in through the front door

Hi again,

Patricia: We are back from a fluffy, white New Years Eve in Bend, OR and have an update for you. The day before we left Spencer installed a near 200 lb. front door by himself. Yes, he is my hero!

Spencer: yep that door is dang heavy. But, heavy doors can make great doors. For proof take a look at this 9 ton gate made of coral in Florida. It pushes open and closed with just one finger.

To jog your memory, we bought the door below at the Restore as our 2nd Wedding Anniversary gift to ourselves. Here's what the door originally looked like (rotated for a better visual effect).

But it wasn't a door we could just install. We first had to lop off 12 inches from the bottom. Here I am clamping down a straight board as a guide for my straight cut.Note the safety glasses. Always, safety first, positioning second and style third.

BUZZZZZ!

Cool. Ready to install? Well, not so fast. There were scratches and holes from the old barn door hardware. To do this we stripped the door with a heat gun [like a super hot hair dryer] and a 5 in 1 tool [currently lost]. The holes were filled with Bondo and the scratches sanded smooth. Then we applied several coats of Osmo Park Lane finish. We chose Park Lane for its strong, durable coating that will protect our door from UV light rays and scratches and most important is friendly to all plants & animals as well as my lungs. I recommend using a very good paint brush [Purdy or equal] with this finish. The Osmo brand brush I bought frayed after the first cleaning. When the bristles spread on a brush it creates streaks and bubbles that can't be brushed out with a bad brush.

Coming from the basement, the door weighs just enough for me to grunt on every stair step. I had to take a 20 minute rest after I got to the top so my arm muscles wouldn't cramp. After that, getting the hinges lined up was like snapping two Lego pieces together. This part I was unsure of because it took the most to plan out. More planning than I'd care to write about...I then dropped the hinge pins into place and grabbed the door for it's inaugural swing closed.

A door with good weight and balanced equally on all three hinges swings smooth and consistent with little effort. This was how it was with our door. With little effort it moved smoothly toward the door frame. Then it stopped and my heart sank a little. The door frame wasn't as square as I thought. The bottom corner of the door hit a full 1/4 of an inch into the door frame.

Patricia was due home in an hour and I had only about 45 minutes of decent sunlight left. I wanted her to come home to the new door in place and working. The door sat perfect along the hinged side so I had one of two choices. I could take the door off the hinges and begin messing with the door frame. This meant I would likely have to tear open the wall and that wasn't what I wanted to get into with limited time. So I opted for chiseling away the door frame. Which turned out to be not to bad an idea. Beneath the layer of green paint was a door frame made of fir. Fir is soft, which meant I could chisel it. The chisel work was quick and sanding it smooth took only a few passes with medium grit sand paper. The door was swinging closed in less than 30 minutes.

Patricia was so pleased that she made us pose in front of the house that next morning before we left for Bend. I like to think she did that because she thought the door was so groovy that she wants to keep a photo of it in her wallet. Print out this photo if you do too?Yep, that's our Christmas tree in the foreground.

Coming up: A quick Dump and Why Bondo! is better.

Project I - Mom's Room

May 16, 2009

So, we actually started work on the house 2 months ago - these next couple of posts will be us catching up with what we've already finished. The project that quickly rose to the top of our list was to provide cozy accommodations for my mom who was arriving in late-June to help with my Grand Opening events at work - thanks, Mom! The least we could do was provide her with a nice, comfy room to call her own.

However, after moving in to the house in late-April, we quickly noticed a musty smell radiating from the back bedroom. This was supposed to be our guest room! We kept the door shut and proceeded to move in and settle into our home around that room. Mold, and unhealthy air-quality was a real concern for me - I already had my summer allergies coming on and had heard unfortunate stories about what breathing mold can do to a person. The last thing I wanted was our new home to cause harm to us or anyone else in our home.

It was obvious that condensation was a problem around the windows - single-pane, original 1950s windows left black mildew stains all over the window sills. We tried wiping down the sills with a solution of warm water and bleach, but the musty smell still prevailed. Spencer carved small sections of wall board out to see what he could discover in the walls - nothing visible. I'm not sure what he was expecting to see - something like this??! - Luckily, that was not the case. Regardless, we needed to rid our house of the smell and whatever harm was lurking in the room, so we decided to demo the outside walls in this bedroom - removing the wall board and insulation.

Spencer quickly saw a new talent of mine - efficient and effective destruction! We had fun :)


















Even after ripping the guts of the wall out, we still didn't find much of anything to find that real ah-ha moment. We proceeded to wipe down the inside of the walls with warm water and bleach and then we added another layer of Mold Control solution.

During our demo and clean-up, it was incredible to find what lay behind the flat painted walls: 1 x 12 planks of knotty cedar. Sap lay behind these walls crystallized, revealing the purity of the product. A true testament that this is a tried-and-true Northwest home.

We let the room sit for a few days and went back in to find only the fragrant smells of cedar radiating from the walls. No hint of must survived. Satisfied with our remediation, Spencer proved to me that he was better than Heman and Spider Man combined - I got home from work to find that he had hung the room full of drywall and perfectly mudded every seam and crevice by himself.

To add the final touches, we needed a fresh layer of paint and curtains to match. Spencer's technique of choosing paint colors scared me at first: he hits up the Oops! shelf of mis-matched paint and chooses the colors he likes. A gallon of Yolo paint (No VOC, GreenSeal Certified) at Ecohaus (Environmental Home Store) runs $40. On the Oops! shelf it's a mere $8. At first my reaction was - We are going to choose the colors of our house, based on other's mistakes?! - Now that I've faced the daunting color charts myself and see the fun that these Oops! colors have brought to our walls, I realize the uncanny luck of turning one person's mistake into our indomitable first choice. We choose cloud blue and light olive green. I, too, choose a fabric from the clearance rack at Pacific Fabrics for curtains - a funky African-print in greens, browns and blues would finish the room perfectly.

Our spare room was ready for our first guest - Welcome Mama Gray!

For our friends and family who are out there reading - know that we invite you to come and stay and experience our cozy guest room too!



:) patty homemaker