Another fine scrape

As I mentioned before, the First Floor project is on hold. Grace and I agreed that this time of year is best for working on the repainting of the house, so although our first floor (and, if you'll remember, our third floor) is a construction area, we're putting that work on hold to get the house repainted. It's not just a matter of using the nice weather... the wall we're working on now isn't well sealed, and during a particularly harsh rainstorm earlier in the year, I discovered water was getting behind the siding, where it wet the insulation. So, we kinda need to get the walls painted properly and sealed up tight.

We started on July 3rd and 4th, but didn't make too much progress, between getting back into the swing of the paint stripping and not having scaffolding. This weekend, though, we dedicated the entire weekend to stripping paint, and got the bulk of the single biggest wall in the house cleared off.


I have to send the Silent Paint Remover paint stripper back for some warranty work, (it's been heating a little unevenly) but that won't be a problem, as we'll be able to replace boards, prime good boards, and finish reframing at least one of the windows next weekend. Not having the paint stripper won't slow us down too much.


One thing we certainly learned was to stay out of the sun, if possible! We only worked in the sun an hour and a half on Saturday, but it wiped us out. Sunday we got an early start, worked until the sun showed up, then stopped for four hours to let the shade return. We got a ton done, and weren't totally wiped out at the end of the day.


The Outside projects gallery is updated with new pictures and comments, starting with the third picture on the second page!

You gonna put scaffolding on that?

Outdoor scaffolding comes in big sections... the sides are 5x5', and that's not something you can easily move around. Even though the rental place is only about two miles away, last year I drove to a friend's house in New Hope to borrow his dad's pickup, to get the scaffolding. A 22 mile round trip to get scaffolding 2 miles.

When it was time to return it, we decided to try out the roof rack on the Integra. It's only two miles, right? Turns out, with the bike racks, it actually works quite well. The only thing is, the guys at the rental place found this very amusing, to the point where they actually remembered us from last year. The guy behind the counter, though, didn't get to witness this, so when we ordered up two sections of outdoor scaffolding, he nodded to the car in the parking lot, and said:

"You gonna put scaffolding on that?"

When we got around back to pick up the scaffolding, though, we were welcomed back, and all the guys who weren't doing anything at the time came out to watch as we stacked four pieces of scaffolding on top of the car, then put four 8 foot crossbraces in the hatchback. One guy who was helping us stood back as I finished lashing it all down with the ratcheting tiedowns, and said:

"You know, that actually works better on there than many pickup trucks we see."

12 years old, over 200,000 miles, and it's still a great little sport utility vehicle!

Our Old New House is on the market again.

When we moved from a new construction house just outside of Doylestown to an old house in Doylestown, Grace took to referring to the first house our our "Old New House" and the borough residence as the "New Old House". At least... I think that's the way she said it. Coulda been the other way around.

Anyhow, our old new (construction) house is back on the market after three years. Click on the picture to see the listing.

** The house sold, so the link to the listing no longer worked, so I changed it to go to a gallery of the pictures I grabbed from the listing.

The really funny part is several of the pictures look like they haven't done a THING to those rooms beyond move their stuff in. Guess they liked what we did! They did finish the master bedroom, the only room we hadn't redone before we left. That's a running joke between us - when we finish this house, except for the master bedroom, it'll be time to move again.

They did also finish the basement, and it looks like they did a good job. I had talked about doing that while we were there, but never got around to it.

Funny, though, both Grace and I said it brought back memories, but neither of us had any desire to go back. We like our new, old house. :)

First floor project on hold...

Well, according to our plan from earlier this year, the First Floor project is now on hold. Of course, we had hoped to be much farther along at this point, but that's always the case.

The reason for our pause on that project is we slated July and August as the time that we would pick up last year's project, namely repainting the house. We've started, breaking out the Silent Paint Remover and the scrapers. This weekend, we'll get scaffolding, but so far we've already done about 25% of the large wall we finished off with in November. Grace runs the heater, and I scrape. I've picked up a 6" variable speed grinder, so I can resharpen the scrapers at the end of each day, so they're good and sharp for the next day's work. I can even give them a quick resharpening when we break for lunch.

