SYNRGYdesign

The nice part about having moved in already is that we no longer have to “go to the new house” to work on it.  We can just wake up in the morning on the weekends and get to work.  The bad part about having moved in already is that we can not unpack yet because nothing is really finished enough to put things away.  That is not entirely true.  The bedrooms are pretty much done.  The family room and living rooms are done except for some minor painting that still needs to be done.  The kitchen on the other hand is not done.  We are still working on the cabinets and the countertops so we can not put anything away yet over there.  Living in a construction zone seems to be twice the work because there is the maintenance of the house itself now that we are living in it and the construction that is going on as well.  We can no longer just leave the tools around and lock up.  As difficult as it may be sometimes it is worth it to be here already and watch the kids really enjoy living here.  

Unfortunately the weeds are getting out of hand.   As much as we would like to try to concentrate on the inside of the house we are forced to also try to maintain the outside of the house as well.  The weeds grew in the back yard like crazy a few months ago when we had what little rain we get here in southern California.  Below is a picture of how tall it got with the kids trying to make a maze through it.  Luckily once we cut it down those weeds have not grown back but the weeds in the front are not only growing but they are of the spiky variety which make it very unpleasant to walk around in.After a few hours of trying to dig up some of the weeds and very little progress lately I quickly discovered that it will take more then just a day to “maintain” the front yard.  The gardener that came by and said he could do it all in one day is looking better and better by the minute…if only we had the money for it.

We are finally getting around to sealing the kitchen countertops.  We are very past due on this but other things such as moving in has taken priority.  We had originally covered the countertops with some cardboard to help protect them while we worked.  After taking them off over the week end we saw that the countertops turned out pretty good.  We applied one application of the penetrating sealer and that seemed to go pretty smoothly.  Then we made some paste hoping to match the existing color of the countertops.  Luckily we went with basic charcoal for our color so we were not that worried about trying to mix something that we could not match.  We tried out a few test spots and found that using a straight concrete mix made the batch a little more green then when we used the ready mix bags.  A few trial and errors later we seemed to get a batch that matched pretty good but we will have to wait and see as it does dry differently.  Crossing our fingers that everything goes well. 

Well we have been living in the construction zone for a little over a month now.  It has not been easy but things are slowly getting done.  Our remodeling efforts have not been as fast and furious as it was before the move mainly because we are trying to find a balance between fixing everything up and having some down time.  Doing only the remodel all the time was really starting to wear thin and the kids need to have some breaks from it. We basically have all the bedrooms done and the kids bathroom is now done except for painting.  All the tiles are in but we still have to grout.  We spent the weekend trying to get the concrete countertops sealed and we finally finished staining the hallway.  They are small steps but are big differences. 

The actual sanding of the floors was not hard.  The sanding machine did most of the work.  We did not rent the drum sander but opted for the orbital sander instead.  It was not even an orbital sander as more like a big vibrating sander.  Going over the floors took a long time to do all three different grits.The hardest part was the edges.  We rented an edging sander and it was a lot more powerful than the big vibrating sander.  It was taking off more then we were anticipating.  We eventually opted to use our hand orbital.  It wasn’t as fast or strong but it got the job done.   

It’s taken a while to get to the point where we can start working on the floors.  The ceilings have taken a longer time then we had originally expected.  We rented a sander to test out how we would take the original varnish off the floors.  We are also concerned about a few areas that have some dark stains.After doing a lot of research on how to remove the stains it seems the consensus is try to bleach the stains so they will lighten up if they are very dark stains.  Since we have no idea what the stains are from and how long they have been there.  We believe that some of the stains are due to moisture being trapped and rusting the nails and staples from the carpet and wood.  We’ll find out tomorrow how well the stains will work.

We had already started the demolition of the interior side for the windows we are turning into doors.  K2 did a great job at taking down the plaster on  the inside…he was having so much fun he did not want to stop for lunch.  I had to help him a long and start pulling down some of the bigger pieces.Unfortunately on both windows we saw the diagonal bracing going under the windows.  Which meant that we have to brace it some how so that the bracing is not abandoned completely.  It is interesting how they used diagonal bracing for their shear instead of plywood.  The outside of the walls will come down later this week.  Hopefully there aren’t any more surprises when we take the outside down. 

Once we removed the terrazzo entry tiles and installed a substrate above the subfloor to prep for the tiles that are going to be installed, we realized that the tiles were still going to sit above the hardwood floors.  Instead of installing backer board on part of it we decided float some self leveling concrete.We had never used the stuff before but that’s about true for 75% of the stuff we are doing to this house so we figured why not try it.  We have specified it and seen it done in the field before but we still really didn’t know how it worked. The stuff is amazing.  It truly does level itself.  As soon as it started pouring out of the bucket onto the floor it was already finding the right places to go.  We did the best we could in directing it to the areas were we needed it the most.  Unfortunately we were installing a very thin layer, probably less then an 1/8 of an inch so it was very shallow.  We will just have to see how it works in the morning. 

One of the things that really attracted us to this house is the mud room/pantry.  It is basically an indoor laundry off the garage that also has a small half bath and a nice walk in pantry.  The idea of not having to run into a cold garage at 10 pm to get the laundry was very enticing to me.  Plus I liked the way it was off the kitchen and had access to the backyard and the garage.  The funny thing about the mud room when we bought it is that we do not think they used it as a laundry room because they had a refrigerator there.  We finally determined they could not bring the refrigerator into the kitchen because of the size of it and the size of the kitchen door openings.  But that still left us with the puzzle of where they did their laundry?  Like many things about the house I do not think we will ever find out why they did certain things but speculation is a lot more fun.We decided to build a platform for the laundry because we have the front loading washer and dryer.  We figured we could make it storage or something underneath and build a platform for a fraction of the cost they sell the pedestals for.  The platform idea was and is a good idea until I started tiling the floors.  I had to tile around the wood framing of the platform requiring more cuts and it was a lot harder to work around.  Tiling the pantry was not fun as I found out there isn’t any light in there which has now been added to the list of places that needs light fixtures installed.  While the tiling may not be perfect in certain places due to my frustration of having to cut the tile 2 to 3 times before I could get the measurement right, it is at least done and no one can tell where I messed up unless they crawl into the corners of the pantry or stick their heads all the way to the back of the platform under the laundry. 

There are literally thousands of articles on the Internet about how to sand floors, refinish floors, re-stain floors and repair floors.  Everyone is just slightly different yet surprisingly the same.I attempted to use our hand sander to try out some of the troublesome areas of the hardwood floor that have some stains.  Most of the flooring is in really good condition considering it’s age.  But there are some spots where it looks like the staples of the carpet rusted and left black spots in the hardwood floor and of course there are some big black stains mostly in the master bedroom that can only be assumed to be left from the same dog or cat that left the scratch marks on the walls.The experiment was good but also proved that hand sanding the edges with a palm sander as suggested in some articles should only be done by someone who has a lot of time and can take the repetitive movements of sanding the floor back and forth.  Hopefully the bigger floor sander is going to work a lot faster.  That experiment will happen in a few days.