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.

These are just two of my favorite things...

*da da dada ... da da dada*

Today I could have been Bryan Von Trap, as I swear as two of my most favorite things happened to us here in the City of Brotherly Love: SNOW and DRYWALL. My pulse is racing, my palms are sweaty, I think I've found my personal "field of dreams".

First, the snow. While our family and friends back in Indianapolis have been living in the white gold for weeks now, we only get a promise of 4 inches and then wind up with rain. For about 3 years this has been the case, and I've been in a serious snow drought. Well imagine my surprise when I got up today and our neighborhood looked like the pictures you see. Score! In 5 years here this is probably the third real snow we've witnessed. It's nice to get back to what you know.

The other major win today was that our drywall guys started. After our previous dealings with a contractor for something this big inside our house, we were both a bit apprehensive on what was going to happen. Was he going to show up? Was he going to take the first half of the money and split when we went to the office? Was I going to catch them riffling through my boxer drawer?

The answers: Nope, No, and I have no clue but won't ask.

There were four guys here today and hung sheet rock at a pace that would make our previous subs blush. I mean we left here at 8 AM with them here and got back from work at 5:30 and they were still here. And still working! And in the dark!

I almost caught the vapors.

I'm posting some shots of the drywall as it is today. Yeah it's not very exciting, and yeah it's just day one. But for the first time in months I didn't have to do it, and it's being done when we're at work. Not in the evenings or the weekends...but real progress when we're away. *swoon*

As with any project that happens in this d%#m house, it made a terrible mess. We actually underestimated the amount of debris there would be today as they're just hanging the stuff, but what can you do. I'm not going to argue with the chef about egg shells when he's creating something delicious (and when we have an obvious language barrier).

The last two pictures of the drywall are demonstrations of the debris just from today. I swept most of the house and used my shop vac as well just the other day. But what can you do. I was in my socks in our make shift "living room" where the door was closed all day. Not too bad in here, but the rest of the house is done for. Needless to say, our cats were PISSED when we got home. We also had to hunt for them a little and found poor Bing locked in the front room, while Marco had the run of the 3rd floor for the day. At least they were both safe, albeit a little dirty. They have given up tonight and started laying in the dirt piles. What can you do?

As usual, I celebrated our latest round of progress and Christina captured it for all to see. Of course I have no shame and the internets were made for nonsense, so the last image is my celebration dance tonight. You know the red eyes and obvious dance moves are getting you excited for more drywall!

4 Years in the Making

So 4 years ago we were newly engaged, bright eyed, and started out on our house hunt! Saw some that were finished but small and not to our tastes, a few "crack dens" and then our "old lady special". That great big house that just needs some updating. I fell in love immediately, Bryan I think has always been hesitant, but trusting and encouraged by all of our visitors comments of "this house will be amazing when you guys are done!"

So for the last year we have been working pretty much constantly on the house. Bryan much more so than me in the last few months, the bigger my belly gets the less good I am on the ladder! I think also his speed and determination has also grown exponentially along with the size of my belly. All of this leads to a VERY special milestone in the house progress. DRYWALL! I had grand plans of learning to plaster and fixing all the walls ourselves, but a year ago and 3 incredible estimates later decided that drywall was the way to go. So the last 6 months since we finished most of the 3rd floor has been a mad dash of work so that we can close up the walls and make the house look a whole lot less like a construction site.

The first image shows our living room with all the glory of the old lady wall paper, new lights in the ceiling and perfectly empty for the crew of guys to show up tomorrow. You can see the dust bunnies rolling through like tumble weeds at the moment. However, to get that room, 3 other rooms and hallway empty, you end up a basement that looks like this. It is actually moderately organized, into baby pile, tool pile, and storage pile. But, this is the path to the cellar in the back as well. Like Bryan said in another post, a year of construction really does distort your idea of normal.

It is really incredible to think that in a few short days the wall paper will be replaced by drywall, and with some primer, paint and trim we can actually use 90% of our house again. Don't get me wrong, there is still a lot to do in the next month or so, but this is a milestone that we have been talking about for 4 years. A bit scary also to not be able to poke holes all over the house just to see what might be under there! At the same time fantastic to see things finally come together and instead of demolition, see the end in sight. I also don't think Bryan can take many more days of the demo. This last picture was the end of the work day today, and I think it will be really good for Bryan's sanity to have some progress happen while he is blissfully at work for a few days!

Lights, camera, 2 months until the kid arrives...

So here we are in the last week of January, and it's really starting to feel like things are coming together with the house. I have officially rewired the entire place with just the finishing touches left on a couple outlets. All of this is good since I'm so sick and tired of putting holes in surfaces and the dirt that is created. It's funny how you can get used to something like living in a dust bowl. There should be no reason that it's ever normal for you to automatically know to wear shoes when you walk around, or to not drag any bare feet on the floors lest you desire splinters or nails. I mean really...this renovation thing alters your brain.

I'm including a couple shots I took last weekend of my work in the last two rooms on the first floor (the dining room and the "pink" room). Mainly what you see is a trench I created in both ceilings to allow for pulling out the old knob and tube, and to then to reuse those holes in the joists for the new wire. Not rocket science, but it's still pulling down dirty plaster and lath above your head.

The pink room got two new cans (*snicker*) and that was that. The picture on the right shows the pink room and the top of what I've created as a door to the kitchen. There's a larger picture of that creation to the left. In all of the months of renovation the house, there is one place that dirt and construction debris is not acceptable. *drum roll*........yeah, the kitchen. Big climax to the post right?!?!?!?!?! If you decide to live through this, keep your bedroom debris free, one room to lounge in that is moderately free of crap, but the kitchen should be clean like you're not walking through it with dirty boots. That's one key to having your marriage survive at the end of this. End of debate.

I've also added a little picture of what my left arm looked like after just that little demo in the dining room ceiling. Please keep in mind that it was only a small trench where I broke the plaster with a wallbaord saw and pulled off the lath. Nothing even close to the demo of the entire third floor back in May. I'm totally becoming compulsive about pulling down anymore plaster. Ugh.....

At this point we feel confident enough about where we're at that we have our dude Jose the drywaller on call to start in the next week or so. He estimated that it'll take about 90 sheets of sheetrock, so this isn't some small job. But at the same time he thinks it'll take two days to hang it all and three more to tape and mud. Man, we hope so! Given the fact that Christina is something like 31 weeks pregnant at this point, we have to get the sheetrock up, all of it primed (two coats), the ceilings painted, and at least the kid's room painted with the trim in place. We also need to get the floors refinished on the first floor, but honestly, I'm not sure there's time. We'd like to get all of this done by March 1st to allow a max of one month before the kid arrives to get her room ready and some feeling of being situated.

But to this point what is being "situated" in this house?

If anyone in the Philly area wants to help out with the painting, I have all the pizza and beer you might require. For real. Just let me know when you all want to stop by!