Our New Old House

This summer finds us cutting lots of trees and shrubs down at both of our new old houses. In Des Moines Brandon cut down the shrubs in front of our porch. They’d overgrown the space provided and I wasn’t able to trim them back far enough to be able to use the sidewalk. I’m going to replace them with rose bushes.

Before:
(With bushes, and snow)

After:
(Bush free and summery)

We did a similar job at our house in Clear Lake. The shrubs in front of our porch there were getting dead spots and were kind of preventing us from keeping the rest of the area around the house clean, so we decided to cut them out too.

Before:

During:

After:

Obviously, we have more clean-up to do now that the bushes are gone. We’re going to dig out the stumps and clear all the weeds out, then plant some new flowers there.

In the back yard in Des Moines we’ve got a bunch of trees that were volunteer saplings many years ago and have now grown to be total pests. We’re gathering quotes this week to see what it will cost to have them removed, as well as what it will take to have the big catalpa tree between our house and the neighbor’s taken out. I’ve got a good recommendation for what kind of tree to replace it with, so that will be a big change coming up sometime.

And while I’m talking about future plans I might as well list out some other things we have coming in the (hopefully) near future.

• Reshingle the roof
• Repair the front steps
• Tear out sidewalk blocks & have a new one poured
• Paint the back wall of the house
• One more coat of paint on the rest of the house
• Build a shed on the old garage slab

Phew! That’s a long list. Better get to work then!

Well, two to be exact, and one’s actually at our OTHER new old house. But you want pictures, so here you go.

This is a small rose bush I planted last spring. It didn’t bloom then, but this year it mustered up enough energy to give me one beautiful red bud. I haven’t done as well as I should at keeping pests off it, so unfortunately the flower got eaten by a grasshopper soon after this picture was taken, but I did get a good sniff of the blossom and it was magnificent! Think of old fashioned rose perfume.

The second rose bush is at our house in Clear Lake. My grandparents built the house in the 60s and at some point planted this rose bush. I have no idea how old this rose bush is, but it’s been around as long as I can remember, and when we bought the house, it was still going strong. It’s had rough years and this year I was worried about it, but with a little care and pruning it came back like it always does. I’m so proud of this little rose bush! And caring for it is one of the ways I continue to feel connected to my grandparents. These flowers have a creamy, almost vanilla scent, kind of like butter cream frosting.

While Brandon is in San Antonio for two weeks training for his job, I’m making a lot of little steps of progress that will hopefully amount to a lot of transformation by the time he comes back.

On Friday after work I drove up to Clear Lake to take care of some cleaning, check on the state of the yard, and swap many of my summer clothes for winter ones. I’d been listening to the weather report all week and when they told me it was supposed to get down into the low 30s at night I decided it was time to light the furnace. Most people don’t like the smell the furnace puts out the first time it’s lit for the season. But for me, it’s got some sort of nostalgic quality. I dug a frozen pizza out of the freezer and settled in for the night.

I got a lot done there and got a good night’s sleep. In the morning I drove back to Des Moines to fulfill the commitment I made to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity that afternoon. One of the attorneys I work for babysits for a single mom who has two kids. She’s trying to qualify to receive a Habitat for Humanity home. The program requires that anyone receiving a home put in a certain number of hours’ worth of sweat equity. They will accept volunteer hours done on that person’s behalf to go toward the quota, so this attorney put out a call for people to volunteer on the woman’s behalf. Since they already had enough help working on construction projects, they sent me to the local ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity version of a Goodwill, St. Vincent DePaul, or Salvation Army thrift store. If you’re a house rehabber, or if you’re just doing some small jobs around your house, it really pays to find your nearest ReStore. They receive donations of both new and used home improvement items ranging from antique doorknobs to professional kitchen ranges. It also pays to check back with the ReStore every couple of weeks or so because they’re constantly changing their stock. The location near my house even keeps a log of special requests customers are looking for. If there’s something you really need and they don’t have it in stock, you can sign up and leave your phone number and if they get a donation that fits what you need, they’ll give you a call. When I arrived, the volunteer coordinator put me right to work cleaning the grease and dust off a professional stove, grill, and steamer that had been torn out of a huge home out on the west side. When I was done with that, she had me dust and find the shelves for a fourteen foot tall book shelf that came out of the same house. I put in 3 hours of work and then grabbed a cart and did some shopping. I found a shower extender for a clawfoot tub, EXACTLY what I need, for a dollar! Yes you read that right, the thing I’d budgeted $200 for cost me one little greenback dollar. I do need to find a connector piece for it, but I figure it shouldn’t be too tough to ask the local hardware store for something to attach a 3/8 inch fixture to a 1/2 inch faucet. In addition to that little gem I found two 24″ bathroom towel bars and matching washcloth hooks and a robe hook for the door. All those cost me $40. So my total purchases were $41. I was expecting to spend $80 on the towel stuff, so I was just as happy as a pig in slop over my little adventure! Additionally, I scoped out their selection of pedestal sinks (one top half was only $15!), their cabinetry (I’ll definitely take measurements and check back for upper cabinets for my kitchen), and asked about the likelihood of finding landscaping materials. Holy cow, it was an awesome adventure!

