Join us as we embark on the extreme adventure of making our first home as eco-friendly, reused and repurposed as possible. Updates on room decor, furniture, art, materials used and references to other inspiring bloggers.
Yeah, this is my fleeting appearance until I get my tutorials on raised beds and upward growing potato bins.
Anyway, that is what I did this morning. I now need to figure out how to adjust the "screen"/glass door to match with the door. We'll do some fancy footwork involving something with a lock so my paranoia will be quelled...at least a bit. Also, I would love for Optimus to not be able to get out.
In addition, I gave Optimus a bath and used some Pineapple Creme Brulee Body Souffle Whipped Soap on him after his normal shampoo. He smells like dessert! I may be plugging it (because I love it so much), but I got it off etsy at KreatedbyKarina recently, along with some coconut lime verbena and orange candied ginger. Can't wait to bust open the others!
So now....Optimus hates me.
Jessie
Currently Listening to "Brand New Cadillac" by The Clash
Ok, I could see how that would be confusing, when Jessie says "time for bed" what she really meant was "time to build a bed before you sleep in it." Not cool.
Thankfully, she already had her own set of plans for a super-tall, indestructible bed that would have space underneath for clothes bins, a bed for Optimus that he will never ever use, and other normal bedroom items like a chop saw and air compressor fittings. All I had to do was shut up and cut or hold boards how she told me to. This was quite nice.
Before you knew it, we had a bed! Simple, quick, easy.
Ok, if you're reading this you know it couldn't just happen like that. But I'll let Jessie tell that tale...
Side note, while working on the bed I went to get a beer from our fridge. Actually from the "freezer" because a while ago our freezer stopped working; the fridge was actually substantially colder. No problem, now we have a fridge and a beer fridge!
Yeah. Apparently the freezer started working again at some point. In our house when someone says "grab me a cold one" they need to be more specific.
Ok, so now that we had a huge bed for Optimus to hog, we thought the room felt a little stuffy....yep, that wall has to go.
We had planned on making some changes anyways, like adding in a closet and making the other bedroom into a master bathroom, thus necessitating a doorway. Probably best to do the dirty demo work before bringing our clean mattress into the room. The main attraction of this wall is the chimney that we wanted to expose. Raw original brick would look awesome in our bedroom and bathroom....if it weren't for the inch-thick layer of plaster applied directly to the brick, it would be easy. Jessie's brother and sister took turns a while ago with hammers attacking the plaster and made tons of progress. We however, are not as awesome or patient as they are, so we brought in the heavy artillery.
We managed to clean off the bedroom side in less than 30 minutes and it was actually pretty fun. Air-powered demolition tools = fun. One problem with this much fun is the amount of dust and crap it kicks up in the air. The hippo light will help demonstrate to your left with the cleaned off brick to the right. Another problem is the several hundred pounds of plaster (basically concrete) waste that you end up with in Rubbermaid containers that can easily bury a room's floor.
Jessie will elaborate on the design details of the room, but there are a few things we needed to make room for, such as the closet. The door to the other bedroom would be entering directly into the closet, so we removed that with the entire frame and transplanted it to the other opening. Lest we forget, this house is really old, so we encountered plenty of annoyances, the least of which was probably the hinges for the door that been painted over so much it no longer needed screws to hold it in place. The door actually opened and closed just fine without them. Super fun.
This leaves us with a gaping hole in yet another wall, but a new, functioning entrance to the future master bath. Even better, it matches the rest of the house because it's original, meaning less new materials to buy/consume. In the end, this is actually progress. I mean, we did end up sleeping in a room with three walls for a couple months, but as of a few weeks ago we've got 3.5 walls....so we're almost there!
Tom
Currently listening to "Buried Alive" by Avenged Sevenfold
Ah the joys of rebuilding something way, way, way older than you. We've discussed the plaster and lath wall construction in previous posts...unfortunately that did not magically make it disappear. Some of you may remember when Jessie started painting every room in the house and got between 1/3 and 2/3rds of the way through each room. Well, we hadn't finished a few months later, but that's ok, because we would have to repaint anyways. Turns out the changes of season (and temperature/humidity) cause the plaster to expand and contract at varying rates, which cause either massive fissures or small mountain ridges to appear in walls and ceilings....everywhere. To better illustrate this, we sanded down a few of these magical ridges, seen to your right.
