Camp House Blog

What do you do when your in-laws come to visit? I put them to work. They are great cleaners and organizers and the house can always use more of both. Our contractor that did the seismic retrofit and dry rot repair, volunteered a day of his time to help us hang cabinets. He asked we unpack all the cabinets, remove the doors and drawers before he gets there so that he can spend the maximum amount of time helping. My in-laws did a great job:

We can see the floor in the dining room and living room again!

The kitchen is sitting and waiting for the install. The walls are painted and the lights are installed. E even installed the washer and dryer; we'll have to move it for the floor installation, but it has been worth it! We've used most of our neighbor's and friend's washers in the past year.

The master bathroom tile was well underway last week. In fact, it is finished but since I'm behind on posting - no surprise there - I only have the "in progress" shots to share.

Here's the two-inch hex tile going down on the floor and the one-inch hex in the shower pan.

Here we see the floor is down, including the matte liner. The wall tiles are in progress.

Here we have the shower walls going up.

I'll share the finished photos once I get around to taking them. This week we plan on installing the fixtures in the bathroom. My grandma is planning a visit to help paint the exterior of the house mid-September and I'm sure she would prefer an indoor bathroom for her stay.

I also flexed my electrician's muscles by installing one of the lights in the laundry room and both of the bedroom lights:

So far, I'm quite pleased with the results.

Back in the Saddle

My traumatizing experience as an artistic administrator is over and I've earned enough cash in 6 weeks of work to pay a tile setter for 9 days of work - almost. What this means is that I now get to split my time between continuing to drive it home (sorry, but not really), substitute teaching, and auditions.

Some serious progress on the house has been made in the last week, in addition to the hard labor E has been putting in under the house installing the radiant heating. Unfortunately, there are no pictures of this process to share with you. The photographer was unavailable, missing, running and screaming, and was not available to document the process. Fear not, there are many more hours of labor for the photographer to observe.

So instead may I present my mother's summer vacation from law-school:

E's ingenious invention for painting the grooves in the siding of the back house/garage:

If you've painted a bit before, you may have giggled. If the previous image didn't elicit a chuckle, may I now present to you a visual tutorial of why painting grooves sucks:

I am a firm believer that it may take us the same amount of cumulative labor hours to paint the main house as it did the back house simply due to the pesky grooves which had to be painted with a brush.

Not to mention, the first paint color that we put up on turned out to be very cool and minty. The front and a side and a half got painted before it hit me. More honestly, before we ran out of green paint and I stepped back and looked at it all. Even though it provided a lovely contrast to the bubble gum pink color lurking on the back corners of the building, it had to go.

Deciding that the paint was a bit too refreshing, we opted for a softer mushroom sort of green. Some may even say taupe, maybe grey? Honestly, I'm not even sure. I can say that I LOVE the trim color.Since taking this picture I've painted the front door a darker moss color and plan on using it as the accent color for the inset arches on the front of the main house. It's looking rather snappy if I do say so myself.

Today we painted the kitchen and tiling is underway in the master bathroom. I'll have an update posted soon. Tomorrow my in-laws will be attending Camp HouseBlog, so I hope to have an even larger back log of news.

Visual Gratification

The back of the house is starting to look like a house. The drywall has been textured in all three rooms (master bedroom, master bathroom, kitchen/laundry/mudroom). Painting has begun in the mbath and mbed. I'm a bit overjoyed with the colors and currently believe it is because they are AMAZING and not that I'm simply giddy at the thought of something being close to completed. It is a bit tough to capture with my stellar photographic skills but if you squint hard you can see the bedroom is what I like to call a "light silver sage" while the bathroom is a "light and dusty robin's egg blue".

Trim work is almost finished in both rooms and tile has been ordered for the bath. I am sad that in the end we couldn't salvage the curved trim work originally found in the room. It turns out that again, previous modifications were made to it so that when we went to remove and salvage it, it simply fell apart in our hands. I'm not kidding, it was held up with paint and wood putty. A 4''x4'' corner piece fell off the wall in 6 strips of broken wood. The pieces had been taken down by the previous fellow, which he then rehung with some mystical system in mind; they were never the same. Fortunately, we were able to recreate a similar baseboard to that found in the rest of the house. The only difference is that this one is 6" high vs. the 8" high found elsewhere. The reason behind this madness is that the previous owner/genius wired the room with outlets that cut into the baseboard. The wiring was all too short to raise the outlets and we opted to obtain some shred of our crumbling sanity by installing shorter baseboards since we had to replace them anyhow. The option of recreating the curved molding is a bit out of our budget at the moment and E isn't too fond of it to begin with. We will be adding picture molding around the room to mimic the real stuff in the rest of the house.

E also hung the medicine cabinets and light fixtures in the bathroom, I think hoping for some visual gratification. The lights are upside down but that's a detail, and we're not at the detail phase yet.

