Mudroom

I have been slowly working on the floor of the mudroom since I first demoed the small bathroom that sits right off of it. During Demo I pulled up the 80's linoleum floor to find some much older linoleum tiles(from the 40's or 50's, individual hard tiles). I started pulling these up and found some really nice wood under the thick tar paper stuff that was holding the old tiles on. For a proof of concept I got all the tar paper up (using the grinder and 24 and 36 grit sandpaper) and do a quick sanding of the floor in that bathroom. It ended up looking good.

7 months later I start the rest of the mudroom :).

The tiles were the hardest thing to get up so in the advice of my 4 year old daughter (who watched an infomercial on day when we were at Hardwicks) we bought a multimaster. Yes it does what they say (the tile came up in about 5 hours). The picture is of the barren alien landscape that the tar paper creates when you rip the tile up. Oh yeah, it smells bad when warm.

However the Multimaster really not meant for room size jobs so out comes the trusty grinder. 2 days later 1/2 the floor is totally smooth wood with no markings. (picture coming) and I have 2 sets of clothes saturated with sawdust and old tar papers bits. I also bought a warm red oil based floor paint thats way to pink in the test, so it may have to go back and get tinted up.

Once the floor is done I have to get the trim up on the doors and around the baseboards, and then all that should be left is some painting.

upstairs bathroom, a history in pictures

There are no pictures of the upstairs bathroom, pre-renovation. It was that bad. Then Aunt Cherie came, and before you know it we were burning the last stained floorboard in our fireplace and cheering. But then Aunt Cherie had to go home without seeing the bathroom come back together, and months have gone by without my posting any pictures of it. Until now!

Dress rehearsal:



Here's Matt's feet, and various things on the floor. In any significant home improvement project, floor detritus must always include a number of plastic bags from Home Depot, and a chop saw on an extension cord.



The G.C. did the tiling in a couple of marathon days during a week when Matt was out of town, and installed some towel bars that I had chosen but didn't end up liking. I took them down and later Matt put up new ones. The medicine cabinet still has no door, or rather it has a twenty-pound door that we're afraid to hang:



But otherwise we are pretty much done, except for trim and some other details:




Thank you, Aunt Cherie - we really couldn't have done this without you!

Well.

In the past few months we've:

1. Hired a real estate attorney to advise us on the sewer thing. He told us that our real estate agent was negligent, and wrote a demand letter to her and her broker asking them to reimburse us for the cost of the repair. They in turn hired their own lawyer and made it clear that if we wanted to pursue it, we'd have to take them to court.
   
2. Watched the city arrive, guns a-blazing, seven months late, to ... fix the sewer? They set up a trailer-office-thingy, brought a huge backhoe, and got to work:
   Then they noticed the patch in the street, knocked on the door and asked me if we had recently had some work done on our sewer. Why, yes. The guy I spoke with claimed that it must have been a miscommunication at the city, and they were all out there by mistake, about to replace a section of the main sewer line in front of our house. (You have to wait until the line fails, apparently. The city does not do proactive maintenance.) They packed up and left, but not before sending another camera down to take a look -- and what did they see but a fresh sheet of roots hanging down at the spot where our side sewer connects to the stub.
3. Called the guy who managed our sewer repair project, to ask him about the new sheet of roots in our new side sewer. Over two weeks, I've called his office, his cell phone. Called his manager. Sent email. I'm practially stalking the guy. He hasn't responded.
   
4. Reported the inept concrete contractor to the Better Business Bureau. The BBB then contacted him to attempt a resolution. His semi-coherent response included accusations against our other contractors, threats to "turn her in" [meaning me], and something about a loophole. Loophole, indeed. Note for next time: Check references.
   
5. Verified that the gas line to the house is leaking, has been leaking for years, probably, into the soil underneath the front yard. This is why all the plants in the front yard are doing so poorly: Natural gas contaminates the soil with methane and other yuck. Fixed.
6. Patched the wall of the fishy-smelling room, tore down the remaining two closet walls and ceiling, and drywalled it. Matt did most of this, though I did tape and mud the wall. It all looks pretty damn good, and the fish smell is gone. During this work we hammered out the concept of varying levels of done-ness, or perfection: According to one of his coworkers, Matt is an 80% guy. Whereas I'm happy to pore over the last few percents. Go team!
   
