Pretty, pretty floors

This:

... is the butt-ugly flooring in our house. Nasty old carpet that is never truly clean, and is an allergen-trapping, dog-hair-clogged nightmare. Also: very bland, peeling-up vinyl in the kitchen. But THIS:

... is what's beneath it. Anyone else seeing the possibilities here? For background, our house is almost a hundred years old, and for lack of any discernable style, it must be labeled a "cottage"; simple, sturdy and straightforward are the only way to go here. Fancy moldings or delicate detailing is all wrong. I see those pine floors refinished, glowing under some low-key wax finish, nail-marks, flaws and all. The kitchen is trickier. Because it seems to have been built at a different point in time, it doesn't have the same subfloor as the rest of the house (you know, the three other rooms), just plywood under the vinyl. There's almost no way we could match the existing eighty-year-old wood, or worth the effort to even try. Stone or tile would be too heavy for the foundation, not to mention too expensive for our poor budget. I'm thinking of maybe sticking with vinyl, but changing to a kitchy, black-and-white checkerboard pattern. It would fit the vintage of the house perfectly-- what's more 1920 than a checkered floor? (Something like this, just the floor part.) We could even investigate real linoleum instead of vinyl, see how much more that would cost. But, that's all a wintertime project; right now we're still working out-of-doors. So here's a picture of the chicken-coop-in-progress:

... and one of Don working on the windows. Ignore the red, plastic shutters; those are going to go as soon as we have time to build the real shutters. (You know, when everything more important than that has been finished...)

Survey and Rot

Finally had the survey done. The cost makes me want to cry a little bit-- a LOT of money to spend just determining where the corners and edges are. But now we can start the fence, after which we can start the garden. So that's good. Plus they're going to give us neat maps and things, which could be useful, or at least interesting.

The back of the property is just where we thought, thank heavens. (That's the side bordered by neighbors who are not so very friendly. We were told that our side went straight up to their little concrete retaining wall, and it does, within a few inches.) One side is further towards our other neighbors' house than we figured; that might be an awkward conversation later on... "hey, it turns out we own more of that side yard between our houses than we all thought!" But they're the cool neighbors with the band and the friendly dogs, (and only occasionally have lecherous, inappropriate house guests), and the only thing they use that side yard for is to access their AC unit. So that should all be OK. There's a lot more road-clearance than we had guessed (meaning that a lot more of "our property" belongs to the city)... something Don wants to ignore now. It seems he was worried about fencing accuracy on the two neighbor-bordered sides but not the two city-street sides, which seems backwards to me because you can talk to or negotiate with neighbors but not so much with the city, especially when there are power line right-of-ways involved. Not to mention that our two "pretty" fences (i.e. the expensive, permanent ones) are going on the street sides, while the backsides are just going to have utilitarian wire fencing, to keep our animals in and other animals out. I told Don that I'm willing to let him make the call about where the fence is going, on the condition that should we ever have to move them, I get complete I-told-you-so rights, including bringing it up every year for the rest of our lives. He remains unfazed, says that pine tree is OURS no matter where the flags are.

Don is working to fix the drainage problem on the north side of the house and repair the damage (inside and out) that it's caused. We finally had a chance to really see the interior water damage, and this project has shot to the top of the priority list, since we really shouldn't rent the place until it's fixed. I didn't catch everything but it involves replacing the sill (?), building a retaining wall to hold soil away from the side of the house, some kind of drainage system, replacing the drywall inside, and (eventually) replacing the gutters, since they've been spilling water on that unfortunate spot all the time.

Finished: Compost Bins

One project done! We built these compost bins from pallets from Don's work that were going to be thrown out, old wire hangers, and some scrap wood. It was easy and cost nothing. Tonight Don grubbed out a weedy shrubby tree thing that was growing right through one of the bins-- you can see it in the picture-- and turned the soil beneath, and I got the heap going with some brush, weeds, and a big sack o' coffee grounds from Starbucks. Right now there are two bins, each about four feet square and a little less than four feet high. Eventually I'll probably add a third bin, so that I can have a three-pile system: one to actively add to, one that's full but still 'cooking', and one that's full of ready-to-use compost.

The rest of the weekend was spent working on the window frames and designing the vegetable gardens and chicken coop, respectively. (I probably don't have to specify who was sweating outside, and who was indoors on the sofa with a notebook.) One of the truck tires went spectacularly flat when Don ran over a curb, and getting it replaced ate up a lot of time Sunday that would have otherwise gone to the windows. Bought a ladder though while we were at Sears, so that we can stop borrowing the one from the hotel. We'll need it for the windows at the back of the house, for roof/ gutter work, maybe for some of the pruning.

These are in the very back corner of our backyard; in the background are the neighbors' house and concrete retaining wall. I hope we can back our fence right up alongside that wall, but we won't know until the survey is done.

Window Frames

All of the window frames need to be scraped clean of old paint, caulked, and repainted. Whatever the house used to be covered in, it's been sheathed in aluminum siding for at least the last several decades. If cost were no object, we'd rip out the aluminum and refinish or replace whatever is beneath-- wood siding, shingle, stucco. But we can't do that, and the metal is in good condition, so it stays. Unfortunately, when one kind of siding goes in over another, (instead of replacing it), it just sort of makes the whole wall thicker; so what used to be window trim that stood out from the wall is now flush with the wall, or even indented a little.

We thought the windows would make a good first project; they don't require any special equipment, research or extra people, just time, effort, and the cost of caulk and paint. The current "color scheme" (read: lack thereof) is this: reddish standing-seam metal roof, white siding, white trim (such as there is). The windows themselves are white vinyl-clad, so it all kind of blurs together: the windows really recede into the walls, since they're all white and the window trim doesn't stand proud from the wall at all. The obvious fix would be to paint all of the trim some non-white color, but I really dislike colored trim on a white ground. It just looks... eh, to me. What I'm thinking is something like this: the thin piece of trim around each window gets painted black, so that the window 'pops' out from the wall instead of fading into it. The roof goes from a rusty red to a dark charcoal-gray, and when we make the shutters (a whole different project) , we paint them a great denim-like blue. It's the best thing I can think of for a white background. And it's all neutral enough that if we changed the siding color at some point in the future, it would still work.

We have seven windows upstairs, but two of them are really tiny; and four downstairs. It took Don most of Sunday afternoon to scrape and caulk just one. Is every project going to take six times longer than expected?