Scenes from our house painting (exterior)

We painted the house this summer, did I mention that? I could swear I wrote a post about it but when I tried to find it, I couldn't.



Anyway, here's a photo of the house in the beginning of the summer:

As you can see, the paint was starting to peel. The sides were in much worse shape, trust me.

Sean and Steve did the majority of the painting and had a little accident we refer to as "the caulking incident." It was the time they caulked the whole front of the house with non-paintable caulk and had to go over the entire thing again with paintable caulk. Yeah, it was awesome.


It's also the reason we ended up painting our house white. Because it was the only color that didn't show the caulking mistake. Because the caulk is clear. Because when we tried to paint over it with green the paint beaded up and ran away. Oops.





Anyway, it turns out we really loved the white. It opens up the whole back yard and we'll add some splashes of color to the door and window trim this Spring. We're also going to get a new fence in the backyard and I will (finally) hang up my window boxes.


Oh, and we're going to paint the cement porch--any color or paint suggestions?

Scenes from our front house painting & caulking "party"

Back in December we spent a weekend getting the upper apartment of the front house ready for new tenants. This included painting the walls and trim of several rooms, scrubbing the bathroom until it couldn't be scrubbed no more, and steam-cleaning the carpet. Oh, and re-caulking the tub.

Our previous tenant lived in the house for 13 years and kept it very clean. Still, after all those years the house needed (needs) some major updates, both cosmetic and structural. Our new tenants were on a tight time line so most of the updates in their apartment were, like I wrote above, of the cosmetic persuasion

Our friend & neighbor Kevin helped us paint on Saturday night. Here he is with Steve in the living room.

We decided to go boring landlord white with the painting but are flexible if our tenants want to paint it another color. Besides Steve, Sara, Sean, and me, we were joined by several generous friends and declared it a "painting party." I guess BEER + PIZZA + [any activity] = PARTY.

My father brought over a steam-vac and helped us clean the carpets. They were stained in certain places and generally very dirty. The above photo is of the living room after the carpets were cleaned and the walls and trim painted. Trust me, it looks so much better. Next time I'll do before and after photos.

My primary job was to clean the bathroom and I got really into it. I scrubbed the walls, the tub, the toilet, and the floor. I put a wax on the floor at the end and then admired its shine from the doorway (me to everyone else: "DO NOT WALK IN THE BATHROOM IT IS DRYING"). With Steve's help, I learned how to use a caulking gun and made the following video of my disappointment:

Scenes from Whit's first caulking experience

Warning: Use of a caulking gun may sometimes inflate one's sense of coolness.

Rite of Passage: Our pipes burst!

So Saturday morning I woke up around 9:00 and lazed around in bed for awhile, reading a magazine and thinking about what my Saturday would involve. It was the first time in awhile that I'd had a day open and to myself, and the possibilities were endless: shall I go for a walk? Perhaps kick it up a bit and strap on the snowshoes? Maybe I will clean my apartment really, really well and even start in on the disaster that is our back hallway/pantry?

I was planning a mix of getting-stuff-done and having fun but alas, none of it was to be. At 9:30 Sara called to report that her mom (who was visiting at the time) went over to the front house and thought a pipe was leaking. Oh, and the basement was flooded. Like past the first stair.

I jumped out of bed, got dressed, and put on my rain boots. Sara met me outside and we ventured over to the front house to take a gander. Sure enough, the basement was flooded with about a foot and a half of water and as I discovered upon getting a face full of spraying water, a pipe had burst.

What followed was a morning (and afternoon and evening) of trying to get the fire-hose sized sump pump in our basement unfrozen and working, as well as finding a plumber who wouldn't charge us a million bucks. There was also the issue of hot water, as in our tenants didn't have any. And then the waiting around for the plumber to get there.

My Saturday quickly turned from a day of doing what I wanted to a day of dealing with shit. After an hour of a self-imposed pity party and a tough love talk from my boyfriend, I decided that I wasn't going to let the flooded basement and bursting pipe ruin my day entirely and that, well, I'm a grown up and I own a house and shit happens. So I cleaned the kitchen while I waited and I learned a lot (relatively speaking) about the basement of our front house.

