All You Can Eat!

Sunday I pulled most of the baseboards. Man, you don't realize how many miles of baseboard a dwelling has until you're on your knees trying to tease it out of the wall without splitting the wood. The first half of the job, I tried to drive the nails all the way through with a nail set so I could just pull the boards off. Well, that worked for the most part when I could actually find the nail heads. But as the evening hours quickly approached, I figured I'd give the neighbors a break from all the hammering and sounds of me dropping the hammer or pry bar on the floor after smashing my fingers. All I had left to do was the closets, but I had enough for one day. When you can’t determine from where the blood on your jeans originated, it’s time to stop.

One curious feature I discovered behind one of the bedroom baseboards was a hole in the sheetrock. It didn’t go through the baseboard, so I ruled out rodentia. Then it occurred to me that I was looking at termite damage because there was sawdust and channels in the back of the baseboard. Before getting into that, I’ll provide a little history of the condo complex.

The complex was built in stages in the early nineties. Our building is one of the more recent buildings. It’s abundantly clear to me that in each building, the job went to the lowest bidder. Hell, they may have even done it for beer or a spiral ham. There are countless examples of egregious shortcuts, inferior building materials, and overall poor workmanship evident in each structure. For example, the siding was actually painted pressboard. Not surprisingly, the stuff quickly deteriorated in rain, rotted, and became an all-you-can-eat buffet for termites and carpenter ants. This went unchecked for years because we had numerous unscrupulous management companies “taking care” of the condos. Long story short, the only thing they took was our money and left the condo owners with huge repair bills and dilapidated buildings.

We are now self-managed and it’s never been better. Work that should have been taken care of over a decade ago has been addressed, and we’re finally getting to the point where we can keep up on repairs.

Back to the termite damage. I called our resident maintenance manager and he confirmed that it was indeed the work of termites. The good news was that it was an old nest, long since abandoned. The damage occurred prior to the new siding installation, and the termite problem was addressed a couple years ago.

After a great Christmas with the family, we got back to work yesterday. We had the lovely and talented Laulau helping us out, and I got back to removing the rest of the baseboards from the closets. Lau and LF painted the perimeter of the ceiling by hand so when it comes time to use the power roller to paint, the edges will have already been taken care of. Then we filled the million nail holes on the baseboards, and I sanded them all down later in the day. Again, the evening quickly approached, so I gave the neighbors a much-needed reprieve from my orbital sander (why do those things have to be so loud?).

Next step: ceiling painting!

Bob Joe

My dear friend and bandmate Bob has been providing/fueling me with unbelievable home-roasted coffee for a couple years now. What started out for him as a great Christmas present to give friends and family has finally become a business.

My bride and I simply refer to it as Bob Joe. The real name of his grassroots operation is Rollercoaster Roasters®. Driving home from practice with a brand new bag of his coffee is an olfactory celebration, and man, I can not WAIT to quaff its full-bodied and almost chocolatey goodness the next day. "Robust" is too pedestrian a descriptor.

As I see Bob with some regularity at band practice (not meaning that I'm actually privy to his regularity, mind you), I get my Bob Joe delivered in person. However, you can order it online and have it shipped.

Do it. You'll be glad you did.

Patchwork

Here's the latest on Operation Condo Refurb:

1. We've packed up yet even more stuff. Members of our collective unbelievable family have offered to store some of our stuff while we get things in order, even though they don't have any room for it either.
1.2. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I am tempted to throw out everything we own.
1.2b Having to move said items whenever you need to get to something else reinforces this fact.
1.2c I think we are creating a compelling argument for being able to subsist with just three towels, two kitchen knives, a place setting for two, and a bed. Oh, and LOTS of coffee.
1.3. Now that everything's all packed up and stored elsewhere, I of course discover that I need something that I have 326 of stored in another town (1/8" phone jack adapter).

2. We have begun patching the walls. In the seven years we've lived there, I have made Swiss cheese of these walls. My guitar hangers (there were six) each require two very large anchors. When removed, this translates into twelve large holes. We had some hanging plants that required some sizable butterfly anchors in the ceiling as well. Since it is such a small living space, we have reconfigured the furniture arrangement countless times. This means that pictures whose locations made perfect sense before also need to be moved. So, more anchors in a new location, and perhaps some crafty wall hanging to cover up the old anchors because I was too lazy to patch the old holes.

2.1. We are now paying for that laziness.

2.2. Next house? NO ANCHORS.

3. Friday we start sanding stuff down and washing the walls.

Dust Bowl

We’re now entering Phase Two of…647 of the Wee Condo Remodeling. We had 700 square feet of wood flooring delivered yesterday, as well as a dishwasher.

I installed the dishwasher as soon as it arrived. The old one had been out of commission for about a year or so, and we decided not to replace it until it was time to sell the condo. Well, the old one had been sealed up for a good long while, and man, did it STINK. I advised the delivery guys that they should not open it under any circumstances, other than to maybe induce vomiting.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I removed all the carpeting a couple weeks ago in preparation for laying down a wood floor. Carpeting conceals a multitude of sins. If you tell someone, anyone, that you’re going to pull up your carpet, they inevitably tell you “Wait. Just wait until you see what’s underneath.” Their inflection almost has a wink in it, as if you’re about to be initiated into some secret society.

Well, I found neither Jimmy Hoffa nor Al Capone's hidden fortune. What I did find was about 387 cubic yards of ground-up sand, a cigarette butt, and an unfortunate amount of shortcuts. For example, the space between where my floor meets the walls, a rift of four to ten inches, is filled in with a moat of plaster. I’m going to have to chip it out because as the building settled, the plaster moat raised like some half-assed glacier. Sexy-looking mold too, huh? Awesome.





This explains why any time I put a piece of furniture up against the wall, it tilted forward. My grandfather clock always glared at me as if to say, “uh, you gonna shim me or what, buddy (it's from NJ)?”

The carpet padding was as supportive as wet toast, and it appears it was stapled down by a staple gun on shore leave. He just went nuts. It’s been a couple weeks and I’m still pulling those stupid staples.

I hemmed and hawed about what to put down. Do I go cheap and install Pergo or the like, or bite the bullet and put down thick, actual wood? I took my father’s advice and went with wood—3/4” solid oak, as it's a much better selling point.

It was a big bullet.

We now have 35 boxes of flooring stacked in our dining room/living room. We tried to plan ahead as much as we could so we wouldn’t have to move that pile until it was time to put the floor down, but since the place is so small, there really was no “good” place to put them. So, we are now living among the squalor you see in the pictures (yes, I know they're blurry--I was in a hurry this morning). We started packing things up in boxes so they'd be protected and easier to move around as we need to, and we've had an overwhelming compulsion the throw out everything we own. To get to anything, we have to move stuff around like a sliding puzzle.



Picture and guitar hanger removal and spackling is next. You'll notice our walls are green and copper. That's a big reason why we're repainting. White. The floor can't go in until we're done painting, and that's from the ceiling on down. I for one will be glad when it's all done, because right now we're just walking around on bare plywood, and I have yet to put on a pair of pants cleanly.