Shutterfly rhymes with flutterby

I've been researching online photo sales sites, and tonight chose Shutterfly. This has nothing to do with renovations, and instead has everything to do with my real job, being a full-time photographer. While I'm not renovating. But it turns out I've not been renovating. So I've had time to do online research.

Three weeks ago, the building inspector told us that we needed to have a plan done by an architect before he'd give us the go-ahead for building a second-floor bath. That was very reasonable. The only architect who ever called Brian back turned out to be a fellow who lives in an 1820's house they've been renovating for about a decade. He came over and chatted with us for a couple hours, at $125 an hour. An expensive chat, but it felt worthwhile. A lot of good tidbits.

A couple of weeks later, with the contract signed for them to come over and look at the place and draw a plan for us, we start wondering if they're ever going to come over and look at the place. We call, find out there's actually quite a long wait ahead of us, and manage somehow to convince the architect's assistant that our carrying 5 gallon buckets of water up the basement stairs with which to flush the toilet and putting out a specialized bag in the afternoon sun with which to take showers - that putting all that behind us depends on him. They schedule a visit and the architect's assistant comes over with his architect's assistant's assistant, and they're dressed well. They're kind of surprised that the house is in disarray - that the house is, in fact, completely torn apart. The architect's assistant finally understands our haste.

We're promised plans within a short time span - say, 2 to 3 weeks. We get it down to 2 weeks, seeing as all's depending on them for the bathroom moving forward. Because in fact, we can't do anything with the plumbing for the first floor bath til the ceiling joists have been planned, drawn, and transformed. The plumber is going to run the plumbing over the ceiling because it's an uninsulated crawl space below the kitchen floor. And needs to wait for the ceiling joists to be in place before he can drill and/or attach his copper pipes. Makes sense.

And so we wait. And 2 weeks rolls around, with no plans. We get a promise for the following week. Meanwhile, we've unscheduled the plumber, whose roster is filling up with other homeowners who can use his services right away.

At last, the plans arrive. We head to the 1820's renovated home to pick up the plans, we're given a run-through which begins with "Tell the contractor to -" and we stop him there. Let the architect's assistant know that, when we told him we'd be doing all the work ourselves, we actually really meant it, and would need to know exactly what to do with their plans. They did their best to educate us, and I'm glad. I learned about Simpson Strong Tie (a ubiquitous joist hanger) and Versalam (a laminate composite that's stronger than regular wood).

We set out to find said versalam, because we were told that nothing else would do. After very little success, we ask for advice and once again ask if there's anything we can use besides the Versalam. We're pointed toward a lumber yard nearby. At the lumber yard, a fascinating series of backpedals happens. The man behind the counter declares that he doesn't like our plans, shows us the flaws, tells us that other laminates will do, then refuses to sell us another laminate because if he does and the house falls down, then he's liable, rather than the architect. We ask for the Versalam so that the architect can remain liable, since we're doing what the architect told us to do. Where previously Versalam seemed to be available, it was now only available if we bought it by the thousand.

The man was not going to sell us anything that had to do with our sub-par plans, because he didn't want to be involved in a project that he thinks will fail!

Our house is going to fall down if we shore it up!

So we're stuck in a jam, waiting for a contractor friend to come back from vacation so we can run the plans by him, get a second opinion, and if it's similar to the lumber yard, I guess we'll bring the plans back to the architect and tell them they've made a dud.

That's why we've not been renovating and I've had time to be a professional photographer. We're stuck with time flying by and the most important project inaccessible. I'll call this a trough in the roller-coaster ride, and hope that we're headed for a peak again soon.

Fitting plywood sheeting in your volvo stationwagon

Drove up to Home Depot today with the windows all down, it's a hot summer's day and the air conditioning stopped working as soon as summer got going.

A highway ride up to Home Depot is not a bad thing. Hope springs eternal, you have funny conversations about nothing in particular, and the station wagon seems particularly large today. You've been cheating on the station wagon and driving the sedan for its air conditioning. So the current car seems big, booming along the highway.

You arrive at the Despot, park in some shade, sashay in with your man and a really noisy, rattley, bright orange cart made out of the same type of softly bent metal bars you used to brachiate along on the playground. Only today, they make you feel more like a grownup than ever.

You find yourselves in the plywood aisle, vast blocky stacks piled up to the fluourescent lights, so far up that sparrows flit around the ductwork. Since neither of you made a drawing of the floor surface you have to repair, you get one 4x8 foot sheet each of 3/8 inch, 1/2 inch, and 1/4 inch plywood. Actually, the 1/4 inch is made of lauan, which you have just discovered the true spelling of, since each of you has been spelling it differently and feeling both confident and confused.