7. Given up on getting the layers of wallpaper off the walls downstairs, and hired JJ to cover the whole mess with quarter-inch drywall. It's an 80% solution: far from perfect, but much easier. Matt had to go from room to room pulling forward and securing the electrical outlets and switches (which were no longer even with the wall surface). The baseboards, also, are no longer even with the walls: it didn't occur to anyone to pull them off beforehand. But it's done, and we've even painted some walls, which is a hallmark of civilization, is it not?
8. During a heavy rainstorm, discovered a leak in the attic, water dribbling down the side of a chimney. Jason climbed up there and sealed up some cracks around the flashing and pronounced it sound.
9. During same rainstorm, discovered a leak under the basement apartment's door. Also sealed and sound.
   
10. Added towel bars to the upstairs bathroom.
11. Done a lot of landscaping. Our garden is going to be awesome. I am going to live there.
    
12. Beta is tired of all this.

ghosts

Last Friday night I was in the kitchen washing dishes when I heard Audrey call out a friendly "Hello!" This was totally alarming, as there was nobody else in the house. I ran out; she was looking expectantly up the stairs. "Who are you saying hello to?" I asked, and she said, "the workers, upstairs. I heard them sweeping. Then I heard a thump." Matt was on a business trip so we called Julianne and Oliver and they came over immediately, armed with a flashlight. We walked all through the house, top to bottom. We found nothing.

I can't say we believe in ghosts. But Audrey has seen and heard things in this house before: A face looking in the front window, voices. She's always matter-of-fact, interested, cheerful, never alarmed. I haven't seen or heard anything; in fact, I've been surprised by how quiet and peaceful the house is. But I have smelled things: Cigarette smoke, alcohol, sweat, cologne, all very localized and brief. It occurs to me that maybe this house was originally a brothel? Perhaps — Olive's brothel?

And then there's the fishy smell in the south-facing bedroom. That has not been brief. It smells fishy and rotten and is worse when it rains. When I Googled "fish smell" and "old house," one post suggested that it was evidence of a ghost. Specifically, the ghost of someone who worked with fish. Perhaps Olive's brothel catered to fishermen?

In more boring everyday news, the bathroom is 95% finished and we are 95% happy with it, but I'm pretty sure that last 5% is going to follow me to my grave, at which point I can become a ghost and come back here and taunt the new owners. Downstairs, the apartment's stacked washer and dryer are strapped to floor bolts so the washer can't wander around anymore, but now it tends to throw the dryer across the room during its spin cycle. The plan is to build a shelf for the dryer to sit on, where the washer can't reach it. This, and some painting, curtains, and lots of cleaning, tomorrow. Renter arrives Friday.

insanity and mortality

On Wednesday of last week, the G.C. finished tiling the upstairs bathroom. It looked about 7,000% better than before, but stark without any of the normal bathroom fixtures, just bare white tile. Oliver put his finger on it when he said "It reminds me of my days in the mental hospital." (Working, not committed.) This was not the ambiance we were aiming for, but appropriate in a way. Restoring this house could make a person insane.

And the mortality part: There was an article in the local paper recently about a man who died when a trench he was working in caved in on him. From the article:

People who get caught in the "collapse of soil are at very high risk for being either killed or seriously injured," said Elaine Fischer, a spokeswoman for Labor and Industries. "Soil weighs between 2,000 to 3,000 pounds per cubic yard."

Tragic on its own, and horrifying in light of the work Matt undertook on our sewer, eight feet underground. It was an insane risk that neither of us were aware of when Matt decided to do that work himself. The "what if" paralyzes me.

comfort height

Since we seem to be discussing bathrooms, I will also tell you something you may not know: There are two kinds of toilets, regular and "comfort height." A "comfort height" toilet is four inches taller than a normal toilet. Towering. You might want to own one of these when your arthritic knees no longer bend at all, because it might be more "comfortable" for you. I tell you this as a favor, as it is something you might someday want to know about.

