Tree Stump Side Table and Beautiful Flower Gifts

The Art of Doing Stuff blog

I'm a SO gonna do this with our leftover "Bye-bye-Tree" stumps sitting by the greenhouse (correction: dilapidated shack).
http://www.theartofdoingstuff.com/stumped-how-to-make-a-tree-stump-table/

And here are some of the flowers we were given with this house. 

Marshmallow! Medicinal

Raspberry! Chuckbaby favourite!

Touch Me Nots- highly invasive.
 Oh well, can't win em all.

Delphiniums a little outta control in the yard

Ground cover I don't know the name of

Brown-eyes Susans...right?

Beautiful thyme flowers

Lead Paint

See the "newel post" above, eh? Eh? I know new words!

About two weeks ago, when I first started scraping paint off the newel post (that is a fancy word for the post at the bottom of the stairwell), I looked into lead paint. What I found was enough to make me regret buying this house at all.

I know it's probably obvious to the rest of y'all, but lead paint and children don't mix. And one of the best (or worst) ways to offend with it, is to dry scrape/sand it off surfaces. Which is exactly what I was doing.

After halting any paint removal, I spent a couple of weeks trying to convince Justin of the problem, and the fact we may have exposed even more during the demo if the plaster had lead paint on it, or the floors that we sanded had lead paint on them (they had been painted previously and had a lot left in the corners, where I would usually sand without even a mask).

Justin didn't really listen to my concerns, until his hand started tingling. And I had some major intestinal woes on Sunday, one day after sanding our stairs some more (while wearing a full mask this time, the good one).

So off he went to the Doctor yesterday. Well, it turns out he likely has carpal tunnel in his right arm. And I was probably suffering from my ongoing hormone issues postpartum/breastfeeding as usual. Still, it finally shook Justin what we were doing. Eating 90% organic food (with the exception lately of dominoes pizza and bbq chips), yet eventually moving our family, including the littlest guy, into a home that may continually have lead dust from opening and closing windows, or worse, having said little guy chew on a window ledge (trust me, he will, you should see his crib!).

So while my fears haven't been absolved, at least they have been made more realistic. Looking for solutions (replacing all window ledges? Painting over all trim until we can have it stripped off site and repainted?) is one way to mediate our fears now.

I should share that the Doctor thought Justin had gone totally coo-koo with his lead poisoning theory. He said, slowly "this is very, very rare, lead poisoning" (in his fantastic Indian accent that for some reason makes you feel like a very neurotic white American). Still, Doctors don't know everything, but we are both feeling a little better. We also thought that prolonging our move-in would be for the best. Of course, we won't have one day left to take off by the end of August with Justin's new job and my total lack of accrued vacay days, but at least we have a plan and feel (slightly) good about the house again.

On that note, Justin and his daddy-o started drywalling the kitchen ceiling last night. Boo-yeah! And for those who also watch DIY/Reno shows on TV, just know, the wife does NOT have to hold up the drywall to be put on the ceiling. You simply build a quicky prop with 2 2by4s that holds it up. Not sure why those shows continually propogate suffering on wives!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking,
"Nice drywalling Justin. But what really stands out is
the sparkle in that kitchen window. Obviously someone
put a lot of work into cleaning each window on a hot
day while making sure their baby didn't run away. Nice."
Thanks.

Staircase

Before



After

In 2 hours last night, I got about 4 stairs washed. The tar adhesive was so nasty, I think the stairs, at a per hour labour, have been our biggest challenge yet. The kitchen in its entirety may compete with that eventually due to the plaster demo, electrical, plumbing, install, etc, but at this  point, these stairs take the crown.
The metal edging over the noses wasn't hard to remove. The linoleum was challenging to remove. The tar adhesive was brutal to remove, and the adhesive/clay at this stage is moderately challenging. See that home depot bucket? I refill that every half tread. So I fill 2 buckets and work with those for every.
Single.
Tread.