Nate the Plumber--and that's actually how he introduces himself--showed up just as the water in the basement was all pumped out and the lights turned back on. It was dark in the basement all day (and flooded with freezing water) so I hadn't been able to see the burst pipe, I just felt it when the water sprayed my face. Not knowing anything about electricity and with our electrician-in-residence at work, I didn't want to play around with the fuse-box and light fixtures while standing in a foot of water. Once the water was out and the lights came on, this is what I saw:

Nate the Plumber went to work thawing out the frozen pipes, cutting and replacing the split pipe (thankfully it was a small part), and solving our drainage problem. He eventually concluded that the waste pipe* in the middle of the house had no access point and therefore no ability to be cleaned. We usually get the main drain pipe in the front yard cleaned of tree roots twice a year but our regular Roto Rooter maintenance didn't do the trick this winter. Nate thought that there must be a clog towards the middle of the house and without the ability to clean it, our basement would keep flooding. So, Nate and his son cut the pipe and installed a Y-shaped pipe for access.

And so far, so good. We had a big melt on Sunday and while that would usually flood the basement, it stayed flood-free. My fingers are crossed, hoping that we've solved our problem for the time being. Or at least until the lining of my rubber boots has time to dry out.

*Steve claims that he's never heard anyone describe this by a name other than "shit stack."

The Winter Of Incessant Basement Flooding

Winter '08/09 will go down as the Winter Of Incessant Basement Flooding. So far the basement in the front house has flooded four times this winter, requiring us to do the following (in no particular order):

• Sump-pump gallons upon gallons of water onto our driveway and into the street during a days-long snowstorm, creating an ice rink at the end of our driveway.
• Bring in the "big guns," i.e. borrow a sump pump with a hose that looks like it could fight fires. See above.
• Inquire about replacing our now-fried electrical board for the brand new furnance for the downstairs apartment.
  
• Have Roto Rooter come out to clear the root-infested drain pipe. Twice.
• Cringe whenever the temperature rises enough for the ice to begin melting and then frantically check the basement for water.

I have to say though that after I (mostly) handled the first flood all by myself, I felt pretty frickin' awesome. Two years ago I would've wanted to lay down in the fetal position and/or call my dad.

Learning how to take care of a home, I've learned, is mostly baptism by fire.

News from the home front

Exciting news to report from the home front: we are getting our house weatherized! And I don't just mean the put-plastic-over-the-windows kind of weatherization.

I'll have more details (and technical terms) tomorrow but here's what it is likely to entail: entirely insulating our house from basement to attic, caulking doors and windows, wrapping the basement in plastic, and completing an energy audit (we've had the first part done).

After my mom and brother came over last night and informed me that my apartment is inhumanely freezing, I feel even more excited to get the house insulated. I think our quality of life will go up by 400%. I'll keep you posted.

Oh and also, our tenant moved out of the front house so expect some updates on what we're going to do up there.

As promised: scenes from my "new" office

New floors, bright space.

Finally got around to hanging some stuff up.

Scenes from my office and bathroom makeover...

So my months of obsessing over all-white interiors led me to two simultaneous projects over Labor Day weekend: new (old) floors in the office and a brighter, whiter bathroom.

In the office, like every other room in the house except the kitchen and bathroom, there was ugly, black indoor/outdoor carpet. I'd like to take it all up eventually and decided to use my office--the only room with carpet not connected to another room with carpet--as a test run: how long would it take? would it be messy? what was underneath?

Formerly white and minimally damaged floors were underneath. Plus lots of staples, glue & insulation, and tack boards. Ripping up the carpet and insulation was easy enough. We hauled five four-foot pieces out in about a half-hour. The messy (and dusty and tedious and long) part had to do with pulling up the staples and tack board.



I wore this cool mask to protect me from allergens.

At the same time, we taped off the bathroom and began painting the walls and ceiling white. Previously, they were a light tan--for a bathroom with no window, it was too dark and dank. The splash-back (is that what you call it) area behind the sink and toilet was a yellow-ish color. I painted it and the woodwork a light grey.



After all the staples were pried and the tack board in the garbage, I scrubbed the floor with a mild detergent and let it dry overnight. I then collapsed into bed.

The next morning, I set to work painting the floor. We used one container of Dutch Boy's Latex Enamel. It went on smooth and thick and thus far, there have been zero scuff marks left behind. It was too expensive either--I think $28 with a mail-in rebate.

The first coat going on! And speaking of coats...



The bathroom took three coats of white. Sigh.

At this point I need to thank my mother who helped me throughout the weekend and especially in the bathroom. She OWNED the bathroom, she ROCKED the bathroom. She also got all mom on me and took charge of the carpet removal--just the kind of leadership I needed.

On Monday, Labor Day, she and my brother stopped by the house to pick up my mom's supplies. This is how they found me: a wreck. The floor's second coat of paint had dried and I barely had enough energy to drag the IKEA chair into the office and fix myself a cup of tea. I forgot how exhausting a renovation project really is.

