Not Without Issue

TL;DR here's the kitchen I made.

In with the new, out with the old

The end of the last post provided no guarantee for a functioning kitchen. But it did mention a new four wheeler. Can confirm.

That picture is not without its own sadness.

Within 20 miles of procuring a new ATV, my truck broke. Somewhere in Indiana. I am fortunate to have amazing people in my life. Amazing people that come to rescue me and say "Oh, I know you'd do the same for me". That is true. I sure would. But I have yet to come across a person that says that, that would ever be in the predicaments I find myself in.

Luckily, Jack had a man's truck at the time. He drove two hours to come save me and Dave. The Ford's fate was sealed that day.

Goodbye Cool Trucks

I sold the Old Dodge.
I sold the Ford.

I don't miss the ford really. I bought Ryan's old truck. It's a little rough but it carries me and my wheeler around without much complaint. 

Just look at the places it takes us.

In spirit of cool things before family things. I took out the backseat so I could fit more subwoofer. 

But then I did the thing. 

I bought the cabinets.

SHEW. I finally pulled the trigger and did the thing I've been debating over for literal years. It's done.

I had a grand scheme of buying them from menards a few at a time but then they decided to discontinue them. WITH DISCOUNT. So I bought all they had and drove 100 miles away to get the rest. Overall the cost was pretty low and the quality is acceptable for the house I have.

Flooring: the chronicles

You see those piles of mortar? The stack of tiles with mortar still attached? The frothpak spray foam kit? That other box that used to carry a 5000w electric heater in it?

All those things can fuck right off. This really kicked me in the shins man. 

-start with a clean new floor

-mix up mortar

-lay tile

-wait 24 hours

-none of the tile stuck

-take it all back up

-scrape all the mortar from everything

-insulate crawl space with frothpak

-buy more mortar

-buy 5000w heater to put in crawl space

-try again

Removing all the 24 hour old tile

Insulate the perimeter

At last. Kitchen tile laid for the final time.

GROUT. This step is: a)pain in the ass. b)requires skill I don't have.

300 hours on my knees with a sponge and a bucket.

YO I FUCKING DID IT.

Christmas as a Russell.

That's me. I'm a Russell.

I had been housing the cabinets in my garage. A future garage project includes a french drain to keep the water out, but currently the floor gets wet if it rains too much. The thought of a trucks worth of cabinets getting soggy from some rain had me panicked. 

I don't do Christmas. Not that I won't ever. I just currently don't. But I did get to spend the day with my sister. And she helped me carry in every single cabinet and get them unboxed. The world needs more sisters like mine. 

I have replaced the foundation, dug out the crawl space, installed new floor joists, laid every piece of subfloor, every bucket of mortar, cut every tile. I installed those windows. There is not a part of this picture that I haven't made.

Finish work :(

I have been simultaneously dreading and dreaming of this period. The finish work. The part that looks good. The steps where every cut and detail counts. This is both my strong suit and my weakness.

Sometimes progress looks like a mess.

The next step is installing cabinets. I debated the layout of these for YEARS and continued to change plans until the screws started going in.

As much as I can continue to tell myself building a house is just a bunch of layers and steps, it's really a grand plan. The things I did five years ago are both helping me and hurting me. But currently, it's about the details. Hanging 20 feet of cabinets in multiple directions and making sure they coordinate with the less-than-square walls, floors, and ceiling. What you see above is a whole days work. 

And here is why the planning matters. See that vent? It's in the wrong place. I had a lapse in planning. I measured out for the 12" cabinets but I forgot about the crown molding. The crown is important. So I'll either have to move that vent or get a cover that will shim up above trim. 

Countertops 

I wanted stone. Well, kind of stone. Quartz. Everyone want's quartz. I could not justify that. So I went with Menards laminate in the from of special order. I bought two runs with adjoining 45* angles. There was still plenty of trimming and fitting to do. But here you can see the trim work start to come together.

If you're installing the counters, always order more than you need.

Here we are. A weirdly unsatisfying part. A lot of work. A big step. Meh results. 

This should be a huge relief. But somehow isn't. It looks...average. It feels average. 

It's all in the details, it turns out

I chose an interesting dark/light situation. Which means the light parts are the important ones and backsplash changes the whole space. As usual, I'm too quick to judge even my own work before it's finished. 

