Skilled labor

On Monday morning the electrician came. We found a number of things still using knob & tube wiring, including three outlets in the living room previously thought to be grounded (and therefore NM cable). The only grounded outlet in the room was the one I tested "to see if this room is grounded", naturally. After surveying the scene, the electrician said there is no way I'd get the rewiring done professionally for less than $6K, and therefore recommended I do it myself. I was surprised to hear that, but he explained what has to be done, and it really is just a bunch of manual labor. Besides, I don't have $6,000, so I guess I'm an electrician now!

The entire second floor is a relatively recent remodel and has all new wiring. There are a few things in the basement that should be easy enough to get to. The bulk of the work is on the main floor: there are somewhere between six and eight outlets and five light fixtures that need to be rewired. The outlets are reasonably easy because I can get to them through the basement. Replacing the light fixtures is another story. Either I am going to rip up the walls pretty bad and have a lot of patching to do, or I can remove the light fixtures, plaster over them, and go to switched outlets and lamps.

The other day I was upstairs looking at the horrible carpet. I cut a patch out of it with a utility knife to see what was underneath, not-so-secretly hoping for untarnished hardwood floor, and not-so-surprised to see plywood. So if I'm going to replace that carpet upstairs anyway, maybe I should just yank up the carpet, cut a hole in the plywood, and get at the fixtures from above, rather than trying to dork around with an eighty-year-old plaster ceiling. Is this a stupid idea?

Tuesday morning brought another plumber. This one was friendly and helpful and didn't try to tell me I needed to burn my house down and let his cousin Frank rebuild it out of platinum. He told me basically what my home inspector did: the corrosion has effectively sealed the pipe back up, and it's fine for now. He also capped off a loose pipe in the attic crawl space that had a leaky valve and looked at why the toilet in the main floor bathroom wiggles a bit, and got it all done in half an hour.

The jackasses from the other plumbing company sent me a card thanking me for my business and a survey entitled "How Did We Do?" with spaces for me to write the names and addresses of my "friends" to be added to their mailing list. They also included a refrigerator magnet. Thanks, guys!


We Appreciate Your Business

On Thursday I made three pies and thirty dinner rolls and it reminded me that not far down the line, I have to re-grout the kitchen counters, which are in pretty bad shape in some places.


Where's the grout?

Today I had to take care of a bunch of stuff at work and didn't get much done house-wise. I did stop off at Krusty Burger to pick up a heat gun, though. One of my home improvement books talks a lot about removing paint with a heat gun, and since that paint on the walls has been so troublesome, I thought I'd give it a shot. It works like gangbusters and I fully expect the wall to be done tomorrow. The only problem is that now that I know I have to rewire a bunch of stuff, I'm not sure if I want to paint the room yet. I will at least get the walls cleaned up and patched in the meantime.


The wonderful heat gun

My goals for this weekend are to get the walls cleaned up and at the very least, get a plan together for rewiring, if not get started on it altogether.

Our hero

I Sing The Outlet Electric

So I got up this morning, fresh off six hours of sleep and ready to do the scrapity-scrape dance. Actually, that's not true. I felt as stiff as a board and my hands were swollen from chiseling away at the wall for ten hours yesterday. But the show must go on!

I went right to applying the toxic death to the living room wall. As I brushed away, taking care to keep the chemicals on the wall and not on me, I looked over to see a very large chunk of wall exposed in the corner. Apparently during the first pass of wallpaper removal, the backing paper and several layers of paper and paint had come clean off, right to the layer I wanted to stop at.

Putting the solvent on hold for a bit, I went over and chiseled at the dry area, and it started coming off in huge pieces. I was getting pieces as large as 2 sqft coming off at once. So the biggest wall in the living room really came off like it was nothing. There were a few stubborn areas, but I applied the paint goo to them individually.

I hadn't finished scraping yet, but I wanted to give myself some time to work on the outlets. I have zero prior experience in household electrical work and I wanted to make sure it was still light outside at least while I got my bearings. I do have 50 ft extension cords and a work light if it comes down to that, though. I was starting to get a headache and my hands were very sore, so I said uncle on the wallpaper for a bit and went to working on replacing the outlets.

Step #1 is to determine which circuit breaker kills the outlet you want to replace. (You can actually bypass this step if you want, and if you do, you won't have to do any of the other steps.) I went downstairs to the panel and turned off the first 20-amp breaker, ran upstairs, hit the outlet with the induction tester, and it was still hot. So I ran back downstairs, turned that breaker back on, turned the next one off, and so on.

I got all the way through the panel, eventually trying the higher-amp breakers too, and the receptacle was still hot! Finally I just hit the main breaker and went back upstairs. OK, the outlet is dead now, so how did I miss it?

