House & Home – Page 10 – Land of Laurel

Adding Insulation to the Bathroom

November 6, 2018November 2, 2018by LaurelLeave a Comment

Now that you’ve seen the big transformation of the exterior of the house, let’s get back to the ugly, shall we? The bathroom was chugging along here at Berrybrier, slowly but surely. My progress was actually pretty good considering I ran home from work every day, stopped eating dinner for November and December, and got straight to work from 5pm to 9:30-10pm during the week and pretty much all day on every weekend. It was a backbreaking schedule I wouldn’t recommend! But, I desperately needed a working bathroom so I could, you know, live in my house!

So after the electricians finished their work and the plumber did his rough in, I insulated the bathroom straight away! Insulation cost about $50 bucks at Home Depot, but I ended up with WAY more than I needed. There are other projects around I can use it for (the dormer, the small powder bathroom off my bedroom, etc), so I don’t mind the excess. I’m tempted to hire someone to blow in insulation in the exterior walls down the line, but it’s not in the budget right now. I’m up for trying to make this house as warm as possible, one room at a time! Alas! What do those of you with old uninsulated houses do? How do you keep warm? I didn’t turn on my ancient heater until late November 2017, when I got really desperate and until then it was so COLD in here!!

Back to the insulation though: this is easy. Like, the easiest. You can do this if you have one hand free. Insulation is designed to be the standard width of the distance between studs (which are set at 16″ on center) and stays in place with friction. It really takes no time at all to whip out a wall, especially if it’s a full height wall without obstacles. The steps are über simple!

Wear long sleeves, pants, gloves, and a respirator mask.
Measure height of space needing insulation.
Cut insulation
Stick insulation in between studs.
The end! You’re done! You just insulated something!

It was super quick to knock out the exterior wall of the bathroom. I used a utility knife to cut the insulation shorter around the window. I’ve since learned that this cheap tool makes cutting insulation EVEN EASIER, so if you pick it up at Home Depot, it’s well worth the $10 bucks. The insulation knife cuts all the way through the insulation at one time while the basic box cutter take a few slices on the same line to cut through the paper and the backing. The pictures I have of the space aren’t great. They were mostly taken at night with my work light illuminating the space since the electrical wasn’t done!

The ceiling takes a little more work and requires at least two hands because you have to hold the insulation up and secure it. I used my staple gun to shoot staples into the ceiling joists securing the insulation. I also left some extra room for the electrical for my future can light. I erred on leaving more room around the electrical than I should have. The new electrical is fine to have butted against the insulation, but I gave the old electrical a wide berth. I do not want any house fires! I did use extra smaller pieces of insulation to fill in all the spaces around the walls of the bathroom, hoping that added insulation would help keep this space warmer!

Overall insulating the bathroom took one evening to complete! A short project with obvious progress is always pretty great. You can see above that my door way does not have the proper 4×12 header it would get these days. It’s an old house and this wall is not structural, so I left it this way. Plus I had bigger things to conquer, like drywall! And tiling! And cleaning up the disaster that was my kitchen…

Yeah the kitchen became the tool library / trash room / storage room and it was absolutely insane looking. For months. This room looked horrific from September 2016 to March 2017. Next time someone yells at you for leaving a dirty shirt on the floor, point them to this blog. They haven’t met crazy messy yet!

Have you insulated a room before? Worked on a bathroom reno in house you were living in? How did you survive?! My neighbors did their only full bathroom recently and they told me they’d been showering at the gym for 4 months!

Exterior Upgrades, House & Home, Painting

It’s PIIIIINKKK!!! My house is painted pink!!!

October 23, 2018June 27, 2019by LaurelLeave a Comment

I give up on trying to call this color coral, it’s absolutely pink and it’s ALL OVER MY HOUSE! That’s right, y’all, Berrybrier is finally painted! It’s been a journey – a rough journey – to get here and I’m so glad to show you this today! My house finally looks like a home, like someone loves it! Remember what it was like when I bought the property? Partially blue with a white corner and lots of flaking paint, it hadn’t been updated in 30 years. I saw a very similar picture to this on the listing and instantly knew this place was my house, my future home. It’s a good thing I’m totally crazy, because normal people don’t fall in love with exteriors like this!

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Home Upgrades, House & Home

Bathroom Progress – Plumbing and Electrical!

October 16, 2018October 15, 2018by Laurel1 Comment

After demo’ing the main bathroom at Berrybrier I’d been ping ponging between my house and my cousin Kristen’s basement for showers and sleeping. In the midst of all the other chaos going on at Berrybrier: the new roof, electrical work, the extremely invasive floor rehab, and the exterior painting fiasco, the bathroom plumbing was completed! I hired a plumber to do the rough in plumbing only, figuring it couldn’t be all that hard to install the fixtures so I might as well do that part myself. Also, I’m ~~cheap~~ frugal.

The rough in was no small job though! It involved new toilet, sink, and shower locations as well as running new pex lines from the main house inline. He also installed a shower surround which is part of my grand scheme to eventually demo this and flip the location of this shower to the other side, giving me a master bathroom. (There’s a floor plan here if you want to see how that could work.) But that’s a project for years out. For now, My crazytown bathroom seriously needed a new floor plan! See how the wall is recessed starting at the mirror? When they installed a larger bathtub, they stole 10″ of space from the room behind it and moved the plumbing back. There was an electrical fuse box at the top of the wall though, so they left that part in its original location. They didn’t build a proper new wall though, so it was a bit of a nightmare of sistered in framing pieces all crazy. The mirror makes the bump back a little difficult to see, but if you stare hard enough at the below it comes together, especially once you notice the mirror is crooked!

Before the plumber could install the shower surround I had to rebuild this wall and make it more stable. It wasn’t structural, but I didn’t trust the existing hobnobbed-together framing. I chose to reframe the wall at the original location, removing ten inches from this main bathroom and gaining the original 10 inches in the half bathroom off my bedroom that desperately needed some extra space. I also needed to fur out the wall on the right side of this bathroomto hug in the shower surround which was 48″ wide since bathroom was 52″wide. I psyched myself up about reframing this wall for several days, talked about it a bunch with Erik (my contractor next door neighbor who saves me from my own stupidity), and rented a framing nail gun and air compressor from the local Tool Lending Library.

