Speed Bag

No mural this week after all. We got the front & back yards tidied, AJ fixed her bike, & I got the present AJ gave me for my birthday set up:

Of course I had to try it out for a while, using these great mitts she also gave me:

Both the mitts and the speed bag are vintage, to go with the overall aesthetic of the garage/workshop/DuserHaus. Of course, at this point, vintage can refer to things that are much younger than we are, but they do look great down there with all the 60+ year old stuff from the "rooms" under the kitchen.

After all that, I was pooped. So, no mural. Next week, I'm going out of town for work, so maybe no mural then, either. But it's next on my list!

Bedroom done!

It took a few evenings & one whole day, but the bedroom is now done!

The pink trim has been eradicated:

I did two of the walls in the same blue-gray as my work room, and two the same ivory color of the new rooms:

When the construction guys jacked up the back of the house to repair it, they caused a shift in the bedroom wall that loosened & tore some old wallpaper that people have been painting over for decades: 

When we saw that, we immediately peeled some of the paper back, to make sure the wall wasn't cracked. It wasn't, but we exposed a couple large bare patches of old plaster that we've just been living with all this time. As a quick cosmetic fix, I tried to cut away as much paper as I could to get to the places where it was still stuck to the wall, while not making the holes too much larger, and then painted over the holes. It worked pretty well:

It doesn't catch the eye when you're in the room, so all's well that ends well. We can do a real fix later, when we have the ceilings redone.

Pickles, meanwhile, couldn't understand why I would want to do all this activity in the evenings instead of doing normal couch time with her:

In the end, she went ahead & compensated herself well. I cleared out some dead plants from the garden bed on Saturday afternoon, & she spent Sunday morning in the sun, on the soft, warm soil:

The garden has a ways to go before I can replant after the Mouse-pocalypse -- I have to build a contraption -- but the bedroom is now totally done & checked off the list. I didn't get to work on the mural because I have a school assignment to finish, but I'm still satisfied with the progress this week. Next week: a return to the mural, along with some overdue yard cleanup!

Mouse Onslaught. Again. Still.

The mice laugh in the face of my attempts to block them from getting into the house. Ultimately, what it will take to stop them from coming in entirely is taking the vinyl siding off of the house, and plugging up every tiny gap along the foundation -- a project that is at least a few years away. New kitchen cabinets/counters would help but that's not happening immediately either. For now, we will just have to keep doing what we're doing: keep the kitchen spotless to not give them a reason to hang around, and keep the kitchen door closed at night to keep them from exploring the rest of the house.

I suspect the reason it's so much worse this year than in years past is because they seem to be taking up residence in the concrete block wall on the north side of the yard. Judging from Pickles' behavior, they've been nesting in the back part of the wall for a few months. Over the past week or so, they seem to have moved closer to the houses. When Pickles goes out, she stops at the bottom of the stairs to power-suction-sniff all the tiny cracks in the mortar at the base of the wall and bark (which sets off the dogs in the house next door -- sorry, neighbors!). She somehow scratched her lip doing this:

(the pink dewdrop shape right under her nose)

That wall is in a slow state of collapse -- plenty of nice little holes for mice to live in. We're supposed to get some very heavy rain this winter, so we've been talking to the neighbors about replacing the wall before that starts. I feel bad for whoever takes the wall down and sets a thousand mice loose.

In other news, I have started the bamboo leaves on the mural, but it's hard to see the progress in the photo. If it's dry this weekend, I'll get some more work done & post a photo then.

I also have felt inspired to finally tackle the last remaining pink trim in the house:

It's in the bedroom, which has the most doors (ugh) and the most big furniture to move (ugh), so I've been putting it off for the past three years. I'm excited to be tackling it, & finally being rid of the hideous color!