At this point, I was desperately wishing for a helper, because I had run up and down the stairs over 20 times and my legs were killing me. Finally I wised up and plugged the shop vac into the outlet I wanted to kill, then went downstairs and started hitting breakers until I heard it turn off. The reason I missed it on the first pass? The breaker that the dining room outlets are on also controls the ceiling light at the bottom of the stairs where the panel is. I had hit that one, saw the light over my head go out, thought "well, that's not it," and moved on. Live and learn, I guess. Next time I'm plugging the shop vac in the first time.

I should mention now that I am completely terrified of electricity, and more specificially, being electrocuted. I don't think this is an unreasonable position. But I was pretty convinced that if I could just replace one of these suckers, I'd be over it, and I was right. Everything looked exactly like the book said it would, and it was done in a snap.


Hey! I installed a new outlet!

An outlet replacement under my belt, I decided to move on to this very old-looking safety outlet under the picture window. I checked to make sure it wasn't hot and pulled it out of the wall. There was a lot of plaster damage around it, but it's not like I'm not going to be fixing a bazillion holes soon anyway.


Ancient ungrounded "safety" outlet

I pulled the wires out of the box. This was a little different from the last one -- the NM cable was much older and more beat up, and there were two of them hooked up to the outlet, so this outlet was in the middle of a circuit leading somewhere else. I pulled them all out of the wall and turned the breaker back on to find out which one was upstream.


Two sets of wires

I should mention at this point that despite having grounding wire available, whoever ran the NM chose to use a two-prong outlet and just tie the two ground wires together. It is the older style NM -- maybe three-prong outlets weren't used yet

Anyway, I determined that the hot wire on the left was hot, and the hot wire on the right wasn't. I was going to install a three-prong outlet, so I could just hook the ground to the screw on the outlet, but I had to connect two ground wires, and it is against building code to attach two wires to one screw terminal. You are supposed to "pigtail" the wires: run the two (or more) you want to attach into a wire connector along with one wire that will actually go to the screw terminal. In a rare moment of foresight, I had bought some wire connectors at HD when I made my recent big trip there, but in a usual moment of density, I didn't buy any actual wire.

I wandered around the basement for a bit and saw an open electrical box in the ceiling with loose hot, neutral, and ground sticking out of it. I hit the main breaker to the house, checked that the box was dead, clipped a few inches off of the ground wire, and I was back in business.


Wired to code

I had a really hard time getting the outlet to fit back in the box. It was a very old box with screws sticking out where the mounting plate normally sits flush with the wall. I put a cover plate on to test and there was a decent gap between the wall and the plate. I think I could pull the screws out and drive them through the outer holes on the outlet's mounting plate, but I'm kind of afraid of taking those screws out, since I can't see where they go or how deep. I have an electrician coming tomorrow morning to deal with the knob & tube issue; I'll just ask for his advice.


New grounded outlet amongst the plaster damage

My mom just had foot surgery and is laid up at home, so I went over to help her get a place set up where she could use her laptop lying down. It was nice to have a break, but once I stopped working, I realized that I was really running on fumes. Probably Jasco Premium Paint & Epoxy Remover fumes. I'm going to just relax for a couple hours and then try to clean up the wallpaper and paint debris and the kitchen. I am on the hook to make some pies and dinner rolls for Thanksgiving, and I have no hope of accomplishing anything in the kitchen in its current state.

I was hoping to be further along, but I worked really hard this weekend and I feel good about that. The project marches on.

Grunt work

I spent all day scraping. Scraping wallpaper, scraping paint. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

After quite a while of whaling away at the layer of backing paper above the layer of lime green paint above the layer of purple paint above the layer of painted plaster I actually want to prime, I decided it might be best to call in the chemical reinforcements.

I drove over to Queen Anne & Magnolia Paint and they recommended a can of this extremely toxic goo. I bought that, a couple buckets, and a canvas drop cloth. I stopped off at the local hardware store on the way home to buy an induction tester.

A detour about the induction tester: I am trying to figure out the magnitude of my knob & tube problem as well as I can before the electrician arrives Monday morning. I can see the wiring in the open ceiling in the basement, but the only ungrounded outlets I have are in the living room, and the offending wires don't go anywhere near there. So I thought (perhaps wishfully) that maybe the K&T wires weren't even live anymore. An induction tester will tell you if there is current running through a wire without having to cut and splice it, so I thought I'd pick one up and check to see if the wires were hot or not.