So backsplash and lights it is. I have dreamt of having a backsplash that I was proud of. I made that. Thanks Lowe's.

I found a guy at Lowe's with a red tag that said "IN TRAINING" and did a situation like I do in the paint department. No less that 20 minutes later we decided on this one. 

Lowe's trainee did real good.

I laid all the tiles out before I started. I bought premixed mortar because cleaning that off of a bathtub sucks(that's my functional water source). This is about 30min of frantic but happy work. I LOVE IT.

oh i added a sink too

Finish work sucks

Backsplash goes up so fast. But then theres the grout work. Caulking. Trim. So much trim. 

I had to move my light switch a few inches around the corner and added a second switch for can lighting. The backsplash grout was a little sad at first. It really took away a lot of the natural stone character but that turned out to be just right. 

The fridge pantry is a standard 94" tall. Which means the adjoining cabinet will be at 94". My ceiling, if you recall from the last post, varies in height and happens to be about 100" tall there. Mostly theres a gap between the cabinets and the ceiling that sucks.

I decided to run the under-cabinet lighting to the top of those cabinets, put up the same crown a few inches down from the ceiling and let the lights shine against the ceiling. That turned out nice. 

Theres ceiling trim, floor trim, window trim, toe kick trim, window sills, caulking, low voltage wiring, somehow more trim, and a bit of 120/220 wiring.  

Here's what all of that looks like:

Not quite done

Theres a good possibility I continue to walk through my kitchen and never actually use it this year. It's nearly four wheelin weather. 

The next steps include revisiting the crawl space and spending more money on appliances than I have ever spent on a vehicle so I don't mind ignoring that for a while. There's still the transfer switch to install, power feed upgrade, finish up some painting and trim in the bedroom, a laundry room that doesn't have finished drywall or even flooring. Of course the bathroom. I haven't even started on the bathroom yet. 

k,bye thanks for reading about my life

The Beginning of the End

It's been a long time coming, and it'll be a long time till it's done, but I'm in the final stretch.

A quick look back

While sitting here, 4 pints in at the brewery nearest to my work, I realized I could have replaced one door on my house back in 2013 and avoided this whole fucking mess. Maybe it was Jesus' recent revival, maybe it's the beer, I'll never know. But I just realized this whole mess started with my hot water heater's pilot light going out. The pilot light went out because I removed some of the old peal n' stick tile to see if I could put something more attractive down. The removal of the tile left a sticky layer that the old door's seal got caught on, quickly ripping it off. The lack of seal let the wind in and blew the pilot light out...time after time after time. 

I fucking wish my issues were waking up to no hot water. Man, I was(read: I am) a fucking idiot. Instead of putting in a $200 door, I decided to put in a tankless hot water heater. Then I found a tankless heater on Craigslist that goes on the outside of my house. Then...it just snowballed into where I am now. I regret it. I could have lived my life nicely without these hard lessons. So many people just call a plumber or an electrician. But nooooo. I gotta be the idiot. 

Shew. Anyway. I have a blog to write.

The Last of the Bullshit

About the last dreadful part of my house remodel is the plumbing. The previous owners used soft copper and compression fittings to tie into existing galvanized water lines and some old cast iron drainage. I don't really blame them, but I still despise the fact that not even one part of this house has been a break in the perpetual shit list of things to do. 

As seen in the previous post, I moved the washer box and added plumbing for a vanity in the mud room. I hadn't done anything beyond running the new stuff down past the subfloor. So...crawl space.

Fuck Cats, man.

I had to wake up at some absurd hour, like 8am or some shit. My list of things to get done was a mile long and I didn't have time for this mess. But I got a text from my neighbor. I wasn't home and wouldn't be for 8 more hours. 

Eight hours and a dozen beers later, another neighbor, BJ, was helping me unload tile and he stopped mid sentence and said "was that a meow?". It was. This cat was so stuck. I was mildly Sunday drunk and this was not gonna be my problem. Might be my foundation, but that ain't my fucking cat. So I called animal control, turned on some 90's country, and drank beers with BJ and foundation cat until Brenda(or whatever her name was) showed up. 

