Rooting Out the Source of Chad’s Tears Falls

What was the problem? We finally figured it out. It wasn’t that I drove a screw through a pipe when installing the sink. It also wasn’t that the Irishman did any damage with his power nailer. (And when I dropped by to offer this suggestion he didn’t take too kindly to the idea.)

No, it was something much dumber. When I turned the water on for the second time, my dad had both his hands inside the pipe chase and found nothing. But then he looked behind him and saw water dribble out through one of those holes I poked.

What a relief. I very nearly had to turn the water on for a third time. But how did the wetness start several feet away from the water lines?

An abandoned pipe in the wall.

Yep. It was just in there. Uncapped but still connected to the manifold with a shutoff valve labeled “Master Bath Lav 1.” That is now quite possibly the dirtiest word in the English language. And that’s saying a lot. Remember, i live next door to an Irishaman. But nothing that came out of his mouth ever led to effectively turning on a garden hose inside my walls.

Now… how exactly did this happen? I think I know the answer. I like my plumber, but the laborer who used to work with him is an imbecile. Like, remember the old red desk that I was starting to spruce up for my cousin?

I had the top unscrewed and leaning against the desk, and the plumber’s guy found it and NAILED IT TO THE BASEMENT WALL. I had to phone the plumber and tell him that he used a piece of an antique that had been in my family for 4 generations. Now it has a new top made of solid poplar… courtesy of the Irishman. The both of them are lucky that the chipped veneer has made it forever a paint grade piece of furniture.

Back to my problem, this same idiot saw lines going up for 2 bathroom sinks and abandoned one of them. Because clearly that was a mistake and one of them should be pulled out, right. So now my 2 sinks tee off from the same supply supply line. No big deal. Right?

Not until it is. Because that abandoned pipe was still hooked up. The good news is it looks like it’s all drying out. Air is moving through the insides of that wall. Humidity is low. With a little bit of luck we’ll be painting the room Easter Sunday.

Tracks of My Tears

The start of the weekend was ordinary. I decided that yes, I do like that green in the bedroom. The photos I took at night show the color better even though the room looks better now. Even my dad, who is not a green person, likes it now. (Actually he had told me to ignore his opinion because he might be biased against the color.)

My dad cut in around the ceiling because my hands aren’t steady enough. I decided that part of the job was healing from the frantic job of cleaning out the house and (even after excruciating organizing work) shoving it into the basement. The good news is that although I haven’t known where things were for months, they were surprisingly easy to find in the well-organized clutter down there.

And I found my bathroom stuff. It was piled in buckets.

Soon to be unpacked into a proper bathroom!

Anyways, I got the bathroom sink hooked up. I found the Teflon tape and connected the water lines. That’s right, I found something. In my house.

And this morning I went to turn it on. I found the cold water, opened the valve, and heard that little burst when the pipes fill up. Then I turned on the hot and heard it run. Hmm. I guess I had the sink faucet on when I installed it.

I ran upstairs and it was not on. But at this point I could hear dripping. Back downstairs, I could see that the dripping was from a recessed light that had turned into a waterfall.

Chad’s Tears Falls were dry by the time I took this photo. Those holes to the left I stabbed into my brand new freshly painted drywall to try to figure out what was going on. My dad came into town (on his yard work day) and brought me this wonderful orange contraption. We cut a hole in the wall so it would blow air in.

Then we started cutting holes to find where the leak came from. I figured that I drove a screw through a pipe when I installed the sink.

Nope. Nuttin’. These holes are dry as a bone. They are not the source to Chad’s Tears Falls. They must be in the kitchen. So we cut a few holes in there.

Nope. False alarms all three. We could find no evidence of holes punched in the pipes. So I went downstairs while my dad was on the ladder watching all 3 of these holes (including the one that’s been closed up in the photo) and did the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I re-opened the water supply to Chad’s Tears Falls. And I shut it again after like 10 seconds. My dad found nothing. But just as I was bracing myself to open it again and open it bigger, he said, “Wait, where is all this water coming from?”

TO BE CONTINUED

Real Paint Begins: Flirting with Buyer’s Remorse

My dad came down and helped me bang out some painting yesterday and today. We did the bathroom, all 4 closets, and the ceilings in the upstairs hall and back bedroom.

Both colors I got in the back bedroom were MUCH darker than I was expecting.

