We're number 1

Well not really, but my neighborhood made Southern Livings 'Best Comeback Neighborhood'. Pretty cool, huh? Hopefully this will change the minds of most Jacksonvillians. Most everyone in the burbs believes my neighborhood to be rat infest, crime ridden and basically a big homeless shelter. Now it's not perfect by no means, but we're getting there. I think this will finally shed some light on Springfield. Thanks a lot Southern Living!

Tool Deals!!!

Lowes is selling an 18 volt combo kit for $39. This kit includes an orbital jigsaw, 1.2 2-speed drill/driver, multi-finish sander and pivoting-head flashlight, plus a couple bits and sandpaper. This is an awesome deal for anyone looking for a present for that diy-selfer. I believe it goes on sale in stores on the 17th, but you can order it today and pick up in stores today.

Insulation question

I am redoing the walls in the downstairs room and have a question for everyone. But first here is the situation. I have torn out the plaster walls in the room and know that insulation is a good idea, but what kind of insulation should I use? Since my house is built in 1909 I'm sure the requirements for this type of house is much different than a newly built house. Should I use kraft paper face insulation, just regular unfaced insulation, should I use a vapor barrier? I have read many different ideas on what is good and bad. I know my siding lets in air for circulation and I live in Florida which is always humid, so I have read that a vapor barrier may not be good, because it could trap moisture, but would the kraft faced paper do the same? Would it be smart just to use the unfaced insulation? You'd think something like this would be straight forward, but I have been finding out with old houses, nothing is.

Painted Subfloor

I've been working on the downstairs room for my wife, so that she can finally have her craft room to make all her etsy stuff. The problem I have been having is what to do with the floors. I had to rip out the original heart pine floors that were there because they were all rotten. I put a plywood subfloor on top of the original long plank subfloors, but then found out that any flooring I put on top would not match the height of the adjacent rooms floor. My only solution was that I would just have to put a threshold that would go from the higher height to the lower height of the original floors until I saw this.

These are a couple pictures from Twice Remembered and she came up with a great solution. Just paint the subfloor!! What a great idea, and why did I never think about that. So I am going to email my wife and tell her if she likes this idea. I think she won't mind as anything is better than nothing. Although I was wondering if I should caulk the seems between the boards or would they contract and expand with the weather and push any filler out?

Squirrel vs. Hawk

As I was leaving the house today I got to see Round 1 of Squirrel vs. Hawk. I took these pictures and you can see the hawk sitting on the telephone wire with the squirrel pirched on top of the telephone pole. They sat like that for a few minutes then the squirrel made a break for it. Lucky for him he survived, but you never know what will happen in round 2.

33,000 Gallons!!!

Recently I checked my utility bill to see how much I have to pay. Normally I don't really look at the usage, just the amount because it is usually the same amount. I was shocked when I saw my bill was near $500. When I checked the usage I saw that my utility company JEA said I had used 33,000 gallons of water! I called them up and said that it had to be a mistake because with that much water I would surely have see it somewhere. Their response was "Sir, did you have any people come over during the month that may have taken showers?" I had to laugh because first no one had ever come to my house and second why would I let anyone take 33,000 gallons worth of a shower. Anyways I told them, "No" and asked for someone to come out and check the water meter again. That day when I came home I had a note on my door saying the 'waterman' had come by and say that there was a leak at the water meter and he had fixed it. He also said that the bill would be adjusted. Whewwww, that was a relief, of course trying to get the money back from them was another story as they would not give me a credit until the second month after to make sure there were no more leaks.

Now this is a Green Home

Anyone think they have a 'green' home? Read this article. 80% of the materials he uses to make these homes are salvaged from other construction or things he finds on the side of the road. Now this guy is thinking green. He also does it for a good cause, he makes them for low income families. Someone give this guy an award.

The Baby is a.....

Yesterday my wife and I went to the doctors to find out if we were having a future football player or a ballerina. As I said yesterday we asked to have the final word written on a piece of paper an put into an envelope. We decided to go to PF Changs to find out. I opened the envelope and was elated to find out that our baby is a GIRL! Well I guess my hopes of a future football player is out the door, but I'm so happy to find out that We're having a girl. So now comes the part where we have to find a name. My wife has already come up with about a gazillion different ones. I guess that will have to be another post.

Is it a boy or a girl?

Well today is the day (hopefully) that I find out if my baby is a boy or a girl. I'm hoping for a boy of course and my wife wants a girl. I think I have the edge because I had a weird dream that my baby was a boy, so I'm hoping I have future seeing tendencies. We wanted to make the revealing a special occasion, so my wife thought of a plan to ask the doctor not to tell us and instead to write it on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope for us. The plan is for us to go to a special place and eat dinner and open the envelope together so that it will be memorable. I thought it was a great idea, so when we go to the doctors today we are going to ask them to do this for us. Well wish us luck, well wish me luck that it's a boy!

Kicked out of your own home... Watch out for the banks

Now this is something I hope never happens to me. A lady comes home to find out that her house was auctioned off by her bank to someone else. I hope this lady sues for a bunch of money. Here's the link.

My Walking Screen Door

Well I came back home from work today, all elated because it was TGIF, to find that my bag of cat food was stolen. That's right CAT FOOD!!! This is the 3rd time that I have had a cat food nabbing, but that is not the whole story. I also found that my side fence door was a little open. I found that weird since I always lock the door, plus it has 2 locks on it just in case. I went to the back yard to find that my screen door decided to run away as well. I don't know what kind of people I am dealing with, but it is evidently one that is hungry for Friskies, but also needs a new screen door to look out of. Oh yea this person also decided to poke holes in my bird seed bags as well. But the jokes on you kid, I needed to fill my bird seed feeders anyway.

Yard Sale = Epic FAIL

Have you ever had one of those great ideas and have it turn out to be an epic fail? Well this weekend looks to be one of those days. My wife and I decided to get rid of our storage unit to save money for our soon to be baby and to save money. So I brought most of the stuff to the house earlier this week. But with all these boxes taking up space, what do we do? YARD SALE! So we decided to have one this weekend, starting today. So from 7-12 we had our first yard sale. We took everything out and set all up, bought signs and lemonade and sweet tea. Woke up early this morning and sat outside waiting for the droves of people to come our way. One hour goes by, ok that's fine it's real early, I'm sure they will come in a little bit. Two hours, maybe I should check the signs and see if they fell down. I go and check and see they are still up. Ok, finally in the third hour someone comes by. It's a neighborhood kid and he buys a M&M mug for $.50. Woohoo!!! our first sale. Now I knew this was the start of a good day. 12:00 comes by and I check to see how much we made. $6.50.... yep that's right $6.50. The dang signs cost more than that, not too mention not one person drank lemonade or sweet tea. Of course only 3 people came by anyways. EPIC FAIL! I know it was just the first day, but I figured I would make more than $1.30 per hour. Crap I think children in sweat shops make more than that. Oh well, just wondering if anyone else has had any similar stories.

Transformers!!!!

Just saw Transformers 2 at 12:01 this morning and thought it was awesome. Not much of a storyline, but action was jam packed. If you still play with your toys then go watch it.

Nail House

Never heard of the term 'nail house'? Me neither until I saw this post and then I knew exactly what nail houses were. If you have watched the Disney movie Up, then you will know. But anyways this is a pretty cool article on a few nail houses and how owners are unwilling to give up their homes to developers.

The Great Sunflower Project

Well this is my second year participating in the great sunflower project. This is an organization trying to revitalize the dwindling bee population. Evidently the bee population is declining and without bees or other pollinators we would see a drastic change in the food we eat in the future. So if you sign up with the Great Sunflower Project, they will send you a packet of sunflower seeds for you to plant, so that you can observe and report on the bees. I believe that for this year they are all out, but just remember their site and apply for next year. Anyways here are our plants in action.

Here they are when they first started out.

Here they are now. I probably have about 10 of them around this height, these are the tallest at about 3 feet. The others are around 1 to 2 feet.

Outside Faucet also = CRAPPY!!!

Well today I went outside in the morning planning on fixing a leaky outside faucet we have had for a couple years now. So I tried to tighten the top nut, which didn't work. So I tried to screw the top screw down further, that didn't work. So now my option was to take the whole faucet off and replace it with a new one. So I made the trip to Lowes but a replacement faucet and came back home. Sounds like a simple take off and replace situation. Everything was going well I put some tape around the thread and started screwing the faucet back on. About halfway through it got real tight, just like you would expect. So I got my handy dandy wrench and started tightening it some more. I got to the point where it was getting a bit too tight, when the one sound you didn't want to hear was heard.... snap! Why did I have to try to tighten this mother any further. Now I had to go back buy a replacement adapter that I snapped and also buy the pvc glue and cleaner because now I have to do plumbing work. So I have now put the faucet back together with the brand new faucet and pipe adapter, but now I am afraid to turn it on, thinking that I will have geiser if I do. Does anyone know the appropriate wait time for the pvc glue to dry? Anyways I hope it worked. Oh yea it is also raining as you can see in the last picture.

Textured Walls = Crappy

I love old house. Do you? I'm sure you do, but there is one thing I do hate about them.... previous owners. More specifically previous owners that quickly tried to redo the house in efforts of making a quick sale. And the one thing I hate that they do, is textured walls. And not only that but texturing everything in sight because they didn't have the fortitude to tape any of the trim or anything.

This is my upstairs hall, but basically every room was like this as well. I don't know what kind of great idea this was but I wish I could get a Delorean and go back in time and punch them in the face when they thought of this idea. Looks like long nights of scraping and sanding ahead for me.

I hate rain!

Well it has started to rain again and looks like it will be raining til at least next Tuesday. On top of that 2 leaks started again. One by the closed off back chimney and the other from the bathroom vent about 5 feet from it. Both leaks floow the chimney and vent pipe all the way to the first flow. Luckily no drywall is on the ceilings in those rooms right now, so there is no ceiling damage but I need to remedy this situation as soon as possible. my roofs are probably about 20 years old, but I have no budget to do a reroof so I will have to call someone to come out and fix the leaks.

Free Root Beer Float at Sonics (if you live by one)

I just got an email saying that there is free Root Beer Floats at all Sonics drive ins. But they only have it during 8pm to midnight tonight only. If you live by one I would say go get a free float! If you don't believe me go to Sonics and see for yourself.

Wife Heart NKOTB

If you haven't heard New Kids on the Block came back. I know I know, who? But this is my wife's most favorite musical group band singers ever. When she first heard they were coming back she almost fell over in joy, so of course I had to get her some concert tickets and not just regular tickets I got her some meet-n-greet ones. These are the tickets where you get to meet the group backstage before the concert and then you get a ticket somewhere in the first 10 rows. I got her meet n greet tickets to the Atlanta and Orlando shows, plus the out of the blue Tampa show she wanted to go 3 hours before it started. Now I was never a fan of the group so I didn't know what to expect, but boy was it crazy. For a bunch of old guys they were entertaining. I think there was about 99% women all of which were in their 30's - 40's. But the show was not that bad. In Atlanta we had the best seats front row dead center, so my wife went absolutely nuts. If I hadn't gone with her I don't know what would have happened. Anyways I just wanted to catch people up with things we have done since the long time off I had. There are more stories to come. Here are some pictures.

If you want to see more you can look at you flickr page

Finally finished with before and after shots.

Well it took me all day yesterday, but I finished putting on the 4th coat of poly last night in the wee mornings and when I woke up today it was all dry. I don't know how soon I can put furniture on the floors but I will wait a couple days just in case.

Before:

During:

After:

Baby Room Floor Refinishing, Priceless!

9" Disposable Roller Tray: $1.98

10" Waterborne Applicator: $7.46

Clear Varathane Water Based Polyurethane: $46.26

Finishing the shellacked floor for your new baby room...... Pricel..... $59.60

For everything else there's Lowes.

Well this is still only 2 coats so far. I have about 3 more to go, but putting the poly on is not that hard at all. With the applicator it goes on real smooth and dries very quickly.

Exterior before and after

I don't think I ever posted any pictures of my before and after for the exterior of the house. I actually finished this last year mostly by myself. I did need help with the very top rafter tails, but everything else I hand sanded, primed and painted.

Before: A couple months after we bought our house. It was painted half cream/pink and the other half just bare ass wood. It doesn't look too bad here, but the sides were mostly bare wood. Scraping and sanding this off took me near 2 years to complete.

During: Here is the fron mostly sanded to complete bare wood. As you can see the original color of the house was green, so we decided to keep it green, but a lighter green.



After: Here is the house tonight. I just went outside and quickly took a picture while it was getting dark. The house is back to it's green and it took me the whole summer last year to completely painting it. As I said before I did have to pay some one to go up top and paint the rafter tails. The colors I used were Benjamin Moore Saybrook Sage for the house, Antique White for the trim and Bryant Gold for the trim. It's a little hard to see the gold but it's there.

What host do you use for wordpress?

