In the last blog entry I mentioned that we were getting a new, big, heavy, and expensive saw delivered to the house, and it finally came. It's amazing what that thing can do, and Lawrence uses it for cutting various types and sizes of wood for projects all over the house. The saw is located in the garage along with a smaller saw. I'm not sure what the difference is between them other than size, but I don't dare ask or I'll get "the stare". I can just tell you it's big, fairly loud, and thankfully it has retractable wheels on it so it can easily be moved around. Don't forget, we also have three other saws inside the house, including a router table, a "saws-all", which is a hand-held saw that is used to cut through just about anything, and of course the proverbial jigsaw. Yes, five saws total, and the neighbors probably wonder why it sounds like we're operating a sawmill in the garage.
In the middle of the living room floor sits the router table. We use this to create all the window, door, base and crown moldings for the entire house. The special bit spins at somewhere over 20,000 rpm and is extremely loud. It has an attachment on the back that allows the shop-vac hose to be connected to it to collect the sawdust, but when both of them are running at the same time, it's deafening. We both have to wear hearing protection when using them. We use some pre-fab moldings for around the doors and windows, but the base and crown moldings are made by us. We buy the raw lumber in various sizes, cut it to length, pass it through the router table three or four times, prime it, then apply a final coat of gloss white paint. The final product looks amazing. The hard part is cutting at an angle on the ends of the boards so they can be joined at 90-degree angles. It gets a little tricky, but with pen and paper in hand, Lawrence calculates it all out, and magically it works.
One good by-product of the saws is a large amount of sawdust, which is collected and dumped into one of our three compost bins in the backyard. Since the grass is growing so fast and has to be cut every weekend, we ran out of room in the first two bins, so off to Sam's Club for another one. Somehow, I have a feeling we're going to end up with an entire fence line full of compost bins.
All of the rooms in the house have been textured and painted, including both hallways, and all light fixtures and ceiling fans installed, as well as all wall plugs and wall switches replaced and covered. The master bath is untouched at this point except that we use the bathtub in the master to rinse out brushes, rollers, pans, buckets, and other painting items. That poor bathtub is now stained with a rainbow of colors that will be very difficult to scrub out. We might have to replace it completely. We did a little work in the guest bath by removing the toilet, which was interesting and somewhat gross, as well as the large mirror and accompanying ugly light fixture. We haven't textured it yet as there may be a small problem. When the previous owners decided to put up some awful dark blue wallpaper, they didn't use wallpaper paste. They used some kind of industrial glue that not only made it very difficult to remove the wallpaper, but now we have these random large glue trails all over the wall above the sinks. We might have to use some kind of large belt sander to remove it, so we just stopped at that point and moved on to other projects. We'll get to it eventually, and we're not looking forward to it.
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| Guest Bath (note glue on walls) |
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| Master Bedroom |
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| Kitchen |
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| Living Room from Front Door (with router table and moldings) |
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| Living Room from Fireplace (the red thing against the wall is the texture gun in it's stand) |
In one of my previous posts I mentioned that we painted the two guest rooms, one being baby poop brown and the other a light green. After we did those rooms we decided to paint one wall in the living room, the same wall with the tan fireplace brick, brown as well. Now, we have way too much brown. I decided we need to repaint the brown guest room red, and red it is. So now, instead of baby poop brown, the room is "Velvety Merlot" as the label reads. It's a very dark red and is actually quite lovely. When we finally put up the bright white moldings and other items, it will really pop. I also had to go back and apply a second coat as the first coat streaked on me. My back is killing me, but it was worth the effort. One drawback to the red paint is I now have an abundant supply of said red paint all over my work jeans previously ruined during other projects, and now when we go to Home Depot or a local eatery for lunch, it looks like I either murdered someone or work in a slaughterhouse. No one speaks to us. I wonder why?
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| The Red Room (not as bright red as in the photo - actually quite dark) |
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| The Green Room |
(As for the above pictures, the ugly carpet has yet to be replaced, the tile in the kitchen has not been replaced, none of the moldings are up, and overall the place is a mess. We're working on it.)
Another new addition to all of this is my Mom's Honda Civic. About two weeks ago it was really getting hot outside and I didn't want Lawrence riding his bike in the heat and local bad traffic, so I went to my Mom's house and asked if I could use her little 1993 Honda Civic until I could afford a new car. Mom is 90 now and doesn't drive very much, and since my brother and sister live with her and do all the driving anyway, it wasn't a problem for me to use the car. Besides, with all the driving I do everyday, the Honda Pilot explodes my gasoline bill so the little Civic is a welcome gasoline sipper that has dropped my monthly fuel bill dramatically. It's a lot smaller than the Pilot, so even a Mini Cooper looks big next to me. I won't even talk about passing an 18-wheeler on the freeway.
We have had an ongoing problem of bad cell phone service at the house, and since that same signal also covers our data usage, streaming music was impossible. I decided it was time to install some Internet service, and after doing some comparison shopping decided to go with AT&T U-Verse. There were some initial problems getting it to work, but after a visit from our somewhat friendly AT&T field technician, it's up and running with amazing speeds. It doesn't help with phone calls, but who cares....we have music now, and it makes working a little more enjoyable.
We did the usual weekend duty of laundry while working around the house, so we're good for another week or two on that front.
We brought Rusty McNose to the house on Saturday so he could romp around the yard and have fun, but apparently he overdid it a bit as today he is very sore and can hardly stand up, and can barely use his right-front leg. He's getting older now and is quickly realizing he can't run around like a puppy anymore, so we're giving him some baby aspirin to help the stiffness and pain and he seems to feel a little better now. We still get a good wiggle of that big fluffy tail and a warm lick on the arm telling us everything is OK.
What's going to happen between now and the next update? I'm not real sure, but we're on the downhill slide of all of this and the place is looking amazing. We still have to install all the carpet, floor tile, window blinds, kitchen appliances and bathroom fixtures, but the very distant light at the end of the tunnel, yet faint, still keeps us motivated.
