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

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.

For our second wedding anniversary I give you...

...finished hardwood floors. You're welcome. It was nothing, just a token of my affection for smooth floors that look friggin SWEET.

So I'll recap real fast to keep this post short (there is a "debate" tonight after all). After we installed the floors I got total stage fright about finishing them. I mean if you mess up framing a wall or mitering window casing then you just buy more right? Well what if you sand and seal a floor and screw any of that up? You have to strip and refinish the floors all over again. There really are no do overs. Seeing as how I tend to learn a new project by screwing up a couple of times...I couldn't take that chance.

So we hired out, which is just about the last third party to work on our house in the near future. "So I got that goin' for me, which is nice." ---->

Anyway we had a great guy named Van (http://www.vanshardwoodfloors.com) show up on Thursday for a quote and did the job today. Below are some pictures of the floor as it is right now. In the end we elected to not stain the floors and just have then sanded a bit with 3 coats of poly. The floors are really wet right now and you can see that in the pictures...hey it's a messy job. And also let it be said that the fumes from the job are crazy. Don't underestimate how much the poly smells, and you can even taste it.

The floors will be dry enough to walk on tomorrow, but we'll probably not get up there until the weekend. Then it'll be putting the new bed together up there to get those damn boxes out of my workshop, and the mattress/box spring out of our living room.

It'll be a magical moment. We still need to install the window stools and all of the trim (casing and baseboards) but I think we can start that next week-ish.

On another note, months ago I ripped apart the electrical for the third floor and half of the second. This was in late May before the demo was 100% done. Anyway, over the past weekend I ran new lines up to the second floor and rewired the office/workshop. It was a pain in the butt having to use flashlights at night and not being able to work in there after like 5:00. The picture on the right doesn't look like much, but there was a lot of wiring up there to even get the lights to work. I've added one new outlet right now, and I'll be adding 3 more in the next couple of weeks.

The wire sticking out of the box is for the (to be delivered and installed) recessed lights that are going in the soffit. I'll split the feeder line and that's it.

So yeah, that's about it right now. Today is in fact our second anniversary, and with the house stuff and life things, we both half spaced it until last evening. We're hoping that it's not a harbinger of things to come for the next 70 years.

So you know, my anniversary gift to Christina was completely cleaning out our dump living room and the basement. Things are finally where they need to be and we don't have piles of lumber in the living room. For her part, Christina paid Van for the floor job...so I didn't have to do it. That's a gift I'll take any time. (I was really hoping that wood was the 2nd anniversary gift, turns out that is the 5th, so maybe we got to that one early. Too bad this year was cotton-Christina)

Aint love grand?

Hardwood floors and an instant love of being done.

Done*. There, it's nice to type that: D O N E*. The hardwoods have been successfully installed in the third floor bedroom. Now, as usual I have a caveat to my declarations, and this time it's that the floors we bought are unfinished red birch.

Whatever, those are the details that the devil resides in.

Right now I'm savoring the sweet smell of hardwoods being laid over 2 days this weekend, with a little extra help. My past experiences with hardwoods involved mainly walking on them and Swiffering as needed. But hey, everyone has to learn to live on the edge at some point.

Our friend Graham helped us (THANKS GRAHAM!) on Saturday to get the ball rolling. Luckily we own all of the tools needed like a chop saw, jig saw, air compressor, and even a table saw (which came in really handy for ripping boards). The only thing we needed was a floor nailer which we rented at the Depot.

Well in the end we rented three as the third time was a charm:

• The first had a crazy "nozzle"/"adapter"/whatever. It's like someone took the real one off to use some industrial size air hose
• The second looked the part, and we were excited to see that the thing would at least hook up to the compressor. Well, after hooking up the hose our hopes were dashed. Someone, it seems, decided to do some field repair on the rental and neglected to replace the main gasket. So air was just passing right through the thing. We soldiered on with a stiff upper lip, but all of the wads of duct tape couldn't help. It was a trip back to the Depot.
• The third, it was just right! This time I made the guy at the Depot hook the nailer up and I even decided to try it on some flooring sample right there.

At this point we were like 2+ hours behind schedule and time moves for no man.

Once we got back everything went pretty darn well. Considering the weekend was like living in a Swamp around here (thanks hurricane Kyle), the floor went down with just minimal pools of sweat on the unfinished floors. (Christina chased me around with a bandanna for most of the weekend) What can you do?

Sunday saw me finishing the main part of the bedroom and then dealing with all of the cuts needed to wrap around the 4 closets in there. That was "fun" and "I can't wait until I can do that again". Yeah, that's it.