Second Annual Labor Day Paint Fest

No one got on the roof this weekend. AJ got her annual back-to-school cold, and it seemed like the shingles needing replacing were in a tricky spot, so we decided to skip it entirely & call a professional. I also didn't continue on with the black paper strips on the shoji wall. I got sidetracked by the discovery of the mouse highway on-ramp in the garage:

They have been burrowing up through the insulation behind this new sheetrock in the garage, straight into AJ's office and the kitchen. I had to move a bunch of stuff to get in there to block that off, so I took the opportunity to paint that sheetrock, as well as the new firewall in the garage:

As beautiful as the construction project has turned out, at its core, it was about bringing a number of things up to modern building code standards, including adding a firewall between the garage & living space. It's not glamorous, but I'm really happy that out of about a dozen things we were told to get done "very soon" by the guy who inspected the house for us when we bought it, we have just two left (replace the mud sill at the back of the garage, and cap the foundation in the garage). From multiple gas leaks around an old and improperly installed water heater, to the light fixture in the kitchen secretly sparking in its junction box in the ceiling, to the imminent collapse of the whole back quarter of the house (which would have landed on the neighbors downhill), it's not an exaggeration to say that this house was a hazard. It's an appalling comment on the local real estate market that you can spend such an astronomical sum for a house and still have serious problems like this, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, we plan to be here for many decades, so it's satisfying to know we've already gotten through so many items on the Serious Things To-Do List, and that our home is safe and sound for the long haul.

Anyway, it was really warm this weekend, so I decided to keep painting, and get the foundation layer of the bamboo mural up on the walls under AJ's office. Here is the space before:

And here it is after:

(Yes, it's supposed to look mottled like that.) I finished off the ceiling the same light gray as the trim on the rest of the house, as well.

Two days of painting and no one has gotten food poisoning or fleas, unlike last year's Labor Day Paint Fest (click here and here to refresh your memory), so I think we can call this year a success!

Garage almost finished...still

Got lots done in the garage this week, but also came up with more ideas of things to do. I think I should just go ahead and accept that the garage will never actually be totally done, but at least it's fully usable & more or less tidy at this point.

I just about finished using The Stuff I Saved on the other half of the wall in the DuserHaus:

Here's the full wall:

I also cut down some more of the wood left over from construction into quarter-inch-thick strips and added them to the outside of the DuserHaus, to mimic a Japanese shoji screen:

The edges of the paper are still exposed along the vertical lines in the picture. I don't think I want to use more wood to finish them off like an actual shoji would have, because it seems like it's going to be too square-ish, so I'm trying out some narrow black paper strips:

You can see in those pictures that there is one panel on the wall that is a map -- that allowed me to tie in to the maps inside the DuserHaus, while cleanly dealing with the one gap between the studs that was too wide for my roll of rice paper.

Over Labor Day weekend, I may go back to the black paper strips. Or, if we're feeling ambitious, we may actually attempt to replace a couple shingles on the (flat part) of the roof...

Garage almost finished

Got some neat stuff done in the garage this week, and I am happy to say that I'm almost finished in there.

First, I got the rice paper hung on the outside of the DuserHaus wall:

It's a little more opaque than I was hoping, but it still looks pretty good. 

Next, I took some x-rays that were done of AJ and Pickles recently, and printed them on transparencies. Then, I put them up on one of the DuserHaus windows, which I had covered with some translucent moisture barrier material left over from laying the floor in AJ's office a couple years ago:

The illumination is from the garage door windows across the room.

After that, I spread out the rest of The Stuff I Saved. Recall that there was a bunch of stuff left in the "rooms" under the kitchen by the previous owner (who moved in in 1963 or so, and lived here until she passed away in 2011) and the owner previous to her. To refresh your memory, look here and here. Some of it was just trash, but some of it was kind of interesting -- old jars of nuts & bolts, electrical parts that someone used to tinker with, etc. Before construction began, I filled about six 12" cube boxes worth of it, with the idea of using some/all of it in the DuserHaus later. Here's what six boxes of old stuff looks like (remember that this table is 5'x5'):