She tried putting soap on it and twisting and pushing for a while, but ultimately we ended up chiseling out a bit of block until it was free. Now this little orange bitch is in my crawl space. 

Sorry for the screenshots. 

Whatever. I still get mad about this part. I'll spare you the pictures, but it left a pile of kittens in my crawl space. Dead, tiny kittens. Those pictures do my crawl space too much justice. It's like 20" tall down there. I had to lay on my stomach and move these smelly dead things before I could get to the plumbing part. 

Just kidding. Here's some dead cats.

Pipes and Shit

Literally. I'm cussing a lot in this post. Maybe I should slow that down. But here's a bit more of what you're used to from me. 

The usual:

-Rip out the old

-Put in the new

-Take some pictures

-Make a blog

Cut out the old.

Cut out more old.

Soft copper. 

No copper. Gas lines I installed a few years back.

Put in the drains. 

Get some 3/4" copper goin on. 

This is all mud. Like 3" of mud I laid in for 12 hours.

Progression

Each blog post represents the trough of my ambition's waveform. The progress being the crest, and the endless tiring work between the two is likely just self deprecation and drinking heavily. Generally at a predictable 3 month interval I make a couple leaps in life then wallow for a while. 

I woke up on a Tuesday and decided I would quit smoking and being a grown up. I DID GREAT. No more cigarettes meant less Casey's stops. I limited my food spending and took every leftover meal my neighbors had to offer. Two months in I had paint on my walls, doors where there should be doors, and even a few extra dollars laying around. Scrubbed my garage until it shinned. Gave the dog a bath. You know, all those normal things I generally avoid. 

Here is what all that looks like:

TV wall and hallway.

For reference, this house had a 4" step down into the hallway when I bought it. The floors were actually collapsed in the opposite way. They managed to layer on the bullshit 6" thick.

He doesn't always look this dumb, we both have troubles expressing happiness. 

Put on some trim. 

YAY!

The pile of things in the middle is the tile for the mudroom and kitchen. 

Resume normal George

I tried out the happy and productive life. Wasn't for me. Luckily for all six of you that read this pile of garbage, it takes a bit of loathing and anguish to get one of these done. Let me give you a little insight.

As soon as all this progress was made, a whole list of shit broke. The only two lines I hadn't replaced in the crawl space sprung a massive leak. My truck's axle, hub, drum, and tire slid out the side of my truck while I was driving down the road, I found a fucking bird in my dryer duct.

Nope.

Kitchens are for families

So I'm gonna buy a new 4wheeler instead. It could be a while before you see pictures of cabinets on here. 

Drywall and Relationships

Reoccurring Themes

Any of you remember highschool chemistry? It's where I learned about hypotheses. And drugs. But don't tell Mrs.Harriot that part.

Now, 8 years or so later, I have been testing my own hypothesis...and I've come to a conclusion. I, George Russell, am incredibly bad at (at least, but in particular) two things. Drywall, and relationships. I mentioned it in my last post, but needed to do some further testing to be certain. And holy fuck am I certain.

I've tested both as a one-tailed and a two-tailed hypothesis because I needed to be thorough. I can now empirically confirm the above stated hypothesis is true. This post covers many months. An inordinate amount of bad relationship attempts. Twenty sheets of drywall. All of which provide more data points to prove my hypothesis. Also a therapist. Because when you correlate drywall and relationships, it is behoove of you to seek professional help.

THAT SHIT SUCKS.

Continued Work.

Look, I can make 100 excuses about why the work on my house is going so slow, but really it's just lack of desire. Remodeling your own home is painful and exhausting. Like most of my life and all of my relationship attempts. 

Last time I posted about the 650sqft of plywood and 2X4s, I was finishing up some inside work. Now it's onto the exterior. By exterior, I mean windows.

I don't actually care what the outside of my house looks like. That's for people that live in subdivisions and go to HOA meetings. But I do know that I have a mixture of windows in places I don't want them to be.

Per usual:
-rip out the old
-install some new things
-put whatever old stuff back that you have to
-take pictures
-write blog

Remove window.

Install window.

You know, they make these window things pretty easy now. You just make a hole and nail a window somewhere inside the hole. Before this, I had five different kinds of windows. Which is annoying, mostly because I only have seven windows.

