Is that a backyard?!

In the short time we've had our house, our backyard has undergone a dramatic transformation. So here's a little picture-timeline of its progress.

May 2009 When our realtor first showed us our house, there was no word but "jungle" that approached describing the state the backyard was in. I actually didn't dare step off the patio into the backyard as I was wearing flip flops and there was debris in the yard from a torn down "lattice", or as I prefer to call it, that homemade rotten lean-to covering the patio. Besides that, the plants were so overgrown I wasn't sure I could go out their without picking up a bad case of chiggers or some other mysterious bug-bite rash. Needless to say, I was enormously hesitant about our abilities to clean up the backyard on our own. Travis on the other hand was utterly unfazed and announced, "We can handle this." Famous last words.

August 2009 Apparently, our first appraiser didn't have the nerves of steel towards our house that Travis did. Our feeling is that she took one look at the house, in particular the backyard, and ran for the hills, bungling our first loan application in the process. How we could see past that and she couldn't, I don't know. Perhaps we were already too emotionally attached to the house to see any flaws but really I just think she was a weeny. Thus we asked the seller to please clean up the backyard before our second attempt at an appraisal and they kindly obliged. So by the time we closed, the scary "jungle" bits were gone. It now just looked barren, due to the summer drought, and mismanaged: trees that desperately needed pruning, ivy that needed to be properly killed off.

September 2009 We started tearing into the house in earnest. We pulled out all the baseboards, committed to replace several interior doors, trashed the molding, fireplace mantel, wood paneling, and a variety of cabinets and shelves from the garage. The electrical upgrade brought out more unneeded items from the house ranging from wiring to breaker panels. As we attempted to clean up the somewhat tamed backyard, we still managed to find a muffler, steel framing, a smorgasbord of planters and lost balls. We also significantly scaled back the oleander (killing two and halving the remaining three in bulk), killed a lemon tree, a mini-grove of persimmon trees, a fuchsia plant, and a smattering of other overgrowth. All of this left us with a large pile of construction debris and an even larger pile of brush in addition to roughly a dozen stumps scattered in our front and back yards.

October 2009 We decided we were about done with building up our trash piles and it was time to do something about it. So last weekend, Travis emailed a few stump grinder off of Craigslist. Fast Response Stump Removal responded (and yes they were very fast to respond) and gave us a quote. Travis liked it so much, he booked it on the spot and as of Tuesday, all of the debris was hauled away and stumps have disappeared. Even I'm just realizing what a big transformation it is as I've just dug up our pictures from 5 months ago to compare.

Lesson #5 in Home Remodeling: Every job has its tools

I was reading through one of the "This Old House" magazines and there was an issue about painting. They recommended using FrogTape instead of traditional blue tape for masking. I remember seeing it at Lowe's in the paint section and wondering what it was. I admit a bit of skepticism after watching their demonstration videos online but I do trust "This Old House" so I committed to try it. I actually had to hunt down the "Delicate Surfaces" version of the tape which is currently only carried at Sherwin-Williams stores. Well, I used it this past weekend to mask off for when we put up wall color. I pulled it off tonight and I'm sold! I mean I'm so committed to this I will never go back to plain blue tape. There wasn't a single spot of paint bleed where I'd masked. The FrogTape was quite a bit thinner than traditional blue tape.

I was concerned about tearing issues when it came time to remove. But the tape seems to carry a bit more flex in the material and since the paint dries on contact, it never forms the paint bridge that causes tearing. It was so great I could pull tape from ground level without a ladder.

Hey that's my stove!

A coworker passed along some of his "This Old House" magazines since he knew I'm remodeling right now. I'm flipping through a story about a kitchen makeover and lo-and-behold, there's my stove (and a zoomed out view) staring right back at me! Okay so it's not exactly my stove. Mine (below) is white, has salt and pepper shakers where theirs has a clock, and doesn't have the window in the oven door. It is however an O'Keefe & Merritt and our best guess is that it's a circa 1954. Now I'm even more torn about whether to try to integrate it into our future kitchen remodel or just sell it on Ebay and get a more modern and convenient wall unit.

I <3 the Fremont inspector

At least as much as one can <3 their city inspector.

The city inspector is the guy who comes around your house to check that your remodels are done properly (i.e. up to code, no frayed wires left expose in the walls causing a fire hazard, proper nails/nailing procedures are followed when you put up drywall so it's doesn't fall on your face one day, etc.) Every time you pull permits to do anything on your house, there will be associated inspections. And just about anything of significance, and many things not of significance, you opt to do to your house requires a permit. Local ordinances vary but Fremont more or less has a permit every time you so much as consider touching the house.

I've heard plenty of horror stories about city inspectors. Some are simply impossible to track down so can hold up projects while you're waiting to get a stage inspected before you can move on. Some are especially persnickety and are rooting for any problems they can possible find, including in parts of the house you're not even touching. And then still, there are of course some that fall in both categories. Add to that all of the green-building rules California keeps passing, inspections of your remodel project can pretty quickly turn into a nightmare.

Travis has talked to the inspector responsible for the area of Fremont our house falls into several times. He came to do the final inspection on our roof today since we finished installing drip edge over the weekend. We passed! Basically, he just asked whether or not we installed drip edge and, well, we did so we were signed off. Travis chatted with him several times about problems we may run into as we remodel. Basically, our inspector explained he wasn't about to go looking for problems and was mostly interested in whether we remodeled according to code and wouldn't purposefully send us on a wild goose chase. Woot!

I've been so busy on the house I haven't updated in a while so this'll be a very straight forward state of the union type of thing.

