Why they gotta do that?

My weekend project was to make some significant progress on the removal of paint from the trim in the kids' rooms.  Thanks to the cheerful help of our dear friends, Tom and Melissa, much progress was made.    Melissa pitched in on the tedious (but made so much better with friendly chatting) project of paint removal, and Tom tackled the 140 years of dirt in the basement with Tim (who was much encumbered by a cranky young son).  Thanks so much, T&M!  Also, a shout out to Emily, who braved the dungeonous basement on Sunday for several hours, wielding her fearsome shop-vac weapon in the effort to vanquish the aforementioned 140 years of dirt. 

We are truly blessed by the kindness of our friends!

So, on to project DEPAINT: 

After paint paint paint of stripper in the early morning, we had this:

 and after a few hours, and then some hours of scrape scrape, wipe wipe, scrape scrape, we had:

It's not much, but its enough to discover that underneath all of that dingy white paint is some beautiful, bright finished pine.  Which gets me to - WHY?   Whatever would possess one to paint over such beautiful wood?  I suppose I can thank the same people who have provided us with the lovely "dusty rose" paint job in the master bedroom....

Argh.

But, onward.   Now we've discovered/realized a few important things:

1)  The wood trim underneath is in good shape and is definitely worth preserving. 
2)  The house was built in 1878, so there is a high likelihood that some of this is lead-based paint. 
3)  Sanding will be required, which will cause lead-dust to permeate the house if the area isn't sealed off. 
4)  It will take us, liberally estimating, roughly forever and an army to uncover said beautiful woodwork.
5)  We have four months to make these two rooms at least charming and liveable for the small ones.  Translated loosely, that means no lead paint and some floors would be most excellent, neither of which are the case in these rooms, currently.  Well, I guess if you are okay with having Excalibur-sized splinters in your feet regularly, these floors would be fine....

Hence, tomorrow and Thursday, Tim's meeting contractors at the house who are likely to be eminently more qualified to do such things (not to mention that they will have the miraculous equipment necessary to pulverize the offending paint and remove it safely without dispersing dust everywhere).  We'll see if we can get a quote to un-paint the trim in the bedrooms, bathroom and office that will not break our bank, but will allow us to do this so that we can get on with all of the rest of the 5000 projects that we need to tackle before our July deadline!  Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Our Secret Garden

One the things that is most exciting about our new home is that we have NO IDEA what the garden will look like!  We first looked at the house in December, and until we became the owners last week, the back yard was actually under a coat of snow. 

This year, every little thing that pokes its head above the soil will be an exciting surprise for us, as we discover what our new garden holds.

The first thing we learned about our garden is that it is carpeted with snowdrops, those brave first flowers of spring:

Clusters of these little beauties have popped up through the thick carpet of last autumn's leaves all over the front and back yard, and it's super exciting. 

We also met our lovely neighbor just to the north, and she told me that the tree that our deck encompasses is a giant silver maple: 

I did say that the deck encompasses the tree, right?

And the other large tree in the back yard is a black walnut:

Yes, that is a face on the walnut....

Tim mentioned this in our very first post - but our house comes with some pets:

We acquired 9 beautiful koi with the house, who live in a fish pond that PRT is lovingly maintaing!

She has truly taken her new responsibilities to heart, and looks forward to feeding them and de-leafing the pond every day.   One of the exciting new secrets of our hidden garden is that it's teaching our little girl some amazing things about life and growth and how fun the great outdoors can be, even if there isn't a swing set!    Now, if we can just keep Varro from crawling into the pond and getting eaten by one of those 20 lb koi, we'll be all set...!

I promise, we'll shut up about floors soon...

...but we're just so darn excited; we pulled up an edge of carpet in the first-floor office, soon to be library, once was the kitchen, to see what we were confronting and it's just what we'd hoped for: hardwood. It looks somewhat different from the wood in the dining and living rooms (darker, browner); whether it's different wood (evidently we can expect maple in an 1870's kitchen) or just a different finish, we're not sure yet (hey, we had thirty seconds with a one-and-a-half square foot section, in a room with no lights!). But it's definitely good wood, and might not need refinishing with any urgency. (We've got plenty of urgent projects, never fear.)

Leaves

One of the perks of having the smallest house on the block is that you have the biggest back yard. Combine that with three big trees, and smattering of medium-sized ones, and you get a sense of the scale of the leaf production that goes on at Un-Muddied. IANAFB (I am not a forensic botanist) but I don't think they got raked at all this past fall; there's a layer of leaves that really amounts to a mat, and while it may have done a good job keeping the ground (and its root-bundles and bulbs) from freezing too hard this winter, it is now keeping the li'l plants from getting up into the light, and, if left too long, they encourage rot in all the living plants they're meant to protect. Not to mention where the leaves gathered on and around the deck would be all bad, keeping dampness against the wood.

The thing about mulching with leaves--and composting them, too!--is that you want to shred them first, so that they can do all the good things that decomposing leaves do (warm the earth, return carbon to the soil) without trapping moisture (if you're composting, then shredding jumpstarts and speeds the process by increasing the surface area that the composting microbes can work on, as well as improving air flow through the composting material. And makes the whole pile a bit smaller!).

Problem: We don't have a mulching mower--or any mower at all! There's no grass. The internet suggests using a weed wacker inside a big garbage can, and we may be on to something. Not that we've got a weed wacker.

Brief aside: I'd always assumed "weed wacker" was a trademark, perhaps an abandoned one, but it seems not to have been, at least according to the folks who know at the USPTO. Perhaps a regionalism?

