Starting the Bathroom

I've started on the bathroom now. I already had the tub in and then I put up the Durock (backerboard) in the shower.  I chose to use the Durock over Hardibacker because of cost and ease of use.  With the Durock all you have to do is score it with a box knife and then snap it.  With the Hardibacker you have to use a carbide cutting tool and it takes multiple passes to cut through it.  I've used both and the Durock is easier to use,  and the price difference between Durock and Hardibacker is about $3 per sheet.  So I guess you could say I've become a fan of Durock.   http://www.usg.com/durock-cement-board.html

I also pulled up the old, moldy, beat up floor from 1955.  There was mold around the toilet, but I expected that.  There had been obvious signs of water leakage on the tile and the old toilet valve was leaky, but that's fixed now.  I scrubbed the mold around the toilet with bleach water.  You can still kind of see a dark outline around the toilet flange on the left side of the picture.  Below that is a picture of the old flooring.

White Walls, White Ceilings

Here they are, my primed walls and ceilings.  Clean white is always a beautiful color!

Remember it's only one coat of primer so some things are still visible.

Started working on the bathroom today.  Stay tuned!

Painting Primer

Today I rented an Airless Paint Sprayer to paint my walls with primer.  The primer will seal the sheetrock and make my paint go farther when I put color on the walls.  It was a mess though.  We got the sprayer around 10:30 but had problems getting it to spray right.  Finally, after going over to the hardware store and making a few calls dad got a big clog out of the tube and the sprayer started working right.  That was around 1:30 or 2.  Fortunately they reset our rental time to 2, so we have a full 24 hours to use it.  The sprayer worked pretty well after that, we were able to get all the walls in the whole house primed in about 2-2.5 hours.  It was one big white cloud inside the house though, even with the windows open.  I had paint on my eyelashes and up my nose.  Tomorrow I'll start on the ceilings.  Now that we've gotten the sprayer figured out it should be a breeze, although I think I'll end up covered in paint again.

This is just before painting, I used paper to mask off around the windows and floor.

The many patches I made.

We added some water to the primer to thin it a little thinking that would help the sprayer, but nothing helps when it's a big, fat clog in the tube.  The pump for the sprayer is the dark red thing by dad's hand.

This is the spray gun.  It actually looks pretty clean here.

Me in the paint cloud.  The flash makes it look a little worse than it is.

I'll take some pics of the finished walls but they aren't very exciting, they're white.

This week

These are a few of the things I've been doing this week in addition to watering, watering, watering my grass seed.  I wish it would rain more!

Dad and I decided after the sheetrock guys left that we wanted to do the doorway into the hall.

So I've been working on that and just finished up sanding it today.

I also enclosed the flue from the furnace.  Before they just had some 1/4" pieces of wood

there and it wasn't finished very nicely, not to mention it was barely connected to the wall.

Almost done with this.

This is the hall (hard to take a pic of it).  It used to have some painted wood paneling on the walls, which I was afraid to take down because you could tell that they had used glue to put it up.  Dad thought we should just go for it anyway.  So while I was in Dallas dad did a sneak attack and pulled down the paneling, pulled the wallpaper off, patched the holes, sanded, and primed the walls.  Luckily for him there was wallpaper under the paneling so the glue didn't make more work for him by tearing up the sheetrock. But, yes, I'm glad it's done.  Thanks dad.

And this is my bathtub.  Out of the box...finally.

New A/C

I went to Dallas for 5 days, but I'm back now and getting back to work.  A week ago Wednesday I had my new air conditioner put in.  The old one was a gamble.  The copper tubing that contained the freon had been stolen while the house was vacant and that allowed humid, summer air to get inside the compressor.  The moisture in the air can mix with the oil inside the unit and can cause it to turn acidic and start eating at the metal inside. ( I learned all this from my furnace man.)  So my furnace guy could have fixed it but there was a 50/50 chance that it wouldn't have worked, and the freon itself was going to cost around $400.  So in the end I decided to just get a new one, the old one was bigger than what the house needed anyway.  Besides it sounds better to say "New furnace and a/c" instead of just "new furnace" when selling.

After Wallpaper

Today I started sanding the walls in the bedrooms.  They all had wallpaper which I have already pulled down, but the walls are still rough from the wallpaper paste.  Some of the wallpaper came off easier than others and some of the marks I have to patch were there before I got started.  Here are some before and after pictures of the rooms.  Today was a very dusty day.

This room has lots of marks to patch. (I didn't make all of them.)

Lots of patches. It didn't really take that long though, just one pass and a light sand after.

Stair Landing

This is what I was working on all of last week. The landing by the basement stairs and the garage door was really unlevel.  The floor dropped 7/8 in. towards the basement and 1/4 in. right to left.  The real problem was that the garage floor had been paved over a few times raising the level about 3 in.  Pictures below show my giant shims that I used to level the floor and bring it up to the threshold of the door. 

The checkerboard pattern is the original kitchen flooring from 1955.

This is my new level landing.

This is the framing for the new step.