Author: janeen

short weekend

because of family visits on saturday AND sunday, we had less time to work on the house, but still managed to get stuff accomplished. we only lost about 8 hours.

remember all those holes mathew made in the walls? we rented a machine and installed the blow-in cellulose insulation. sorry no photos, i was downstairs in the garage while mathew was upstairs in the living room with my dad. my brother jason helped me loading up the agitator/blower (sorry, there ARE photos but they’re on jason’s camera…)

later after my family left, mathew and i switched places so i installed the insulation in the second entry while mathew filled the machine. (left) a photo i took of myself. it’s a very cool machine we rented, we had it in the garage but controlled it with a remote. and it was even powerful enough to blow insulation up to the attic, 2 flights up.

on sunday mathew’s dad, daniel came over for brunch. then we went downstairs to see if the wood in the entry was worth saving.

(left) it was! (right) the edger and a sandpaper disc they call “pizza.”

(left) filling a few more holes with insulation. (right) patching the holes and large gaps with plaster.

and because he just needed make a little more progress, mathew pulled down all the damaged plaster in the hall built-in cabinet. now it’s really ugly! he’s thinking there might have been a light-well here in the past, it would explain why there was water damage in the middle of the house.

a gift from bob

a gift from mathew’s co-worker, bob. mathew has it proudly displayed as you walk downstairs to the garage. my only question is “why did he leave the shrink wrap on it?” lazy? trying to make a statement?

the beginning of pretty

on saturday after i applied fiberglass mesh tape to the cracks in the walls, mathew applied a skim-coat, painted the wall with pink “plaster-weld” and then we got to work with plastering the first wall.

(left) mathew burnishing the wall after 2 layers of plaster were applied. (right) on sunday i started with some paint stripping.

and then it was time for plaster on the second wall, this batch was a good consistency and mathew was quite happy with how it turned out. while mathew was burnishing i cut out some “recycled” gypboard to fill in some of the spaces where i’d removed old loose plaster.

(left) i did the best with what i had. adding the gypboard cuts down on the amount of plaster we’ll need to layer in to fill those spaces. (right) mathew starting on the built-in cabinet in the hall, removing even more of that weird paneling the previous owners liked to use all over the house. behind it the plaster was really ugly and water damaged.

this is how those two walls look as the plaster is drying.

more of the same

mathew figured out the leak: an incorrect installation of exterior siding. on sunday we covered the wall openings with gypboard.

(left) the original plaster wall! (right) installing gypboard.

mathew drilling holes in the 2nd hallway for blow-in cellulose insulation. the holes go between each stud. once those top holes are drilled he drops a string and plumb inside to find where horizontal pieces might block the insulation, then he drills more holes below that.

we decided to strip the old paint and plaster skim coat off this third wall. pounds/gallons and years of paint were removed. then we stripped the 2 layers of wallpaper. the exposed plaster walls are quite beautiful in a rustic way, they look like walls in old buildings in europe.

saturday activities

mathew inspecting the ceiling and drilling holes for blow-in insulation we’ll install next weekend.

my cousin larry was back to paint the closet door he sanded last weekend. he ran a marathon in the city the next morning.

mathew installing batt-insulation above the doors to keep out drafts. i spent the day stripping paint then stripping wall paper.

i finally got a good look at the old wallpaper. mathew removing wallpaper.

dragging my feet

there were so many photos from this weekend that i’ve been putting off making a post. i was going to post the photos and no text and say, “figure it out!” but now that i’m typing…

i’m still in the middle of “destroying” this room and making it as ugly as possible. after the sanding it was time for the loose plaster to come down.

i screwed in plaster washers to hold cracks and edges in place.

my cousin larry came over to help; i put him to work sanding this slatted door from upstairs. (left, photo taken after the sanding was done. he’ll be back next weekend to paint it!) it was nice having someone work with me in my demolition room. mathew has spent the last few weekends, mostly in the garage, working on electrical/rewiring stuff. in the evening another cousin, jon and his wife florence and their two kids, makayla and malachi dropped by to see the house and go out to dinner with larry. of course, as usual, i forgot to take photos of our guests… and they brought yummy snacks. (right) here i am sitting with a wall where i’ve removed the plaster in a perfect line so that the new repairing gypboard can be screwed to half of the stud and the remaining plaster can be screwed to the other half. (does that make any sense?)

mathew installing yet another electrical outlet and finding a weird panel attached to the wall where he thinks a heater might have once lived. and we also discovered this weird green wallpaper on two of the walls in this room. previous owners had put a plaster skim coat over it but it wasn’t holding that well and easily chipped off. so the room gets even uglier…

my sunday started with a lot of plaster skim-coat removal. after making a royal mess i got tired of working by myself and went down to the garage to see what mathew was doing.

i found him in the garage causing trouble… i mean cutting lots and lots of holes in the ceiling. adding outlets upstairs means running wires in the floor below the living room. he also spent the entire day doing rewiring and fixing electrical stuff that wasn’t done correctly by the previous owners. (do you see a pattern?)

mathew thought it would be better for my morale if i worked downstairs with him in the garage. so then instead of demolition i was put on construction duty, cutting and installing 2x4s for a partial retrofit of the garage. there are these precariously placed steel beams in the garage that in an earthquake could fall over. i helped to make them safer (and felt quite manly in the process) by securing them to the floor above.

(left) after that bit of retrofitting i replaced the mesh on a window screen. (right) at 7:30 i’d had enough fun in the garage, but mathew kept rewiring until close to 10 pm. it wasn’t something that could wait, our tenant would have been without electricity!

hope everyone had a nice weekend. (next time i’ll cut down on the sarcasm…)

last weekend

hey everyone, i’ve been really sick and mathew has been really busy with his job, so here’s what happened last weekend.

the bathroom vanity now has drawers!

because of my lack of electrical knowledge i had a bit of a dangerous shock while stripping paint… my paint scraper slipped and must have hit something inside of the open outlet and there were huge sparks. (left) can you see the scorch marks at the lower right of the outlet? (right) and see that crater at the lower edge of the paint scraper? the sparks made that! luckily i was wearing gloves, a respirator mask, glasses and headphones. mathew says because it sparked against the outside of the plug, this is good because it means the box is grounded.

(left) meanwhile mathew was outside grinding off the bits that hold the useless mini half-gates at the bottom of our stairs. (right) and inspecting what the next steps will be for the cracked plaster wall in the living room downstairs.

a lot of the electrical outlets in this room were added more recently by a really BAD contractor. they were all placed at varying heights in the baseboards. they installed them by chopping out parts of the baseboard and then filling in the space with plaster. NOT pretty (see my scorched outlet photo above.) mathew is planning on putting them above the baseboards and then replacing the missing trim. (right) and while mathew and i are busy with demolition, scraping, sanding and general chaos, our friend and temporary downstairs tenant, mark was dancing tango with his girlfriend atsuko in the kitchen.

mathew up a very long ladder trying to uncover the reason for a leak.

(left) here i’m sanding to expose covered cracks in the plaster walls. (right) proudly standing next to my ugly work.

strange san francisco summer

instead of the standard summer cold and fog we’ve been experiencing heat waves along with the rest of the bay area this summer. the garden likes it…

there are also lots of mystery plants that are also thriving. last night we harvested cilantro and two types of basil.

i’m not sure if it’s normal for our neighborhood or because of high fire danger, but every time anything happens lots of trucks and fire engines show up! i counted 6 today, with one in our driveway, but i don’t know what the emergency was.