It's Fun to Break Things

This weekend we started serious demolition.  We ripped out the kitchen and the master bath.  I'm not gonna lie- it was fun but it was really tough.  I've never been a person who likes to break things. For instance, I never understand why rockstars trash fancy hotel rooms (drugs) or why some people can get mad enough to punch through a wall (drugs) or how an otherwise calm giant lizard could wreak havoc on an Asian nation (rhymes with pugs) but I do understand the pleasure of completely demolishing a disgusting, outdated house.  It's pretty awesome. 

The work itself is easy, lots of bashing with a sledgehammer, but a 10 pound sledgehammer gets unbelievably heavy after swinging it over your head a few dozen times.  I started out all fired up, full of Redbull and moxy, but after an hour of kitchen demo I was ready for a nap. I passed the buck in a big way this weekend.  I started out strong but was reduced to pointing and mumbling by the end. I got through a good portion of the kitchen before tapping out.

I removed all the doors and bashed out the upper cabinets and some of the lowers.  Then Louis took over and knocked out the rest! 

The only thing left is the sink because no matter how hard we tried, we could not find the second water shut off valve.  Part of the minty overhang is still there because it's housing a few electrical wires that we didn't want hanging over the sink.  Other than that, we killed it. RIP mint kitchen. You had a good run. 

My favorite part was watching the glass wall go.  It was like watching the end of an era.  

It put up a fight- wouldn't budge, spitting glass shards at us, being super heavy and generally awkward, the list goes on.

Wicked little glass shards just daring me to drop my guard! There was glass everywhere by the time we were done.  We loosened the top and kicked it over.  Then we had to cut the gel sealant lines between rows of blocks and heave them all into the dumpster. 

In the midst of all of this, our lovely neighbor from next door came by and brought us brownies. Brownies! I swear I heard a harp playing when she walked in.  We gave her a tour of the place, MINUS showing her all the mice mummies we found behind the dishwasher, said our thank you's and goodbyes to her and then ate brownies in silence before resuming the destruction.  

Then as I was running out to grab a big trash can from Home Depot, a place I'm so familiar with now that I can tell you where to find just about anything, a little dog came walking up to us out of nowhere! 

It was obvious that the little thing was exhausted from its adventure so we got it some water and then read its collar. Sophie had gone on quite the journey from a few properties behind us and her mom was very relieved that we called, there's a somewhat busy street in front of our house and everyone was happy that she hadn't made it that far! 

I'm really pleased that our neighbors are turning out to be lovely people! You never know when you're out in the country- we find shell casings all over the place from where the previous owners of our house shot randomly all over the property.  It seems like every neighbor we meet is happy they're gone. I wonder if they'll feel the same when we have massive bonfires, slip n' slides and outdoor movie nights where Anchorman may or may not be playing on loop.  I think if I give away enough produce in the summer we can get away with it! 

Demo-ing the bathroom was a perfect project for day two.  Those tiles hopped off the wall like they'd been waiting to be put out of their misery for decades!  I barely had to tap the walls with my hammer.  Because that bathroom went out in such a classy way, I'd like to pay tribute- 

"In Remembrance" 

Master Bath

1965-2010

("It's So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday" is playing softly)

You didn't care that your tiles clashed with the flooring, you had gumption, I'll give you that. 

The blue-ish carpet around the bottom of your sink really pulled the room together.

Your medicine cabinet was disgusting and the light above it had an inch of dust on top BUT...

that didn't stop you from offering to hold a toothbrush- polite to the end AND furthermore...

you were ready for any dixie cups that needed to be stored. Classy. 

 

If only you had a shard of soap for me...PERFECT! That looks like Irish Spring, my fave! 

  

Lastly, you had a scented toilet paper roll. It's the little things. 

Perhaps the best overlooked convenience was the compact design.  Only 1-2 inches separated your bathroom needs.  Shower/toilet/sink- all within 3 feet. Perfection. 

  PS: That's actually a really nice and brand new Kholer toilet that I'll be selling on craigslist this week.  We're getting dual flush toilets or I'd keep it.

After a moment of silence, I started bashing away.  

Elapsed time for the picture above was about 3 minutes! Best of all- I figured out why there's a water damage spot on the ceiling downstairs-

 When I got to the area around the soapdish, my hammer broke through the wall. Apparently there had been a leak between tiles for quite some time and the wall was completely rotten. I guess no one ever re-grouted or sealed after 1965.

