The Couch

     So, as I may have alluded to on moving day, we could not fit the couch that Traci's parents were kind enough to donate to us.  Our home, unlike many in the United States, is not blessed with a patio door.  There are two regular doors, but being an older house one is thirty inches wide, and one is thirty-one.  Modern doors are usually 36" wide for your reference.  Anyway, when Jim was around on moving day he measured that the couch was 36" wide no matter how you twisted, torqued, or rammed it.  And believe me, on moving day we did it every way that we could.  So for the last week our garage has had a really nice couch occupying a portion of it.
     I was determined that I would get the couch into the house somehow today.  I had whittled my options down to two a.) take the couch apart and b.) take apart the door.  I began the day feeling pretty good about option number one, and it was my preferred option.  I wanted this option because Friday night I was talking to Traci's brother Joe, and he was talking about how his couch had velcro on the back of the fabric that allowed the delivery guys to take it apart when they moved it into his house.  His reasoning was that couch manufacturers had to have some sort of way of getting their furniture into older houses with narrower doors, so most of them had to have some sort of contingency plan built in so that they could come apart.  That made a lot of sense to me, and I was hopeful when I walked out into the garage at around noontime.
     I began by flipping the couch down on its front, on some moving blankets because the floor was dirty, and pulling staples that held on the dust cover on the bottom.  I figured that this was the best place to start because if something were to go awry, no one would probably see it because, you know, it's on the bottom.  So I began to remove staples slowly and really didn't get anywhere because there was this problematic leg that I couldn't get off.  No matter what I tried it would not unscrew, and eventually I found out that it was because they are not screw on legs.  They sort of pry out somehow.  So I pried all four legs off - with some limited collateral damage to the legs themselves but again, they are on the bottom - and then I was in business.  I was able to open enough on the cover to see the inside.

My exploration hole, complete with some of the tools of my trade for the day.

     So once I had the corner of the couch opened up and I could get a good look inside, it became painfully obvious that there was no way to take the couch apart without a Sawzall, or maybe a lumberjack's axe.  There were no bolts or anything that one could even begin with.  So I guess it was on the Plan B. 
     So I went to the door, and to be honest I had absolutely no confidence in myself.  This is what I was facing:

This is the door what would be on the operating table on Couch Day.

I know that it seems simple enough, but you have to understand something about me.  First of all - as Mike always says - everything I touch turns to shit.  And what he means but that is not so much that I destroy everything, but I usually get whatever I am trying to get done, done, but it usually doesn't go right.  Either everything gets messed up along the way, or they just don't turn out tight.  For example, let's say that I stop to help you change the tire on your car.  I would be able to get the tire off, and the spare on, but I probably will have broken the hubcap when I was taking it off and now it won't go on.  Get it?  So that was running through my mind as I prepared to start stripping the layers of moulding off my door.  Plus, I knew that I had enough tools that I would be able to do this project, but I still knew that they weren't the right tools.  So I knew I could do it but I wasn't sure if it would turn out right.
    I began at the top layer, because I didn't know what else to do.  I began by taking off the screen door because that was on the top layer and it seemed like the easiest place to start.  I mean, it was pretty straight forward - only a couple dozen screws and it was off.  I put it on the side of the house. Then I took off the moulding that was around the door, and I was a little surprised.  It was a lot thicker and attached with a lot of pretty heavy-duty nails.  But I got it off and what I found was a little astounding.
     What I found was one of those pre-hung door sets sitting in a big hole that had been cut into the house.  There was really no framing around it, and as I poked around I discovered that the only thing that was keeping the door set - door and frame - in place was the moulding and the footboard.  I couldn't believe it.  There was no other trim to take off, so I just took the whole door out and set it aside.  Let me show you:

This is what I took out of the house.  Just a pre-fab door set with sill plate still attached.

The ragged opening from the outside.  Notice all the insulation just hanging there that was stuffed in the cracks.

Looking out from the inside at the same hole.

    So it was off, the whole door and all its assembly was just gone and there was a giant rectangular hole in the wall.  You could see all the materials that were used to make the house, which was sort of cool, and you could see a piece of what used to be because under the paneling (which is awful in its own right) is a truly awful sort of drywall or something.

Imagine having to look at that business every day of your life.

And I was just a little disturbed to see what was under the sill plate at the bottom of the door.

I am pretty sure that is not good, but I decided to just leave it be.  I mean, it's been working okay all this time so far, right?

     I whipped out my tape measure, just to be sure, and I knew we were golden.  I had measured the couch at 32" at the widest part with the legs off (not including the cushions, which could be sort of smushed down to fit) and I knew that I was only needing one inch to fit through the door.  We had like 34" when the door was all taken apart so I knew it would be golden.  And other than navigating some wet and a little ice and having to haul the couch up over the fence, it went smooth.  And the couch went into the house.  Traci and I made a deal that when it came out it would be in pieces.