I got home and realized I had left the drop cloth on the counter at the paint store. Before returning to get it, I checked the wires in question, which were, of course, hot. Damn! My mind boggled, I wandered around the house doublechecking for ground. I did find that the outlets in the living room are in fact grounded, they just have two-prong sockets, and that the three-prong socket in the bathroom does not have a working ground. So it's probably in the bathroom, and maybe some light fixtures. If it's only in the bathroom, that will be pretty good news to me.

After this lovely ten-minute detour into the world of electricity, it was back to Scrapeathon 2004. The instructions for the solvent said to wear a mask and heavy duty rubber gloves, pour some into a jar, and use an old paintbrush to apply a coat to the surface. I didn't have a jar, but I had bought some plastic cups to apply my paint samples from. Well, the solvent ate through the cup in about 30 seconds. "Boy, that was dumb," I thought as I raced to drop the leaking cup into a bucket. I worked for a while pouring a little bit directly from the can onto the brush and spreading it around on the wall. It only seemed to remove the top layer of paint. Just scraping away at the dry stuff, I was able to get a few layers at a time, so I went back to that.

I scraped and scraped and scraped and scraped and noticed that the areas I had put solvent on a couple hours earlier were coming off the wall like it was nothing. I went to Safeway looking for a mason jar, settled on a Pyrex cup, and returned home to cover the walls in paint stripper.

I alternated applying solvent and scraping for a while when I ran out of solvent. It was just after 8pm. Of course I wasn't going to get away with a day of working on the house without a visit to Disneyland. I returned with a gallon of gunk and set to covering the dining room walls in it.


A coat of solvent working its way in

I scraped and scraped and scraped until I could scrape no more and finally called it quits at about 11:30, leaving a huge mess of paint and wallpaper fragments behind. Once I've crammed the paper bits into more trash bags, the shop vac should make quick work of the paint chips and dust.


Big mess

Remaining tasks:

• Apply solvent to living room walls
• Scrape living room walls
• Steam and scrape leftover adhesive from walls
• Replace electrical outlets and switches
• (Figure out how to) detach light fixture in dining room
  
• Fill holes in wall with plaster
• Caulk moldings and corners
• Spackle dents and cracks
• Sand everything smooth
  
• Wash walls
• Prime walls and trim
• Tape and apply tinted primer for dining room
• Lots of taping and painting
• Replace all cover plates and heat registers
  
• Clean up the war zone

I had hoped to at least get the rooms primed this weekend, but I didn't anticipate what a job removing all the old wall coverings would be. If I can get things scraped, spackled, and sanded by the end of tomorrow, I'll feel pretty good.

I am having a lot of fun working on the house. Even tedious and repetitive tasks, say, scraping the walls for hours and hours, aren't too bad. It would be nice to have another person around to help out and chat with; it can feel a bit solitary to scrape at the walls for 8 or 10 hours by oneself. I have a stereo set up so I can listen to music while I work, which helps, but I think the real secret of staying motivated and on task is that I planned the project very thoroughly. I always know where I am and what's coming next. It can be hard to feel like you're accomplishing a lot when there is an undefined amount of work ahead of you.

For me, there is a defined amount of scraping tomorrow: lots and lots of it.

Action-packed!

My home inspector recommended that when I paint my living and dining rooms, I just paint over the wallpaper, because "it's going to be a real pain to get it off". I am 100% in favor of avoiding pain and I had intended to go along with this plan. The only problem is that the wallpaper is this sort of burlap-texture affair, and the seams are just terrible. I decided not to go to the trouble of priming and painting just to have an ugly wall with a nice color. I had heard that wallpaper is especially onerous to remove if it is painted, but that if you sand it up a bit, it's not so bad. So I bought a wallpaper steamer and a lot of sandpaper.

Last night, I was winding down to go to bed and idly stabbed at the wall with a drywall knife:


A drywall knife gets right under the wallpaper


The wallpaper peels off in a little strip...


And then in a big strip!

Excited at how easy the stuff was coming off, I ripped down about 3/4 of the wallpaper in the dining room in around 15 minutes. There was still some backing paper underneath it, but without the paint, I thought the steamer would make quick work of it. I got so revved up at this prospect that I had a hard time going to sleep and didn't manage to bed down until 2:30am or so.

After staying up too late, when I tried to get up this morning, I was really feeling the lack of sleep. I called in sick to work and slept for another hour or two. When I got up, I felt a lot better, and soon enough to put in a full day at work, but what I really wanted to do was rip down my wallpaper, so I decided to just get up and kick ass on the house for the day.