While I was saying good bye to big blue, the kitchen got worked to the studs.  We discovered that the back kitchen wall is only separated from the bedroom behind it by 2inches of air between drywall. No sound insulation, nothing! That drywall was so old we could have punched right through it.  

Then it was time for the partition walls in the master bedroom. BEFORE:

AFTER:

 It really opened the room up to take both down.  An interesting thing happened when the second one was being demolished...

When you're a kid you get excited to find a toy inside a box of cereal, when you'd an adult you get to find things like an old staple gun inside a partition wall frame!! 

 This is the construction equivalent to a doctor leaving scissors inside a patient.  We almost couldn't believe it. That wall was a fake wood paneling time capsule of sorts. Best thing is- we needed a staple gun!

Next came tackling doors.  There are a LOT of awful doors in that house along with narrow door frames. This is what we do to narrow door frames where we come from. 

 

Yup, we busted them all out/I planted some seeds in seedling starter cases while they got busted out. I'd reached the pointing and mumbling stage by then. 

It was 60 degrees and sunny today- the time for planting is upon me!  I don't think I'll be able to plant enough to sell at local farmer's markets this summer but I'm going to try.  I ordered a shocking amount of seeds and have started my seedlings.  I'm looking to buy a smaller greenhouse this week just to use to start seeds and for personal use/growing flowers after.  I'll buy big ones to put on that concrete slab out back for year-round produce before next winter. 

I'm also looking to fence in a good portion of land behind the house for a big garden -something really basic like posts and wire fencing just to deter deer and rabbits.  We're going to take a stab at putting the fence up ourselves so that'll be an interesting task.  I'm going to work on some aerial plans before we do anything.  I need to leave room for moving the mobile chicken coop around. 

I'm pretty excited to build that chicken coop.  It's going to be structured after Tara.  I think the eggs will taste better because of it! Chicken coops and chickens will be a whole other entry but here are a few pictures of designer coops so you know I'm not the only person who wants one. www.backyardchickens.com is a cool site if you ever thought about raising some of your own! 

A lighthouse looking chicken coop.

A chicken McMansion.

A greenroofed coop! People are so creative.

Like A Bar At 2am

Lots of waiting around at the house today. I used that time to take a looong walk around the property. Now that almost all of the snow has melted I can get a really good look at what we're dealing with.  As I've said previously, we first saw the place covered in knee high grass, then knee high snow so seeing it now, completely barren, is like getting a really good look at the person you've been talking to in a bar when the lights go on at 2am....not always what you thought. In this case, it's like marrying that person and THEN having the lights turned on. Gotta make lemonade!

Here's a photographic tour of the walk I took today and all that I saw so you can understand the landscaping issues we have- I love a challenge.

The first thing that became obvious to me is that we have a TON of deer.  A. TON. I'd seen deer hanging out before but usually at the far end of the property and only a handful.  However, the amount of deer poop I saw today would lead me to believe that we bought a deer nightclub, and a really popular one at that.  For you folks who, like me, had not seen deer poop before- this is what it looks like.

My apologies to anyone who was eating Cocoa Puffs while reading this.


Growing up I loved seeing deer when we'd drive through my dad's home state of Pennsylvania or when the occasional confused deer would be spotted wandering through suburbia.  Back then they were just pretty to me, now I see them as pretty, tick carrying, garden destroyers.  I need to bust up this deer nightclub and fast!

I've been reading a LOT about ticks lately and while we're lucky to not be near a wooded area, the high amount of deer running all over is just as bad.  Our lovely neighbors say they have to check themselves everytime they come inside in the spring. They've found them crawling on their boots and socks.  Annnnd cut to me fainting.

I make an effort to eat organic vegetables, free-range organic eggs, grass-fed only red meat and we're paying extra for no-VOC paint & adhesives but let me be clear- I will spray Agent Orange all over that property to keep ticks away.  I have my limits.

Knowing your enemy is vital so I've been doing a lot of tick research.  They're vulnerable in late March/early June. THAT'S when you gotta spray.  That's also when we'll have blinding flood lights on motion detectors attached to everything and big surly rescue dogs running around, both of which I'm hoping keep the deer away.  Ticks don't like open areas which describes our whole property so my fingers are crossed.  I'm also hoping that chickens eat ticks.  It'll be another few months before we have them but when we do I hope they put a jihad on ticks. I know that guinea hens love to eat them but I don't think they lay eggs...and they're loud from what I understand. BUT we'll see.

