Pondering Parker's Playroom

After what has essentially been something like 7 months off from construction, we're back at it. And man, getting back on that horse was a tough one! Granted I’d much rather dabble in framing, electrical and the major items instead of trim and paint (ugh), there is an essential factor that you must have for any major work: time. That is far and away our greatest challenge right now.

With our daughter Parker now at a whopping 11 months old, she officially needs her own space to do what little kids do. So we decided to take this as our chance to redo the front bedroom on the second floor into a playroom that will eventually be her bedroom when she’s ready. As it happens, her nursery has an adjoining door to this front bedroom, so in the end it’s like she is getting her own suite at the Bellagio or something. It has a bay window that I'm already itching to make into a window seat!

(I’m banking on that move meaning that her nursery room can be taken over by me. What man doesn’t want his own cave with a mini fridge and HD cable?)

The room had been packed to the gills as a storage room for 18 months, so once that clutter was jettisoned I had to tackle the closet. Now, we’re pretty sure that the closet was original to the house, and it was built like a brick s#$%house for sure. The kicker is that I could barely ever use it. See, in the olden days, people must have had REALLY small feet or didn’t wear shoes. Because the original closet (you might be able to tell by the pictures) is a nice like 36 inches wide, but a mere 10 inches deep. I wear size 12 shoes, and putting my shoes in there was a pain in the butt. Not only that, but any shirts that hung we on one of three rods that ran perpendicular to the closet opening which made it weird to look for that long lost Cosby sweater in the back.

So I got to smash it apart and throw the whole thing away. As usual this meant a huge mess and since I’m paranoid about that level of dirt in the air, I had both doors sealed up like a bio medical lab. So getting bags of trash in and out plus ladders, compressor, etc was a chore. But you have to do what you have to do right?

Anyway, the original closet has been replaced by one of Christina’s design that I had the pleasure of constructing. If you can’t picture it with the framing, there will be an upper and lower closet with little “wings” off the side (you can see the header of the bottom closet, but you can’t see the studs running to the back wall to make the separate between the two boxes). The left side boxes in the radiator pipes for the third floor, and the right side will be open inside for shelves, TV equipment…whatever. Pretty decent use of symmetry and space if you ask me….

The other task for this room is getting more than the current number of working receptacles since keeping only ONE for a room this day and ages is not only against code, it’s pretty lame. The challenge was in the party wall opposite the closet, since there was no way I was going to grind into brick again for two boxes and the channel needed. Not going to happen in the room next to my daughter’s crib, and since brick dust goes EVERYWHERE and takes eons to get rid of; I elected to just frame a wall against the brick/plaster that’s there.

So in the end I got to build a closet and a wall plus add four new recessed lights and relocate the existing overhead fixture (still to do because I keep forgetting). I hope to get the new receptacles in next weekend, and then hopefully get our man Jose to sheetrock and paint the room by the later half of Feb. Like I said before, it’s just time…and when you get about 4 hours over the entire weekend to get anything done between naptime, and bedtime, it’s all a shell game.

Misson Accomplished

Happy Memorial Day! I hope this finds you reflective on the reason for the holiday and not too sun burnt. We here are the Grimes casa are busy living life with a 3 month old and trying to trod along with the work on the house, the goal is to have it done enough she can't snack on lead paint or step on nails when she starts crawling. Picking up from the last blog post, my work for the past few weeks has been trying to focus on the door jambs/casing, and installing the baseboards in the first and second floors.

Just like our previous President, I can also say "Mission Accomplished". Ok, so just like Bush needed to clarify the misleading headline 6 years ago, I have some 'splainin to do. 6 of the 7 doorways have new jambs, 3 have doors and only one has a door that latches. The baseboards are pretty close to done, but I am in need of a nice transition piece to help with the difference in the height of the baseboards we've been installing throughout and the stair trim that we left in place. So in all, good enough for government work!

