This room in my basement is where I do all the wood refinishing projects that aren’t stuck to the wall. Currently I’ve got a door propped up on sawhorses soaking in Citri-Strip, a table for heat gunning paint off the trim pieces for the windows, and a table for Citri-Stripping other trim pieces. You can see a door propped up on the right that’s been refinished — I just have to put the hardware back on it and hang it back in its doorway — and a stack of windows from the front bedroom waiting to be reglazed, stripped, and refinished.

Closeup of the trim pieces ready for Citri-stripping:

So that’s my little workshop! Hopefully I’ll have some nice progress pictures for you soon.

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!

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.

And our spider friends are enjoying the increase in insects to eat. As you can see they’ve grown big on their steady diet. (I took this picture for Brandon. He loves spiders.)

Before:

During:

After:

Before:

During:

After:

Scratch is impressed.

Here are the old pipes to the tub:

And here are the new flex tubes, which are much easier to attach to fixtures.

Since we were going to have the plumber here anyway, we asked him to remove some of the scary old fixtures that had been left behind by previous owners. This toilet was a must to go.

And so it  was gone…

And they capped the drain hole.

The pipes were all galvanized before and probably very close to original on the house and had calcified inside quite a bit. Here’s the inside of one of the valves they took off:

So, with all the galvanized gone they replaced it with Pex.

Now our water pressure is GREAT, the hot water gets to the tap really hot, and fixtures are all easy to attach!

We used John Carroll of Des Moines (Carroll Plumbing, LLC) and we were really satisfied with his work.

The mock orange is in full bloom.

And this flower that looks like sedum (I’m not actually sure what it is, but it’s not sedum) is spreading nicely in my front flower bed.  EDIT: My friend Matt informs me this is spirea. He also says spirea sounds like a venereal disease. Either way, it’s a pretty plant.

Even this shiny little beetle was out enjoying the day.

Happy spring!

On Saturday, it looked like this!

Actually, that picture is from after I’d cleaned up after the party a bit. But you get the idea.

Friday night Brandon put up the last of the wallpaper border in the dining room.

I’m very pleased with how it came out.

On Saturday morning he put the attic door back on with freshly painted hardware.  (I still have a little more clean-up work to do on that door, but it looked pretty nice having it back up.)

On Saturday night Our New Old House was full of friends and laughter. We finished all the projects on our list in the knick of time and it was a wonderful party.

We’re so grateful for everybody who came and celebrated with us! Our house is so much warmer with friends to share it with.

I think we can.

We’ve made some good progress on the dining room. Here’s how the dining room windows looked mid-chemical strip:

And with chemical stripping done, waiting for wood filler to dry so I can sand it.

The rest of the woodwork in the dining room is coming along nicely. I finished stripping one side of this door.

And the rest of the woodwork on the doorways:

Here’s the kitchen doorway mid-chemical strip:

Brandon took off the door so I could get the rest of this doorway stripped. It’s pretty much done now except for some minor clean up of putty between the pieces.

And the kitchen doorway very close to finished:

In the living room we still had a section of wall that needed priming.

So Brandon primed it.

Also, I heat stripped the paint off the window frame and baseboards on that side.

There are still sections of the floor that need to have the carpet padding scraped off so I’ve been finishing that job this week.

Finally, in preparation for the party, I made a batch of cookies. Ok, really this batch was just to motivate myself to keep working. Well, ok it was to bribe myself to keep working. Whatever. Cookies rock.

Last night I painted the whole living room with the same bone white that is in the dining room. I was only able to do one coat, but it’s a huge improvement from the stark white primer. Tonight I’m going to finish scraping the dining room floor (finished the living room floor on Tuesday,) do a couple of touch ups on the wood work, and possibly heat strip the woodwork around the living room front door and front windows. Brandon started putting up the wallpaper border in the dining room last night and we’ll finish that tonight. Then Friday will be for arranging furniture and cleaning up.

Phew! There’s nothing like marathon house fixing!