This was my first go at vinyl siding, so I was nervous and didnt really know what to do besides slowly and carefully remove it. With a hammer, and a crow bar...obviously.

I don't really like these windows. But they have a 10 year warranty and cost about $20 a piece. Yes, twenty. Why these things were so cheap, I may never know. However, I do know that I bought seven brand new windows from Lowes for less than the advertised cost of one window.

A Brief Intermission

 

I put that new window in during the month of march. I just left all the siding laying in the yard. As you'll see in the graph below, I needed to curate a little more information just to be certain about my previous theory. Fast forward to August. I now have at least three more data points for the graph, and I am in the middle of some mild crisis. Luckily the byproduct of a George crisis is just productivity and irreversible mental anguish. The later of which I'll deal with at some point. For now: windows.

A Brief Period of Motivation

At some point in this adventure my yard looked like a junk yard, the inside of my house was trashed, my garage was a disgrace, I didn't own a thing that didn't require work. I still don't. However, for a brief period, I had a normal human's motivational level.

I built a new workbench in my garage, I finished up the one ton project, I got rid of the junk yard, sold the old blazer, and fucking rocked out all new windows and vinyl, and even a new door! I might have skipped work for two weeks, ate only casey's cheese burgers, avoided showering and almost all human contact...but progress is progress.

North facing front window. Not new door.

West facing side window.

FUCK THIS WHOLE WALL.

Good enough.

It doesn't even look like I learned on this window.

I know it's garbage. But it's my garbage.

So at this point I have all the major exterior work done until I decide to build 60 linear feet of porch. But that's just an idea at this point. Currently, I'm content with siding that's marginally different colored, windows that match, and two well insulated doors.

Empirical Proof

Ok. Look. I've done my research. I'm almost to a decade of data about this. The only weird part here is gonna be if a girl asks what data point she is. Uh, please don't.

Drywall

I tried to hire out the drywall. I saved up some money and was going to call a real company(or one of the aforementioned data point's dad's remodel crew), but my neighbor talked me out of it. In the long run, I'm happy I didn't hire it out. There is some bit of dignity in doing all the work yourself(or watching your neighbor do it, that's the same...right?).

So now there is a gap all the way around.

My house is of an unusual size. It may or may not vary in height as well. The average wall height is about 100 inches. The average drywall height is....not average at all. It's very specific at 48 inches, or 96 inches if you hang two sheets properly. 

I was feeling pretty good about this.

Lots of fillers, tape, and mud later...DAVE PARSONS

For reference, this picture was taken while standing in a very similar spot less than two year ago.

This is an exterior wall. On the outside of this wall is the tankless water heater mentioned in post two. Also within this wall is the gas lines that feed the water heater as well as the furnace in the attic. There is cold water and hot water for the washer box. There is a drain for a sink as well as a drain for the washer box. 220v for the dryer. 110v for the washer. A two gang box for some cabinet lighting as well as a receptacle. More 110v under the sink, and more 110v above for future network cabinet. The only part of the drywall I messed up was the drain being 1/4" off. And I'm pretty damn proud of that.

Hot Wings and Cold Beer

There isn't really anyone involved in the terrible decisions I've made that have led me to fix up this tiny little home of mine. But there is someone who taught me how to do so many of the things I know, and not to be concerned about tackling the other parts I haven't learned yet.

I remember when I was about 12 years old, we had an old bathroom in the basement that was in desperate need of repair. I recall coming up the stairs to my step father, Dannie, reading one of those Menards how-to-fix books, but not really caring what it was about. The next day I woke up to a large pile of dumpster material in the same location that we used to have a bathroom. Piece by piece, getting parts only on the weekends, he built a new bathroom from floor to ceiling.

We got a garage, he did the same thing. Never made a deal about it, never worked up about it, wired the whole thing. Insulated, covered the walls, built a work bench out of the neighbors old hardwood flooring. Poured concrete, ran plumbing, built a shed, wasn't a thing he couldn't do.

I could go on forever about all the projects Dannie had. Always working on something, never worried about getting it done, never questioning his own abilities. He taught me many things and he gave so many memories. Always so certain, always a little bitter, and always in our hearts. Miss you, Dannie.