catch up

For a moment there I was almost blogging in live time but these silly AREs (architectural registration exams) really put a damper on my momentum.  We've completed a few projects this spring/summer but first I owe some 'after' photos from a project we completed last fall- the driveway.  I had progress and completion photos from when we were actually working on the driveway but they were all lost in the great hard drive crash of '11.  Here are some pics I took earlier this spring and I have to say I think Bryce and I were both surprised the driveway was still in such great shape after the winter.  The landscape fabric we used kept the gravel from sinking into the muddy ground and we didn't even have to add more which we assumed we would.  So without further adieu, here's another before which is actually an 'after' (note by the time we got around to this project we'd been driving over that grass for 4 years so picture more of a dirt/mud pit)

and the much after 'after' photo

and just for giggles, here's a photo from when the previous owners were moving out

I explained the process in the last post but here are some close up pics of the gravel blend we put together to add some tans as well as the pavers we used on their sides to act as a border.

And here's the driveway addition looking from the back door of the house.  We didn't want to (and actually probably wouldn't be able to because of regulations) widen the curb cut so we angled the end of the new section.  It's not the easiest park job between the angled entrance and narrow carport but we get our small SUV in there just fine.

Here's a recent photo of the carport as well just to show how the space is utilized these days.  You can also see the door to the garage with updated light fixture and hardware which have been installed throughout the years.  The items stored in the carport here are the trash can, recycling and compost bins (not smelly!).

 

wired for sound

Always one to take advantage of the situation, Bryce immediately went to work on an item off his list while he had access between the first and second floors...

speakers.  He was able to run wire from the receiver in the living room TV cabinet under the baseboard in the living room, thru the wall into the lazy susan in the kitchen, up thru the corner cabinet, across the upper cabinets and (with the access provided by the hole in the ceiling) into the upstairs bathroom cabinet and master bedroom closet.  My one condition was that he use wire staples to keep the cables in order and they're completely undetectable except for in the upstairs cabinet when it's open; and even then they're hardly noticeable. 

In addition to the speakers we already have outside on the deck, now we can have music playing throughout the house as well.  I have to admit, this is actually pretty awesome.

and everything in its place

This is likely to be the most self involved post yet so go ahead and skip it. I added a tab about 'organizing' which I really love to do so I thought I'd share how I fit two adults' wardrobes into one 5' wide closet. Seriously, you don't have to read this one.

Being short on room in our closet, we had to determine what items merited space there and which could be stored elsewhere. Off season items are kept in the guest room closet which creates a great opportunity during seasonal rotations to donate items that weren't used, keeping our wardrobes smaller and limited to pieces that are actually worn. The guest room also holds gym clothes, ski gear, my dresses, Bryce's suits, painting/project clothes, sports clothing, off season jackets/coats and random halloween type dress up items. There is a dresser in the guest room where I store seasonal clothing and my swim suits. Frequently worn shoes and coats are kept by the back door along with scarves, gloves and other accessories. Less frequently worn but still in-season coats and shoes are stored in the coat closet under the stairs and out of season or dressy shoes are stored in a bin in the garage attic. So...back to the bedroom closet.

After all the above mentioned items are taken out of the mix and put away, we're left with this (at this point spread across the guest room while the closet was torn apart).


and they all needed to go in here


My first step is always to catalogue what items I have, sorting them into groups and taking note of the largest or bulkiest and starting with those. In this case, I started with our denim. Bryce and I dress very casually for work, in jeans every day, so we own a lot of jeans.


With Bryce being taller than me, all of this clothes would naturally go on the upper shelves and mine on the lower. I put Bryce's jeans vertically on two shelves; they're sorted lightest in color on top to darkest on bottom, since he typically chooses depending on the color of his shirt. My jeans are on the horizontal shelf. I typically choose my pair depending on the height of heel I want to wear that day so they're sorted in piles of long, medium and short/skinnies. Each pile is then sorted from lightest on top to darkest on bottom.


I hang any sweaters that won't get the hanger bubbles on the shoulders and all the rest are folded and organized by color in rainbow order (I'm a big fan of rainbow order).


The shelving sytem we bought has a tall vertical space to one side for dresses but we use the space for a canvas sweater hanger that houses sweaters in the winter and shorts and skirts in the summer. Again, I sorted by rainbow order and put Bryce's on the top half and mine on the bottom.


Most of the shirts we own are hung, the exceptions being screen printed type t-shirts and Bryce's under shirts.


Bryce's shirts all went on the top and mine on the bottom; all are sorted in rainbow order and within each color, by sleeve length.


