PAINT!

After taking a good look around at the outside of my house, I decided that I was running the risk of portions of my property rotting to the ground if I didn't give them some attention before winter. The first thing was the fence surrounding the back of my property. The back yard/deck/porch/whatever was in terrible shape when I acquired the property. It was full of old furniture, overgrown weeds and vines, and years of neglected yard waste. It's come a long way since then, but I'm not sure now how I was living with such a terribly rundown fence, without it really bothering me. Well, it was looking like it might rot to pieces, so I scraped the old paint off, scrubbed the moss/greenshit/algae off with TSP and bleach and the powerwashed the thing.

Here is a picture of two "cleaned" panels, and one painted. I bought the best paint I could afford and used around 6 gallons of "Ultra White" on this fence alone. Valspar's Duramax paint claims to be extremely durable, painter-primer in one, fade resistant, and mold and mildew resistant.

The difference is very dramatic, and I will still probably do a second coat in the spring.

Then, I noticed that I had several sections of rotted siding in the front and back parts of the house, above the porch roofs. After working on it for a few weeks, this is my diagnosis of the problem:

1. Drainage. My roof gutters are badly in disrepair, and in some parts missing. The runoff from the main roof, splashing onto the porch roofs is causing major moisture on the portions of siding closest to the porch roof. Moisture + wood siding = rotted.

2. Caulk. Do not caulk wood siding. It appears to me, that due to point 1 above, this siding has been "repaired" before. I love to caulk, and it makes sense that if you have a moisture problem, SEAL IT UP! This is not the case for wood siding. The moisture still finds its way into the wood, only now that it's caulked, the wood can't breathe. Also, the wood shifts and expands with the temperature and humidity, causing the caulk to break and stretch, which not only makes it ineffective, it also makes it ridiculously hard to get off after it's all damaged and rotted. Wood needs to breath! DON'T CAULK IT!

3. Neglected painting. Paint is the first shield of defense on the outside of the house, which is why I have invested in fantastic paint, and am taking the time to be very thorough in prepping the surface to get a good job done. My guess is that this house hasn't been painted in 10+ years, with the exception of a few patch-ups with the wrong sheen, over unscraped peeling paint. It just needs to be well cleaned and re-painted every so often. If not, it'll have problems.

So I removed the rotted siding, replaced with custom ordered cedar. (Who knew it was hard to find 4" wood lap siding pieces?) I then painted the bare wood, and then set about prepping and repainting those entire sections of the house, trim and all. Everything was scraped, and received two thick coats of paint. The front of the house is finished and looks fantastic. In the back, I am still racing the cold weather to finish. I am so excited to get the entire house painted next year, as it looks FABULOUS!

Easy Fixes

I am sitting here on a rainy day, waiting for my tenants to move out so that I can begin another apartment renovation project. One of the biggest things I have learned so far is that these projects always take more time and more money than you expect. So in light of facing that in the coming weeks and months, I wanted to share with you some "fixes" that turned out to be much simpler than I expected. It's nice to start off being positive, huh?

The lock on my front door had become loose and wouldn't lock or unlock correctly, often deciding to keep the keys stuck in it once the door had become unlocked, or jam somehow. Assuming the lock was old and deteriorated somehow, I ignored it, assuming I would just have to replace it once it got really bad. Well, it had gotten bad and my roommate was having trouble getting in regularly. So, I took the lock apart to troubleshoot it and see if it was totally shot. I discovered two loose screws inside. Once tightened, the lock was good as new. A 5-minute solution to a months-long problem = awesome.

WD-40 is a landlord's (or handyman's-- since you can't find good tenants or evict bad ones with WD-40) best friend. I have a screen door that would close but not latch, and then fall into the latch later, making it sound like someone was messing with the door when no one was there. Creepy. Fixed with WD-40. Also, 90-year old interior doorknobs that stick, squeaky porch swing hinges, transom hardware that's not been used in decades, TOILETS that run because the pieces stick! Just good stuff.

My bathroom sucks. It's identical counterpart in the other side of the duplex was redone with beautiful vintage-style subway tile and black and white hex tile last year, and someday (hopefully sooner rather than later) my bathroom will get a similar makeover. Right now, it is pretty terrible. A while back, the shower handles stopped working and would spin but not turn the water on or off, depending in where it got stuck. Based on this one problem, I was ready to start gutting the bathroom down to the studs for renovation. My thought process is usually along the lines of "if we're doing this work anyway, now is the easiest time to do A, B, and C, that also need done at some point." And BAM! You got a full bathroom renovation based on one faucet handle that doesn't work. So my dad came over to look at it. He popped the tab off of the top of the faucet, tightened the screw inside, and the faucet worked again. Less than 5 minutes. Since I learned this, I've used this "fix" a few different times.