My homeowners' insurance carrier, the wondrous USAA, has set a number of contingencies on my policy. Essentially, there is a list of work I have to have done within 30 days of closing or they'll cancel my policy. They basically took anything negative my home inspector wrote on the inspection and demanded it be fixed. There are about seven things ranging from replacing the toilet tank assembly in the master bathroom, easy to do myself for $10, to replacing or disabling any knob and tube wiring in the house, potentially prohibitively expensive. I had let time get away from me on calling in an electrician and a plumber to take care of those items specifically requiring them, and I figured I might as well see if I could get some people in today, seeing as I closed 29 days ago and everything.

I called around to a couple electricians until I found one who said he might be able to come by toward the late afternoon. I called a plumbing service who said they would have someone out within the next couple hours, and I set to wrecking shop on my arch-enemy, the mauve burlap wall covering.

A couple surprises were in store, such as an area underneath a picture window where the wallpaper had been stapled back into the plaster, because there was a big hole underneath:


Nothing some plaster and spackle can't fix

All in all, I found three hidden major holes in the plaster. There was already a big doorknob-shaped hole in the living room, bringing me to a total of four. But patching a few holes isn't really a big deal when you already have to do one, and it's really not a big deal if you're going to paint the entire wall and don't have to worry about making the patch blend in.

I put a good dent in the wallpaper job and the plumbers arrived.

I showed them an open pipe in the upstairs crawl space that seemed to have a slightly leaky valve. I thought it just needed to be capped off or something and they agreed. I took them into the basement to look at a galvanized pipe connection that had a little rust on it. My home inspector said this wasn't really a big deal, since the rust tends to just seal the pipe back up, but USAA wanted a licensed plumber to sign off on it.

We walked back up to the main floor to conference, and then an unpleasant conversation began:

"So what do you want done about the pipe in the basement?" asks the plumber.

"If it's not a big deal, I want you to write down 'It's not a big deal' and I can fax that to my insurance company. If it is a big deal, I want you to fix it," I reply.

"How old is this house?" asks the plumber.

"It was built in 1924, so, 80 years," I reply.

"See, all of your pipes are 80 years old, they are so old at this point that my recommendation is that we get in there and replace all of them."

"I don't know that the pipes are 80 years old. A lot of them have been replaced."

"Those pipes are 80 years old."

"You looked at it for about ten seconds, how can you be so sure?"

"Look, I've been in plumbing since 1978, and those pipes are 80 years old."

"Then why did you have to ask me how old the house was?"

"You're the owner, I wanted to see if you had any prior knowledge."

"Right, so you can't fix the pipe, you have to re-pipe the entire house."

"Yes, my recommendation is that we gut everything and replace all the pipes."

"Well, I can't afford to have the house re-piped, so what are my other options?"

"Hey, don't get mad at me just because you can't afford to fix your house."

At which point I said "Thank you for coming out, but it is time for you to leave now," and showed them the door.

I don't know what the guy's problem was, but he was giving me attitude from the jump. And on top of that, now he wants to scare me into some five-figure remodeling job? Let's just say I don't recommend Southwest Plumbing. I called the dispatch office and wasted another 5 minutes of my life complaining to the customer service manager, who pretended to take down my information and told me he hoped I'd try them again sometime, because I "didn't receive the normal service." He didn't expect me to be happy, and I didn't expect him to care. We were both just going through the motions, like an embarrassed couple the morning after a one-night stand agreeing to call one another.

But on with the day. I called up USAA and told them I was having trouble lining up all the work on time, and because USAA has the best customer service known to mankind, they told me to just keep them updated on it. So I made another appointment with another plumber for Tuesday morning, relieved to have the deadline off my back, and finished up the wallpaper removal.


Wallpaper debris

The electrician called and asked if he could come on Monday morning instead. OK.

At this point, I decided it was time to make a trip to Tijuana for all the supplies I'd need to complete my painting project. Because they had painted absolutely everything mauve, I needed to replace all of the electrical outlets (these are called "receptacles" in Electricianese). I figured while I was at it, I might as well replace the light switches, too. I needed plaster and spackle for repairing the holes in the walls, a door stopper to prevent further holes, TSP for washing the walls, primer and paint, rollers, brushes, tarps, trays, a pole for painting the ceiling, a stepladder (I had been using a dining chair), a shop vacuum for cleaning it all up, and god knows what else. I got away for just under $500. Everyone on my Christmas list is getting a Maruchan Ramen and glue portrait this year; I can't even afford macaroni anymore.

I ate dinner with "I would be humped without" Josh & Megan and got back to work.

While the steamer heated up, I collected all of the debris from the first wallpaper removal into four 33-gallon trash bags. These will most likely go away when I get around to calling the junk guys to remove all the debris from the basement door replacement.

