General Posts

This is something I would never have realized without having a houseblog that allowed me to easily look back on my bold predictions, but I believe that I have just solved one of the great puzzles of remodeling. We all know when we think a particular project will be completed, but how can we predict when it will really be done?

Today I put the 2nd coat of stain on the door of our family room closet. That got me to thinking about how long it had been since I had started sanding the door. A quick search on our site revealed the answer…1 year, 11 months. Ironically, I titled that post ‘back in the saddle,’ which implied that we were back on the horse for a ride, not just a quick trot around the yard. Sadly, the door sanding post came a good six months after the room was allegedly nearly done. And not to mention that in the meantime some animal(s) had holed up under the tarp for enough time to do unspeakable things to that door.

So, to summarize, here’s the chain of events that have led to “finishing” our family room:

• Fall 2007: Chloe moves out of her room, freeing it up to be our TV room
• 7/2008: I will give us a pass here, since Ginger was born a year earlier, but we now finally start the project.
• 10/2008: We are nearly finished after only 9 weeks. We are on a ROLL here!
• 5/2009: That’s strange…where did the last 7 months go? Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because the door is being sanded, and we are going to be done soon.
• 5/2010: Now would be a good time to get the patio cleared off for the summer. Ooh, wait a minutes, what’s this crap under the tarp?! Damn it, this never would have happened if I had just finished sanding this door when I stopped a few weeks (a full year) ago!
• 4/2011: Last week I did actually finish sanding the door (as well as the upstairs bathroom door), and I stained it this weekend. Things are really moving now!
• The future: All that’s needed now is two coats of poly and some hinges. How long could that take? [I am documenting this now as a challenge to ourselves to actually see this thing through.]

So back to the question of when a given project will be completed. After analyzing many such improvements in our house, I have realized that all projects can be broken down into a simple equation…

Multiply these factors together:

• Cost of project (in US dollars)
• Number of children squared
• Disgust or annoyance with the project (measured in # of hours it takes to force yourself to start working on it on a Saturday morning)
• Number of other projects that are competing for your attention
• Number of times you think or say “wouldn’t be it be cool if…”

Divide by these factors:

• Bank account balance or equity line in US dollars
• Partner’s “encouragement” to finish (units are # of times subject comes up in a one month period)

The end result will be the number of months it will take to finish the project. The amazing thing I have discovered, though, is that no matter what project you plug into the equation, the end result is always virtually the same…somewhere between 3 and 4 years. This doesn’t apply to the entire house remodel, mind you, as that will never be done, but it is a good estimator of how long a single component of the remodel will take.

I hope that others will find this equation useful and stop themselves before they even start projects. Or better yet, before they purchase their home. If you stopped telling yourselves that this “little” project will only take a few weeks, you could save a lot of headaches and cash. Try this out before embarking on your next job and see if it still makes sense! And if anyone finds this to be useful or discovers missing factors, please let me know in the comments.

And since we are actually getting close to finishing this family room, let’s get back to the closet door. As with all our old fir doors, it looks fantastic with fresh stain, most importantly, there is no visible trace of it having been used as a toilet.

Inspiring

This kind of gets me motivated to start working on the rest of the upstairs doors. How long could that take?

What a sad little outlet…

I know! I’ll put a bird on it!

it's so pretty!

Spruce it up! Make it pretty! This is Portland, after all.

A small (but very satisying) project completed this weekend was finishing up the conversion of the obsolete back steps to a hall closet.  Previously, everything had just been piled up on the steps, making it difficult to find anything.   About a year ago, I wired the closet for power and CAT5, as well as installed our router and VOIP unit.  As with all projects that reduce clutter, there is a real sense of calm that comes out of seeing things neatly organized on shelves.

And no post is complete without the amusing or painful “oops” backstory.  In this case, when I bought the plywood for the shelves (back in 2008!), I hadn’t paid much attention to it.  Only after making my first cut did I notice that the grain looked unusually interesting…and suprisinging oak-like.  A quick check of the label verified that someone had slid a sheet of two-sided oak plywood into the stack of what I had meant to buy.  After I got the nerve to pull out the receipt, I learned that I had spent $60 on a single sheet!  And now we have the best-looking toilet paper shelves around…

Neat and tidy...for now!

Answer: speed it up to 120x speed. That means that every 2 minutes now takes only 1 second. I am trying hard to figure out a way to apply this same technique to my job as well.

This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, ever since seeing some of the first sped-up recaps on home-improvement shows years ago. The cool side effect of speeding it up so dramatically is that it basically turned it into a stop-motion sequence of our entire project.  While I didn’t capture every minute of the construction (due to having only one large memory card with me and having to dump it every 3 hours), I did manage to come back with 38 hours of video (or a whopping 65 GB for the geeks out there.)  Working with so many large clips proved problematic for editing, so I spliced each day’s together into a single, uncompressed movie sped up to 12x real time  Once I had the four intermediate clips, I then sped each up to as much as an additional 10x.  There are a few places where I kept the speeds lower to better emphasize a portion of the video.

