Downstairs Flooring Project, day N

So I absolutely fell off the wagon as far as keeping up with this blog goes, though in my defense we rapidly jumped from our original plan of a weekend and one week of nights to a more scattered schedule and, as such, there's been less to talk about on a daily basis. We near completion, though!

Ray came by last Wednesday and they did both the tile install and most of the carpet. There's a chunk between the two that comprises the extra 10 square yards I failed to order. After some last-minute scrambling last Friday, we managed to get the missing 10 square yards of carpet delivered to the house in the afternoon before heading out of town. Ray's coming today to finish the install of that and then I think we'll be set.

It's weird to think that it's almost done down there. We spent 5 hours last Sunday removing all the painter's tape that's been up for about a year. It was a painful, annoying process but it's done. We also put in a new lighting fixture on the wall plus a new chandelier in the foyer. We need to do some cleanup down there of the trim and woodwork, as I'm sloppy with a roller and everything's speckled with latex paint, but it should come up pretty easily. It's also dusty from the buffer that removed the old pad and adhesive, but that's nothing a vacuum and wet rag won't fix.

Above: In my classic OCD way, I rolled the tape I removed as I went.
The perspective is screwy, but the roll above is about 6" x 8". You
can see the new lighting fixture in the background, too.

Above: The princess surveys the damage to our collective sanity.

Above: The new chandelier in the foyer. We're big fans.

Pics of the end result to come soon. I promise. No, really.

Downstairs Flooring Project, day 3

Or: The Real Victims In This Whole Mess

Above: Murphy and Denali check out the door. Again.

One problem with this project, and it's a problem we do run into with home improvement projects, is that the cats need to stay out of it. Now, we've tried blocking off the downstairs. Access to the downstairs is tough to block off, though. Being a split level house, the living room is bordered by a wrought iron railing surrounding the foyer. We've wrapped the whole thing in giant pieces of cardboard but they still wriggle underneath and jump the six feet down or, even scarier, jump over onto the stairs. The lower floor is currently pretty dusty and dirty, so we wanted to keep them out of it. We set them up in our bedroom and attached bathroom with their water fountain, a litter box, and their food bowls.

That was Saturday. They're pretty annoyed at this point (Monday evening), to say the least. They haven't stepped foot outside the bedroom since Saturday morning. It's now to the point where Murphy, the more (what's a nice way to put it?) outgoing cat, the one who thinks he's a dog, has started teaching nice, quiet, sweet Denali all his tricks. She's now taken to jumping onto the stuff-covered dresser at 4:00 in the morning, mewling, or walking across my nightstand and knocking things over, sticking her rear in my face. It was tough enough with one doing it every night, now she's doing it too.

We're about to the point of being done with demolition, though, so we might be able to clean up down there and let them out soon – provided we're not waiting on water shield drying or some such business. In the past we've locked them up for painting, but paint's dry in a few hours so it's not so bad.

Long story short, I'm expecting to be eaten in my sleep some time soon. If you don't hear from me within a couple of days, call the MSPCH.

Downstairs Flooring Project, day 2

Playing a little catch-up here as I didn't actually start blogging yesterday as I'd planned.

Yesterday they pulled up all the existing carpet, scraped the old pad off, and started on adhesive removal. We also had some excitement: I took a look at the original estimate for the job and realized I'd ordered 40 square yards of carpet instead of 50. Good times! Off we went to Green Depot to find out exactly how much carpet we'd had delivered on Friday and to bring Ray back a sample so he could see what he could do with joining or sewing. It also turned out that we had to order the water shield we plan to use, as they didn't have any in stock. It's a veneer-like product that goes straight on the concrete to prevent moisture seeping up to the carpet from the slab.

At this point, we're overnighting the water shield to get it here on Tuesday. Once we have official word on the length of carpet we can find out how much more we need to order and put a rush order on that, as well. Ray initially figured they could get the entire job done in the first weekend and following weeknights, but at this point it looks like we're going to end up pushing to the following weekend regardless.

Here are some photo updates.

Above: The hallway, now sans carpet!

Above: The main room, plus some buffing machines

Above: The fireplace side and impromptu tool bench

Above: Out the back, plus some attempt at adhesive removal

I realized I hadn't talked much about our flooring choices. I'll try and do some of that in tomorrow's or Tuesday's update, as there'll be a lull in work. See you then!

np: Alkaline Trio - Dethbed

Downstairs Flooring Project, day 1

If you know us, you know that we've been talking about renovating the downstairs since before we even made an offer on this house. It's a split level, built in 1974, and I think that was when it was last decorated. When we moved in it was all dark wood paneling with a red carpet. The sliders were duct-taped shut with heavy red velour curtains, shielding the previous owner from the dazzling sunlight while working away in his office–what at the time looked a little more like a burrow.

Fast forward a year and a half! Living entirely on the upper floor, we sanded the paneling down over the course of about six months, primed the walls, and months later settled on carpet, tile for the hallway, and, last but not least, paint. We went ahead and painted in the space of a weekend (though we've yet to remove the mile of painter's tape) and finally scheduled the flooring to be done starting this weekend and happening nights during the week to wrap up next weekend.

It's the first time we've had someone else come in to work on the house, though, and it's a reasonably major project, so I figured I'd blog the progress similar to our friends Jack and Anne's recent kitchen overhaul. Not as many moving parts as there, so it won't be a fraction of the excitement, but I wanted to have before- and after-photos and here's a good place for them to land.

