Big update lots done.

We finished the penny floor and are 95% done with the office. It is currently in a good enough for government work state and we have moved focus on to the bedroom and bathroom. After the floor was surfaced I transformed one of the el-cheapo mirrors into a pretty cool looking wall mirror with some redwood and old electrical wires from the basement.
We added some antique furniture from my Grandmother and Aunt and popped the super comfy reading chair in the corner. The room looks really good!
Today I finished stripping the old wallpaper in the bedroom. About halfway done patching all the cracks in the plaster. After that it is primer and then we are going to test some paint colors to see what looks good.

Another quick win was tearing the old runner from the stairs. The wood needs to be refinished but is otherwise in really good shape. We are most likely going to just restain it and leave it naked. Here is Belle cleaning the stairs after I pulled all the nails out. It was actually really gross carpet, but we are desensitized at this point. The snowflakes were horrible dustballs.


The big project however is the bathroom downstairs. PaGyver is spearheading the effort to turn the stinky old bathroom into a very cool but appropriate wet-room. So far we have completely gutted the room and ran new drain pipes for both the upstairs and downstairs bathrooms (no more galvanized!). This involved cutting a hole in the foundation to run the new pipe through and attaching it to the sewer outside the house. We have already connected it up and patched the foundation. Tomorrow the goal is to get the electrical in, finish the shower drain and put in a new wash machine intake/drain. We are turning the front closet and bedroom closet into a washer/dryer room while leaving some closet space on the bedroom side. The front closet will get moved to a hidden passage under the stairs. Very exciting.

Floors Galore.

In addition to continuing to lay pennies (Thanks MAdams for letting us buy $42 in pennies) on the office floor, we decided to re-do the floor in the upstairs 'working' bathroom. I am typically against wood floor in bathrooms but this bamboo floor looked really cool and is ultra-renewable and pretty low cost.

Of course like all projects this one really had its hurdles to jump over, the first one being the clawfoot. The tub is 90+ years old and weighs I would say right around 400lbs. I quickly realized I was not going to be carrying it on my own. In addition the pipes were pretty old and there was very little room to grab the drain pipe to try and remove it. My MacGyver solution was 2 hydraulic car jacks on either end of the tub and a dolly. This sort of worked. The jacks lifted the tub very easily but the pipes were so rusted together that despite all the connections being loosened they pulled the plastic drain pipe out of its connection to the main drain. (Actually it also looks like PaGyver never glued that joint... amazing it didn't leak at all.)

After that discovery I loosened the no hub connector to the plastic and jacked the tub up until the entire 18" drain pipe cut off was above the floor. Then luckily i was able to separate the tub drain from the stub. The tub had to stay on the jack however because the tub drain is still 4" below the bottom of the clawfeet. Wheeled the tub out and got to work.

Next hurdle was that the door was too low profile to allow for the thicker floor. 30 minutes of hauling the door up and down the stairs and slashing the base with the router and it was all set.

From there it was a lot of cutting custom floor boards and gluing the panels down. Putting the tub back in left some nice compression marks in the new floor, but its still a vast improvement. From there it was pretty easy to re-connect the "broken" pipe and glue it in. First try no leaks, all good! Still need to floor around the toilet but it was very late when we finished the tub area and I was still tired from traveling.

I really like how it came out, and have some custom bamboo quarter round toe boards in mind to match. Also have some crazy ideas for paint.

Lessons learned: Small diameter car jack wheels will dent floors. Routers are the most versatile of tools. Old plumbing sucks.

Other random events: Clovers have taken over our yard completely. It looks very cool but I am really really glad we went with raised beds because they are everywhere.
Got rid of the old water softener last night. Thanks trash guys (they must hate us)
The garden continues to outgrow our demands for lettuce and spinach. 1/2 tomato plants is producing heavily. Peas are producing very well. Sweet potatoes are coming in strong and Belle has some artichoke started.
Thanks MaGyver for watching Kai and all of the 'epic family for having us over for turkey. I had a great time.

Penny floor details

Houston we are out of pennies!

Mysteries of the penny floor disclosed: There was not much online about how to install a penny floor. Plenty of articles describing the floors with pictures, but very little info on glue, flooring material etc. Those guys used a black grout, it looks like the people here used thin set. Not really sure what these guys used but I am very happy that I am only doing 100sqft. I got a tip from the comments here stating that resin was used as a topcoat, that gave me an idea.

We definitely wanted the floor to be sealed. While having exposed pennies age would be cool we figured it would be too hard to clean and too cold on the feet. I had an extra gallon of polyurethane snowboard resin which has been very useful in making random things so I figured I would give that a try. As I mentioned before the first attempt was to actually put the whole thing in the snowboard vacuum bag and essentially veneer the pennies onto existing laminate tile. I never made it that far because I discovered that hand laying these is easier and not that difficult. I wanted the mould to be extremely precise (when intersecting pennies are 5/8" to center, pure diameter they are 3/4". So I used a 3/4" router bit on 5/8" lines. It came out ok, with some gaps, but the real trouble is intersecting the tiles. I probably could have got it working in the vacuum bag but it would take a long time to build all the 1x1 tiles even 4 at a time.

Hand laying is the way to go. Polyurethane resin works very well and it holds my snowboards together so I know it has pretty good impact strength. It has very poor tensile strength so I expect cracks in the first earthquake. To strengthen it I could have laid a layer of fiberglass mat under the pennies, but I hadn't really thought of that and it would increase the cost. Once dried the surface is very smooth and not cold at all. As you can see from the picture below the resin amplifies the pennies shine when exposed to light.

In other news I noticed that the site (graf snowboards) where I learned how to make snowboards is no longer online :(. Going through that process taught me so much about laminate construction and exposed me to some great tricks (vac bagging)

Sticky fingers.

Lots has happened so it is about time for an update.

Did some mini projects during the week which included playing with fire, which has always been a hobby of mine. I burned the paint off of the brass chandelier in the office and re-wired it. It was not too bad to get the paint off, and we left some of the tarnish and burnt paint on for the distressed steampunk feel we are going for with the office. Rewiring it was quite a pain because of how the thing was built, in my confusion I ended up soldering it together 3 times, then running late live wired it in with rubber gloves on. Fun times.

Sunday was family day with Belle's mom, uncle and grandfather coming over and MaGyver coming down. We did the standard tour for the fam and before hitting original mike's for dinner I prototyped the first couple tiles for the penny floor. I had built a jig that was supposed to let us resin in a 1'x1' tile at a time, but in testing that simply did not work. I had also hand laid a tile with pennies and a resin top coat which came out much better. Based on this we decided to forgo laying tiles and simply penny over the existing floor. As of tonight, we have laid and coated about 2% of the floor, and it looks really good. Pics to come (I don't want to touch my phone with such sticky fingers.)

Once the floor is done, the office will be complete, just need to shuffle furniture around after that.

In addition to that we also removed the old in window AC unit, which was very gross. The kitchen looks noticeably better.
Scraped some more wall paper off the bedroom walls.

Meeting more of Belle's family was very cool, all very nice people (Hi!). Grandpa had some very interesting stories and it was very neat seeing him relate to some of the older parts of the house. I wonder if after another generation the nostalgia of seeing a push button lightswitch or a raised tank 'crapper' will be forever lost. I enjoy those details of the house for their difference and uniqueness, and it was interesting to see someone to whom they were so ordinary and familiar.