But we do have a hedge trimmer! (Thanks, previous owners!) And a pair of big ol' rolling Chicago garbage carts. And goggles. And dust masks. And leathern gloves. And a plan, a vision, a dream within a dream…

Okay, back to reality. We also have a healthy memory of Bobby Ojeda (and mine own left-middle-finger-tip-history; pins in a finger are no fun), and we'll keep our hands well clear of sharp fast-moving objects.

Dusting and sweeping...

...and moving stuff around. And gathering a bin full of expired, dubious, and anonymous chemical solutions for disposal. How lovely! Cook County taketh away. Well, no, not really, you have to bring it to them. On Tuesday mornings, Thursday afternoons, or the first Saturday of the month. When the rabbit howls at the full moon and the streets run blue with the lymph of the walnut-eating camel.

Speaking of Cook County taking away, how long will it be before I no longer think of the Blues Brothers when I get email alerts from the Assessor of Cook County?

Blues Brothers - Penguin by MattyP20071

More on floors, and renovating in fifteen minutes a day

We've been getting comments on and off-line after that last post, so here's a bit more of our thought process and what we're looking at. It's hard to photograph something that's in very low relief like floor damage but here are a couple of other pictures. First up, by means of the old heating vents, you can see the thickness of the boards (3/4") as well as the bites that time has taken from them.


Often the question of refinishing is posed in terms of "is there enough board that you can sand down to a flat surface?" and that's an important question; I tend to think that if we were to take it down to a flat surface, we'd be (a) in the neighborhood of 1/2" thick and (b) probably onto the tongue and groove itself. Picture number two here should give a sense of what we're looking at in terms of how big the divots in the floor are.

But the other thing that's on our mind is how crumbly these boards are after 130 years. Pulling up the carpet from the softwood in the bedrooms, the tack strips came right up; the tacks sticking into the carpet had better purchase than the nails going into the floor. By contrast, when I pulled the carpet out of the hallway, the tack strips stayed solidly put; I had to bash most of them apart in order to pull the nails. The softwood is in really bad shape, in other words, and we wonder whether the bottom half of the boards are any stronger than the top half.

As if that weren't enough, there are two other things pushing us away from refinishing the current floorboards. First, there is at least one spot (we haven't got all the carpet up yet!) where the carpet hides unusable floor: the "master suite" is actually two small bedrooms with the wall between them opened up into a six foot wide (eyeballing; I haven't thrown a tape on it) passage. Second, the floors are nailed to the joists with common, not finish nails, so we can't simply do a pass over the floors with a nailset in order to make a path clear of metal for the sander or planer to cover. There will be a lot of ripped sandpaper or dulled planer blades--and a lot of lost time and money--in those nails.

Those are the set of factors that has us leaning toward replacing the floors. We'd not lay new floor atop the old; the old floor is uneven enough that we'd be setting up for breaking the new boards at the tongues and grooves when they flex over the high and especially the low spots.

All that said, we do respect that public-private division the original owners had, so if we do replace the floors, we'd replace the floors with something that honors that privateness and separation, not attempting to match the public-space floors but rather complement them with something homier. Not necessarily pine, but something that maintains awareness of that spatial distinction.

Now for the admission: I'm really looking forward to laying a new floor. Anything that combines the pleasure of completing a puzzle with the joy of power tools is all good in my book. And I really don't relish the idea (even if we were to hire someone to do it) of 1/4" x 550 square feet=20,000 cubic inches of lumber converted to dust inside the house (sanding down the floors), plus the VOCs involved in the actual refinishing. There are good reasons to buy pre-finished lumber and a big one is that it can get its finish under a fume hood.

Fifteen minutes (okay, maybe 35 total) today: ripped out the last of the carpet from the hallway (left the padding to protect the floors while we're working up there) and a strip of carpet from the last bedroom, and swept up the bits of tack strip. We're almost ready to get some professional eyes in there in person. (Don't think that we're not getting estimates on everything. We've learned a few things, one of which is not to assume that you can't afford to have a pro do it.)

Good news and bad news!

Every house comes with some of both, right? 

Our first major project involves the floors upstairs - covered

with three different kinds of...aged...carpet when we purchased the house, we knew that we wanted to be carpet free as soon as possible.  Also, it's a priority for us to get the children's rooms in great shape before we move in.  So, on Saturday we started pulling out that nasty carpet! 

I think the good news and the bad news can be summarized in this one photo: 

This is the entry from the upstairs hall to our bedroom.  On the top of the photo, you see the GORGEOUS hardwood floor of the hallway, which has been buried under a carpet lo these many years.  It just needs some love and a hefty coat of MinWax, so we are super excited about that.  (On your knees, waxing minion!!) 

BUT, the four bedrooms upstairs all have variations of what you see on the right - heavily worn, splintered in many places, painted pine.  Not too surprising, as the Victorian way was to make sure that the public spaces looked as good as possible, and save the moolah on the private spaces!  So, we will be finishing our carpet pulling project and then calling in a floor person to see what an expert thinks should be our next plan of action.  We've got a few possibilities:

1)  refinish the pine floors
2)  lay hardwood over the pine floors
3)  rip out the pine floors and put in new hardwood floors. 

We'd love it ya'll could weigh in, so please post and let us know your thoughts!  

For additional information, here's a couple more pictures:

More gorgeous upstairs hallway floor!

The floor in Varro's room.

The master bedroom floor.  Yes, the walls are dusty rose.....













And, for those of you who got all the way to the bottom of this post, I'll leave you with a little reward:

                                                            Daddy, where is your nose???