Yay Tile!

One day's worth of tile work and the majority of the full tiles are down.

Tons of cuts to do but it's rolling.

Also it's hard to tell but the baseboard is up, painted and looking really good.

Kraki vs the Fridge of Doom

Appliances convey.

That's a phrase that brings a smile to a buyer's face. Well ok fine, some people don't care but it saved me a couple thousand bucks for a fridge, washer and dryer.

The only problem is they're "dirty". Dirty is a good word. It covers a whole entire gamut ranging from streaks on windows to mud covered trucks and hundreds of dust bunnies roaming the fertile plains of a bedroom.

Its companion "Clean" is just as broad. Years ago in a conversation about cleaning I came to the realization that different people have definitions of clean that may only intersect occasionally.

In this conversation we were talking about cleaning a wooden glass top table. Remove the stuff from the top, wipe it down, dust it, some windex and for me it is clean. One person disagreed. It wasn't clean until the glass was removed from the table and the underside of the table was clean. For myself, unless I saw something on the underside of the glass, it wouldn't have occurred to me to do that. Differing versions of clean.

I ramble on about clean because the people who lived in this house lived in a state of "clean" which I would call filth. I had an inkling of it when removing the carpet. Yes it didn't smell good and there was dog hair and dirt but I didn't expect nastiness of this degree.

I took no "before" pictures of the fridge. You wouldn't want to see them. Really. I was reluctant to put bottled water inside.

I mean it.

I should have worn gloves.

I will only go so far as to say that there was hair in the refrigerator...not A hair. Hair. Hair, how shall I say it...of varying curliness. At one point I just essentially hosed down the interior and wet/dry vac'd the bare concrete floor.

In any case, I now have a fridge into which I can put actual food I intend to eat. Shocking.







<----Clean Fridge. Yay.



<--Yes, a lot of bottled water.





<--Don't ask. I said it was nasty, remember?

Ready....Set....Paint?

Well, it's hard to tell but on Saturday the ceiling texture got applied. It took longer than predicted but it's done.

Paint should be going up Monday and Tuesday...walls and ceiling both.

As messy as the popcorn was to take down, the knockdown is just as messy going "up". The sprayer nozzle shoots it all over the place and occasional showers of that paste rolled through.































You can see a bit of the newly leveled floor in this photo if you stand on tiptoes, squint and lean a bit left.

Recall that I did say that my photography skill left something to be desired. You can't say that you weren't forwarned.

Popcorn!

Popcorn be gone! Yay!

Getting closer to having the painting done.







Also starting to get the floor levelled out.

Good stuff.

BLAM!

Day 1 of people who know what they're doing working on the house.




I am put to shame in mere hours:

Drywall in living room repaired!








Pillars Removed and Tile Gone.

The weird banding which made the doorways narrower even got removed. (You can see it below on the pillar base that got removed).

Awesome!























I know there's something to having the right tools but knowing what the HELL you're doing is worth even more. I could have beat on it that like a crazy monkey for a week and I'd still have less done than this.

Kraki

Picture/Text Layout

After fighting with this crappy composition interface, the previous post is semi-legible.

Apologies to anyone using IE to look at it, I'm giving up on making it line up even CLOSE to the same in both IE and Firefox. You guys with Chrome can just deal with it :P

Kraki

Demolition Weekend (Part 2)

Sunday went very well: the fake hardwood floor is gone now along with the padding underneath. It was amazingly easy to pull up although I am glad that I was gentle with most of it since I'll need to use some of it in my bedroom.



















More of those "built in" shelves were in my bedroom.













They're gone now, thankfully the previous owner half-assed them and one of them only had 3 screws holding it in. The other had 4 nails. Mostly they were being held up by the paint. I'm glad I didn't put anything heavier than my drill on them while I was underneath!




I am going to have to figure out how to patch the "hardwood" flooring since I wasn't planning on replacing the flooring in my bedroom yet. The corner TV stand thing that I pulled out still had the carpet under it. I shouldn't be shocked but it's a bit sad to see how badly these projects were done by the previous owners.




The other pic I took of that corner is too hard to see but even with the 2x4s in the way you can see the "wood" flooring end and the strip of carpet...giggity.

Demolition Weekend (Part 1) - with 100% less carpet

So after a couple days of very little accomplishment, I decided that Friday would be "Get this stinking nasty dog hair ridden smelly blah carpet out day". Since I only called it that in my head, it rolled around better there.

The two front rooms are pretty much the same as the pictures from before but much less carpety. 100% less carpety in fact. The 2 other bedrooms and a connecting hallway also had carpet. After seeing how much dirt was under it, I'm going to TILE the hallway leading from the garage->utility room-> entry way area -> kitchen.

I almost took a picture of the dirt but everyone's seen dirt and there's nothing holy or even unholy about this dirt.

Friday went well so I decided that this would be demolition weekend.
Obviously this is a couple hours in...I started thinking that it was taking a lot more time and work than expected so I might as well take some pictures of it and post them.

We have now arrived at NOW! Congratulations.

Anyway, this was a sizeable pain in the ass. Also a pain in the back, neck, shoulder, several pains in the palms from stabbing myself with nails. Just about the only thing I didn't do was bash the shit out of my thumb with a hammer.

After several hours, I realized that the pile of crap was pretty amazingly sized.

I wasn't looking forward to moving it but damn, I was accomplishing one impressive pile of shit. See? That's a pretty big mess for one set of crappy "built in cabinets".

Pre-Demolition Weekend

So there are several things that just have to go on this house. I forgot to take a picture of it beforehand but you can sortof see the "Built in" furniture on the right side of this picture.

According to rumor, back in the 1990's, new homeowners wanted very large odd shaped spaces to store their television, VCR and 8 Track tape players. Many of these drywall and plaster "Shelves" were SQUARE. Because you know so much electronic equipment is SQUARE 18"x18". Right. So anyway. They had to go.






Oh, also people loved large square pillar things in the middle of their entry way. They're great.

This also has to go. Soon(ish).

I bought a House

So yeah. Tuesday I signed away my soul and swore the next 360 months to pay a payment for some sticks and such attached to a concrete pad (it also has a roof and windows thankfully).

Google says it looks like this.

But they lie, the tree and lawn is WAY more dead looking although it is far less brown than it was back in April. I thought I was going to have to dig the tree out but maybe it doesn't need last rites. Also, that's not my vehicle as everyone knows.

In any case, it's pretty nice floorplan and in a good part of town (Kensington Lakes).

I feel dirty

I swore I wouldn't do this but I needed a place to put some pictures with comments since my photography skill leaves something to be desired (mainly photography). So...here goes.