Then we get into smaller groups of items that can take up the remaining space. Our few pairs of dress pants on pant hangers, sweat pants, my few skirts, my camis and my unmentionables in the drawers at the bottom.


All that was left was some accessory items: scarves looped over hangers, belts on hooks, my clutches in a clear bin below the sweaters, empty hangers and what you can't see in the photo, my off season bags on the top shelf above Bryce's shirts.


The dresser you can see to the side of some of these photos houses Bryce's under items, sports type shorts, swim trunks, our socks and screen print type t-shirts. We have a lot of t-shirts, mostly held onto for only sentimental reasons. I roll them instead of folding them to optimize space and so that they can all be seen at once.

plumber's crack

So before I dive into how we fixed our plumbing problem, let me explain what was really going on. All the waste water pipes in a house need to be vented to keep fumes and gases from building up inside the pipes. Typically, there is a straight vertical pipe that is intersected with the waste pipe from the toilet forming a 'T' where the waste water goes down and any fumes go up...but not in my 103 year old house. In my house, the wall containing the vent/waste pipe upstairs doesn't line up with the one downstairs and, because the pipe was likely added at a later date, there is a bend in the vent portion.


You can see above where the leak was due to the broken pipe. What was leaking was very fortunately not toilet waste water, as that is piped in below the leak. The top of the vent pipe is open to the elements which would typically allow any rain water to run down the pipe and out of the house with the waste water. When the pipe cracked, this allowed rain water and any condensation build up to run down the pipe and into our kitchen. In addition, the roof is not watertight where the pipe runs thru, so rainwater was also traveling down the outside of the pipe and into the kitchen. This explains why a toilet waste water pipe was leaking when it rained.

We called in the professionals from Three Amigos Plumbing, and after a quick visit, they had a game plan and would be back to fix the issue the next day. In the meantime, we had a homework project to cut a hole in our bedroom closet so they'd have access to attach the new portion of pipe. We considered it pretty lucky that the pipe went thru the wall between the bathroom and the back of our closet so we had the option of removing the toilet tank to put a hole in a remodeled bathroom in a very visible place or putting a hole in the closet behind all of our clothes. Not a tough choice. So that night, after removing most of the clothes and shelving system, Bryce went to work cutting a hole in what we thought was drywall but was actually a plaster wall.


So now we had a hole in our kitchen ceiling and one in our bedroom.



The next day the plumbers got to work and our house, of course, threw them some curve balls. The weight of the 20 or so feet of 4" cast iron pipe above the cracked portion was not supported anywhere. It simply rested on the pipe below, which is likely part of the reason for the crack in the first place. Since the broken pipe was to be replaced with a newer PVC version which would not hold the weight, it needed to be supported somewhere above. The plumbers needed to extend the hole upstairs until they ran into a part they could somehow anchor.


The horizontal 2x4 toward the top of the hole is where the weight is now entirely supported. The two metal straps toward the bottom of the pipe is where the old cast iron meets the new PVC filler. We now had a small hole in the kitchen and a large hole in the bedroom but the pipe was fixed.


We decided to leave the hole in the kitchen ceiling until the roof is fixed/repaired/replaced this spring so that a new patch job wouldn't be ruined by any potential further rain leaks. For the bedroom, instead of trying to patch the wall in the closet, we figured we'd simply line the entire back of the closet in plywood. This actually solved two problems as it covered the hole and added the needed additional support for our shelving system which was really burdening the plaster it was hung from.


two sheets of plywood and a few coats of paint later and it was as if it had never happened



In hindsight, it may have been worth looking into cedar boards instead of plywood but I don't know how much the market around here cares about cedar closets.

99 problems and a roof is one

The morning after the ugly sweater party, Bryce was busy replacing the door knob and I was cleaning up the kitchen when, after drying off the wet countertop for the second time, noticed this.


See it? Above the door to the living room? Ok, here's a close up.


Yep, there was a crack in the ceiling and it was dripping water. Now, I have to admit to noticing this crack in the past but assumed it was just that, a crack in the plaster ceiling, nothing new around here. Well, on this particular morning that crack was bulging, wet and dripping so upon further inspection it appeared we had a leak in our drywall ceiling (the surfaces in the house range from plaster to drywall to paneling to unidentified). We knew when we bought the house that the roof would need to be replaced within the next few years and it was raining heavily outside however, we're on the first floor of a two story house and right under the bathroom. The toilet to be exact. We crossed our fingers that it was a roof problem, water running down a pipe thru the second floor to the first, and not a plumbing problem as the prospect of tearing up the newish travertine floor upstairs was not one I wanted to outright accept. We waited a few weeks to try to determine a correlation between the leak and either the rain or a flush pattern but the ceiling actually never dripped again.