Notice the couch inside the house - where it will be forever more.

    So all that was left was to put everything together again, and I am not going to bore you with a lot of pictures of that process.  But I will admit that it didn't all go super smoothly.  First of all, I started putting the moulding on the inside in the wrong order.  I should have done the sides first, but I tried to start with the top.  Once I got that squared away though I was good.  On the outside I did it wrong again.  I should have done the top first, and then the sides, so I had a lot of trouble getting the top piece to fit like it should.  I also had some trouble because all the nails on the outside had to be pounded out through the wood, which broke a lot of the wood around the nails.  There was also a little collateral damage from when I had to remove the moulding with the wrong tools. 

You can see some of the paint and wood damage in this photo.

Some of this damage occurred when I removed the moulding, some of it occurred when I had to remove the nails from the moulding, and some of it occurred during re-installation.  It is sort of a potpourri of damage here.

 In the end, however, the damage was nothing that a little wood putty and a coat of paint won't be able to conceal, and since we are planning on painting the house and trim in the spring or early summer, it is no big deal.  It looks hooker good - good from twenty yards away but a little rough up close - and for now that is good enough for me.  Here is a shot from said 20 yards afterward.

The after photo.  Looks a lot like the one above, except it is much darker so you can tell it is later in the afternoon.

     In the end I am pretty happy, because it went a lot better than I was expecting things to do, especially knowing me.  And to me the small amount of damage that occurred is acceptable and will be fixed without too much trouble at some time.  And most importantly, the couch is in the house.  And boy does it feel good to lie on.  Until next time, take care.

The Pocket Door

    I suppose that you could call this my very first home improvement project in my new house.  Replacing nails on the board that boards up the broken window on the dilapidated lean-to attached to my garage doesn't really count, but I do think this does.  While Traci worked on unpacking the last of the pictures and knick knacks (oh, and finding the mysterious lost box of kitchen items - which she did) I tasked myself with fixing two doors in the basement.  See, the basement is partially furnished, with a living room and a bathroom and an office (read bedroom that can't legally be called a bedroom).  There is a narrow hallway that connects the living room to the bedroom and on one side of that hallway there is a giant closet that was missing a door, and on the other side was the bathroom, accessed through a pocket door that had come off of its track and was stuck in a sort of half-closed position.
    Now pocket doors are a wonderful thing.  Instead of swining open like a conventional door, they slide into the wall and allow one to put a door in places where a door might not always be able to go.  So that is what I was dealing with in this situation, only it had some twists.  First of all, it was an ancient and heavy pocket door, that wasn't as well engineered as current ones generally are.  Second, it was in a very home-spun wall that didn't make a whole lot of sense.  But we will deal with that a little later.
     So I decided that I would begin with the closet door, because it was going to be the easiest I knew and I figured that I needed a little bit of a boost before I began.  So I grabbed the door and walked it over to the closet and stuck it in and it went wonderfully and perfectly.  I was a success at my first bit of the project.  That was cool.  Both doors slid past one another like butter and it was even on the right way.  Now on to the pocket door.
     I knew that the pocket door was going to be a lot, lot harder.  I messed with it a little while and looked into the situation.  There was a track that was installed WAY UP in the ceiling for the door to ride on, and there were some sketchy looking wheeled hardware that ran on it.  The problems that I immediately saw were two: 1.) I had to pull the door out of its normal line of travel in order to get the wheels back on the track, and 2.) I couldn't get my hands on either side of the door to remove it from its spot.  See, the door, when closed, was excatly the same size as the opening it was meant to cover.  So I couldn't get my giant Mickey Mouse hands around it to pull it outward from the bathroom.  Wonderful.  My gaze immediately turned towards the wall.

     It was going to have to go.  At least part of it was.  I began with the trim around the door and along the section of wall in the hallway.  I gently pried around the areas where it was nailed in and it began to give way in a couple of different ways.  Some of it came out like I wanted it to, where the nail came with the trim.  Good.  In some instances, the nails actually pulled through the trim and I had to remove them from the wall behind.  Anyway, what I found was not encouraging. 



This is the inside of our wall.  As you can see it is not a pretty sight.

   Yeah, it is. not great.  You can see the shower to the left, and the things sitting in the basement to the right.  The "bedroom" is behind the camera.  The paneling is pulled away from the wall and you can see all sorts of supports and studs inside the wall, none of which I will point out are 2x4s 16" on center.  But I digress.  That is the area in which the pocket door slides, and I had hoped to be able to pull it out there in order to get it on its track, but no suck luck.  There are too many supports, etc.  So I decided I need to deconstruct a little more.  The painted trim piece in the foreground would be the next to go.  In the next two photos you can see the offending door, now removed from its pocket, and a view of some of the trim pieces scattered around.

