Extending the Fence

Our local garbage and recycling pickup place has finally made it easy to recycle -- one big bin on wheels (yay!), to hold all the recycling, unsorted (yay!), with a smaller bin beside it for recycled glass (otherwise broken glass gets through everything). And they now accept #2 and #5 plastic tubs, the kind everything is sold in -- butter tubs, jam jars, and take-away at delis and olive bars (yay!).


They have also, in their wisdom, agreed to pick up lawn debris (grass clippings, old plants, etc.) every week rather than every other week, and have provided a big bin on wheels for that, as well (yay!). All the lawn debris, by the way, is composted, and available for any resident to pick up and use -- if you have a truck you're willing to fill with compost.

However, this means that now we have three big bins (including the garbage bin, which is the same size) to store in the yard. We're going to put them all just outside the side door, next to where the garbage is now - however, there is a fence there -- or there was until Saturday. (The photo on the left shows the old garbage bin alongside an uprooted bit of fence, where the other bins will be stored.)

HomoDommi simply dug some new post holes, and extended the fence about 12 feet towards the front of the house. We've been meaning to do this since last fall -- for the aesthetics of it, not the bins, which weren't announced until early summer. We had purchased the pickets and primed them last fall, but as with many things, aesthetics got stalled in the Sargasso Sea of winter and other projects, and it took the winds of practicality to finish the job.

Before and after, as of today, at least.


HomoDommi and FemmeDommi started on Saturday, hours after the new bins arrived. We finished with everything but the latch and the painting yesterday afternoon. (I was supposed to paint today, but instead I prepared and made Walnut Liqueurs.) I'll post a better before-and-after photo after the painting is done. (We're doing planting on the side of the house, too).

Painted Steps

The actual re-painting of the concrete steps didn't take that long, although it required, in advance, re-sweeping, re-washing, and letting the concrete re-dry -- while waiting for the weather to warm up to 60° so the paint would dry quickly.

(Molly is wearing a party hat to remind us that her birthday is very soon, although not as soon as she would like. She wears it every day after school.)

The red is a much nicer color than the tan stain was, bold and bright. At least 4 people have stopped on the street to compliment us on the color and the overall effect. One of these was a complete stranger (a mother picking up her child at the pre-school in the church next door; she said she's been watching us at work all summer).

Another was a neighbor -- the one with the tidy lawn which ends abruptly at the sidewalk with no stray grass-blades hanging over the pavement. You know, that neighbor, the one we all have. We sense in their approval also a vastly relieved sigh, that the neighbors (i.e., us) have once again pulled back from the precipice of Trailer Trash Yard.

Personally, I'd give the red a 90 out of 100, where 100 is the ideal color. I expect the dark green that I had wanted would have been a 92 -- assuming it was the shade of green that I thought it was, and not the shade of green that Mel thought it was, which would have clashed. Mel is better with colors than I am, so she's probably right. Even so, a difference of 2 points -- and when the red works well enough -- is certainly not worth a re-paint.

The final photo is by Molly, if you hadn't guessed from the shadow-silhouette (showing pigtails), of the stairs at the base of the entry sidewalk. Another artsy shot.

Staining the steps

So, we were unable to get the old paint off the concrete. And let me say, we all hated the old paint. It is kind of a gray-blueish white, and once cleaned, the stairs and walkway looked ghastly against the green house and red brick pathway (demonstrating that cleanliness is not always a good thing). Faced with the choice of choosing a paint (a choice involving going out again to Home Depot, and then having to decide on a color -- I don't know which part of the task is more dreaded), or just trying out the stain, because we already have a gallon: we stained.



Not much to say -- the pictures say it all. The stain -- which admittedly I just slapped on -- is streaky, blotchy and too transparent. It just looks dirty, and not even as nice as the nice balanced layer of dirt that had been there before we cleaned.

Actually the front looks kind of nice if you stand across the street, maybe because the tree blocks much of the view. However, we haven't a force field to install to keep all viewers of the house at least 45 feet away. Tomorrow we paint. The question is now, Green or Brick Brown?

