Cold Spaghetti

Somehow over the last two months we’ve carved time for Paul to work on the outbuilding.

He finished the siding (all except for that top header in the front) and the siding along the back and sides.  FINALLY.  The piles of hardie in the backyard are gone.

This is what the back of the outbuilding looks like from the roof of the shed that belongs to the house behind ours.  Close quarters.  Let’s hope they have a termite contract, too.

Then Paul got to work on barn-style doors.  So that we could stop the rain from coming into the opened section of the building.

Here’s a newly hung door.

Ah, who I am kidding?  This is totally a beefcake shot.

Here are the doors.

And here is the question: what color should paint them?  (Or, should we stain them?)

(Note… I’m partial to paint because we’ve had bad luck with stain.  But I’m easily persuaded otherwise.)

The caveat.  This is the back of the house with the color that will eventually, one day, cover the entire house.  And outbuilding.  At least, this was the plan.  But, like I said, we could be persuaded by particularly fetching arguments.

Oh, and the color is more blue than aqua, despite what the photograph tells you.

Anyone have ideas or suggestions?

April in New Orleans.  What a tease.

Beautiful, beautiful weather, low humidity, sunshine, and music, music, music.  She comes to us at the height of our crazy spring, coinciding with finals, abstract submission deadlines, and all of the other stress-inducing things that come when folks are trying to wrap up their lives to prepare for summer.  In New Orleans, you learn to stop and smell the roses when you may… because if you wait until you’re ready, it’s too late.  She’s gone.  April has run off into a breezy dreamland and you’re stuck with sticky, unpredictable May.

In an effort to keep the stifling grip of May at bay, Paul has been dedicating his afternoons to the repair and renovation of the yard.  Yup, we’re shifting gears yet again, before the summer hits full swing.  It’s yard time.  The schedule is a familiar one… he leaves for work before 6am, works until I’ve taken the kids to school and comes home to continue work, stopping around 3.  Then he starts on the yard and works until dark, when the kids are going to bed.  He eats dinner and showers and then works the second job for awhile, until he’s too tired to think and crashes.  We do this schedule a lot, with me sort of flying around trying to keep all the pieces from collapsing in order for Paul to make progress.  This is why DIY home renovation takes a lot of time.

The current project is the next phase in one we begun before Katrina, when the builder next door (Todd Tedesco) built the house roughly a foot and a half above grade and then brought in truckloads of sand to build up the land around it.  Paul realized quickly that the run-off would severely erode our foundation and built a “levee” to protect our house almost overnight.  We’re glad he did… the neighbors on the other side, who do not have nearly the proximity and volume we experience, have severe settling to their handicap ramp (and likely to their home) so it’s alarming to think about what state our house would be in if Paul hadn’t acted quickly back then.   (See the depth of the shovel?)

The levee was a temporary fix.  We had a site surveyor come out and was preparing a report about the problem… this was literally a day or two before Katrina.  After the storm?  Well, nothing is the same after. So we’ve had to deal with the problem ourselves.  The run-off, while not going under our home, is still a tremendous problem.  Rather than erode our foundation, it’s eroded our front yard.  We haven’t been able to plant anything in the front because it is washed away.  The entire front sidewalk has a lean that wasn’t there before due to the weight of the flowing water… it’s that dramatic a problem.

So, Paul has brought our side of the yard to grade.  Where it was when we bought the home.  Down to the original sidewalk.  This matches the other side of the house, where Paul installed a drain long ago to great success.  He exposed the downspout, created a bed of concrete to slope to the drain, and unearthed the original sidewalk, which naturally leans inward to prevent water from going under the house.  We are just thankful that the contractor the builder used* didn’t tear up the bricks when he dug up the area between the house to lay down plumbing from the backyard.

The other plus is that the wood used in the previous solution’s ‘levee’ was creating a termite draw.  Much better that these old pieces of lumber are away from our foundation.

Another benefit is that Paul will be able to access the underside of the house on this side — rather than having to crawl all the way from the opposite side to address an issue that is right there.  Considering this is the side that has the junction box, this is a big deal.  (Look below… see the light sand over the dirt?  It’s several inches thick.)

There is much work still to be done, but so far he’s laid more than 800 pounds of concrete and moved several hundred pounds of dirt.  In less than 5 days.

—

* Remember him?  He was very nice.  Let Will drive the bulldozer.

We’ve been using Paul’s ‘idle’ hours to move things along on the house.  Each morning, he starts work at 6am and works for several hours on the start-up.  Then around lunchtime, he moves on to working on the house.

Today we worked to finish many of the tasks in Will’s Room.

This included finishing the painting.

As a reminder, “painting” one of our rooms means sanding, washing, fixing, filling, priming, and perhaps doing all of those things two or more times before moving on to actual paint.  Then 1-2 coats of primer on the oil surface and at least 2 coats of paint on the walls and 2-3 on the trim.  Alllll the way up the 12 foot walls and on the ceiling.  Because of the humidity near the ceiling, it takes hours for paint to dry.  So it took the last three days to finish painting walls and trim.

Then Paul moved into baseboards.  Repairing open sections and installing toe molding.  Delicate cuts make it all fit…

Notice that our family room is the sawdust catcher.  We start to get nervous if at least one room in the house doesn’t have sawdust on the floor… it’s just not home without it.

Here’s the big picture.  I still can’t believe the awesomeness of this room.

He’s making a round cut around the edge so that it will mesh in perfectly.

Ta-da!  This also is to give a sense of how small the room is… although it felt huge after the paint was up.

The lights went in over 4 years ago.  Trim kits went in today.

We don’t claim to be speedy.

Ceiling view from the door to the hallway.  It took Paul a lot of research, trial, and error to figure out how to install standard lights and trim kits in old ceilings, where beams are not spaced the same as modern construction.  He actually fashioned special cutting tools and ways of working through the layers of lathe in order to place the lights where we wanted them in the ceiling and have them properly aligned and spaced.

When he was still trying to figure out the particulars, he actually contacted This Old House with specific questions about recessed lights in these types of ceilings.  They never responded.

I figure it’s ’cause Bob Villa has nothin’ on Paul.

See the beige oil paint around the door?  We’re still not sure what to do with the doors.  Dip them and stain them?  Paint the trim?  Paint everything white?

We want to have them repaired and have working hardware (none of our doors actually close) and figure we should go ahead and dip them, too, since it’s usually part of the process.  And it seems a shame to paint them after the beautiful cypress is exposed.  But there is no way we’re stripping the doorways, so would it be strange to just have the doors be natural wood?

Trivial details.

After scraping paint off the window, cleaning the floor, and hanging the curtains, we set up Will’s bed.  The one that has been sitting in our front room in pieces since last September — the kids have had to climb on and around it piled behind our couch for almost a year.  We’d have jacked it up on cinder blocks, but that’s how we store our cars in the front yard.

The bed!

Will currently sleeps in a full-size bed, so we have a mattress for the bottom bunk.  We realized that we wouldn’t be using a box spring… what do we do with a box spring?  Paul wants to put some carpeted plywood above to make a play space on top.  I’m thinking we’ll wait a little longer before anyone goes up… I’m nervous about Kate.

The bookshelves are still full of our work stuff.  All of Will’s clothes are currently in his closet and though he won’t have a dresser, he’ll have plenty of shelf space!