Pictures!

Owing to a number of circumstances, from a wonderful weekend trip with Dad to Natchitoches, several weeks/weekends of Mardi Gras oriented distractions, and then finally being out of the habit of putting anything up on the web, progress on the house was a bit, well, relaxed. And, frankly, that has kind of applied to the blog, too.

This weekend, however, saw the addition of sheetrock to the new wall, and I have to say I think it's going to look just fine. It's also gotten me back in the mood to share, so here is a nice photo catalogue of some my social activities of the past couple of months. I'll upload some pics of the progress on the house in another post.

From my trip to Natchitoches with Dad:

This was a great trip! We enjoyed wonderful weather, an awesome Bed and Breakfast about a block away from Natchitoches' historic Front Street, some delicious food, nature hiking, and even a round of golf on Northwestern's golf course. We also got to drive around the area and talk about a lot of family (mostly Dad's) history.

On the way up, we drove by Melrose Plantation, historic home of the painter Clementine Hunter. It wasn't open for tours, so I snapped a couple of pics with my phone and off we went.

After driving around Cloutierville, where we discovered to our absolute horror that the historic Kate Chopin house had burned to the ground, we made our way into town and enjoyed some poboys on Front Street. We played a round of golf, checked in at our B&B, cleaned up, and then ate dinner at a great seafood place called Antoon's, right on the river. The owner of Antoon's, who unfortunately we missed, is the son of the town barber (who my father remembers as one of the only other really avid fishermen on Cane River when he was growing up). We enjoyed delicious food and drank a couple of glasses of red while we watched the moon come up over the far bank. It was a really nice experience. We grabbed a movie and woke up early the next morning to have a steaming cup of coffee on the back porch of our Bed and Breakfast. Here is the porch:


And here are some shots from the porch that morning:






All of the guests of this B&B, the Jefferson House (which I recommend highly), had attended a Mardi Gras ball the night before, and we were the only guests stirring early in the morning. We took a little drive through the town, and when we returned, the proprietors Herman and Arleen Mayeux had breakfast ready. While we ate, we were subject to the cute begging of their two Dachshunds. After they realized that they were dealing with experienced dog-begging-resistors, they curled up in the corner for a nap:


After breakfast, we drove around all over the area, looking at different places Dad had spent time growing up. We ended up in Kisatchie National Forest, where we took a nature hike through land that Dad had camped out / hunted on in his youth. Here are a few pics from the nature hike we did at Longleaf Vista in Kisatchie:





Following our hike, we were a little worried about getting back to Lafayette (and for me, all the way from there to NO) at a decent time, but we couldn't resist heading to Clarence, LA to get a long-awaited taste of Grayson's Barbeque, some of the best barbeque in that part of the state. We arrived at the place in what appeared to be the post-church rush, but they handled our order very quickly and we even got an order of ribs to bring home to Mom. Here is a shot of me outside this mecca of meat:


Following that, we headed home with our bellies full and smiles on our faces.

From Valentine's Day weekend:

Becky and I had a wonderful Valentine's day weekend. There were some parades, but mostly we celebrated a day early by having a night out in the quarter. We began by meeting up at Monaghan's Irish Rose on Conti for a beer, then scooted over to EAT! on Dumaine St. The meal was pretty good, affordable and sans corkage fee for the bottle of wine we brought, but the service was a bit lacking. Fortunately, we were ready to have a good time so we did not let that faze us!

Then we walked over to the House of Blues to see the Old Crow Medicine Show, a great band playing a sort of bluegrass-y folk with a great energy. The show was sold out, but we had purchased tickets the week before and were good to go.



It was an incredible show, and the encore, which ran 4 songs, ended with covers of Neil Young's Tonight's the Night and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust.

The following day saw some of a parade, but the weather was threatening and I had plans to cook Becky a steak dinner for Valentine's Day, so we walked the 2 blocks back to the apartment a little early. We were a little fatigued from our late night the evening prior and dinner at home was a very nice way to relax.

From various Mardi Gras happenings:

Becky Goes Bananas Mardi Gras day!

This Dragon costume was pretty sweet.

Becky and me, Mardi Gras Day

Proteus Float

Proteus

Nick and Allie's dog Spartacus, dressed as Elvis!

Becky, preparing some essentials for her ride in the Krewe of Mid-City

That's Becky and Dede, right in the center of this picture. Wait! or are they further right?!? Becky! Becky! Throw me something!!!