The work is like having thick clay on a surface. You wet it and it becomes thicker and thicker. So even the first rinsing dirties the whole bucket and I resolve to "wash" with dirty water for most of the cleaning. But slowly it is coming off.

If I had known that simply cleaning would prove this effective, I would have gone lighter on the lino removal. Of course, hindsight is 20/20 because between me and Justin taking shifts at the house, it's hard to know at what point water would have worked. But the stairs have some nasty gouges in them from our removal process. Hopefully all of this is not for nought and we can sand them back into shape.

The black paint of the risers is iffy for me. Does it contain lead?  Should we try removal? Painting over with white (or even black?). I don't know.

And Down Came the Tree

Yesterday Mr. Roman from The Real Tree Whackers came by and chopped down the middle spruce tree. The photo below at the top is from 1999 when the last owner actually bought the house. You can actually see the fact that there is a house behind the trees in that photo.

 Then we come to this photo above. The house is being swallowed. The middle one has completely uprooted the pathway to the backyard, the far right one is doing the same, all the way to the foundation, and the far left one bugs me the most because it blocks all of the light for any flowers or plants in the front yard.

And here is the house. Wow. Really highlights the links in the chain don't you think;) My coworker who lives a few blocks down and passes by everyday came in at lunch yesterday. She said "you'll love it! But the house is really, really dirty." Sigh.

Exhausted, not from renos but from bickering

There's a darling photo Jen took last night of me and Justin. We are sitting on the couch, me looking angry and giving a crude gesture to the camera, while Justin is leaning over me, looking mocking. However, in the background can be seen our loving maternity and wedding photos hanging up. I couldn't post it because it may be too crude for even this blog. But it speaks to how I feel. Exhausted, defeated and pissed off.

Anyways, here are another couple before and afters of the floor. Truth be told, I'm really thinking the dark stain was a bad choice. We should have gone natural. But such is life. Life is a bitch.

Living Room Before sanding

Living Room After sanding

Living Room Post Sanding, wet with top coat

Upstairs Hallway post-sanding

Upstairs Hallway post-staining

It was love at first stain

Last night Justin started to stain for the first time. So it took us from July 3rd to July 14th to start staining. Our neighbour insinuated yesterday we were going slow, but we've only had 2 weekends, and Justin is working alone 95% of the time with me taking care of Charlie. I would say we have spent all together about three 12 hour days, plus evenings totaling maybe another 20 hours working on the house total. Combined with help from dads, friends and me, maximum time spent on the floors is likely only 80 hours. That includes time spent demo'ing the plaster and lath (about 30 hours or more), ripping up the old vinyl, lino and tar adhesives (about 25 hours),removing the nails , and doing fixes and we've really only spent about 30 hours maximum actually on the floors. People are so impatient!

If you are going to sand, make sure you prep your cracks FIRST. Going back over everything after trowel filling all the cracks was indeed demoralizing (same neighbours asked how demoralized I was feeling yesterday. I refused to give in to that, and took it as a challenge frankly).

The other thing was that we were going to water pop the floor which means wetting it down first to bring the grain up, which helps with the colour. However, after I last-minute researched, we realized this would take a whole extra day because you need the humidity to be the same after wetting, and you need a humidity measure, and you need  a way to keep the water consistent, etc, etc. You could make it so perfect, and of course, we don't want to redo it in 5 years. But you also have to accept that it's a small house that will have rugs, furniture and a little guy on it. Will we really notice in a month? I hope not.

Anyways, here are some photos of the stain. We thought at first not to do a second coat, but I think it needs it now that we saw last night's result dry.

The far left shows the dried stain from last night. 

This is fresh (stinky) stain. When the trim is put back on, it should really pop. For now, the first thing my eye was drawn to was the messy wall/floor edge.Hopefully the contrast will take away from the sanding, stain marks on the floor which were inevitable from years of abuse and neglect (okay fine, plus our own abuse put on it).

Before and After flooring.