In this post are some picture from the past week or so. The top one is the trim we used for the two doors on the first floor since they are tight on a wall and the profiled casing would just look odd since the mitre would be off. The rest of the pics are some doors on the second floor as well as some baseboard. Not quite as riveting as a picture of the shooter on the grassy knoll, but it's a holiday and I'm dog tired.

(OK, here's where I walked away and Christina finished the post. Enjoy)

We also have finally hung art work on a couple of walls, and have some empty frames just waiting for adorable baby pictures that will go up shortly. This really means that I have to commit to the locations, and that might take quite some time of placing, and rearranging. I did dig out my UPenn diploma from the depths of our junk room, it should be good for something other than collecting dust right? We also put some of the white wall stickers up in Parker's room today too, but those are also going to take a little more rearranging before the big reveal!

All in all it we do have some outstanding big projects, but those are going to be a ways off. It is really just nice bite sized afternoon projects for awhile, and wrapping up the big ones that we started over the past year. Bryan and I joke about who is going to paint the base board that are recently installed, and the general consensus is that it will be Parker! That or any unsuspecting house guests over the summer.....

Any takers!?!?!

Hello blog, It's me Bryan

It's spring time. It's the time of the year where the bleary eyed DIY home renovator brushes off the pitifuly small winter projects for the glory of full on renovations!!! I mean it's time to say NO to painting trim (that's ok in December). NO to weekend projects seeming huge when they involve lowly drywall anchors. NO to your table saw being used as an actual table in the basement.

Wow, that felt good to type! But I have to confess something to the internet Gods...I'm taking the spring and summer off.

I think I know what you're telling yourself right now...."But Bryan, in the past year you've done a lot, why stop now?". Ah yes, that question. I get that question a lot actually. Well I have a pretty good reason, and her name is Parker. In my last post (two months ago almost!!!!!) I posted some pictures of her. Well she's just about two months now and while the diplomatic answer to this question should be "I just can't bear spending time away from work and NOT with Parker" or something like that. Well honestly, that's very true, but not 100% of the story. The main reason is that by Saturday morning I'm tired. I mean dead to the world, need a coffee IV all day....tired.

Who wants to demo a room or hang sheetrock like that? Not I says the bearded man.

Anyway, on to the house blogging. Since Parker and Christina came home on March 4th, things have been pretty chill. Above are a few pictures of Parker's room.

We had the baseboard material delivered at the end of Feb and with the help of my visiting father, managed to install a bit of it in the dining room, and her room, and then promptly store the rest in the basement. Sometime we will actually get the rest of it in place, but maybe that will be a fall project. Who really needs trim in the house anyway? Wouldn't modernism dictate that trim is just unnecessary decoration? Our home inspector might disagree, but I think we can make a case for sure!

What's on the plate right now is fixing the door casings after the drywall was hung. The pictures above show the problem. You can't just trim out the door when the current casing is not wide enough to cover the existing plaster and the new sheetrock. No good. So I've removed the casings from the two doors downstairs since the back sides of them are not important (one is to the basement, and the other into a closet). It is always better to try something first in the least noticeable spot.

In the end I ripped a 1 x 8 down to fit the "unique" and "charming" characteristics of each opening. I did shim the pieces to finally make the opening square. Speaking of square in a house this old, check out the pic to the upper right of the front bedroom on the second floor. Notice anything a little Tim Burton-esque about it?

Yeah, that's most of the doors here. Not the fault of the fellers who hung the sheetrock, but that's just how the house has settled for these 100+ years. What can you do. I'm going to fix all of that when I install that doorway's casing next weekend. Might be some work.

Up and to the left is a quick shot of the basement doorway after I removed the old casing. In the end it was pretty easy, I was just careful to not mess-up any of the surrounding drywall. Like I mentioned before, these two doorways were done first as there is no back to them really. The doorway into Parker's room is on the right above, and that will be the good one as the hallway and her room have the top coats of paint on them. As much as I hate painting, I REALLY HATE repainting anything.

