Contractors - Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma'am!

To heck with having an exploded kitchen -- we've hired contractors to mostly finish the work.  By "we" I mean The Texan, who did the legwork. I just showed them around for bids, and then have been letting them into the house for work.

The last straw was the day after HomoDommi returned home from his latest visit, when we all realized that -- due to school functions, having to move houses (their rental expired), and summer school (not to mention recovery from the sheer exhaustion after the last working visit) -- he would not be able to get back to Portland for any reason until late June at the earliest. And then he would only be able to stay a few days, and would have children with him. We at Cattus Dommus Prime would love to see the children, but their presence would not be conducive to dawn-to-dusk work on the house. We couldn't stand the thought of 6 weeks of no-progress, followed by a mere couple of half days' work, followed by more long weeks of stalemate.

So contractors it is.  The Texan chose someone who bills himself as an "All Around HandyMan", which allows us much flexibility -- and it's already proved useful.  I'll call him "Marvellus" -- a rotund man with shiny white hair who reminds me of a generic character actor from a screwball comedy -- and his sidekick, "Gricolus" -- a wiry, pepper-bearded short man who moves quickly and constantly, who, if anything, reminds me of the generic town-drunk sidekick in a singing western (without any hint of the drunk part). (Click here for more fun with Roman names.)  Gricolus's high-school-aged son "Tertus" is working too. A summer job that comes with long-term career experience.

HomoDommi does good work -- our new Handymen have not done anything better than he could have.  They are faster though (and there are three of them, two of which have a combined 75 years of experience), and not worse. They've worked four partial days so far, and in that time have sheetrocked (and double-mudded) the remainder of the room and ceiling, and built a broom closet.  They fixed a bunch of mistakes in the mudding of the walls that I did, too. The space feels more solid now, less echoey, although it's still wide open.

The next step is up to us. We are priming the sheetrock -- putting plain old drywall primer behind all the cabinets, and special "toothed" primer everywhere else, even the ceiling. By "toothed", I mean, environmentally green gluish-paint-substance-with-tons-of-sand-in-it.  

This coming weekend, we will plaster all these toothed surfaces with American Clay, a textured plaster that gives a hand-crafted, earthy feel to the walls.  By "we", I mean, me, and The Texan.  The How-to DVD that comes with the bag assures us it is easy to apply, while recommending we hire professionals.  The Texan and HomoDommi have used it before (on the downstairs bathroom, for anyone who's been to the house) -- and assure me it is nowhere near as straightforward as implied.  They both seem to think the kitchen will be easier, however, because, "the bathroom -- that was two of us, in a small space, in 85 degree summer heat!"  

I look at the sheer volume of wall space we will be covering (about three times the size of the bathroom, and much of that is ceiling) and the forecast for this weekend (sun at last, with a steamy 83 high for both days), and I wonder about those professionals. Time to recharge my keen sense of humor, I see.

Front Railing

When we re-floored the porch in August, we took out the original railing, and have needed a new one ever since. Now that Mater Dommus Paterni has come and gone -- so it's too late to help her up or down the steps -- we have finally gotten a railing installed. It's another great job by Mike the Contractor.

The steps have been these huge concrete things that HomoDomi has hated forever. This summer, we painted them (brown and red ), and that was a vast improvement. But there's been no railing, of course, and it was both bare-looking and dangerous.

To mask the width of the steps, we've put a big box around one side. We have to wait to paint the railings until it is drier and warmer -- we will mimic the look of the rest of the porch railing: green on the top and soft butter yellow for the rails.

And around the big box we'll put lattice to match the rest of the underporch look, too. Come summer, we'll set pots of flowers on it.

It's hard to see in the photos (it is difficult to get far enough away to see the whole front of the house unobstructed), but the box, which seems heavy and unbalanced in these shots, works to balance the long stretch of porch on the right. In the summer, when the wisteria is fully leafed out, it will look much less bare. I am going to have to replant the left hand (north west) corner of the house, of course (there's a hydrangea there that has now been put in full shade and blocked from anyone's view).

Aside from the painting, there remains only the question of a cover for the box -- we waiver back and forth between galvanized steel, or copper ($160 more). I think long-run (i.e., after kitchen is paid for) it would look best with a copper top (bent over the edge of the box) and copper gutters across the front of the house, with a copper rain-chain hanging down the left corner (behind and over from the box). But we have to live with it for a while and get a sense of what's needed, not to mention a sense of what it will look like in sun and with greenery around it.

A same-spot shot of the porch from August.
A view of the porch from last July, long before the renovations, and in sunny summer.

Update: Linen Closet, redux

The upstairs linen closet is done. Well, mostly -- the contractor's part is done. We still have to caulk the inside of the doors, prime, and paint it, which will lead to repainting all the woodwork and the walls of the upstairs hallway. HomoDomi is going to strip the hardware and buff and re-age it, but that will come early next year. And later, we will add a laundry chute. But at least now we have the feeling of lots of storage space. (The box in the lower right covers the hole that will become the chute.)
Today we had to find a latch for the new closet doors, to match the old. We went back to Rejuvenation House and combed through their piles of old fasteners. It's dirty work, but fun to do -- you feel like you could discover treasure at any moment. (But Rejuvenation House is not run by dummies, and the true treasures have been pulled out already and the merely valuable pieces are priced accordingly). (photos taken with mobile phone)


We found two matching latches (with a bigger handle than the one which had been on the closet), for $10 each. Not bad, when they were asking $30 for new reproduction.

Update: Linen Closet

Day Two: Michael installs shelves, and hangs one door (built from scratch, of course). The wood is beautiful, old-style fir. HomoDomi has suggested leaving it as stained wood, but that would require stripping the other closet and the other four doors in the small hallway. Also, I think the white paint looks nice and is appropriate for an upstairs hallway of the time.