Here's what was left when I was finished on Sunday:

Here's what I did with all that stuff (click on the photo to make it bigger):

The "Let It Snow" neon sign is from our friend Jon, from a lighting job he did several years ago. The calendar, dated 1955, was hanging in that same spot when we moved in, so I just put it back there. The white light bulb sockets used to be in the garage, before the construction guys broke them & we had to replace them. The fuse box between the calendar and "Snow" is the fuse box that was still live and powering the lights in the garage when we moved in, & that we were happy to have removed during the construction project. The rest are various fixtures, cords, and jars left by whoever used to tinker in the "rooms" under the house.

I also made this pool cue rack out of some old copper and iron pipes:

There are a couple more things I want to do with that stuff next weekend, and then anything not used is going to the dump (again feeling the need to prove that I'm not a hoarder).

The last thing I did was set up some colored lights that Jon had given AJ years ago:

The orange one behind the rice paper is especially nice.

Well, my days of summer fun in the garage are just about over. School starts on Thursday, and I will have to prioritize that over puttering around. Next weekend, I will wrap up using up/tossing out that pile on the pool table, and then see what little projects I can squeeze in around schoolwork for the next 16 weeks.

More work in the garage

This weekend, I continued organizing the garage. I decided that it is more important to finish getting the garage in order while I'm still on summer break than to restart the mural -- I can just about get the garage set up & fully usable in the time I have left, plus, life goal: stop starting/restarting projects before I have finished the previous one(s).

Now that we have our bikes finished, job number one this weekend was to find a place to park them. Ideally, I wanted a spot that is both convenient and isn't visible from the open garage door or any windows, so that people won't get any fancy ideas about breaking in to steal our bikes later if they happen to get a peek. I settled on this spot under the concrete front steps:

It is a small area with a low ceiling and an awkwardly placed post supporting the steps and porch above, so I haven't been sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. Happily, it turned out that the bikes fit perfectly there, so all I had to do was outfit the space a little. I used a door and two windows left from the part of the house that was redone during construction to build a dividing wall:

It's a little hard to get a photo of because the pool table is in the way, so here it is from another angle:

What I like best about this, besides the fact that I found a way to reuse materials that have been part of the house for sixty years and more, is that the glass allows the bikes themselves to become design elements in the larger room. 

Next, I made a tool board in the workshop part of the garage to free up shelf space and make it easier to have the tools we need ready at hand while we're working:

Again, a reused piece of plywood from the construction project. And again, to keep anyone passing by the open garage door from getting any fancy ideas about breaking in to poke around for expensive tools later (not that we have anything particularly expensive, but a peeker wouldn't necessarily know that), I hung a small curtain above it that I can let down to conceal the tools (& also keep dust off them) while we're not working on something:

Yes, there is a theme here: having our bikes stolen off the front porch has made me even more aware of not advertising the stuff we have to passersby. I admit it. But this is a city. It's not crazy to be more careful. 

Lastly, I continued working on the design of the DuserHaus. I stripped the paint off of one of the windows that was originally on the little room in the garage and rehung it in the same spot (except on the opposite side of the wall, so that it will open out):

Then I took one that was originally in the "rooms" under the kitchen, and hung it on the other end of the DuserHaus wall:

Aside from a few pieces of lumber, this is officially the last piece of the pre-construction house that I saved for reuse. I actually tried to get rid of that door a couple weeks ago, because I still couldn't think of a project for it and I have a rule about not keeping things around indefinitely if I don't have a specific plan for them (this is what I tell AJ to convince her that I'm not a hoarder). The two people I offered it to couldn't use it, and I just hadn't gotten around to putting it on Craigslist. I'm very satisfied that these pieces all came together so well this weekend.

Next weekend -- the last one of my summer vacation -- I'm going to put rice paper on the outside of the DuserHaus to create the sense of a wall, but still allow light to come through, and do some more storage reorganization to get the rest of the space ship shape.