The electricians had begun working on the house this week and when I got home the night I planned to frame the wall… the electricity was off in the house. Arg! I was mad, because there was no way I could frame a wall in the dark without any electricity. No!! I needed to get the wall built that night so the plumber could install the shower surround onto it the next day! This is why renovation is stressful! You’re juggling about ten different schedules.

I stormed around the outside of the house ripping off the old cable cords the painters had refused to remove and pulling the lattice off the front porch rail. I could see Erik who was working on his house peering out his dining room window at the crazy lady yanking off the lattice in a bit of a rage nextdoor . He knew my plan was to reframe the wall that night. I finished ripping off the lattice and went inside my house where I’d left my phone. I picked it up and read a text from Erik, “I thought you were building that wall tonight?” Simultaneously I heard a knock on the kitchen door. I opened it and there stool Erik, toolbelt on and drill in hand. “I came to help frame the wall!”

“I don’t have any electricity! I can’t do this in the dark!” I said. He didn’t falter, “Let me go get my battery powered light!” Within a few minutes, the whole bathroom was lit up by a surprisingly small light. But then my rented air compressor didn’t get to a strong enough pressure. Erik went and got his air compressor, but that didn’t work either. Maybe it was the nail gun itself? Or the fact that we were running it off of an extension cord that ran from Erik’s garage, over the fence between our houses, and through my backdoor?

So with that off the table, we turned to screws and his impact driver. But then he said I’d bought the wrong kind of screws and ran over to his house where he had better ones. And then he cut all the 2x4s with his circular saw using his foot as a stand in about 2 seconds. Then after watching me drive in one screw, he said, “Why don’t I do the next one? I’d let you continue, but I think we both want to finish this tonight…” And then my neighbor built me a wall while I stood outside the bathroom and watched. So… he’s a nice guy.

I don’t even have a picture of my newly framed walls because it was crazy dark the night the wall got built and the next day the plumber arrived to install the new water lines and my new shower surround right in front of it. So if you look closely at the picture below you can tell which 2x4s look newer and those are the ones that make the new walls.

The plumber even put in blocking for my new sink as well as getting the necessary new pipes for my new plumbing locations. He also reworked the vent pipes and an outside gutter that was draining into my sewer line. I didn’t quite expect butt ends of copper pipe to be the rough-in plumbing, but I put “figuring out how to cut pipe and install water shut off valves” on my list of things to stress about later. Overall, I paid him $1178 to move all this around which was a pretty good deal for this extent of work. I’ve heard of people being charged more than that just to move a toilet! I’m lucky to have basement/crawl space access to all the pipes, allowing for an easier install.

You can see in the picture of that the shower pan was full of water too! It had to stay that way until the plumbing inspection, which of course was two weeks out. It got pretty gross!

And because, literally nothing goes smoothly during renovation, when – two weeks later – the inspector came through, he walked into the house and saw some coats, vacated the house, and failed the inspection. Apparently although the Portland Bureau of Development Services states in numerous places online and in pamphlets that inspectors can review unoccupied residences without a representative of the owner, by “occupied” they really mean is there can be no personal belongings on site. At the time I was living at my cousin Kristen’s, but I hadn’t removed all my personal belongings from the house! I called the Bureau and begged them to reschedule my inspection without a two week wait. Luckily, they understood my interpretation of their rule and rescheduled the inspection for two days later, provided a representative of the owner was on site.

My angel cousin Kristen volunteered to wait at the house for the inspection since she typically worked from home on that day. The inspection sheet was supposed to come out at 8:00 that morning and provide a 3 hour block of time when the inspection would take place. I checked at 8:00am. I wasn’t on the list! I called the Bureau in a panic. Every day I didn’t get an inspection was another day I couldn’t live at my house!

Again, I lucked out and got a very sweet member of the scheduling department who told me my previous help had gone through 4 out of 5 steps to schedule my inspection, but failed to actually schedule it. However, they were able to squeeze me on the existing job list that day! Woohoo! So the inspection happened and it passed on the condition I open a mechanical permit for my new vent fan.

Then the electricians went in and installed the boxes and wires for a new sconce, can light, and vent fan! All of a sudden the room was coming together! I was so excited to be able to take the reins and start knocking out the rest of the work in this room myself!

And with that I was one step closer to having a bathroom! Wouldn’t it be nice to shower in my own house again?

Exterior Upgrades, House & Home

Painting Blues

October 10, 2018October 10, 2018by Laurel7 Comments

Ages ago, I talked about trying to decide which color coral to paint the house at Berrybrier. The windows when I bought the house were aluminum clad exterior / wood interior windows. The aluminum exterior was a dark forest green with slight blue undertone which dictated my color choices on the rest of the house. In the end I decided on coral and dove in whole-heartedly with no looking back! I was attempting to schedule the exterior painting around the same time as the bathroom demo, new plumbing, electrical work, and roof replacement. So I was a little busy and things were a little crazy!

I was stressed and stretched thin; but my mom was in town and she volunteered to interview painters while I was at work. It was a huge load off my chest! Unfortunately it turned out that painters are extremely difficult to find and extremely flakey. My mom finally found some people after a few weeks: a married couple with their own painting business. The lady called me about 4 times to schedule a time to meet to sign the contract. This should have been the first weird sign. But the house looked terrible, my mom thought these people seemed good, and I was ready to paint it pink!

The woman came over one night last October – a hot October – to sign the contract. It was the very end of painting season in Portland and she wanted to get started ASAP. I was all for it; I couldn’t wait to see the house all in coral. We walked around the house and discussed various things that night: exactly what I wanted painted the white trim color and what I wanted pink, some trim repairs on the back of the house, prep work needed, and payment. We also discussed timing, since the dormer was still being built, the roofers were still at the house, and the electrical was just beginning to get started. I had bought the paint – Sherwin Williams Emerald – during a big yearly sale, so that had been taken care of. The painters were charging about $4500 for the labor for the job which felt like a great deal. They asked for 50% upfront, which was pretty standard with how I was paying most of the various workers on their projects at Berrybrier. The painters were going to start the following week. I ponied up.

