Category: upstairs

i spent the morning scraping adhesive off plaster walls with a heat gun. with my respirator mask on, i could imagine it smelled like warm chocolate frosting…

mathew finished his bathroom framing. later this evening he sanded and painted the new siding outside. (above right) mathew in his new birthday overalls! [notice the shiny clean kitchen floor? i scrubbed it last night. – mathew]

for dinner we made pizza and tested the oven with an oven thermometer. as i suspected, the oven has no temperature control (i baked a lasagna and a casserole last week…) if you set it at 400 degrees it will preheat for 10 minutes and keep getting hotter. after baking the first pizza for 5 minutes the oven was 525. after 5 minutes of baking the second pizza it was up to 575! how hot could it get? so, this oven isn’t great for cookies but it’s excellent for super-thin crust pizza! too bad you can’t smell these… mmm.

while i went off to do yet more shopping – i think i’ve been procrastinating, because i’m feeling intimidated by the cast iron sewer pipe that i need to move for the new toilet location – janeen started to tear up the underlayment that is on the floor in the room we are using as a living room right now. there are so many nails in it – fortunately they did not glue it down, though.

when i finally got back from ‘discount’ (it’s anything but) builder’s supply, i realized that we need to remove the painted over window because it will interfere with the shower. it’s a bit weird because it looks out directly at three of our neighbor’s windows. there will (only) be two windows left now. so instead of fiddling with the intimidating plumbing, i reframed the wall and, with janeen’s help, nailed on the siding through a combination of leaning out the side widows, and climbing on the roof. it was really difficult to fit the new siding in, because the old siding had all shrunk the new pieces were almost half an inch wider.

so, it feels a bit better now that we got something done. janeen managed to take off about 1/3 of the underlayment. janeen is now relaxing under a blanket next to the floor where she removed the stinky underlayment.

we didn’t make any major progress this weekend but got a lot of little things done.

i cleaned and repaired the blinds in the office and took down the valance and curtain rails. (20+ years of dust?) we’ll keep these blinds for now until i figure out what i want instead of them. hopefully soon i’ll get some new paint on those walls.

mathew temporarily fixed the sad, sagging deck in the backyard.

and pulled up the floorboards to get to the plumbing in the upstairs bathroom. he did some re-routing with the copper pipes in the garage. the previous plumber had some strange, inefficient methods. i know nothing about plumbing, but hot water shouldn’t travel twice the width of the house then go up and around the exterior of the house, should it?

is there anything this guy can’t fix? last week mathew also repaired the ancient stove in the downstairs kitchen. now we can cook downstairs! as good as the mexican food is around here, there are only so many tacos and burritos you can eat before you need some variety.

it’s columbus day and i guess some people have it off? mathew is away at work and i’ll soon be sitting in front of my computer, in my pink office with clean, functional blinds.

we had helpers today! in one of the downstairs rooms, my parents pulled up carpet.

(left) and linoleum tiles… under the underlayment (right) is old fir. mathew says this is called the sub-floor, not meant to be the final layer but often kept exposed in old houses and can be quite nice when finished. we may or may not add hardwood. we’re not sure what condition it’s in but the part that was uncovered was painted red.

and upstairs my cousin larry was helping scrape “chocolate” adhesive and wallpaper off the plaster walls. he was in town for the weekend and thought he’d put in a few hours of help.

the five of us had lunch at a local, very popular, hole-in-the-wall mexican restaurant. on the way back we looked at murals, another tourist attraction in the mission district. thank you so much larry, mom and dad for all your help today. i hope you’re not too sore tomorrow.

after our helpers left, we came back for more scraping and sanding. this new sander and wet/dry vac are amazing, the dust gets sucked directly into the vacuum cleaner. dustless sanding. mathew started to repair the plaster and kept wondering if we should have torn down all the plaster and put up dry wall. but what a mess that would have been, and more waste. and how many people actually have plaster walls these days? eventually the plan is to break into these walls and add built-in shelves and cabinets.

my hands and arms are so tired i almost didn’t post tonight. hope everyone had a nice weekend!

(left) doesn’t the housewarming plant from genanne look nice in the upstairs kitchen? (right) i got my own tools, bag and gloves!

(left) today i pulled up the carpet in the foyer downstairs. (right) linoleum #1.

AND under that, linoleum #2! this one will be tricky. it was glued down and there’s major water damage near the door. not sure how the wood survived…

upstairs: mathew took out the tile, chicken-wire, and mortar floor. noisy.

the dust was thick and photogenic. (yes, genanne, we’re both wearing our masks.)

(left) “i hope the toilet made it down okay.”

just kidding, it’s in the garage. the bathroom is now completely empty.

today we met up with janeen’s friend, genanne, for a picnic – at the house, of course. she introduced us to a really tasty mexican food restaurant just blocks from our house, la taqueria. (janeen says: and she brought us a super cute potted plant as our first housewarming gift. must take photo! and why aren’t there photos of our guest? i think we were starving.)

we had a surprise visitor while we were eating – dee dee, the wonderful real estate agent who helped us buy this house, showed up with cookies and home-grown tomatoes for us. (j: and again, sadly, no photo of dee dee…)

after moving in many of my tools – finally i have a workshop – we discovered, last week, that the lock on the garage door was broken. it did not appear to be broken at first, but when you put a key into it – any key – you could twist the entire lock and unlock the garage door. i couldn’t wait to get in there and fix it. i’m now a locksmith. i cannibalized another lock in the house that’s broken, and rekeyed the garage door lock to match one of the house keys for another door. don’t need any more keys.

while janeen was busy entertaining her friend, I continued with the upstairs bathroom. I was determined to finish stripping all the walls, ceiling, and get the bathtub out of there.

janeen did some major cleanup (j: and recycling!) – there was dust, broken tile, broken wall board and plywood, nails, plaster all piled on the floor and in the bath tub. then we took out the cast iron tub and we maneuvered it downstairs. more good news (for me): the sewer pipe, which i thought i was going to have to move, is already in the right place for the new toilet location.

just one more thing to do before we can start on the rough plumbing: the floor tile was set in mortar with metal lathe embedded in it. we need to take this out to get the toilet out (it is embedded in the mortar), and to change the plumbing for the new toilet location, and the shower.