Of course, no matter what we do (short of replacing everything with modern drywall) we'll end up with more cracks popping up later, but we'll worry about that after we get everything painted once. It's amazing the difference color makes for the feel of a room. Now I feel like I'm inside a pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving every day in our living room. Yes, I like that.
Meanwhile, it snowed here! Yeah, it's a dusting for anyone North of us, but here it's the blizzard of the century. Schools closed early, work was canceled, and by 6pm Wal-Mart was completely sold out of 4 items: milk, bread, ground beef, and pizza rolls. Hot Pockets also took a good hit. Naturally, this was a day BEFORE any sort of frozen precipitation began. Gotta love North Carolina winters...
Regardless of how infrequently we get weather like this, the bees are not fans. They'll stay in their boxes most of the day, but the wind cuts through the openings and isn't good for bee morale (or continued bee living). Jessie's mom is totally BA, so she goes out there with a drill and starts putting on a small blocker to keep the wind out of the hive. She doesn't need a suit, the bees respect her too much to screw with her. While she was doing our work for us, I was foolishly riding my bike in the snow because it's fun. It worked about as well as you would expect.
I love the snow, so overall it was a pretty nice, relaxing time. Of course, due to the cold we found even more squirrels had been sneaking into our basement and making sweet pads for themselves in our walls...everywhere. But more on that later...
Tom
Currently listening to "Maybe For Now" by Few and Far Between
Documenting your life's work outside of work is really time-consuming. Let's play catch up.
Remember way back in last year when we dug up half our yard to uncover the large pieces of driveway underneath? Well we finally did something with some of the concrete amalgam: enter the fire pit. Perhaps fire pit is a misnomer, considering we're not sure if it's legal to start large fires in our yard here. We'll just call it the decorative hole in the ground for now.
Now, also remember from that same old post where the squirrels had eaten through some of the insulation on the power mains into our house? There's more where that came from. In fact, just a week ago we woke up after a particularly ornery storm had come through to find that half of the electrical circuits in our house didn't work. Did the usual checks, no breakers were tripped, no lines were loose, no water damage, no squirrel damage....then I got out the digital multi-meter to start probing (yeah, that's right).
First checked an outlet that was working and saw ~121 VAC (volts) as normal. Checked an outlet that wasn't working and got ~20 VAC...so they were still getting power, but not enough to run anything designed for 120. Went back to the breaker box and discovered that every other breaker exactly in order was reading 120-20-120-20-120-20 (-ish). Traced it back to the two big mains coming into the house. Every house has two 120 mains coming in and one ground. The breakers are wired such that each main services every other breaker so when you add breakers they end up evenly distributed between the two mains. The other reason is so when you put in a double breaker for a 240 VAC outlet (to run your dryer or range for example) it will take the two separate 120 VAC lines to be able to essentially add them together and get 240 at the appliance. As a result, our dryer and range were only getting ~140 VAC...
Anyways, this means the problem is outside of our house. The two possibilities are that we have a problem inside our power meter box, at the weatherhead, or in the lines to the transformer up on the street poles. For reference, pretty much every electrical company says the customer is responsible for anything from the weatherhead IN to the house (except for the meter, which you aren't allowed to screw with). We called the power company to come check their lines before I started scaling our house and electrocuting myself.
As it turns out, our mains are routed through a couple decorative trees that were planted in our front yard. Over the years the three lines that are twisted together had rubbed up against tree branches so much that it had worn through the insulation and one main and the ground started to fuse together, creating a resistive short, which made the wires get even hotter and melt together (they were permanently one piece) while corroding due to atmospheric exposure. They replaced them with all new lines from the pole to the splice outside the weatherhead and we were back in business!
And that catches you up on everything in the past 5 months. But not really.
Tom
Currently listening to "Lost" by Avenged Sevenfold
Today it was about 80 degrees out. Awesome. For about an hour in the morning, we took some coffee outside and walked around the yard to decide where we are going to plant our garden. Onions, shallots, garlic, jalapenos, bell peppers, brussels sprouts, lettuce, tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, organic tomatoes (you get the point), squash, beans, zucchini, cucumbers, watermelons, peas and some other stuff.
