Rehabber’s Rehab

This holiday season was filled with fun and sadness, and between the two, and the house, I am worn out. However, we have started to turn a corner. It had seemed like everything that had happened until now was progressively making my life worse and worse. Everything was dirty all of the time, the dust had spiraled completely out of control. We lost electricity in half of the house, there was no shower, the only toilet was in the stinky make-shirt bathroom in the basement. To top it all off, it was cold. Really, really, cold. all of the insulation had been removed from the back of the house in re-doing the sunroom, and it was making winter in Chicago pretty unbearable.

So we retreated to my mom’s for a month, but now we’re back.  The cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom are in, the floors look awsome, and there is consistent electricity, including overhead lighting in the living room (a rarity in Oak Park), and now, we finally have the refrigerator actually in the kitchen.

This past weekend was spent on a few miscellaneous projects.  We got the the window trim all put back up, in the dining room and main bedroom and it looks great.  The new continuous window sil blends in beautifully with the rest of the original trim.  Matt and Thor also got the refridgerator put into it’s built-in cabinet.  And it works, too.  Probably the biggest task was getting the giant bathroom linen closet cabinet in.  A good 2 hours was spent with Thor and Matt locked in the bathroom as they tried to lift the cabinet in and maneuver it into place with about a 2 in area of wiggle room.  They got it in, and trimmed out.  We just need to finish drywalling in the top area around it.  Meanwhile I worked on stripping the door to the basement in hopes that putting that back up will help keep the house warm.  We will get there.

Thursday

On my lunch break I took a trip to Costco to stock up for the soon arriving horde (the Martin’s, Matt, my Dad and Granddad), the main essentials being snacks (dips, crackers), bottled water (even though the tap water in Chicago is very good), and most importantly Gatorade. Gotta keep the workers happy, otherwise they are running out every five minutes to pick this stuff up. After work it was off to the paint store. Thor and I were determined not to repeat our earlier mistake of just buying paint and putting it up, so we bought about 7 samples of paint for the living room. It’s actually pretty nice that our Benjamin Moore store sells tiny samples that you can put up and try out for only about 3 dollars. I wanted blues, he wanted greens, and we wanted to paint one wall a neutral color. I figured we’d put them up and duke it out. (more…)

OK I might leave the dramatic reveal to Liz’s post about work weekend 1.1, but the front half of the house is looking about 80% done.

Once I took off my cranky pants on Sunday after a frustrating start, a surprise call into work, and having to re-stain some trim that didn’t turn out, the Martin crew was able to wrap up the trim, crown molding, baseboards, and shoe for all of the doors and rooms in the front half of the house.

I was so happy with the way everything turned out and how much we got done.  I am so grateful to my family for all the work they did and the fun that they had doing it.  Sometimes rehabbing can become overwhelming because there is so much to be done just to start doing additional work.  Couple that with an unforeseeable completion and trying to live through the repeated cleanings and messings, cleaning and messings and your life quickly becomes on the verge of breakdown everyday. (more…)

When we got back from our rafting trip in Pennsylvania this Labor Day weekend, we returned to our half painted office and all disorganized house.

There seems to be a strange phenomenon in the house that as you work in the evenings, instead of cooling down the house gets hotter.  Maybe the stucco house releases heat stored up in the day as the evening goes on.  By the end of the evening I felt like I had spent an hour sweating it out at a bad spa and we finished putting up the paint on the walls of the office.  We painted the office “spinning wheel” by dutch boy, and decided not to change the color any (we were debating making it lighter), and are in retrospect both pretty happy with the results.  I’m leaving the trim white.

The office is not part of the great trim reclaiming project since if we do decide to add on a second story, this room is currently the top contender for where the stairs will go.  No point is doing a lot of work on it when it might all just be ripped out.  Plus it will be nice to have at least one room that is done.

Still to do: touch up the trim, paint the pink closet white and put up a curtain over the closet.

I have two words for you: Heat Gun.

I fell in love with this device about 5 seconds after using it when the paint began to bubble and peel off immediately.  My previous experiences working with chemical strippers left me frustrated and with unattractive results. 

Perhaps they are more effective if you are not attempting to remove 10 layers of paint at once. After a couple of hours of layering on the stripper, waiting for it to work, scraping off some of the paint and then repeating this process again and again, only to be left with wood that looked uneven and splotchy, I was considering giving up and giving in and just paint it all.  I decided to try another chemical that is supposed to remove 7 layers of paint (right up my alley) and be stronger than the others.  I would say it was even less effective than the others.

I thought I’d give it one last try with the heat gun, and after about 5 minutes of fiddling with it to get the hang of it, I was removing paint in long strips leaving a clean board behind. So, here is my how to strip paint with the heat gun: (more…)