this year my immediate family celebrated our first green (gift-free) christmas. not only did this save time, stress, money AND the environment, but it left lots of time to talk, catch up, play games and enjoy each others company (all of which i forgot to take photos of…)
but we remembered to take some family portraits…
hope everyone had a peaceful christmas.
wednesday started early preparing for a christmas celebration with mathew’s family.
it was the warmest the house has ever been, filled with family and lots of yummy baking and cooking.
(left to right) jim, evamarie, reirin, daniel, leonora, turtle + mole.
tuesday was a house day.
i sealed the heating ducts with aluminum tape while mathew masked the crown moulding, picture rails and door frames in the living room.
(left) ready for spraying. (right) the color in the living room is a very pale pink (i’ll take a daytime photo soon.) my grandmother loves pink and we thought it would be fun to give her a cheerful, fun color, but when the paint first went on, it was late at night and i was worried i made a bad choice. but now that it has dried and we have seen it in natural light we like it more and more.
on this night we were up till 1:30 painting and i added color above the picture rails and gave the walls a second coat.
we celebrated mathew’s sister evamarie’s birthday on monday. she is visiting from minnesota but will move back to the bay area in 7 months. yay! (left to right: turtle, eva, daniel, elijah, leonora, mole.)
and finally we have color! it was worth it staying up till 1 am painting.
mathew did some holiday baking! (he’s applying glue to the underside of a ceiling medallion.) isn’t it pretty?
after attaching it to the ceiling and securing it with boards and screws, mathew realized the medallion wasn’t sitting evenly on the ceiling and would require too much filling to hide the gaps. so he removed the medallion, scraped off the glue and sanded the medallion flat then reapplied the glue and secured it to the ceiling. the next evening there were still large gaps between the ceiling and the medallion and mathew figured he had no choice but to fill the gaps (even though it goes against his perfectionist tendencies) because the ceiling was also uneven. he was really upset at how badly it had gone but while removing the securing boards and screws the medallion fell off completely! so now he has a 3rd chance to make it perfect. sitting in the trash is the “Power Grab” glue that he used. it was not powerful, nor did it grab.
in our bedroom we have a space with a door leading to the backyard stairs that is without insulation or even interior wall panels. it makes our bedroom COLD. we decided i could steal this door from down in the garage because it will fit the doorway in our bedroom. the previous owners had this weird plywood panel bolted to the top and i’m removing it so we can put glass in it.
sunday night the painting began. mathew got to use his industrial paint sprayer for the first time. it is incredible how fast this thing is. the test closet was done in minutes.
next he moved on to painting the living room. it’s primer so it went on the ceiling and trim. the paint sprayer is FAST but it’s also noisy, creates a fine mist of paint in the air and takes about an hour to clean. but the foyer, hall and living room were done in just a couple of hours instead of a couple of days or weekends.
here i am masking a door that will be polyurethaned. mathew thought my outfit was a crack-up, i had a plastic bag on my head to protect my knit cap from the paint. (maybe he was laughing at my goggles and respirator too?) (right) the newly painted living room.
i’m sure all of you know how COLD it’s been this week… on monday night AND tuesday night our neighborhood has had power outages that last over 2 hours each night! of course they happen after the sun has gone down, when we should be cooking or eating dinner and trying to stay warm.
(this awesome photo was being shared on flickr.)
luckily mathew has been really organized with candles and flashlights. and we have a gas stove so cooking is difficult but not impossible, a lot like camping. but this week has given us a glimpse of what life must have been like before electricity and our stressed out, plugged-in world. the upside is: it’s very quiet and we’re saving electricity!
i wonder if i will be knitting in the dark again tonight..?
sorry, too much time has gone by since my last post. 1) we’ve been busy. 2) i’ve been lazy. 3) we’ve barely taken any photos (there’s only so much paint stripping you can photograph.) 4) mathew was in new york visiting his brother. 5) and there was one more reason that i’ve forgotten…
mathew installing new picture rail in the hall. (he wanted me to mention that this was a two-person job. i helped and took photos afterwards.)
(left) yay! i stripped all the paint on the door frame and double doors between my office and the living room. (now i just need to sand them…) (right) the foyer with new plaster and stripped wood, ready for paint.
(left) foyer baseboards after paint stripping (ick.) (right) baseboards after sanding (ahh.)
this time around we’re painting with an industrial paint sprayer, this involves masking everything we don’t want painted.
mark moved out at the end of november. mathew opened the door that was sealed shut between the bedroom and living room. and on monday he pulled up the carpet to find foam padding and linoleum.