Tom was doing some reffing at the YMCA, so I had a bunch of time for myself. Since it was warm enough for me outside, I sat outside and read a book (#10 of my 50 book goal for the year) while Optimus laid next to me. Then, I got super bored and still had a lot of time, so I pulled up a ton of ugly concrete paver things from the yard. Thank you so much to whoever took the time to make the yard look ugly. Ugh. Now they are sitting by the road waiting for somebody on Craiglist to come and haul them away.
In the meantime, I was searching for more to do. We had discussed the possibility of several raised beds for the yard. One or two little ones would have a bunch of wildflowers and one would be a big one dedicated to a large strawberry patch. Strawberries spread like crazy, so keeping them contained is a must.
Typical raised beds are made out of railroad ties or treated lumber. Both leach chemicals into the ground around it. One of the things that has been running through my head lately is an alternative to this. As you may have seen in a previous post, we have a bajillion pallets that we got for free off CL. Pallets are made out of untreated wood, so I have been working on dismantling them in order to build raised beds out of them. We'll paint them with a pretty exterior paint that we'll most likely get from the Habitat Restore.
In the meantime, I was looking for more to do. Speaking of things to get rid of, the lathing strips from under the plaster has been in our house for a LONG time. We don't want to take it to the landfill and we haven't figured out what to do with it.
Genius idea! First of all, I painted the lathing strips with exterior paint (from the Habitat Restore) and then took puffy paint and labeled them to use as garden marking stakes. Next, I'll cut them with the chop saw and we'll be good to go. As soon as the weather gets warmer, there are so many more things to do!
Jessie
Currently Listening to "In the Evening" by Led Zeppelin
Ahhhhh. I lost half of the post, so that's what you'll get here.
Yes, I am not in school anymore. However, I do have homework for getting a proposal together for a social work conference. Procrastinating is way more fun, plus you all get to see what we have been spending our time on away from the computer. This is months overdue, we know.
We finally moved into the back bedroom over the holidays since we had lots of guests and needed more space. To give us some privacy from the people staying in the back bedroom, we put up sheets (to also keep some of the dust to a minimum). Under that blue panel, we did find some more brick. Instead of chiseling all 3" of plaster off by hand, which is a HUGE pain and takes forever, we got a $15 air hammer/chisel. Tip: Those are one of the best tools EVER.
While our room looks pretty and colorful, there were also a few problems. Well, at least one that really stuck out. In a normal house, the humidity is supposed to be at 45%. Ours is at a dusty 16%. With the humidifier working overtime since Christmas, we've gotten it up to about 33%. Better, but not great.
Meanwhile, this is what the future master bathroom looked like. On top of the window are all of the boards we pulled out from the old door and casing, moulding and trim from around the room.
CAUTION: DISASTER.
Well, there are super old 2x4's in that stud wall. We had to remove two of them to make room for a bathroom door. That bathroom door happened to come from the entrance to the 2nd bedroom, so we moved the ENTIRE old rickety frame and door to a new location. We're really going for that whole reduce, reuse, recycle thing...or whatever. Basically just the part where we want to make the house as old and authentic as possible without buying a ton of new stuff. When we took the studs out, we cut them down to reuse them. However, you can see the interesting stuff we found when we took them out. Original 88 year old bark on them as well as sap still oozing out of the wood. Pretty cool, huh?
Bathroom progress! You can also see the paint swatches I'm testing out to see what goes best with the future bathroom. We're still trying to do earthy tones, but we figured terra cotta would be best to match with the brick and the tiles we want to put down. I'm fairly certain we are going with the bottom color. We also got a tub at the Habitat ReStore for $25. I just wanted one that was bigger and deeper, but didn't care about having jets. This one had been marked down from $75 and was the loner, so, of course, I wanted it. There was grout and caulk around the edges, but all I needed was a putty knife. Simple, easy.
Matching the paint to the black slate tiling:
Other unfinished projects -
Finding the perfect paint for the hallway...
...and the bathroom.
We also have colonies of squirrels living in our basement laughing at us. So not cool.
Currently Listening to "Hysteric" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs
" by Duane Eddy
" by Weezer
" by B.W. Stevenson
" by Jessie James (a guilty pleasure...I hate admitting this one)
" by Ok Go
" by Beau Brummels
" by The Detroit Cobras
" by Cake
" by Flatt and Scruggs
" by The Guess Who
" by Johnny Cash
" by Kansas
" by CCR
" by Wilson Pickett
" by Outkast
" by Incubus
" by Madonna
" by The Who
" by The Talking Heads
" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs