Back from the Biltmore

Well we went to North Carolina this past weekend. And the 8 hour drive from Florida to North Carolina was very refreshing, especially after the hard week we had before. We went to go visit the Biltmore and get some inspiration for our house. Needless to say all it did was get me depressed. My house, nor anyones house can compare to the Biltmore. I swear, they had one room where it was about 4 times the size of our house. I couldn't believe the size and detail that this house had. Was a very good visual of what houses were like back in the 1800's. Well I wanted to take pictures of the inside, but was told that I could not do that, so we only have pictures of the outside. But I did find some on the internet, so I will post those, even though that is not what it looked like when we went. Anyways the house seemed like it had 300 rooms. They had a room for everything, sleeping, bathroom, kitchen, canned food room, bottling room, planting room... you name it they had a room for it. This is one house I will put a bid on when I see it on the Asheville listing. Anyways here are our pictures:









Mrs. Vanderbilt's Room: Yes folks that is gold on the walls.



The Chandelier: This thing is 3 stories high!


The Dining Room

Yoda 1995 - 2005

Our dog Yoda died yesterday after going to the vet because of injuries. I just wanted to let everyone know and hope that everyone will pray for our dog. He was a good dog. We saved him from an animal shelter in Georgia after hearing that he was used in a puppy mill to produce puppies. The owner was caught with 50 dogs in her house, all in cages and all were used to make puppies. We were told of this and drove to Georgia to help any dog we could. When we got there, Yoda was the only one left. He was very old at about 10 years of age, but we adopted him anyway. In his 10 years at the puppy mill, he never ever saw grass and was never let out of his cage. He had many ailments, but was in decent shape. For the last 4 months we gave him the best life he could have. From playing in the parks in Springfield to taking walks down the street, he loved his last days. I know he was very thankful to us for giving him such a great life and I know that the last 4 months made up for the 10 years that he was couped up in a cage. Yoda is now in a better place and we will always miss him, but I know he is always with us.

We will always love you Yoda.

Yoda the dog

If you don't know we have 5 dogs - 4 chihuahua's and 1 lab-chow mix. Their names are Peanut, Yoda, Charlie, Tinkerbell and Chewy. Well today was a sad day, when I went home to walk my dogs I saw blood all over the ground. I was panicking and walked into the room to find Yoda witha cut on his stomach and his intestines hanging out. I was in shock and called Lita. We rushed him to the vet and they took him in. Lita cried and cried, and I just couldn't believe what had happened. He was ok in the morning and I took him out with everyone else and he was fine. We paid the $400 fee for surgery and the vet said that as long as nothing internal was damaged that he would sew him up and give him antibiotics and he should be ok.....

Well 2 hours past and the vet called me saying that there was no damage internally!!!! He had closed up his wounds and was asleep. Me and Lita were so happy, now we just have to watch over him and make sure that his wounds don't get infected. What a week we were having! Yesterday the dogs got poisoned when we fed them macadamia nuts and today Yoda almost got split open like a watermelon. I just can't wait for this week to end, I don't think I can take anymore dog related problems. Thank God he has gotten through his first test.

Down comes the kitchen

Yesterday we had some friends (Pete, Travis and his wife, Afrie) came over to help demolish our kitchen. This was our first time every knocking down a wall, or taking shelves out. I must say it was pretty fun! Well we didn't do too much knocking since our friends were enjoying themselves, but it was great watching the wall go down.


Here's what part of our kitchen looked like, because of FCC rules I won't show the rest.


Pic of the sink area while getting its beatdown.


This is the counter, well what's left of it. Actually it's sitting outside by the curb.


Travis ripping down a wall with his bare hands


Looky what we found behind our kitchen wall... Exterior siding. Looks like the PO didn't feel like tearing it down. That's good for us because now we can reuse the siding for some of our damaged boards outside.


Here I am acting like I'm doing work.


Here is the wall half way down


You can now see the next room from the kitchen. Joy!!!

Who ya gonna call... Linoleum Busters!

Here are more pics of me and Lee busting up linoleum:


Heres Lee using his 'Proto Gun' to blast the bugger away.


Here I am, not using a proton gun. I guess I haven't earned that yet.


Here's Lee again hard at work.


Here is the aftermath, only a little in the middle to do, but basically all done.


Here is what is left on some areas. Gummy black tar like substance, I hope it sands off easy.

Tomorrow: Demolition of our kitchen! And moving a wall back so that our kitchen will be way way bigger.... MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

The PO's POed me!