The first day of that week, the electricians shut off all the power at the house to do their extensive work. I probably should have guessed that that would happen, but I wasn’t expecting it since they hadn’t told me specifically to expect this. I found out later they didn’t think I was actually living at the house during these renovations! I had to call the painter and let them know that if they needed power to do their work (they did) they’d be delayed three days. This was an issue because the days were getting colder and wetter quickly. We pushed three days which brought us to a Thursday am start.

The plumber started his work in the bathroom that Wednesday. It was supposed to be a half-day job, the water was off at the main line to the house. Of course, with Berrybrier, nothing goes as planned. The plumbing needed another half-day’s work and the plumber wasn’t available again until that Saturday. This meant no water for the painters’ sprayers. I called the painters again, I asked if they could use water pulled from a hose from the neighbor’s house. They refused, saying they needed too much water for that and would rather push their work. That was a little annoying since access to water is access to water, but they were understandably annoyed at the situation. And I was too. This was convenient for no one! However, they were able to work on the house as soon as the water was turned back on. They planned to start work that Sunday and complete as much as they could on the house in the week of sun that stretched out. I was called out of town that weekend, last minute. I was excited to get back and see the progress on the house!

I returned home the following week, mid-week. Nothing had changed at the house. It did not look like anything had been touched on the painting. I called the painters confused. They told me they had found out they were having twins and were in a state of shock. I had not realized the woman was pregnant when she had come over to sign the contract, so this surprised me. It also frustrated me since we’d been discussing our tight timeline to paint the house. I’m all for mom and pop businesses, but it’s also important for these small businesses to be professional. The real bummer? This no-show thing soon happened again and again.

Several times they promised to paint, several times they didn’t come. I was majorly stressed as my insurance company demanded the house be painted by the end of November. Finally, they got it to the stage where the house was primed and the painters agreed to write my insurance company a letter assuring them the house was painted and water-tight. Thankfully, the insurance company agreed that this was sufficient and extended my painting timeline to October 2018 (a full year extension)! But we were still pushing to paint on the sunny days that fall. Unfortunately the painter still rarely showed and his team of painters were non-existent. One person was trying to paint the entire house in a couple of days. This person also decided to spray all the trim and then brush all of the siding. And then he never showed up.

The painters then refused to fix the window trim on the back of the house and refused to remove the silly little old alarm speaker on the front of the house. They refused to clean up the excess cable wires that were all over everywhere. They weren’t doing basic things like filling the holes from the old stair railing (dime sized holes!).And they continued to not show up when they promised to.

Other brand new things like the smooth, new electrical pole on the side of the house were painted, but covered in drips. It looked terrible and definitely not like it had been done by a professional!

On December 9th, after the painter again did not show up. I took a hard look at the house. It looked terrible and it was increasingly clear in the areas that were “complete” that the prep work was insufficient. Some of the areas that had been primed had sticky oversaturated spray in places. I was extremely stressed, upset, and felt helpless. I talked to my neighbor Erik, he walked around the house and agreed the painters weren’t doing a good job. I sent them a text and told them not to bother coming back to the house, but I’d like to settle up a return of some of my payment. Of course, they fired back that I owed them an additional $600.

I had some painters Erik worked with come look at my house that week. They were shocked by the condition and pointed out a lot of things I hadn’t even noticed before. They said the house would now be more work to properly paint than before. That blow added anger to the stress and exhaustion and unhappiness with this project. Combined with a non-functional bathroom, ripped up kitchen, and way too many other projects to count I was a pretty big mess.

I had another painter, this one referred by my Uncle Scott’s Uncle Dan (a local contractor) over to take a look. He concurred, the house would now be more difficult to paint than before the other guys had started their work and created this mess. Cue the tears and feelings of loneliness and utter despondence. Daniel’s post on the renovation of the side of his house sums up these renovation feelings oh too well! It was a very low point and the house looked horrific.

Winter was already here; my house was covered with papered windows and oversprayed trim. It was an extremely obvious and embarrassing way to leave the house for the winter, but there really wasn’t an alternative. So gutters covered in plastic and patchy front paint and overspray it was!

Even the snow did not make the house look any more charming! Passersby would jokingly ask if I’d changed my mind on which color I wanted. I’d taken a house badly needing painting and made it into a roadside ~~attraction~~ horror. It was mid January before I took all the plastic wrap off the windows. I didn’t have a ladder tall enough to get to the plastic wrap on the gutters… so that got to stay through August the following year!

My sister moved into Berrybrier in January 2018 and that March helped me patch the trim over the window and back door where ripping off the porch roof exposed cut up mouldings. This was a small improvement, but every little bit of progress counts!

Meanwhile I submitted a complaint to the Oregon Certified Contractors Board against the painters I’d hired and tried to focus on the hefty list of other things I needed to work on. The painting would have to wait until summer 2018 and there was nothing I could do about it. This was a HUGE life lesson and a really unfortunate loss of a significant amount of money. But overtime, the stress reduced, the anger faded, and I’ve accepted it and moved on. Because there really isn’t an alternative is there? Have you ever had huge issues with professionals you’d hired? What did you do?

Exterior Upgrades, House & Home

Light It Up, Up, Up! Light It Up, Up, Up! (But please, not on Fire!)

September 18, 2018September 17, 2018by Laurel2 Comments

Speaking of things at Berrybrier that were in obvious need of immediate attention, during my first walk through the electrical at this place scared me! I went into the purchase of the house knowing that I would be dumping several grand (not a small number!) into updating the dangerous wiring! I snapped this picture with my phone at the initial walk through in order to have photographic evidence of my nightmares. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in this picture, but from what I can tell, there are three fuse boxes here and there are not enough fuses to power this house.

I became quite acquainted with these fuse boxes as between refinishing the floors in the kitchen and the roof/dormer addition we blew a fuse every few days before the electricians could get in here. I also found out that the oven was on the same fuse as the dryer so the two could not be run at the same time! Needless to say, this wiring was very concerning!