Was it worth the time to do?  Probably not.  But I can’t think of a better way to immortalize the time we spent building that thing. To see the best quality, make sure the change the video from 360p to 480p.

And for those who can’t access youtube at work:

Last weekend I went down to San Diego with Chloe for four days to help my brother replace their ancient, termite-destroyed deck.  During the demolition, which he took care of before we arrived, he found that some of the framing could be removed with a broom!  Given that their deck sits at the top of a slope and that they have a 1 1/2 year old, the time had come to take care of it.

The old:

Served their useful life

At some point, joists were sistered to the sawed-off ends of other joists

Some of these posts could be ripped apart by hand!

We ended up putting in a solid 80 hours of  labor between the two of us in just 4 days.  It was pretty aggressive, but we needed to make sure that if it wasn’t complete when I left (why do I always delude myself that things will be finished in an arbitrary, unrealistic timeframe?) that the framing and posts had to at least be finished. That would leave smaller projects that could be done piecemeal, as he has time later.  And for the record, this deck is quite large…10′ deep by 34′ wide…a little larger than a weekend project has the right to be.

Without going into all the gory details, most of our problems stemmed from one issue…the concrete footing that held the upper end of the deck wasn’t level.  For about half a day I assumed that it was, since the seriously settled corner of the adjacent patio made the less-seriously settled footing look relatively level.  Once I checked it, though, we found that sloped down just over 2″ in about half the width of the deck (about 16′).  I convinced my brother that we had to make the deck level, regardless of how it looked with the patio, because it would be a nightmare to build a deck that sloped only on one half.   And, of course, it would look like hell and cause lots of other problems down the line when attaching posts, decking, etc.

Given our tight timeframe, we had to deal with the problem in an unorthodox way.  Instead of building a custom form, pouring concrete to level the footing and then having to wait for it to dry, we shimmed that end of our sill plate into position, essentially suspending it in place.  That allowed us to start connecting joists and get going on the rest of the structure.  We went in later and used long anchor bolts to attach the board to the original footing and then packed in new concrete under the board.  While it’s not a technique I’d want to use for building a house, it worked out great for this.  Fortunately, we were able to rotohammer new holes into the existing post footings and attach new post anchors to them.  That saved a lot of time and let us start building much more quickly.

The new:

New posts attached to the old footings

The board on top is level, the concrete is not

Me, attaching the first beam

Beams in place and braced

My brother's wife staining deck boards

A zillion joists installed

Beautiful redwood boards

New and improved structure

See no evil, hear no evil, smell no evil

Posts and a lonely rail

Weaving deck boards into place. The funky dimensions of the deck required a lot of extra cutting to keep the seams looking random

Look at the trim board under the front edge to see how much the patio has sagged

Me, my brother, my sister-in law, my nephew and Chloe

As you can see, we did not end up finishing.  While that was a little disappointing, there’s only so much you can get done in just 4 days.  And we met the goal of getting all the “big stuff” done.  It was also really fun to get to spend a long weekend with my brother and his family.  Most people do not think of this as fun, but it was actually a great time.  Then again, most people don’t have houseblogs, either.  Hmmm…maybe they’re the sane ones?

Or maybe it was a raccoon, an opossum and a rat.  And it wasn’t in a pub but actually a blue tarp that had been protecting (I use the term loosely) our large stack of stripped down doors until we had time to refinish them.

While doing the annual spring cleaning of our patio, I lifted up said tarp, so that I could relocate the doors, which had been lying across two sawhorses since last summer.  My first thought was that Chloe had picked up a piece of dog poop with something and then put it under the tarp.  That didn’t make sense anyway, but especially not once I grasped the magnitude of the “deposits.”  And once I got over my initial shock, it became clear that at least two different species had been shacking up under our tarp.  I consider myself open-minded, but even I wasn’t comfortable with this type of relationship.

Another possibility is that it was an opossum having a litter of babies on top of our closet door.  I used a scraper and a hose to knock everything off, but as you can see from the picture, there was definitely some damage.  I am hoping that once it’s sanded and refinished with a dark stain, it won’t be too noticeable.  That is not a job I’m looking forward to!

Pre-stained, err...pee-stained

Well, sort of…  I was recently interviewed for an article about homes with ”Wow Factor.”  Unfortunately, while the story of the discovery of our bungalow was published, there was no mention of our little blog.  I can’t really complain though.  The interview was a lot of fun!

If you’re curious about the WSJ piece, it’s posted here: http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/sir-insights?WC=HPInsThumb

We stumbled on this a few weeks ago in the Dunthorpe area.  Never seen anything like it…

We could live in this thing!

I think I found another twin this week.  I’m starting to wonder if I’m trying too hard to find similarities where they don’t exist, but I’m convinced this is a heavily-modded version of our house.  It looks like they flipped the bow and chimney to the right side, and of course, the elephant in the room is that it has a full porch.  Our dormers are swoopier than all the look-alikes, but the placement and sizing is identical.   It’s too similar to just be a coincidence. You can see the other copies here and here.

The third sibling

This wasn’t a planned shot…it just struck me as funny when I opened up the fridge.

Mixing work and leisure