Win Some, Lose Some: Completely Random Edition

Today's big win was round two of leveling the floor in the third bedroom.  Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Exhibit A:

Yes, that is a 4' level sitting on my floor.  Perfection.  After dinner last night I caulked up all the seams that were ruining the job, and then we popped over to Home Depot for yet another bag of concrete.  We mixed and poured the last two bags before bed.  Success!

And now for the first bad news of the day: my sofa arrived this morning.  At 8:30am.  Not between 3pm-7pm yesterday as promised.  And it's a nice sofa, except for one big fat freaking problem.  Wanna see?

HAHHAHAHAHAHAHH!  It's hilarious, right?  Or I've become slightly unhinged, I'm not sure which.  But either way, look what happens when someone sits on one of those freakishly tiny cushions:

Yeah, so.  Also, it is SO uncomfortable right now.  I feel like I'm sitting in a church pew, which is not a place I enjoy being.  I know the down-wrapped cushions will deflate over time, but as it stands, the seat is way too narrow and this thing is unspeakably, horribly fluffy.  Really, it looks kind of nice with the throw pillows on it-- the scale is great since it's a whole foot longer and about 4" taller than my previous sofa-- but I obviously cannot keep this thing.    

Tomorrow we initiate the return-- this company claims you'll get a full refund (less a 10% "restocking" fee) including free return shipping, so we'll see.  Good thing I haven't sold my old sofa on Craigslist yet-- I mean, I posted it yesterday and I've already had multiple offers because have you SEEN the other sofas available on Craigslist?  Damn, they're ugly. 

Lesson learned: just because buying furniture over the internet worked really well for your mom does not mean it will work well for you, and you're going to be crushed when you spend $1200 and wait three months to receive your sofa only to discover that it is just not going to work.

Anyway, this was probably some kind of sign or some shit, because we really don't have the money to buy a sofa right now.  When I die, just pry my old bones off the old brown sofa to which they will surely have fused.

Returning the sofa means I won't have to feel so bad about spending nearly $900 on flooring for the third bedroom and laundry room, at least.  AND our only car is officially dead at a shop across town right now AND we'll have to pay to get it fixed in order to trade it in so we can buy a new car, AND we spent about $250 leveling the floor AND we have tons of huge bills to pay following all of this summer's medical emergencies.  

So I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're reading this and you are a fabulously wealthy philanthropist and you just don't know what to do with all that money you have just lying around, please consider a small donation (about, say, $10K) to two poor professors who are just trying to get by.  Sigh.

On The Level

Though I still need to do another (final, I pray) coat of mud on all the drywall in the third bedroom, we decided to turn our attention elsewhere this weekend-- specifically downward, to the floor.  You see, the concrete slab upon which the bedroom is sitting is not exactly level.  It's not even kind of level, and that's going to be a problem for the engineered hardwood install we're planning to do in a couple of weeks.  

It's high on the north side of the room (nearest the door) and about 1.5" lower in the center of the south (window) wall.  The corners of the window wall are only about 3/4" lower than the high side.  So... that's a mess.  After doing some research on the best ways to address the issue, we invested in six (!!!) bags of self-leveling concrete at $30 (!!!!) per bag.  I read the reviews online and was pretty intimidated by the project, and it turned out to be every bit as challenging as I expected.  

When we pulled up the carpet and the pressboard tile beneath it, big chunks of the previous owner's attempt to level the floor came up too.  They'd just poured concrete on top of the un-level slab, but it wasn't really attached to the slab, just sort of floating on top.  So we knew we'd have to start over before putting in our flooring.

We started by chipping up the few shreds of old concrete that were actually bonded to the slab.  Then we primed the floor with the recommended product and waited for it to cure.  We rented a corded drill (pro tip: cordless drills aren't powerful enough to handle mixing concrete) and a mixing paddle for $18 and readied our supplies: 6.5 quarts of water per bag, pre-measured so it would be easy to mix the next bag while spreading the previous one. 