I pretty much called it a night after that. Today I got up late, took a leisurely shower, and drove out to Johnston to have a birthday lunch with my Grandma, the original east sider of the family (along with Grandpa, who grew up in Highland Park). It was great to catch up with the family, and after the party was all cleaned up I headed back to our new old house to unload my car and tackle a couple of projects I’d assigned myself for the weekend.

One was to hook up the washing machine to make sure it and our plumbing work. I’d never hooked up a washing machine before, but everything went pretty smoothly. I do have one leaky spigot, but it’s convenient enough for me to turn it off when it’s not in use and turn it on when I need to run a load of laundry. Check that off the list!

Next I wanted to see how far I could get with scraping the wallpaper in the front bedroom. If you’ll remember, there is a layer of paint over that wallpaper, which makes a seal that the Downy/water spray can’t really penetrate. So I have to sort of hack away at the paint layer first and then use the Downy on the remaining wallpaper residue. It’s rather laborious, but luckily for me I have another Grandma right down the street who makes these kinds of tasks go much faster. She called me just as I was sitting down to start scraping above the baseboard and told me she’d seen me drive by and could she come over and work on the dining room wallpaper? When she sets her mind to finishing something, by golly she gets it done, and I could tell it had just been bugging her that she hadn’t finished a room before she left for New York on an American Legion trip. So I set her loose in the dining room while I tackled the bedroom. We both made a ton of progress despite my breaking two razor blades and slicing my finger open on the second broken one. Once I stopped the bleeding, I took a trip to the grocery store to buy band-aids, Neosporin, and more Downy. Grandma and I worked on the wallpaper until 8pm.

Tomorrow my goal is to get down to Menard’s and take care of two things: 1) the fixture to attach the shower unit, and 2) find pieces of pipe and the necessary mounting brackets to make a full sized shower curtain rack. All the pre-made kits I find are just big enough to enclose half the clawfoot tub in a circle. I want a shower curtain around the WHOLE tub so I’m going to have to build one myself. Thanks to the $50 gift card from Menards and the $25 one from Home Depot that my super generous friends gave me as housewarming gifts, I’ll have that project covered as a freebie!

I’m off to a well-earned shower now. Pictures soon!

If you’re sick of the lolcats and their Engrish, too bad. I love them and I will emulate them on my blog.  So

 The point is, we have been given an insurance quote by someone who seems reasonably reputable!  So that’s a HUGE load off my mind.

Meanwhile, in all the excitement about the house and construction and everything, Brandon and I totally spaced out that we’re supposed to send a lot of things to our mortgage originator: 2 most recent pay stubs (each), our 2006 W-2’s, and our bank statement.  We were worried at first because most of our important papers are in a filing cabinet in our house in Clear Lake, about a 2 hour drive from here.  We were JUST up there this weekend and didn’t want to have to spend the gas and the time to go up again tonight.  Fortunately, we filed our taxes online and were able to print a copy of our 2006 tax return, which has all the information the lender needs.  Brandon put together an email with the tax return, our bank statement (LOVE online banking), and we’ll be scanning our most recent pay stubs tonight to send by email. 

It feels like life’s putting up hurdles in front of us and we just keep sailing over them.  So far so good.  Four days and counting.