I don’t know if that photo shows the colors. But when the first coat went on the ceiling, I said eep! It’s so dark! Maybe we’ll go a tinge lighter on the second coat. And then I used up all the paint on the closets. But then it dried and my dad and I decided that it actually looked kinda good. And then I kept it and bought a second gallon of the same stony grey for the ceiling. And once again used it up on the closets. The room is darker than I expected, but the lighting should be good so I’m calling that fine.

But then I wondered how the brighter white trim would look against everything else. So I brought up the radiator and pulled back the drop cloths so we can pretend.

Yep, I still think it’s fine!

So in the bathroom I flirted with buyer’s remorse but ended up sticking with the colors I picked. That may not be so in the back bedroom. The room gets the best light in the house in the mornings. The front windows will get great light in the afternoons once I’m able to remove the awnings. But that might be a while. But anyways, I wanted a color that would glow in the sun. And since it’s just a bedroom, I figured it could be a bit more vivid than the rest of the house. And I guess I let my longing for spring to get the better of me. So here’s what I bought.

Now that I have a couple inches on every corner, or the size of about a thousand swatches, I have to wonder what I was thinking. My dad said called it basement paint. He may have a point. This might be cheery on pegboard in a dingy unfinished room that gets little natural light. But here’s what I’m thinking of doing. I could save it for random uses like that, but I’m too cheap to let a gallon of premium paint go to waste. Also, I’m not sure if a single gallon will finish the room. So I’m thinking of rolling it on for the first coat and then deciding for sure. But I’ll get a (somewhat) similar color for the second coat, and it should have no problem covering.

Remember, the very well made braided rugs I got from my grandmother and the poorly made but serviceable navy blue comforter I have from my dorm room may temper it and maybe make the Easter grass green walls actually look good.

Or I can migrate to something more subdued and sagey or a Tiffany blue for the second coat. I do want the room to glow in the sun, remember.

The one color I never had qualms about was the ceiling. I thought the house looked too cold with the white primer, but learned my lesson from the bathroom and went to something that was barely not white. And I ended up Westhighland white, which is warm but still very close to a pure white. I’m thinking this might be the color for the kitchen and hallway walls, too.

Aside from painting, 3 steps forward, 1 step back.

Finding other things to do last Saturday so I could wait for the paint sale wasn’t much of a problem. One annoying job that’s been looming over me for a while was that grout haze gunking up my bathroom floor. About a year ago. I hired people to tile my bathroom floor. They effed up, then they redid it, and it still wasn’t perfect the second time but I called it good enough. But what was not good enough was that they never came back to buff off the grout haze. I got a few false promises, and then and they said that they couldn’t get it off because I tracked dirt on the floor. I don’t know how they thought I’d be dumb enough to believe that. I fired them and pocketed the extra money. I tried fixing their mess by using ScotchBrite pads, but I was working up a sweat without seeing any improvement and then the blue dye from the pad started staining the grout! I gave up and ignored it for a year.

Finally, my dad found a YouTube video that showed how to do it. I used a nylon cup brush that you put onto a power drill. Also a mask, goggles, and ear plugs. Here it is now! Not perfect (yet?) but much improved. There are still a few bad stains from duct tape residue. Don’t worry, those will be easyto get rid of. This job made my hands sore, but in the end I saved a couple hundred bucks by getting screwed over, so it all worked out.

Then remember how I sent out two of my grottiest radiators?

They’e back! Blasted and primed white. I’m glad only primed because they’re already a little scuffed up. I’ll have to take better care of them when they’re painted for real. But also I’ll have the paint to touch them up so I guess it’s all good anyway.

So I’ll give my metalworker an endorsement. Larry at Wrought Iron Revivals in Conshohocken. I like him and the price was more than fair.

And then… a more mixed success story. My parents’ neighbor offered me the granite top from her kitchen island. My top priority for Phase 1 countertops is that they must be free. Second after that, I want them to be food safe and sturdy enough to last 2 years or so. So obviously I said I’d take it. And so her contractor dropped it in like the worst place possible.

Do you see that poor unfortunate day lily in the sink hole. He told me we had to move the top. But it was a little heavier than Daddy and I bargained for. It was a struggle, but we did get it off the perennials. Here’s the result:

Why yes, that dent is new! My dad was angrily looking at dent pullers when I left today. Even though he did it (thank God!!!) I feel a little bit responsible. So, it goes without saying that we will be cutting this up to fit my kitchen BEFORE it makes its way into the city.

