So long painted wood!

Hey Friends! I made a "How To" blog post! 

One of the first things I noticed in the house, which turned into a list containing at least one million "oh that's not right" or "that needs to be changed" things, was I could see brush strokes on the paneling in the dinning room. The wood just looked sort of gross. To glossy, dinghy and dark.  The picture below, you can see to the upper left some of the brush strokes. 

Instead of plain paint or shockingly much more expensive wallpaper, I'm going old school and using fabric to line the paneled walls that are not wood. I'll have another post up soon with all the choices so you can help vote for which is the best. So now that the wood is actually much lighter, this changes the game a little for which fabric we like.  

But for now.... I figured I would show you guys a quick little demo of how easy it is to remove paint from wood, with out using harsh chemicals! I always cringe and usually blurt out something along the lines at resale shops, "yuckkkk! That would have been an awesome dresser, that could have made them more money if they didn't paint it!" If you have a nice piece of furniture but it's beat up, DO NOT PAINT IT! Please. In a weekend or less you can refinish it back into the beautiful piece of art it originally was. 

But some times we fall in love with a piece that is some ghastly purple color, buy it for ten bucks and add it to the grave yard of other, "I'll get to it" projects. Not, that I speak from experience of anything....

What You Need.

- A Heat Gun

 - A Putty Knife

You can find these near the paint or drywall 

department. Don't get too wide of one, three inches 

max. Also buy the one step up from cheapest, you'll 

drive yourself a little crazy using too thin and flimsy

 of a knife. Remember to keep it clean and free of 

bends and dents

 - Something to lay your heat gun on and tools

The heat gun stays hot for quite sometime,

 so make sure you don't leave it laying around 

on something that could catch on fire. Also,

 your other tools likely will have sticky hot 

paint on them.

 - A Mask that blocks out vapors and odors. 

Spend the $6.00 for the one mask, don't be cheap

 and get the five pack of"dust masks" for a buck. 

  -  Wire brushes 

 I like brass for cleaning out the

 grain and nylon as a cleanup

 after cooled brush.

I have a big ol' respirator to use as my mask. 

If you do a lot of projects, it's worth the 30-60 bucks

 to not constantly be buying new masks. 

Please don't burn you're house down! Be aware of everything you do! 

Lay down a crappy towel or newspapers below your work space, the paint is gooey when hot. Turn on your heat gun, not a blow dryer, to medium, maybe high, don't be antsy, start low and move up in heat, you don't want to burn your wood. At first it takes a little while to warm up the paint, but once you see it start to bubble you're ready to go! ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS scrape with the grain! Did you get that? Always scrape, scrub, brush, wax, oil, whatever with the grain of the wood. If you don't do this, just give up and pay someone to do projects for you.  You need very little pressure to scrape the paint off. Once you get through to the wood it is really easy to get the feel of how hard you scrape. Then go to town, scraping along the grain!  I like to use a wire brush to help get the gunk out of the grain, I use a brass wire brush gently and once the wood has cooled I use a nylon brush to dust off any left over paint globs. 

And, Now! The time lapse uncovering of the beautiful 

quarter sawn white oak that lines our dinning room walls.

Once I have the wood all clear of paint, I might go back through with super fine steel wool and a chemical remover. But I don't think I will need to do that here unless there are a few nasty spots that are being fussy.  Then I will move on to the next steps of cleaning, feeding and finishing the wood! 

Enjoy and be Careful! 

The Kitchen, Part One

The holidays took a heck of a lot more time than I thought it would, back tracking me on writing a blog. Sorry! I'm planning to write a bunch of shorter blogs about the happenings in the kitchen. If I did just one, you'd be reading for days! Ha! So here we go!

It all started when this died, one year ago, today.

Then I fell in love with this....

The big range. 

Oh, and Cosmo 2.0, I think by now he had started to melt my heart. 

So, we were rocking a little bit of a torn up, but totally functional kitchen.

I miss that tall faucet so much.

Then, we didn't need these any more, and thank God, they were not that great.

Check, out those blonde cabinets! The kitchen was built to to serve the 12-25 disabled folks that lived here. The city didn't care if it matched the rest of the house, they needed cheap and functional. Puke. Puke. Puke. But, a year later, I miss those ugly things.

We posted the double oven on craigslist and a few days later, the entire kitchen was gone. A church came and paid up $500 and took the double ovens and all of the cabinets and counter tops, even the sink. 