Last weekend, I spent 7 some odd hours by myself and got 2 coats of primer onto the roof fascia as well as earned myself a few splinters and some bruises that could easily implicate Travis as an abusive spouse...except for how he was in Texas and all. This weekend, Travis and I teamed up to install drip edge flashing. Since we opted to forego gutters, we need to flash the edge of the roof to protect the plywood underneath the roof shingles at the edges. We tackled our lower roof line first but about 1/3 of the house's roof line rises up to 10 ft. Travis asked me to get on the roof and help him from up there. That didn't pan out so much seeing as I managed to skin my knee and scrape up my calves in all of 30 seconds. And I'm afraid of heights. Your roof pitch doesn't look steep until you're sitting on it looking down thinking, "That's a long way down to the ground."

We spent the remaining time priming the living room and managed to finish 2 coats on all the walls and 3 on the walls where we removed the wood paneling, exposing some very yellowed drywall paper. I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of cutting in paint.

Our electrician started work and completed grounding of all the outlets throughout the house and even started installing the new breaker panel in the garage. I'm very much looking forward to being able to 1) reach the breakers, 2) knowing which breakers to throw. Baby steps.

Things can get a little messy

Case in point. :-)

And some people may get hurt

In case you're wondering, those are splinters in my middle finger. There are in fact two. There's a tiny one below the dark line on my finger which turned out to be the nastier of the two. It was in quite deep and both were rather old wood which kept splitting and breaking apart as I got close to getting them out.

Do you remember when you were little, and you would get a splinter or a thorn and cry to your mom who would get a needle out of her sewing kit and expertly fish that thing out of your hand? Ok, maybe not. Maybe it's only Chinese mothers who did that.

I remember being terrified every time that happened. Your mother's coming at you with a needle to pick thorns our of your hand -- it's the psychological equivalent of salt on the wound. But to my mother's credit, never once did it hurt.

Well tonight I found out what's worse than that: having to stick yourself with the needle to fish out the splinters. Travis is out of town and I was working on the house by myself (sans gloves as usual). Did it hurt? More than I remember my mom doing it did but really not much. It was mostly the anticipation of having to stab my own finger that hurt.

Update (10/11): In the interest of full disclosure, I feel I should admit that sticking myself with a needle was not the first solution I thought of. My initial reaction was, "I wonder if I should go to the emergency room." Then my pride rose up indignantly and mentally berated me for even considering getting the insurance and emergency room involved when in fact, I was just too much of a pansy to take care of it myself the good old fashioned way. And you know what happens when my pride gets involved. :-)

Little surprises

Yesterday was our first day allowed back inside the house since we fumigated. We had PG&E over to relight our pilot lights and I arrived to an ecstatic Travis raving about how awesome the PG&E guy was. Apparently, he knew all about old appliances and taught us a lot about how to use our 50 year old antique range unit. The unit's pilot light was out when we did our house inspection way back when but it's apparently still in good working condition. It's also quite adorable so I'm holding onto it for now.

In the meantime, I noticed that the fumigation guy had opened some cabinet doors, most likely to test for Vikane gas traces before he certified the place for reentry. So I opened some more and stumbled upon the garage door opener. We'd been debating asking the listing agent about this since we closed but it obviously had been sitting in our cabinets the whole time. Along with it, we found manuals for the thermostat, 50-year old furnace, water heater, and just about all of the electro-mechanical systems in the house. Thank you previous owner for being organized enough to have held onto this stuff for so long. I thought I was the only one that kooky.

Oleander = Hercules aka "The Beast"

After cleaning up the oleander I was reminded of the great 1993 hit "The Sandlot". Just like in the movie, any ball hit near the oleander or "The Beast" apparently became its property.

Ball Count: 19

UPDATE (10/26):
more balls found
Total Count: 36

Lesson #4 in Home Remodeling: Your first coat of paint will look like crap

I have come to realize this is simply a fact of life. The same holds true for primer. And in this situation, I am reminded of the eloquent advice of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Don't Panic.

The color's wrong. The cut marks are glaringly obvious. There are even roller marks all over the place. And you're busy thinking to yourself, "What have I done?!" But don't panic. Wait until you let the paint set, put on a second coat and the paint will magically work wonders on its own.

I would love to post some of the final pictures of the office that we finished painting yesterday. Unfortunately, by the time we got the second coat on and let it dry to the right sheen, the sun had set and my flash insisted on firing causing distorting the color so I'll have to wait until we're allowed back in the house (we're fumigating) until I can take better pictures.

The elusive spark arrestor

Back when we were doing inspections on the house, our inspector mentioned that our chimney should have a spark arrestor. A spark arrestor prevents sparks traveling up your chimney from landing on your roof and possibly starting a fire, especially important if you have a wood shake roof. Most roofs are composite shingles nowadays though so a roof fire is a fairly minor concern. A larger concern is that without a spark arrestor, rain water, bugs, birds, and stray debris can get in your chimney.

So we decided to this minor home maintenance task this week. We stopped by Lowe's late Monday night and they only had one model that Travis was not pleased with. There were a lot of other options on their website but unfortunately none large enough to accommodate our chimney (clocking in around 8" x 17"). We went to Home Depot and no luck: they stocked the same model as Lowe's. At this point I was wondering how much further I was willing to entertain Travis's stringent aesthetic requirements for something that, after we installed it, nobody would ever see again.

After an hour of internet searching and a delayed, but inspired, realization that I should check at my local Ace store, I finally scored us a chimney cap last night that passed Travis's criteria. So after work today, I volunteered to climb onto our roof and install it. I think I deserve a gold star for my handiwork considering I'm quite nervous about heights.