Only problem is the SPR is heating unevenly. I contacted the manufacturer, and they replied very quickly with some possible problems. I looked, and discovered we're still within the 1 year warranty - by exactly one week! So I think we'll be using it this weekend, returning it first thing Monday morning, and hoping for quick turnaround. We might have to find other stuff to do, but there are two windows on that wall (possibly three) which will need reframing, so we'll stay good and busy if we can't be scraping paint.

A little time off

Not much being done on the house recently. Last weekend we spent some time with Grace's folks and managed to just take it easy. I got up late, did a little work, had breakfast, then napped until almost noon. That was NICE! Before we left, though, we managed to pick up another 18 foot 2x8, and sister another joist, this time completely on our own. I've got some pics from that one, just haven't posted it yet.

This past weekend, Grace had a personal trainers' seminar in Rhode Island, so I tagged along. I snuck into a couple of sessions, and the info they were sharing was REALLY interesting. I can only imagine how good it is if I knew everything they were talking about, like Grace. She was really excited about some of the stuff she learned. When I wasn't sneaking into the seminars, I was walking around Providence, and taking pictures. Got some good shots, pared the 200+ taken down to 75 (yeah, I know, still a bunch) which I posted in the gallery.

On the house front, we're starting back up this weekend, but the First Floor project is going to be on hold for now. We still have to finish repainting the house like we started last year, and now is the time to get back to work on that. Hopefully, working together, Grace and I will make quick progress. Unlike the first floor project, stripping paint and repainting isn't rocket surgery, just takes some time and effort. I've learned how to resharpen the scrapers, too, so that'll help immensely.

Oh yeah! One more update on the house... we finally had a tile guy come in and tile the backsplash in the kitchen, and it looks GREAT. Have some pictures of that as well, just haven't posted them either.

Fan guards are there for a reason...

We've got a fan set up, circulating air around the cedar for the windows. It's an old floor fan, and the protective basket that goes around the fan blades got damaged, so I took it off. Well, just in case you were curious, those guards really do make a fan safer. I've managed to get my hand whacked by fan blades twice this weekend, and both times drew quite a bit of blood.

Also, despite working (very carefully) inside the main circuit breaker panel to run new circuits, I managed to get a "tickle" from the fan motor when I reached to switch it off.

Like Dad taught me, "once you don't respect this, it'll kill ya". I guess I respect the circuit panel just a little bit more than this silly little fan. Both can still hurt, though, so be careful when you're working with stuff, even if it's not quite mortal danger.

This weekend, electrical work.

With the cedar for the outside casing on the windows still drying this weekend focused us on electrical work. I transferred switches from an old metal triple-gang box into a nice, new plastic quad box, ran wiring for the light in the dining room, and moved the location of the smoke alarm.

The quad box comes from our plan for the wiring. Two switches control lights in the kitchen, because there's no room for them by the kitchen doorway. Then, we have one switch for the chandelier over the dining room table, and one which will control the lights on the stairs to the second floor. The wiring for the kitchen circuits is already existing, since it was all redone during the The Big Project (which is starting to seem like not such a great name because our current first floor project is also pretty darn big) but I had to transfer it out of the nasty old metal box. The wiring for the dining room was all removed during demolition, so that's all new, and I'm also taking the opportunity to split the first floor into a 20-amp circuit for outlets and a separate 15 amp circuit for lights.

While we've got the ceiling off, I'm also going to redo the circuits for the second floor, and I got a start on that one, replacing fifteen feet of cable with 6 feet of new cable. For some reason, the old wire ran several feet out of the way, extending the length of cable needed. Very odd.

The nicest part is having a real light in the dining room area. It lights the area up far better than the 100W floor lamp we've been using.