You shop around, spending some time in the tiling aisle, wondering at the alchemies of sand-containing and non-sandy grout. You eventually check out, and wheel that bright orange screecher uphill with the 3 sheets of plywood, all the way to the station wagon in the shade. The back deck gets opened. You realize there might be a problem.

The first sheet of plywood goes in, and keeps on going in, with a foot and a half passing over the headrests of the driver's and passenger's seats. The other two sheets of plywood go on top of the first sheet, but encounter resistance. You know there's 8 feet of space in the car. You both decide to lower the backrests of the driver's and passenger's seats, so the plywood has more headroom, though you have less. The back deck finally clicks closed, but not really closed, so you know you have to take the back roads home.

Now comes the fun part. In order to drive with the plywood above your head in your laid-way-back seat, you have to hunch up to the steering wheel with your head compressed under the plywood, arms tucked in at the elbows, peering over the steering wheel. You're suddenly a blue haired old woman, married for 50 years, driving a volvo that's never fast enough for the person behind you!

Rock star on the phone with my husband

Elliot Easton of The Cars was just on the phone with my husband. It was a regular cell phone call, my man sounded very normal, walked around our barely-there house to get better reception, and finished up the call with no indication that he was on the phone with a ROCK STAR.

My man is cool like ice.

We've got a big red dumpster in the driveway. Filled it three-quarters of the way up with stuff taken out of the house. This is the second dumpster we've had, mind you. This second dumpster is 5 feet shorter than the previous one, is 25 bucks cheaper, and is a delicious shade of serious dumpster red. And it's almost full again.

We kind of ran out of things to put in the dumpster. You're not supposed to put real trash in the dumpster, nor are you allowed to put plastic garbage bags in the dumpster. So we hauled over all the plastic garbage bags containing de-construction debris, pushed them onto the pile in the dumpster, and then cut open each bag with scissors so we could dump the contents into the dumpster properly.

Since we ran out of things to put in the dumpster and we still have several days til the dupster is taken away, we decided to remove the laminate floorboards from the library.

The library has pretty honey-colored, bevel-edged wooden-like boards, but the wood is just a tease. It's some sort of special treated wood, so that if you tried to sand it down, it would get sticky and gum up the sander. The floor did dearly need a refinish, and since no refinish was welcome, the pretend wood had to go.

We were kind of excited about it going, especially since there's a smooth oak plank floor underneath all the laminate. Right? So we pull up the first board. There's a black, gunky, hardened goo under the first board. We pull up others. Goo has been slathered everywhere, directly on top of the beautiful oak floorboards, so that the laminate can be stuck on top of it. The laminate is additionally nailed into the oak, as well as being securely glued via tongue and groove to each laminate plank. The goo is unnecessary! The goo is ugly! The goo is all over our perfectly-imagined two-and-a-quarter inch oak planks!

The official name is mastic. I dreamed last night of mastic. I believe I was in a boat, and the lake turned into mastic, and it was dangerous. I was mad and sad, just the way I got in real life when we pulled off that first board.

Pulling laminate boards that are nailed, stuck together, and glued to the floor is not nearly as thrilling as being on the phone with a rock star.

Two and a quarter inch oak

Today we heaved and pulled and tried to get clever about removing a wooden console from near the front door. The fellow who built this big wooden console thingie with shelves, doors, and bannisters knew what he was about.

There were 6 wooden bannisters up high like jail bars. We could rotate them, but there was no obvious way to remove them. We looked under the console for screws, but none were there. We tried prying them out, but they just kept rotating in an appealing but useless way. No discernible way to get them out from the top. So I got to take the cordless sawsall to 'em! 5 seconds each, and they were toast. Crack the last bit in half and pull the two halves off the top and bottom screws. It was like opening up a window to remove those bannisters.

And then we tackled the rest of the console. Eventually we reached floor. Most of the floor is honey-colored wood laminate, which our contractor friend tells us probably won't take a refinish. Something about funky waxes used in the process. So the top layer of laminated wooden floor goes right up to the edge of the console, and then stops. Then goes all around. And about half an inch below that level, in the space formerly occupied by the big wooden console thingie, is a possibly lovely oak hardwood floor. There's only about 5 square feet to see, so you can't quite tell. I think we'll probably rip out the rest of the laminate and uncover the wood to see what we've got. The truth is, hardwood is more sexy than laminate. But we're hoping that we're not seeing false promises of sexy wood, only to rip the laminate off and uncover ratty wood.

