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The roofers came out on Friday to rectify the punch list items. They missed several things, including the cracked ridge shingles that were my primary complaint. We probably have 30-40 like this, scattered along our ridge lines. I will have to call them again tomorrow, but this time I’m going to try to get the guy in charge to come out and look at these. Somewhere along the line the communication isn’t getting through, so I want to make sure that we get it finished right next time.

9/17 update: I got the main rep. from the roofing company to come up on the roof with me.  He completely agreed that the workmanship was shoddy and committed to getting it fully resolved.  Since we still haven’t paid them anything, I believe that they will.

Cracked shingles

They really cranked today.  The roof is basically done, minus some clean up tomorrow morning.  I went up to check everything out, and they did an amazing job of incorporating new flashing into our beat up old dormers.  And the appearance of the shingles is actually better than we expected.  Of course, the new roof is making our old paint look even worse, so you know what we’ll have to do soon…

New shingles

They showed up this morning, and by the time I got home tonight, the whole roof looked like this.  Very exciting!  At least we are telling ourselves that it’s exciting, so we can feel better about the large amount of money that we’re spending.  I think it would actually be much more exciting to have a roof that had 20 years left in it!

Felt-papered roof

Because without it, I might not have a good reason to tear open a section of our roof on Labor Day. We are getting a new roof started the day after, so we knew this was our only opportunity to repair the old tongue and groove boards that had rotted decades earlier. The previous owner had opted to go over them with plywood (which is great, except why not fix the damage first??), which I had to remove to get access to the bad boards. And of course there was no way that we’d consider doing this until just before we were getting a new roof installed.

Once I got the plywood off, it became apparent that instead of 3 rotten boards, we had 6. And actually we had more, as you can see in the photo, but the ones I left alone were only bad on the top. If the bottoms were solid and were still holding paint, I didn’t touch them. Since they are only decorative at this point and are shielded from weather, they’ll be fine. The “new” boards were from the old back porch ceiling (since incorporated into the kitchen), which I had dismantled and stored in the garage. To see them in their native setting, see this post. This was one of the first times that we’ve been able to take advantage of our stockpile. We did spend some money getting boards dipped & stripped, but it is worth it to get the lead paint removed. Since we needed more boards than expected, I had to use our Speedheater infrared paint remover to clear the paint from where I had to saw through the extra boards. I don’t like the idea of kicking out a bunch of lead paint dust, especially with kids around!

Damaged T&G boards

And without the boards

Repaired eaves

Stephanie had encouraged me for awhile to get prints made of some of my pictures, so that we could hang them up in the house. A couple of months ago we finally sat down and decided which ones to use. As often happens, Stephanie added a minor constraint to the project (such as squashing my desire to use the free, white mattes that came with the frames), I complicate matters by balking once I find out what a custom color matte would cost at a frame shop, and then she solves the problem by finding a $3 can of spray paint that is pretty similar to our ceiling color. If you ever need to change the color of a matte, we found that they take spray paint very well. It is so much cheaper than buying a custom matte, and using a stock frame was, of course, a fraction of the cost of custom framing.

Here are the pictures we have up in the dining room. The one on the left is a section of Portland skyline at night, and the one on the right is of the crane sculptures at the Portland Japanese Garden:

Portland skyline as seen from grain elevators

Crane sculptures at Portland Japanese Gardens

Here are the pictures in the living room. All four are from the Japanese Garden.

Portland Japanese Garden pictures

Since the pictures are hard to make out in the room shots, if you are curious, here are the actual pictures that we used:
Click to continue »

Although these pictures are actually “in progress” pictures, they give a pretty good idea of what the drywall looks like now. We ended up getting a bid from a contractor we’ve used before for $800 vs. the ridiculous $2200 that the guy who did our upstairs wanted to charge us. $2200 to do one room and a hallway ceiling?? As you may remember from the last post on this room, we decided to cop out and have someone drywall over the heavily-cracked plaster in this room. We got a bid by a plasterer, who said it all had to come down and be replaced (for $3200!), so that was out of the question. And since we are really trying to accelerate progress on our house, we decided to spend the $800 and just get it done. If I were doing this myself, it’d take me longer to just acquire the drywall then it took these guys to get the whole project done. It’s such a great and unfamiliar feeling to see progress on a project when I come home from work! I really like how they installed the drywall. They got 4′6″ x 12′ sheets, so there is only a single horizontal seem on each wall, making for really smooth walls.