 Justin is back sanding today because the drum sander marks between the drum and the edger was showing up really light. Me, I whipped over for the umpteenth time to Home Depot to buy yet more sanding paper. I am actually getting to enjoy Home Depot, which I never thought was possible.

Victorian? Huh??

So based on the aspect of the gable, facing sideways to the street, meaning basically the house is wide and not long, I was SURE (SURE!!) that we had a colonial revival. Now don't get me wrong, this house is the next thing up from an eyesore right now. I'm aware. And even with some love, it will never be an unique Colonial, but it gave me a place to go from when accepting or searching for furniture, fixtures, etc.

However, the heat register peaked my interest tonight, so I did a little zooming in on our photos and a little google image search and voila, I got a Victorian register come up. Weird right?

Here is a description from http://www.columbusarchitecturalsalvage.com:

DESCRIPTION:

Very nice vintage/antique architectural salvage cast iron heat register grate with operable louvers. This heat grate has a wonderful Victorian sunburst design and measures approximately 10" x 12" (insert dimensions) and 12" x 14" (overall dimensions).

The price said $75. Hmm, cool. No idea what the accuracy is, or the story behind the design, but I have another thing to read about while sitting at home with a sleeping Charlie while Justin does all the grunt work. A little sad about that actually:(  But at least I'm kept occupied in ways.

Living Room Floors - Befores and Afters

WOW! Look at those beautifully sanded floors! These last two really show the work Justin went through getting this done. Back-breaking, but so worth it, right?

Floors

Kinda cool to see the before and after demo in the kitchen. The door looks smaller now that the ceiling is gone. Hm. Never would have thought about that. See that stack in the corner of the kitchen? Yeah, some errant plumber sawed off the joists in the corner to retrofit that way back in the day. So now that we see it, we should fix it. Another thing. And that plumbing going horizontal from the stack? Well, we need to figure out with a good plumber how to minimize that (into the wall?). Because there ain't no room for a kitchen on that wall with all the plumbing. And I hate the old layout with the fridge blocking the door. Just seems wrong. Not everyone agrees with me, but that's me.

 This is the result of last night's filling of the cracks session. Below shows a little more of the battle fought in that the floor just looks dusty and muddy. Apparently we did  need a filler (as Mr Google informed me). Luckily Terry over at Timber Realization Centre is my new bff and he helped me track down the right thinner this morning to thin out this peanut buttery goo and I got my stain, urethane and he threw in a free fluffy mop for me too!



\

Here is the latest budget:
Materials: $3000
Tools & Safety gear: $500
Roof: $6,000
Kitchen: $8,000
Services Rendered: $3,000

Total: $30,000

So when I'm telling friends and family how stressed I am and they tell me not to sweat it (which is hard anyways since it's been +31 for 3 days people), I can't help but think they don't get the situation.

This is insanely a lot of money.

When you have to decide between your floors, your kitchen and your roof, I'm not even sure how you can put one over another.

Last night Justin's boss for canoeing stopped by and let us know that the house used to be resided in by illegal graffiti artists (as in, not the ones who do cool legal graffiti murals) and he attended a party there once. I guess it got so out-of-hand that someone or some people actually broke the main water line in the basement. Nice. So much for a dry basement eh? Fack, what did we get ourselves into!

If that wasn't enough, I didn't mention, but on the weekend my palms, feet and throat broke out in hives and cancer sores. It took about a week to go away, but man, even driving was painful! Swallowing was painful! I don't handle stress that well;)

Stain

I put in a lot of hours phoning around about stains and sealers, oh gawd did I spend hours!
I really wanted to use an earth-friendly hardwax for the floors called Osmo wax from Europe. However, the price (over a GRAND!) and the timeline (a WEEK to stock) made it next to impossible to figure this out. We did like the way they looked, but the upkeep, the lack of others who have used it, and so on, caused me to call in the real guns (toxic chemicals).

Let's be real here though. The hardwax is barely less toxic. Apparently the smell is awful, but it's not the VOC awful. But we're not living there...so...

