Up and at ’em

Posted by aaron in driveway, landscaping, outside, painting on 29 June 2011

This morning, accomplished a few things, which is good because my afternoons are all Hamlet and my evenings are becoming time for other things. Plus no one likes hammering in their neighborhood at 7pm.

  • More leveling and gravelling – almost done, maybe, I think, perhaps
  • Nailed part of one wall of shingles, almost ready to paint.
  • Transplanted another tree from the edge of the new parking spaces to replace the old dying walnut in the backyard. We’ll see if I didn’t kill this one like I did the last. Note: When digging up a seedling, always dig wider than you’d think, then deeper than you’d think, to avoid the taproot.

No Comments

Today…

Posted by aaron in outside, painting on 29 June 2011

Did some scraping on the west side of house to prep for nailing and maybe painting tomorrow AM.

No Comments

Gravelgravelgravelgravel

Posted by aaron in driveway, outside on 28 June 2011

That is all.

No Comments

More stuff

Posted by aaron in outside, tools and materials on 27 June 2011

A gravel expansion of angled parking spaces next to my still technically gravel driveway continued apace today. Details and pictures soon, when it’s complete. So maybe not so soon, really.

And also today, two revelations about mulberries:

1) They are delicious. I knew they were edible, and had even started looking up things one can make with them online, but hadn’t actually tried real nice ripe ones until today whilst wandering around the yard talking on the phone with an old friend.

2) They stain things. I knew they stained my hands and the tarps on which they’ve fallen over the last few years, but I just realized that maybe they could also stain wood. This could add an interesting, very purple, twist on projects in the future.

Related – noticed that the black walnut by the driveway is bearing fruit this year, so homemade stain plans are definitely back on the agenda for fall.

No Comments

Stuff happened…

Posted by aaron in Uncategorized on 20 June 2011

But I was either in Hamlet rehearsals or sick over the weekend, and thus wasn’t really a part of them.

Work resumes on the house later today. I think.

No Comments

It continues to be the little things…

Posted by aaron in furniture, outside, shed on 8 June 2011

  • Shopped for flanges for this really clever bookcase thing I’m building. No really, it’s going to be awesome. Someday. Particularly if I can find the pipe fittings I want ideally a) with a patina and b) for not $10-20 apiece. Someone just suggested the local Habitat ReStore which I’ll need to look at soon.
  • Moved things about in the shed. Again. I really should have built a garage. Let this be a lesson to all new homeowners, especially those who like to build things like I do. You’re going to need space for the tools and supplies. More space than you think.
  • Measured the doors I rescued from a house that was slated for demolition to see if I can swap any in for my upstairs bedroom doors. The upstairs doors need restoration attention, which they probably won’t get for a while, so meanwhile I think giving them temporary replacements (and similarly old replacements at that) is a good idea.

No Comments

Back to the small stuff

Posted by aaron in furniture, outside on 7 June 2011

In an effort to keep myself blogging, but also to demonstrate to anyone reading this (Bueller?) how it’s a lot of little things that eventually get you a really nice looking old house, I’m going to try and post, often sans pictures, what I’ve done on the house each day, even if that’s just prep or minor work.

Today –

  • replaced several shingles (there’s a post in itself…)
  • prepped a bunch more for painting
  • marked off the beams for an all-reclaimed-materials bookcase
  • got the drill press running and did a test drilling for said bookcase
  • trimmed off some old shingles so they can be reused
This was a day off from OSTF, though, so no promises anything this exciting will happen the rest of this week…

No Comments

Rabbit-proof fence?

Posted by aaron in garden, outside on 16 May 2011

Another old project which I am only now posting. With plans for some garden space (in place of lawn) came the realization that there are rabbits bounding about my town much of the year. Some fencing was in order.

First, to prep the space… I pulled sod in a roughly 8′ x 4′ rectangle next to the existing flower beds, and I think I came across a footer or something connected with the old old old porch stairs that likely came off the front under the peaked roof.

With the space cleared and major rocks and roots removed, I laid a ‘path’ using salvaged bricks so I could access both ‘plots’ easily.

Fill in with several inches of topsoil…

And now for the fences. These held up fine in the ensuing winter, but they were definitely a temporary solution – although a good way to use existing materials, I think. I started by pulling the screen – some fiberglass/nylon, some maybe aluminum – from the frames of old storm windows I hadn’t yet dragged to the scrap yard.

Once again, my 1″x1″ poles were turned into stakes with a quick miter. I then cut the screen maybe 5 inches wide and attached the runs to stakes with ye olde staple gun.

As with the raised beds out back I found it easiest to attach no more than two walls at a time, and then complete the sides after the first walls are in the ground. You may also want to carve some trenches along where the screens will run first (you want them to be even a little bit underground so gaps don’t open up between earth and barrier) to make it easier for yourself as you lay in the stakes, the screens, and then refill with some dirt.