(left) the picture rail in the foyer. unfortunately in most places it has been stubbornly unstripable. the paint just chipped off of this section to reveal red and gold underneath. (right) we received this weird cauliflower cousin in our organic box delivery today. i’m sure many of our smarty-pants friends and family know what this vegetable is called. i don’t feel like looking it up at the moment, but we thought it was really cool looking.
mathew took last week off work and got a lot done on the house.
as he was scraping away paint and wallpaper he found this interesting wallpaper border above a door frame and wanted to add another one to replace it. this restoration has been all about keeping the original details of the house. i’m not sure how i feel about more wallpaper but we’ll see…
there’s something really beautiful about the bare original plaster. mathew loves the mellow, variations in color. it looks like old walls in europe.
the next step was filling in gaps with gypboard then using plaster washers to hold on loose plaster. and next was the pink plaster weld paint, to hold the plaster to the surface.
and then plaster! all of this happened while i was in my office through that plastic door next to the front door.
another project mathew has been working on is creating a router table from an old table saw stand he had. he finally got to use it in making the entry window frame more decorative.
recently mathew’s mom was questioning mathew’s “vacation” time spent on the house, i guess she didn’t find it very restful, but working on the house is all mathew thinks about, it’s all he really wants to do. he isn’t the type of person to watch television (ever!) or sit and read a book or paint or draw. he was incredibly happy last week and this week, back at work, he’s incredibly grumpy…
i’d been feeling so overwhelmed lately that i forgot to mention the flooring delivery disaster i dealt with the week before thanksgiving…
so, we were expecting a delivery of wood flooring from fedex freight. they scheduled a 3 hour window with me and didn’t show up till the very last minute as the sun was setting. so, it was late and cold and the truck was as big as a house. our wood was the very last delivery so it was jammed into the opposite end of the truck and difficult to remove. it was also a huge pile of wood but fred the fedex guy was patient and managed to get it out of the truck and onto the ground in one piece. both of us thought it was a lot of wood but the delivery schedule listed our name, address and shipment of 1100 pounds of red oak flooring so we didn’t question it.
fred tried to push it up the driveway into the garage but the slope was too extreme for the weight of the wood. so we took the package apart and fred wheeled all 50+ boxes of wood into the garage on a hand truck. i did what i could to help load and unload the hand truck. when the work was done it was very dark and we were glad it was over.
when mathew came home he said it was the wrong wood and about 3 times too much of it. then fred called and said it was the wrong shipment. we had received over 3000 pounds of maple flooring.
the next day robert the fedex guy showed up with another giant truck and a smaller pile of wood, but no lift gate to get it out of the truck, which is about 4 feet off the ground. i asked him if he would be taking the incorrect shipment out of our garage first and he didn’t know what i was talking about. i just about cried right there on the street. after begging me not to cry and a long conversation with a dispatcher he decided to leave the correct shipment and fred would return to pick up the incorrect wood later that day. of course because he didn’t have a lift gate he had to load and unload the wood (not in boxes this time) onto a hand truck and stack it in the garage. fred arrived after dark and so did mathew and together they packed up the incorrect shipment to send it on its way.
i’m not sure if you’re really feeling my pain, it hadn’t started out as the most relaxing week and my work was already suffering. luckily the fedex guys were super sweet (as all delivery guys seem to be.) they could have (should have) left the deliveries on the sidewalk but they did whatever they could to make life easier for me. robert even gave me a pep talk about not skipping thanksgiving and told me i could purchase entire thanksgiving meals from whole foods or bi-rite if necessary. in the end i’m glad i didn’t skip thanksgiving, it turned out to be a really nice day with family. and now we have quarter sawn red oak for the downstairs living room and hall/entry.
(left) this is half of the flooring in the garage and (right) half of it in the downstairs living room getting acclimatized to its new environment. i wish i had taken photos of the monster pile of maple, but at the time it just wasn’t funny; i couldn’t look at it.
it’s funny (or not!) how it really does have to get ugly before it gets pretty.
(left) stripping paint. (right) stripping more paint.
we now have two heat guns! last weekend the original heat gun died so mathew bought another one. and during the week he successfully fixed the broken one. and then there were two. now we can both strip paint at the same time. yay! more paint fumes!
(left) removing anaglypta in the entry. (right) stripping adhesive in the built-in hall cabinet.
(left) mathew built me this little paint stripping cove to protect my office from dust, paint chips and fumes. (right) and look, here i am doing more paint stripping! (big surprise.)
(left) the anaglypta in the entry was pretty badly damaged by a leak. (right) mold was hiding under the anaglypta.
(left) mathew took over the anaglypta and wallpaper removal in the entry while i moved on to finishing the paint stripping on the built-in cabinet. (right) this is what we looked like all weekend. actually, i pretty much wear the respirator mask all weekend, every weekend. whenever mark’s girlfriend, atsuko sees me she laughs; i guess it’s a pretty funny sight. and she’s started calling us “house monsters.” yes, we are creatures who lurk around, destroying things, making bad smells, loud noises and causing chaos.