The offending door, now removed and put in the hallway.  Just off the top of the door is the sketchy hardware that is used to hold up the door and allow it to slide along the track.

You can see all the assorted trim pieces lying about the bathroom.  Notice too the super cool decor in the bathroom.  Lots of off-pink, if that's a color.

   Well it went, and the structural support part of the wall behind it too.  I use the term structural support loosely because it wasn't supporting anything more than the paneling and trim pieces, but it was still supporting something. So that had to come off too.  All so I could get the stupid door on the offending track that was way, WAY to high up in the wall.  Wanna see a picture?

Look at how far up into the wall this track is mounted.  How the hell was I supposed to get the door up in there.

     The good news, however, is that through perserverence and a large amount of luck I was able to get the door mounted onto the track.  I am not totally sure that it is mounted correctly, but it seemed to be the only way that it could go on, and it is traveling somewhat smoothly and is working.  So that was the good news.

The freshly remounted bathroom pocket door.



The door in a working condition.

 Now all that was left to do was to go ahead and put the trim pieces back on, oh, and replace the parts of the wall that I had to remove. 

In the process.  You can see that the trim pieces along the ceiling and the right hand side of the door have yet to be re-installed, but the trim along the floor (below the bottom of the picture) and at the end of the hallway are back.

All done.

    So what did I learn from my little project?  Let me put it in list for for you:

1.)  I am going to hate that pocket door, since I am pretty sure that it is going to fall off again sometime next week.

2.)  Always plan for twice the amount of time that you think you will need for any project.

3.)  There is a critical shortage of nails in my house.

4.)  I am going to find messed up stuff every time I do a home improvement project in this house.  I am pretty sure.

I also learned one bonus thing.  I was in the unfinished part of the basement using the concrete floor to straighten some nails (see #3 above) when I saw this:

The leg of the laundry tub.  That is the sump at left, with the ancient galvenized pipe.

That's right, one of the legs of the laundry tub in our basement is being held up by a hinge.  Bold strategy.  Luckily it is too rusted and painted to ever actually swing, plus it is mounted to the floor somehow, so I am just not going to mess with it.  You have to pick your battles sometimes, and this one just isn't worth the fight.  But the good news, however, is that things are fixed up in terms of the door.  I tested it this morning and it works just fine, you just have to be a little gentile with it.  So I term it a success.  This weekend we try again to get the couch in the house.  Now that should be a trip.

Moving Day

      So, moving day is over.  Sort of.  I apologize for the lack of pictures with this post, since I intend to make this a picture-intensive blog, but right in the middle of moving day I thought to myself "I should be taking pictures of all this but I don't know where the camera is located."  So no pictures of this one.  Moving day was pretty typical as moving days go, although I will admit that it was not the smoothest.


Our U-Haul looked just like this one and it was
pretty much full, although we had some space to
stack more things on top of other things.

       First off, it took a lot longer than I thought it would take.  Twelve hours from when we started was when I finally sat down and took a load off in a meaningful way.  Honestly, most of the reason it took so long was because we weren't as ready as we could have been, and we weren't as ready as I thought we were.  Traci did a fantastic job of getting things packed up, but I know for sure that I could have done a little more to help us be ready.  Also, as it turns out, we have a whole lot of shit.
      Second, we didn't have as much help as we needed for as long as we needed it.  I failed in my quest to find people to help us move, because many hands make light work.  But everyone seems to have been working or out of town or busy with something.  So for the first few hours I was doing what I could to get things into the truck while Traci worked inside.  That being said, I have to give HUMONGOUS thanks to Rachel and Jim who did come help with the moving.  We would still be working on it two days later if it weren't for them.  So thanks, guys, you were life savers.
       So it took forever to get packed up, and truthfully the last of our things didn't get moved out until Sunday when I went to clean the old apartment, which was the day after actual moving day.  Sometimes it just goes like that, and thankfully it wasn't a super long distance cross-country move that we had to make or we would have been in a heap of hurt.  But the moving things into the house went well until...
      Until we tried to move the couch.  We received a new-to-us couch from Traci's parents, which was very nice of them, but it is a sort of overstuffed affair and there are no patio doors on our house.  In fact, there are really just old 30" wide doors, and no matter what way we contorted or moved or flipped or wedged that couch it wasn't going in.  So for now it is living in our garage, and our options are a.) take apart the couch, b.) remove a picture window and take it through there or, c). remove door jams until it can fit through the door.  I am currently leaning towards options a or c but we will figure it all out eventually in one way or another.  That was by far the biggest snag.
     There were a few small casualties, that is for sure.  We - and by "we I mean "I" - broke a mirror that was a sort of specialized, one-of-a-kind sort of thing.  It was Traci's, and thankfully it wasn't broken too bad.  The load shifted in the back of the truck and it sort of wrecked one of the bed stands, but not so badly that we can't get it ship-shape with a little wood glue and some screws.  We lost one framed map that was not put away correctly, and we got a dent in the microwave.  Oh, and I accidentally took out an overhead extension cord at Traci's parents when we went to pick up the truck.  And one of the hoses on the dryer wasn't long enough to hook up to the water supply.  And we took out an outdoor light fixture with the couch when trying to wedge it in.  But nothing terribly tragic.  And it is done, which is the most important part.  We are almost totally unpacked too, but there will be more about that later.