In other landscaping news, the current pathway to the porch from the driveway is nonsensical and therefore fits right in with everything else.  It hugs the shape of the house making you feel like PacMan trying to get to the front door.  The way I see it, no one is ever going to go to the front door on that path, everyone will use the side door because you get to that first - it's logical enough.

I've gotta bust up that pathway and put in a new one that curves to the front door from the driveway.  I like the idea of natural stones or light gravel with solar lights and low shrubs lining it.

The current shrubs around the house are hideous.  These two look like buried troll dolls. Then there are two unkempt holly bushes on the front of the house. They all gotta go. Bonfire. Hydrangea and Gardenia bushes will take their place.

I love that big tree in the photo above but please take note of the odd elevated area around the base where someone previously had a bricked, or otherwise walled-in, raised flower bed that they removed.  Now it's an eroding mound of dirt to deal with.

I spent a lot of time looking up plants that love water.  I'm interested in plants that love water because it seems we have some drainage issues here and there and I'd like to use landscaping to help remedy it and keep us from getting swarmed by mosquitos this summer.

Many thanks to whoever went off-roading on one side of our front yard, (technically it wasn't ours yet when this happened) I suspect it was crazy ol' Doc Brown and his DeLorean by the looks of those tracks. We now have rivers of muck and stagnant water. The tire tracks are so deep that I'm going to have to till up the area as soon as we get a tractor.

There's SO much blacktop that I think water runoff is always going to be a problem.  I'm looking to plant trees all along the driveway to drink up as much of it as possible.


My personal preference would be to have a fine gravel driveway to let water permeate the soil but this blacktop looks pretty fresh so I think we're stuck with it for a while.





Let me show you how much blacktop we have- here's one side of the parking lot we have out front. Yes, that's a weird cut out blacktop bit sticking out from the side like an employee of the month parking spot.  The plywood is where the dumpster is going to go so it won't make dents.

Here's the other half, just the part where I'm parked is big enough to be almost a full basketball court. It's pretty ridiculous. However, the house doesn't have a garage so the blacktop is nice if we can add one somewhere on it before next winter!

From here I went down to the OTHER section of blacktop where that big warehouse building used to be.

The land slopes down to that area from the upper "parking lot" and since the building foundation was made level by digging into that slope, dirt is eroding and starting to cover most of it.

The plan is to add at least a two level retaining wall to that slope to stop further erosion.

In the picture to the left you can see the 3-4 foot drop where they dug the land to be level for the building foundation.  That's where the retaining walls are going to go.



The building on that spot was sold by the previous owners as they were moving but there's still water and power out there as showcased by the lonely water spigot below. Behind it is a gas tank about to tip over but still in working order.  The soil runoff problem is pretty clear.

Here's that second driveway area I mentioned in my last post.  The bit of fence you see is a gravel entrance that leads to where the building used to be. Again, my hope is to put greenhouses here and nice people, who have a passion for buying local and paying in cash, can drive up and buy vegetables, apples and eggs!

From there I headed north to the barn along remnants of a gravel path.  To the right you can see the lights for the lit riding ring that is now grown over in more dead grass.

If we find a trainer who wants to rent the barn and back acreage from us I'll see about getting the lights to work again.  I'd love to see horses running around and have always wanted to take formal English style lessons.  I had a few when I was really little but it made my mom nervous, I blame Gone With The Wind.  Now that I'm a grown up I can try again while I run with scissors, go outside without a jacket in the cold and eat cake for dinner. Love you mom. :)

The barn is interesting.  To be frank, it smells like animal pee. This is something I didn't notice when it was freezing outside.  Today it was in the 50's, I don't even want to know what it smells like in the summer.

There are 4 stables, all of which have had their doors removed.  Nice. Yet random things like horseshoes and feed buckets are still laying around.

Here's the other side of the barn, no there's no snow now, I took this shot a month ago. I can't tell if there's supposed to be a loft but there is a door that opens at the top of the barn.

There's also an office attached to the barn that I plan to make look amazing in my efforts to lure a horse trainer.  It's that or me milking goats.  We have to use that barn for something and I'd prefer to look at horses. I read somewhere that horses like little companions so maybe a goat or two just for fun.  What they eat,  we don't have to mow!



I walked around the barn to take a look at the very back of the property where I thought I saw a fox...

BUT it didn't run so I wasn't sure.  Being me I walked closer and realized it was the mangiest cat to ever live.

