newly purchased old house + 9 days + lots of help = great looking apartment + sore muscles + exhaustion + smiles

On March 25, 2011 David purchased his first house, located at 1-3 Morrison Ave in Somerville. On March 26 David, his parents, Christine and I packed up his stuff from his old apartment and piled everything into the living and dining room of 3 Morrison. Filled with delicious pastries from Lyndell's Bakery, we spent the weekend stripping wallpaper, and literally chipping paint from what became known as the "Barney Room" - as you can see in the pictures, it was painted a blinding mixture of purple and green colors seen most commonly in a children's candy box (like Nerds maybe?). David's new roommate John moved in the night of the 26th, armed with an air mattress as tall as I am and a bag of clothes. John, and David's co-worker Kim, were there for a day to attack the resilient walls layered with paint and paper.

After a week "off" at work, David, his parents and I returned on April 1 to attack the house again. Christine, there to help again for the weekend, came with the much welcomed addition of Grandpa John (my mom's dad) who proceeded to work the entire week with Susan, David and me. Harvie had to return to VT to teach for Mon-Fri, and we had my dad there to transport much needed items from the St. Jay house for Christine and me, and help with the house, for most of Thursday and all of Friday. We worked on the house non-stop from about 9am to 2am (I "quit" early (meaning maybe 11:30) a few nights to do some work on my computer) for 9 days, but got a TON of stuff done, and the house is looking great! At the end of the week Christine moved in to the bedroom on the 2nd floor, and this coming week the last roommate, Jerome, will be moving in. Here are a few stories and pictures from the renovation week:

The "Barney Room"

This room, like most of the third floor, had a wonderful two layers of carpet. Layer 1, a nice dark purple to match the blinding wall paint. Layer 2, a beautiful brown shag to remind of us of changing decorating trends. The base layer was luckily a nice, non-leaded (we checked) maroon paint on wide floor boards.

Successful removal of both carpet layers made the room look remotely better...

This room was one of the two worst rooms to fix. In hindsight, we would have saved a lot of time by knocking all the walls down and putting up drywall. When we started though we didn't anticipate how long it would take to chisel off the layers of paint and wallpaper. Lesson: if it seems hard, put up drywall.

I barely recognize myself wearing Davids pants. My work pants were plastered with paint chips and sticky wallpaper... thankfully a belt seems to fix some of Davids smaller fitting pants. This picture shows the plaster walls, which were oddly covered in green stuff we assumed to be some kind of sizing, b/c it was water soluble and definitely not paint.

After many hours of work, we present to you the new and improved Barney Room! A soft blue for the walls, fresh brown paint on the floors, and some of Grandpa John's light yellow paint for the closet!

Another view of the new and improved Barney Room. The cardboard hole in the wall is an access panel that we created. It was later replaced with a wooden panel by Harvie.

The Bathroom

Lucky for us, the bathroom didn't need any renovations. However, 4 hours and two people were required to clean the bathroom. David is skeptical as to whether a cleaning of this nature was really required, but I promise you that the more dirt and grime we removed, the more dirt and grime we found. It was a filthy mess. I scrubbed most of the tile grout with my index finger and a scotch brite, not realizing we had a scrub brush that would have made my life easier. Needless to say, my forearm was in agony when I went to bed that night.

The "Room with No Heat"

At the beginning, this room seemed like it would be a lot easier than the Barney Room. However, we couldn't have been more wrong. Below a layer of wallpaper and paint was this annoying green paint that would half chip off. This means that when the wallpaper was removed, half of the paint went with the wallpaper and the other half stayed. The question became, do we remove the rest or leave it? Unfortunately, leaving it would have resulted in uneven walls, or walls that required a lot of spackle. So, we chipped away, for hours, and hours. My hands are still recovering.

The rectangular hole in the wall is where we redirected heat from the next bedroom over to this room, so that it would no longer be "the room with no heat". Grandpa John executed most of this project, after much discussion with David about the design of the redirect. You will also notice that there is drywall on one of the walls. This was put up by Harvie and David after we took down a shelf to reveal a large 1ft x 6ft hole in the plaster.

David finishing the drywall.

Dad and I painting the "room that had no heat". Dad unleashed his expert edging skills, and dug around for some late night energy and we finished off this room around 1am with David and Susan.

The "Blue Room"

This room is now David's room, and required the least amount of work to repaint. Lucky for us, the room did not contain any wallpaper. It did have quite a few cracks in the plaster though which required much repair. I performed my first real spackling job on a corner in this room! Thanks to Susan for the expert instruction.

The "Living Room"

This room was literally a piece of cake, and was a much needed easy job at the end of the week. There was only one layer of wallpaper, and no paint. The paper came off easily, and with the teamwork of David, Susan, Dad and me we had the room all stripped by mid-morning on Friday.

We painted this room "melted butter" - yum! We were a little worried by how bold and yellowy it looked when we started to paint, but when it was all done we thought it looked pretty good. We didn't do anything to the floors in this room other than clean them up. One wall in the living room received the drywall treatment.

The Kitchen (it's in there somewhere, I think...)

Grandpa John installed the dishwasher, which arrived courtesy of craigslist fully NON-functioning. False advertising by the seller, but luckily an easy part to replace. Grandpa also boxed off the piping under the sink, which had previously been exposed to all the lower cabinets. With a fresh coat of white paint, they are all looking pretty good now!

We stripped the walls in the kitchen that would be more difficult to work on once people had moved their stuff in. We thought the kitchen would be SUPER easy, as it seemed to have only two layers of wallpaper that were easy to peel off. We were wrong, though it didn't turn out to be too hard. There were MANY layers of wallpaper, on top of MANY layers of paint. We left the paint, removed the wallpaper.

