Ok, the short version is we have a garage now. I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this and not just looking at the photos, that you want the play-by-play. Once again, I’ve done a poor job of keeping up with blogging, but I’m trying again. With Sarah and I temporarily moving the neighbor’s ..read more

After a number of quotes, we bit the bullet and signed on to get the garage built. We made an initial deposit on Friday and they said they’d be in touch Monday to discuss scheduling. Instead, Monday they showed up with an excavator. Unfortunately, even though the concrete demo was done, we weren’t quite ready for them to start. Monday morning surprise excavator! Primarily, we needed to get the fences along the sides of the yard removed. We also needed temporary fencing, a porta-john, and while they had asked if we had a survey and we said yes, we actually needed the physical survey markers at ..read more

I’m going to skip over all the things that I haven’t kept the blog updated about and go straight into covering various projects. So, I apologize that they won’t be posted in chronological order, since we’ve done a ton of projects since I fell off the posting timeline and the effort involved in getting caught up on everything is a big reason I haven’t bothered. So, concrete demo. Let’s back up a step. When we bought the house, there was a two car garage in the back (we have an alley). It was probably a 1.5 car garage when it was built but they poured a three foot concrete pad next to the garage ..read more

Just a heads up that my WordPress theme died and now the site looks dumpy. Even though I haven’t been posting, I try to keep things working. I’ll hopefully get it straightened out soon. In the meantime, let me tease you all with some projects we’ve been working on and I intend to write posts about: the front yard, the basement stairs, the basement exterior walls, the back yard concrete demo, and if we can get our act together, the garage! Stay tuned. I haven’t forgotten about this thing ..read more

If you aren’t a regular reader or weren’t paying close attention, you might not even notice that an entire calendar year separates this post and the previous one. What can I say? I fell off the blogging horse. What happened in the past year? Is the house done? Well, I’m not going to cover a whole year of work, but the big development is yes, just one week after the last post, we moved upstairs. One of the reasons I didn’t post right away when we moved is that people want to see pictures, and honestly, right after you move in things aren’t staged and pretty. It took us time to work through ..read more

With the edging installed and the railings varnished, we moved on to balusters. I bought three different kinds of wrought iron balusters to make up a pattern: plain straight, a swirling pattern intended to tie with the front door that we called “squiggles”, and “baskets” where several pieces wrap around to make a ball. Originally I was planning to put “knuckles” for these, little diamond-shaped bits along the straight length, but Sarah liked the baskets and they were cheaper than the knuckles, which made it an easy call. I worked out a pattern and approximate quantities to order, along with “s ..read more

As I mentioned a couple posts back, Sarah took on the project of adding a hardwood edging to the stairs that go from the second floor to the attic as well as the attic hallway that overlooks the stairwell. Carpeting will cover the remainder. The first step was to add a piece of veneer plywood to each step riser using glue and a stapler, next cover the holes with Drydex (spackle) and prime the wood. I mixed up some regular drywall mud and filled in the corners where the risers meet the drywall sides of the stairs. I took the opportunity to patch some dings and dents, as well as close up the too ..read more

In addition to the stair cladding, I also needed to do the newel posts, railings, and balusters. We’re going to have stained red oak newels and railings, and iron balusters with some spiral pieces to tie thematically with our front door. I did a bit of online research and started ordering the parts I needed. I got the newel posts from the same company that made the stair treads, we ordered balusters from a couple of companies, and the railings are from Home Depot. I also did some research on how to mount these things, since no one wants a newel post that wiggles around. There are a few options ..read more

I’ve been working on the stair railings, and I’ll have a post about them hopefully soon, but there’s been a bunch of other things going on we should get caught up on. For starters, we got our countertops! Sarah and I went shopping for stone countertops for the kitchen as well as the three bathroom vanities. We learned that while there are lots of installers, they all buy from distributors and the distributors won’t sell directly to you. We did some online shopping and then visited two different local distributors and figured out what we liked and didn’t. Unfortunately, the distributors only gi ..read more

This was a relatively small project. I’d left it on the back burner for a while, but since I was waiting for some (more!) deliveries to move forward with the stair railing project, I decided to knock this one out. Back when we had temporarily (several years) had the washer and dryer on the first floor, we ran a gas line up to it, using the segment that was future-intended for the stove. This meant I had an existing hole in the floor to run through up into the wet wall. The nice thing about the wet wall is that there’s room inside to work. I bought a recessed box for the gas valve a while back ..read more