So... wanna buy a house?

For sale: one recently renovated, 3-bedroom, two-bath house with detached garage, fully-fenced private yard, and eat-in kitchen. New gas furnace; all electrical upgraded and completely rewired; all new plumbing; and, a brand-new master bedroom with en suite. Won't last long - make an offer today!

"But wait, Don," you say. "What's that about a fully-fenced yard?"

Then, of course, you do a spit-take and shout, "What the jesus?! Why in the name of great Caesar's ghost are you SELLING?"

That, my friends, requires pictures.

Keep in mind, as you peruse the evidence before you, that once the house actually goes on the market, I might be taking down some of these pictures. Just in case, you know, someone out there actually reads this crap. Or does a Google search for "great Caesar's ghost" AND happens to be in the market for a 65-year old bungalow in Victoria.

What? It could happen!

Anyway, it was a few short weeks ago that I came home from work one fine Friday, and saw activity in the long-abandoned house next door (the green one, not the pink house with the neighbours that helped us build the fence). Turns out the landlord finally got off his lazy ass and went looking to rent it out again. He (finally) had the decency to come up to us as we puttered about and introduce himself (we've only been living here for five years), and we shot the breeze for a few minutes, mostly taking advantage of the situation to point out the holes in his soffits (where the squirrels, birds, and rats were getting in) the crack in his foundation, and the tree that overhangs the driveway that we desperately wanted to prune back so it wasn't in quite as much danger of falling on our house. He used the time to assure us that he was renting to a single mother of two daughters who was into gardening and "interested in working around the house and cleaning it up a bit". Once he had gone (and we'd cleaned up the trail of slime he left behind), we started talking and quickly came to the conclusion that we just weren't ready to deal with the whole shared driveway experience again, and that maybe it was time to take advantage of the recovering market and low interest rates to hie ourselves off to a better neighbourhood all together.

And that was before the people had even moved in.

The very next day, the new tenant showed up, and went absolutely apeshit on the flower beds and planting areas around the house. She was pulling dead branches out, and raking up the fallen leaves and dead flowers, and totally going to town. Of course, she left all of the stuff in a big pile in the middle of the driveway, and only when I looked rather askance at the mound of crap in the exact spot at which I wanted to leave my car did she bother to ask if I happened to know the next time the city was scheduled to come by and pick up the brush piles. (About the middle of next March, actually.) Not the most auspicious beginning, but we figured she was just excited about moving to a new house and eager to get the place set up before moving in.

We were wrong, of course, but then you probably already figured that out.

Our first task was to draw up a list of all the things we would have to do before we could put the house on the market. The list has about fifty tasks on it, but among the most prominent (read: most effort required) were to redo the drywall in the upstairs bathroom (that we'd screwed up while renovating back when we first bought the house and which Leonard the plumbing god had subsequently put a whopping great hole in), patch the bloody pit of death in the driveway (oh, boy, asphalt!), and put in another fence behind the garage (so we could put "fully-fenced" on the listing, and to complete the privacy of the backyard).

The bathroom will have to wait until we get back from a trip to Toronto in the middle of August, but in the meantime, we've been working hard at the rest of the list.

The first notable thing we did was to build a box out of left-over cedar fencing to cover the trio of pipes in the front flower bed:

We still intend to plant some flowers and whatnot around it, and top it with a potted plant or two, but it does a nice job of concealing the pipes while still allowing easy access:



As it turns out, one of the reasons I took that picture is because I wanted to get a few pictures of our new neighbours. You see, they had sort of started to move in while we were still puttering about making lists and meeting with mortgage brokers and real estate agents. What we'd seen so far did not exactly fill our hearts with joy, as you'll soon see...

This first picture is of the front of their house - yes, the view you see when driving down the street towards our place (sorry about the blurriness, I was trying to be inconspicuous):



At first, I thought they were just using it as a staging area for their furniture before they moved it all inside, and then I realized that no, that's their outdoor smoking area! Joy! Also, if you look carefully, you can see a broken (as in, shattered) mirrored closet door tucked under the fir tree on the left. That's been there ever since they first started moving in (almost three weeks now) and they have two small dogs (one of which they let run loose all over the place) and a very young toddler (who is walking).