I'm working real hard in this picture, aren't I...

We painted the kitchen a color called "Sagey" which seemed to match well with the existing counter tops.

The Pantry

The pantry requires a before (left, obviously) picture, even if it is a little blurry. The entire pantry was PINK, and had peeling linoleum flooring and less than usable cabinets. Grandpa John, with the help of my dad on the floor, tore everything out and leveled the existing shelves. Harvie then spent an entire day installing new shelvings below a counter top generously donated by Grandpa John. After a day's work fitting all the pieces together, Harvie sat down to dinner and looked at my grandfather's chop saw and said "we had a chop saw??? do you know how much time that would have saved???" David responded with a "oh, yeah, oops...". Even if it took a bit more time, the pantry turned out beautifully!

In case you need more "before" pictures, visit: https://picasaweb.google.com/dhp.porter/3Morrison#

For more renovation pictures, follow this link: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/sredir?uname=slhp315&target=ALBUM&id=5596709666689905665&authkey=Gv1sRgCOW0ye3o05Km_wE&feat=email

Celebrating 6 years of fun

Six years ago today David and I had our first date. After a game of LIFE in my South Baker dorm room a couple of days before, David invited me to join him for his Jazz teachers concert on Valentine's Day. I said I would "think about it" and David responded "see you Monday". What nerve! Needless to say, I found this assumption both flattering and obnoxious. Even so.... I found myself texting David (with my old school phone, probably one of the first text messages I ever sent... makes me feel old!) and telling him I'd go. We met up at Willard Straight before the concert (the Cornell union) and I happened to arrive first. While I tried to look "cool" staring at the various magazines David came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. After the concert we sat outside my dorm room under the Baker Tower arch and talked for way too long - all I really remember is my toes going numb. And so it began....

To celebrate it all, David and I finished off our relaxing weekend in IL by going go kart racing with our Groupons and gorging ourselves on Mexican food and snickers. At the track David's fastest lap was 24 seconds and mine was 27. I might not have been as fast, but I shaved 3 seconds off my first lap times!

Looking towards the future, on Sunday both David and the Seller signed the P&S, and today they posted a "SOLD" sign! We are now waiting on the garage permit from the city, and working on the final details of the mortgage. The closing date is now scheduled for March 25th. We are keeping our fingers crossed that everything finishes up as planned, and looking forward to getting to work on the house!

Settling in Somerville

Well, settling for the next few years at least. For the past few months we have been intently watching the real estate listings for a 2-3 unit home in Somerville. Requirements were:

1. existing two car garage, or space to build a garage
2. near Davis Square or Porter Square
3. one of the units needed to be 1 or 2 bedrooms and the other ideally 3 or 4 bedrooms
4. in an affordable price range (of course)
5. "unique character" and sunny rooms

After being out-offered on the first house we liked (with a garage) we expanded our search to more seriously consider houses without a garage, but that met our other requirements. We immediately found the above house, located at 3 Morrison Ave, Somerville, MA. David went to see the house armed with a new camera, a measuring tape, and pen and paper. He took many pictures (see link below) and most importantly (to the car nut) took measurements of the back yard space. We drew up various rough sketches of garage possibilities and David made many phone calls to the city to learn about permit requirements and building rules. After confirming that we could indeed build a garage for this house, we made an offer. The next few days were quite nerve wracking as we negotiated back and forth with the seller, until at the end of the week we settled on a price and both parties signed the offer. That Friday (Jan 28) we planned a home inspection for 8:30 am. As I was traveling back to Boston Thursday night I learned that David's plane was to be delayed until Friday - putting me solely in charge of the inspection. I brought my mom and Tommy along for moral support and expertise, and we braved the cold (and traffic jams) to see the house.

Throughout the inspection David was messaging me "how is it how is it how is it" and I'm trying to swype away and getting words totally off the map that make no sense because I'm sliding my finger across the screen so fast. I finally gave up in frustration and just took notes on what the inspector said. Having not seen the house yet, David was quite nervous about what I'd think and whether the pictures had been a good enough representation. Luckily, I thought the house was awesome - in need of some work for sure, but a really nice lay out with lots of "character and sun". I scribbled away at all the comments from the home inspector, and in my fervor forgot to take any pictures of the "problem areas". Luckily the house seemed pretty sound over all. Initial work will include removing the nasty carpets, fixing a duct in the basement, and supporting the main girter with new lolly columns as it is sagging with age.

With the home inspection in the clear, we set to work on designing the garage. Per city rules we had to hire an architect or engineer to make the plans, and so far it has seemed to be a good idea because they can check all city codes and have friends in the city offices to run plans by in advance. The picture below shows our final plan, though the car pictured doesn't have to be at that funny angle, it can turn in more to the right and be parallel with the edges of the garage. The garage will be made of concrete (must be fireproof), will be 15 feet tall and have a slanted metal roof. It will be large enough to accommodate one car, a two post lift, a shifter kart, a work bench, and a few other odds and ends. It takes up quite a bit of the backyard, but leaves enough space to meet city laws on landscaping and for us to have a grill and a small garden (the area along the right side of the house is all grass as well).

Currently we are waiting on the finished design from the architects, which will then be submitted by the sellers to the city for a permit. Assuming all goes well then the P&S will go forward, and we will be well on our way to owning a house! There is a tenant in the 1 bedroom unit for awhile longer, so we would work on updating the 4 bedroom unit first. David would then hopefully live there with 3 other roommates until I move back in a couple of years and we can take over the 1 bedroom.

For more pictures:https://picasaweb.google.com/dhp.porter/3Morrison#