More photos of the finished (and put back together) office and bathroom soon. For now, more photos of the improvement project can be found here.

Oh, and I won't be doing the rest of the floors for awhile. Maybe never!

Intense colors WHOA!

Stairwell of an Israeli house profiled in the New York Times this week.

Having lived in a multi-colored, high-intensity house for almost a year now, I have to say that it's a mixed bag.

On the pro side, photographs taken in our house are always lively and engaging (I'm biased, of course) and first-time visitors to the house usually offer positive feedback. One otherwise laconic friend recently stated, "These are the colors I'd paint my house if I had the balls." Awesome, thanks!

On the con, it's a little dizzying to go from intense red to intense surfer blue in just two steps. And there's something about the bright colors that makes the space feel cluttered to me, even if it's really not. To the contrary, the two most muted (and cluttered) rooms--my bedroom and my office--are often my refuge from the intensity. They both seem to me clean, and airy.

Since Steve and Sara moved downstairs--we need an entry about that, I know--I've been contemplating future changes to the space. I'm drawn to all-white walls or at the very least some more neutral palettes. Thoughts?

Updates, all shapes and sizes

1) Two more regular characters have been added to the homestead scene, namely Sean and Sara. They both came off adventures of their own--Sara in the political world of Iowa, Sean on the coast of Kenya.

Over the past few weeks, Sara and Steve moved to our downstairs apartment and painted it fun colors, in the tradition of our fun house:

2) I started work at City Hall, heading up a Councilmember's office. I am learning more about the Inspections department and housing court than I ever imagined possible. Good stuff.

3) Been cold and snowy around these parts lately, producing crisp views like this one:

4) Mortgage company is still a jerkfest.

5) Our next door neighbors moved out (sadness) but our tenants have a new baby (happiness).

From the safety of my winter hibernation...

Now that the snow is flying, I am content to sit by my window sipping coffee, knitting hats, and thinking about all the things I'll do around the house come Spring. These daydreams include what has become a staple of all my fantasies: the illusion of more time.

This summer, for example, I constantly claimed that post-campaign I'd have more time. Now it's post-February I'll have more time. This spring--I claim again--I'll have more time. It's not likely that I'll have more free time at all. In fact, it's likely that I'll be up to my waist in local and presidential campaigning.

Still, one can fantasize and fantasize I will:

• Get Your Garden On with Gayla Trail, a workshop held in Toronto this April with the author of You Grow Girl. She's an urban garden goddess.
• Food not Lawns: My little patch of grass has such potential, at least from the perch of my warm window seat.
• The removal of this monstrosity. Steve and his pops did put a nice, new door on the outside to keep the heat from pouring into the kitchen of our tenant but it's likely we'll scrap and rebuild the whole thing. And I'll help, I swear.
• Paint the downstairs, including the room that STILL has painter's tape around the windows. This could happen sooner than the Spring, I know, but the fumes. The fumes!

The hole

Since we moved in, the toilet in the upstairs bathroom was wobbly. Lately, it had gotten to the point where sitting down was dangerous if one wasn't exceedingly gentle and delicate. Not too long ago, Steve called to tell me that finally, the wobble had gotten the best of us: the toilet leaked and the seal around the bottom needed to be replaced.

Here's Steve with the gross, expired wax seal that protects all toilets from leaking.

Now, I've had many moments during which I've been happy to have a friend along for the roller coaster ride of home ownership. The toilet breaking was one such moment, mostly because the sight--but surprisingly, not so much the smell--of the hole above made me want to retch (in case you're wondering, that brown stuff is not poo).

Steve apparently LOVED the challenge of a broken toilet though as well as tormenting me with the grime from the hole:

Anyway, my involvement ended after the above photo was taken but I think that Steve solved the problem by going to Home Depot and buying a toilet fixing kit. Now when I sit on it to do my business, it's nothing but stable and strong. Not unlike a throne.

It turns out...

...that hedge clipping is the most fun I've had in a long time. It's the adult version of cutting off your Barbie's hair. I kept looking around like Really? I'm allowed to do this? I can just cut this branch off, alter the landscape, and no one can tell me not to? Awesome.

It also turns out that the next day, my forearms hurt so bad my arms shook when using the phone or lifting a coffee mug to my lips.

Scenes from my home office

So a couple weekends ago I put together a bookshelf for my office. It's from IKEA so you can either exclaim, "Ooo, I love IKEA--awesome!" or call me a yuppie behind my back. Or if you're Steve and Micaela, to my face.

