It's been almost two months since my last post. Sorry I've been waaaay behind on this, friends. Most of July and the beginning of August was monopolized by my
So, I quit. I was bummed out because it was decent pay and I actually liked my boss (better than my co-workers, which is unusual), but I have no plans on making this house building project last 3-5 years of weekend blitzkriegs. Also, the job was rotting my brain and my body. So, out with that, and in with building the house...
...just after I spend about a month in Chicago and Michigan with friends and family. Hey. I needed a break. I took it. It was marvelous.
Alright, house time...
yaaaaaay!
When I last left you, the shakes were still up on the house and I had no door. Times have changed. First things first was taking down all of that ugly, poorly installed, grayed, faded, and moldy shake from the front and back.
The last of the shake goes down
As far as the door goes, it was a nightmare and I have no pictures of the process. Mom had to sand and scrape and strip all of the old paint off of it. The layers of stubborn nastiness would have come off a whole lot easier, but the paint stripper's optimum temperature to work was "between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit." The temperature never went below 100, even at 2am. As an interesting aside, this was around the same time I baked two pans of chocolate chip cookies in my car.
Bake for 3 1/2 hours at room temperature
At the same time, I was ripping apart the old door frame, which was smashed up and would end up being more wood putty than wood by the time I was finished. I opted to build an entirely new frame (as finding an exterior door frame for a 24" door is impossible). After about five coats of paint and two weeks of work, we had a door. Oh, also, I slapped up some new siding where the shakes were formerly busy uglying up the front of the house.
At this point, a new window had been delivered from Lowes. I decided that the slide window at the top wouldn't cut it and wanted something really cool that would also allow me to put my head out of the window and, just in case, be able to crawl out of it in an emergency. I was so excited about the new window that I promptly got to pulling the old window out of the house.
Wheee! There's no way I'm going to regret this decision!
Then I went and actually opened the box with the window inside to take a good look at it. The window, badly marred across the entire face from being shoved into the box, did not open all the way (as I was told it would), was made of dozens of different pieces and grades of wood as to make staining not an option (as I was told it would be), and, here's the kicker, was put together with STAPLES. I felt as if it would fall apart when I picked it up and it indeed already had started falling apart. So, after returning the window, I have a gaping hole in the loft and have basically committed myself to building my own casement window so that I don't have to spend 400-500 bucks on something that wouldn't be valued as a stocking stuffer.
After that setback, I decided to continue with the front by finishing all the movin' and de-shakin' that it so sorely deserved. This involved most of the same processes that the siding required: furring, cutting, staining, etc. Except that the peak was a HUGE problem. The guy who framed the house used a 2x4 instead of a 2x6 as the roof's spine, leaving a 2" square hole in the front that I had up until now been running an extension cord through to get power inside the house. Additionally, had cut everything at such wonky angles that nothing lined up, nothing measured the same in any two spots, and there was all sorts of magic I would have to pull out of my butt to make sure that it didn't end up looking like Jenga blocks.
This shot is about an hour before I had realized all those problems, which is why I'm using the hammer to put boards in place and not to knock my self unconscious
I ended up making everything fit together fairly nicely for all the problems. To even out a bad 2x4 cut the original owner did, I needed a very small block cut on three sides and sanded at a slight angle. Creating this piece was such a tremendous effort on such a small block of wood that a wound that I got a few days prior from striking my index finger with a hammer reopened onto the wood, permanently staining it with my blood.
When I originally was thinking of starting this blog, I wanted to make a counter for how many times I had bled or otherwise injured myself in the process of building this house but I thought there was no way I would injure myself enough to necessitate a counter. I've probably bled about 12 or 13 times now and injured myself another 4 or 5, so this house very much figuratively had my blood and sweat in it. I thought this piece would be the perfect way to literally put my blood and sweat into the house. So I dabbed the block on my profusely perspiring forehead and signed it. I built this house, damn it, and now I've got the block to prove it.
It also just so happens that that block is right at the top of the front of the house. It's basically the keystone. So, I finished things up and hammered it in place.
riiiiight there
And that's it for now. Tomorrow I stain the remainder of the front and start in on another project. See ya'll later!
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