Garage Progress

Tim, and his helper, Christian, had a busy day getting the garage foundation framed out and the gravel tamped down.

Tim says he'll be back in the morning to add the rebar and then they'll be ready to have it inspected. Hopefully it will pass without a problem, as the concrete delivery is already scheduled for Wednesday morning.

The trusses were delivered over the weekend.

Stencilled Curtain

Hot weather is a good excuse to work on indoor sit-down projects.

So, this afternoon I stencilled the bottom edge of one of the dining room curtain panels! It actually went faster than I was expecting—only about three hours of work to figure out the spacing (to make all the gaps the same size) and to also do the stencilling.

Stencilled curtain panel

Bottom edge stencil pattern

I'm hoping to finish the second curtain panel tomorrow, after I have a chance to wash it.

Copper Gutter Envy

Our garage rebuilding project is not terribly photogenic today—the contractor is mostly just shifting around dirt and laying wood forms and gravel in preparation for laying a new foundation. Boring! And even I'm tired of listening to me whine about the paint stripping.

So, I thought I would share a project one of our Laurelhurst neighbors has done. We don't know when they started their renovation, but this house has had workers there most days since we bought our house in early 2010. And they're still working on it. Wow!

Sometime in the last month or two they installed new gutters and I have serious copper gutter envy.

I had considered copper gutters last year, but our brackets had all been disfigured to accommodate the modern K-profile gutters, plus I was concerned someone might come along and steal them when we were out of town. Holy cow—if I had seen this before we installed ours, I might have been sold on the idea.

Garage Foundation Gone

Another noisy day—with jack hammers,  power tools, and a dumpster—and the old cracked foundation is mostly out.

They discovered it was actually poured over a bed of river rock! In his hardscaping class, Jeff learned that's one of the worst foundations as the smoothness of the rocks means it doesn't lock down in place. There was also no steel reinforcement of any kind. It's probably just as well we decided to replace the foundation because now we can be reasonably sure it will last.

(We found at least one rat living under the cement—that was exciting when it came shooting out from under the piece of concrete. Unfortunately, it got away.)

The contractor rented a neat power tool to move the huge chunks of cement to the dumpster—I'm told it's called a skid steer.  Wow, we'll have to rent something like this when we do the driveway.

Garage Demo'd

And then it was gone...

We've learned over and over that if you can't do the work yourself, it just isn't worth paying someone to remodel old buildings; labor is now so much more expensive than new materials. That's why we're doing this seemingly crazy thing and tearing down the old garage to build an identically-sized new garage.

One of the rotted back walls

Apparently buildings come down pretty fast when you're not trying to save the pieces. Seems like a lot of the time was loading and taking more than one load to the wood recycler.

Unfortunately, I was worthless to do any of my own work today. I just kept running outside every twenty minutes or so to see the progress and take pictures.

Garage Empty

Except for the parts needed for the rebuild, the garage is empty! It's been a lot of gross, dirty work, but we're out and ready for demolition to start tomorrow.

I managed to sell both garage doors on craigslist, so they're already gone.

Almost Done With Guest Room

It feels like we're getting close on our guest bedroom paint stripping project, so we've been pretty good about working on it. The rainy, cool weather has helped as well, because, really, who wants to hang out with a heat gun when it's already too hot?

Unfortunately, with paint stripping, the heat gun stripping takes off about 95% of the paint but seems to take only about half of the total time. Removing the last 5% seems to take just about as long. (This is an educated guess on my part—I haven't carefully measured our hours and effort and calculated the real percentages.)

I spent several more hours today working on the guest room detail work. I also got sidetracked scraping some of the thick skin off the plaster walls. It's pretty easy to remove once you get it started. I probably don't need to scrape the walls, but I am a little worried the plaster contractor will just plaster over this layer and I'd rather have it removed first.

I'm just about ready to declare the guest bedroom woodwork done enough for sanding. There are quite a few areas where I've been trying to dig paint out of crevices, but there's just too much gap between the pieces of wood and my digging is causing damage. I think it's better in those cases to just touch up any paint showing through the stain. We've already got matching paint so it should be a breeze.

Jeff also made more progress stripping paint with the heat gun in the hallway. (As tempting as it is, we're not going to turn the corner on the stairs and do the lower portion.) The goal this summer is to finish the upstairs landing so we can have the floors refinished up there in both the master and guest bedrooms and the hallway connecting them. The stairs are a project for 2013.

I also managed to get Jeff's help to rehang all three doors in the master bedroom. My plan is to stain them while they're hung so I can stain both sides at the same time.  I'm hoping now that they're hung I'll just wake up some morning soon feeling like finishing that bedroom. (A girl can hope, right?)