House Made

trowel for stuccoing

Ohhh details. Yeah. I completely forgot about those. I got all caught up in the joy of being finished with the project; the heaven of not squatting on a bucket-bottom; the thrill of being able to stand upright and not lean over all monkey-fashion. Sweet, sweet hand lotion. There should be an ode or a sonnet or a country song to you. But anyway.

Here’s what I did. At first, I thought I’d put up a scratch coat and then a finish coat. Then I realized that the a finish coat would have plenty to bond to since the aggregate was thoroughly expposed on the wall’s face. (Metal lathe, which is under all the house’s stucco, was never a consideration for the likes of mere garden walls.) So after I pressure-washed off all the grime, slime, and loose paint, I painted on a concrete bonding agent for a little extra holding power. I mixed up small batches of La Habra base 200 (grey) from Home Depot and troweled on the mix. It took me about 3 batches to find a consistency I liked but then I had the proportions set and things went fairly quickly. Definitely spring for a big flat mixing tray. It’s so much easier to get the stucco out of that than a bucket. I sacrificed a wooden spoon from the kitchen for mixing because it was easier than using my pointing trowel and it was totally worth doing. The pointing trowel was great for stuccoing the tops of the walls though. It was like frosting a cake.

I worked in about 4′ square sections. When I completed 2 sections, I went back and used a rubber float on the first section, which had set up enough to withstand some finessing, to smooth out the trowel marks and bring up the sanded finish. Once that was done, I misted the whole thing lightly with water to keep it from curing too fast and continued to mist once a day for 3 days to get a proper cure.

We could have tinted the stucco mix and avoided painting, but I don’t think we would have gotten the color right in every small batch. The wall would have looked like a Greg Brady patchwork vest.  Then every day when I’d see the wall I’d have to say “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia!” Much to Beth’s chagrin.

newly stuccoed wall


old tatty wall

In my other photos, the angle, light, shadows and dog all conspired to downplay the true hideousness of the weathered concrete walls.  This weekend, though, I got before and after pics of the last section. Now you’ll see some stuff.

Overcast days never turned me on, but something about the clouds and this mixed. Finally, you can kind of see the craptastic shape of the concrete vs. the stuccoed finish. And let’s be clear: This little 3′ wide wall, all crumbly and cracked, was in approximately 12 x cube root of pi x a million times better than the 75′ big wall. This little guy has yet to be painted and since it’s raining today, that’ll have to wait until Thursday or Friday. When the paint is finished, Back Yard Stucco 2007 (woo-hoo) will be fully crossed off Beth’s list.

Note that the original title of this project did not include the words “Back yard.” We’ve amended that because we’ve decided to implement Front Yard Stucco 2007 (woo-hoo). We’re so pleased with the change the stucco has made that we’re going to carry it around to the front concrete retaining walls. I have to say the process has been extremely satisfying and I’ve gotten pretty good at it for a lay-person with zero real training. Check it out – I’m even on the calendar to give a lesson to our neighbors.

Beth here.

We’re stalled on progress on beadboard in the bathroom while we wait for an edge guide for the router. Whenever I get frustrated about slowed projects, I find it helpful to review the blog and see everything we’ve done on the house — it’s like an interactive scrapbook. While things may seem like they’re going at a snail’s pace for me at the moment, it can be gratifying to see what we’ve accomplished in the past (especially considering I started out with little or no tool knowledge — Merideth was already a pro). Now if I could only get the folks at Home Depot to not talk to us like our husbands sent us for a part (note that the Ace employees NEVER do this).

If you’d care for an unreasonably long review….
We started with a sweet little Pueblo/Spanish-style bungalow that someone had covered in green siding. We cannot know why people do what they do. We can only shake our heads and try to fix it.

First up after gleefully ripping off the siding was stucco (seen here and here), which thankfully was NOT done by us, although selecting the main color was probably the most trying task of our relationship. (Merideth and I discovered in the process that we physically see color differently. I tend to see more green in colors while she sees more red. Clearly mine is the correct vision despite the fact that she’s a designer.) When the stucco was done, we put in a new front door, which was Merideth’s eBay find of the decade — $200!

The windows. Dear lord, the windows. We decided to restore all of the wooden windows on the front of the house (the bedrooms got Milgard for soundproofing and safety), and oh my goodness did it take forever. Read about it here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (Sadly, I didn’t even direct you to the posts where we only whine about how we’re still working on the windows or how we no longer want to work on the windows.) But now they’re done! They’re DONE!