The other terrifying thing with the electrical was the hot mess that was the exposed wiring in the basement. Things were spliced together all over the place by some previous DIY-er without much thought to safety or fire prevention. I had dreams of plugging in a vacuum and burning the house down, which just really makes you feel at home in a new place.

You could tell at some point, a previous owner had updated the knob and tube wiring to a modified mid-century DIY version of wiring. I couldn’t tell if that was reassuring or concerning when the electricians told me that. What I did know is I needed to get things rewired around here asap!

The thing about updating electrical is in order to pull the permit, the city gets to force you to do a few other updates as well. But they sure don’t pay for those additional requirements! One of the things they required as part of the electrical permit was updating and moving the electrical meter to bring it closer to the front of the house. Originally the meter was on the driveway side of the house near the between the master bedroom and bathroom windows. Since the electrical came from a pole on the street though, the wires had to snake along the entire edge of the house under the eaves. It looked about as lovely as the spliced wires in the basement, though the electricians assured me it was far more safe. Which was not reassuring at all, really.

With the bathroom demo’ed, the electricians were able to come in and whip up brand new wiring in there as well as cleaning up everything in the basement and installing the new electrical meter. Moving the wires from the street was the first thing they tackled, it was a big change! Since the wires came from the pole on the opposite side of the house from the driveway, they originally snaked across the entire house before they could creep along the eaves. It was not my favorite look.

The city, however, authorized new wiring that would come from the wires that snake through the big walnut tree by the end of the driveway. This meant it could be far more streamlined with a straight shot to the driveway! They added a new pole that jutted through the new roof and installed a new meter. One unfortunate thing about this new location is how dang close the meter is to the front door. Now it’s one of the first things you see on the house and it’s not a location I could dictate at all. This shot below was nabbed before the city came to change the wires to the new entry point, but you can see the new wiring. Now although there are no more wires running along the eaves, in order to get the entry to the circuit box squared away they had to run a conduit pipe halfway down the house. This is because the front half of the house only has a crawl space (no full basement).

Electrical is time consuming too! The guys came out for 3 full days plus one half day to get this all worked out. They updated me daily on all the terrifying discoveries they made – like the wiring to the garage was through a 1950’s extension cord hidden in the poured concrete behind the house and spliced into other interior wiring (AHHHH!!!). My team was super nice, but it took more handholding than I would have thought. In an ideal world, I would have been there to answer questions and generally more available to the electricians. It all worked out in the end, but it could have saved me some hole patching. Ha!

Now, electrical work is not all that pretty or exciting; it’s one of those hidden things that makes your house tick though! The final product cost me a pretty penny, so appreciate some afters okay?! First, check out how light and bright my basement is with some cheap lights picked up at the Restore! It’s so bright, my picture turned out truly horrendous from the blow out.

This is a huge improvement over the dark dismal space the basement started out as when I bought the house though! Let’s start a competition for worst photo in this post, shall we? Entering this guy below — which while blurry and taken on an iPhone — shows how dark it was in this space before. The only lights were pull-cord, single bulbs scattered haphazardly throughout. You had to walk halfway down the stairs just to get to the first pull cord light! Now you flip a switch at the top of the stairs and a small sconce and the three big lights above come on, lighting up the whole space!

And that crazy batch of wires above? That area is totally cleaned up now! There’s still an electrical box here, but the wires and crazy fuse box on fuse box are gone! The wire in this picture is actually cable wiring that’s been cut and needs to be removed (again on my to-do list).

All the wires that were spliced together all terrifying and dangerous in the basement ceiling are now rewired and organized too. The ceiling is looking much more colorful and much safer now!

All these wires lead to the best part of the electrical work too! Look at this new circuit box, y’all! Not only is it labeled, but if something blows, I just have to flip a switch rather than going all the way to the store and buying a new fuse. It’s so amazing to have this and to be able to confidently turn off the electrical if I need to replace a light fixture or update an outlet. It’s a huge relief and it has a much larger capacity! No fuses have been blown since the electrical was upgraded.

Speaking of safety, the last upgrade at Berrybrier was adding a grounding wire to the house! Yup, nothing was grounded before. Yikes! Now this copper wire goes from the circuit box through the ceiling to the ground outside. It’s a vast improvement for safety!

At this point, anyone reading this who’s had to do any electrical work before is counting the numbers in there head. Yes, this cost thousands of dollars, but this was money well spent, that I allotted for this even before deciding to purchase. There is nothing scarier than fire hazards in the home and old houses go up like kindling. The peace of mind I now have is priceless! But the electrical work was not at all! I spent about $8,500 on this project. This included:

updating and cleaning up all the dangerous basement wiring
adding new GFCI outlet, sconce, ceiling fan to bathroom
moving city electrical meter and rewiring all house electrical to new location
adding a new 200amp circuit breaker
adding new fan boxes in the upstairs bedrooms
replacing outlets in the upstairs bedrooms
installation of grounding
installing new grounded 30amp circuit for dryer
adding a sconce and 3 new light fixtures in basement, removing old fixtures
disconnecting power to garage and removing wiring between house and garage
adding a whole house surge protector
installing a dedicated grounded outlet for the fridge
Adding two outlets and an overhead light to the new dormer
adding new ceiling fixture at the top of the stair well with a switch be the bedrooms and a remote switch at the bottom of the stairs
Plus $200 – $300 in electrical permits pulled from the city

It did not include the installation of any of the fixtures which would have been another $1000 dollars, a bullet I wouldn’t have wanted to take even if it was $250. I don’t mind installing new lights, the electricians were shocked by that! They were also nervous about the liability of me installing my own fixtures, so definitely discuss this at length with your electrician before they start (I did not and it was confusing). Berrybrier isn’t burning down anytime soon though! This place is no longer a fire hazard! Which is a good thing since I came home last week to my sister blowtorch in hand toasting homemade marshmallow fluff on a s’mores cake she made! That’s enough fire danger for me!

Demo, Exterior Upgrades, Home Upgrades, House & Home

New Roof For Berrybrier + a Dormer!

