Home Improvement Projects
 

Since we no longer have LJs Office with it's attendant wood project thread, I started this one.

First off, I now have a load of furniture to refinish. Chest-of-drawers, highboy, two night tables, a buffet table and a kitchen table and chairs (veneer, I doubt I can do much with those). The bedroom CoD and night tables all have real marble tops.

Stripper (no jokes, please) seems to take off the finish and the underlying coat of (paint/primer/undercoating) with no trouble. I will try to scrape out the scrollwork with a plastic scraper but may have a little trouble there. The buffet table has a broken/missing leg that will have to be replaced. I will try to duplicate the other one on a bandsaw and a sander but may have to fabricate all new legs. Hardware is mostly good, but one drawer handle looks cracked...maybe I can solder it back together.

Pictures will happen when I can borrow a camera and get back to the house. Figure on the second weekend in January. I have to go there anyway, might as well make a long weekend out of it.

Brian

Ooh. I love this thread. :joylove:

My house is nothing but one big home improvement project. The BIG big project happening right now is the disassembly of the above-ground pool and surrounding deck. Been in progress for a little over 3 months now. I'll take a current picture tomorrow, and post the in-progress series (working title, "How My Backyard Turned Into a Deadly Construction Zone.")

The other four projects currently in progress are: re-hang the cabinet doors in the laundry room once I finish painting them; apply texture to the walls of both bathrooms to cover up our crappy drywall seams, then repaint them; finish caulking the playroom (a roughly enclosed porch) so the damn spiders will stop coming in droves; and replace the sliding glass back door with a French door.

Just for my vanity, a link to the old thread... http://www.cellar.org/images/smilies/smile.gif

You lie, that's not a vanity. That's a (beautiful) bookcase. :p

Brian, why? Is this furniture particularly near and dear or antique or unique?
Refinishing is like major work if there is much detail. Usable furniture is cheap and plentiful, often free.
I mean trying to solder a piece of hardware you can buy for 39 cents doesn't make sense unless it's a rare or unique piece. The cost of stripper, sandpaper, steel wool, brushes, thinner, stains & finishes can add up fast. :confused:

Bruce: The pieces need the work...the finish is chipped, yellowed and yucky. It's not near and dear or valuable. I will repair the handle because it's not generic and I cannot replace it without buying all new ones. It's not covered with many coats of paint, just the one varnish and some base coat or other. I want the furniture to match the decor and I like dark brown anyway. This stuff is a kind of yellow-white. I have the stain already, and enough stripper to do two pieces. I will get more when I get back to work on it in January.

Brian

Geez, aint that that the truth! I've got a 55-year old house, and some of the interior has been painted so many times that you can literally just peel the layers of paint off with your fingers. It had a major renovation before I bought it, but the list of stuff to do never ends... :yeldead:

I'm making and installing cherry plank flooring (10" 8" 6") in the breakfast nook/kitchen right now. Its fun but seriously buying flooring is prolly smarter.

My parents have a Civil War era stone house in West Virginia that has suffered a large number of hamhanded renovation attempts, including sawing a hole in the floor through which to pour a concrete floor in the basement. :rar:

My parents have recently had the roof replaced, and are now in the process of replacing the windows and sills, which have eroded a great deal over the decades. At some point the porch (not original) will need to be replaced.

I happen to know of a cute little civil war era stone house in PA that they could practice their skills on first... you know, practice makes perfect and I'd want their house to look its best and everything.[img]images/smilies/blush.gif[/img]

That's great! I'd make an inlaid patch of contrasting material so people would ask and I could tell them a great story. :biggrin:

Not if you saw the resulting basement floor. It had to be smashed up and removed. Previous owners also walled up the massive fireplaces, probably to prevent drafts. The chimneys are now home to a huge colony of swifts, which are fun to watch in the evening.

And they eat bugs. :yum:

For reference, here's the house. With the new roof, but the window directly over the door hasn't been replaced.

OH, shit. sorry. i wasn;t thinking about all that. maybe UT could momentarily un-archive that forum, and move the threads you guys still want to read.

i just don't have time for much more than trolling the turds. i'll try to stay on them, cuz i like to do it, and it needs to be done, but i haven;t much time for creating anything useful or uplifting.

party on, cellar.

Cool...9 over 6s......unusual. That's not the house you built the bookcase in so it must be the one for the revolution. :eyebrow:

3 stories from the back?

9 over 6s? Not familiar with the term.

It is indeed 3 stories on the back. It's a weekend house that my parents bought about 30 years ago pretty cheap.

The windows, the number of panes.

Doh! I thought so, but for some reason I couldn't see it. I was looking at the second floor vs the first...

:biggrindu

Beauty and brains too. ;)

i absolutely love these houses, they have SO much charater (meaning fix up work, too) makes my stupid little ranch in the middle of iowa so, boring...

Aw, now I feel like I cheated on a test or something :blush: We have 3 9 over 6's. I wish we had them upstairs too, HM's parents house looks beautiful.

http://pic7.picturetrail.com/VOL205/...6/59798307.jpg

That's not cheating, knowledge is where you find it. I'm sure there are even people who have them that don't know that terminology. :)

Before we decided to get rid of the pool:

The whole thing was surrounded by this fence-deck monstrosity:

And.... after:

...

Uh....nice puddle. :eyeball:
What are you doing with all that pressure treated lumber?

:luv: WOW! What a lovely house!

Uh....nice puddle.

That's because under the sand there's apparently another layer of plastic, and it's been raining. It's not really that big, less than a foot deep.

What are you doing with all that pressure treated lumber?

