The horror lurking beneath the carpet

Winter is here. Time to retreat indoors and tackle all those projects I've been avoiding all Summer. 1st on the list is my daughter's room. She has been living in squalor since we moved, a hodgepodge of old furniture and badly organized toys. We took EVERYTHING out, painted the walls a color-wash of periwinkle blue. ripped up the rug and found (drum roll please...) linoleum tile. Just weird. It was so old I couldn't even identify what color it was. It peeled up easily enough so no problem there. Under the tile was this ancient adhesive, black and smelly. At a loss as to what to do next, I packed up for the day and went to collapse with painkillers and mindless t.v. I happened to leave a damp rag on the floor. The next day I removed the rag and discovered that the black goo under the rag had dissolved. With a bit of elbow grease I made a clean spot. So now I had a choice. I could attempt to cover the floor with really cheap carpeting and leave the yucky stuff for another time (or another homeowner, bwahahaha!) or I could give up 2 1/2 days of my life and clean the floor. I chose to clean the floor. The nightmare consisted of spraying the floor with 409, laying wet rags down on a section of the floor, letting it sit for an hour, and then coming back and scraping and wiping and picking at it until it came off. 15 minutes into the project the smell intensified to stomach churning level. An 11x9 room took approx. 16 hours. By the end of it I felt like an 80 year old and I smelled like a landfill. Thank God that's over.

`Tis the Season to be Creepy

Since our last post, other than dealing with a leakage problem in the basement (A drain in the middle of the floor doesn't help save stuff on the floor against the wall, where the leak is) we have been working on our favorite event of the year -- Halloween!

As a matter of fact, we have a site dedicated to the preparations thereof and you can see our progress by going to www.cathousehalloween.com and clicking on the picture. We are having a great deal of fun with this one.

Dog 3 Window 0

We are back from vacation! It's a rather labor intensive vacation, requiring a lot of prep work and recovery time, so it's pretty much added up to me avoiding any home improvement (and thus not blogging about it) for the past two months. I'll tell ya'll about in another post. Meanwhile, no sooner has the dust cleared from our arrival home than something breaks and we all have to stop to fix it. Our dog is adorable. Our dog is lovable. Our dog is 90 lbs. of bark and 2 lbs. of bite. Nevertheless he feels it necessary to introduce himself violently to every person who dares (the bastards!) to walk up on the porch. We have narrow windows on either side of the door. 42" x 9". He can't hope to fit through them but he keeps trying anyway. He has gone through glass and two (!) plexiglass replacements. I went to Home Depot yesterday and got the thickest plexiglass they make. I got a scrap piece for $42. $$$$$! I also learned that they no longer cut glass or plexiglass....something to do with twitchy lawyers or something. Now how I got a scrap piece when they don't cut it anymore I can not tell you. At any rate now I have to spend the weekend figuring out how to get this thing to the right size, and then installed in my window frame in a way that the dog can't pop out again.

The project that completely baffles me...

Summer is not a good time for me to keep up the blog. We are just too busy to sit down and update. Most of my housework (what there is of it) has been gardening and clutter elimination.
I thought I would let you all see the one project that I am NOT prepared to tackle yet, my Victorian garage. As out-buildings go it's pretty cool. Not as cool as the carriage house up on the next block. ( Maybe I'll take a picture of that for next week!), but it's brick and it has a chimney. Why it has a chimney I don't know. It has a nice door with a transom and a large window as well as the big doors out front to drive the car through. It's brick. The roof is tin. The floor is thick concrete. It used to have electricity. That's where the fun stops. This building has been completely neglected. It's actually kind of dangerous. The top layers of brick are what my chimney guy used to call "gravity bricks" as in all that's holding them in place is gravity. The door has been shoved back at a precarious angle, causing the bricks over it to become unstable. The inside is painted bright blue and the outside is painted silver (why!?). The bay doors are a patchwork of scraps and the gutters utterly destroyed. I have enough knowledge to feel confident about fixing the brick up top but all the rest of it will require a whole new set of skills. For the first time in my history of home ownership I was tempted to knock something old down. I've decided against it. It might be decrepit but there isn't another one like it nearby....and it would cost too much to replace. It also costs to much to have other people fix it so its time for me to start studying up on arch repair among other things.