It started meowing the equivalent of a cat in it's 60's who'd been smoking since it was 13.  Furthermore, this cat was a dead ringer for Skimbleshanks-

The resemblance is uncanny, no? It had a collar on so I went about my merry way, see you later Skimbleshanks!

On my way back to the house I came across a very weird, burnt patch of land...apparently someone/the previous owners burned a bunch of random things in a big pile. It was a little scary.

Metal, plastic, ceramic pots, beer cans, misc wooden things, glass, anything and everything you can imagine is all a part of this big burn scar in the middle of the back yard.

From there I walked up to the back of the house. There's a small cement room under the porch that always weirds me out.  The door doesn't close right now and there aren't any lights.  In my imagination it's where the Candyman lives. In reality, it's a very useful room that will one day serve as a root cellar. Those brick piles are so Blair Witchy, I need to get rid of them.

After my walk the dumpster got delivered so we have a place to throw our demo trash tomorrow. Now we can finally get rid of the huge pile of masochist's pick-up-sticks in the living room from when I pulled up floorboards. No more stepping gingerly around them while trying to remember if I ever got a tetanus booster (I didn't). 

Then chimney guys came by and put caps on the top of the chimney and fixed the insides (I'm hazy about exactly what was done but I'm told it's $300 well spent). Lastly, Jimmy the septic guy came by and explained the new and improved system.  He was 3 hours late but it's cool, he's put up with our sh!t a lot (pun intended) so I can waste a little of my youth waiting on him.  

Here are the three huge septic tanks out back. We originally had only one but for whatever reason, he had to add 2 more to make the system work properly and abide by county codes. I'm thinking of creative landscaping tricks to camouflage them.  Low shrubs around them? Flower beds? Potted plants on top? I'll figure something out.  

It was kinda warm today....time to start growing seedlings indoors!  I'm headed to Home Depot this week to buy a small greenhouse where I can lay out all my seedlings.  Then I have to get a deer fence put up around the area where I want to garden outdoors.

There's no shortage of things to do but first on the list for tomorrow is demo.  Demo is the word of the day.  We've got to fully gut the master bathroom and kitchen all the way down to the studs.  I'll have photos of the destruction after!

The Heat Is ON

GREAT day today. Lots of good news- the boiler guys brought the parts they needed and got it working so the house is slowly getting warm and we could finally turn the water on which means we can use our own bathrooms! To top it off, I finished pulling up the floors, hooraaaaay!

There are only a few lights that work in the house so any pictures I take after dark are terrible. BUT you get the idea, no more raised wood floors on top of linoleum. Pulling floors was hard but honestly really fun! It beats making spreadsheets any day of the week.

The boiler guys said ours is WAY too big for the house and will cost us a ton of money to run.  SO, we'll probably just keep it for the rest of this year and look into something else for next winter.  We're getting a propane tank buried in order to have gas for cooking so we'll likely go with a propane boiler next year.  I've always thought baseboards looked gross but getting warm that way feels great compared to having warm air blown at you through vents. I just need to see about better looking covers for the baseboards.

Our contractors came out and measured all the rooms this afternoon, we're still debating where to relocate the stairs but anywhere is better than their current location so we're pretty easy to please. We're also planning on completely removing the guest bath and using that space to expand the master.  Then we'll take some room from an upstairs bedroom to make a full guest bath with an entry in the hall and in the bedroom for overnight guests.  The bedrooms in the house are huge so you won't even be able to tell.

I'm still waiting for the quotes to come back about new windows and doors as well as kitchen cabinets but I'm stopping by the Home Depot tomorrow to check out their options.  We're hoping that if I can keep the kitchen costs way down we can reallocate funds towards other pressing issues like repairing the downstairs full bath, expanding and remodeling the downstairs laundry room into a big mud room/laundry room/dog washing room.  Another big wish is to be able to window-in the screened in porch....and vault the ceilings....and add a big window at the top of that vault to let in the southern light.  It's far fetched but we're just pricing out options!

I love the screened in porch, even though, like the rest of the house, I want to change everything about it!

The ceiling is really low and for whatever reason it's made of gorgeous wood. What a waste. No matter how pretty it is, it's too low and gives off a serious nautical theme.  If we can't do what we want with the porch I'm going to roll with it- anchors, blue and white canvas, seashells and a few life preservers. 

The floor is made of a special cheap tile that ensures anti-friction so you slip every time you walk on it.  Perfect for older relatives worried about bone loss. I need to look into what I can replace it with.

