Project Sundays 5-10 & 5-17-15

*5-10-15*

Now that we've finally got that railing out of the way, it's time to start on our next project, which is to fix up the two raised garden-beds in the front of the house. And by "fix", I mean "completely re-do from scratch". You see, the previous owner of the house left us this:

A friend of mine described it as "A masterpiece. No finer landscaping has ever been done..." So yeah, we had to start from scratch. The first step was to sit down and get very overwhelmed. We've never done any real landscaping before, and this is sort of a big project to take on. We found some tutorials and a youtube video, and decided that it was time to get started. We decided to start on just the left side and see how it went before committing to doing the entire yard. Also, the left side was a lot worse, and needed fixing more desperately.

I yanked out that ugly-ass plastic liner and chopped it up with a sawzall so that I could throw it out. Then it was time for the daunting task of removing every single one of the pavers that were already in the ground. We saved them all, of course, and we'll reuse them when we're ready to re-build the wall.

After everything was neatly stacked on the porch, it was time to start digging. At this point, we took a break and went to the hardware store (a pattern in our lives) to pick up some supplies. We got some marking paint, pea-gravel and landscaping cloth. When we got home, we marked out the line where that we wanted to dig to, and then... then it started raining. 

We got a little bit of trenching done, but the ground was getting muddy and gross. So uh, we took another break. But it was a productive break, we went down into the basement and did a lot of demo work. Some previous owner had put up some really shitty studding, that at this point, wasn't even holding anything up anymore. Our house flooded last summer, and I guess the ugly paneling that was in the basement had to get ripped down, so all we were left with were these weird studs. We spent a couple of hours with a friend ripping down the studs and removing the falling drop-ceiling tiles. It was a productive afternoon, and we got a lot done.

At this point, we left to go back to the apartment and get cleaned up. It was Mother's Day, and we were taking our moms out to a fancy-ass dinner. Okay, we went for pizza, but everyone had a good time and it was a lot of fun.






 
*5-17-15*


We started out strong this weekend! We got to the house and worked on finishing up the trench for the left garden bed. We were going to dig down to about 2-3", but got a bit carried away, and dug to about 4-5" instead. But I've been told that this is good, as you want your first course of bricks in a retaining wall to be as deep into the ground as possible so as to provide a stable base to build up on.
I had purchased an expensive tamper to squish down the trenched ground into something resembling a flat plane, and it turned out to be exactly the tool we needed (good thing too, it wasn't cheap).

The next step was to lay out all of the bricks (or pavers) in a row to check on how flat the round is, and if the stones sit where we want them to, and a million other little finicky details. Like I said, it's super important to get this first row perfect, because you're going to be putting 2 or more rows on top of it, and you want them to look good, and not to fall over. Once we determined that yeah, it looked good, it was time to move all of the bricks and use our landscaping cloth.

I cut the cloth into sections with a utility knife, and laid it out about half-way across the trench, so that it would be covered by the bottom course of bricks. The cloth serves a few different purposes, but it mainly prevents weeds from growing up in between the layers of bricks. While we were doing all of this, some of our friends stopped by and got busy moving all of the bricks from the right-side retaining wall onto our porch, and in the time it took us to lay out 1 course of bricks to our satisfaction, they even managed to trench out the whole right side! Needless to say, hubs and I felt like we weren't getting nearly as much work done as them! But it all looks pretty damned good, if I do say so myself.

Here you can see the left-side bed with its first course of bricks, and the right-side bed all trenched out! This all took us about 5 hours of work in the hot sun, so we decided that it was time to call it a day. We're not going to be having a Project Sunday next weekend, and I've been a bit under the weather, so I don't know when we'll have a chance to come back and finish this up, but I'm hoping that it'll be soon! I want this project to be done with already!

Also, we're having the house painted right now, and I can't wait to show you some shots of the interior (which also needs some fixing up and some TLC), and to give you guys an over-view of some of the inside projects that we're going to be taking on!