After the window work came trim (the lion’s share of which was done by Merideth), which was a sucky job made more fun by being able to freak out our neighbors with the color.

Merideth went to work on the Porch Project (Phase I) and stripped the porch poles (making for some fun double entendre).  It took longer than expected (of course), but it was all worth it, as the porch ceiling looks great and the posts are the most striking accents on the house.

We evened out the front concrete steps that had been torqued by the roots of a now-gone tree, which worked well despite its ugliness, and most importantly made it possible to tile over the stairs. Pretty.

The front yard started out as a field of oxalis (hateful clover), but we terraced it and planted a California-native, drought-tolerant garden that defies the sun. Defies it!

In the back yard, Merideth cleaned and stained the pergola. I detailed our lawn-seeding/HGTV frustrations in what was our most controversial post ever. Who knew about the rabid Lisa LaPorta fans out there? Eventually, it turned out beautifully (well, most of it — we’re still working on parts). Currently, Merideth is stuccoing the garden walls.

We extended the fence to hide the trash. Still works like a champ.

We lost our fear of electricity (although we still have a healthy respect), and installed new lighting in many, many places, moved switches, and generally played with our power.

In the bathroom, Merideth secured her title as The Awesomest with her first carpentry project of building a new medicine cabinet door. The bathroom grout plagued me for years with its brown ways. I finally fixed it with some grout paint.

I installed an Insinkerator, earning the respect of people the world over for my impressive cleaning solution collection.

All in all, I’m proud of our triumphs with this house. And just reminding myself about our successes gives me inspiration for more. Come back soon for our upcoming notes on bathroom beadboard, dining room wainscotting and painting concrete. More likely you’ll just read our complaints about stalled projects or the weather. We’ll try to intersperse whining with pictures of Dixie and The Boy (not Chico and The Man).

Never ever say bad things about something that you want to keep working. You know that rule right? Like, you don’t want to say “The car is getting kind of old.” It will hear you. It will rebel by breaking right down in some fantastically-expensive-to-repair way. That’ll show you.

So as far as the house knows, our bathroom is AWESOME. It’s perfect. Absolutely nothing at all needs to change. Its plaster and lathe is lovely. It has the perfect amount of lighting. It does not need one thing. (We have to be particularly careful since we have just the one bathroom. We cannot afford sullen plumbing.) But we did cut the bead-board, pull out the old baseboards, and get moving on the new trim. That should nicely complement the completely unnecessary new lighting and tile restoration.

In other news, we made further progress on the back walls and we came home today to find that the front tree had been given a high and tight by the city. I guess if they’re going to put that kind of work into it they mean to let us keep it. Rah!  Oh, and they fixed the possible leak in our water main.  Double rah!

Only 3 more days til the weekend! The bathroom knows we’re coming.

Beth here. 

Shortly after Merideth posted this, a giant puddle of water erupted from under the Stumpgrinder 2500.  Turns out it wasn’t all roots down there.  The suspiciously straight, rusty/silvery-looking roots are, in fact, the water main, and the Stumpgrinder doesn’t care to differentiate between the two.

The workers immediately turned off the main valve, and a guy came out within the hour to replace our water main with copper pipe (Yay!  More free!).  Water was restored, and the parched dog’s water dish was filled.

Or was it REALLY fixed?  A giant puddle appeared in our sidewalk hole on Sunday night.  Neither of us knows enough about plumbing/drainage to tell if it’s coming from the “fixed” water main, or whether there was a rain cloud that appeared directly over our driveway.  The water pressure in the house seems okay, but I just don’t care for unexplained puddles.  We have a call into the city, and hopefully they’ll check the pipe prior to pouring cement over it.

Fingers crossed.

no sidewalk

We all know that very few free things come our way in the house restoration game. In fact, for me and Beth, everything costs $2,000. It’s our magic number. When we have a project coming up, we just start saving toward $2,000. That number loves us. If only its attachment to us could be parlayed into some sort of winning lotto pick combination. But I digress.

Today we started down the road of getting something for free. City workers came by, marked off the cracked sidewalk, then dug it out with a backhoe (which was awesome to watch). Turns out it’s the tree’s fault the sidewalk is messed up (You should have seen the roots the workers tore out.) so the city is paying to fix it. Really the best thing about this, even better than the money saved, is that we don’t have to go through the hassle of pulling a permit.