September 11, 2018September 14, 2018by Laurel2 Comments

Even before I bought Berrybrier, I knew the house needed a new roof. The listing actually mentioned this and – despite not seeing any leaks after a strong rain during escrow – it clearly needed to go. It was a hot mess of a roof in a city where waterproofed roofs are pretty dang critical. This was no DIY project my friends. It was time to bring in the professionals!

Although it’s not currently in vogue, I knew I wanted to replace the roof with another light colored shingle roof. The Portland summer sun is hot, hot, hot! When it bakes down on the house the upper floor becomes an oven of trapped heat. The lower level of the house manages to stay cool if it’s just a single hot day or even two hot days in a row, but any more than that and the house gets sweltering. A light colored roof can do wonders in keeping a house cooler. I picked Owen’s Corning’s Sierra Grey which I knew would go well with the exterior paint color I had in mind.

There was one other thing that I wanted to do when I replaced the roof though: add a dormer. The layout of the upstairs bedrooms with the stairwell made the house a perfect candidate for a dormer right at the top of the stairs. You see, when you walk up the stairs at Berrybrier there’s a large landing between the two bedrooms and across the landing from the stairs is a little door to a storage space. You can see the little crawl space door at the top here.

Well a simple dormer added at the location of this crawl space could launch a huge amount of potential for Berrybrier. Adding a room in this space with a window would also allow more light into the stairwell. The future potential though is huge. A bathroom at this location would not only add incredible convenience to the upper floor bedrooms, but it would also turn this house into a 3 bedroom 2.5 bathroom house effectively doubling its value from my purchase price. Equity, baby! It’s important!

I went about interviewing roofers shortly after I bought the house and trying to draw up plans for a dormer to get approved by the city development department. That was stressful! And then there was the whole manner of finding someone who could build the dormer too. A couple weeks into my search I mentioned my need for a roofer to Erik from next door who – of course – had a guy. A few days later Rigo was at my house and he said he could build the dormer too. Woohoo!

After inspecting the roof, Rigo was able to tell me that it had the original cedar shingle roof below two layers of asphalt shingles. This meant, I needed a complete tear off of all three layers of roofing and a new layer of plywood sheathing before the new roof went on. Of course, this is about triple the work of adding a new asphalt single roof and thus about triple the cost. Oh the joys of homeownership!

Off to the computer I went drawing up plans for a dormer addition. It took me about a week of a couple hours work after my 9-5 job to complete the plans. I was able to go to the Portland Development Bureau’s homeowners’ night and get my drawings looked at after working hours. It’s a busy Thursday night at homeowners’ night and after waiting two hours I thought I would have to go home without a permit. Luckily, they squeezed me in right at the end and approved my plans quite quickly! Even better, Rigo and his crew were able to start work the same week I finally got permits for the addition of the dormer!

The first thing they did was rip off the entire roof! It was the very bitter end of last September at this point, but 2017 was a hot, dry summer and we managed to avoid any rain. I know, hard to believe it’s Portland, right? They spent about just a couple of days with a crew of 4 or 5 guys to rip off all three layers of roofing. The sheathing then took another couple of days. They layered waterproofing over the sheathing very quickly. They split the roof side by side and did demo, sheathing, and waterproofing on one side before moving to the other. This kept an assurance that just in case it did rain my house wouldn’t end up flooded! I wish I’d gotten a picture of this crazytown Frankenstein roof, but the guys did it so quickly while I was at work a basically blinked and missed it!

They did all of this work on the roof in the existing plane of the roof before on Saturday October 7th in the morning a crew showed up and cut a GINORMOUS hole in my roof! It was amazing to watch them just take a bunch of saws and just go at it! Here’s all the guys smiling once the hole was complete and they were ready to start the next phase of work.

Within just a few days, they’d built the shell of the dormer and completed the roof! I was amazed that just four days later the dormer went from a dream and a hole to an entire new room! From the outside, it looked like it belonged. I wanted an addition that looked intentional, like it could have existed from the beginning and this one had that vibe. Sure, it was only a shell that first week – just enough to keep the water out – but it felt right!

One thing I wasn’t in love with though? The dark black roof vents on the opposite side of the roof. They looked jarring against the light grey shingles and stood out way too much for my liking. I asked Rigo about them and he was quick to let me know they also made light grey ones (like were on the old roof) and he could switch them out in a couple of weeks. Yay!

Back to the dormer though! A quick couple days later and the dormer was sided and trimmed out to match the house. The guys finished up work on the interior of the dormer, adding appropriate studs and structural elements. The only remaining item was the window… which was on back order until November of course! Brrrrr! The weather was starting to get cold now and there was still a gaping hole in my house! A normal person would have selected a different window that was more readily available. But not me! See those green aluminum exterior wood interior windows? I was duplicating that in the dormer, no matter what!

This was a long phase of a crazy looking house, but wrapping up the new roof was a huge relief, despite the $12 grand now missing from my bank account, I felt like I’d really gained a sense of security knowing water wasn’t going to start pouring in one way or another. The dormer came in a 4k plus an almost $500 window. Both were huge investments in the house, the dormer obviously was an optional add, but the pricing felt right and the timing was good to ensure everything was waterproofed together.

Waiting on the window proved to be the most difficult thing due to the weather. The house was freezing! I slept in my sleeping bag in order to stay warm. The house felt like a stranger at this point because so much was going on. See that picture above? The windows were all taped off for painting, the new electrical meter and service had been rewired by the city, everything was happening all at once and boy did I have a thousand things to do! More on that soon…

Home Upgrades, House & Home

Getting Down to Wood in the Kitchen: A Survival Story

August 31, 2018June 18, 2019by LaurelLeave a Comment

Gosh, when you’re trying to DIY twenty million things around your house it’s certainly difficult to find time to actually live your life, let alone blog about all your projects. Terribly bleated, but let’s get into what I was working on last fall, shall we? I started writing this last October, when this was all fresh in my brain…

So, do you remember what my floors looked like when I moved into the house? Most of the house is the beautiful old fir that’s held up well and looks amazing. It was a huge selling point for me when I first toured Berrybrier. The living and dining rooms showcased some of the best floors I’d seen when touring houses.

The kitchen and bathrooms however at Berrybrier though? Sheet vinyl.