In all that's about it. The casing needs to be fixed so I can rehang the doors and then install the both the door trim, and the baseboards. Bleh.

I've also included some pictures of Parker's room in it's 90% completed state. It wouldn't be a DIY project if there weren't "little" "3 hour" projects left to do. But since Parker is sleeping in a cradle in our room, I'm chalking up my procrastination to "out of sight, out of mind". But time is ticking....

I'd like to introduce everyone to Parker!!

So on Monday Feb 23rd at 5:22 AM Christina gave birth to our daughter (and future weekend home remodeler) Parker. In just 2.5 hours of labor Parker was born and that was that. Parker was born at 34 weeks, which is a bit early, so she's been in the ICN at Pennsylvania Hospital and is tentatively coming home this Monday or Tuesday. Good stuff.

In the meantime Christina came home on Tuesday, and so we started to wrap up Parker's room. Luckily we have an extra week while she's being taken care of, and it's time that I desperately needed. The list for Parker's room was:

• Paint the back wall magenta
• Trim out behind the radiator and piping in the corner
• Paint the old sub floors
• Hook up all of the electrical and install the recessed baffles
• Get the furniture and put it together

Not a bad list, but since I hate painting it took all of my effort to get at least that part done. Right now the magenta is up, the electrical is 90% done (just need to connect two receptacles and find plates for the 2 square boxes (not an easy find).

Scattered throughout are some pictures of the room. As for the floors, note in the first room picture that the floors are just the old sub floors. They were deemed not really salvageable by our flooring guy, and after flirting with installing carpet, we opted to just use a dark grey floor paint. Admittedly I was kind of apprehensive about the process and the potential outcome, but Christina was right...the floor looks good.

Up next is painting the second floor hallway the same color as Parker's room, and picking up the baby furniture tomorrow. I need to run at least the baseboard trim in there, so I'm hoping that I can squeeze that in tomorrow AM before the furniture arrives. But man, who knows. Do babies care that the baseboard and the base caps is not installed? Maybe she'll notice at 4 months...but probably not at 9 days.

So yeah, that's that. Parker's IV and feeding tube (used as a back up only) were removed yesterday, and she's already back to her birth weight and nursing like a full term baby.

In summary, Parker has made all of the months of blood, sweat, and expletives worth it in every sense.

P.S. - Since I drafted this post like 8 hours ago, the second floor hallway has been painted the same color. Also, Parker has all tubes removed from her but is unfortunately under Billi lights for the next day or so. What's a "Billi" light you say? Use Google. But in the meantime I'll say that the lights are used to cure any signs of jaundice, to which Parker has just a hint of. They say maybe 2 days with the blue lights. We'll see I guess.

- Bryan

Knowing when to just walk away

So it's Saturday night, and I left the hospital early to try and pick up the house tonight/tomorrow morning in time to get back to the hospital for Christina to be induced. Yep, it's here. 2 weeks ago we looked like we saw Bigfoot walking into a Wawa after we got the news, and now we're apparently ready to be parents? Life is insane sometimes.

On the kid front real fast: everything is great and like I said Monday is GO TIME! We had a tour of the NICU this evening which was actually not terrifying in the least bit. Well besides finally having it all hit me like a ton of bricks...we're actually going to have a kid in the next 48 hours. Damn.

On the house front, it's been a looooooong week. In between trying to balance work and entertaining Christina at the hospital, I was responsible for priming and painting just about 65% of the surfaces in the house. It was a long week (but thanks to Cat, Joey and Rich for the help!). I'm posting some pictures that are small, so click on them to see the full size.

Oh, and you'll note that the picture quality looks vastly superior than the usual drab ones that we have. Well that's from my father-to-be/weekend house warrior present, a new Nikon D40 camera. It's nothing too fancy, but it'll be sweet in the upcoming months with the baby, and it helps with the house shots a bit too. Some shots are with the flash and some are without. I was playing around a little.