Closing Time

     So...we closed on the house today and immediately began to move things in.  Went from the closing to the hardware store to make some copies of keys, then to pick up the giant U-Haul that barely fits in our driveway, then to start moving some things.  Tomorrow will be moving day, and every foot of the 26 foot U-Haul will be full I am sure.  But that is okay.  That is what moving is all about.
     Anyway, I was at the closing with a whole bunch of real estate and banking professionals, and as such it went really, really fast and really, really easy.  The realtor even took a picture of me to go on her Facebook page.  I am not going to tell you her name because I don't want you to go see it.  Anyway, now that it is ours, let me introduce you to the house.

The garden.  It looks overgrown but with a little bit of work it will really be nice.

Welcome home.  The house from the driveway, with the detached garage at left.  Notice the bold strategy of putting both doors facing the same side of the house.  What you can't see is the dilapidated lean-to on the other side of the garage.  Lots of lights outside for the nighttime though.

The south side of the home, showing one of the big picture windows.  I especially like that someone tore down the TV antenna to the point where I can't use it to get any good reception and that it is super dangerous for anyone hanging around it.  Wonderful.

The house.  Behind the camera is the highway, which is fine.  Pretty standard from here.

I used my master negotiating skills to get this sweet snow blower included into the deal.  The gas can and lawn mower, however, were not.  I guess my skills aren't as great as I thought they were.

There is a walkout basement, facing the north, and this is it.  The basement is actually partially finished with a non-bedroom, bathroom, and living room area.  I say non-bedroom because it does not have an escape window.  Yet.  it is on the list.

The kitchen.  Pretty standard, although I wish there were nicer cabinets and maybe some cabinets by the stove.

More kitchen.  Lots of cabinet space.

The master bedroom.  Or at least the bedroom we will use.  Behind the camera is a really odd little closet that makes some strange dimensions in the bedroom.  Note the lovely paneling.

This is the living room.  It actually has TWO big picture windows in here.  Still more paneling, as you can see.  But the hardwood floors are nice and would be fabulous with a refinishing.  There is also a light over an area where a table would go just outside the kitchen that looks like it came straight off the set of "Cheers."

The bathroom.  Pretty standard.  What you cannot see, however, is the the little screen in the block window opens but there is a storm window painted in place over it, there are no outlets in the entire bathroom except a really sketchy one on the lights surrounding the mirror, and that the floor is somewhat rotted away under the toilet.  There are, however, plenty of towel racks.

The guest bedroom.  Paneling galore and window treatments that actually caused me to a.) grow a vagina and b.) get big hair and shoulder pads like an 80s chick.  Those will have to go for sure.

    So from here, it all looks pretty good.  Until I whip out the photos from the folder on my computer entitled "Mechanicals and Damage.  Let's take a look at those, shall we?

Notice the crack in the bedroom window.  All of the windows are the original, single pane wooden style, and the bulk of them are painted shut, which is fine until summer rolls around.

I am not sure but that sort of looks sketchy.  This is where the electric comes in from the street.

You are not supposed to connect copper pipe to galvanized pipe.  That is what someone has done here.  It is rusting a hole in the top of my water heater and needs to be addressed.

NOT GOOD!  At least it we were able to determine that the water making these stains is coming from the inside of the chimney because it is improperly capped.  And it isn't used for anything anymore so it isn't too big a deal.

Non-working water spigot and bad paint.  The whole thing needs scraping and painting.

Really needs painting.  And someone had quite the time on a ladder.

    In reality, it is a good little house that just needs a little TLC and some updating.  So we are going to do what we can to make it great.  And because we don't have a ton on money, we are going to go it as much by ourselves as we can.  Wish us luck and please come along for the ride.  Moving day is tomorrow, do let's start by hoping we don't break anything then.