Upstairs

OK, so this has nothing to do with crops, but they do seem like they must have come from aliens. On sunny mornings, this is the sight that greets us. The reflections from the playroom windows upstairs create these three Xs on our neighbor’s house. Chloe likes to run upstairs to open and close the windows, which makes the patterns move around. The only thing that stumps is is why do the windows create these Xs? The windows are just plain squares of glass, so there must be some kind of complex polarizing effect going on here. Can anyone explain this to us?

Today kicked off Upstairs, pt. 107. Actually, we have no idea how many days have been “lost” up there, but that’s intentional. We honestly don’t want to know!

Much of yesterday and today was spent on home improvement store runs and clearing out Ginger’s room. I took this week off of work, and our goal is to have her room 100% done and the rest of the upstairs as close to that as possible. There are still little bits of trim work to do in all the rooms, and it’s amazing how many hours can be thrown into finishing a “done” space. My plan is to try to do all the sawing outside, to avoid kicking a bunch of dust into Chloe’s room, but today’s weather didn’t really cooperate with that idea. So, I opted to start the less fun task of starting to patch and mud the plaster walls on either side of the stairs. Our goal is to merge the 15 or so various textures on those two walls into a semi-cohesive look, even if it’s not perfect. And then we’ll paint the walls and rip the carpet off the stairs, so that they can be refinished. We’ve pretty much decided to hire someone else to do it, in line with our “save our sanity” plan that we committed to in our last post. Hopefully by paying for help on a few things we’ll squelch our desire to just move away from all these projects. Even today when dropping $400+ at lumber yards for “a few little things” to finish Ginger’s room, I was dreaming of how nice it’d be to be able to spend that money on something else…or even not spend it at all… So, without further ado, here’s the super-exciting kickoff picture…

Earlier this year, we blogged repeatedly about about our upstairs remodel. Post after post detailed our frantic race to get Chloe’s new bedroom and playroom habitable prior to her little sister’s birth. Then Baby Ginger arrived and we got so distracted that we never mentioned our upstairs again. Pretty inconsiderate of us, huh?

For those of you who have been curious about how it all turned out, below are a few photos of the new playroom. The space isn’t quite finished yet - we have still have some trim work to complete, doors to stain, shelves to install, pictures to hang, etc. But the space is far enough along that Chloe has been able to enjoy it for a couple of months now.

We were able to stay under budget on this project since we pretty much moved everything from Chloe’s old room into this room. The only new additions are the curtains and tablecloth (my first sewing project ever), the big pink beanbag chair (thanks Grandma!) and the new white bookshelf (thanks IKEA!)

We’ll post photos of Chloe’s new bedroom and bathroom soon.

I put in about 5 hours today and was able to get all of the upstairs heating connections finished. All that’s left to do is to connect it to the furnace (luckily, it’s only about 5 feet away from the old chimney chase) and finish insulating everything. Oh, and we have no return duct yet, but I’m not convinced that we’ll even need one. The stairwell should act as a giant return vent, allowing the air to work its way down to the front hall. If things don’t work well, then I’ll add the separate return in later. It took so long, because I foil-taped both the inside and the outside of almost the entire assembly. It may have been overkill, but I hate the idea of air leaking out into the cold attic space!

I really should have run all the ducting before I closed up the chase back in 2005. However, I was too paranoid about tipping off the kitchen inspector to future projects that may or not end up getting permitted. The problem it’s causing me now is that the chase is somewhat snug, and it was a bear feeding ductwork up it. Ironically, while the chase was snug enough that it made my duct insulation bunch up halfway up the shaft, I had the pleasure of watching the entire 10′ of insulation slide off the pipe while I was securing it at top. I was frustrated enough at that point to just say screw it, and I’ll try to come up with some clever way to push it up from the bottom later. Or I’ll just say screw it and let it warm the chase up a bit. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, the section with the metal strap is a tee that branches 0ff to the right (and then wye’s into flex duct that heads for Chloe and Ginger’s rooms) and continues straight towards the playroom register. The little flex pipe that branches off to the left is for the bathroom.

See if you can follow the math…

Colder weather
+ Large holes in the closet walls (attic access areas)
+ No heat ducts
= Cold upstairs

While the new insulation has made a tremendous difference, not having the furnace connected (yet) to the upstairs was not working out now that we’re into November. It was getting too cold for Chloe to be sleeping up there, so I finally took the first small step back into the remodeling world since Project Ginger. I put in foam insulation and 1/4″ plywood panels to cover all of the attic access holes. I probably went overkill by creating 7 of them, but I do not like inaccessible, or even difficult to access, areas. Some parts of the attic had been sealed up since the house was built in 1911, although maybe ignorance is bliss, since who wants to even know about raccoon poop? So, here’s what they look like now and what lies behind the plywood.  Check back in another five years to see if we’ve even painted them by then!