I scraped away at the backing paper: underneath it was a layer of lime green paint; under that was another layer of paint in a neutral, but too close to mauve color, and under that was the plaster wall. I steamed away at it, but the steamer actually seemed to make it harder to get the paint off as various sections became limp.

The layer of paint just above the plaster seems to be reasonably flat. I'm going to strip away everything on top of that and spackle over the plaster, wherever it may expose itself, to get it flush with the paint. Then patch the holes, replace the receptacles and switches, wash, prime, and paint. Scraping and sanding all that paint is going to be a formidable task.


So many layers


Green paint, neutral paint, plaster

Off to bed. It's 3am, and I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow.


Your Working Boy

Colors

A couple quick shots of the colors I chose for the living and dining rooms:


Hunting Coat Red


Palm Leaf

I also chose different colors for the ceiling -- the green will get a lighter green called "Rustic Green", and the red will get a slate tan called "Cottonwood". I chose a trim color with a very distinct yellow tint called "Honeycomb". I hope it's not too yellow, but if it is, what's another trip to my vacation home and another $25?

Slow weekend

Katie was in town visiting this weekend, so I didn't get a whole lot of house chores done.

I bought a can of that expanding foam insulation stuff to seal up around the basement door frame. I'm going to install the deadbolt tonight and I'll probably do the insulation at the same time.

I also got two paint samples for the living and dining rooms -- a green called "Palm Leaf" for the living room and a red called "Hunting Coat Red" for the dining room. I painted a a couple 1'x1' areas on the walls and checked them out at various times of day. The red is definitely going to be a keeper. The green was a little lighter than I'd like; kind of "minty". I picked a lighter green to use for the ceiling in the living room, and a fairly neutral color for the dining room ceiling. I need to pick a trim color -- I am thinking of something like an almond cream instead of the standard white-white-white trim.

The weather stripping inside the front door had come off from the frame in one section, so I pried out the old rusty nails and nailed it back up with finishing nails.

A guy from Speakeasy is coming by today between 4 and 7 to install DSL, and I fully expect that to drag house work to a crawl.

I have a basement door

On Monday evening, my mom came over and we tried to get the door installed. I was having trouble getting the door frame plumb and after three days of working on such a simple task, my confidence was flagging, so I decided to make dinner and call a handyman the next morning.

Tuesday morning, I got up and walked into the kitchen and heard some rustling. I looked over into my greenhouse window and saw a very irritated looking cat:


Kitty in the kitchen

The prevailing theory is that this cat got in at some point when there was no door in the back and was now trapped in the house. I picked him up to make sure he wasn't hurt or really skinny -- he wasn't -- and let him out.

This basically steeled my resolve to get a professional to come in and finish my door for me. I looked through the phone book and found the "Handy Person Service" section. Nobody could come until the next morning, so I left the plastic sheeting up and John from 206-HANDYMAN showed up around nine Wednesday morning. He got the door frame in plumb, it closes, he installed the new doorknob, it took a couple hours, but I have a basement door again.

I still have a few jobs to do, though:

1. Seal underneath the threshhold with concrete
2. Install the deadbolt (I have a plastic shopping bag shoved in the hole right now)
   
3. Insulate around the door frame (will probably use that spray foam insulation)
4. Replace the brick molding on the door
5. Repair the broken shingles around the door
   
6. Remove the immense heap of boards, rusty nails, and concrete from my basement
   

The current brick molding is fine and everything, but the one I took off was much larger, so the new one only barely covers the rough opening and the area around it looks terrible and is not weather-safe at all.

I'll go to the trouble of taking a picture of it once it's all done.

The Door, pt. 2

I woke up early on Sunday morning. The plastic sheeting I had stapled over the rough opening was still there:


It keeps the rain out

I went to Home Depot to ask what I should do. I told Maurice, my main man in the door department, that as I saw it, I had two options: either get a shorter door, or rent a jackhammer and remove the offending step. Maurice said that he could get me a shorter door in about 2 weeks for about $280 (over twice the price I paid for the standard-sized door). So, I could wait two weeks with a hole in the back of my house only to have a door four inches off the ground or rent a jackhammer.

It cost me about $70 to rent a 55lb Bosch Jackhammer from Aurora Rents up in Shoreline, and I hauled it home in my trunk, stopping at Josh's for his leftover tub of patch concrete. This may seem like an obvious thing to say, but jackhammers are totally awesome. Also they are very useful for tasks such as destroying concrete steps that are keeping you from covering up an 82" by 32" hole in your house.


Our hero with jackhammer


Before


After

I had made plans with my family to go see The Incredibles on Sunday at 4pm, so my mom came over while I finished demolition of the old step. We returned the jackhammer to Aurora Rents and went back home. I cut a 2x4 down for a concrete mold and started to mix up some of the patch concrete. I troweled in a bit of it but ultimately had far less than I needed, and we had to go to the movie.