Then we started pouring.  And after we poured five of our six bags, we realized we needed to stop and correct course.  See, there are several places where the concrete slab and the concrete footings for the walls don't really meet.  I thought those were just little divots that would quickly fill in with wet concrete.  But they aren't.  They're actual holes.  Lots of the very expensive concrete just flowed right out of them.  And the more I tried to fix it, the bigger mess I made.  So here's what we're working with right now:

We've made a lot of progress towards making the floor level, and those ripples you see on the wall in the back are actually just splash marks-- it's not as bad as this photo makes it look.  But in one hour I'll be able to head into the bedroom (it needs four hours to cure before you walk on it) to caulk up the gaps on the far side of the room (there's one in each corner under the window) so we can pour the last bag tomorrow and hopefully be done with this step.

In other exciting news, my new sofa is supposed to arrive within the next hour and a half.  I'm skeptical.  I mean, it was technically supposed to arrive by the middle of August.  We'll see.

Hotel Door: 1; Me: 0

Pardon the recent lack of posts-- between the sloooooow process that is inexpertly mudding drywall and the awesome trip we took over the weekend, there's not much progress to speak of in the bedroom and laundry room.  I was all excited to get back home to finish up my mudding, but I unfortunately had a bit of a run-in with a hotel door in Lexington, Massachusetts, and now I'm stuck sitting with my foot up while my seven stitches heal.

We spent the weekend with some of our favorite people in two of our favorite places-- the Boston area and our former home of New Haven, Connecticut.  Two of our dear friends were married at the beautiful DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA and we were so excited to go.  I mean, SO excited.  Like, so excited that I absolutely knew something bad was going to happen.  You know when something is just too good to be true?  We were not only going to attend the gorgeous, intimate, personal wedding of two people we adore; but also spend time with some of our very favorite pals (also wedding guests and the owners of the best poodle ever) who just bought a house in my dream neighborhood in New-Haven-adjacent Hamden, CT.  We also planned to pop into NYC before our return flight from JFK; we were hoping to stroll around Central Park (where we got engaged) and see our niece and nephew (and their parents, of course!) in Harlem.

The first snafu occurred when we arrived at the airport in Portland on Friday and couldn't get the key out of our car's ignition.  We finally worried it enough to yank it out, but the ignition was stuck in the battery-on position, so we knew the battery would be dead by the time we got back.  And since the battery was on, the doors wouldn't lock.  But we were out of time to mess with it, so we sprinted for the shuttle and boarded our flight.  One hurdle jumped (or at least delayed).

But later that night, I was trying to pull open a stuck door at the hotel, and it finally opened with epic force and essentially cut off the tip of my toe.  A few hours later, I had stitches and antibiotics and strict instructions not to walk much.  Boo.

We did squeeze in a bit of New England tourism anyway, checking out the Buckman Tavern in Lexington (site of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War) on Saturday and Walden Pond on Sunday, and of course on Saturday evening I ignored my doctor's instructions and did a bit of cautious dancing at the wedding.  Sue me.

Sunday afternoon we returned with our pals to their beautiful new house in Connecticut, where we spent the next two days reliving the early days of our relationship and eating everything in sight.  Maybe I walked a little bit more than I should have and I definitely ate more than any doctor would recommend, but I've been looking forward to a New Haven visit pretty much since the day we moved out of our apartment there.  I wasn't about to sit on the sofa and miss out, you know?  Though sitting on the sofa with this guy is very tempting:

He had to have a drastic haircut after an encounter with a skunk a few weeks ago, but he is still every inch the charmer.

Yesterday we realized we just shouldn't try to squeeze in a trip into the city-- between time constraints and the fact that, due to my constant walking, my stitched wound was still bleeding quite a bit-- so we made our way to JFK (why, why, why aren't there ever any good flights out of LaGuardia?  It's, like, a million times more convenient) and arrived in Portland at midnight.  After collecting our bags and getting our car jumped, we started the one-and-a-half-hour drive home.