A tool we don't like!

We rented a professional water pressure spray-gun, in an attempt to spray the paint off the concrete walkway. The plan was to chip off/get rid of the paint, and then stain the bare concrete (to save us having to buy paint -- we already had bought stain). The spray-gun loaned to us by a friend (which I talked about earlier) chipped bits of paint off, but it was a slow process. Two separate neighbors, and the rental shop, assured us that the professional version would gouge out the concrete itself, if we weren't careful with our aim.

It runs on gas, starting with a pull-rope like a lawn mower, and much louder. It's a lot more powerful than the "amateur" version, and comes with four different nozzles (3350 units of pressure, whatever that means -- the amateur one is about half that). The nozzles vary the shape of the water (from a wide 75° angle ring, through 40° and 25° to a pinpoint) and the force of the water (with pinpoint being enough to gouge concrete). (The fourth nozzle was labeled "chemical" and I didn't figure out what shape that was, but from its position in the row, it was less forceful than the widest-angle nozzle).

Curiously, no paint chipped. Or very little did. And Andrew, the Operator, said it felt dangerous and rather unpleasant to use, so he stopped trying after only a few minutes. I think we ran the thing for less than half an hour, in fact.

On the other hand, we loooove the amateur spray-gun, which will also take off paint (more slowly than the other) but without the feeling that it might leap out of your hands at any moment and scour off your skin.

The professional (rentable) high pressure water spray-gun is the first tool we haven't liked.

The Wonderful High-Pressure Water Spray-gun

One of the list items under Finish the Porch, is Stain the Ugly Concrete Stairs. They are a dirty gray-brown. Andrew thought the church had put a quick slip of cement over them just before selling the house, and has intended to get rid of the steps or at least improve them since they moved in.

Today we bought special cement stain, and borrowed a high-pressure water spray-gun from a friend. This puts out water at a rate about half of the professional spray-guns (which you can rent from Home Depot), but the friend said it was perfectly adequate for cleaning moss and dirt off steps before staining them.



It works like a charm -- pull the trigger, point and spray. And the dirt disappears as if you were spray-painting Clean all over it.

We are left now with a clean step and front walk. And the discovery that it wasn't a cement slip, after all, but paint that the church slapped on before selling the house. So we aren't sure the stain is going to work -- but it is not returnable, so we'll try it before anything else. One option is to rent a professional spray-gun and shoot the paint off -- even the spray-gun we have, given time to work its magic, will push off the paint. Whatever we do, we have to do it soon -- the walk and steps look horrible -- pallid gray with patches where the paint has pulled off. The dirty steps were at least a rather warm and homogeneous brown.

Another use for the spray-gun is the pathway bricks. It turns out that the sprayer melts the mortar off the bricks like butter. So I spent a very fun hour this afternoon shooting off mortar, cleaning 80% of the bricks in the time it would have taken me to scrape 5% of them (and more thoroughly than by hand).

Slow progress

If you're keeping track, of the items to finish before we leave for Minnesota:

#1: Plant the wisteria. Done.

#2: Finish the railing for the stairs. Half-done, but we need more wood, and a trip to Home Depot will take 2 hours from other projects, not to mention suck the last remaining spark from our souls.

#3: Secure the bike cellar. Three-quarters-done (The door is complete, although painting will wait until September. The space is almost electrified -- meaning, it has lights inside and a motion detector and light outside, but the wiring isn't complete. This item will probably be completed tomorrow.)

#4: Cover the hole in the roof. Not started. It won't take long to do, just the chutzpah to climb on the roof again, without a safety rope -- or rather, with a safety rope, but it is no longer tied, as it used to be, around the chimney as an anchor.

#5: Yard Clean-up. Half-done. Getting the wisteria planted was a big push forward, but we still have to get all the wood scraps put away. We made inroads on this today, but there is a lot of wood -- this shows about 1/3 of it. We have finished the storage area for wood in the crawl space next to the bike cellar -- laid a tarp and set in hooks for the wood to rest upon -- but have only just started stowing it.

