Here are some pictures of our freshly refinished floor, and our freshly half-decorated living room and dining rooms. Oh, and our cats, Bea and Rza (whose diet is going pretty well!).

(Corner Cupboard made by Milford Furniture [Amish folk, supposedly] and Gretchen’s Birthday present!)

(I only post this twice because of the updates in cat positioning.)

(Storm Trooper Rod Stewart)

Overall, we’re pretty happy with the way things are looking! We do want to make some improvements like getting smaller speakers for the turntable (instead of these monoliths), hang more artworks around, and I’m not too sure the arrangement of furniture is 100% yet.

The color of paint we chose for the living room is “Aloe Essence” and the dining room is “Soothing Aloe.” They’re pretty close in color, but just different enough to make the two rooms have a little contrast. We had to choose lighter colors because of the dark woodwork around the house.

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Real pictures soon!

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Here are some pictures:

We really like the way the archways have turned out now that the walls are primed. They needed a good amount of resurfacing with spackle and joint compound. But after a few coats of that and some sanding, they look great. The lines are clean, and the primer makes them look sharp.

Another shot of an archway

We’re still not exactly sure what we’re going to do with the water pipes that run down the wall in the dining room and living room. The had been wallpapered (why?) and the wallpaper over time burnt onto the pipes because they are hot water pipes. We were able to peel a lot of it off, and I sanded a small section of it with a fine grain sandpaper and it actually looks pretty good, so we’re considering cleaning them off and polishing them to their natural copper color. Not sure though. They also make high temperature paint, so we could paint them if we wanted to, but the color selection for that kind of paint is limited, so they probably wouldn’t be able to match the walls.

Disclaimer: This is something I’ve been avoiding for a while, but to give an idea of what the whole room looks like I have to allow you to see the condition of the room as a whole. It’s pretty terrible. Because none of the rooms are “done” we don’t really have anything arranged or cleaned, everything is just sort of piled in the middle of this room so we could take down the paper, but rest assured, now that the walls are primed we’ll be cleaning this room up some and bring the furniture in from the living room so we can seal that room off and start sanding. Anyway, here it is:

That’s a curtain on top of a bunch of boxes on top of a shelf with an old kitchen table mixed in.

Next up, the living room.

What we’ve been listening to while doing this room:
Johnny Cash Pandora Station
This American Life Podcast

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Saturday morning I got home from Darreck’s house (where I stayed after DJing Friday night) and Gretchen was stressed about the basement. Apparently all water that goes down any drain had been shooting out of an open pipe that is down there that the washing machine drains into. The washing machine would do the same thing, and that’s quite a bit of water. We stopped using water for a bit and thought it had been resolved, but by Saturday night it was back to flooding the basement. I called my dad and he made plans to come over Sunday morning first thing and see what was going on.

The way the plumbing is set up is that because there isn’t any water upstairs, all water runs into one pipe that is pitched to run out to the septic tank. On Sunday morning we realized there was probably a clog in the pipe leading out to the septic, so we went to Home Depot and rented a snake and borrowed a pressure washer from my grandfather to try to flush the pipes out. The snake was only 25 feet long, and not long enough to make it all the way so we ended up, after a lot of time and dirty work, calling a plumber anyway. He had a 50 foot snake and pushed the clog out and everything is back to working properly! Ugh, what a mess. The plumber was nice and came out for an emergency visit about half an hour after we called on a Sunday afternoon during an Eagles championship game. I highly recommend ASAP Plumbing in Quakertown for emergency work (if you need it).

I also started walking around talking to the neighbors about the public sewer line and figuring out how to connect to that in the best way in the not-to-distant future, so we don’t have to worry about this at all anymore. The only problem is that we’d have to run pipelines through my neighbors yard to the street. He seems okay with it, but we probably have a lot of political nonsense to sort out with the township before we can do any of that. It’ll be expensive, but I think in the long run it’ll improve the value of the house and definitely save us some headaches in the future.

Besides that, the living room has been sort of on hold. I’ve been patching up rough spots and sanding when I can. I’ve started cleaning the wallpaper gunk off of the molding so that we can prime the walls and then move everything in from the other room so we can finish there. There’s just not enough time in the day for everything, and Gretchen’s been a little sick and now that she’s feeling better I think I’m getting it. Hopefully it passes. We need to do some painting. On that note, I forgot to mention we found Zero VOC primer at home depot. Olympic makes it. That will definitely be our next purchase for the walls. I painted the walls in the kitchen with Zero VOC paint and there was barely any terrible paint smell at all. It’s not good for you to breath that nonsense in forever.

So after spending the entire weekend on plumbing problems, I’m happy that we’ve temporarily resolved them and can resume the living room. It’s also been snowing pretty regularly here and it’s great. Philadelphia would only ever get rain, though this morning there was some snow there!

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Sorry for the blurry pictures, turning the flash off makes that happen.