Racism and Real Estate

I've been off my computer for a couple of weeks with this and that but this blog has not been far from my thoughts. A couple of things showed up in the Richmond Times Dispatch that have me thinking about Richmond's future....And it's past. The 1st: a study done by the Fair Housing Alliance. Seems segregation is alive and well in the nations real estate market. http://www.nationalfairhousing.org/index.php . Of course no one from Richmond would EVER think of doing something like that. Never. When I think Richmond I think integration.

The 2nd: An article concerning cracking down on trespassers in Gilpin Court, (the link seems to be on the fritz right now) the housing project closest to my neighborhood. It seems that a significant amount of the crime that takes place over there (and in every other RRHA project) is perpetrated by people who don't actually live there. Seems they have stumbled on the idea that if they control trespassers they control crime. ARGH! Ya'll are just figuring this out now?! Lots of other cities figured this out in the mid-nineties. Where have you been?!

What these two things have in common is that they are both related to my impressions of Richmond when I returned last year. Richmond is stuck in a time warp circa 1992. Other municipalities (poorer ones) have figured out solutions that Richmond hasn't begun to implement. It's not that they haven't thought of them. Any search on RTD will bring up articles about PLANS for improvement. It's just the nothing gets done. Another RTD search done on city council over the last ten years brings up all kinds of examples of corruption and stupidity. No doubt this is a factor. I suspect the corruption, stupidity, and apathy hidden in various city departments is much more of a danger. I suspect I'm not telling anyone who lives here something they don't already know. I pin a lot of hopes for improvement on Mayor Wilder. I do not envy him his job.

Neato House Changes Owners Again

Our apologies for the lack of posts these past couple of weeks. It's mostly been more painting and minor repair work. I thought I'd show you guys a picture of a house we considered buying a year ago. At the time we couldn't get the realtor to call us back. It was all very strange. It was purchased for 85,000. In all likelihood it probably had bigger issues than we were prepared to deal with. Any time the foundation has a serious problem I feel like I'm out of my league. But it has so much potential! Three floors, and the third floor has a porch. Plus it looked at me with a pitiful "help me" face. I hate it when they do that. At any rate it got tinkered with by the new owners for a few months and now its a duplex. Just what this neighborhood needs.... It still needs major work, roof, porch etc.... Maybe someday we will get a turn at helping to put her back together.

Further notes on the paint...

I like color-washing because I'm a sloppy painter and it's a very forgiving process. You are deliberately making a big swirly mess. If you like perfection in a paint job color-washing will drive you crazy. We had it in a couple of rooms at the old house. It always put me in a good mood. I'm really happy to have it back. We originally used Behr interior flat paint in a couple of colors with food names (buttercream and caramel apple, maybe?). This go-around I was a cheapskate and bought Wal-mart paint in "yellow sand" and "turned leaf"(also flat) and a quart of glaze. First we paint the room with the lighter color. Then we mix the darker color with the glaze in a 4:1 ratio. If you have a big enough bucket just dump the 1 gal. paint and qt. glaze together and you are done. Save the paint can though, there will be a lot left over. First we get an old rag (not terrycloth, smooth works best), get it wet with water and its ready to wipe. Next, someone gets the paint on the roller and dabs a bit on the wall. The other person then wipes the paint in a sort-of circular motion, covering a 2'x2' or 3'x3' area. We also do a bit of dabbing and wiping as well. In the corners we put the paint on with a brush and wad up the rag really small and dab it around. Periodically, the paint gets too heavy and we rinse out the rag a bit and start again. It's not an exact science. You can practice on a wall and if you hate it you can paint it over with the lighter color and try again. The whole thing goes on pretty fast once you get the hang of it. Previously we did this technique on the ceiling as well. It looked great, but after building that thing in the backyard last week we were competely wiped. There is no way I could have spent another hour with my arm over my head. The "House Made" blog has some great pictures of a subtle color-wash that I really admire. http://housemade.blogspot.com/. Check out the "interior as it is" photos under the "House Photos" heading. I'm guessing that the colors are closer together on the color wheel.