moving

Not much work on the new house over the past couple of days. With the 1st of June quickly approaching we decided that we'd better dedicate ourselves to moving. Inevitably, this activity coincides with an unseasonable heat wave - tomorrow will be a stupefying 90-some degrees.

In any event, we've moved out a lot of stuff. No pictures of either of us moving, but here are a couple pictures proving that progress is being made:

Empty room!



This area will be empty once Scout lets us move his little sheepskin rug. He laid out on it while we moved the table from over top of him.

Tomorrow we'll try to clean and paint some places to put all the stuff we currently have piled up in the living room of the new place.

coming soon

It was too late and too messy to take pictures tonight, but we've made some progress in actually making rooms look like they will when we're living in the house. The bathroom walls are painted (the 1st coat anyhow), as is the walk-in closet, which will allow us to move some clothes over.

Tomorrow - more painting, lots of moving and some pictures.

"half bath"

One of the nail rows we removed from the laundry room floor. This was anchoring little vinyl tiles that were already glued down. Why?


















Newsflash: Calamity Ted Busts Out of the P P Corral!

(For those of you who, quite understandably, miss the high humor in this caption, previous owners had placed a toilet and sink behind a half-wall and swinging saloon doors just off the kitchen in the laundry room.)


















We're not exactly sure what to do with it next. Now, as you enter the house from the back door, you're standing in a small room with a toilet in the corner. (Before we took the half-walls out there was at least a little mystery, if not privacy exactly.) We might replace it temporarily with a utility sink and decide later whether we want the second bathroom. If so, we'll build real walls.

progress on several fronts

We've been too beat to put up photos after our working days, so I'll make up for it with a bunch of pictures this morning.


















Wood floors in the sunroom. The wallpaper is practically leaping off the walls. We'd hadn't meant to do any work in here until the high priority jobs (bathroom, kitchen, fixing the stinky hot water...) were taken care of, but every now and then it's nice to walk in and do something easy.


















The kitchen floor is mostly uncovered. It's fine except for two "repairs" (done with ill fitting 2x4s), made by someone who clearly knew they'd be covering it up with tile. Ah well, looks rustic.














Progress in the bathroom is slow and painful. We've washed the glue off the walls and now have layers of paint, primer, and plaster. (Plus, we replaced the tile with newspaper!) We're using a chemical stripper, to tedious and caustic effect. Chipping it off with a razor blade is actually more efficient.

Looking out the window, that's Debbie and Linda's house across the street. They have 2 greyhounds and an Australian cattle dog.














These are the ferns, about 3' high, and the hostas coming in at the back of the yard. The fence, like most everything else, is rotten and falling over. That's Tom's yard behind ours, which we'll begin to annex ... very slowly.


















We found this message under the wallpaper in Ted's office: "To those who wonder who lived here between the years 1956 and 1969, it was the Senders!"

I imagine we have the Senders to blame for the half-bath, and the kitchen cabinets. I'm just going to go ahead and blame them for the kitchen floor too. Curse you Senders!

back to work

The semester ended yesterday (more or less), so there will be more time to work on the house from this point on.

Today, some progress was made on the bathtub (removing old caulk and experimenting with grout cleaning/replacing) and on the kitchen floor (exposing more of the old wood floor underneath). No pictures from today's efforts, but we'll post some tomorrow.

Here's a safety tip from Ted: (I actually discovered this last week) When you switch modes on your ShopVac from vacuuming to blowing out, keep in mind that any debris in the vacuum hose will - immediately upon restarting the ShopVac - shoot out of the hose at the same wonderous speed with which it shot in. Plan acordingly.

Note: If you're Macaulay Culkin and robbers are attacking your house the previous safety tip is actually a plan!

what lies beneath

The tentative plan had been to pull up the kitchen floor and prepare to lay down porcelain tile, which we'd actually talked ourselves into doing ourselves. Thankfully, we may never get the chance to rue that day. Underneath the grey vinyl tile we found a layer of baby-girl pink tile. Underneath the pink, a tenacious layer of backer-board -- truly foul in places and nailed down by a maniac (some edges have something close to 20 3" nails. Did he think it was going somewhere?). Underneath that -- jackpot! Hard wood floors. We're guessing it's yellow pine, and so far it's in pretty good shape.

Before and after pictures to follow just as soon as we get a pry bar and some time to finish the job.

paint colors

This is one of the colors we're considering for the house, the geographically unlikely "short grass prairie." It's only recently edged out "carriage door" which looked too muddy in sunlight. A favorite among the color names, but not the color itself so much, is "porpoise." We'd probably regret choosing a color for its name alone, even if we could say "we painted it Porpoise on porpoise."

Click here for a page of other possibilities.

One of the painters we talked to told us that the Period Eclectic style, the trend to build houses in the 1920s with French Provincial, English Tudor, Spanish Mission, Mediterranean or otherwise international features, took off because of the movies. All of a sudden a variety of architectural types and periods were visible across the country. It does make sense. A lot of those houses look more like they were designed after movie sets than actual historic buildings.

As far as the Period Eclectic goes, ours is a tame example. Only the hinges on the front door and the modest stained glass window in the dining room suggest that the builder was aiming for a Tudor. There is one down the street, though, with awnings in a sort of Renaissance Fair style. It's something to see.

the old manse

the story so far: we bought this house. it needs a lot of work. for the next few months, our answer to the questions "what have you been doing?" "how are you spending your time/money/blood/etc." "why won't you answer the phone?" and "where are you?" will be answered right here, on the virtual page of this blog.

for more pictures click here and here.

beginning with the bathroom

here's the bathroom before we got started. sadly, it looks much cleaner in the photo than it really was.














scrubbing bubbles, scrubbing.














the vinyl wallpaper came off fairly easily. this is what's underneath. it looks as though the original paint might have been an avocado green. we're planning to go with some sort of white.

dining room window

We discovered a similarly sized, 8 pane window in the garage and now suspect that the buffet window in the dining room isn't original. It doesn't match the style of most stained glass windows in the East Forest Park neighborhood where we live, nor those in nearby Forest Park, though the houses with stained glass tend to be Victorians and tend to be 20-odd years older than ours. It reminds Kelly of a certain fish & chips restaurant, or a restaurant near a fish & chips restaurant, and therefore, of fish & chips.