And old decaying sheet vinyl at that! See how it’s all torn up in the corner? Here’s a picture a few weeks after I moved in once my mom and cousin Carla had spent an hour tearing off the wallpaper.

The floors get even worse if you take a closer look. Flaking in places and worn away in others, this clearly had to go. This was clearly a health hazard. Luckily, I was pretty sure these floors weren’t asbestos which would have been a whole different ball game to tackle. By looking at the floors I could tell the first layer of flooring had gone in in the 40s or 50s and the second layer on top of the first looked like 1980s. My educated guess that I’d missed the asbestos era (1960s-1970s) was later confirmed by professional testing at a laboratory. If you’re starting a project like this of your own, start with the testing.

The first couple of weeks I had the house I debated what to do. Install sheet linoleum over the sheet vinyl? Install linoleum click flooring over the sheet vinyl? Some people were even rooting heavily for peel and stick vinyl tiles. I try to minimize my exposure to vinyl as it’s a fairly toxic product during all life stages: production, installed, and recycled/trashed. Plus vinyl has some nasty off gassing issues. Basically, I really wanted to avoid vinyl. Linoleum can be expensive, however, and I personally find it difficult to clean vinyl and linoleum since they are softer surfaces. Would linoleum be a good alternative in someone else’s home? Absolutely. I just wanted something else in this kitchen. I wanted tile or… wood. I wanted the transition between the kitchen and living room (below) to be less awkward!

I turned to the air intake vent above. Under inspection, this vent when lifted showed wood floors running beneath the vinyl. Wood floors that looked to match the ones throughout the rest of the house… was this too good to be true?!

Being absolutely insane, my natural reaction to discovering original fir floors under layers of vinyl was to feel deeply in my soul that I had to rescue these wood floors. No matter what. They had to be saved; it was what was right for this house. Berrybrier deserved to be restored and I really wanted wood floors. Plus, I figured using existing wood floors had to be cheaper right? I started “planning” my project to save the floors. Let’s just say I went into this project completely naively. Like almost idiotically so. I was running on pure determination and a dream of rustic wood kitchen floors. I thought I’d have the project complete in a weekend. I thought I’d be moving on to the next project in just a few days. Boy, was I so very wrong.

My kitchen was functional and decent-ish looking before this project. I’d dressed up one side of the kitchen and I’d bought a used stove for $50 buck from my next door neighbor, Erik. I went out and bought supplies for the first weekend of the kitchen floors mission on a Saturday morning: hazmat suits (such a sexy look), gloves, goggles, air respirators, two hand scrapers in varying sizes, and a lot of plastic to tape off the various doors leading to and from the kitchen. Even though the vinyl wasn’t asbestos, I planned on treating it that way. It was time to transform the kitchen and it had to get uglier before it could get nice.

My mom was in town to help and we spent the first part of the day taping off the many doors: bedroom door, bathroom door, basement door, stairs door, and the living room opening. That took at least an hour, so it was already past noon when we truly got started, but we had a kill-room worthy of Dexter ready for our plan of attack!

We began at the stairs, knocking down that pathetic little banister first (see second picture) and then removing the metal bracing at the stair noses. That was all extremely positive and went very quickly. I was happily surprised to discover there were actual wood stair treads with proper rounded nosing beneath the sheet vinyl! I had been expecting unfinished plywood with flat edges and nosing… That was probably the last happy moment for the next five weeks. But dang, did the site below excite me!

Yes, I said five weeks. Five very long and painful weeks. The floors certainly took longer than a quick weekend. After exposing the stair nosing we spent the rest of that day working slowly with the hand scrapers on the stairs. Progress was extremely slow. Luckily for me, I live next door to another fixer upper! The house next to mine is owned by a contractor working hard on his own big project (and doing a much better and more informed job that I). Erik is kind enough to come over and help me figure out what to do. He must think I am a complete idiot since I always a mess, but still he’s patient enough to lend a hand and point me in the direction of the right tool, which is what he did that first evening.

You guys, there is such a thing as a floor scraper. Somehow, I did not know this. This was a major idiot moment and I am dying a bit inside just remembering it. Erik came over and saw the disaster we’d created and lent me his floor scraper and of course it worked a million times faster than what we were previously doing.

The next day we woke up, fixed our plastic which we’d had to remove to use the bathroom and go to bed, ate a quick breakfast in the dining room turned kitchen, and got to work. Using the floor scraper I was quickly able to remove the entire top layer of sheet vinyl from the floors. Yes, I said top layer. Yes, there was a second layer beneath it. Yes, am cringing as I write this.

The second layer of sheet vinyl was much more difficult to remove. The top layer had a thin (and, as we discovered, water based) layer of glue holding it to the lower layer. You could fairly easily pull off this upper layer in strips and sheets. The bottom layer of sheet vinyl was a bitch. A thick layer of black tar based adhesive was holding it to my glorious, original, fir wood floors. In many areas of the kitchen I was able to get the both layers of sheet vinyl off but not the tar adhesive. The floor was still taunting me though, because in a few spots I could get both off exposing the hardwood floors beneath! But, in some I couldn’t remove the bottom layer of sheet vinyl or the adhesive at all.

We picked up the loose bits of vinyl and put it into contractors trash bags in the driveway, taped down huge sheets of black plastic over the still partially tar/vinyl covered floors, and went to bed. Boy, I thought, we made great progress! We’ll be done next weekend for sure! Wrong again!

The next weekend dawned and I woke up at 7 am determined to finish the kitchen. I decided to focus on the area by the bedroom door where I figured I’d be able to get up the sheet vinyl in a few hours. I was wrong… (seeing a trend here?). I worked on that nearly all day and then spent the next day at the tool rental store asking for help with a machine. The tool rental store told me to forget it though. They had nothing that would help remove sheet vinyl and tar based adhesive without destroying the wood floor beneath. In fact, they recommended straight acetone to take up the stubborn tar and remaining vinyl (see that stubborn bit by the sink?).