After the movie (which was fantastic), I made yet another trip to Home Depot for a 40lb bag of patch concrete. I also picked up a bag of fiberglass insulation for the area between the door frame and the studs, and a mask to wear when installing that. I dropped my mom off at home and went home to finish off the step.

I won the good-neighbors lottery with my house. Affirmation: as I toiled under the work light mixing concrete, my neighbor Tom stepped out his back door and handed me a Heineken. His timing was impeccable -- it reinforced my feeling that I did well with my choice of house, and I really didn't mind losing a weekend to this door fiasco over it. The neighbors at my mom's house in Spokane have been complete assholes for over 15 years, probably were before then, and probably will continue to be for the foreseeable future, and they are not moving. I hope Tom and Jenny don't move either.

I got all the concrete poured into the mold and reasonably leveled and went off to do some grocery shopping and some sleeping.

I got up the next morning and pried the mold loose -- there were still a bunch of holes in the face of the step, but nothing I couldn't fix with more patch concrete. I lugged the door down into position and saw that it would finally fit:


The door fits in

Now all that's left to do is screw the door into the frame of the house, shim it, caulk it, and do something about all those broken shingles. I'm having a really hard time doing it myself, so I'm going to have a handyman come over tomorrow morning to help me finish the installation.

I hope painting the living and dining rooms go better than this did.

Unexpected project

While she was showing me around her place, my friend Sheryl told me a story about an emergency remodel of her bathroom and said "It's not the cost that's so bad, it's the timing. These things can strike without warning."

Josh recommended I get started on a project right away, just to get my feet wet and to start making my mark in the house. I thought this was a great idea, so I had planned to spend this weekend, my first weekend in the house, getting started on that. I decided to paint the living and dining rooms, which are this horrible mauve color:


The dining room from the living room


The living room

They even painted all of the moldings mauve. The heating vents and electrical sockets were not spared either. Anyway, I had intended to go to Home Depot to pick up a few basic things, and then off to Queen Anne & Magnolia Paint to get some samples and start choosing colors in earnest.

A couple of guys from 1-800-GOT-JUNK were scheduled to arrive at 8:30am on Saturday to remove an ancient upright freezer and metal desk that the previous homeowners had neglected to get rid of. My real estate agent had arranged for this, and all I had to do was let them in. They showed up right on time and went into the basement. They blanched at the freezer, which really is huge, and said "Are you sure that thing will fit through the door?"

"It got in, didn't it?" I helpfully replied.

They took a few measurements and found that if they removed the freezer door, it would fit through the basement door with a tiny amount of clearance, but fit it would. It was then that one of them noticed the large pipe running down the back of the freezer with a three-inch-thick crust of ice on it. Neither of them wanted to chip the ice off, lest he be sprayed in the face with deadly freon. I wanted even less for them to leave without the freezer.


Once-icy pipe


What came off

OK, no more excuses! Get this godforsaken freezer the hell out of my house!

They tried to take the door off as specified by the instructions on the side of the freezer and eventually gave up on that and just started hammering away at the hinge, eventually breaking the door off. They loaded the freezer onto a dolly and wheeled it toward the door, and naturally, it wouldn't fit.


The junk guys try to get the freezer out the door

Apparently, there just wasn't enough clearance with the door still on the hinges, so that had to come off. As with every other piece of hardware in this house, the hinge was heavily painted over, so we had to bang on it a bit to get the hinge unstuck. As we tried to lift the door off, a fair bit of the door frame snapped off. Yes, ladies and germs, one of the jambs in my door frame was rotten. We took the hinges off at the frame, moved the door out of the way, and they evacuated the freezer. I signed something, the junk guys wished me good luck, and then they evacuated themselves, too.


The rotted and cracked door frame

So there I was. Just past nine in the morning, not a full week spent in my house yet, and I have no basement door. I figured I had better take some measurements, but somewhere along the line, my measuring tape disappeared. I went to the local hardware store and picked up a new tape, some safety glasses, and a pry bar.

I ran back to the house, measured all of the dimensions of the door and its frame, and went off to Home Depot. The guy in the door department asked me if it was a nice door. "No, it's pretty old and beat up," I said. "Just buy a new prehung door, then," he told me. He told me it would be a lot easier to remove an old door frame with a sawzall. I have been looking for any reason to buy a sawzall for a while now, so I put one in the cart. I also got a few other things on my list: a circular saw (tired of waiting for the class saws), a screw finder, tool belt, a couple cleaning products, basically a lot of minor things. I did not, however, buy a door, because I really didn't have any way to get it home. I still don't have roof runners for my car.