There's an entry to the driveway and an entry into the kitchen/dining area from the porch.  I'd love to replace that door above with a set of french doors once the room is windowed in.  Either way, I'm excited to move a table out there and have dinners on the porch in the summer.  Sidenote: That huge house you can see in the background of the picture above belongs to the people who live behind us.  All the land behind our property belongs to two brothers who live next to each other and that house is one of them.  We hear they're nice but I haven't visited yet. Their dad used to own hundreds of acres and they've sold it off in smaller chunks keeping a big compound for themselves. 

The reason we know about who lives behind us is because we met our the neighbors who live next to us last week. We absolutely lucked out because they may be the nicest people on earth. They recently built their home and they referred us to the contractor we picked.  Here's a not so great pic of their house from one of the downstairs bedrooms- 

 The house is gorgeous, unique and lovely.  

As you can see, the snow that was about 3 feet deep is melting and showcasing all the landscaping we have ahead of us.  Here's a shot of the backyard from the back door looking towards the right of the property-

 

In the distance on the right you can see a huge concrete slab where the previous owners had a big warehouse/aluminum building where they ran a pool business. They took the building when they left so now it's a BIG slab with a water spigot sticking out of the middle and a powerbox at the end.  It's going to be a perfect location for greenhouses! 

Now a shot looking towards the left-

It's pretty gross out there right now. The ground is all torn up from when the septic guys used a big tractor to repair the system.  

Here's a better picture of the slab behind a beat up shed. There's a separate driveway entry at the end of the slab that will be great if we rent out the barn to a trainer and when we're set up to sell produce. 

It was sleeting today but I'll take more landscape shots next time. Still a lot to do but things are starting to come together! We're hoping to have a demo party this weekend where we'll pay people will beer and pizza in return for demolishing our house.  Sounds like a good deal to me!

The Neverending Flooring.

 

Long day yesterday. The pictures are dark because it was dark by the time I left. I am so, SO close to being done with the floors. All I have left is about 20 boards at the top of the staircase. I removed everything from the kitchen and entryway. That fridge has GOT to go at some point, it's always in the way.  I need to figure out when the contractor plans to bring a dumpster over, my pile of floorboards is knee high.

I probably could have finished the job yesterday but I spent too much time chatting with the guys who came to troubleshoot the boiler.  I was hammering away and pulling up floorboards when they drove up, they took forever getting their stuff together so I kept working away until they walked up to the porch.  I came out to greet them - looking crazy I'm sure since I now spend most of my days clad in 3-4 layers, wearing safety glasses, working gloves and carrying a crowbar- and sure enough they looked shocked. They were no picnic themselves mind you, one was huge, smoking and wearing a head flashlight and the other was in head to toe camo with a zz top beard and chaw in his mouth.   The one with chaw in his mouth said, "I coulda sworn by the swing of that hammer there was a big ol' man in here!" (Feminists of the universe rejoice!)

Anyway, nice guys but they could NOT get it working and it's 100% the bank's fault.  The bank sent a guy out there months ago to put 25gallons of oil (hardly anything) in the boiler to see if it worked, it did and would have kept working IF that guy had remembered to turn the boiler off when he left.  Instead it burned all the oil and kept running until the gears got stripped. Thanks bank, just when we thought you couldn't make our lives hard ever again. The boiler guys are coming back this afternoon with new parts for the engine to try again.  At almost $200/hour they'd better fix it today or I'm recycling the metal and getting propane.  

So, I got a lot done yesterday but no cigar. I spent my morning meeting with our contractor and the people he uses for window/doors, kitchens/bathrooms (we'll see what their estimate is, I'm really tired of people telling me that cabinets cost more than my college education) and a flooring guy named Javier who I absolutely love because he's going to take over the floors once I'm done pulling up this last part! Javier will rethread the wood planks and make it seem like nothing was ever pulled up, then he'll sand them and stain them a dark brown.  I had thought about tackling all that myself but as much as I'd like to have ripped arms I don't know that I want to run a sander over 2,000 square feet, I may end up with scary, veiny Madonna arms.  Take it away Javier!

I'll finish my part of the floors today and then our contractor is stopping by to design a new bathroom layout. Once we settle on a design they'll start ordering materials and we can start demoing. That plus the boiler guys plus a chimney repair person coming out means another busy day. There's a ton more to say but I have to get back in the car to head out there now. Driving 40 minutes to an hour to get there from where we're renting a place now is getting tiresome. If we can get the boiler working we can turn the water on, heat plus water = staying the night there!