The pizza boxes really make the place feel like home I think. That, and if you look really closely at the living room blinds, those should be white. Not the shade of beige they appear. I guess that is what 12 solid months of dust will do........

At this point, the priming is done (all 8 gallons of it) as are all of the ceilings. I did manage to get the nursery walls painted, minus the soon to be magenta one. My goal today was to work on the main colors throughout which is an MAB color called "Lemon Ice". It makes me want pie when I see it. I hope that feeling doesn't last forever. Anyway, when the realization of the fact that I will be a father before the next Flyers game hit me, we decided that he rest of the wall paint and the floor paint can wait a bit. I needed some time to decompress.

I wasn't going to argue. I'm tired, sore and really lacking decent sleep.

So the plan is that after the fun with the kid subsides a bit, as she'll be in the NICU for 1-2 weeks, I'll work on her room to complete it which includes wrapping up the electrical items. Not a big deal. We did decide to paint the floor of the nursery and the second floor hallway to speed up this process to be able to then get the baby furniture in and set up. There is apparently no rest in any of this.

On a totally more random note, I was playing with the new camera today in the hospital and I realized something that must be pretty obvious to everyone else in our daily lives. While Christina is working to keep our kid healthy by being in the hospital room for 2 weeks, being stuck with needles over and over each day and braving hospital food, to the left is how she looks at this point. A portrait of beauty and grace as usual.

To the right was me this afternoon. I am way out of my league, and badly need a haircut.

That's really it right now for us here on South 13th Street. I mean aside from needing to finish painting the walls and floor and trimming out the nursery, assembling the furniture, cleaning the place up, buying diapers and even premi clothes...it's like sitting on a beach.

A beach next to the great Sea of What Have We Gotten Ourselves Into. It's a beautiful view.

- Bryan

Huffing fumes

So we're at a pretty decent spot with the house. The drywall is done and today the hardwood floors were wrapped up today with an extra coat after some uneven drying overnight, and our cats. But I'll get to that crime shortly.

First off, Christina and the (not yet born) baby are doing great. She's been in the hospital for just about a week now, and at this point she can shower unsupervised, has no IVs and can even take a 20 minute wheel chair ride around the joint once a day. It's just a wait and see and if she doesn't go into labor by the 23rd, the docs will induce. It'll be at week 34, but that's ok.

So because of all of this I've been playing a pretty hard-assed GC trying to to get everything done right after one another. Case in point, the drywall wrapped up on Tues, and Wed the floors were going to be refinished. I had to finish some electrical stuff to get some lights on, as well as haul out a couple hundred pounds of trash created by the sheetrocking. But whatever, it's managed fine so far and my work is being great about my hours. I'm trying not to press anything, but at the same time things need to get done around here. Pretty fast.

The floors we have on the first floor came with the house and spent most of the past 40 years covered by rugs. When we removed all of the rugs a few months ago, you could really see that the floors were dirty and had never been sealed, and the same was true for the stair treds. Odd, but whatever. I'm sure you can traverse into the past blog entries and see the floors before. The pictures here are obviously the floors refinished. These were taken this morning and since then some spot sanding was done and another coat was applied.

A quick story: So last night it was really windy here in Philly and I had a committee meeting of just myself, and decided to leave the bathroom windows open in our suite, but close the bedroom ones. Well in hindsight that was a HUGE MISTAKE. At 1:45AM I woke up basically hallucinating and gasping for air. I opened both bedroom windows and quickly pressed my face to the screen to get fresh air. Dumb dumb dumb. Once the windows were opened the cross breeze was great, especially when we had gusts of 50 mph here in the city. But still, why did I do that? Nothing like huge amounts of VOCs in your lungs for 2.5 hours. This is why I'm not in Mensa.