March Makeover Madness

I was a little bit of a load the weekend before last, so I’m not as far along as I’d want to be. But that’s ok because now Sherwin Williams is having a March Makeover Madness sale. Someone needs to talk to them about these names. I think I’ve chosen my paint, but have to wait till they open at 10 tomorrow to get the discount. The plan is that I’m going to go with a greyish off white on the ceiling and a either a subtle light blue or light greenish blue on the walls. My parents came in for breakfast to help me decide which goes best with the tile. I had fun with samples like this. The photo is useless for figuring out colors but you might get the idea at least. The two blues in the upper right were the final contenders.

In the end I got a greyish off white for the ceiling and a foggy, greyish light blue for the walls. I think they work nicely together. The white primer made the tile look too dirty.

The back bedroom is ready to paint, too. I’m starting to think a cheery but soft green would work there. The Internet says that it’s a good color for rooms with east facing windows, and this room gets the best light in the house until I’m ready to take down my awnings. I might go in there to read the paper when I’m home in the mornings. There’s a rocking chair in the attic I can have.

And the kitchen and upstairs hall I’ll leave neutral. Some warm off white will do well. Something that looks good with what I have in the living room. I’m thinking some shade of gold. But not too yellow. I hated the way the spray foam color looked with the brick.

So we got to the first paint store and their tinting machine was broken. She sent us to another store, not too far away, but when we got there we found out that they were out of the paint I wanted. The salesperson at the first store ran after us to bring us back in to buy the paint and then bring it to the other store for tinting, but we had already turned the corner. So instead we went to a third store where the paint was in stock and the tinter worked. But there was someone ahead of me trying to get a custom color adjusted. By the time we had the paint I decided to finish off less urgent priming jobs instead of starting on the nice paint. I’m excited to start it this weekend!

Let’s talk about paint colors – downstairs

You already saw ideas I have about paint colors upstairs and how I plan on painting the trim throughout the house. Downstairs I have 3 more spaces to figure out what to do with. But first I wanted to clarify the color of the marble in the front bedroom. It’s more brown than pink. This picture may or may not help.

In the living room, I have this rug. I loaned it to my mom and she’s gonna be sad to part with it. It matches the exposed brick. So it’s kinda decided that however I paint the walls is going to have to look good with brick red. You could have guessed that before.

I have enough furniture to make the house function, but it’s likely that most of what I start with in the living room will be temporary. These two pieces probably won’t be.

The cedar chest (which might be my favorite of everything my grandmother gave me) is going to be a coffee table; the chest will go along the brick wall by the stairs. Then there’s one more architectural detail in here that you haven’t seen before: this very nice stained glass transom that my mom had made for her old house in Jersey.

Inside the vestibule looks like this. I’m going to put nice paneling over that glue. Eventually I might pick out a kind of crazy wallpaper for the tiny amounts of actual walls in this room, but for now it needs a color. Unless I just use leftover paint from somewhere else.

And then there’s the kitchen. Like I said before, I’m installing deferring cabinet doors till later, so we don’t need to worry about what they look like just yet. What we do need is a color to put on all the walls and ceilings that looks good with the beams. I’m thinking some kind of neutral, and I’ll put color on the other stuff later if it feels boring. This is a pain to paint so picking a color I won’t get tired of is important.

So now you’ve seen every part of my house and enough furniture that you should get an idea of what it will look like. You’ve also seen how generously my parents are storing all my stuff…

One thing – I don’t necessarily want my decor to look old fashioned. I thought I’d get some mid century modern pieces to fill in the gaps and come up with paint colors to keep the place not stuffy. I’m also tempted to keep the living room on the airy side and go cozier in the bedrooms. But that’s a concept, not a color. I think I mentioned before that it might make sense to hold off on painting the front bedroom till Phase 2. I might hold off on more just so I can keep doing things by the seat of my pants. But the best thing would be if I could do everything now and actually be happy with my choices forever.

So tell me what you think I should do. I’m all ears until I buy the paint.

Let’s talk about paint colors – starting upstairs

All of them! The truth is, I have little idea of what I want. I could stick with white walls. Sometimes that looks great. But I kind of don’t want my house to look like it was rehabbed on spec. I think I want a slightly subdued off white on my ceilings and trim. Not quite the bright white of the primer, but it needs to be neutral so I can just roll/spray/brush it out everywhere. Mrs. Blandings expresses the struggle of picking out just the right white pretty well. But she knows better than I what she wants. She should be friends with my mom.