New unfinished oak hardwood costs about $3 per square foot, and once we've uncovered the wood, the next step is finding out what type of oak it may be, so we can buy replacement pieces for any buzzkill ratty wood. After that, we get to figure out how to repair an interlocking floor. I can't wait.

Shower Power

Chilly night. I took a shower in what I should describe as a rattle-trap contraption, but which I instead wish to describe as an inspired solution to a pressing problem. My man rigged up a shower using a "solar shower" which is hung over a rafter from a short bungee cord, pointing downward to a Finding Nemo child's pool, surrounded on all sides by a blue tarp. On sunny days, we can put the solar shower outside to heat naturally. Said solar shower is a thick, sealed plastic bag, one side transparent and the other black, with place to pour in water near the top and tube with shower-like nozzle attachment near the bottom. It's actually really nifty, and REI's version is hugely better than a weird leaky version from Walmart.

But today was drizzly and cool and overcast. No sun with which to heat the solar shower. And we were getting stinky. My man spent a half hour in the basement at the microwave heating water to pour into the solar shower. Which is completely not what REI was thinking of when they put this thing on the market, but we're desperate here.

And standing on the back porch in chilly weather with a semblance of privacy afforded by various window coverings, lukewarm dribble barely rinsing the bubbles from my hair, hurrying because the bag is running low quickly and the alternative is turning on the garden hose with freezing-cold water, keeping my eyes closed because there's still soap to rinse off and I don't really want to know how close I am to the garden hose solution, I finally get clean. And the lukewarm water runs out. And I feel as though I've indulged in a luxury.

Starting

OK, on April 7, 2005, a house was purchased. My husband and I did the purchasing, and a relative of the seller did her best as realtor to make the purchase hell. We figure anything after Paula will be easy.

In the early 1960's, the house was purchased by a couple in their early middle years. The fellow renovated the kitchen, bath, and barn. We found some cool pictures of the barn renovation. The renovations were done well, for the time in which they were done, and they're all absolutely hideous now. But that wasn't actually the problem.

It was the systems. This couple, who had become elderly and who never had children, didn't have much of a heating system in place. The plumbing was all run above the floor, with the water meter coming up through uninsulated space and into the kitchen floor. The plumbing was actually full of leaks when we bought the house, since Paula had turned off the heat in a cold snap in March once it became apparent that we really wanted to buy the house.

On April 7, 2005, we got the keys (actually, we walked in through an unlocked door, after Paula led us on a goose chase for nearly unfindable keys), and we started ripping. Oh boy, it was awesome to begin the process. Mouse droppings rained down on us. That's when we bought masks. Erratically-spaced lath got pulled off. That's when we put on leather gloves. And green wall paneling came down. That's when we started wearing shoes with soles thick enough to absorb an inch or so of nail when you stepped on it.

Over the next several weeks, we gathered friends for occasional weekends. They helped us pull down acoustic tiling, uncovering adze-cut beams and hand-sawn floor planks. A couple came over and demolished a room in an afternoon. They have a well put-together house, and said it was exhilarating to pull someone else's house apart, since they didn't have to put it back together again.

We used a sledge hammer and bully bar to pry up linoleum in the kitchen floor, so we could replace wet floor boards from the leaking pipes. And in the meantime, we were selling the other house. And maintaining jobs.

I tried to sell the other house myself, using the newspaper, signs, and websites. Didn't work, very depressing. Realtors have the MLS service, which is used by the vast majority of buyers. So I eventually hired a realtor at 3% of our selling price so I could have the privilege of listing the property on MLS. It worked immediately, with lots of folks coming through with their own realtors, and finally the other house sold. That closing happened last week. And we scrambled our way through moving from one house to the next, with the help of friends and parents. I think we'll stay here for years and years, if only to avoid another move.

We found out that the "new" house was probably built in 1823. Haven't found anything yet about the barn. Today while tearing out lath and mineral wool insulation, I found a rolled-up bit of newsprint and paper, tied with thin cloth. Parents were over, so the four of us went outside and unrolled it. It was dirty, frayed at one end, and the newsprint said something about boys' shirts being 6 for 5. I unrolled it on the grass, and there were machine-made punched holes in this very thin paper, with what looked like die-cut edges. It was a pattern to a piece of clothing! I'd hoped for an obituary or a notice in the paper about the fire in the house. I liked it better as a rolled-up old mystery.