Here's the morning work started. We weren't sure when Ray would be showing up, or if he'd come at all on Saturday (details were left loose due to vacation schedules) but sure enough, he surprised us in our pajamas at 10:00 Saturday morning.

Above: The hallway, with carpet

Above: The main room, with carpet

Above: The fireplace side, with carpet. Isn't it lovely?

Above: Ray and his assistant hard at work. Note that this carpet
was actually put down over another thinner utility carpet.

Yeah, you heard me correctly.

Stay tuned for more; exciting times ahead.

Organization: Hide the Stuff You Need

I have a much more topical post brewing, at least for here in New England, but I wanted to start this blog off on a positive note so, instead, let's talk about organization.

It's always been a tough thing for me. One one hand, I'm lazy and messy. On the other hand, I'm a bit OCD and anal-retentive and really like having everything in its place. Unfortunately, the messy and lazy usually win out. Buying a house came with more space for my accumulated crap, both useful and useless, though, and for once I find myself not having to cram everything I own into the closet of the small room I have in an apartment with two or three other dudes. Of course, now things can spread out and I don't quite know where to put anything. Silverware goes in the silverware drawer, sure. But where do Christmas decorations go? What about the full-sized Frylock costume I spent a month making in 2004 that I can't bring myself to throw out?

At some point I stumbled upon a system that's been working well for me, though. The key idea is to hide things you'll specifically go looking for but leave out, in the forefront, things you want to be reminded of, things you'll forget about if you have to actually go find them.

I've found that this works in a whole bunch of different situations, too. Take the fridge, for instance. That's what inspired this in the first place. I found myself going shopping and buying vegetables only to come home, put them in the vegetable drawers in the fridge, and forget about them until it's time to scrape them off the bottom of the drawer and throw them away. The beer, however, is sitting on the shelf and I see it every time I open the door. I'm going to go looking for that and not necessarily forget I have it, though, so why is it right there? I started putting the beer in the drawers and the veggies on the shelf. As a result, when I open the door to grab a beer I'm reminded that I have kale and leeks and should make a stir-fry for dinner. Of course, now you're wasting the magical "crispness" and "freshness" properties of the drawers on beer. Let's ignore that for now.

To answer an earlier question, we use Christmas decorations exactly once a year. We're always specifically going to go looking for them, so put them somewhere you won't trip over them all year: the attic.

We finally renovated our laundry room late last year and got new appliances. In my apartment days, I either had no laundry in my building or I had an all-in-one ventless machine that was absolutely no fun to use so, as a result, I got used to living in a quarter of my wardrobe and letting laundry pile up for weeks before spending an entire day doing it. In doing so, my clean clothes always fit in my reasonably small bureau because I only ever had so much clean at one time. With awesome new machines, though, laundry is easy. However, I had no idea where to put all my stuff now that it's clean—my bureau and closet were overstuffed. I did end up donating a bunch to thrift stores but also adopted the same system from the fridge. I put suits and dress clothes in a closet in my study. I never see them, but I'm going to specifically go looking for them three or four times a year. Voilà, I've gotten a third of my closet back and now, when I open it every morning, I can actually see sweaters I'd forgotten I had and wish I wore more often. I stacked pants and jeans on upper shelves of my closet, too. I can now see them all instead of the top two in the drawer. Removing those from drawers freed up a lot more space for essentials like socks and t-shirts.

We did this in the kitchen, too. We had one big drawer of tools and random stuff. Spatulas, thermometers, corers, skewers, etc. We also had a drawer right below it with two phone books and nothing else. Solution? Well, take the few items used every day and put them right at hand in a utensil crock next to the stove. That was a no-brainer and, of course, doesn't fit this scheme. After that, though, take stuff with a specific use – stuff we'll go looking for – and put it out of the way in that lower drawer. This consisted of things like rolling pins, cheesecloth, beaters, corers, and the like. Now the more-used drawer is less cluttered and contains general-use things like tongs, extra spatulas, and skewers. It's the drawer I'm most likely to jump to in a rush and thus has the stuff I wouldn't necessarily have planned out ahead of time.

You can scale this to anything in the kitchen. Put spices you don't usually use closer on the spice rack and put the cumin further away. You're more likely to say "hey, some dry mustard would go nicely with that cumin." Put weird things like coconut milk in the front of the pantry where you're more likely to use it, then put rice in the back because you're always going to go looking for it. As an added bonus, now when you're reaching to the back for the rice you're more likely to think "hey, let's cook that rice in some coconut milk; it'll be tasty and will also use up this coconut milk I bought for something a year ago and never used."

That could just be me, though.

np: Belly - Every Word

Oh, vanity

I just spent longer on setting up the layout of this blog than I'll probably, in total, spend writing entries for it. One cool thing, though, is that the header image will change automatically with the seasons. I'm proud of that one.

Images for the header were borrowed/taken from MotherEarthNews.com and FreeFoto.com.

I do have some topics to talk about here, I promise. For now, though, off to Green Depot to pick up the paint for our downstairs. Happy Valentine's Day if you're into that kind of thing.

Welcome to me. And perhaps to you?

I haven't even set up this blog's "about" or anything like that, yet, but will soon. This is the first entry of what I hope to be a chronicle of growing up, owning a home, getting married, living in suburbia, and at some point becoming a parent. I'm a 31-year-old guy, living a pretty good life, married to a great gal, living in Andover MA with a couple of cats and a good amount of humility.

What I hope to do here is not so much share what I'm listening to or the latest meme—that's what LiveJournal and Facebook are for—as what I'm discovering as I get older, settle in, and learn how things work, sometimes the hard way. Should be fun. It sure has been so far.