The green stuff is the old tongue-and-groove porch planks, most of which are rotted on one end for about 10-15 inches, but otherwise fine wood. My job today was to cut off the rotten bits and remove the rusty nails -- I got through less than half this pile, taking 3-4 nails from every board. Both Andrew and I have plans for this scrap wood -- he wants to build a sort of table for tools in the cellar, I want to build the "cat structure" that Molly has been designing for months (essentially boxes on a pole, lined with carpeting). We have so many cats living in the yard now that I'd like to provide a cat-house (like a bird-house) for winter.

By the way, you can also see in this photo the edge of the brick walkway I am creating, using the bricks from the chimney (or rather, the ones remaining after paving the patio in back, and the floor of the bike cellar). It's very rough right now -- the mortar (which is like heavily caked sand) is still on these, and I've just set them into place over the grass, which I'm trying to kill. One of my first projects after we get back in September will be to cut out the lawn underneath, clean off the bricks and lay them properly. I suppose I'll talk about why what and how when that project is properly in progress.

On the Eighth Day, We Finished the Porch

Technically, we only worked on solely the porch for six days, but we feel as if we started on it last Tuesday, when we bought the lumber. (If you recall, we then finished other projects and fought the heat for a couple of days before starting). But however long it took, the main part is done now.

We started the end with a couple of new boards -- 14' 2x6s, which we used to form an extra strut to support the porch floor. It turns out that Home Depot is geared towards contractors (okay, we're slow). It cost $10 for these two humongous boards -- it would have cost $8 for boards half that length. So it's cheaper to buy in bulk. Andrew said it was dicey driving home with wood sticking this far out of the car.

We also rented Andrew's current favorite tool, an Angle Nail Hammer. This is a totally cool sort-of stapler which you position over the porch board and then whack with a hammer (once if you're big and beefy, three times if you're wimpy and at the end of the day). It drives a nail-like staple in at a perfect 45 degree angle, affixing your porch board permanently to whatever you're hammering it on to (which very occasionally, unfortunately, is not the thing you intended to hammer it on to).

We decided in the end to solve the length problem with a 10" wide "threshold" in front of the door (a slab of pine) -- so in front of the door, we only needed the 7' boards. You can see the white board in place under/in front of the door in the picture. For the 40 inch space to the left of the door we pieced porch boards together to make 8' combinations with 7' planks. This involved sawing the boards into combinations that would add up to 8' and which coincided with where there was a strut to nail it to and which kept the seams far from the rain danger of the front of the porch (leaving only the options of 1' + 7' and 2' + 6'). This meant that I learned how to use the Skilsaw, so that Andrew could be punching the Angle Nail Hammer on one board as I prepped the next.

The final product is very fine. It is thrilling to walk on this tight, non-creaking, solid surface, that we put together ourselves in only a few hours. There is some metaphor in the fact that we were able to repair and build the floor underneath our feet. Perhaps it is particularly poignant to us because we spent several days in the "pit" created by the porch walls, so we are quite aware of how the porch floor is 3 feet above ground. To me, it still feels like I'm walking in air when I walk across it.

The work is not entirely finished of course. We would just stain the wood if the whole porch were in this pretty wood, but half is still the old green, so the whole thing will be painted. So next, there is patching, priming, and painting (butter yellow) to do (my job) while Andrew finishes the balustrade and the railing down the steps.

Dry Rot!

And the adventure continues. Today, as planned, the first thing we did was get all the surprises out in the open. We removed the threshold plank, and yes, discovered that the 2 - 2x6s under it (that which supported our bodies so softly as we stepped onto the porch) were completely rotted out.

Then we figured out that, for some unclear reason, the column support of the porch roof -- the one on the left as you face the house -- was supported itself only on 2 out of 4 sides (the column is hollow), and also that the rotted out wood was the primary part of the support.