So stay tuned!

Project Sunday 5-3-15

We spent a long day yesterday working on the house. We've decided that the projects for this Spring/Summer are going to be working on the front exterior, so... railings, and flower beds and tree trimming and such. We're making progress, and getting things checked off the list, so check out:

Railings pt. 2

Again, I'm calling this post pt. 2, but as we've already discussed, I think this should really be pts. 3 & 4 (possibly even 5?). Meh, whatever, it's done, so does it really matter how long it took... (two weeks, if anyone out there is counting).
Anyway, when we last left our heroes, they had successfully installed the anchors that would hold the posts that would hold the railings. The next step was to attach special L brackets to the house where we wanted to put the railings. This turned out to be a bit more tricky than we had guessed.

Last time we installed a railing, we did so on a brick-exterior house. So installing the L brackets was as simple as drilling into the brick and screwing the brackets into place. Okay, so it was a good work-out, but it wasn't difficult. This time we were attaching the railings to a house with vinyl siding with squishy squishy foam underneath. The problem? If we attached the brackets and tried to tighten them up, we would crush the siding. Not so good.

The solution? Ask at the local mom-and-pop hardware store. The guy gave us a look for about 0.5 seconds, and then took us to the right aisle to find these little plastic plugs that were exactly what we needed. (If you have a little mom-and-pop hardware store in your area, I highly recommend going there for questions like these. Don't get me wrong, I do love my big-box stores, but I feel like they're mostly for when I already know what item I need to get. If I want to ask what type of item I need for a particular project, I have much better luck at the little local places).

After our trip to the hardware store, we headed back to the house and drilled some large holes in the siding that we fitted our little plasticy plugs into.

This will give us something to tighten against, so that we don't squish the siding.

Once that was done, we could actually go ahead and instal the L brackets! Finally! This was taking a lot longer than I had expected, and at this point we had already been working on this easy afternoon project for a couple of days. I'm writing this up fairly well after the fact, so I don't actually remember how long this took us, but I think it was at least three days total.

The bracket that we will eventually attach the railings to!

Now that we'd installed the anchors and the brackets, it was finally time to put in the damned railings! Huzzah! That part actually went fairly quickly, and I'm sorry to say that I don't really have any pictures of it. It was late in the day, and I was tired, and I just wanted to be done with the damned thing, so I didn't take as many pictures as I usually do. Sorry. My bad. Here's one shot of the first part of the last railing. Yeah, think about that.

You can see both of the columns, plus the brackets attached to the house, if you look really closely. At this point, we realized that it was like, 4pm and hot out, and we hadn't had any lunch yet. So we took a break to go get some fries, and came back to install the very last piece of railing.

Here it is, finally finished!

As a bonus, in this last picture you can see the sorry state of our front garden beds, which are, indecently, our next project! So, I think that's going to be it for right now. I know that I took a long time to write this blog post, and as a result, I probably forgot some important details of the project (which has been done for about 2 weeks at this point). We're currently working on those garden beds, and I'm going to try to write up my posts about those a little more often, so that I can give you guys all of the really boring details you love!

Stay tuned for more "DIY Summer 2015"!

Project Sunday 4-26-15

I know it's been a long time since I've done a Project Sunday (grad school will do that to you), but now that we're home owners, expect to see more of them coming your way! Let's start with this one...

Railings, pt. 1

Okay, if I were to be 100% honest, this would really be "Railings, pt. 2", since this is actually the second day that we've been working on this project.  After work this part Thursday, we decided we had time to instal a railing on our front porch. Long story short, we really only had time to go to the Home Store and get all of our supplies before it got too dark and too cold and too tired to really get any work done.

The lovely hubs.

So, we got up early this morning and decided that we were going to get the railings done before we had to leave for a concert at 3pm. Long story short, we didn't. But we did make a lot of progress, and I wanted to share that with you. Here's the before picture, so that you can see what we have to work with:

Before...