Anyway, if you've ever put together furniture from IKEA you know that they include wordless instructions and a crapload of wooden pegs, non-screw screws, and a set of allen keys. The instruction packet also features a happy little man who mimes something like, "Call IKEA if you need help!"

What follows is my photographic evidence of the process--from start to stop, frustration to frustration, bruise to ultimate triumph:

Those damn pegs pissed me off, I thought I would die one or two times when they kept popping out. Instead I hit things and swore.


Sadly, my office doesn't look much cleaner than this now...


Can you feel the chaos evaporating from my life? The cube-shapes are crying, "Order! Cleanliness! Success!"


Of course I picked the hottest day of the week to tackle the project. I was sweating a lot and took breaks to rub ice cubes all over my face.


Battle wound: it grew bigger and is now a nice, faded yellow.


Ooo, getting closer.


I own you, bitch: when I finished I sat on top of the bookshelf so that it would know who's the boss.


Yuppie-ville, here I come! Look at those baskets, those file folders, those boxes--so lovely. Seriously, I'm really happy with how this came out and can't wait to get the rest of the office squared away. Onward!

My office

So I really haven't been able to use my office yet since I still have boxes upon boxes of shit piled up all over the place. How descriptive of me--boxes of shit.

To be more specific, I've got entire IKEA magazine files full of Tori Amos lyrics I printed out in eighth grade (not to mention magazine covers) as well as the syllabi from almost every course I took in college. I've got cool scraps of paper that I can't wait to use for something and old office supplies from my high school yearbook office that were going to get thrown out--why not reuse, I thought? I am, in short, a ridiculous pack rat that needs a kick in the ass. I'm about 90% positive that this kick in the ass will come from my mother and probably in the form of her coming over to purge for me.

In the mean time, this is sort of what the office looks like:



At least the light is pretty and the color is nice. Whatever--I need help. Seriously.

Yay! Water in the basement! Yay!

So Buffalo was somehow miraculously saved from that bad Nor'easter that put New Jersey and West Virginia into states of emergency. We got a little bit of freezing rain, and lots of complaints from people who thought spring had sprung and packed away their winter clothes accordingly (this includes me).

Around 8:00 last night, I picked up a voicemail message from our tenant informing us that the basement in her house was flooded. Given that I was at a meeting, I let Steve handled the first shock of going over there and hurried home.

About two inches of water covered the basement floor, which wasn't so bad considering other times when apparently four feet of water was hanging out, sometimes with sewage (Oh seller's real estate agent, why did you not tell us?). When I got there, Steve was already at the store getting whatever we needed to fix the problem--he came back with a sump pump.

In a painless 10 minutes or less, the sump pump was set up and pumping and we were back home chugging wine* and eating two boxes of macaroni and cheese. And I did my taxes.

I think some part of the flood seemed novel, one of our first potential disasters. Like: Yay! Let's sump pump this mother! Yay, we did it! Yay! Wine!

Questions is though, when does the novelty wear off?

*"chugging" is the appropriate term

Unwired

So we don't have internet or phone service at the house right now which has limited our blogging capacity. It's also limited our contact with the outside world.

Last night while Steve was wearing a hat he made of tinfoil, he started talking to "friends" that I couldn't see or hear and telling me that we really should look into "protective, black universe curtains" for our windows. Help us--we must make contact!

In all seriousness, our unpacking process inches ahead and has now gotten to boxes containing the Dregs of Moving. You know, the crap you didn't pack up with all the rest of your stuff but can't bear to throw away yet.

For example, in one box I've got six pairs of shoes, fairy wings, Mardi Gras beads, CDs, mixtapes, pens, electric mixer wands, and a couple mugs. These boxes may very well take years to unload.

Photos of our move to come soon, in the meantime you can take a look at the view from one of the kitchen windows. The wires here taunt us daily: We carry the internet, We carry phone service, We are not yours to touch or use or love...

The dark, scary quality of this photo may cause my suburban relatives to refuse to visit me.
It's usually bright and sunny up in here!

Red, red walls

Our red hallway, soon to be home of the Awkward Portrait wall.


Trying to show some contrast, forgive the dork-factor.


Finally, another kitchen shot. I cleaned out the cupboards and drawers, need to get some contact paper.

You got tickets?...To what?...The Dad Show.

On Friday, Steve wrote that his dad was coming up to Buffalo to help us paint. Immediately, we both knew our meager painting party was about to turn into a production. As Steve said in an email, "he's bring drop cloths, and dad-ness." Dad-ness he brought.


BJ calls a team meeting in the living room.