And then we figured out that the central column of the three at the front of the porch, while nicely propped up on all four sides of the column itself, was only kept from crashing to the ground by being nailed to the porch ceiling, and by resting on the mostly rotted 2x6 threshold board, itself resting on a 2x4 coming up from the ground about 2 feet away. Unfortunately, we figured this out after cutting the board out.

So there were several rather urgent minutes of grabbing a jack and a new length of wood, and propping the column back up again between the structural supports that Andrew had added in the storage chamber. (The porch had only sagged about 1/4" to 1/3" in the meantime).

It took all day (we had to stop at 9 p.m. due to noise laws), but we are finally back to only about an hours' worth of work until we are at the point we thought we were at last night.

No pictures yet of the newly rebuilt and finally supported front of the porch. But isn't the hydrangea pretty? I hope it survives the construction.

In media res

I would have started this blog a couple of weeks ago, but I had been intending to start at the beginning of the project we are currently consumed with -- building a storage area under the front porch (for bikes and outdoor stuff, mostly). However, the disk with all the "Before" photos on it, in my camera, has crapped out, full of memory errors. I lost about 50 photos of "before" and "early-durings".

It was a setback. How could I start a blog intended to show progress on projects without any showing? But I'm past that now, and I have a new compact flash disk in my camera.

The photo above shows the area of the house we are working on -- under the porch on the right side, behind the climbing rose. There used to be a set of stairs coming up from the driveway - those are long gone. Instead, stairs (built, finally, today) will lead down, to a locked and generally air-proofed area carved out all the way to the concrete main stairs into the house.

Below are two comparison photographs (first, taken two days ago; second, taken tonight) showing sample progress. Here you can see Andrew standing in the space.


The camera is in the doorway, where the stairs-up were, and the stairs-down will be. Behind Andrew is a 14 x 10 foot span of clay at ground level. This large crawl space (which is what the whole porch under-area looked like before this project started) is a popular litter box area for all of our cats in the house and the neighborhood (spacious! convenient! outside, yet covered in the rain!). They usually enter through the "window" in the trellis at the back (and have continued to do so, undeterred by the construction nearby). That window will be closed up -- another loss of environment for the cats. We will not be digging that area out (it holds the water main and gas line into the house) but we will lay a tarp over it and use the area for storage as well.

All of the walls that you see were carved out from the clay under the porch-- we hired two teenagers (Will and Molly's baby-sitter and his girlfriend) to come dig; Andrew carted clay to the dumpster. They worked for 17 hours (over two days) and dug much of what you see here (or, as it happens, what you don't see here -- what was in the hole). It filled a 10 cubic yard dumpster of concrete and clay. In the week since, Andrew has carved out another 1/3 dumpster worth of dirt.

It's hard, back-breaking labor. Andrew has been working on this project almost literally from about 9 in the morning until after dusk every night since Tuesday 7/17 (even carrying on that schedule after reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until 6 in the morning last Monday).

But you can see that he is, essentially, creating a new room, one that is about 8x7, complete with entrance stairs. Three walls will be wood (the concrete foundation of the house is the fourth wall), up to high-waist height; above that will be simple plastic sheeting, allowing light through the trellis that is fit all the way around the porch. The stairs went in partially tonight (wood over concrete) and will be finished tomorrow. He has some more framing to do, and then the brick floor will be installed (made with the broken bricks from the chimney we dismantled last April -- maybe I'll blog about that on a slow week). And last will come the electricity, a light inside and a light outside the door, on motion detector, to discourage burglars and allow later evening putaway of yard toys. Oh, and there's the door -- we're having lots of discussions about where the door should go, what it should look like, and which direction it should open.

We are all concerned, but not worried, about water runoff. This is an old house, with concrete foundational walls that are 9-10 inches thick. We do not have wet walls in the basement despite Portland's rain -- so we aren't much worried. But Andrew has taken much care to dig the storage room floor so that it slopes away from the house; the stairs have a lip to discourage rain water; the whole floor is brick over gravel over clay to encourage water to flow away.