So, I went to Home Depot and bought acetone. Poured it on the tar and tried scraping and watched it evaporate while doing absolutely nothing to the tar. I’m going to be honest here and let you know how incredibly discouraging this was. I was trying to think of alternate solutions and how I could possibly do something else in the kitchen. Tile? Painted plywood? Something had to be better than this heartbreaking view of tar mastic.

In my heart though, I knew the original wood floors were the best solution – not the easiest solution, no, but the best one for me, for this house, and for the direction I want to take it. I was determined and ready for the next plan of action. I spent some time googling and found this product at Home Depot. 747 Plus – according to the reviews – basically liquifies tar cutback to the point where you can squeegee it into one spot in the room and scoop it up using absorbent kitty litter. The many reviews were mainly positive. The packaging explicitly stated it was designed to remove tar adhesives. It sounded like a godsend. Like there was light at the end of this tunnel! A wood floor under all this black tar! Spoiler alert: it did not work as advertised. But you’re not surprised are you?

The next weekend (my third in a row dedicated to the kitchen floors). I pulled off all the black plastic covering the floors. This was going to work! I told myself. This is finally the solution! Many of the reviews stated to spray on the 747 Plus and leave for 4-6 hours before trying to scrape. I decided to try this first. I sprayed everything down and left the house to run some errands.

When I returned the tar didn’t look like liquid, but it was shinier on top, almost melted looking. By spreading cat litter and using a handheld scraper I could scrape the shiny, melty layer of the tar off. It was not squeegee type work, it did not come off easily. It was incredibly messy, leaking through the hazmat suit and staining my knees, butt, and arms with tar. Sounds safe right? But the worst part of this? It stunk. It smelled so freaking bad. It was such a strong scent of tar it gave me a powerful headache and the entire house reeked. I left all the windows and doors open to try to air it out.

Unfortunately, after hours of scraping at the slightly liquidy tar, the floors now looked even worse than when I’d begun that day. The tar had spread over some of the exposed wood so now everything looked black and depressing. But I wanted to give the 747 Plus another chance. I opened another bottle and followed the directions perfectly, waiting the recommended time between steps. This worked no better. It was a sticky, black, horrific mess. My headache got worse. I made the floors worse! See here how on the picture on the left (from the previous weekend) you can see the wood of the floors but in the picture on the right (after the 747 Plus) the tar actually covers up that whole area too?

I finished what I could and threw in the towel. The tar was everywhere now and I’d gotten it all over the place. I took a bath that night and called my mom on the verge of tears. Luckily, my mom’s response was, “I’ll be back next weekend and we’ll try something else and tackle it together!” Otherwise I would have probably given up completely right then and there. The next weekend, my mom came up and Erik from next door came to the rescue! He brought over two machines: a big round buffer with scraper blades and a drum sander. One of these, he assured me, would save the day.

First up: the buffer machine. We plugged this guy in and Erik gave me a few minutes tutorial on how to use it. It seemed like with continued pressure in small areas it would scraped up the tar and it looked very, very easy to use. Plus not bending over and scraping would save our backs! Erik left to go work on his own many house projects and I began using the buffer machine. Or should I say, began trying to use the buffer machine. What Erik had made look easy, was in fact, really fucking hard. I literally was not strong enough to use this machine. I would turn it on and the thing would take off across the room, basically dragging me helplessly behind it. It was scary and dangerous and I immediately knew I had no business using that machine.

Not that there was really even much of an option to continue using the machine, because within a few minutes the machine blew a fuse. Yup, the shoddy electrical on the house (which was supposed to be replaced just a few weeks later on the 24th of October) could not handle the load of the buffer machine. My mom and I started trying to figure out if we could go buy and install plywood over the kitchen floors this same weekend.

Erik came back over. Erik saves the day. Again. He decides to run an extension cord from his garage, across his yard, over the fence, past my garage and into my kitchen. “Don’t give up,” he tells us. Erik decides we should try the drum sander on a part of the floor that is less covered in tar. He plugs it in and runs it over a small section a few times. Holy hedgehogs in Hades! IT ACTUALLY EXPOSED WOOD FLOORS!!!

At this point, I was basically jumping up and down clapping my hands with glee and my mother was ready to sell me to Erik for a couple of horses and a trading agreement. We found hope! Four weeks of working on the kitchen and there was hope!

Now Erik cautioned against using the drum sander on the super built up areas of tar so we returned to hand scraping what we could and pulling up rogue nails. Luckily it seemed the 747 Plus helped to soften the tar in most areas making it slightly easier to scrape. We worked at it the rest of the day and made decent, but not amazing progress. You can see here the areas I sanded with the drum sander, the areas we scraped, and the areas that were still tar covered.

Luckily, Erik returned on Sunday and told us to just screw it and use the drum sander on the more built up areas of tar too. We happily accepted his proposal and by the end of Sunday we had this lovely and promising view!!

Then Monday night after I got off work we sanded a little harder on some of the corners and ran the sander over the center again. I am absolutely obsessed with this drum sander by the way. It is SUPER easy to use, really fun, and not super loud or obnoxious. It’s easy to control and gets a hell of a lot done. It’s my new favorite power tool and has a hefty lead over all the other power tools I have had love affairs with.

Anyways, after our second pass things we’re looking even better. It was at this point I realized these floors could look way better than I’d originally thought. A little more work on them and I thought I’d be able to get a pretty stinkin’ close match to the floors in the rest of the house. That makes me unbelievably excited!

Left to do the next weekend (note: this was now the 5th weekend in a row I’d working on these floors) was edging the room and moving to higher grit sandpaper. Erik suggested we purchase a cheap belt sander from Harbor and Freight for this job. I now do everything he says, so of course I did exactly that. The belt sander is smaller and able to get the edges of the rooms, farther beneath the cabinets, and into the corners the belt sander can’t make it. But because there are no perfect endings, this belt sander did not work so well and the tar still wouldn’t come up and grrrr… let’s just all pull our hair out together, okay?

And all of a sudden… I was out of time to work on the floors. It was time for the bathroom to be demo’ed so the electricians could come do their work. The floors were put on pause and left in this mostly okay state… until the end of February. Yes, that’s right folks, I did not have a kitchen from early September 2017 through the first week of March 2018. So before we get back to the bathroom and before I return to this kitchen saga, let me fill you in with all the other things I had on my plate last fall… stay tuned!