I peeled some of the wallpaper off of the soffit on the cabinet above the refrigerator and just painted white paint over the glue that was up there and it turned out pretty nice, so I’m thinking about just doing it over the rest of the cabinets to get rid of the dirty peeling wallpaper that’s up there until we redo the cabinets completely.

The walls being such a bright shade of white makes the trim look a little yellow, but it’ll have to stay that way until we get the living rooms done and then come back to the kitchen for the cabinets and such. The baseboard heaters are also the same color I think, I wonder if you can paint them… anyone know?

We also got the phone hung up all proper instead of having it hanging out of the wall and having a phone line running across the floor. It’s nice (even though our phone is probably the last remaining non-wireless phone in existence).

The Saturday after New Years, we got a lot done. My dad came over in the morning and helped drain the pipes in the garage and winterize the plumbing so that we could shut the electricity and heat off for the winter. That should save us some grief, and money. Thanks, Dad! Gretchen’s sister was also over and helped us scrape some wallpaper in the smaller living room, while I sanded the glue off of the wall in the bigger room and started spackling. Thanks, Merry! It’s coming along. I wanted to make more progress Sunday, but my arm was sore from sanding an entire room and we wanted to go visit Gretchen’s newborn nephew, so we did that instead and then watched Arrested Development on Boxee.

I know this makes our house look like a complete mess, but we have to keep everything packed and or covered up while we work so dust doesn’t get all over it. 3/4 walls in this room are scraped now… just the one wall is left (the one against the kitchen). I’m a little nervous to see what’s going on on the opposite side of the doorway that I had to patch up in the kitchen. They also uncovered this funny hole in the wall that appears to be filled in with cement. There must have been some kind of stove or something and had an exhaust pipe going out of the wall. It’s behind the hot water pipes that we are thinking of covering with a wooden box or some built in shelving, so we may not even need to patch it up, but it’ll be an adventure nonetheless.

This is just a shot of the wall in the bigger living room that I have sanded and started spackling. It looks SO much better than it did rough, and with the holes from the curtain hangers filled in. I’m so sick of sanding and then cleaning over and over, but the closer we get to being done, the more I want it to be done.

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I got some of this Olympic Premium Interior Latex paint (of the Eggshell varietal):

It’s Zero-VOC, which is good, and it wasn’t totally expensive. We have MANY $10 off a $50 dollar order coupons for Lowe’s so I think after it was all said and done it was only $18 dollars a gallon… which isn’t much more than the cheapy Lowe’s brand white paint.

I also picked up some more spackle and another can of primer, since I left our last can of Killz out on the porch and it froze. (Don’t do this). Gretchen and I plan on getting the kitchen done this week and using the weekend to continue the rest of the living room so that we can at least get our downstairs in order.

In other news, the furnace in the garage that heats the apartment is 100% shot. Well, maybe only 99% shot. We had a plumber come out this morning and check it out today after discovering that there was no heat upstairs. Apparently there is a multitude of problems with the thing, culminating in us needing to replace it entirely. 1. It’s 30 years old and mostly broken. 2. It’s installed improperly and “illegally,” which I assume means not up to code. 3. When it does run it pumps oil fumes into the apartment above the garage, which would be bad if anyone was actually up there.

So we’re waiting on a quote from the plumber for replacing that, but we will, in all likelihood, turn off the water and flush the pipes so that they don’t freeze over the winter. That means no heat, but it’s such a mess up there that nobody would be able to live there anyway. Instead we’ll focus on fixing up the (or installing a new) bathroom in “the main house” and finishing the cosmetic things. The plumber will also be quoting us on the bathroom. Cross your fingers.

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(Lowe’s tip #1: You can find generic equivalents of almost all of the products they stock on hooks or shelves at eye-level down on the floor in boxes to save some $$$. For example, a brand name putty knife hanging on a hook can cost $4-6, but if you get one of the box on the bottom shelf they cost about half that.)

(Lowe’s tip #2: Go to this page and register and they’ll send you a 10% off an entire purchase coupon in the mail. We’ve also been receiving a steady supply of these coupons after filling out two change of address forms [one for the each of us]).

The Joint compound filled the indented doorway pretty nicely, and is drying a solid white color. It looks pretty good. I’ll wet sand it tomorrow (thanks for the advice JCC), and add another layer and we should be ready to paint. I also patched up the spots I missed with the spackle initially. Putting on a coat of the primer helped us find those spots a lot better.

