Forest for the Trees

Here are pictures of the floor, at long last. We still have a lot of detail work to do, but it’s reeeally nice to have the place back to a livable condition (that I actually am not compelled to run from all the time). I refrained from detailed bedroom shots because I still have to replace all the closet doors, and it looks rather unattractive as-is. Those are coming later.

It's interesting...because I was so intent on just getting this done, I wasn't able to appreciate the incredible metamorphosis that transpired. I had to get away from it for a day and come back with fresh eyes to really take it in. I love it.

Click to enlarge.

Getting There

Just a quick update on the renovation. The wood floor is down, closets and trim are painted, and the trim is back up. The floor installation started on Sunday and finished exactly a week later, working about eight hours per day. Judging by how many nails I had left over (there were 1,000 per box), it took 2900 swings of the hammer to get the job done. I'll be taking some pictures this weekend once we get the place in a better state (read: organized) and will post them next week.

The kitchen originally had some super-cheap, bottom shelf vinyl, and we were going to replace it with a nicer-colored, thicker vinyl. At the last minute, we decided to skip the vinyl and go with wood. Because there was carpet originally, there was 1/4" underlayment to match the height of the carpet. So, in order for the wood pattern to remain consistent and not have some awkward-looking transition, I had to remove the underlayment and lay down a 3/4" section of plywood under the stove. These pictures are of me ripping up the underlayment and vinyl. That was a job-and-a-half. Click to enlarge.

More pictures are coming up next week. They'll be in focus, too. This particular digital camera can't seem to handle anything other than sunlight, so the shutter speed is too slow. Tripod time.

Renovation Invigoration

I've been getting a lot of "how's the condo renovation coming?" questions lately, so I'll post an update.

We have finished painting the walls, and man, what a difference. Whereas virtually every wall was a different shade of green (aside from the one copper wall), everything is now either white or antique white. The bathroom is completely done, save for caulking and maybe floor replacement. I still don't know what I'm going to do about the floor. It's your typical off-the-shelf, contractor grade vinyl flooring. It looks okay, but...just okay. The vanity is passable.

During this week, I'm going to level the floor, meaning that I have to take down whatever high spots exist before I can even think of putting the wood flooring down. The high spots are either in the form of patches and shims that have somehow risen over time, ridges from a sloppily poured foundation (cleverly disguised under the carpet), or any one of the million carpet padding staples I keep stumbling upon. I started out Saturday morning with the intention of getting the floor leveled by using leveling compound and a belt sander, but I just couldn’t get my mind around how I was going to be able to lay the first couple rows down, because the starting point was on that plaster moat I mentioned in an earlier post. Long story short, I consulted The Great Oracle, my father, and he made suggestions that were much easier to live with. We measured this, chalk-lined that, and began to marvel at what a geometric nightmare my condo is. You’d be hard-pressed to find a square in the entire joint. It’s seemingly all 45-degree angles. We are going to have to make a ridiculous amount of complicated cuts with the chop saw. And that’s even before the closet floors get done. Regardless, I’m newly recharged and can’t wait to get going for three reasons:

1. Walking on bare, dirty, splintery, paint-splashed plywood for five months has grown tiresome
2. I get to reclaim floor space from the 700 square feet of wood stacked in my dining room
3. See #1

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, my father, Terzo, and I are going to start laying down the floor starting Sunday. I’m taking the week off so I can finish it, and also because I’m hoping no one will be home in the surrounding condos during the day. I don’t imagine anyone would be especially delighted to hear the droning of my air compressor, nail guns, shop vac, and chop and table saws. I know I wouldn't be.

A couple weeks ago, LF and I went down to see Jefe and Lau to check out the house they bought on the Cape. They went through hell and back to get it, and they’ve found themselves a little gem. Once I got a look at the basement in which one could practically land a plane, the flame was reignited under my butt to get the condo finished. All that beautiful…beautiful…beautiful ROOM! To be able to work on something automotive/electronic/instrumental/bicyclical in an actual workshop instead my kitchen table or standing at my dresser is the stuff of dreams.

Though tremendous strides have been made (albeit in fits and starts), there's still a lot to do.

Paint the two bedroom closets
Replace closet doors (the current ones are only a ¼ step above cardboard)
Replace busted-up trim
Paint the miles of existing trim
Replace the kitchen floor (material yet to be determined)
Replace the heat pump
New draperies/curtains that LF (aka Coolest Ever) will make (sweet, sweet privacy at last).
Caulking
Overall touch-up

Stay tuned. Here's some before and after shots. Click to enlarge.