Since we’re going to be so busy the rest of this summer working on our new old house, Brandon and I made it a point to go up to Clear Lake this weekend and work on our other house. We did some outdoor jobs that we’ve been putting off too long. Brandon mowed the grass while I went to the hardware store (more about that later), and when I got back he had borrowed a neighbor’s tree trimmer (sawblade on the end of a LONG pole) and was cutting away the branches that were brushing the roof. I changed my clothes and got on the roof to help. He gave me the lopping shears and I snipped off everything I could reach. Then he handed me a big broom and I swept the whole roof. Our neighbors on two sides have really dirty trees that drop two sets of leaves every year, PLUS these little peppercorn-like seeds that act just like ball bearings under your feet when you’re trying to walk around on the roof. Yeah, I was taking my life into my hands, no doubt about it. But after I got the roof swept off I put on my rubber-coated gloves and cleaned out the three inch layer of mosquito-infested compost that had built up in our gutters over the course of the summer. Amazingly, I escaped with only one mosquito bite on my whole body, and it’s on the knuckle of my right pointer finger. All in all it was a very productive and exhausting day, but we did get to go swimming so that made it all feel a little like a vacation.

My trip to the hardware store had two purposes: to buy some things we actually need, and to scope out prices and plan for future projects.

Here’s the stuff I put on my list to buy:

• latex gloves
• a gallon of kilz
• a couple new brushes (since the foam ones I used last time have since bit the dust)
• a face mask
• furnace filter
• protective eye goggles

I got all those things.

More importantly, I did some planning for future projects. Here’s what I came up with:

We want to remove the countertop sink in the bathroom and replace it with a pedestal. I found a really lovely one for about $60. Faucets tend to cost between $40 and $60, so I’ll budget for $60. That doesn’t include any additional plumbing hardware we’ll need to connect it with, so I guess I’ll add $30 for that and come up with a total sink replacement budget of $150.

We need to buy a refrigerator. Menards had a 10 cubic foot self defrosting fridge/freezer for $309. We were hoping to spend no more than $400 for a fridge, so that’s probably what we’ll go with. I had hoped to buy an Energy Star appliance, for the tax break, but they only had one at Menards and it was around $600. This one only uses 386 kwh per year, though, so it’s not like it’s an energy hog.

We can borrow most of the power tools we’ll need from friends and family, but we wanted to see what it would cost to buy them anyway, because it’s always nice to have your own tools.

I found two circular saws that I liked and that were in my price range. One was a Tool Shop brand. It was $23.66, a nice compact size, and had all the standard features. I found a Skil one at Sears, though, and it felt more balanced in my hand. It costs $39.99. They had a Craftsman saw at Sears that I picked up but it just felt awful. All the weight was in the back and it felt really bottom-heavy. It was also $39.99 on sale.

The Skil reciprocating saw was $54.99 on sale, but the Masterforce, which comes with an actual hard case rather than a canvas carrying bag was $64.00 regular price, so I’d probably go with the Masterforce. Everything about them other than that was the same, except I like the pivot foot on the Masterforce better.

I wanted to see what a chainsaw would cost, so I looked at the 14″ ones, both gas and electric. I was really surprised by the difference in price between the gas and electric. Gas was $109 and electric was only $34.99. The electric one at Sears was $59.99. I don’t actually plan on buying one very soon. We already have an offer from my mom’s boyfriend to use his next week.

The big project I’m going to work on planning for is the retaining walls and planters to fix our erosion problem on the side of the house. I still haven’t measured for how big these retaining walls are going to be, but I got prices per unit for all the supplies we’ll need, so once I have measured we can figure out how much it will cost. Here’s a list of supplies I will need for the project (and the prices I gathered today):

• Paver base (50 lb. bag – $2.38)
• Pea gravel (50 lb. bag – $2.39)
• Retaining wall bricks (88 cents each)
• Top soil (40 lb. bag – $1.14)
• Flagstones ($1.44 each)

So, the plan as I see it in my head, having never done this before, is this:

1. Measure the area to build the walls
2. Add up how much of the supplies I’ll need
3. Buy the supplies I’ll need, plus extras
4. Put the first layer of bricks together so they fit properly
5. Mark the final layout where the walls will go
6. Dig a swath for the base layer of bricks
7. Pour paver base into the swath and tamp it down
8. Build the brick wall
9. Put a layer of pea gravel inside the planting area
10. Put a layer of top soil inside the planting area
11. Put some plastic edging strips at each end of the pathway between the two planting beds
12. Level the ground and put down paver base
13. Lay flagstones to make a path
14. Pour pea gravel around the flagstones and up to the walls to fill in the rest of the space
15. Plant hostas and other shade loving plants in the planter beds

At least that’s the plan as it appears to me in my current state of being under the influence of a valerian root sleeping pill. We’ll see how coherent all this looks to me in the morning.

[tags]budget, Clear Lake house, future plans, gutters, power tools, retaining wall, trees, yardwork[/tags]