In the living room, Gretchen continued her rotation around the wall, scraping off the paper and glue, and got most of a wall done. She continued to use vinegar cut with hot water in a spray bottle, because we forgot to pick up fabric softener when we were out at Wegman’s today. We DID however stock up on all of the things we haven’t been able to find since leaving Philly. Not a lot of grocery stores around here carry seitan. Here’s the wall:

With that wall and this section done, we now have a corner of the living room wallpaper free:

While waiting for the joint compound to set, I joined in on the scraping, and uncovered this lovely bit of wall:

It looks like after the walls were up, a vertical strip about 6 inches wide was cut into the wall to run the electrical work through. Then the hole was covered with a sheet of what appears to be metal and then slathered in spackle (or joint compound, I really don’t know what the big difference is besides consistency) to smooth it out. This caused some headache in scraping the paper off. On the rest of the wall, if you made the paper wet enough, it would scrape off. Then another wetting would let you scrape the glue right off. With this patch of wall, I basically had to scrape off a layer of the spackle underneath the glue with a 1” putty knife to get anything that was on top of it off. It looks a little sloppy now, but we can sand it down and patch up any rough spots later. The whole house looks pretty messy right now anyway.

Hopefully, tomorrow will mark the end of kitchen work and we’ll be set to paint it. I think we’re just going with white for now because we plan on putting in new cabinets and appliances sometime next year, and we can just paint over the white with a suitable color then.

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The paper itself peeled off very easily. Most corners were a little dog-eared, and by pulling on them slowly at an angle it came off in one piece. “We’re halfway done,” we thought. Then we noticed the layer of paper-like glue that still covered the walls.

This is not a picture of the kitchen, but the walls in the stairwell have a similar coating after peeling the wallpaper off there. Here’s what it looked like:

A little research on the internet led us to a product called DIF, made by Zinsser:

Most sites (including Zinsser’s own) that I read said it was a non-toxic substance and that the enzymes do all the work. Unfortunately, after buying it and bringing it home, Gretchen read the instructions and found this little gem on the bottom of the back label:

“This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.”

So we promptly returned our massive bottle of DIF and purchased a massive bottle of vinegar from the grocery store:

By cutting water in a spray-bottle with 1 cup of vinegar we found that the glue scraped right off with a putty knife. We’ve also read that diluted fabric softener works the same way (or better). More about that after we try it out. This part was pretty messy, but went pretty quickly with the two of us working.

Our first unexpected discovery is that there used to be a doorway between the kitchen and the front living room. We didn’t know about this, so after removing the wallpaper we were surprised to find the archway patched halfway with drywall and halfway with what appears to be the back side of a piece of wood paneling. This is what it looked like (post spackling [to smooth out the edges]):

I asked around about this, and short of tearing out the doorway and patching it back in to make it more flush, the best way I’ve heard to cover up this rough spot is with some joint compound. For now I’m just going to spackle the rough spots on the wall to get it cleaned up a bit. There was a lot of damage to the surface of the wall. It appears that the first round of wallpaper was removed before the current wallpaper was hung, and that took a layer of plaster off with it in irregular patterns all over the wall.

After scraping the glue off of the wall, we wiped it down with water and TSP:

This is a heavy duty cleaner that you should probably not get on your hands. It cleaned some things that probably haven’t been clean in 30 years. We used some rubber gloves, because this stuff will burn your skin. It helped clean off the last of the stickiness and prepped the wall before spackling. We chose TSP substitute because it’s phosphate free and better for the environment (and probably for us).

I used some basic lightweight spackle to smoothe over the rough spots and fill in the holes:

I also cleaned up the rough surface around the patched doorway, and tried to make the transition between the wall and the patching as smooth as possible, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be that noticeable afterwards. It didn’t really clean it up enough, but it definitely does look better.

I let the spackle dry for a day, and sanded it down the next day. The sanding left our house a nice coat of dust all over EVERYTHING, and was pretty hard to clean up. I’d advise anyone that has a lot of spackle repair to do in one place to either do it before they move in, or to move everything out of the room and close it off to keep the dust from getting everywhere. Fortunately (or unfortunately in most cases) a majority of our belongings are still in moving boxes (and we hope to get the walls done before getting comfortable), so it didn’t mess up a whole lot.

After cleaning up all of the dust, I wiped the walls down with TSP and water one more time and began taping the trim.

We picked up a can of Killz 2 Latex Primer (we went with the latex this time after realizing the oil based primer takes forever to dry), and got our painting supplies ready.

I did the trim with a brush, and then rolled the rest of the wall with a roller. After drying, it looks pretty good (for having just one coat of primer and no paint):

While I was priming the walls in the kitchen, Gretchen picked up where she left off on scraping the wallpaper in the living room. Here’s what we’re faced with in the rest of the downstairs rooms. Two full rooms of this:

The wallpaper has a weird texture on the surface, and does not come off in sheets like the kitchen. So we’re forced to scrape it off little by little. The same vinegar and water mixture and a putty knife works okay on that, but we plan to try using fabric softener and TSP to see if it works any better. The good news about this, is that the glue comes off with the paper, so it’s a lot less messy, but a lot more time consuming.

This is where Gretchen picked up the scraping:

And this is where she stopped (the wall is pretty much done!):

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