Primed And Ready

Sunday we primed the walls. Fortunately, we were able to ply the help of Jefe, Lau, and H with beer and food. I’m sure they would’ve done it for nothing, but LF and I rather enjoy feeding people, and we reeeally appreciated the help. We started early in the day and finally stopped painting at around 8:00 or so. Cleanup is the part I always conveniently forget to account for, so that added another two hours.



Interestingly, the copper wall covered with the least amount of effort. The green walls, however, were a different story entirely. We opted to prime every wall in the place, and two coats were required. A five gallon bucket of primer was just enough to do the whole condo. So, even though all the walls are just primed right now, it’s stark white and I have a better idea of what the end result will look like because we’re just going with plain ol’ white paint. It looks great.


We still have a ton more work to do, but it’s progressing nicely. The bathroom and kitchen will get worked on this weekend, and next weekend we will start painting. I’ve replaced a couple light fixtures and continue to find places that need a skim coat of spackle. The baseboards, all 621 miles of it, might also get painted next weekend. Somewhere down the line I’m going to replace our closets’ bi-fold doors. They’re just pressboard and don’t age well. Well, they are 17 years old, after all. The screws that hold the hinges on no longer bite, and they’re just floppy and worn anyway.

What else does this mean?

The flooring phase is coming up very soon, and I have to admit that I’m dreading it. I have a great deal of floor prep that needs to be done before I lay it down, mostly in dealing with the perimeter of the floor where the plywood meets (or doesn’t meet) the foundation. This will be done via floor leveling compound and/or shims. What I’m mostly worried about is the noise. I grew up on the NJ shore, and my grandparents owned a rental apartment that was attached to their house. It was instilled in every generation that lived or visited there that they had to be quiet so as not to disturb the tenants. That principle has stuck with me all my life and everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve been extremely considerate to my neighbors. This will be virtually impossible when I lay down the floor because I’m using an air compressor, pneumatic floor nailer, and a chop saw. This job will take at least a couple days, and as it is, I can’t even chop up an onion without my neighbor’s dog freaking out.

Look Up. Keep Looking.

We painted the ceiling Saturday. I picked up a Wagner power roller, and not having to dip the roller in the paint tray every fifteen seconds made the purchase alone worth it. Other than that, though, it was still painting as usual. I spent the day looking up and getting the odd paint spatter in my mouth. I had on safety glasses to keep the stuff out my eyes, so I couldn't use a face mask because it fogged up my glasses.

The paint we used is true ceiling paint. It goes on pink and dries bright white, so you can see where or if you missed a spot. I really can not recommend this paint enough. It's a brilliant concept that works beautifully, and we actually use spackle that is based on the same concept.

Next: priming!

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!

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.

Are They Bikes or Rabbits?

My lady fair and I are revamping the condo because we reeeeeally want to sell it and get an actual house. With closets. And no one attached to our walls or ceiling. And maybe, just maybe, a garage or basement. This past Saturday while LF was at work, I pulled all the carpeting up because we want to replace it with a wood floor. The carpet was crap to begin with, and three cats and their clumsy owners have done nothing to help its sorry state. I may dedicate a series of posts to this process, so stay tuned.

I started at around 8:30 in the morning and finished about twelve hours later. Well, I didn’t finish completely; I got all the carpeting, padding, and tack strips out. I simply didn’t have the energy left to remove the seven billion little staples that held down the padding. Mustering up what little juice I had left, I dragged the old carpet out to the rented dumpster. The Condo Association rents a large dumpster twice a year so owners can unload accumulated detritus from their basement storage units. They also do this so that if there are any renovations, the owners have a place to throw the debris rather than jam our usual dumpster. The Association is absolutely instrumental in the NO OLD APPLIANCES policy, but inevitably the policy gets violated. There’s always some schmuck who throws in a microwave, TV, or dishwasher in there.

I made the first trip with the super-silty carpet scraps, and it was completely dark where the dumpster sat. Under the pile of debris, I could see a glinting bicycle wheel.

Hmm...

I pulled on the wheel and out came a bike. All I could read was "Raleigh". So, I hauled it into the house, and it's a burgundy Raleigh Record 12-speed in fantastic shape. I pumped up the tires and took it for a ride—never taking into consideration that it’s pitch black outside and I haven’t even checked if the brakes work or if the front wheel is on tight--and it's a nice and solid little bike. All it really needs is a polish and some tires, and it’d be a capable road bike once again. I'd put its vintage at somewhere from the 80s. Naturally, I immediately started scheming all the things I could do with it. I could takes its alloy wheels which are the exact size of Walt’s and sell the frame. I could strip it down and turn it into a nice little fixie (what I would probably like to do most). Or, I could just leave it as-is and use it as a road bike. There are many options, but it all comes down to this:

Where the hell would I keep this one?

And yes, for those at home keeping score, I now have six bikes. I’m a sucker for strays. What can I tell ya.