Steve's dad--heretofore known as BJ or the Beege--came armed with a box full of things we did not have, some of which I never thought of acquiring: plug-in lamps for dark corners, a wire brush, a tall ladder, more brushes, more drop cloths, more trays, and items whose functions I still do not understand.

When we got to the house, BJ and Sara took a look around as neither had seen the place in person. Soon though, a "team meeting" was called and the Beege took a seat on the only chair in the room. He asked for a piece of paper and a pen so that he could write out a work plan.

"What are painting in this room?" He asked. We continued on like this until all rooms were accounted for and then we prioritized based on each job. Agreeing that certain friends/family members might need more supervision than others, BJ agreed to be the resident grump. Or to put it a different way, he agreed to be the Dad of the Painting Party.


And he's nice!

Seeing that it would require the most amount of work, BJ took on my writing room and its pink walls, trim, ceiling, and doors. The rest of us began taping things off and after that was done, we cut in and rolled.

Throughout the day, whenever we needed a deciding opinion, we asked BJ. He almost always had an answer that sounded official and undoubtedly correct.


Inspecting Sara's work in the Orange Room.

At the end of Day One, we sat down for another team meeting done in improved Robert's Rules style. I made a motion to do a second coat of "Pollination" first and Steve seconded my motion. The Beege declared it resolved and we moved on to Towne Restaurant for a late dinner.


Wrapping up Day One with another team meeting.

Not to be upstaged, my Dad--heretofore known as the Coach--decided to come over Sunday morning. When the Coach and BJ met, the world almost exploded because of their dad-ness and mustache power.

The Coach proved to be, as noted earlier on the blog, a beast with the roller. In case you missed it the first time, here he is whipping through a second coat of "Garden Pot," right after he cut in and rolled our red entryway.


Coach doesn't mess around.

The Dads bonded over things like the bizarre consistency of the "Pollination" paint or whether or not we should sand something dry or wet*. They each were quick and precise and finally, when they both decided we were all good to go on our own, they let us snap this final picture:


Mustaches of power!


*What is with the universal Dad qualities? I'm also remembering when my friend Brynn and I shared a storage space one summer before college and our Dads conspired to make our belongings fit inside. Something unspoken went one between them in the process. Bizarre.

Scenes from the painting party, part one

Sara waits for direction on Saturday morning. We began around 10:30 and painted until after nine that night.


Steve's dad came up from the downstate area to help us paint and generally be the dad-figure at the ruckus that was our painting party (ha!). As you can see, he's painting the walls of my writing room a blue-grey. When I took this picture, he had already done the ceiling but you should know that the whole thing was pink: walls, trim, doors, and ceiling. All pink!


This is my helpful brother Joshua. He is a rock n' roller.


Sara again. She's a cutie. By the end of the weekend, she was a pro at cutting in. Here she is in our living room with a bucket of "Aqua Bay." You can't tell from the picture but the wall she's painting is textured. Some time, between 1886 and 2007, someone painted over that velvet, floral wallpaper stuff. We've got patches of that raised design throughout the room--it's very neat.


It was a team effort for sure. In the background: brother Josh and Steve on a ladder. They are painting the room "Pollination," a pukey-yellow-green color that took three coats in the end. In the foreground: Harvey continues on with the "Aqua Bay."


My mother approves our color choice and work (she's standing behind my brother). She said, no less than nine times, a version of the following, "I really like this color." I really like her, and the way she repeats things when she gets excited.


When Mike wasn't rolling "Garden Pot" on our kitchen walls, he was cleaning out the light fixtures and taking apart the ceiling fans. This is why our relationship works so well, my friends. I would never get to shit like that and he sees it and pounces. You go, Mike.


I told my friend Jack to look excited about taping and this is the result. Jack entertained me/eavesdroppers with internet-comic news and the possibility of building a flashlight that could knock a man over from sheer light force. We also discussed the new Tori Amos (concept) album and my accompanying contempt.



My mother told me that my dad was a beast with the painting roller. And that, dear readers, he is. Here he is on Sunday morning doing a second coat of "Garden Pot" in the kitchen. He also cut in and rolled the red entryway (of which I failed to take photographs).


This pictures makes us call our house the "Fun House." We will be filled with bright, bold energy every morning. The orange room, by the way, is Steve's bedroom. The paint is called "Lucky Penny."


Steve's dad needed to head back home but wanted to stop for a "big, expensive" cup of coffee first so I drew him a map of his itinerary. Apparently, while I was on the phone, they all made fun of me for drawing such a nice map. They were jealous of my skillz.


Behold: fresh paint! This photo is a total accident and marks the near-end of our painting party on Sunday morning. It was intense, exhaustive, and successful.

More photos to come!