I also took a couple of pictures of the stuff they had left in the driveway, as it had already been sitting out there for a couple of days (through one decent rainfall, actually) and I wanted to capture the essence before we left on our annual three-day baseball pilgrimage to Seattle. You know, just in case they cleaned it up while we were away. Ha!





(Barely visible on the right side is PART of the pile of branches she pulled out of the beds on the first day, and which I had to kick to the side in order to actually use our driveway.)

Turns out we need not have worried too much - when we came back three days later, they had only built on what was already there:



And kept building the next day:



Aaaand the next:





Lest you think we were just passive witnesses to this, rest assured that we had talked to them several times, and even mentioned that we were planning on putting the house on the market soon. I had even pointed out that we have an easement on both sides of the driveway, and that they were not actually allowed to store or build anything within that easement. Each time, we were assured that it was only temporary, she was cleaning it up, her daughter's boyfriend was coming to help, her ex-husband was going to drop by and pick it all up, etc, etc, etc.

All a load of shit, of course, but you knew that, right? We sure as hell did.

Not wanting to delay any further, we drafted my buddy Clamb into helping us wrestle the two-man auger again, and got started on the back fence. Here's what the spot looked like after two trips to Ellice with loads of brush, pruned branches, and old grass clippings from the "compost" heap we were uh.. storing there. Yeah.



And after a late night of raking and pruning, another load of brush to Ellice, and a couple of hours with the post-hole digger and some concrete mixing:



That was also the weekend the neighbours were busy... dropping off yet more shit:





Yeah. It was at this point that we kinda started to lose it about the whole situation. I mean, it's one thing to make a bit of a mess when you're busy moving, but she didn't do a damn thing about it all weekend except spread it around into the driveway and her back yard.

Anyway, we had to wait a day to get our fence panels (oh, there's a story there, but I want to get this posted tonight), so we picked up some asphalt patching and turned our attention to the hole in the driveway. We had already filled it with gravel before going to Seattle, and let it settle:



We took out the excess, tamped down what remained and covered it all up with four bags of asphalt repair:



It was pretty damn straightforward, actually, which makes me wonder why I had been dreading and postponing that particular chore for so long.

The next day (after tipping the delivery guy five bucks because he had to carry the panels down the driveway, thanks to the neighbour's crap all over the place) we put up the rest of the fence. We had to do a little surgery to the panel on the right to get it to fit, but it wasn't too hard:



And that was that. Looks pretty damn good, though the War Department put her back out again helping me jimmy the panels into place.

So, yeah. House for sale in Mayfair area of Victoria. Central location, with a lovely view of Langford.

MORNING UPDATE!
I was out washing the side of the house last night (in preparation for painting it), and she was out there smoking (of course), so I took the opportunity to remind her that we were putting the house on the market and that our real estate agent would be bringing some prospective buyers around to look at it. (Not exactly a lie - our mortgage broker wants some pictures to send to one of his clients who might be interested, but those folks MIGHT drive by, right?) Anyway, I said the buyers would be coming by sometime this week, and she said something about waiting for her ex to come by and pick up her daughter's stuff. (Man, I could do a whole post about the whacked out family history or whatever, but this IS a renovation blog, at least nominally, so I won't. But trust me - it's like a whole season's worth of Jerry Springer.)

Anyway, she spent the whole evening bustling around out there -- and accomplished sweet f-all. This is what I saw when I left the house for work this morning:





Seriously. This is what she thinks is "cleaning up all this crap".
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The briefest of updates....

I was having a conversation (over Instant Messenger, of course) with someone the other day, bemoaning how long things seem to be taking now that we're close to being finished.

As I told her, we're finding it really hard to stay motivated.

So we don't.










New post and pictures to come shortly. I promise.
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A little more of that old in-and-out

Inside and outside, that is, as we tried to take advantage of the non-inclement weather this past weekend to button up the landscaping (read: massive holes in the ground) before winter, and hurried to get the workshop cleaned up a little before the carpets/laundry room floor go in.

Of course, the War Department was not content with just doing OUR landscaping, but insisted that we also help the Maker Of Pies and her hell-dog do their lawn as well. As it turned out, this was a good idea because once we got done helping Maker Of Pies' husband (Mr. Awesome) with their house, he came over and helped us with ours. As you'll see, this was a good trade for us...

