Expanded Attic!

I'm a bit of a hoarder when it comes to sheets of wood. I bought a few sheets from a guy on craigslist a while back (along with a large galvanized bucket, and a fertilizer spreader). I also pick up various chunks of sheet goods that others are tossing out. I finally put some of that stuff to good use.

Out upstairs attic is a bit cramped. Not room for much else other than the A/C unit. After measuring out this end of the attic, I decided to add about 16 square feet of floor space.

Added board seen in bottom portion

The edge of the existing floor went flush to the edge of the joist, so I had to piggyback a 2x4 up against the joist. I used a board from a pallet so you can see the stripes a bit, but only until the plywood goes down on top of it.

Boards ready to haul up

Sadly a 4'x4' piece of plywood won't fit up the small drop down attic door. So I ripped the piece into two 2'x4' sheets. This probably was for the best anyways because it would have been really difficult to move a large sheet around up there.

I moved the insulation around a bit to make it even. The previous owners just threw boxes up here compacting the insulation down. Not only is this a bad idea because it reduces the effective r-vaule of the insulation, but it also puts undue weight on the sheetrock. (I really dislike all of the half-done jobs of the previous owners) Anyways, I slid each piece in and nailed it down separately to make it easier on myself. I'm glad to have the extra space. At the very least it will make it easier to reach the filter for the upper A/C unit.


While I was up here I wanted to add a small shelf just behind the hatch. Again the previous owners had just thrown stuff on to the slanted portion of the attic, so I had to fluff up the insulation. I added some riser blocks and some longer boards  resting on the existing joists to hold up this big piece of MDF. The MDF was pulled from a pile that a neighbor was throwing out. It's about 20"x54", so it's about 7 extra sq feet of usable storage; more that that, it will keep us from throwing stuff up there like the previous owners, haha.

I think the total cost was probably about $15, and about 3-4 hours.

(half a sheet of plywood and 5 inches of a 2x4 I bought. The rest of the 2x4s were pulled from the trash)

Rotten Plug

I noticed at Christmas time that one of the plugs on our front outdoor socket was holding firm, and the cover was pretty loose. It was a nice day out, so after giving the sprinklers a run through to make sure they were all working and pointed the right way, I decided to look at this plug. I pulled off the cover and pulled of the sealing foam and found part of the plastic receptacle was broken off. I also found that the receptacle housing had a pretty large mud dauber nest. I scraped that all out and swapped out the plug.

I've replaced several plugs in the house and I've found that the original builders just used the insert taps on the back of the receptacles rather that the screw terminals. While this isn't terrible, I don't really like it. I use the screw terminals on each plug I've replaced.

After replacing the plug, I filled in around the receptacle box with some indoor/outdoor caulking. Then I replaced the sealing foam and the metal cover. I then filled in around the cover with some additional caulking to help prevent more insects and geckos from trying to sneak in. There's a gap where two pieces of siding meet that seemed to be the likely entry point. Now the plug works like a charm. Total time, about 15 minutes.

The caulking is only evident in areas where I overfilled in an effort to keep out critters. There's a foam gasket that seals around a majority of the cover. 

Crepe Murder!

We've always hated the crepe myrtle in our front yard. It was too close to the house, blocked the window and was in a poor place for the plant's health. We had a warm day on the weekend so Claire and I got after it and yanked that sucker out. We gave about a shovel's width radius around the crepe myrtle. We down a then channel about a shovel deep.





 I used one of my many axes to chop through the roots we hit. Once we had dug a nice channel about 12+ inches down we tied it up to Claire's Car and with a little shoving from me we toppled the beast. Now the house looks even better from the street. Next Christmas the tree will really shine from the front yard.

Bathroom Tiling!

The downstairs bathroom had a few problems when we bought the house.

 The previous owners did a bad job caulking the tub. (took about 2 hours of scraping to get out the old dried caulk so I could do it right), they didn't tile under the new vanity (just laziness as they had spare tile), and they didn't attach the vanity to the wall at all to make it stable. 

We found some nice tile at the Habitat Restore for about 70 cents a square foot (a quick google search showed it being about $3 normally).

I removed all the fixtures, giving Claire thorough explanations along the way. It was awesome making her scrape the old wax toilet ring off the bottom of the toilet. We then got to smashing. With regular hammers, flat  head screwdrives, and some flat scrapers we managed to get all the old tiles up. 

First we hammered the screwdrivers under the edge of the tile and big chunks. We also got good chunks up by just hitting the tiles hard, haha. Once we had the tiles up, we went at the mortar with the scrapers. That was the most annoying part. Lots of hammering and lots of dust. Eventually we got it all up and then cleaned up. Tiling wasn't too bad, but I had to do it all in one evening after work, which was pretty rough. It caused a few joints to be uneven and for me to get lazy with some cuts, but in the end it looks pretty good. I grouted the next evening, and then installed the fixtures the next day (as I had to go out of town for work right after that). I'm really happy we got it done, but hopefully the next tile job is less rushed. 

New Bench!

The house came with this very modern-art-bench in the front yard. In reality it was an old bench that was only being held together because it had sunk about 3 inches into the dirt.





As a generous wedding present (and as I recall we never found the true gifter) we received this brand new bench! it looks great under the tree. We've slowly been adding flowers just behind it and hopefully this spring will be extra beautiful.

Guest Room Painting

This guest room (which is our office until we have a big enough litter to require another room), had an old "Precious Moments" wallpaper border and the walls were a drab color. My wife picked out a bright yellow color which at first I was nervous about, but now I've grown to really like. When the sun shines through the windows it's so bright and refreshing!

Kitchen Lighting

The kitchen had this awful drop ceiling fluorescent light fixture that cast this clinical light over the whole kitchen. It hung down about 6 inches and made the kitchen feel very cramped. I ripped down the whole drop ceiling box.


Then my dad and I replaced the light fixture and added a new one above the sink. It took a lot of searching to find a light fixture that matched the one in our entry way.


I had to call several companies and talk to several "this one guy over at .."s but I eventually found a matching fixture. Claire and I picked about this triple hanging fixture and it really make doing the dishes a lot easier. Previously standing at the sink cast a shadow over the whole sink. Now it's super bright! Finished off the kitchen perfectly.

Kitchen Make-over

When we moved in the cabinets had this white-washed gloss treatment on all of the woodwork. The backsplash was great, and the floor tile was alright, but the cabinets looked pretty rough.

Preparing to prime

We sanded every surface to knocked the clear coat down and to even out any of the high spots inside of the cabinets. You could see where moisture had swollen but the shelves, so we smoothed those down with a sander.

All Primed!

Once the sanding was done we taped up plastic and spray primered the whole place.

We then got to painting. Picking a color was tough. We had an idea of what color we wanted, so we went to the home improvement store and grabbed every sample that we thought might work. We walked out with roughly 100 samples, and then got to round robin elimination. We took two samples and decided which we liked more and set the better aside. Then grabbed two more samples and set aside the best one. We went through the whole pile and then repeated the process with "winners". We did this again and again until we had a winner. We decided on the dark tan. We painted all of the cabinets with the help of some friends.

Painting Started!

Claire's dad built new cabinet doors for us as a birthday present and we installed those later and called the project a success! Made the kitchen look so much better!

Finally done!

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