The good and bad news is that Stephanie is now a week overdue.  While it’s been helpful to have all these extra weekends to work on the upstairs, enough is enough!  She is definitely ready for the baby to come out now.  Yesterday and today I worked on finish coats for the trim, paint edging and cleaning up.  While there are still a lot of areas that need further touch up, the rooms are looking REALLY good.  We had taken pictures earlier today but then retook them at night to really show how nice things are looking.  During the day, the mix of lighting is not as flattering and a lot of the details are lost in shadows.  At night the lighting is much more even, which I guess really means that we did a really good job planning out our lights (OK, really we were just lucky).

Getting all the paper out from under the base shoe was a real daytime nightmare.  I suppose there is some trick that professional painters use, but I sure don’t know what it is.  After 4-5 coats of primer and paint, the base shoe and paper had become one.  I ended up having to use a utility knife to score them apart, which sounds much easier and faster than it really was.  It probably took me at least two hours to remove all the paper.  And while I usually try to do everything by hand and without masking, there was no good way to get paint on the base shoe and not the floor.  I know that everyone’s thinking “well, why not paint the base shoe before installing it?”  And yes, that would’ve been a good idea, but I had so much other unpainted trim (sills, separator beads) that I just didn’t want to be bothered.  Sometimes you get on a roll and don’t want to be slowed down by such tings.  Of course, all I did was defer one lousy job for an even worse one.  Not only was the paper hard to remove, it was even harder to slide get it under the base shoe in the first place (I wasn’t going to settle for a sloppy masking tape line!).  This is how I do so many of my jobs…bounce back and forth between two methods that I don’t like, always thinking that the other one would’ve worked so much better.  There’s always next time.  Regardless of my construction inefficiencies, I’m really happy with the way it’s turning out.

Luckily the baby held out through another weekend, so I got two more days in on the upstairs. I finished up the caulking of all the trim, got it all primed and even got a first coat of gloss white on some of it. Our friend Jason of the Jasonian Institute even came over to pitch in a few hours of help. That was an unexpected surprise and helped push things forward today. Next Saturday is the baby’s due date, so our borrowed time will likely have to be repaid in full before you see any more updates from us…

After my past experience of working with my dad on painted trim, I find that it now takes me twice as long to get it done. The tradeoff, though, is that it looks at least twice as good. I never used to bother with caulk, and the result was gaps all over the place. Unlike stained trim, which camouflages gaps quite well, white trim appear to have all of these dark lines in it. It can really cheapen all the hard work you put into carefully cutting and installing the trim in the first place. While my dad potentially uses caulk to the point of overkill, working with him on our bathroom wainscoting showed me how good painted trim can look. Caulking ever single visible seam makes it look so much more professional and substantial. While I “wasted” at least an entire day’s worth of time caulking this trim (not to mention the day I spent with the spackle and wood filler), it looks really, really good.

I took off Monday and Tuesday in order to have a nice, big five day weekend. I can say without hesitation that the most exciting accomplishment of those days was the fact that I cleaned up the rooms. It is such a great feeling to get out all the clutter and tools and see your creation. A funny story is that I didn’t tell Stephanie that I was going to be throwing all the wood scraps out the window (the only way a reasonable person would consider doing it), and she saw a piece of plywood plummet down while she was sitting at the dining room table. Her first thought was that it was me falling out of the window, which scared her to death. I guess it probably wasn’t very funny to her at the time, but I found it kind of amusing.

Anyway, we had decided a few weeks ago to cut our losses and stop any work on the baby’s room. Since our window of opportunity is rapidly shrinking (Steph’s due date is less than 3 weeks away), we realized that to have any hope of moving Chloe upstairs (and thereby staking a claim on her room (and more importantly, her closet, since ours is only about 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 feet!), we had to give up on our “nobody sets foot in the room until it’s 100% done” goal. Since we’ve never made that target in the past, what made us think we could do it this time? So, that means that much of the finish work, such as staining the doors and doing the trim in the baby’s room, will have to come after the fact. I did manage to get up most of the base shoe trim this week and have even started some of the filling and caulking. Unless the baby comes in the next couple of days, we should even see a bunch of painted trim this weekend!

Over the last couple of days, I started and pretty much finished Chloe’s built-in bed/windowseat. All such projects are inspired and/or degraded by my “seat of the pants” design method, which is further affected by issues such as sloping floors and non-square walls. I’ve never been good at having the patience to sketch out all the detail work ahead of time, although I know that it’s a great thing to do. Regardless, I’m pretty happy with the way it came out, and once a few more pieces of trim and a lot of white paint are added, it should look pretty decent. And even though it’s “made for a girl, it’s strong enough for a boy.” I made it super-sturdy, so any jumping around shouldn’t be a problem.

This weekend saw another closet door hung, as well as more trim in Chloe’s room. I basically just worked until I ran out of wood, which didn’t take too long. Got to pick up more MDF this week.  As often happens, I realized that my “vision” was limited when I created the closet openings.  If I had just put them a few inches over, I wouldn’t have had to do all the funky cuts in the trim.  On the other hand, I think they look kind of cool with the notches for the rafters in them.