The day began with a large truck backing into our driveway and dumping three yards of "lawn mix" (sand and topsoil) in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, the truck was back with another three yards of topsoil:



Mmmm... dirty.

We promptly left it sitting there and went over to help Mr. Awesome with his place, hoping that the rain would hold off for at least a while so we wouldn't have to shovel mud when we got back.

It only took the three of us (the Maker of Pies had the plague or something so she couldn't help out) a couple of hours to grade, seed, roll, and fertilize their lawn, so we were standing in front of our twin mounds of hard labor by one o'clock.

And that's when the real fun started.

Before:
Just in case you've forgotten what the fruits of our previous labors have done to the outside of our house, I took a few pictures...

Here's the rather sizable depression in the back yard where we hauled away all the extra dirt that was left over from digging out the perimeter drain:





Also in those pictures (but impossible to see) is the trench we dug for the electrical line out to the garage that sunk down over the past year. It's quite narrow, less than six inches, but could be treacherous when racing out there in sandals to disentangle the cat from the lawn furniture again.

In the front yard, we had the remnants of my all time favorite hole:



As seen from the street, with the big bare swath over top of where we laid the new water service line:



After:
So, with Mr. Awesome's invaluable assistance, we got started shoveling, wheeling, spreading, seeding, raking, and hurting. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the driveway was clear:



The backyard was filled in:





And the front hole was topped off and a scattering of lawn mix laid down over the whole yard:





In case you were wondering, the brown patches are peat moss that the War Department laid over top of the grass seed so it wouldn't blow away. She claims it works, and when it comes to outside stuff, I know better than to argue with her. (Yes, it could be said that I should know better than to argue with her about the inside stuff, too, but where's the fun in that?)

All in all, it went amazingly smoothly, and it's quite the relief to get that finished up before the really bad weather comes. Pretty much the only complaint I had with the whole day (aside from needing THREE vitamin I before bed) was the outside supervisor:



NOT the sort of thing you want glaring down at you when loading a wheelbarrow with yet another load of dirt, I have to say... the inside guy is much more laid back.

Speaking of the inside, we have a hard deadline for prepping the office floors and we're going out of town this weekend, so we decided to start another project that would entail moving everything out of the workshop and storing it in the office where the carpet is going to go.

Yeah, it didn't make any more sense when I was typing it than it does reading it over again now...

Anyway, here's the pictures to explain.

Before before
This is what the workshop looks like (from both ends) most of the time:





Yeah, we're a tidy bunch.

Before
Here's what it looked like after we moved all the crap out and washed the floor down twice, once with TSP and once with muriatic acid:





After
And here's what it looks like after we painted it with an alkyd epoxy concrete paint from Rona, followed by waking up with terrible headaches from the fumes and Amy deciding to stay home from work and paint over the smelly paint with some good old Armor Coat from Crappy Tire:





Sadly, no after after yet; still have some painting left to do. Anyway, I think that's enough pictures for one post. I have more, but one of them is going to be a post in and of itself.

Oh, and coming soon: a break-down of all the different tasks and jobs involved in doing your own basement reno, together with a frank appraisal of whether they're worth doing on your own, or if you're better off hiring someone to do it properly. Er, for you. To do it for you. Yeah.


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Unexpected diversions

I'm sure it happens to everyone who renovates their own house. Hell, I'm sure it happens to people who aren't renovating their own house. But why does it seem to happen MORE when WE'RE renovating our house?

I'm speaking, of course, of those little things that go wrong with stuff in the house that are completely unrelated to whatever it is we happen to be working on. Here's a fun idea: let's make a list!

Here's a short, non-chronological (and probably incomplete) list of unrelated things that we've had to fix unexpectedly while working on the basement:

• front door sill


• kitchen drain


• bathroom sink drain


• my wisdom teeth


• refrigerator


• kitchen linoleum where we ripped it while moving the fridge


• dining room chairs (reupholstering)


• the cat

...and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm too tired to think of.

