, in fact. Which came along with a tornado watch that Jeff had to endure while I was in Lawrence doing a review for the paper. While he was herding the cats into the basement for cover, he was treated to the window well doing this. (Pringles help a lot in cat-herding. - Jeff)



Not as much water as we used to get. But DANG IT. We were sure we'd fixed it.

When I got home, I decided this had to end, so we got out in the unreal torrent. While Jeff held the flashlight (and got bitten no fewer than TWENTY times by mosquitoes -- no exaggeration at all - Jeff), I got a big piece of plastic sheeting and crawled under the deck. And there I finally discovered the problem. When we had the grading done on the outside of the foundation back in May, the landscapers put a big line of earth under the north edge of the deck. Seemed like it would keep water out, which it would -- if only the land were sloped so that water ran that way. None of us realized it was actually sloped the OPPOSITE direction. Meaning that all this time we've had the floods, it's been because water's been coming from the other side of the deck and getting trapped, creating a lake that eventually backed up into the window well.

Which explains why we never saw previous water damage. We created this problem in trying to ward off future problems.

Back to the rainstorm. With about nine inches of clearance, I dug out a trench through the dam. As soon as I hit the other side, the lake started clearing immediately.



By morning, there had been almost four more inches of rain -- well over six total in just one night. But the basement was DRY. Well, save for the new leak in the opposite corner, the result of not having put a downspout extension on after they finished the porch. Some dirt-moving and downspout work later, it's fixed there too. Not a huge deal, considering how much water we had.



The catch-basin low spot in our backyard, as I used the pump to clear it out. Note the dirt berm at the lower left, which Jeff made before the storm, buying us a lot of time under the deck.



A neighbor who's been at the lake for decades says this is the very worst flooding she's ever seen. The docks down at C-point are all unbelievable. The water was way, way up over the seawall. It's starting to recede now, but it has a long way to go.

The bathroom ceiling had also leaked again earlier in the week. This time we finally got a roofing repair guy over, who discovered the culprit: A 4-inch pipe flange on a 3-inch drain vent. Grrr. Fixed now. Tight as a drum for the latest storm.

And we're also having a pro dig a nice, deep French drain under the deck to funnel all this stuff out efficiently into the creek next to us.

Back to the shelves. They're almost done.



And Jeff did a nice cartoon where the last one will fit into place. Note Liz watching in approval while I toil away in my Gary Numan shirt.



We're close on this room, thank goodness.

Randomness

Looking through the house pix, I just came across this hilarious shot.



This is the result when we were tiling the bathroom and poor Jeff had to take a barcode sticker off about 2/3 of the tiles we used.

Really lame. I know why the stores have to do it, but BLECH.

Windows and shelving

Lots more done in a relatively short time. The guys at KC Deck Builders finished up with everything, and we're very pleased with the results. The new windows are in, and look like they've always been here.



The dining room looks vastly bigger. Unbelievable what a difference it makes to have light coming in this north face.




Ditto on the bedroom upstairs, which we're turning into a library/sitting room.



And from outside, everything lines up and looks just fine. It won't win any design awards on this face, but it's not terrible. Another window in the kitchen will help to balance things a bit.

Today I finished trimming out the tops of the porch posts with details to give them a bit more weight.



Meanwhile, Jeff finished up the painting on the new shelves in the master bedroom closet. While the closet's a good size, its depth was totally wasted before with nothing but a set of bars and a shelf at the back. Like that, it might as well have just been hanger-deep.



These new open shelves are going to provide a huge amount of storage. Living with our clothes in the weird shelves between the dining room and living room have sold me on this kind of storage. You can see everything and get to it easily, since the piles can't get too tall and disorganized.

Next, back to scraping popcorn -- this time in the library. Blech.