In the end, I weaseled my way into the heart of a great wholesaler named Terry who owns a huge supply store called Timber Realization Centre (isn't that an ethereal name??). He got me the right filler for all those cracks we filled wrong to start, and he is letting me get all the stain and urethane I want from him. And, it's in stock! I'm learning that nothing is in stock anymore (duh), but seriously, I'm used to Ikea, what did we expect!?

So we're going with BONA which is only available to the professionals. And we're using Ebony stain. I wanted either totally natural or totally dark. Not sure why. I don't like in betweens in life, in terms of morals, situations or style apparently either.

Here is ebony stain.

I have this new vision of the house as kind of Spanish Colonial. So white with black trims and pale pinks and reds for colour. Funny how one month you adore dark navies, and the next you want everything looking Scandinavian. I guess that is one of the (few) reasons that it's good this is going slowly. While mostly we are screwing up, the time it is taking ensures we are making choices, not just reacting. Right? Right?? Hmmm...

Put these two together and you have my vision. Although we don't have nearly the light to do roses in the front yard, but some pale pink sweet peas along the fence and who knows what else down the road?

Budgets and ONE WEEK of Renovations

Charlie in his work clothes.

He's been in the house about

10 minutes total so far because

it's just too dangerous, dusty

and downright scary for me

to have him there!

I don't know how people get budgets for renovations. Everytime we call an electrician, flooring guy, plumber, or even a locksmith, they need to come out, look at everything, know everything, etc. There is no "ballpark figures". How much is upgrading the service panel? Well, that depends. Your wiring to the garage isn't to code, so you have to bury that. Okay, let's bury it. Well, then, it will be thousands. Why? Well, I can't give an exact figure. Etc, etc.

Insane!

So things seem to be moving slowly. The floors, of course, took up the entire last week. Yep, it's been ONE WEEK of renovations. I think people expect a lot of us in one week. Friends keep asking how the "move is going". To me, that's like asking "how is the potty training going?" to a parent of a 6 month old. WTF people?

In one week:

• Pulled up all vinyl, lino which was paper or board-backed.
• Pulled up adhesive-backed lino on the stairs and spent approx.  8 hours scraping every little bit of that tar adhesive off.

The stairs still look like shit. And you can see light through the space between the riser and tread.




This is a pretty photo of the place, highlighting
 the back-breaking edger.

• Prepped all floors (thanks dad) by nail punching all nails 1/8" below surface of floor.
• Removed all base trim that is likely going to be replaced as it's just quarter round (dad)
• Demo'ed all plaster/lath from kitchen ceiling (Justin) and walls (Carter, Justin)
• Removed all stubborn cabinetry (Justin, Carter)
• Cleaned the hellamess this left (me, Justin)
• Moved all dumpster contents to new dumpster (Carter, Justin) as there was a problem with the stupid Bin Bags we bought where they wouldn't pick them up from the alley even though it says they do on the packaging (apparently just not in Canada).
•  Drum sanded all floors in 2 days (Justin).
• Edged all floors in 2 days (Justin for the hardest, coarsest grit, and father-in-law for the rest).

Before and After of the 2nd floor hallway. Okay, needless to say, it doesn't look fantastic in the after does it? Can you even tell which is after? Sigh, the one on the right people. Oh dear.

Still left is to sand all corners with a Dremel hand tool that I bought on the weekend for this purpose.

I started peeling off old paint on the railing and entryway trim. It comes off like plastic, as though I am holding balloon latex in my hands. It's actually really addictive and I found myself spending an hour doing it last night saying mentally "I should really go home now, really. Just one more little strip first."



Started filling cracks, holes with putty (Dad, me) to realize it was the wrong filler

Ordered filler (coming tomorrow) for the insane spaces between floor boards



The wrong damn filler. This is carpenter's putty. Whoops.

• Weeding (mom, me)

Before and After weeding. I'm too depressed to tell you which is which since they look EXACTLY the same and yet my kid ended up with a zillion mosquito bites as a result of my extensive weeding with him for hours! BaGar!