So yesterday when the guys were in between coats I was running around the house trying to find the cats. The guys started so quickly after arriving that the cats had already hid and that was that. So in the end I just closed the applicable doors, and wished upon a unicorn's pot o' gold that all would be well when I got back in 8 hours. Well, the cats wound up being in the basement, and that posed two distinct problems.

Problem one is that the flooring extends under the basement door about 1 foot so that means the door would be opening and closing as they worked. Hmm...well that wound up not being an issue since the cats are terrified of anyone in work boots.

Problem two is that our genius cats can open doors. Bing has been able to open doors that open out (away from you) since we brought him home. And that skill seemed to have been on display last evening as well. Great, now let's book him on Letterman.

The pics here show the that once the cats opened the door and wondered into the stinky and sticky new world, that they left behind their Neal Armstrong-esc footprints. You can see Marco returning this morning to the scene of the crime...what a little s*&t.

Our guy Van was cool about it and spot sanded a lot of of the marks before slopping on the last coat. So I'm here in the hospital room hiding for a bit before I can walk from the front door to the first step of the stairs.

So that's that. I'd like to tell my mother that it was BING that opened the door, so that both of the cats are guilty here. Marco might be in the picture to the left, but he's there for demonstration only.

It's always the darkest before dawn

I'm blogging about our house progress from Pennsylvania Hospital here in Philly. Why? Well on Friday Christina had a bit of fluid leakage and the docs said her water broke (only slightly but it's all or nothing there) and she's been admitted until delivery. She's fine and the baby's heart rate, size, and fluids look great. Christina is 32 weeks along (if you don't know what that means for this situation I'd suggest Google) which means she needs to hang here so that everyone can help the baby not come out for a couple more weeks at minimum.

In summary: while she's going to be here 24/7 watching tv and keeping the home fires burning in utero, the house HAS TO BE FINISHED. I'm also blogging about the house to help show our family and friends that we're doing fine and that when this baby comes home (albeit not in the way that we had planned) the house is going to look amazing.

With that being typed, to what I'll assume are complete strangers, it's time to blog about the house. Because I'm sitting here in the hospital I didn't have the patience to resize the pics in Photoshop. So apologies to those 4 people that are still on dial up.

After months of toiling on the house doing things like removing the old wiring, reinforcing joists and making huge messes, I think I see the proverbial light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. As our last post mentioned, the drywall is in full effect at the house which still makes me smile.

Since drywall posts are so fun for other people to read, I'll cut to the chase. Everything has been hung and two coats of mud have been applied. Sanding will be today (Sunday) and hopefully wrapping up tomorrow. I think I shed a dusty tear thinking about that. As usual I'm including some pictures so that you can see what we're up to.

The next piece to this puzzle are the floors which are ready in the wings. I've lined up the guy we used for sanding and sealing the red birch on the third floor that I installed. He's ready to roll on one day's notice, and I'm thinking Wednesday to start with the final two coats going down Friday will work out just fine. That'll keep the last of dusty and annoying tasks back to back which is A-OK with me.

The goal here is that while Christina is in the hospital I want the floors done and the place cleaned up. I have offers from some friends to help me prime and paint the new drywall which will help out tremendously and for which I'm grateful. If Christina does deliver in two weeks our kid will be here in the NICU for a couple weeks, so I'm hoping that those two weeks will mean that in the evenings we can head home and all Christina has to worry about is what outfit goes into what drawer, or where the wipes should go ease of use. That's it. Period. I don't want her worrying about when the paint will be done, or when the baby's room will be put together. I'm really going to work on getting that done so it's a non issue. In my perfect world she'll worry about what painting to pick for the room from our stash, or if the rug should be centered in the room or not...but nothing about the trim in the room or the second coat of paint.

So that's what is going on here on 13th street nowadays. I don't know how to properly manage work, hospital and being a part time G.C., but I'll find out tomorrow.

It's finally gotten pretty crazy around here, but I see dawn breaking on the horizon.