He's been spending an awful lot of time under the house painstakingly installing radiant heating tubes. I can't blame him for wanting to see something looking livable. The bedroom and bathroom now even have a fully functional heating set up. A nice neighbor fellow of ours informed me that since I was unavailable for the unveiling of the heating system, he went and experienced the sweat lodge in my stead. For this, I am grateful. I hope to keep all future gatherings in the house at a more respectable temperature.

A list of demands

I was recently informed by a reader, aka friend, that she needs more house blog. She is distressed that my posts are not as rapid and numerous as she'd like. Well, demands being my specialty, I give you: THE WALLS!

Our tour begins at the entry door into the mudroom/laundry room. Please notice the niche left for the laundry board.

A turn to the left reveals the laundry room.

Walking into the kitchen, turning around this is the view of the mud/laundry room.

Turning our attention back to the kitchen you'll notice the huge stack of plastering mud in the room.

Now we're looking to the right.

Now we've run across the room, literally, and are turned back looking into the master bedroom.

Again, running break neck speed into the master bedroom, you can see the patch job on the wall where the old wall heater used to be plus the interior of the master bath.

Just around the corner is the rest of the master bath.

This concludes our tour for today.

Let there be WALLS

This is what the kitchen looked like before the sheet rock crew descended upon it just 30 min ago. The first sheet of drywall just went up. I can hear the them working at epic speed as I type. I'm sure later today the kitchen, mud room/laundry room, mstr. bathroom, mstr. bedroom will be covered and we will have WALLS!The master bathroom prep was competed last week. The Wonder Board went in the shower and on the walls. The shower pan passed inspection and we have a smooth mortar bed for floor tile installation.
Today's fun fact refers to the bathroom. Can anyone guess how far out of square the room was? I'll give you a hint: The previous owner who did such splendid work elsewhere definitely had his hand in constructing the small section of wall next to the door - between the bedroom and bathroom. Remember folks, the bathroom was once half the size it is today, then the previous owner put up a wall doubling the length but kept the original wall dividing the space in two. We removed the partition wall (original bathroom wall) leaving his section. You can see the offending wall portion in the image bellow. If you look really carefully you can see the wall furred out.

Anyone notice the 2x4 in the far corner. Yes. The wall was off by 2" inches. Considering the room is only about 11' long, that's quite a large variant.

Now that I've got that out of my system; moving along to something way cooler. We've been looking at exterior paint colors!

I admit, the two small squares on either side of the door are 1) pretty darned subtle in this picture 2) look pretty much alike. I can guarantee that they look very different. I swear it. My neighbor would attest to it as well. She'd swear it in front of a grand jury. She'd swear it threatened by a pit of vipers. She'd swear it, but don't tell her I told you so. Plus, she's an artist.

Here's the official color pallet as of 6/7/2010:

The two sage colors are for the body of the house and accents in the arches over the windows. The trim is a dark eggplant (color didn't translate to the computer very well). The windows which are already installed are the coconut cream. At the moment, I'm toying with the red umber for the front door.

I suppose with the drywall scheduled to be finished and textured by Friday, I need to get cracking on paint for the interior. The forerunner for the mstr. bedroom is the looser for the exterior. It has more green in the color and the paint swatch looks gorgeous in the room. Speaking of the paint swatches, after doing some great reading and chatting with my artiste neighbor, I picked up 2x2 squares of drywall and painted them with sample paint. They are great for moving around the house and checking various lighting situations.

I suppose I should be typing less and doing more. I'm off to Home Depot to rent a power washer and get some exterior paint to test out on the cottage.

Back in the saddle again

I'm back from my life on the road.

While I was gone E progressed on the house. We had an inspection on the insulation (pass) solar (pass) final stucco (pass) final seismic (pass).

The current project is the master bathroom. I had the tile prep folks over this morning. Our floor is almost prepped for me to tile it. We are having a mortar bed poured since I'll be using small 1" hex tiles for the majority of the floor. The shower pan was pre-sloped and the walls are being furred out. I've come to the conclusion that I stand the best chance at getting a professional looking tile job if I pay the professionals to prep the area. If the area is flat, flush, smooth and plumb, my chances are significantly better. I'll take those odds.

The small bathroom is currently prepped and ready for me to tile. There are a few small areas that I need to patch in the wall where the plumbing was updated but other than that, all systems are go.

Solar - post dated, April 2

Today I did some plumbing for the solar loop. In the picture you can see the delta-T pump (at the top), the air separator, the expansion tank, the pressure relief valve, the fill and drain valves, a ball valve, one of two temperature gauges, and a bunch of fittings and pipe to connect everything. I feel good about everything except one solder joint... the connection to the air separator. My propane torch was a little too wimpy to heat up such a mass of metal so I'm not entirely sure I got a good connection.

I still am waiting for a 3-way valve, but that is the last thing before the solar will be fully plumbed. The 3-way valve is a safety measure: when the temperature of the tank exceeds a threshold, say 180F, the valve will open and send the hot water through an underground loop to dissipate excess heat.

Tomorrow my dad and I will fill up the attic with the 2nd layer of insulation. We've got the whole attic covered with R13, so tomorrow with the addition of R30 (perpendicular to the first layer) we'll be up to R43.