Thursday, June 14, 2007

A Week of Reprises

I’ve been splitting my time the last few days between Foxcroft and Pete’s house and doing projects in new settings using old skills.

I started prepping for painting here at home. Since I spent six years painting the old place, it feels pretty familiar. The good news is that most of the paint on the eaves trim is tight, so I’m not heat gunning everything off like I did before. The better news is that since the house body is done in shingles, I don’t have to scrape them at all. I will merely clean and re-stain them. I am starting in back and will do all the rafters and trim first, stain the body, then go and heat gun the window trim, and do that last. I’ll continue my one side at a time approach.

At Pete’s we ripped out the vinyl kitchen floor, the original brown linoleum floor under it, and the plywood it was attached to and got down to the sub floor. They have a really nice mid century modern that he and Susie have lived in for over 20 years. Susie and the girls took out the short wall between the dining room and the kitchen, and Pete removed all the cabinets. They are doing a complete update and yesterday we installed a new oak floor in the kitchen. So we got to pull out the ramsond nailer. Some form of “Ramsond Floor Nailer” is our perennial top search term.

We also completely emptied their house into a PODS (Portable On Demand Storage) unit in their driveway. I got to use my old-summer-job-with-the-moving-company spatial skills as we packed it up. The flooring company is coming to redo all of their first floor and will sand and stain the new kitchen along with the rest of first floor. I told Pete if he lived a little closer to campus he could have bought the PODS and then sublet it to students to live in come fall...

Of course I have been performing both tasks this week with one arm swathed in gauze and bandages because I seem to have ANOTHER case of to-photo-dermatitis. I can’t believe it happened again, and I don’t know where I bumped into wild parsnip! While the floor nailer is the number one search term, far and away the most popular image search is this one, and that is just yucky.

2 comments:

StuccoHouse said...

Looks like we will be working on painting eaves/window trim, etc. at about the same time. Don't you dare finish it in a week and make me look bad! How do you plan to work up there...ladder...scaffolding?

Mike said...

The back of the house is only one story. If I go fast, it's because I'm not taking all the paint off, but in 8 years, I have yet to go fast.

I own two sections of 5 foot high by 7 foot long scaffolding, so I can make a 10 foot high tower, or a 5 foot high 14 foot long low section. (If I go to the rental store and get another set of x braces I can go 21 feet long by 5 high. This is the best thing I've ever bought. I end up renting too when I get to the high places, but this is enough to get a lot of things started and to be able to dink around on projects while not spending more money to do so!