*crickets*

Whatever, after some total mental lapses involving tapes measures and being able to, well, actually measure, the floor went down. The last (and craziest) part of the install was at the third floor landing near the bathroom and along the stairs. There were 100+ year old spindles nailed into the original pine subfloor that we were going to obviously cover. Our solution? Use scraps of the floor as spacers of sort. Then I just stood on the stairs and reached up to cut them with my reciprocating saw. And it totally worked. The cuts aren't 100% flush with the flooring but they're close enough to make a HUGE difference.

The old bullnose was removed and some spiffy new stuff picked up by the Boss today. She does have a good eye I must say.

Anyway, the floors were run and cut to the end of the subfloor and the new bullnose tacked in. The only "problem" with the bullnose is that the edge curves gently 90 degrees and they didn't have that piece. So until we decide to lose our minds and pay $200 for a custom milled 90 degree curved piece that's like 4 inches long...there's going to be a gap. Sue us.

You basically see the final product in the picture to the left, but probably better on the right. See? Ok, so some spindles didn't make it though the flooring install, but they're in a nice little stack waiting to join their friends once again.

Just wait until we post the pictures of the plumbing fixtures now that they've been installed....and WORK!

Electricity (that was Friday) + floors (you know, unfinished) + plumbing = A happy house. Or at least until the stress of staining the floors happens...

Long time no typing at you!

So fall is here and of course the project that had no end in sight...has an end in sight! I'll wait until you recover from fainting..................................OK, let's soldier on with the blabbering blogging.

So we've been busy over the past 3 or so weeks with finishing the grouting in the bathroom, some light framing/construction, and some (more) painting. The third floor is ACTUALLY slated to be done(ish) by Monday. "What are you talking about Bryan...we know about the contractor drama, so how can you be about done(ish) on Monday?

Note: done(ish) means that all I have left is the window trim. Can do.

Well, glad you asked. In the end (and tons of phone calls and conversations) we decided to pay the electrical subs to come back and finish the job. Yes this means that we'll be paying them essentially AGAIN for the work. Yes that sucks. And yes, we fully plan to recoup our money in the end. I can assume you know what drama that will mean in a few months. But I digress....

So the sub is coming back Friday and we're finally going to have power and lights up there. Big win. We spoke to the plumbing sub a couple of times 2+ weeks ago, but then he stopped calling us back. After we called ever.single.day.for.two.weeks. Needless to say, he hasn't convinced us that he is worth paying. This still leaves open the nonsense about our contractor never paying them, but we'll deal with that when we come to it....but whatever. Honestly, and not to be too gross....I need to make #2 in our new bathroom after all of the checks I've heaved out of my wallet. There I said it. Sorry everyone. (that last thought will FOR SURE be deleted by Christina in the next 18 hours I just know it)

We did let the plumbing sub know our intentions to use someone else with "if you don't call us back by end of day...yeah yeah..." you get it. But Monday our replacement guys will be here bright and early to finish the work. Damn straight.

In the meantime, I will be attempting to install the hardwoods in our bedroom with our friend Graham. This will be on Saturday, so hopefully that adventure ends like "Return of the Jedi" and not "Empire Strikes Back" by Sat night. At this point only the magic 8 ball knows.

Anyway, how about some pictures?!?! How about THE LAST PICTURE I WILL EVER POST of our shower? (you're welcome for the "last...ever" realization). Note the fantastic grout work, and matching marble ledge and curb?

If you work through previous posts, or have a memory that I can't even pretend to possess, you'll know that under the new bathroom is our old office (now workshop). Well I had a couple of decent days and worked on the soffit that will house the plumbing and recessed lights. We're so fancy I feel like I should be wearing a suit all of the time. Pin stripes.

Here's the result of my effort. To be truthful, this actually took me two weekends. One Sat to start building it the way I thought it would work the best...with me ripping almost all of it down the next day. Then this past weekend I got my head out of my proverbial #2 and did it right. The product is to your left.

Hey family and close friends...want to come over and stay for the weekend? (a few of you have braved our work cave in the past) AWESOME! Here's what our living room looks like right now. So come on over!!!

And yes that's a mattress and box spring in our living room. We ordered them in June thinking that (HAHAHA) we'd be using them upstairs by now. I got a little antsy over the past couple of weeks since we paid for them and they weren't in the house. And given how well our recent track record of paying people to do or deliver things has been going...I wanted them in our house. So add in the 120 or so feet of window casing we have lying around, and the place is like cat hide and seek heaven.

I guess to wrap this latest update up I'll give you a picture that we find kind of funny. What do you get when you cross someone grouting and needing bucket after bucket of water, with another person who spent 30 minutes mopping the kitchen floors?

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<--- That. New uses for those silly grocery bags.