Oh, and of course, this weekend's very own unexpected diversion:



The damn garbageratormajig lost one of the little blades inside and was making an awful racket. Of course, this happened while I was in Prince George, so it took the War Department a couple of days to decide that MAYBE that loud, metallic grindy-type noise wasn't a usual thing, and maybe she should just not use it for a while.

Anyway, we got a new one, but holy hell, when did garbage disposal units get so damn pricey? Of course, we couldn't find the make and model of the one that was in there, so we had to completely dismantle the kitchen drain and put in the new one from scratch, but it's done, and really only took a couple of hours. Or three. No more than four, really.

Oh, and as an added bonus, the new one is called a Badger 5. Tee hee. (I spent the whole afternoon yelling "Snake!" It was awesome.)

Anyway, the real basement news is ... the painting is finished! Wheee!

That's right, we have officially finished the painting, and even put down a deposit on some very nice carpet. It's looking pretty sweet, even if I say so myself. And here's a schwack of pictures to prove it (I took some with and some without the flash so you could kind of see the colors in different light. I dunno if it worked though, I'm still trying to figure this camera out.)











(Needless to say, if you have any ideas on how I should go about building a proper cabinet for that gaping hole around the electrical panel, I'm all ears.)

All I have to do is pop in a couple more tapcons to crunch the floor right down and we're ready for the carpet guys.

Tapcons. Joy.


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All doors, all the time. Except when it's thresholds.

So, yeah. Doors are done. Well, except for the closet doors, which only just occurred to me as I was typing that.

Damn it.

Anyway, EXCEPT for the closet doors (which really only need to be hung - twenty minutes' work, tops) we're finished the doors. That includes the bathroom door, the office door, AND the workshop door.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, the War Department decided to fix a door that wasn't actually broken. No, wait. It WAS broken, we just didn't know it was broken until she started fixing it. Painting it, actually. She started painting it, and ... you know what? Let's just get on with this.

First up, here's the door between the office and the laundry room after we put up the trim and painted it white (of course):



And from the office side:



Must admit that it was a lot easier to set up the hardware on that door than it was the stuff on the workshop door. For one thing, we needed to get a new spindle and a new knob for it, and the ones they sell at Rona are those cheap-ass, tacky little fake brass things. Lucky for us, the Restore had a pair of knobs that matched the one we already had exactly, and the spindle for them to boot. Of course, we had to wander into the employees-only section of the store and pick through some contraband boxes, but they were nice enough to forgive that transgression and sell us the bits we needed.

And after much fiddling about with cork spacers, a 3/4-inch spade bit, and a little old-fashioned cursing and swearing, we've got the hardware installed (and working!) on the workshop door:



We've decided to leave the back of the door unpainted as it sort of fits in with the rugged look of the workshop (read: drab old concrete and exposed pipes):



And yes, I will EVENTUALLY finish that last little bit of drywall - I just have to patch the hole in the upstairs bathroom first so I know how much scrap I'm going to have left to work with.

The closet has been finished, caulked, painted, and touched up in preparation for hanging the closet doors (which won't actually go in until after the carpet):



And that's about it for the doors... oh, right! I seem to have mentioned a threshold and a certain little project of Amy's that took an interesting turn...

The War Department has been wanting to paint the threshold under our front door for quite some time. It's exposed to the worst of the weather, being at the southwest corner of the house and all, and she was worried that it wasn't going to make it through another wet and rainy winter. So while I fussed about making chili (Labour Day tradition, don't you know - goes great with Edmonton kicking Calgary's ASS ha ha ha!), she got the wire brush and sandpaper out there and set to cleaning up the threshold in preparation for painting.

This is sort of what the threshold looked like when she started (except it was still attached to the house, not sitting on our workbench):



Look okay, right? Maybe just a little brushing to get off that loose paint and some extra TLC? Well, not so much...

Shortly after the War Department got going with the wire brush, she peeled off a great big piece of caulking. And then another. And that's when she realized that the job was a little bigger than she thought. Turns out that the threshold had been broken for a while, and whoever had repaired it last hadn't taken it upon themselves to do it properly, but had just caulked up the biggest cracks and slapped another coat of (crappy) paint on it.

And this is the result after the caulking came off:



Yeah, that'll be FINE for a winter or two!