I took my spoils home and called Josh, who has a station wagon with a roof rack. He said Megan had the car, but she'd be back in a bit, so I went over to their place to hang out. She returned soon and the three of us went back to Home Depot, where I bought a door and a doorknob/deadbolt kit. We brought all that and an old dresser they had for me to my house and went out for dinner. I cannot overemphasize how humped I would be in this whole moving and homeownership endeavor if not for the generosity of Josh and Megan.

I realized at the table that it was getting pretty dark outside, and I didn't have a work light, so I ran a few blocks to the local hardware store, getting there ten minutes before closing. Further increasing the damage for the day, I picked up a work light, a Mag-Lite (I lose one every time I move and was down to zero), and a four-foot level. We finished dinner and retreated to my house, where Megan decided there wasn't much to do and went home. We opened up the box the work light came in and found that it had a 2 foot cord. No, I didn't have any extension cords.

So we went to Fred Meyer up in Greenwood for two 50' extension cords and something very important.

Finally, we returned to the house to start sawzalling and prying off the door frame. Apparently the door frame predated the new shingle siding on the house, because we broke a bunch of shingles in the process. Finally, the door frame was out of the way and we could install the new door!


The door doesn't fit

The sides of the old door frame ran all the way down to the floor, on either side of that concrete step. My new prehung door has a threshhold on the bottom and therefore sat on top of the step, four inches higher than it should have been. Back to Home Depot for more advice.

We arrived at Home Depot at 9:01pm, the store having just closed. I dropped Josh off at his house and returned home alone to drown my sorrows in PlayStation crime.

Join us tomorrow for our next exciting episode of "The Door That Wouldn't Fit!"

The Reveal

I'd been living in Seattle for nearly two months, having quit my job over two months ago, and my mom had been successfully kept in the dark about it. Until last night!

I had tried to do the reveal after my Wednesday carpentry class. I called her as soon as I got out of the class at 8:45, to no response. So I drove over to her apartment and called a few more times. All the lights were out, and I found out later that she had gone to bed at 8:30 that night, still exhausted from a long bus ride that weekend.

So I left work at 6:30 sharp yesterday evening, determined to catch her even if she did want to go to sleep before prime time. I sent her a few IMs and got no answer. I called her cell phone and got no answer. I drove over to her apartment again, no lights, no answer. Frustrated, I began walking around Fremont, irritatedly banging out complaints with my thumbs to anyone who would read them. Finally, she responded via IM that she had been out to dinner with a friend and was just getting on the bus in Bellevue, giving me around 45 minutes to kill. I walked over and had dinner at Paseo and when I was done, I walked back over to her house, sat in my car, and gave her a call. We made small talk and she said she was getting off the bus. I watched in my side mirror as she stood on the corner by her apartment, talking to me on the phone.

I asked her if she wanted me to come visit, and she said "Yes! I'll be in Seattle this weekend!"

"Why don't I just come over right now?" I said, getting out of my car. "I can be there in a minute or two."

"Oh, and how would you get here in five minutes? Drive a million miles an hour?" she said as I walked up behind her on the street. "Remember when you were kids, you used to say 'Mom, why don't you drive a million miles an hour? We can get there in ten seconds!'"

She sensed that someone was behind her, turned around, and screamed.

"Are you surprised?" I asked rhetorically.

"How did you get here?"

"I drove," pointing to my car.

We walked down the street, and she walked forward with her eyes fixed on me completely, as if I had just landed in a UFO.

"I have another surprise for you," I said, "but you have to come to the place I'm staying. I can't fit it in my car."

We walked into her apartment and she set down her bags, stunned. We walked back out to my car and drove off toward my house. Still, she wouldn't allow her eyes to leave me. She genuinely looked as if she was trying to determine whether or not she was dreaming.

"This is the best surprise you've ever done. I don't think there is any way you can top this," she said perfectly. It was all I could do to keep it together for the big surprise.

We got to the house, walked up the steps, and I took out my keys, and knocked on the door before putting the key in the lock. I felt like I had driven to the place a little too confidently and wanted to throw her off a bit. We walked in and I turned on the light. She looked around at all the moving boxes, baffled, and I said it.

"I bought this house. I moved to Seattle two months ago."

"Do you have a chair I can sit in?"

After settling down a little, I gave her a tour of the house and we walked around the neighborhood for a bit. She was still understandably in a state of shock as I rattled off all the times we had been on the phone and I had been in some hilarious compromising location, such as at one of her sisters' houses.