Here is Becky and Dede's float, #17!

This is a shot from my parade, Muses, when we stopped in front of Gallier Hall.

Kenny and Andrea and me hanging out before the Muses parade.

On Sunday before Mardi Gras, we went to see the Krewe of Barkus, which I think I am going to do every year from now on. Hundreds of costumed dogs, how could you lose? This year, the theme was Batmutt: The Bark Knight, but all I got was a picture of this hot dog somehow.

If you look closely, you will see that there is a Mardi Gras Tiger inside of this parked truck...

This dude, who we saw on Mardi Gras day outside of Molly's, was clearly living the High Life. Here's to you, sir.

What shall we use to fill the empty spaces?

This weekend Jack once again generously offered his time to help me (re)build the wall between the "Master" bathroom and bedroom. This wall had to be moved because it made the bathroom too narrow to house the clawfoot tub that had been installed prior to my purchase of the house. We started the project by determining that the existing antique bedroom baseboard was going to present a problem, both to the wall-building effort as well as the plaster repair / skimcoating yet to come. After we made that realization, it was a simple step to decide to remove it.





As you can see, it was pretty tall, and the horsehair plaster did not reach down behind it, so there is a pretty interesting view of the house sill, floor joists, and general construction of the place. Once the baseboards were removed and safely stowed, we began to lay out our footers.




This was really the first time the new wall started to feel like a reality for me. I could see how far it would extend into the bedroom, and how much room would be available in the new, larger bathroom. Me likey.

About this time, I got a call from my neighbor indicating that a delivery truck was outside of my house. My gas range had arrived! Many, many thanks to Mom and Dad for such an amazing piece of help!


After the footers were down, we used Jack's laser level (which shot laser lines on the floor, wall, and roof) to ensure that our first uprights and headers were all plumb and in proper alignment. At this time, we started to realize that the 2x4's we were using for this project were not the straightest ever cut (thanks, Lowe's), but we forged boldly onward using our framing nail gun and elbow grease to straighten and align them as necessary.


This technique worked very well for all of the single uprights and cross-members in our little addition, but when it came to the outside corner we had a real dilemma. The outside corner basically was built with a pillar of 3 2x4's nailed together, providing outside and inside faces appropriate for the (eventual) sheetrock installation. The twist in the boards, however, became more apparent as the top of this pillar was twisted almost 45 degrees clockwise from the bottom. It was a big setback, so we broke for lunch, making the Taco truck / Jefferson highway Lowe's run. BTW: I love that taco truck, on the lake side of Jeff hwy a few blocks on the downtown side of Lowe's. Don't be scared to try it! At a few fits and starts (and visits to a number of hardware stores besides that Lowe's) we got some clamps that, along with some cleverly cut blocks, allowed us to clamp the twist out of the pillar. Here's a view looking up from the floor at that whole operation:



At that point, it was time to call it a day. We returned to the project Sunday morning with the goal of getting all the way through installing the sheetrock, but even our first step was a little off as we remembered that Home Depot doesn't carry the paperless drywall I want to use in the bathroom, and we had to go to Lowe's, again. However, we picked up the sheetrock we needed along with some Stryp-eez in a spray can Becky wanted to try on the windows and a couple of other needed tools.

Jack and I started off by getting some firebreak pieces installed along with the final upright.


Once that stuff was installed, we ran the electrical outlets in this wall, one facing the bedroom and one facing the bathroom and protected by GFCI.


All in all, it was a very successful morning, so we turned our attention to this twisted pillar. As we removed the clamps, we saw that it wanted to return to its original twisted position. Frustrating, so we decided to shop around a little bit for a solution. After a nice lunch at Gott Gourmet (also recommended... don't be afraid to get the Chicago Dog, it's inexpensive and very good) and yet another trip to home Depot, we felt we had the proper tools to finish this project. Using levers, levels, clamps, elbow grease, and a lot of cursing, we finally got the top of the pillar in line and secured with hurricane braces (shown here). That took all afternoon, and around 5 we decided to call it a day.


I want to thank Jack again for his help. No way I could have done this without him. I hope to have pics of a completed wall in the next couple of weeks!