And now I'm resting on the sofa, willfully ignoring the school work, housework, and drywall work that need to be done.  Renovator, heal thyself.

More later on a pair of very exciting and adorable new additions that came home with us!

[The Laundry Room] Wasn't Built In A Day

Let's take a quick look back at the late, not-so-great laundry room of yore:

Above is what it looked like from the third bedroom when we toured the house for the first time.  Dark, scary, and dirty with paneled walls and acoustical tile ceilings.  Let's see if I can dig up a few more photos:

Above: From the kitchen door after the washer and dryer were removed (the former tenant took them when he left).  That's the attic pull-down in the foreground and two weird closet-y things on the background, and that brick is the back of our chimney.

Above: again with the tenant's stuff during our home inspection.  This one was taken from the door leading outside to our breezeway.

I took the above shot after we got our new washer and dryer after a generous assist from my sister and brother-in-law-- without whom we would definitely not have been able to afford pretty white front-loaders-- and after I painted all the paneling white.  I think this was... late September of 2012?

 

 Again with the white paint job, this time the photo was taken from the kitchen door.

I'm not sure if you can tell in any of these photos, but the laundry room ceiling was beginning to sag.  The weight of the pull-down stairs was a bit much for it.  So we needed to shore it up a bit before we could proceed with any renovations, and we also wanted to frame in a space for the half bath we'd eventually like to put in.  The solution was to put a wall up immediately behind the pull-down stairs, thus turning all the space behind it into a potential half-bath (for now it's just a killer closet).  

In order to make room for the bath, we also needed to stack the washer-dryer, which meant removing the "cabinets" that were over them before.  The cabinets were, like all the others in this house, really just open-backed boxes with shelves sitting on ledger boards, and they were covered with old funky peeling shelf-paper.  And some rat poop on the top shelf (I'm guessing it fell down from between the attic floorboard--the acoustical tiles didn't extend into the cabinet, so the top shelf was pretty much open to the attic).  Suffice it to say I wasn't sad to see them go-- you generally don't want something that's been pooped on by rodents that close to your clean clothes.

We needed to move the junction box for the ceiling fixture from the low end of the ceiling (over the washer and dryer) to the high part so the washer and dryer would have enough clearance to stack, and our electrician took care of that for us when he was here addressing the situation in the third bedroom. 

Finally, the laundry machines have to sit about eight inches away from the wall because of the very enormous hookup for the dryer vent, and so the first thing you saw upon entering the laundry room from the kitchen was a whole mess of crap behind the dryer.  Some genius screwed a sheet of plywood against the wall (ostensibly to cover up some wires) and we really didn't have the know-how to address the situation.  Here's a dark photo to explain what I mean:

So in order to hide all of that and also make the laundry room look more like a hallway and less like a laundry room, we built a shallow wall.  We also needed to construct a soffit over the washer and dryer to accommodate some wiring at the ceiling.

While I still have a lot of taping and mudding to do in here, and we still need to hang the new ceiling fixture and put in flooring, and I still have to paint the shiplap behind the laundry machines, I'm just too happy about all the changes to wait til it's done.  I have to show you now.  Here's the view from the third bedroom as of this afternoon (again, please pardon the dark photos-- there are no lights in here yet!):

The future bathroom is behind that curtain-- it'll obviously have a door when it's ready to be a bathroom.

Cabinets are going to be installed to the right of the laundry machines so we'll have lots of storage.

From the kitchen door:

 From the third bedroom proper, through to the kitchen:

It's getting the same hickory engineered flooring as the bedroom.  

tl, dr: same view, July 2012 to September 2013:

,dWGFCKQ;OSDHjabsmvhvamdhkquhKjagdjyBAB.  That's me being excited!