A thick fog rolled in the other day. The air was calm and quiet. Nice thing about a fog is it traps the heat in, gets nice and warm. And you totally expect a horde of undead zombies to come crawling ashore from a wrecked pirate ship. Some of these old growth forests are spooky enough as they are, dark as a cave and crawling with critters. I’d hate to be in a boat out there, when this fog rolls in.
Category Archives: House
Laundry Room Plans
Yeah, it’s just the laundry room. Nothing exciting. It’s currently 72 poorly arranged square feet that are working way harder than they should be. In fact, this room does so much that we’ve decided to start the renovation here.
Currently, the washer and dryer are arranged perpendicular to the existing cabinets, which wastes a lot of space. There’s an entire corner that we can’t even get to. We just kind of drop things down into the hole, bulky storage items that we don’t have to retrieve often.
Speaking of the existing cabinets, we’re pretty sure they were born in someone else’s house. Then, when they were taken to the dump and thrown away, someone saw them and said ‘hey, I bet those would fit in my laundry room.’ Now they’re here. They’re very poorly built; when you open one door it kind of twists the whole frame of it so all the doors open simultaneously. I hate them. When I get rid of them, I will burn them to the ground so there’s no risk of them ever being used again.
Oh, and check out these wonderful shelves. Those steel racks only found at places like ace hardware, that can transform any old, rotted, trashy slab of wood and turn it into a beautiful, efficient, adjustable shelving system. These too shall burn. The steel shall sink to the bottom of the sea, I swear it.
This tiny little 5 x 10 room has a lot of functions. In addition to laundry, it’s got to have a place for a cat litter box, the microwave and coffee pot, cat food, and quite a bit of miscellaneous utility storage. It needs to have a hanging wardrobe of sorts, a place to hang clothes fresh out of the dryer, have hooks for mops and brooms and crossbows and whatever else needs to be hung up.
One reason we’re somewhat motivated to tackle this room first is that there’s a bank of cabinets in the kitchen that is going to get taken down. These are good cabinets, actually, and they’ll be a nice fit and give us a ton of storage in there. Once those cabinets are down, we get to knock out a wall and open the kitchen up a little bit. Looking forward to that.
Construction and demolition may not start for a while. Still deciding on things like flooring and how to make the new cabinets. But I’m hoping to get this finished before summer, because then I’ll be outside doing landscaping.
Light
Sometime between 1992 and late last week, someone paid money for this light fixture, and then they attached it to what is now our house.
Did they buy it because the original one fell off its last rusty screw and shattered into pieces? Or did they spot this gunmetal contraption at Island Hardware The Exchange abandoned on the side of a dirt road road and just absolutely fall in LOVE with it? Either way, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it was straight when they installed it, and it was only a matter of time and gravity that gave it the leaning tower look.
Anyway, it had to come down. Ships were running aground when we kept it lit for too long.
We got something a little more to the scale of the house. With a few shims and spacers it installed upright. Came with one of those fancy high efficiency light bulbs that will function for 300 years before it burns out.
So we’re slowly adding things to update the place and give it a little more visual appeal from the outside. It still looks pretty crappy of course but these things take time. Meanwhile, we’ll just enjoy the view that goes the other direction.
Saying goodbye to the old kitchen faucet.
It was an emotional weekend. The lovely kitchen faucet, the one that came free with the house, finally decided it was time to go. Yes, the poor thing just refused to turn off, letting water leak out and drip unless you wiggled the tired handle just right. You could hear the flakes of oxidized metal scraping off every time you went to pull on that lever. I tried to save it, but in the end, there was no hope for it.
It was a fighter, too. Every nut and bolt was sealed in place by years of corroded metal, calcite deposits and the petrified remains of plumber’s putty. But in the end, hammers and saws and some brute force were able to gently pull this old fossil out of the sink.
My choices for new faucets were limited to exactly two. There was the $179 model and the $219 model. They were otherwise identical. I went for the one that didn’t look like the box had been opened and scavenged for parts. It won’t be the same as the old one. Nothing will ever drop flakes of calcite onto our dishes like that old faucet. I just keep telling myself that it was meant to be.
Also this weekend I got the garage wired for surround sound. I don’t care about the sound so much as I just like having the speakers set up in the wall, which means they don’t take up shelf space. Plus, surround sound kinda rocks.
Got rid of the front light fixture (I may smash its top off with an axe and stick it in the ground and plant crap inside it, kinda like that cute little chair we saw in town) (lookit the pics – you’ll see what I mean). When I went to install the new light fixture I opened the box and realized we were delivered the wrong one. So now there’s just a couple live wires sticking out of a pole next to the front door. Home, crap home.
Cozy: realtor speak for ‘small’
Normally, when a house says ‘cozy’ that means small. But in this case, I have to say, it really is cozy. And our stuff fits in it exactly. We don’t have room for one more thing.