Sometimes, however, a person accidentally comes to own a "comfort height" toilet when, oh, let's say Home Depot were to get her order wrong and slip her one, unmarked and incognito. And if this were to happen, she might unknowingly take it home and install it, and perch upon it as if it were a tall, tall barstool, and say to herself, hmm, this feels wrong. And her child might be unable to hoist her little bottom up onto the seat. And her husband might tease her for buying a geriatric toilet, and her aunt Cherie might confirm that it is in fact a geriatric toilet. And while she might pretend to laugh along with them, it actually perhaps makes her want to cry, because her cute little corner sink now looks disproportionately tiny and stupid, and she really liked that sink.

Can you believe that this very thing happened to us? In the little bathroom off the mudroom.

But all of these events led up to one very astounding plot twist. I think that here in this blog Matt or I may have mentioned that I really hate Home Depot. With, like, blinding rage. Their screws and fasteners aisle particularly gets to me. Which is a digression. So last week, I went to talk to the store's customer service people about this comfort height fiasco, and they said "bring it back." Simple as that.

It had not occured to me that we could pry up a toilet that we had installed and used and bring it back for a full refund, but there you go. Matt got it out of the bathroom and into the car, and then Audrey and I drove it to Home Depot, loaded it into a cart and trundled it in, boxless and dismantled, a used toilet, and we exchanged it for a regular-sized toilet, and the people at the customer service desk gave Audrey a little Home Depot apron and invited her back the next day to make a butterfly house, maybe to compensate, I don't know. And all of a sudden, Home Depot is okay with me.

upstairs bathroom demolition

Apparently we have been understating the situation here at chez Isadora, because when Matt's aunt Cherie walked in the front door two weeks ago, she seemed to think that there might not be anything left for her to do. Ha!

Cherie flew across the country primarily to help us work on the house. She's a veteran home-improver, not afraid of anything (but not fond of rats), and she has perfect timing, since we've now burned through our two home equity loans. She brought us some momentum and perspective on the house. And some investigational holes in walls. And last but definitely not least, a completely demolished upstairs bathroom. Remember this bathroom, the one where the toilet had been leaking into the floor underneath it, probably for years? Seventeen kinds of smelly? Gone!

When you live in a house that needs as much work as ours does, it is a rare gift when a person is willing to stay in your house with you for more than a few hours, and even rarer when the person is willing to focus on your house as intensely as you do. Cherie did this, and it was awesome — inspiring, entertaining, and an overall sanity check. Also educational. Here is some of what I've learned:

1. That bathroom was truly bad, bad, bad. It was not just my imagination. It had to go.
2. What I've been affectionately calling "construction dust" — the dust and dirt that you get when you do demolition — in a 100-year-old house is way dirtier than the construction dust in a newer house. Our house has exceptionally dirty dirt. This was also not just my imagination.
3. If you need to pee in the middle of the night and you don't have a bathroom, a bucket is an acceptable alternative.
   
4. People use power tools because power tools make projects go faster, not solely because they are noisy and dangerous.
5. It might be wise to limit the number of days per week that we work on (or worry about) the house to something less than seven.
   
6. It might be possible to separate all the people of the world into two categories: Those who enjoy demolition but rarely complete a project, and those who enjoy finish work but find demolition deeply disturbing.
   
7. In his teens, Matt was the white sheep of his extended family.
8. In a previous life, Olive was a gold rush–era prostitute.
9. People who live in the Midwest build big fires:
   
   
   

Found under the northeast corner of the bathroom floor: one (1) nest, containing one (1) rat skeleton, one (1) mouse skeleton. Possibly friends. The rat skeleton is one long, long spine with skull and ribs and a few legs, prehistoric-looking and ferocious. Audrey believes it is a dinosaur rat.

Now that Cherie has gone home, we are having the gentlemen contractors in one last time to put together the bathroom, because otherwise it would take us weeks, or months, and that is too long to go without a bathroom, even though we do have a bucket. We're using 1" white and blue hexagon tiles on the floor, white subway tiles 6' up the walls with a blue line around the top, and we have a clawfoot tub, pedestal sink, and toilet ready to go in.