Always Use Protection

A lot of time this weekend was spent making an accurate representation of the available space on Visio. Saturday I decided I wanted to get enough tarp to properly cover the floors to protect them from the next phase of work, and as I began measuring the floor spaces I realized that I probably only wanted to do that once. So, I included measurements for doors and windows and countertops and such. What I ended up with is a document that I hope continues to be useful for materials estimates and furniture layout. See it below (really, and click on it to get a closeup!):


On Sunday, Becky and I purchased and laid out all of the necessary plastic sheeting, no mean accomlishment since we had to go to Lowe's to pick up the tarps and that place is like a black hole for time. We also purchased a number of sheets of Luan, a low grade light plywood useful for laying down over the plastic in an area where you might be working to protect the floor underneath from dropped tools and such.

While at the store, I ran into some old family friends, Homer Ed and Carolyn, and we spent a nice time catching up before returning to our shopping. On our way home, Becky and I grabbed lunch at the taco stand where I am now becoming a regular. We enjoyed our lunch-from-a-truck on the steps of the house with an orange Fanta, then laid down plastic over all the floors as seen below.





When we were finished laying plastic, we experimented with the idea of sanding and poly-ing the wainscotting, but after a couple of experimental sanding spots turned out a different color than we expected, we decided to drop the idea of sanding. I may still put a coat of poly on the wainscotting, but I am more interested in spending the coming weekend building the new bathroom wall and hanging sheetrock in there.

Right about the time we decided we weren't going to sand, Jack called and requested that I bring back his shop-vac and give him a hand cleaning the other side of his double. I hustled over there and spent the rest of the day sprucing the place up so he would feel good about moving in.

Anyway, we're nearing the point of sheetrock mud and paint, so if you're reading this and feel like getting a putty knife in hand, get in touch!

4 Full Coats of Poly, 3 China Brushes, 2 Lights left on and for each of us a pair of sore knees!

The Holiday season has passed, but it was wonderful! Becky and I spent Christmas in Lafayette, playing board games and spending some wonderful time with my family. The food was matched only by the company.

Now, about the house:

On Christmas Eve, I got off of work around lunch and headed over to Becky's apartment. After a quick change into some house-work clothes, it was off to the house to apply coat #3. With some observation from Jack, we knocked out the 3rd coat pretty quickly. Sorry, no pics of coat #3.

When we got back from Lafayette late Friday evening, after a wonderful meal with Aaron and his family in Baton Rouge, we opened presents late into the night. I used the following day to do some housework and to get some exercise with Jack and his dog, Scout. Sunday it was back to work on the floors, where Jack, Becky, and myself knocked out the last coat like we were pros.

I came back a couple of days later and took the pictures you see below. Hooray, floors!

2nd Coat down!

... and I think it's looking pretty good!

Getting down to the nitty-gritty

After a weekend of sanding, cleaning, and applying the first layer of finish, the floor refinishing project is nearing completion. Friday was a day spent frantically ensuring that I had all the materials for an early start on Saturday. Matt, who has worked with Jack in the past, is a professional contractor who has, in the past, specialized in flooring. He has refinished many floors and was an *awesome* source of both help and knowledge. On a previous Sunday, he helped me create my materials list, and also gave me an overview of how the project should proceed. He showed up this Saturday morning ready to go, and fortunately my preparations had gotten the house ready to begin.

Saturday morning, at 6:15, I swung over to Jack's with Becky. We loaded up into his pickup and headed to home depot to pick up the sander. The sander rental is 28$ for four hours, or 40$ for 24 hours. Needless to say, we went with the 24 hour option. We also purchased all the necessary sandpaper for the rental sander (the most expensive part of the project, 6$ a sheet and we got 30 sheets). I had already purchased a whole boatload of other necessary items, including brushes, mineral spirits, rags, hand sandpaper, more mineral spirits, and a few other items.

Then, we got right to it (right after a minor scare with someone falling through the hole where the central air return grille had been removed to allow sanding access to the floor around its rim). Matt handled the big rented sander and Jack and I started doing some detail sanding of the edges and corners with palm sanders. The big rental sander started up with 36 grit sandpaper attached, which looked almost like small gravel attached to paper. It really took the old finish off the floors pretty quickly!



I wanted the floor to keep a lot of its character, though. I wanted it to look beautiful, but *OLD* and beautiful, which is kind of the general theme I am shooting for with the whole decor. This meant that I didn't want to sand too much of the "character" off of the floor, I really just wanted to get it protected and sort of uniformly covered with finish.

The floor underneath what had been the bathroom wall was interesting. As it had obviously not been sanded during the last floor refinishing, it was sort of a ridge that needed some serious hand sanding to flatten. Here it is after a good bit of effort (you can hardly tell!). You can also see the dust that covered everything during the sanding process.