The wood burning stove is finally all put together and the stovepipe is connected. Tonight was our first fire, and the house is really warm. We were a little concerned that the house would get a bit smoky but that stove is pretty airtight. And the nice thing about having a nice, cozy, small house – it’s not hard to heat the whole thing.
Cats, garage, moon, et cetera.
Stuff
I don’t have a very high opinion of stuff. In general, I think the vast majority of stuff is stuff we don’t need. O, sure, we acquire a lot of versatile solutions to modern living. But, for the most part, it’s all a bunch of crap we don’t need.
For months now, most of our stuff has been in a storage unit. This is because we didn’t have the floors done in the house, and I didn’t think there was much point moving our stuff into a house that just had subfloor. Let’s get the flooring done, then put stuff on top of it. It’s kind of a cart-horse dynamic. Okay, floor’s done. So now, we get stuff.
That’s me, waving hello. I’m at our storage unit, getting some of our stuff. I’m amazed, and kind of disgusted, at all the stuff we paid money to move across state lines. If I had it all to do over, I’d just leave all our stuff on the side of the road in a ditch somewhere and start over with nothing.
We’ve been spoiled all this time, living in this big empty house. The living room had no furniture. I could practice Iaido, play floor hockey, chase Inky, slide around in my underwear like tom cruise in risky business. But now we’re bringing our stuff into the house, and all that space is going to get swallowed up. Possessed by our furniture and decor and wall hangings. Basically, our stuff.
Listen. I implore you. Stop collecting stuff. Just get the stuff that you need. Spend your money on fun things, like trips to Maui, or an exhibit about south american bats at the natural history museum. Those are the fun things. Stuff isn’t fun. Stuff sucks. Stuff is an anchor, and it just weighs you down.
This is our storage unit. We’re amazed at how much stuff we’ve taken out of it, and a bit depressed by how much stuff remains. We’re responsible for that stuff. We pay money for that stuff to occupy space. At some point, I have to put the rest of that stuff into a truck and cart it all here, via ferry, which costs money by the way. And then I have to find a place for all that stuff once it gets here on the island.
You might be a redneck if…
…you mount your bookshelf on the wall with 2×4’s.
Part of the challenge in this house is that most of the walls have these baseboard heat registers on them and you can’t really put furniture in front of them if you want heat. Solution? Prop up your furniture on stilts, of course! Just use 2x4s. They’ll hold that bookshelf when it’s all full of books, no problem. It may not look fancy, but it sure looks sturdy.
I pinned the sides of the bookshelves to 2×4 studs using these super jumbo 2d10 galvanized nails that Jamie bought. Those nails could tow a small barge. They should be good enough to keep the bookshelf from falling on our houseguests sitting on the couch. But no promises.
Of course, putting the bookshelf over the heat register gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “cook the books.” Ha ha, get it? Cook the books? Hee hee.
Hardwood Floor, Part 1
Got most of the flooring installed this weekend. It’s really nice. It’s a lot better than living on particle board subfloor stained with the remains of squashed ants, dog pee and whatever else spilled on it in the past.
The install went well. I’m in good physical shape but after three solid days of crouching, kneeling, installing, hammering, sawing, lifting and pressing, I am beat. Everything hurts. And it’s not done yet but I won’t get to the rest of it until this weekend.
We put a good vapor barrier down underneath the flooring to help with the expansion and humidity. The pneumatic nailer was an expensive rental but well worth it as it saved so much time. I’ve installed flooring by hand, just small jobs, and it’s completely do-able but it takes a lot longer. This is 500 square feet of floor and I’d hate to have to pin every plank into place with a hammer and tenpenny nails. Ugh.
Those logs in the corner made for some interesting cuts. I’d like to take this time to thank Festool for making such nice precision tools to get jobs like this done. Couldn’t have gotten the job done without them.
I initially wanted to put a solid band around the tile at the entry and at the back patio but the planks didn’t come in very long lengths. I think 32″ was the longest one. So they split up a bit around the perimeter of the tile. Still, I’m happy with the way it turned out. The color is fantastic; though again, like the tile, it makes the wood paneling look even crappier in contrast.
Inky was completely and thoroughly terrified throughout the entire experience. Spent most of the time under the bed. She did NOT like the pneumatic (traumatic?) nailer at all and could not be consoled when I was hammering away with it.
In the end, it’s one of those things that makes our house look like a home. We’re very happy with it. I have just a bit of finish work to do in the living room, need to finish the bedroom and put a bit of flooring in the closet, and install some trim pieces. The trim will come much later, as I want to wait for the garage to be finished entirely and have all my tools available to custom make it.
It’s getting there. It’s finally starting to feel like a place where people live.
Living Room Furniture
The blue chair stinks, so I’m told. I can’t smell anything. That bucket of premixed mortar makes a great footrest, though.
No, we didn’t have a designer arrange this for us, but thanks for asking.