Giving it away on my local freecycle.org list. This one chick has taken almost all of it, and I seriously wonder if she's got an obsessive disorder and is just piling it all in her backyard, because I just can't see how anyone could reuse it. Seriously, it's all rotted and full of broken-off rusty screws.

Plus, 90% of the boards are under 4 feet because we had to cut up most if it with a circular saw (because of the aforementioned rusty screws all snapping apart instead of politely unscrewing.) She's told me she's building a freaking greenhouse with it, of all things. But whatever--better her backyard than mine. :)

Just finished caulking the new French doors we installed recently. Still needs paint, of course, once that's dry.

Before & after:

Note: the "before" picture is from before we moved in, so the changes to the room on the other side of the doors all happened a long time ago.

Nice doors, I'm sold on those lever handles. Put one on the outside door for my Mom. Makes it much easier for us too. ;)

They're also really good for kid-hands. The littlest used to not be able to get through the sliding glass door without help (it doesn't get heat/AC so the door must stay closed except in ideal weather,) but now he's in and out of the playroom all day, like butter. :D

Reviving this thread! BrianR, I want to see that furniture you were refinishing, and Griff, I demand pictures of that cherry flooring you said you were making. There was another thread around here where glatt (I think?) was installing new cabinetry in his bathroom, and we never got to see that finished either.

We've been continuing work on the backyard (ex-)pool. We got it to the point where all that remained was 8 metal uprights that had supported the pool structure, and a good 16 to 24 wooden 4x4s that had supported the deck structure, all sticking up out of the dirt surrounding the sandy pit. (Plus of course the now ragged edge of the deck at ground level, but that's almost a separate project. Pool first.) The sand isn't even just sand, there are layers of vinyl sheets underneath it, I guess to help it keep its bowl-like shape. Personally, I plan on just burying it with dirt when the time comes, since it's below ground level, but my husband thinks we need to dig around the sand and cut the vinyl out first, otherwise we'll have drainage problems. But we've agreed for now that the argument is premature and we'll ignore it for now.

SO! Our neighbor lent us a "farm jack," supposedly capable of pulling several tons upward. We tried it out on one of the metal uprights. It didn't even budge, and after pushing the lever with all our strength for several minutes, we gave up and pulled it away from the upright, to discover that we BENT the 2 inch thick solid iron rod that runs up the center of the jack. So we bought our neighbor a new farm jack. Then we decided we would dig some of the dirt out around one of the posts to maybe loosen it a little.

We dug.

And we dug.

Two feet down, we hit cement. Ah, excellent, now we've reached the little cement chunk that holds it in the ground, and we just need to dig outward to find the edge of it, and then we should be able to easily lever the whole thing out, right? (Ever seen an uprooted street sign? About a cubic foot of concrete at the base of the pole, usually all lumpy-shaped because they poured it straight into the dirt.) But as we spread the hole wider, we discovered that in fact this was no mere chunk of cement. This was a single huge RING of poured concrete that joined all the posts in a circle, like a freaking sidewalk.

So we rented a jackhammer. I had never actually seen one in person before. It was electric, and the tag said it weighed 55 pounds. I could barely move it around, and I certainly couldn't wield it when it was actually turned on. We worked for hours, him with the jackhammer and me with a shovel clearing out the debris he was creating. Finally, we cleared out all the cement on one side of the post (did I mention this shit is a foot thick??), towards the inside of the pool. Then we used a sledgehammer to knock the post out through this little passageway.

Congratulations. Only 24-32 more to go. Keep in mind, we dug for days around that post just to expose the cement in the first place. And the jackhammer cost $70 a day to rent. I've never been more demoralized in my whole life.

So we brought in a demolition contractor. We had brought one in several months ago, when we got our tax refund, but his quote was over $3000 and at this point we still thought it was POSSIBLE to do it ourselves, we were just toying with the idea of being frivolous. Now, the matter had moved far beyond what we "might" be willing to pay for. Fortunately, we told this second contractor not to worry about the remaining deck (which the first guy had included), we just wanted a price for removing all the vertical posts stuck in cement. His bid was less than half the other guy's, and miraculously included ripping out the entire RING of cement, not just the posts stuck in it.

Unfortunately we had a miscommunication about what day they were going to start, so I was awoken just before 8 AM by the superintendant ringing my doorbell. But for the last four hours, four burly guys in hardhats have been digging and jackhammering my backyard. It's so exciting!! One thing I noticed was their jackhammers are pneumatic. You can tell by looking at them that they weigh a lot less than ours did, and they're connected to a HUGE air compressor they dropped in my driveway.

I already went around and put notes of apology on my neighbors' doors about the jackhammering at 8 AM. But I mentioned that this was part of a continuing effort to remove what had previously been an awful eyesore towering above their own backyards (the original pool fence was around twelve feet tall.)

By the end of tomorrow, I will have nothing more than a huge hole in my backyard, plus of course the jagged ground-level deck that we told them to ignore. But we could cut that up and get rid of it within a day or two, we've only left it until now so we had something to walk on. I'm wondering if I could maybe even get them to take the dozen nasty-ass railroad ties in the back corner of the yard when they haul away all the concrete debris. We'd even load them into the trailer for them, if they've got the space.

And the long shot:

You got a coupla chinese guys poking up outta that hole yet?

Quite a few apartment complexes around me have filled in their pools because of liability issues. They just back up a dumptruck to 'em and fill the hole. After a few years they have a lovely grassy area surrounded by a kidney shaped cement walkway.

My neighbor was removing his old chain link fence. He spent a day trying to get one post out. Then he bought a sawzall with a hacksaw blade and just cut the rest of the posts off just below the surface of the ground. Took him that day on the first post, and two hours on the rest of them.