The only thing I’m afraid of is that they might decide to take out the tree. It’s the only good sized street-tree on our block and I’d hate to lose it. Keep your fingers crossed. Now I have to go see if I can pick 2-0-0-0 or some combination thereof for tomorrow’s draw.

UPDATE: This just arrived. The Stumpgrinder 2500 is sawing through roots in a very satisfying way.

Beth here.

We’ve always needed more light in the bathroom, and since we’ll be putting up beadboard and a new mirror soon, now was the perfect time to run a new fixture.

As with anything electrical that happens in this house, the fire break was running right in my way, as was another random board, a stud, and a pipe.  But many holes later, a new light fixture is in residence, and the holes will all be covered up.  Or we’ll say that we’re going for a post-deconstruction style or something.  Either way.

Immediately upon having the new light, we decided we didn’t know how we ever lived without it.  Also, some people have some answering to do for letting my eyebrows get so far out of control, when clearly I didn’t know the extent of the damage. 

Maybe it was better to live in the dark.

P.S. by Merideth: Beth chose to celebrate her birthday by doing this project. No, really. When asked what she wanted to do for her special day, this was it. Dedication or insanity? I call it awesomeness. She is the number one MOST awesome chick after all.

bucket

Peanut butter and concrete. Deelicious. Work has been nuttified lately so I haven’t gotten home for work until well after dark for weeks. While that’s sad in and of itself, it also means that I haven’t done those little outdoor chores I like to have wound up before the weekend. Today, though, I worked from home. Working from home meant that I could patch concrete at lunch and, since I won’t be commuting home, I’ll have an hour or so of daylight at the end of the day to patch some more.

I want to get back on the stucco train tomorrow but that can’t happen with holey walls. Hopefully with just these few rays of sunlight I’ll get the last little bits done and be ready to mud up on Saturday. I SO wish I could work from home every day. Stupid steady work.

I know I’ve discussed this in the past but fo’ reals I hate projects in which you have to waaaaaiiiiittttt between steps. We have three fairly sizeable chores on deck right now and all are creeping along thanks to wait times. Well, and maybe PMS. It happens.

I’m patching up the cracks in the second garden wall so I can stucco it to match the one we did last week. One crack turned sizeable as I started chipping out the loose material around it, demanding an ICU-style emergency procedure. Cure times for that totally stalled Stucco-plan 2007. We did, however, get the top garden wall painted a lovely “bamboo tan” that works great with the whole Spanish thing we have going on.

Putting the trellises up and getting the veggies in continues to wait on the wall project. We need to make sure the wall cures before we soak up the soil it’s holding back with the water our future tomatoes will so love.

Indoors, we’re gearing up to continue the bathroom renovation. That’s been on pause while the lumber sits, drying, in the dining room. Beth started the rewiring on Saturday and when she discovered that, once again, several sets of wires led to separate outlets (on no consistent horizontal or vertical plane) because a fire-break was in the way, she retired to the sofa in exasperation. She’ll need to reposition the fire-break and by then it had gotten too dark to work without light. So that’s waiting.

Wainscotting in the dining room also looks forward to the day its lumber is dry.

Wait. Wait. Wait. I feel like the red “don’t walk” man is the House-Made logo right now.

Beth here.

Since we’ve lived in this house, we’ve never really known what the internal temperature was.  The thermostat could say 70, but sometimes it felt like 84 and other times 50.  This caused a lot of playing with the setting, attempting to just make it so we weren’t dripping with sweat or shivering in a corner, begging the dog to come cuddle and relinquish some of her heat.

All of this is a long introduction to the fact that I decided to replace the thermostat with an exciting digital model that cost about $25.  Since I always forget to take a “before” picture, here’s an approximation of what we started with:

Not so pretty.  And not so useful.

But when I took it off, here’s what was behind it.  Is this normal?  To have two wires just sticking out of the gap in drywall? 

I quickly decided I didn’t really care if it was normal to have the two wires or not.  There are times to do things correctly, and there are times to be warm.  I installed the new thermostat, and told it the times we wake up, leave for work, come home, and go to bed.  It’s like the thermostat really cared.  Here it is in all its glory, but you must ignore the patch job below:

 It was very nice to wake up to a warm house this morning.  Thank you, new thermostat.