New floor, going in!

Today was the day! Dad and Mom came over and brought a table saw with them (thanks for the loan, Dave) and Dad and I proceeded to figure out how to install the laminate flooring. The first short row went well enough. Then I thought we had it in backwards and that we had to start in the other part of the room to boot. Approximately an hour or so (at least) later, with many cut boards and another row in, I realized I was wrong and we had done the first row correctly. Back to that part of the room! Save the cut boards for later! With many measurements and thinking things through, Dad and I got past a partition and a width change, and got several rows in today before they had to return to Lakeview. This is the gorgeousness of the new floor:

After Mom and Dad left I put in another couple of rows, and managed to damage myself pretty well:

If that doesn't look sufficiently painful, let me tell you that the camera and lighting don't do the massive blood blister justice. This is what happens when I'm using a hammer and I look somewhere else to check a gap. I didn't say nice things and I had to pause to put something cold on my wound. The only thing I could find was a bag of frozen cranberries. Those probably ought to be tossed before next Thanksgiving...

Tomorrow I plan to start up the table saw at about 8am. That ought to please the neighbors!

Projects...Continued

After a month of supreme productivity (for me) while house-sitting for Bill and Vanessa, I can list the following as accomplished: installed back "dog patio," painted bedroom, painted dining room, painted living room, tore out carpet and pad from living room/dining room, fixed toilet, put new filters in faucets (ok, that was an easy one), installed new shower head, removed brush from yard, crawled under house and right back out after spiders and dust freaked me out, contemplated how to fix squeaky floor, dismantled old cookstove (wood/electric combo from the 40's...quite the monstrosity), had old stove removed/new range put in, fixed screen doors.  I'm pretty happy with myself, but the BIG project is about to start: installing laminate flooring. Dad's bringing me a saw and I get started on that tomorrow. Whew. I'm hoping to take a short vacation before school starts, but we'll see how it goes. Here's a picture of what part of my living room looks like right now. Oh, and I've also torn out the linoleum at the door and the particle board underneath. Still haven't figured out how to effectively fix the squeaks, though. Cheers!

Le Patio

I mentioned to Dad and Mom that I had projects for July. Lots of projects. I knew I would need help cutting out a dead plum tree and some other brush and I knew that the man with the chainsaw would be Dad. So, I mentioned needing help and he and Mom grilled me for more information on said project, which was the first step of patio construction. Not only did they bring the chainsaw, but they also arrived with: the huge pickup which can carry a full pallet of pavers, hand saw, shovels, extension cords, level, hammers, buckets, T-square, and themselves. I had gained some much needed engineering assistance AND laborers to boot!

This is what we faced:

The weeds and baby trees look innocent enough, but they are a rude bunch, which we were to find out later when the shoveling started. But first we needed to frame in the area and do some measurin' and figurin' and calculatin' of slope. That was a bit comical. Mom and Dad were at either end of a string line and I was in the middle hunched upside down eyeballing a level and hoping to direct them to lift or lower to match a nice centered bubble. I know there are devices made for this, but we had to make do with my cockamamie skills. We got it done and framing began. A side note: holy crap, pressure treated lumber is spendy!

After the frame went in, Dad then figured out how to engineer the screed which would run along at the correct depth, thereby showing us where we needed to dig down and where we needed to fill. This is mom, happily digging away after I had pooped out. By the way, Vanessa's digging fork was a miraculous tool that made this job SO much easier than it would have been. Thanks, V!

Mom finally agreed to take a break. It was 91 degrees at this point. We had the frame dug down and it was time to call it a day!

Extremely early the next morning, the parentals got a load of gravel (those people start the day pretty early, and that's coming from someone who rises at 5:30am to feed the dogs) and we prepared the frame for filling. First we put in some weed barrier that I had the fortune to find on sale a week earlier. Yay, impulse shopping finds!

Then we started the process of filling with gravel and releveling with the screed.I like this picture of the bucket standing guard over the weed barrier.

I don't have a lot of pictures of the gravel going in, because Dad and I were a well-oiled machine with the "haul, pour, level, haul, pour, level" routine. Poor mom was stuck in the back of the pickup shoveling buckets full for us. She does well with that shovel. Here's Dad hosing off the finished gravel.

At this point, we were ready to go get the pavers. A very stern lady with a forklift scared the bejeesus out of me and Dad by hefting a pallet from the highest possible rack of stone products at Home Depot. I guess she knew what she was doing, but I've never taken that little orange barrier fence they put up more seriously. In the end, the pickup was loaded with pavers, retaining wall stones, and a dolly. I don't know how hand-trucks became known as dollies, but I'm glad we had one because we had a LOT of pavers to haul. One hundred twenty six of em, plus the extras on the pallet for the future patio part deux. After getting things stacked up, we called a halt and cleaned up, then went to a Gems game. Yay, baseball!

Bright and early the next morning, we set out to place the pavers. Unfortunately, we had too much gravel. I blame myself for the slope and screed measurements. All that beautiful gravel was pretty much now in the road.

We soon had a system, however. Dad was the "grader" and proceeded to manually remove gravel as mom and I packed and placed each paver. Each paver had to be leveled individually, which sometimes involved a lot of discussion, moving of problematic lumps, and stomping. To those of you wondering about the slope to the right, I live on a hill (which Dad loves to point out and complain about) and I also wanted to retain enough slope in the patio to have runoff go AWAY from the house. It looks more extreme in the picture than it really is, for some reason.

Finally, after getting all 126 pavers in place and then using the gravel to create nicely filled sides, we put in a small retaining wall on the uphill side of the patio. I was happy to have the gravel to fill in and hold the sides and retaining blocks. Here you can see some fisticuffs in action.

In the end, there are a few spots which will have to settle out and may need a bit of "help" in getting tamped in again, but this is the finished product. The dog's kennel will go on the right side, up against the fence and retaining wall, leaving an L-shaped area free. The total dimensions ended up being a 9x14 patio with about a foot of graveled area on each side. I absolutely could not have done this without the help of my parents. They are awesome. I love them, and I love my new patio.

The girls do, too.

It be time to get busy!

Wow, I spent over a year in apparent blog hibernation! It wasn't really something intentional, just that I lost inspiration and went into a tailspin of funk for a while. Last summer was a near bust for traveling (a week at the coast, some good pics of the girls that maybe I'll post one day or use as a Christmas card...ha! like I remember to send cards anymore!) and this summer I don't have huge plans for travel either. BUT, I have MASSIVE plans for house remodeling. At least massive for me. So, I hope to post some "before and after" shots of the living room grunge-o carpet and the back yard dirt patch. Hopefully they will be transformed into gleaming hardwood floors and a terraced patio, respectively. This will all go down while I am house-sitting for Bill and Vanessa. It will be a little schizophrenic working/living in my house and sleeping/living in their house, but without the girls underfoot I hope to get a LOT accomplished. We'll see! Cheers to everyone and happy summer!