Most importantly to me, she took it the right way. It wasn't a joke to be made at her expense -- I decided not to videotape the event, despite countless requests -- but a surprise for her. When she told me "This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me," I knew that it had gone off without a hitch.

The story so far

I have wanted to buy a house for a very long time, but it always just seemed like an impossibility given the state of the deservedly infamous Bay Area real estate market. About a year ago, I really got a fire lit under my ass to make it happen. My aunt Angie and my girlfriend's brother-in-law Mark both share the majority of the credit in explaining to me just how doable it is. Mark made the excellent (and obvious in retrospect) point that I should just go talk to a mortgage lender: "It's free." I figured out that since I moved to California, I had spent roughly $100,000 in rent, and it was just making me sick. I started really putting some genuine effort into buying a place. I bought How to Buy a House in California. I investigated the online listings like crazy. I went to Lending Tree and found that I could borrow enough money to actually buy a place, which was news to me, and exciting news at that. I wouldn't be able to afford a big place in Palo Alto, but I could get a small house in Redwood City if I were willing to be poor enough to do it.

To make a long story short, I wasn't. I would have ended up trying to make a $3500/mo house payment for a 900 square-foot place on the east side of Redwood City. The extent to which I am willing to be house-poor is directly proportional to how excited I am about the place. I eventually came to the realization that I would be stretching to my absolute limit to afford a place I wouldn't even be willing to rent.

It became clear to me that something was going to have to give. I couldn't get what I wanted with the money I had, so I had to make a compromise. I could compromise on location and look somewhere away from the Peninsula, most likely Fremont or thereabouts. Or I could compromise on the idea of a house and buy a condo. I can't stand commuting, and I am really not very fond of the East Bay, so the first option was out. But it put the idea in my head to add a third column, "move away from the Bay Area".

The only non-negotiable condition of possible cities was that they had to have a decent tech economy. Off the top of my head, I thought of southern California, Portland, Seattle, Boston, and Austin. (There's New York, but remember that my goal was to buy a house.) For a variety of reasons, I narrowed it down to Portland and Seattle. Ultimately, I have a ton of friends and family in Seattle and there are a lot more jobs here. I found that I could make the same salary here as in the Bay Area and that comparable houses were roughly half the price. With this information, there wasn't really a decision to make anymore. I wasn't going to buy a condo in Sunnyvale.

I started looking for jobs, and within a week and a half, I flew to Seattle and had a couple job interviews. A couple days later, I resigned at work and began packing my things at home. I drove from Redwood City to Seattle on September 11. It took a little over 12 hours. My impossibly generous friends Josh and Megan offered to let me stay with them for as long as I needed to buy and move into my own place, and I took them up on it.

I had two weeks before I had to start work in Seattle, and I intended to use them primarily for house shopping. I got in touch with the real estate agent Josh and Megan used to buy their house, and off I went. I had looked at a lot of places online already, and I ended up looking at about twenty in person. My mom told me that when she bought her house, she just knew right away that it was the place, and so it was with mine. I knew that it was the house I wanted to buy, and I was lucky enough to have my offer accepted. Actually buying it was a bit anticlimactic, honestly.

Speaking of my mom, the twist: She lives here in Seattle, and while I have been here for nearly two months, she doesn't know that I've quit my old job, that I've bought a house, and certainly not that I've bought a house 1.5 miles from her apartment. It's a surprise! I had intended to tell her on November 1st, the day after I moved in to my house, but she is out of town until tonight or tomorrow. If she's back tonight, she'll find out tonight. If she's back tomorrow, it'll have to wait for Thursday; I have woodworking class on Wednesdays.

We have this running gag where she calls me on the phone and says "Why don't you come visit? Why don't you come to Seattle and live with Mom?" I say, "I'm on my way right now! I'll be there in about 10 minutes. Just go stand on the porch. If I'm not there, just keep waiting." This makes for an obvious reveal: All I have to do is show up for once. This will provide a wonderful one-two punch when she thinks I have arrived just for a surprise visit and then she gets the real surprise.

I am really hoping she'll be back tonight. The anticipation is killing me.

Another stupid blog

I am not a big fan of blogs in general. Most of my ire towards blogs occurs when I am trying to find something on the web and all I can find is a description of what some jackass ate for lunch that day, and what his "current music" is. That said, I have been known to enjoy blogs that have more of a specific purpose. The Julie/Julia Project, for example, and I have done one or two travel blogs myself.

So it is with some, but not much guilt that I start this, a blog about being a first-time homeowner and learning about home improvement. For my own sake, I'd like to be able to see the progress of the house in photos, of which I anticipate copious amounts. For my friends and family, it will be a cool way to check in on my progress. For complete strangers, maybe someone will happen across this and learn something.