Update: check out Part II of this saga here!

Demo, Home Upgrades, House & Home

Demo Day! Goodbye Bathroom!

March 14, 2018by Laurel4 Comments

We demo’ed the bathroom! It’s all gone now. Actually it’s been all gone for many months and I’ve just been too busy putting it back together to actually blog about it. 🤣 Anyways, I thought I’d give you the run down of the demo days and some excellent after pictures… of my filthy demo face. Overall this was my second time demo’ing a bathroom and I have to say it went vastly better than the previous time as I did not end up in the hospital with a cornea infection. Yup. That happened a few years ago when I helped demo my parents master bathroom and it hurt like a motherf***er! But that was last time and this is this time. Let’s concentrate on Berrybrier today!

Let’s start with how the bathroom started out. Do you remember this magenta madness? The bump out above the mirror floated there like an overly long soffit that just might fall off while you were on the toilet. There were only about 12″ between the sink and the corner of the tub for you to slink by to get to the toilet. The shower head was not operational, but someone had used it previously which is why everything was rotting. Everything was filthy. I can’t even talk about the floors, but I will say someone decided to wrap the flooring vinyl up onto a teensy counter by the sink. That tub was amazingly comfortable and taking baths is my favorite, but this tub was ginormous. WAY too big for such a tiny bathroom.

Demo day got off to a slow start as I was exhausted and slept until 8am; which isn’t really even that late honestly. My mother was still staying here and she had planned to have a visit with our cousin Mary that am. So I slithered out of bed half comatose and made myself some toast and jam and was munching away on that sitting in my bathrobe when Mary arrived. Let me clarify: Mary arrived in work clothes ready to help with demo. Somehow my mom had missed that memo and here I was totally unprepared to start with lots of helping hands. Ofph! 🤭

Once the confusion was sorted out, I threw on some proper clothes and we got to work. First we removed the mirror on the back wall and Mary and my mom tackled the weird wooden tub surround.

They were removing the decorative molding and flat panels so we could see properly what was going on beneath it. We’d already drilled enough holes in it to know that it was not a clawfoot. Cue the ugly crying. But! This worked out because knowing it was a clawfoot would have caused me to try and save it and this bathroom is just WAY TOO SMALL for a bathtub that large.

Underneath, you can see this tub was barely supported from the upper lib, nothing was supporting it below. We eventually wedged a furniture dolly beneath it in hopes we’d later be able to roll it out of the bathroom that way.

After that, we moved on to tackling the removal of the sink and toilet. Since none of the water shut off valves in the bathroom actually functioned, this involves turning off the water at the main. Eek! Which in turn meant my house no longer had a functioning shower or a bathroom or even running water in the kitchen. Yay! Also… I had to google how to remove a toilet. Thank god for the internet, it’s basically teaching me everything these days.

The more we removed, the more we found, like this cute swans wallpaper!

At this point, things were looking… better?

Seems like a good time for a simple, easy task like removing the little corner Ikea cabinet, right? Well, that came down quick, but we also discovered some gnarly mildew behind the Ikea cabinet! At this point, Mary had to leave, which was extremely understandable. Ha!

After Mary was on her way, it was time to turn our attention to the elephant in the room: the overly large (but extremely comfortable) bathtub. In order to move that tub anywhere, I had to disconnect the plumbing. Well… the pipes I needed access to were in the wall, so I had to do a little demo in the half bathroom as well! I removed the faux wood paneling from two of the bathroom walls with a mini crowbar and hammer in less than 15 minutes and what to my wondering eyes should appear? A ~~miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer~~ hole already cut into the wall! This is probably why that paneling went up!

I made the hole bigger with my hammer, grabbed a metal blade for the sawzall, and started cutting. Bing, bang, boom and the tub was no longer connected to the house! Yes that is the toilet in the foreground of the picture below. The half bath is VERY TINY. It’s basically a quarter bath, but don’t that to him, he’ll get all offended.

Once it was disconnected, it was time to try to get this tub out of the bathroom! With enough prying of the tub with a spare 2×4 we were able to raise the tub high enough off the supports to get the furniture dolly wedged nearly all the way under the tub. Once that was done we were able to a remove the rest of the rotting wood surround and supports and the bathtub was freed! I know this is a terrible photo below, but you get the idea.

We wheeled the bathtub out of the bathroom, taking out the door frame in the process and left it in the kitchen, because that was as far as two people could move it alone. Now that bathtub stayed in my kitchen until early February when my Aunt Stephanie and Uncle Mike came to visit and helped me conquer a few tasks around the house. The two of them, plus my sister and I were finally able to move it out of the house lifting together! But don’t let me get distracted, back to demo day 1: after the tub was out of the bathroom and into the kitchen, though, it was time to go to sleep. We were exhausted.

The next day was lathe and plaster demo day! We spent the entire Sunday taking out as much of the lathe and plaster as possible. It was crazy town and filled the floor with debris. We filled 7 contractor bags full of lathe and plaster from this little room, despite me keeping a ton of the longer pieces of lathe!

Seriously, you think that it’s a small room, but oh. my. god. The whole room was 2 feet under lathe and plaster. We filled SO MANY BAGS! All stuffed and weighing a bazillion pounds, full of lathe and plaster!

Once the lathe came down, we found some not so great things, like exposed knob and tube wiring. And knob and tube wiring that just ended in the plaster after someone removed some sconces… Yeah, not good. Luckily, electricians were scheduled for just a few days later!

Once the floors were swept clean of all the debris and the little discoveries were made, we were even more tired than the night before and we were absolutely filthy. Oh, and my mom was so ready to fly home he next day to her comfortable bed and house that requires no demo. She was ready to relax!

I was also filthy, but very much excited for the projects ahead! I knew that this was a huge step, but a super exciting one because soon I’d have a fully functional bathroom and it was going to be so freaking pretty!

Of course… finishing that bathroom took me about 2 months longer than I thought it would and in my incessant push to finish, I neglected this blog. But don’t worry, y’all. I still took pictures and am here to overshare.