We're installing a railing along the side of the stairs to make it easier to get in and out of the house. It's not super high up, but some of our relatives have had issues with it, and when it was covered in ice... ugh, forget it. Nightmare city. We're also installing a piece of railing on the other side of the porch, where there is a 2'+ drop to the drive-way. Right now it's a nice place to hand things up from the car, but I can see myself tripping and falling, and I really don't want that to happen. So yeah, railing.

We've installed railings before, and I don't remember it taking an extremely long time, so I figured we'd be able to finish the whole thing in a few hours. Turns out, I was wrong. The first step to installing railings is to put up the posts (newel columns). In order to do that, you need some of these funny looking feet-things to anchor them into. And in order to do that, you need to drill holes into the concrete, with a special masonry bit and a hammer-drill. Not a quick process.

Trust hammer, gets the job done.

After we drilled the holes, we need to pound in some masonry anchors, which are basically special screws that expand when you hit them, so they stay in place in the concrete. Pretty nifty, if you can get them to work. It took a lot of finagling, but finally we got all four holes drilled, and all four anchors in... for our first post. Then came placing the footing on, and tightening the nuts down so that everything stayed in place. Here's a joke for you: How many vice-grips does it take to instal a masonry anchor?

That's my father-in-law's foot! He helped!

The answer is: At least two (which was all we had on hand). Once all of the nuts were tightened down, we had our first footing installed. Just two more to go! Luckily the next two didn't take quite as long as the first one. We got into a rythem, and it actually went pretty quickly. All in all, installing three footings took about 3 hours, with one quick trip to the harware store and a break to mow the lawn. Not too bad. Still, we spent all morning on the railings, and I feel like we don't have too much to show for it. At least we got to use our giant shop-vac!

It came with the house, honest.

Anyway, I'm not sure when we'll have time to get back to work on these, probably Wednesday. You see, we're not actually moved in to the house yet. We're waiting to get all of the painting and flooring done before we start putting our stuff in the house, so we're still in the apartment. So we can only work on projects after work and on weekends and such, and have to allow time for schlepping everything there and back. Fun, right? Anyway, stay tuned next week for Part two! (I hope)

"Mock" & Cheese

Every year on Passover, I face the same challenge: what to feed my picky husband. He won't eat fish, or eggs, or veggies, or... grown-up foods, really. He mostly lives on pasta & pizza and bread, and on a holiday when we can't have any of those, not eating the same thing 10 nights in a row becomes... difficult. So my plan is to try to collect a list of easy go-to recipes that I can make any night of the week with little or no prep. This is the first one in my new collection. A friend gave me the recipe just two days ago, and I already love it. So, here it is:

Tova's "Mock" & Cheese

Ingredients:

3 eggs

3 1/2 cups matzah farfel (I made my own with regular matzah, a plastic baggie & a hammer)

1/2 lb. (or more) of cheddar cheese

1 cup milk

1/2 pint sour cream

1/2 pint cottage cheese

Salt & Pepper to taste

1. Grease an 8x8 baking pan, pre-heat oven to 350. Beat the eggs with the milk & seasonings, and add in the matzah farfel, to soak. Cut or shred the cheese into small bits.

2. Mix in the cheese, sour cream & cottage cheese. Pour the mix into the baking pan and try to make it look all even and pretty.

3. Bake covered for 30 minutes, then uncover and bake for another 30 minutes, or until golden-brown and delicious.

4. Enjoy!

Bought a house!

We're still more than a week out from our original closing date (for the house), but because of circumstances we moved the closing up, and as of last week... we're home-owners!

Yup, you read that right. We closed on the house last week, and have actually owned it for 8 whole days now! Though it doesn't really feel like we own a house, since I never get to see it. Sadface. We closed on Monday the 30th, and my husband and I camped out there over-night (after cleaning it up a bit). We have two twin size air-mattresses borrowed from my best friend (who lives right down the street) and four chairs that the seller left us.
Or rather, we have four chairs that we asked the seller to get rid of before the closing. He dragged them out to the curb and called that good enough. The city however, disagreed, and we had to move them or get a ticket, as we found out once we came home after the closing. So, we took them back into the house, and now we have bonus chairs.