Also, my shower head has, over the time that I've lived here, slowed down to a gross trickle. It's only slightly better than the feeling of getting peed on. I assumed it was a problem with old plumbing and water pressure or something beyond my control that would have to be fixed in the imminent renovation. I mentioned this to my dad the other day and he suggested I just take the head off and soak it in vinegar to get the hard water deposits out. So I unscrewed it, and found a massive amount of small debris buildup on the screen. I removed that, sprayed some CLR through it, and put it back on. Totally fixed. Good water pressure, normal shower. Fantastic. Mr. Tickle agrees.

Third Floor Bedroom

In this second-story apartment, there is a third-floor bedroom in the finished attic. I absolutely love finished attics, and have grand dreams and elaborate hypothetical floor plans for my own large, steep-roofed (high slanted ceilings) unfinished attic. So, as you can imagine, I loved the idea of this apartment having an attic bedroom. In the first week after buying the building, we went through to start learning about it, finding out what had been done when and where, etc. Unfortunately, we discovered that, in addition to this bedroom not having an open-able window (it was a hole, with a piece of plexiglass held over it by spray foam insulation) it also had no insulation and no ventilation. So, not only would this bedroom be perpetually cold in the winter, it would also be absolutely unbearably hot in the summer. Completely unacceptable. And thus we added many months, much money, and labor that we had not anticipated to the project.




So, we tore it all up, stripped everything down to the studs. We added rafter ventilation channels to the underside of the roof and then insulation. We took out the old closet and added a new large walk-in closet. Dad removed a large beam at the front of the house, and added new supports to create a beautiful angled architectural detail around the window, effectively opening it up to let natural light flow into the room. We lowered the ceiling to 9 feet and insulated it thoroughly. New electrical outlets were installed every few feet, new switches, a new light fixture wired in to light the stairs with a three-way switch at the top and the bottom. And then we hung 5/8"-thick drywall.



My dad's brother came and finished the drywall and in exactly one week, we primed, painted, installed fixtures and electrical covers, laid flooring, installed and painted all the base trim and window and door casement, and constructed a removable "railing" by the stairs for safety when it's in, and for convenience in moving furniture in and out when it's not.



I found the wood laminate flooring at Lumber Liquidators, and paid $1.99/sq ft for it, making it the most expensive flooring in the apartment (we got great deals on the luxury vinyl tile downstairs, and the refinished floors are really fairly cheap when you do the work yourself.) It was MUCH harder to install than we expected but we finally worked out a good system about 1/4 of the way through.

This door is a temporary solution to a special order door that did not come in on time. The door that is ordered is a horizontal five-panel design that matches the time period of the house and the other four doors installed in the apartment. For the other four (bathroom and 3 bedroom doors), I purchased only the slab, primed to paint, and cut the notches for the hinges and drilled for the doorknobs myself, in order to match the prior-installed frames. This door pictured leads to an unfinished portion of the attic that houses the furnace for this apartment. Because it is an unfinished space, I ordered a pre-hung door to fit snugly in the frame and not allow air through. It is filled instead of hollow-core, and thicker than standard, and designed also to stop sound traveling through. When this door is installed, there will also be a threshold at the bottom to close that gap.

Also pictured is the wall air conditioner. Because there is no central air, and in this room, no window suitable to install a window a/c, we put a small unit into the wall, to be vented into the attic.




The "open-air" walk-in closet is divided off from the main room by a new wall that we added. We installed white wire shelving here.

And, so as not to be redundant, the final pictures of the upstairs bedroom can be viewed in this post.

and... Finished!

So, a few weeks ago, we got to a point in the apartment renovation where it seemed that one could see what it was going to look like, so I cleaned it up, advertised it, and had an overwhelmingly good response within just a couple days. Soon after, I signed a lease with a new tenant, and have been working long hours since then to finish the apartment by our deadline (tenant move-in date). Dad has been out of town for work, and arrived back a week before the deadline, and took the entire week off to spend long hours with me over there, finishing everything up. Friday, we finished only a few hours late, and handed the keys over to our new tenant. Here are some of the finished results:




All of our stuff waiting at the door to be moved out



a few final touches-- This is the main living/dining space, with refinished floors



Kitchen with new (used) appliances.



upstairs (third floor) bedroom, showing the track for the slide-in railing by the stairs. Behind the wall is the walk-in closet, and through the door is the unfinished furnace room. New wood laminate floors.



upstairs bedroom again, newly re-constructed window alcove, ceiling fan. (and omg, I love the floors!)

MORE TO COME!

Windows

When we first acquired this apartment, standing from anywhere in the house, it sounded as if all of the windows were open. Air and noise (and ugly) flowed freely. We have replaced every window in the apartment (12 in all) with white vinyl replacement windows, re-insulated around them and I have painstakingly stripped, sanded, filled, caulked, and re-painted the trim, which had approximately a million layers, and 91 years, of bad chipping and peeling paint. Before, the trim was painted the same color as the walls, a flat gritty grayish white.


BEFORE:


AFTER:


Also, the trees got green!