We don’t have good “before” pictures of these areas, but the hallway ceiling, in particular, was in horrible shape. There had been some exposed pipes run to the upstairs sink, and the corner where they had penetrated the ceiling was a big, gaping hole. A long-ago leak had turned much of the lathe and plaster black, and most of the ceiling was cracked. Going over the whole thing with a smooth sheet of drywall has made such a difference…

Drywalled family room

Hallway ceiling remade

As anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows, sometimes “easy” just means easier than the alternative. Easy also may mean that you are cutting corners or hiring someone else to do the work. In this case, we’re doing both!

We have long questioned how far we wanted to go on this back bedroom, which was formerly Chloe’s room and is now destined to become our family room. The plaster is cracked in quite a few places, although to some extent that’s been mitigated by the multiple layers of wallpaper. On our ambitious days, we’ve talked about stripping off the wallpaper and repairing the plaster. In our more lazy moments, we’ve contemplated doing nothing and just moving a couch our TV into the room. But, as we’ve gotten really tired of shuffling things around our house as projects move from one area to the next, we did commit to not “temporarily” start using this room, a phrase that for us usually equates to at least two years before we fix it up.

Our compromise in this case was to remove all the trim, so that we can have someone (not us!) come in and install 1/4″ drywall over all the walls. While the plaster purists out there will be appalled, we just don’t have the time or patience right now to strip off all the wallpaper and fix up the plaster. I spent about 3 hours removing all the trim today as the first phase of this project, and tomorrow I’m going to call to get a quote on the drywall work. The salvageable trim will go to Houck’s for stripping, and we will install new base trim. One of the previous renters had a dog that did an amazing amount of damage to the base trim, so it was shot. We will probably take the picture rail to the Rebuilding Center, because I’d rather go with crown, and there is no other picture rail in the entire house. Anyway, once get the walls “restored,” we’ll refinish our stripped trim and replace the trim that wasn’t salvageable. And between getting a quote and actually getting the drywall up, I am going to rough in some wiring for the TV. Our goal is to have this room finished by the time Stephanie starts teaching again in late September.

And just now Stephanie asked me while cutting some vegetables in the kitchen whether “the final nail was in the coffin?” on the patio door idea. That was something we had tossed around for awhile…”wouldn’t it be nice if we replaced the back window with a door out the the patio?” This idea has long been stretched between our desire to streamline our projects and our bad habit of coming up with bright ideas. Keep posted to see which philosophy wins…

This is the part where you simultaneously realize how good things are going to look, feel like you are making progress and become completely aware of how long it’s going to take to finish. It’s a 50/50 mix of elation and dread. Today I sanded Ginger’s closet doors and got the first coat of stain on them. The fir looks simply beautiful. I don’t think anything can touch old growth fir in terms of warmth. While new doors, such as the ones we put in the kitchen, look great, the vertical grain doesn’t look as varied or interesting as the flat-sawn to me. And if you don’t remember, we scored these old cabinet doors for $40 at the Rebuilding Center. There aren’t many places where you can find 5′ doors, especially for a great price. Of course the real “price” comes when your back is sore from spending hours and hours bent over while sanding and staining

A couple of days ago I sanded Ginger’s door down to get it ready for stain. Like all the upstairs doors, we had taken it to get dipped & stripped (probably over a year ago!), but unfortunately, the work never ends there. I hadn’t really looked at them too closely after getting them back from the strippers, but while sanding them, I noticed that the strippers had been a little to aggressive with their scrapers. One side of the door had really rough-sawn panels, and apparently the texture wasn’t willing to let go of the paint, forcing the strippers to scrape and gouge the panels to get the paint off. Because these gouges cut pretty deep, I decided to sand all of the panels smooth in order to remove the grooves. On the plus side, we now have nice, smooth panels on both sides of the door, but the negative was the hours I had to spend to sand just one door. Even with a power sander, it took forever to sand enough off to make the gouges less visible. They didn’t come out perfectly, but the great thing about old doors with beautiful grain is that the remaining blemishes actually add more character to the door. At least that’s what I tell myself, so that I can stop sanding. Comparing it to the way it looked when we bought the house, it was worth all the time and expense.

Stephanie pointed this out to me last weekend. We had allowed our neighbor’s bamboo to creep into a patch of dirt next to our patio, because it acts as a really nice screen and maybe even more importantly, takes no maintenance.  But while we’ve always known it’d eventually start to spread further, we were shocked when we saw this monster.  Keep in mind that it’s a good 2′ back from the rest of the stand - it’s freakin’ huge!  I think it’s the bamboos’ way of telling us to get out of the way, because it’s taking over!