Here is a shot of the living room during a change of sandpaper:


And a shot from the living room to the bathroom (that's my repair job in the hallway, again looking pretty good for an amateur, I think!).


After the sanding was done, we had to inspect the floor for sander marks and blemishes. We did a pretty careful inspection and deemed that the floor would be ready for Sunday's cleaning and finishing effort. Then, we drank beer.

Sunday started a little slowly due to the beer drinking previously mentioned, however the workload left was much smaller and we had more help as Becky and Sylvia (Matt's girlfriend and an expert at applying finish) were able to join us. After some final detail sanding, we vacuumed the floor as clean as possible and began a wipe down of the entire surface with mineral spirits, always pulling any dirt or grit towards the door we would eventually be exiting from. No shoes were worn in the house from this point on! Here is a pic of what the floor looked like after we had wiped it down:


Once the floor was clean, it was time to apply the poly. This was pretty simple: apply a thin coat, using brush strokes with the grain. We joined together as a team and were able to accomplish this pretty quickly, and we finished the first coat at about 11 AM on Sunday. Thank goodness, too, because this gave the finish (a semi-gloss polyurethane) time to dry before the cold snap hit later that night! The last picture in this post is a pic of the "team" finishing up the first coat in the living room, and I was struck by its similarity to an impressionist painting by Gustave Caillebotte called The Floor Scrapers, which I stumbled across in my Internet research for tips on refinishing old hardwood floors:





Have a merry, merry Christmas!

There's a hole in the floor!

A lot has happened with the house since my last post, and I am not going to backtrack in detail. Suffice to say that I have learned all about climbing under the house, sweating pipe, the use of Bunny bread in a plumber's world, and a host of other fun tips from checking for gas leaks to using a rotary tool on plaster (which works very well, by the way).

This blog entry, however, is going to focus on the prep work for the big upcoming project this weekend: wood floor refinishing! This weekend, with the help of Matt and Sylvia, and possibly Jack, Becky, and maybe even Tork, I am going to be like Daniel-san and sand-the-floor.

A couple of months ago I was wrestling with ideas for renovating the bathroom. Originally, the bathroom came with a beautiful claw-foot tub that was too big to fit properly between the walls. This resulted in the back of the bathtub actually poking a hole in the sheetrock on one side of the bathroom. This bathroom was also home to the worst-placed floor furnace of all time. The floor furnace was actually installed in the bathroom doorway! Add to that it was ridiculously cramped, poorly placed, and there was no place to store towels or TP. Obviously, something needed to be done here.

So, with the help of my good friend Jack (who I have now promised is to be a guest of honor at any housewarming party), I tore out a wall between the bathroom and the master bedroom.


Then, I took out the floor furnace. Man that thing was big! It looked like a diesel engine.


Then we built a frame in the hole to support the new floorboards.

After that, I had to remove some of the floorboards so that the repair job wouldn't look, well, like a repair job. This involved some interesting cutting and chiselling to "stagger" the end-seams. In the process, I determined that the floor is, for the most part, in great, solid condition.


I also took out a couple of boards towards the middle of the bathroom to repair the hole where the old toilet was, and one that was cut prematurely for the new toilet position that didn't quite work.
The flooring was held in place with ancient, humongous square-cut nails. Chiselling around these for a straight seam was one of the most challenging parts of this operation.



Jack had brought over some flooring that looked like it would be a perfect fit, if not a match, from his house. The boards he brought were pretty dirty (they had been under water during floods several times in the last 100 years) and in the end did not fit as well as we had hoped. The wood was just a little too narrow, and with so many replacement boards adjacent to each other, the gaps were just too big.


So I went to Ricca's hardware, which is a really neat old place that has lots of old wood doors, mantles, wrought iron, clawfoot tubs, and other antique architectural features. Thay where i spoke with Jim, their carpenter, about replacing my flooring. I had brought a sample of what I needed and we determined that he would be able to help by taking some flooring he had that was larger than what I needed and planing, trimming, and routing it. The price was about 4$ a linear foot. I needed about 38 feet, and I tipped him for helping me measure and prepare the boards.



The wood turned out to be a much better fit! There is a little technique to getting these tongue-and-groove boards to fit during the repair process, but with some instruction from Matt and a number of other sources, I got through it. And, color-wise, it seems a perfect match. All in all, it seems as though we are going to be ready for this weekend!