Anyway, I haven't even seen my house in a week because I've been so busy with school, work and of course, Passover. Hopefully I'll get to go out there tomorrow afternoon sometime and you know, make sure its still standing? Then I probably won't see it again until Sunday night, when it'll be time to start assessing how much work needs to be done, and what we have to finish up before we can move in.

Stay tuned next time for: The House Saga: Part 1

Buying a House

So uh yeah, we bought a house!

Okay, not quite, but we're very very close. Maybe I should back up a bit? At the beginning of this year, my husband and I finally agreed that we were ready to get our own house (read: I finally talked him into it). We started poking around on Zillow (here's a link to their homepage, if you are interested), just to see what was on the market.

We found a few houses that we liked, but not much. So my mom asked if she could hook us up with her agent, who had helped her sell my grandfather's condo after he passed away. I said sure, have him send us some listings, it can't hurt.

So he started sending us listings. A lot of listings. Like, 10 a day. And granted, some of these were updates to previous listings (like price changes), but still, we were quickly overwhelmed. We tried to sort through the listings and keep track of our favorites. Luckily, we knew exactly what area we wanted to be in, so that helped.

We quickly found one that we liked, just slightly outside of our preferred area. We asked the realtor about it, and he sent us more information. Then I called my mom to tell her. But when I gave her the address, she said she had to check on something and she would call me right back. Turns out, my cousin owns that house, and he's not actually interested in selling. Okay, back to square one.
We found another property we liked, and once we ascertained that this one was in fact for sale, we made an appointment to see it on Monday March 9th. Perfect.

Sunday the 8th was my birthday, and since the weather was so nice, my husband and I decided to spend the day at the zoo. At around 12:30 we get a call from the realtor. There was another offer on the house we were interested in. He could fit us in that day at 2 to look at the house, but the seller was ready to make a decision, and if we liked it, we would have to put an offer in before 5pm. No pressure, right?

So what did we do? We went to the giraffe house to sit and think about the situation (and to vent our frustrations to a very nice docent). We decided that we should at least see the house, after all, maybe it wouldn't be what we liked and we would have no problem passing on it. Just in case we liked it though, I called my uncle the contractor and asked if he could come walk-through the house with us, and let us know if there were any glaring issues with the structure or the foundation or the roof, or anything really.

At 1:45 we were parked in front of the house, nervously wondering what the protocol was. At this point I had never actually met our realtor in person, and didn't actually know what he looked like. I guessed however, that he was the guy standing on the front stoop waving at us. I was right. We took a deep collective breath, and got out of the car.

We looked over the house, and it was every bit as charming in person as it had been in the listing. We fell in love, we wanted it. Our relator looked at us like we were nuts when we told him that we wanted to put in an offer.

"Are you sure?" He asked. "After all, this is only the first house you've seen..." But yes, we were sure. It was in the exact location we were hopping for (literally down the street from my BFF), and had everything we wanted in a house, including an unfinished basement that we could fix up. So off we went to my in-law's house, where my mother-in-law (the attorney) helped us look over all of the paperwork before we stupidly signed our lives away.

We sent in our offer, and 20 minutes later, it was accepted! We were now officially on our way to being home-owners! The whole thing still feels like a dream, especially since it all happened so fast. I woke up Monday morning (the day we were supposed to see the house) in a state of shock. I turned to my husband. "Did we really buy a house yesterday?" I asked. "Yeah, I think we did."

There is still a lot to do, and nothing's final until its final. We have our inspection on Sunday (though I'm not anticipating any big surprises, after already walking through the house with a contractor & an engineer), and then we're closing on Tax Day.

So let the countdown begin!

35 Days!