I won’t use the same kind of paint or gloss, but these may end up the same color. I read articles about how to choose white paints, and it sounds like Benjamin Moore White Dove is fail safe. That’s what I want. Something safe that I’ll never get tired of on the parts that are annoying to redo.

In the kitchen and bathroom I have more freedom because the ceilings can’t have flat paint anyway. I thought I might have painted the walls pearl grey and kept the trim and ceiling white, but I was never sure about this, and some are steering me away from it. I do know that the white ceiling is a tad bit too bright with the rustic tile and grey grout, but I think the off white would work fine. I’m not sure if you can see what I’m talking about from this photo, but the morning sun almost makes the photo show real colors.

So anyways, I kinda give you carte blanche to give me ideas in here. I have grey, white, and a darkish blue going on already, and plan on putting a marble top onto my Phase 2 vanity. So I could keep paint kinda basic or bring in another color that looks good with the blue. The trim and radiator will be some kind of white.

Moving on from there, the hallway has a lot going on and is only 5 feet wide. Picture dark stained doors and light floors. Possibly blond. I’m thinking I should practice restraint here just because the space is narrow and the architecture is busy. But… I don’t have to.

In the back bedroom I’ll have this maple dresser/buffet and a small upright teak cedar chest. At least to start. The braided rug on the floor in this photo goes with my navy blue dorm bedding. And remember, that room has some exposed brick.

In the front bedroom I may not bother to paint the walls at all since there’s Phase 2 work that will alter them a little bit. (More on that later.) But here’s what I’m putting in the room. This has a fancy marble back splash, and there’s a matching 3 drawer dresser. I might be better off moving this stuff to the back bedroom someday.

Then a very good friend of the family gave me this rug, which takes the room beyond the point of no return into the traditional direction.

I figure this room can look like a bed and breakfast or a whorehouse, and obviously I’d prefer the latter. But I’m also making some Phase 2 changes to the walls, so I might call the white primer good enough for now. Whether or not I paint and decorate anytime soon, we can talk about what I should do.

So what do y’all think? I’m open to hearing any ideas now while while I try to figure out exactly what I want.

Primer Progress

People told me it would take 3 or 4 hours to roll primer onto every wall in the house with the electric roller. People lied. I was at it about that long last Saturday but got fed up and decided to pack things up and finish the next day. And then… I RAN OUT OF PAINT. Ugh! My 5 gallon vat was just barely not big enough; I went back for 2 more gallons, just to be safe and finished up after work Wednesday.

So what was the experience like? My dad bought me a Wagner smart power roller. Now I owe him money. Don’t let me forget. The pump speed is variable, but even on the slowest setting I had to turn it on and off a lot because it was giving me too much paint. The paint goes on kinda clear but dries really white, which meant that I missed a lot of spots and had no way to know until an hour later. It was pretty easy to clean. I wrapped the roller cover in a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator overnight to avoid cleaning it, and it froze solid, so then I cleaned it in hot water. And dialed down my fridge thermostat. After I was done I didn’t wrap or refrigerate it, and now it looks like it’s ruined.

So if you buy one of these, buy enough covers for every time you plan on using it… unless you’re using it with the same paint a day or 3 apart and want to cheat my way. When I started on Days 2 and 3 there was a lot of water in the roller so it came out like this.

So start painting in your closets where it doesn’t matter.

While I was painting, I almost felt sentimental. The signs of how things went together were disappearing. The taped joints, the screws lined up along the house’s idiosyncratic framing. The nails randomly spread out over the solid walls that are laminated. The big skim coated areas that made me so happy with the tapers. Numbers written in my dad’s handwriting around outlets. Even a blood stain. I think I remember how that happened.

Those things are gone and in their place we can see something that vaguely looks like a finished house! First of all, the place just glows with all this bright white paint. I remember it being a bright house when I bought it, and it finally is again.

Just this morning I noticed the tops of the windows and doors in the kitchen and living room. I made a big fuss about making them line up all along, but now you can actually see what I was talking about. (Also this is a rowhouse living room with no lights on!)

That’s about it for now, but feel free to brainstorm permanent paint colors. I’ve chosen nothing, but I’ll be back next time with constraints and ideas I have so far.

The plan for Year 3? Finishing Phase 1!

I’ve decided that this round of heavy-handed repairs that took over the whole house should be called Phase 1. Phase 2 will be a bunch of smaller projects that can be done independently of each other… after I take a good long break. Anyways, if I want to make this sound fast and easy, I have 4 jobs to do. Painting, installing trim, sanding the floors, and putting in a Phase 1 part of the kitchen.