Mike said he hadn't built for exposed wood, and there were touches left in that were intended to be covered with paint. I think that convinced HomoDomi more than my opinions about required extra work and appropriateness.

So far as we know, the woodwork paint is original -- so in order to match, we will likely have to repaint all four doors and the other closet. I want to get a quart of pale blue-green paint and update the walls of the hallway, as well. The existing blue-green is a pretty color, but has faded and gotten dingy over the years.

Here, for fun, is the view from the bottom of the closet down through the kitchen (the light glowing in) to the basement. You can just make out, behind all the wires and white pipes, the blue line that is the curtain-wall of my room.

The Upstairs Hallway

We've been really busy the last several days, and I've been too tired to blog at the end of the day.

Michael, the poet who installed our attic fan last month, freed up some time for us this week. So we've got him fixing the hole on the second floor where the chimney used to be. We love Mike and hope he will have time to do many other projects for us. But first, the New Linen Closet.

Here is the progression: Last April, we had an over-crowded linen-closet and a wall in the upstairs hallway. The plan is to have, by next week, two gently filled linen closets in the upstairs hallway, side-by-side, looking as if they had been there all along.

In the meantime, if you recall, we removed the chimney behind that narrow space of blank wall. We sawed through the lathe-and-plaster wall, exposing the chimney and a large hole. You can see, in several of these photos, the back of lathe-and-plaster walls around the sides and back of the hole, and a gap that has been considered useful for running electric lines. The whole second floor is electrified by five wires that run from the fuse box in the basement, up this hole along the chimney, into the attic, across and then back down between the walls of the second-storey rooms. Some of this electricity is original knob-and-tube, which actually is in pretty good shape. About half is a slapdash job from the remodeling done in the 1950s.

By the way, also run up the hole from basement to the floor of the second-storey are the water pipes for the upstairs bathroom. That is, water comes in through an underground pipe into the basement on one side of the house, across to the middle of the house, up the chimney hole, and then, between the ceiling of the first-storey and the floor of the second-storey, back across the house again to exactly above where the water enters the house.

This talk about electricity and plumbing will become relevant in future blog entries, when I talk about the work going on in the attic and the kitchen.

We took down the chimney bricks in April, and since then, the hallway has been an over-crowded linen closet and a drafty hole extending from attic to basement. For seven months, we've had a large plastic sheet roughly taped over the hole in the wall, but really there's been nothing to prevent a boisterous child from jumping/falling/being pushed from the second floor down to the hard concrete floor of the basement. In fact, for a while there, towels were being dropped (but they fell into an area almost impossible to reach behind tables and bookshelves and things, so that was discouraged).

Anyway, there's nothing like getting things done. Mike took measurements Monday, started building yesterday, and except for waiting for glue to dry and painting, will be done tomorrow, I think. He started by closing in the box with plywood yesterday, and today he did the frame and molding that will decorate both old and new closets, so they look like a set. Tonight, the glue holding together the grid decoration (false panels) for one new door is drying; tomorrow the other will be set. HomoDomi and I scrounged through piles of antique and junk hinges today at Rejuvenation House in order to find four hinges that exactly match the original hardware (nothing so grand as shown online, which have been cleaned up). I just realized, writing this, that we forgot to pick up a latch. Darn, another trip to one of our favorite stores that we'll be forced to take.

We asked Mike to leave the holes to the other floors -- both the ceiling up to the attic, which we will block from above, and the gap downward. You can sort of see his shop vacuum blocking the hole in the floor in the last photo. One of the projects coming up will be installation of a proper laundry chute down to the basement -- complicated because it passes through the kitchen, and we haven't finally decided where exactly it should be located yet (wiggle room of two feet or so).

Fixing a hole...Fixed.

Nothing like johnny-on-the-spotiveness. We've had a hole in our roof since April. Today, we got it fixed. (The photo, hard to parse even for me who took it, is a view from the basement up the space left by the chimney removal through to the roof; that black square at the top center is the blocked hole. The arc-y things are electric wires and flexible plumbing carrying power and water to the second floor.)

We had a party last week; a friend mentioned he knew a contractor he could recommend; the friend actually followed up and introduced us. The contractor, Mike, turns out to be a poet who just published his first book, and is the builder of the Poetry Kiosks that appear around Portland (little windows on stands with poems in them). That alone was enough to get Mike hired, but then we found out he lives less than two blocks away and had been previously recommended by two other friends but they hadn't carried through as thoroughly as this latest friend. Networking and follow-through: the keys to success.

Mike is great. In one day he closed up the hole, re-shingled, and then cut another hole and installed a solar-run heat fan to suck the hot air up and out of the house in the summer. His efficiency is counter-balanced by our lack of it -- for him to get everything done, Andrew and I had to go to Environmental Building Supply (an eco-friendly building supply company, for the solar-powered fan), Home Depot, Lowe's, and Oregon Roofing Supply (for the shingles and plywood).

I took a picture of Mike and Andrew and the fan (which is so efficient that it was spinning while sitting half-out-of-the-box on the workbench on an overcast day), but my camera appears to have broken. The display shows only fine stripes of gray and black, and two out of three photos are unidentifiable files. This happened between Photos #3 and #4 this morning, while the camera sat in my pocket.

Apparently we are going to hire Mike to finish the closet on the second floor (in the hole left by the chimney removal) and possibly to finish the railings on the front steps, since Andrew is more mystified by how to building angled railings than he had let on before. I obviously had better get cracking on getting my camera repaired or replaced!