By my calculations, the cost of replacing all the windows in the apartment is not justifiable by the amount of income (rent raised) that it brings in, but in my opinion, it is really necessary for several reasons:

1) energy efficiency- There's no way you can reasonably heat and cool a house with that amount of air flowing through the windows.
2) comfort- same thing. My front living room was unusable for comfort reasons in the coldest part of the year until I replaced the window. Not fun to sit by a drafty window.
3) aesthetic- crisp, clean, and white. They just look cleaner and nicer from the inside and the outside. Particularly if the outside has been fitted with aluminum screens and storm windows. Removing that old gray bit from the outside really makes it pop. The exception to this point is when you have original wood unpainted windows. This is what is in my own house now and it is sad to remove the original when they are still beautiful.
4) value- Units with new windows will rent for higher amounts than if they didn't have new windows. Like I said above, the cost, unlike most improvements, is not quite justifiable by this amount only though. However, I believe that the value it adds to the property overall (realized when selling or refinancing) makes it perfectly justifiable.
5) cleaning- the sashes on these new windows unlatch and fold in towards the living space to almost horizontal, making them a breeze to clean. No climbing around outside the house. No pulling out layers of flimsy storm windows and then trying to get them back in correctly. Screens pop out easily too for cleaning.

Because there are a few extra hoops to jump through for government tax credits on new energy-efficient windows, I don't pursue this. The other advantages are enough for me to keep it simple.

Bathroom, 3/4 there

Here is the bathroom at the apartment-in-progress, as of a few days ago. It's even better now, and final photos will follow shortly.

Thanks for the photos, Mom.

The BIG project: Bathroom

Ok, so this is what I've really been working on. In February, my dad and I bought this duplex in the neighborhood and have been renovating the top apartment ever since. Here are some before pictures of the bathroom.








The tub "surround" is a DIY job that someone saw on HGTV with brown paper bags and some kind of clear adhesive coating that, in the right context, looks like a neat leather faux finish. But not in a shower.

The tub is not level, and so the water runs out the top, down the side and down in between the shower and the vanity where both the wooden vanity and the floor were rotted out and the downstairs tenants' kitchen ceiling caving in.

The door has a mirror framed in gold-painted spray foam insulation as trim. Classy.

So we ripped out the surround, all the walls (several layers of drywall and plaster). We replaced the window, along with all the other windows in the house. We tore up the floor, put down a new wooden subfloor and concrete board on top of that. We added two sets of built-in cubby shelves, new drywall, a new vanity, a new tub surround, and new light fixtures. We tore out and re-installed the crooked tub, and put down new flooring.

After pictures coming soon!

Eco-Hypocrite

I have an ant problem that I have been battling for two summers so far. So, sadly, this year, as the ants have started to come out again, I poured ant poison granules all around my house. Then, I diligently recycled the bottle.

Berries

I really enjoy gardening, and have had two or three gardens at previous residences. Although I LOVE my 1920 duplex in the city, because it was built on a side street corner, what would have been my decent-sized backyard has been subdivided into two lots and there is a tiny house built between my back porch and the alley, effectively eliminating my backyard and leaving no room for a garden. And even though I totally believe in gardening more than having chemical-lawns, my man disagrees, and won't allow me to till up my also-very-small front yard to grow veggies. For the second season in a row, he has been diligently tending the small patches of grass and they are starting to look like a lawn that any upper-middle-class-suburb-dweller could be proud of. So... that's nice, but still no garden.

So then there are the sides of my house. One side has a small bed that is approximately 2 feet wide, raised and bordered with railroad ties and right next to the sidewalk. Last year I moved and transplanted all the bulbs that had been growing untended for years into better spots, and filled the bed with mostly lilies, a few daffodils, and an occasional tulip. They are doing really well.

Then the other side has a bed running along it that is about 4 ft wide, low to the ground, with the neighbor's driveway next to it. This has become my berry patch.



The first two-thirds have been planted with red raspberry transplants from a friend's garden along with a few that I got a good deal on from a mail-order nursery. They were planted haphazardly halfway through the first summer I lived here and tended badly, so I didn't expect them to survive. Despite that, they grew again through last summer, giving me a few berries. Earlier this spring, before they started to bud, I pruned the canes down and am hoping that this is finally the year to get a good crop.



In addition, last summer, one of my roommates brought with her a couple of strawberry transplants, which we stuck in the ground, and which have EXPLODED this year. The strawberry section is creeping into the raspberry section where there wasn't quite enough sun for the raspberries to thrive. This is the first strawberry bloom of the season. (And yes, a weed.)



A few years ago, I bought Earthbound Farm's Food to Live By by Myra Goodman. They got their start growing raspberries and so have an entire chapter dedicated to raspberry recipes which I have been waiting for years to try, because grocery store raspberries are too expensive and never as good. (FYI- this is a great cookbook, highly recommended.)

So, needless to say, I am terribly excited about the prospect of a small berry crop this year, as this is my only edible plant besides the potted herbs that my roommate grows. I have dreams of homemade strained frozen raspberry yogurt, in particular.