So, this was our kitchen suddenly.

We had already begun ripping out the many layers of flooring, now that the cabinets were gone it make it easy to pull the rest up. That board in front of the range, that's totally preventing anyone from falling into a pretty decent sized hole. Luckily we had another tiny kitchen up on the third floor so Rick managed to drag the sink and cabinets down. This made me feel better since at this point we only had on bath tub/shower and I didn't want to do the dishes in it. And I couldn't justify eating off paper and plastic for however long (I was thinking maybe three months) until we had a kitchen again. You can see to the upper right we started exploring what all the walls had to tell about the past of this kitchen. 

The wall we started to knock out divided the kitchen, we called it the kitchen nook room. It once held a servant staircase that we took a long time deciding if we should rebuild it. The staircase shared the room with what would have been a butler's pantry as it was adjacent to the dinning room, and a nearly hidden door in the entry way to hurry out the answer the door for guest.

Hell with the wall and the kitchen nook and staircase. Sometimes bringing things back to original isn't worth it. But adding another 100-square feet to the kitchen, in a house built in a time that all kitchens were tiny, hell yeah.

  

So long kitchen nook! 

Near the time of expanding the kitchen we had also discovered a bonus of 2 feet more of ceilings! 10 Foot ceilings! Holy moly, what a total change it made to the entire room, once the ceilings were back to normal.

At this time we were able to took into the kitchen nook ceiling from here. That is when we learned more about how the room at actually been set up! 

With the walls coming down, we found some really beauiful wall paper. We figure the first major remodel of the house was in the 1930's/1940's then ~1973, then again early 90's. A few other smaller remodel projects happened through out the house at different times too. The kitchen could tell a story as we peeled it apart. Each time change happened they just covered up the old, or updated right next to the old. We had layers of floors, layers of walls, and you can see each new generation of electrical wires lined up side by side.

 This one above was found in the butler's pantry. We are 98% certain that it is original to the house. With out a doubt this was the most beautiful I had found through out the house. It was paper and ink. Nothing too fancy like silk, but nice enough incase the guests saw into the room as butler's went in and out of the dinning room.

But then there was this one. This one just makes my old fashion heart explode. There were apples,  plates, and clocks. Under this was another close in style of wall paper, but a bit older, that depicted more farm life, like a little person in a big hat turning the ground for turnips.

We also found  A LOT of wall paper like this. This is also a nice date marker for when they had lowered the ceilings. You can probably see it in some of the picture. 

So, this is starting to get long. So for now you wait! I have nothing else better to do right now, well, i have about a million trillion things I should be doing right now, but I rather do this. So, I'll set up an auto post for Part- Two to be posted tomorrow morning. 

SO CHECK BACK! This time I'm 100% for real, there will be another blog tomorrow!

Extension!

Day 14.

Last Day of The Dumpster!

Just kidding! We paid $40.00 to keep it another four more days. AMEN! I'm sure we could have really scrambled and called in some emergancy backups lured to help with kosher hotdogs and frozen pizzas.... but we decided to take the more realistic, and less exhausting route to finish up this dumpster.

I told Rick that this dumpster had given me mixed feelings. (You know it's bad when a dumpster makes you have feelings.) One, I have felt overwhelmingly stressed about it. It's so big, it's so tall, we only have two weeks, how are we going to get all this plaster out of the third floor, yada, yada, yada. Joined with this feeling was this strange sense of... "Ahhh...." a blissful sort of "ah". Out of the last fourteen days I spent almost four of those days doing NOTHING involving the dumpster. I just sort of said, no, nuh-huh, no way, not today. So I had these two distinct strange feelings which mixed together to an uncertain sort of feeling. In the past we've been able to fill up a dumpster in under a week, and then had a week to fart around filling it up with random junk. Not this time! So much dumpster, so much junk, so little time! As of right this minute, we're about 85% full. Almost ready to close the back gate of the dumpster and figuring out how to fill up every last inch of this 8+ foot tall dumpster.

                                     

My friend Nora came to help out  a couple of the dumpster days, she thought it was a blast. I remember when I thought dumpster days were a blast too. Now I find myself spending every night in bed filing my battered nails into a normal shape, digging dirt out of from under them, and sticking around ten bandaids to myself. As I sit here and do this, I try to give myself pep talks that there will be an end, this is all worth it, I am not dying and no, everything can't hurt this bad when I get old. 