And here’s what you get when you drop some plants in your now rabbit-proof plots:

Update:
And here’s about half of the unused tomatoes at the end of the season. Half. The rest went to a friend who swears she could live on fried green tomatoes, and had to prove it after my delivery.

No Comments

Bringing down the house

Posted by aaron in neighborhood on 30 March 2011

It’s an easy title, and I’m lazy right now.

A house across the street was under full renovation – interior stripped back to studs, entire structure floating on jacks while a full basement with new, taller foundation was built. Unfortunately the owner – Joe Orbeck, a great man with which to have a conversation, about houses or life – was sidelined for a long while with illness, and the house shell was eventually condemned. It, and a half dozen or more houses around town, was taken down using Recovery Act dollars.

Bruce around the corner, me, and a few others managed to salvage some usable materials before the demo crew came through – with Joe’s blessing of course – but it was still a shame to see those old, strong, straight beams get torn apart and tossed into dump trucks.

No Comments

Stair carpeting

Posted by aaron in stairway on 27 February 2011

This project only took an afternoon – a few hours, really, not counting picking up materials – making me wish I hadn’t put it off for so long under the assumption it would take forever. Like so many other things in my house, such as that bathroom rewiring project, or learning Spanish.
Learn from my mistakes/laziness and, if you have a set of bare wooden stairs of your own, don’t wait to get them covered with a runner. It reduces noise by a ton and cuts down on wear to boot.

I’d picked up a roll of carpet remainder for $15 at Home Depot a while back – the color matched what I was thinking of doing upstairs, and the width was less than the width of the stairs. All in all, it was a serendipitous find, but you should be able to locate a strip of carpeting that meets your needs by heading to any floor-covering store. (Yours, for example, may even reach all the way to the bottom of the staircase. I wasn’t concerned about that because most of the creaking noise I wanted to muffle came from the top of the stairs, and this is definitely a semi-permanent renovation, much more functional that aesthetic.) A floor coverings store is also a good place to pick up the carpet padding you’ll need:

Get the heaviest type they have to muffle the most sound. A good set of shears (I still use a pair made by Chicago Cutlery for this and many other projects) will cut through the padding without much problem.
A note on amounts – the way I did this project, I only put padding on the stair treads, not underneath all the carpet, not even on the risers which some online plans suggest. As a result, I had bought enough carpet padding to go beneath the total square footage of the carpet runner, but wound up using less than half of it. To follow these plans, you’re only cutting out rectangles that are roughly the depth of the tread minus one inch and the width of the *carpet* minus two inches. You might consider buying less padding as a result.

A measuring tape, sharpie, straight edge, and shears are all the s-based tools you should need to cut out the sections of padding.

Cut, place, measure, and remeasure before applying any fasteners. You may have a fun situation like I did where the runner grew wider along its length, almost an inch-and-a-half from one end to the other. You can compensate by cutting a few of the padding rectangles wider to match, or you can not care like I did. Either way, you’re simply centering the padding on the tread, ‘grid’ side up:

A staple gun with 10mm staples was enough to hold the padding in place. I put at least 10 staples into each piece, four each along the top and bottom, and one additional centered on the sides.

Next came the part where I learned why most online guides to carpeting stairs encourage you to have some specialized tools, like knee kickers and stair tools. This project is far from impossible to complete without them, but it likely would have gone much quicker with them. It also might have gone faster with a partner, but the wrong pair could just as easily get in each other’s way. Again, I did this myself with just a hammer and tacks, and it’s holding up fine.

Start at the very top stair, back of the tread. Line the carpet up as squarely as appropriate so the runner doesn’t veer to the side down the stairs – you’re going to wind up straddling the runner a little awkwardly, especially at first, but once you have the first riser’s worth nailed down it gets a lot easier to manage. I started with just a nail in each back corner to hold things in place while I double checked that everything was positioned the way I wanted, then sank several more at the back of that first riser. From here on out, I followed a simple two-part formula:
1) Work small, work tight. Pull, push, smooth, and hold (with your free hand) each section of carpet on which you are working, generally about a riser and a tread’s worth at a time. Look ahead and behind to make sure you’re not bunching the carpet, and once you’re set, hammer it down:
2) Work from one side of the stair to the other. This will help with the above. I wound up with a nailing pattern very similar to my stapling pattern, generally with one fewer nail across and one more nail along the depth.
Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat, and if then get out the utility knife and/or shears to trim the very bottom.
One other note – keep all the nails to the edges of the carpet. The padding should already be affixed to the stairs, so worry about keeping the carpet from moving – and avoiding any partially sunk nails in areas where feet are more likely to fall.

No Comments