We decided at that point to do some detective work and since we were hoping for a roof leak, started in the attic. Bryce stuck his head up there first, clearly ignoring the 'do not stand on the top of the ladder' warning on the ladder.


The attic is small and the floor of it is covered in blown in insulation, ducting and who knows what so you really can't get into it further than the waist. We could however see this from the attic opening.


There was very clearly (at least at some point) water running down the old chimney which is near the leak in question. We went outside to get an idea of the layout of all the items that punch thru the roof that may be allowing water to run down them and to the ceiling of the first floor....turns out there were a few. No idea what the two smaller ones are but the largest of the three pipes is the vent for the upstairs toilet waste water. That would align it directly above the leak. Hm....


Now we have discovered a definite roof problem but the location of the leak made it more likely to be a pipe problem. We figured we'd need to patch up the water damaged drywall in the ceiling anyway so we might as well bite the bullet and see what was in there.


First we found mold which was a given, but luckily very concentrated in that one spot. But next we found this


a cracked 4" cast iron vent pipe (the likes of which has never been seen in our plumber's 25 years of experience we later learned). What you can't see in this photo is that there is also a golf ball sized hole in the side of the pipe a few inches above the ceiling and if you looked directly up at the pipe, daylight. So now we had two confirmed roof leaks and a busted pipe.

a place for everything

This is a project I might not have included except that it was modified recently so I thought to throw in a post about it. I actually originally completed this one about a year or so ago.

I have a lot of jewelry....like a lot. I actually can't remember what I did with it before I put this all together but I imagine it was in a drawer or bin of some sort. Being one to enjoy a little organization, this set up would obviously not do, so I came up with an easy fix.

We have ample storage space in a floor to ceiling built in cabinet in our upstairs bathroom you can see here


I had a similar set up for storage in college and used push pins in the inside of the door to house my (much smaller at the time) jewelry collection. I took inventory of the jewelry I wanted to display and figured out the layout on the back of the door, taking into account any shelving so the door would still be able to close. I used wooden dowels, a scrap of chicken wire and Command's small wire hooks and ended up with this


Starting from the top: a bar for rings and pendants, wire mesh for earrings and brooches, two bars for beaded bracelets, four bars for bangles and nine hooks for necklaces of various lengths. The wooden bars lift off the hooks on each end for access to items in the middle. There are still a few things that don't fit and are in a drawer along with any nicer jewelry but it's so nice having everything easily accessible and relatively tangle free (not to mention it's a nice pop of color to look at every morning). I find myself wearing a lot of items I'd otherwise forget about now that everything is on display.

I tried to be careful about placement in relation to the shelving but once all the items were loaded on the door didn't quite close. I ignored the issue rather than putting anything back in a drawer but the other day I finally got around to fixing it.


It only took a little bit of pressure to get the drawer to close so Bryce installed a simple cabinet magnet and it works like a charm.


Now the door stays closed when not in use. Funny how you realize how much something actually bothered you once it's fixed. Thanks babe!


These are the hooks I used and the rest of the project was made of scrap materials I already had.


Total project cost, about $10.

keyless

A few weeks ago, conveniently during our annual ugly Christmas sweater party, the doorknob to our back door decided to just stop working. Somehow twisting the knob no longer did anything rendering the door inoperable while our house was completely full of guests. I can't say I shed many tears though as this gave me the perfect opportunity to replace it with the keyless version I'd been wanting.

I don't have a great before photo (shocker right?) but here's a nice one of the door taken while we were painting the outside of the house.


What I didn't know, is that for some reason, hardware manufacturers everywhere decided they would not make this in black. Wish I had known that before installing a black mailbox, doorbells, light fixtures, address numbers and painted the front door hardware black. I debated buying whatever color was cheapest and spray painting it black to match but at $120 for the doorknob it wasn't worth risking. We ended up buying this one, which was simply the darkest oil rubbed bronze we could find and of course no one but me would notice the discrepancy (and well, now anyone who reads this). We installed a new deadbolt to match as well as a new knob on the door to the garage which is just across the carport from this.

and here's my shiny new latch with keypad (paint touch up on this door is on the spring to do list)


The next challenge though was that the holes for our deadbolt and knob were too close together for the battery pack casing on the inside.  Bryce was able to figure out how to install that part upside down although the batteries inside needed help from a little tape to hold them in place.