Then I pass out for the night.

I enjoy taking various post-dumpster/renovating "selfies". I feel pretty stupid as I do them, but eventually I find myself having a few pictures that help me really remember how I feel/felt at that exact moment in time.  I posted this picture to this on our Instagram, I captioned it....

"Tiny scratches along my bottom eye lids, gritty sand between my teeth, filling my bra and covering the floor when I unbutton my shorts to pee. A wanna be tan line that disappears after a real good scrubbing. Too many bruises to count, more scraped than my first year on a bike, parts of fingernails missing, banged up knuckles that just won't heal. Pieces of plaster and sand fall from my hair as I let out a few gnarly hacking coughs trying to rid my lungs of inevitable dust. Bandaged wounds, dried out skin, stinging eyes, yellow and purple bruises, shredded finger tips and lots of tiny hives are all that are left every night after a long shower. At least we're one day closer to finishing our dream house."

I don't have to read that caption, when I look at this, I know exactly how I am feeling.  

        

One of the days that Nora came over, she helped me with my crazy tube idea. I had constructed a PVC pipe ladder like structure to help keep this tube in place, and lend as a backbone to keep the junk going down from bouncing on the tile roof and to keep it stiff and straight. We then sewed and stapled a thick plastic tarp to it to create the tube, the chute.

Renting one of those huge garbage chutes you see on the side of big buildings is ridiculously priced, not to mention gigantic and difficult to put together. The only thing we had to worry about getting from the third floor down near the dumpster was all the broken plaster we smashed off of the wooden lathed walls. I completely refused to carry  hundreds of buckets filled with plaster up and down from the third floor to the dumpster. So I had to be innovative. The tarp chute eventually tore and trying to patch it was pretty much impossible.  So chute number two came into fruition.

                     

Four or so hours of working on chute number two I had built one hell of a plaster chute! This time I chose canvas. It was more resistant to tears, it is patchable if it does get a tear, it's washable if needed and it's way easier to sew. I had a few other top secret things for it too to make it such a success. But if you want to know what those are, you're just going to have to give me some money and i'll tell you how to build this bad boy and for it to last and be reused and built to the exact needs you have. :)

(If you're some kind of investor who would like to invest in my idea and sell it to the average house renovator shopping at Lowes or Home Depot, I'll let you buy my design ( a much nicer constructed one than my first product) for the low price of paying off our three mortgages and my student loans. Then you can keep all of the rest of the profits. Serious.)

We did manage to get a clog somehow, right around the time Rick started putting stuff down it. :) The whole thing ripped itself off the window sill and plunged to the ground. Another hour of repairs and it was back up and running again better than ever.

Along with everything in my body hurting, I've reached a point of not caring about anything but the dumpster. I broke a few laws of Allie this week, like never going out in public/ letting people see me with out my basic go to makeup.  :( Also, I gave up on trying to be a perfect little hostess and cleaning the guest room and bathroom, and the entire house. Thanks dad, Michelle and Cory for understanding and being so cool with such a horrible, horrible mess the house is in. I started to do laundry two weeks ago. Some of it is done and still sitting in the baskets, some of it has been washed a few times already just to be worn again to be covered in dust, dirt, and plaster, and a lot is still sitting behind me in it's organized piles waiting to be washed. 

This is a pretty decent example of how the house looks all over the place.  This is higher up on the dusty scale because these are our third floor stairs, where most of the major wreckage is happening. But the whole house, is haunted house dusty.

These pictures below are a few days old. We have taken out even more from the third floor. 

As you go down the three pictures, I am just slowly moving my camera to the left from the corner I am standing in. Where you see wood 2x4s on the ceiling and floors, is where a wall used to be. 

This picture is opposite the pictures above. Now you're looking at the corner  I was taking picture from.

In other news, my canna lilies are starting to pop out of the ground! I'm so excited! I planted almost 300 bulbs! And Henry now has a soccer ball and basketball, both of which he as managed to pop, but still loves to play with them and run around with them in his mouth. 

AND! May 29th is my HALF BIRTHDAY! YAYAYAYAY!

I LOVE HALF BIRTHDAYS!

Once the dumpster is gone and the house is sort of tidied up a bit, I am going to make a youTube video of the whole house, so you can get a better sense of what the hell is going on in the house!