Anyway, it's a good thing chili gets better the longer you cook it because we had to let it sit for a couple of hours while we cleaned up the mess, cut a new threshold out of some pressure-treated lumber and installed it into the doorway:



Looks pretty innocuous just sitting there, but let me assure you that it took some precision cuts - and not just reciprocating saw precision, either! REAL precision.

Anyway, the gap under the door has been repaired and the house is safe from marauding wildlife - the stuff that doesn't already live inside, at any rate. I'm off to scenic (HA!) Prince George for a few days to help yet ANOTHER person move, so don't expect much progress in my absence. Unless Amy decides to bite the bullet and get the carpets done while I'm gone...


Shyeah. Right.
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The Really Important Stuff

Blah blah door blah blah trim blah blah paint blah blah blah...

PIE!!!!




Yeah. That's about all I have time or energy for right now. Check back tomorrow.



Maybe Tuesday.


Yeah.
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We seem to be running out of holes....

There seem to be fewer and fewer holes in the basement these days. Because we keep putting things in them or covering them up with other things. And no, not just random things we find lying around. Things that are supposed to go there. Things that we bought or built for that specific purpose.

It's actually somewhat freaky, to tell you the truth. Things are ... getting finished. Like, actually done-finished, not just finished-until-we-finish-this-other-part-we-needed-to-finish-first-and-then-we-can-do-more-work-on-it.

Yeah.

First off, we do have a small cause for celebration: we passed the final plumbing inspection! Woo! Couldn't have done it without Leonard, of course. The guy's an absolute gem.

With that all wrapped up, however, it was time to turn some serious attention to the trim and other bits of finishing that must be done before we can pass the final, FINAL inspection, the dreaded (and deservedly maligned) Final Occupancy Inspection(tm).

Not that the inspector is likely to care how much attention to detail we apply when filling nail holes and sanding the edges of things, but that's more for our benefit anyway.

Oh, and something I think I forgot last post: we installed one more of the doors in the basement, the one between the office and the laundry room:





We had to put that in as a barrier to keep the cats out of the office while we were sanding, prepping, priming, sanding, painting, caulking, and painting the window wells. They're still crooked, but at least they're white, shiny, and crooked:





Oh, and did I mention, done?

Anyway, the big project this past week was the built-in bookcase. (You can see the hole it's supposed to go into in the second of the two pictures of the door up there- the big hole to the right, with all the crap sitting in it.)

I, of course, had never built a built-in book case before, but I know someone who has. And he just happened to be in town this week! Amazing coincidence, that, eh?

So poor Top Brass Pa had to spend his Saturday on vacation helping me manoeuver a jinormous sheet of 3/4-inch good-one-side plywood around on top of the table saw out in the driveway. He was very gracious about it, however, and I must admit that I probably couldn't have done it without him. That's not to say that he actually did any of the work, mind you - I made every measurement, cut, and tool mark on the bookcase myself - but his advice was invaluable, and he was always on hand to catch the pieces of lumber as they came off the other end of the table saw. (I actually only made one wrong cut - and we had enough spare wood from the sheet that it didn't matter at all. For me, that's pretty damn good!)

What we did was to take some measurements of the hole and design the shelf layout on paper. We then built a box, complete with back, that could be lifted right into position on the two-by-four supports I had built into the wall when I framed it. Overall, it worked like a freaking charm.

So here's my wee beauty after we sledge-hammered it into position (it was a shade tight on the bottom. Just a little):



And just in case you thought it was a simple matter of nailing some boards together, think again:



All of the shelves are dado cuts - and yes, that took a lot longer to do it that way. Nearly the whole day, in fact.

Here it is with the trim around it and the edge pieces glued and nailed into the shelf faces (the tape is just to hold the trim until the glue sets - it's not staying, no matter how well you think it matched the colour scheme):



And yes, the nails in the trim are some of the holes we've spent the rest of the weekend filling.

Among the other holes-that-aren't-holes-anymore, are the two heating vents and the cold air return:







And that's about it for this update. I'm hoping to do the final sanding on the trim for the door and bookcase tomorrow, followed by a coat of primer on the bookcase. Then it's paint, paint, paint. Oh, and caulking of course. And then some painting.

But damn me to hell if it isn't starting to look like a real room!



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