I am thinking of putting my blog on wordpress with my one domain name. I was wondering since a lot of you use wordpress, what host do you use for your blog? I know there is a free wordpress, but I want to be able to configure how the site looks. So I need a good host. I have heard about bluehost and gatorhost, but I don't know anyone that uses them.

What's wrong with houseblogs?

Is anyone else seeing Home Restoration's blog posts showing on the latest entries list 50 million times? I just thought that it was weird seeing that many posts for the last few days. I'm assuming there is some kind of glitch because when I view his posts they are all dated in the past. Just weird.

Sail Jacksonville!

This weekend May 29-31 is Sail Jacksonville. It's an event where replica tall ships come to our riverfront in downtown. The events include tours of the ships, live entertainment, a pirate battle and of course fireworks. If you are in the Jacksonville area, I encourage you to come out this weekend to enjoy the festivities. Oh, and it is free. (except the beer)

The Government wants to paint my roof white?

I just read where the government wants to paint roofs white in the US. Now I'm sure they only mean buildings with flat tarred roofs, but I couldn't stop to think what my house would look like with a white roof. Shoot I got some leaks going on, so if the government wants to paint my roof white for free then I am all for it. It was a good read and made me wonder if white roofs would make a big difference for the environment.

My pitiful office

While I was painting the baby room, I started thinking of all the great times I had in there.
This was of course, the room we slept in and ate and cooked for a few years. Now everything has moved out. Now I have a master bedroom (though still cluttered). I have a family room (which also is cluttered). But at the very least this room was my office, it had my computer and other gadgets in it, plus the dogs were always there.

Now this is what has happened to my office, yes that's right. It is in the upstairs hallway, right in front of the stairs. As you can see it looks pretty neat. Haha. Anyways I am typing here thinking, damn I downgraded, but it's all for the little dude.






I just wanted to show the awesome heating system we had at the time.

Shellacking is done

Well I finished shellacking the floors and they came out very nice. Even though the new wood and old wood don't match, I'm not going to cry over it. Now I have to wait to put down the poly, which I will probably do next weekend when I can get some from my local paint store.

Question: what brands of poly have people used? And how good were they?

Before:










After:

Shellacking the final upstairs bedroom

Well yesterday I was removing the flooring from the downstairs room and today I am shellacking the last upstairs room. I know I know, I never finish what I start, but I'm the type of renovator that likes to do a little here and a little there. I know there are some of you like that out there, I read your blogs. Anyways I finished sanding the floors with a palm sander, vacuumed and cleaned the area as good as possible and started to put shellac on the baby room floor. Did I saw baby room.... YES! I am going to be a daddy in 7-8 months. So I need to finish this room as fast as possible. I know I haven't blogged in like ages and now all of a sudden I am a soon to be dad and blogging away. I guess that is how it works sometimes. But here are some pictures of the shellac on wood.

You can kind of see in the picture that part of the floor has a different tone. That is where the previous owners put down new pine next to the old. As you can tell they don't match up very well, but I am going to see if a few more coats of shellac might blend it in better. Then after that I will poly over it. I know most poeple don't like poly, but my wife insists that it have poly on it this time. So whatever wife says, I do. While this waits to dry I will be making more shellac.

RAM in the rain

Can anyone guess what this is???

If someone said the Riverside Arts Market, then you are CORRECT!

Now what is so special about RAM?? Well it's just you same ole art and craft market, except that it is held every Saturday uner I-95. Yes I do mean the highway I-95. The space under this bridge has always been wasted space, but the city finally finshed paving and renovating the space. I always wonder what they could put in there but never imagined an art and craft market. Anyways this market has been a huge success and it only started about a month ago and it keeps getting better. Though it did rain while we were there, the bridge gives enough rain shedding to walk most of the area without getting wet. Check this out if your in Jacksonville on a Saturday morning.

Wierd find under the floors... and rot

I am in the process of redoing the old downstairs room, which was originally a kitchen. To start off I had to pull up all the old original floors because they were in such bad shape (alot of rot from a former leak I presume). Anyways while I ripped up the plywood to get to the original floor, I found what looks like old linoleum and newspaper bits. It was kind of weird to see the newspaper, the linoleum had a 1950's design on it.

You can see the small newspaper piece in the second photo, there wasn't much left of it, so no telling how old it is. I assume that it was put down and then the linoleum on top. Anyways it's pretty cool to see.

The other thing I found was lots of rot. Some of the floor boards were pretty wrotten, but most was still in useable shape. I will have to put some piece of plywood in its place and then put big sheets of plywood on top.