The big hurdle here is floor finishing, the last time I have to clear the house and hand it over to contractors. This means that in classic Crooked House fashion, I’ll be dividing all the work between things to do before and after floor finishing.

The first thing I want done, really done, is the bathroom. Paint the walls so and I can bring the bathroom sink and toilet tank back upstairs and install them for good (until I get my Phase 2 sinks). It’ll be nice to not have to dump buckets of water into the toilet bowl anymore.

But why stop there? I can have A BATHROOM DOOR! And it’ll be a lot of fun to see woodwork in this room. Not only is this an important step towards making the house civilized, but I would like to shut the door and let the bathroom be a safe, clean place for my stuff while the floors are being sanded. Though I guess I could do that with plastic.

And I decided that yes, I’m keeping most of my new-old interior doors stained. I bought them at Philadelphia Salvage peeling, splattered with odd colored paint, and full of gouges and nail holes. The plan was to strip them, fill the damage, and paint them, but when I stripped them, the wood looked so good I decided to keep it. All that damage morphed into patina.

Needless to say I won’t be using paint stripper in my living room after the floors are finished. So these will have to be stripped (and possibly stained and varnished) before the floors are done.

The old plan was to spray paint and install the door casings and what not before the floors are finished, but the Irishman corrected me that I’d be nuts to install anything that goes to the floors before they get sanded. So instead I will be doing some windows and closet shelving and putting up all the woodwork in the bathroom, but the rest of the woodwork is gonna have to get stored in the basement.

Then there are thresholds and other flooring transitions to make. Radiators and other furniture to spray. Stripping the railings? Sealing brick? touching up mortar around my brick walls? I’ll be busy for a while.

And after the floors are done… Woodwork! Furniture! A kitchen! I should be able to properly store clothes there as soon as the floors are done. There’s not much doubt that I’ll get there, but how long will it take? Your guess is as good as mine.

Looking back over year 2

Yes, it’s already over. If you remember, I ended year 1 with the house torn apart. Most of the functional things were in, but most of the visible things that make the house look good were not. I wrote 3 posts last year to commemorate the paper anniversary. This year the anniversary should be cotton, but I’m still giving the house nothing but (green) paper. But let’s look back on what I accomplished. It seemed slow at the time, but now it looks… less slow.

I had 3 windows boarded up for about 3 months. I was wondering when they’d arrive, and when they did, I was smitten.

The chimney was relined (so my gas boiler won’t kill me). And do you remember what chaos it was to get the heat temporarily reconnected so I could test out the boiler? Of course it was my dad’s genius that allowed it to pass.

And not long after that I got the bathroom floor and a usable toilet. Remember how excited I was about the toilet? Now you do. This was exciting because I was on to pretty things and instant gratification. Right?

Siding the cantilevered was the first order of finish work. Why? Because not having it sided gave me a small water infiltration problem that forced me to push off the insulation job after I rigged a temporary fix onto the downspout. Also, I thought it made sense to get the hardest and most weather sensitive job done first. And clearly it was the right decision to work on ladders and scaffolding during the only part of the summer that turned out to be hot, before I had a working shower.

But… I was expecting it to be hard. I wasn’t expecting it to take 7 WEEKS!

Then there was tiling the bathroom. I had previously discovered that I got taken for a ride when I bought these tiles on Craigslist, and had to buy more retail. But at least they look good. And you have no idea how great it was to have a usable shower in my own home.

Then it was on to restoring the upstairs floors. I reinstalled them in one room, glued down to a new plywood subfloor. Easy? I thought it would be, but this was a 6 week job.

In the rest of the house, I patched damaged spots and glued plywood scraps up onto the underside of the floors. This also took ridiculously long. But it should look great when they’re sanded out, right?

I finally perfected the process of laminating drywall onto rigid foam onto soft old plaster on soft old clay brick walls with no studs. And then there were bedrooms! Sorta.

There was the patio door that I thought I couldn’t do right away. But I did! (with the Irishman’s help)

And really, would I have wanted to have this kind of mess later?

Then I started hiring the Irishman to help me every Saturday and all the drywall happened so fast I couldn’t keep up.

And I had the walls taped. No regrets hiring this out.

And we closed the year out with drywall primer. This feels like a really good transition point, no? You’ll hear more about it later. It’s not even done yet.

There were plenty of rough spots this year, but in the end, I think I’ve come forward plenty, no?