I guess you can tell that I am mad at what the previous owners did to the house. I decided to finally rip the pee soaked carpet in our living room yesterday. As I was in my Incredible Hulk stage, ripping at the carpet and foam pad, I was greeted by some mysterious padding.


It looks like it is some super linoleum.
It was very hard to get off, so I used my trusty new weapon... Lee, my next door neighbor.


Lee was a pro at attacking these new enemies of mine. We started at around 8 and worked our way all the way to 3 in the morning. It was a long and hard process of carefully prying them up but the end result was worth it. Hopefully I can rent the drum sander again and sand my way through the last bit of glue/tar like substance. If anyone has any idea what these are it would be great to know. One weird thing was that it wasn't one whole piece you had to strip.


It was actually individual square pieces with smaller square pieces in the middle. It must have been a back breaking experience putting this thing together. Too bad it was worse trying to take it off. The good thing is that we basically got all of it off, bad news is that I still have a dining room to go through as well. Oh and another bad thing I found, some of the floor was damaged by termites. So it looks like I will have to replace some pieces through out the floor. Guess I will have to salvage pieces from the back room .


This is what the floor looked like in the living room, nasty ole carpet with stains and all.

This was my first attempt at breaking through the piece of sh*t linoleum.

Giving the floors a shellacking!

I hope no one read the title and thought I was giving my floors a beating. Instead I am thinking about shellacking my floors. I have read a whole lot on this and have met some people that have actually used shellac on their floors. The advantages of shellac is: 1. it is faster drying, so you don't have to wait days for poly to dry and then turn around to see that their are dust particle or footprints in them, 2. it's easier to fix and I have 5 dogs and 3 cats, so I know I will be fixing a lot (don't want to sand my floors every yr), 3. it is non-toxic, so I don't have to worry about the zoo eating something off the floor or licking it.

Now the disadvantages: 1. It will mess up if alcohol is put on it, also if water is sitting on it (but from what I have read, water will not mess up the dewaxed version), 2. It easily damages (but of course it is easily fixed as well).

So from looking at these, I think that I can handle the disadvantages and I will try out the shellac. I will go with the garnet because I want dark floors. Hopefully I can get some from shellac.net in the near future, but I am told that they are out of garnet as of right now. If anyone has used shellac on their floors please comment on how you liked it. I would love to read more on this.

Peel Away part deaux

After using Peel Away on the siding and having sub-par results, I decided to use it on one of my upstairs windows sills and on the top of my columns (still don't know what it is called). This time though, I let it sit there for days, I had to make sure that none of it dried and after a few days I jump in and began to scrape. Well my observation was that it worked a lot better this time. The paper still didn't bring any paint up, but the paint was all gooey looking and came off pretty easily. You should see the amount and different color paints the previous PO's used. So now I am happy with my Peel Away (at first I thought I waste 30 some dollars on crap). So now I have used Peel Away, Soy Gel and common stripper from Home Depot. From my experience, Soy Gel seemed to work better and faster, plus it didn't nuke my hand like the other 2. I may have to try Peel Away 7, because that is non burning. So I guess that will be in another update later on. Something I did find, was that I hear that Peel Away 1 casuses the would to turn a darker color, but I didn't experience that at all. Maybe because you have to wait a couple days or something, but so far same colored wood. Anyways I will have to update pictures later. Now off to project #64373734224562 finishing the sanding of my floors, so that I can finally shellac the thing and not worry about it. You know people always say to do one project at a time, but I can't seem to stop jumping around. Hope I actually finish something soon. Well I did get the A/C and Heat done... of course I didn't do and still have to pay for that. Oh well, the house is calling.

More pictures of the sanded floor (and may the force be with you)

Here are some other pictures of the floors, for some reason they would not upload when I posted the first message. Anyways, I thought I had a before picture, but now I can't find it. Oh well, but it was a drastic change. Well here are the pictures:


Here is the master bedroom floors after all the hard work of sanding. As you can see there are some areas that the sander would not get to. Guess that's where the ole sweat work comes in handy.


The hallways leading to the master bedroom. I officially hate paint and gray painted substances.


Here I am inhaling massive amounts of lead paint and wood fibers. Kids: Say No To Lead!



Here is a little preview of what the floors looked like before. I had a better one but can't seem to find it anymore.


Here is what happened to me after inhaling all of the lead paint and wood fibers. For some reason I turned into Darth Vader and my pals turned into a bee, giraffe, and catwoman, I think.

Got bored, so I sanded my floors!

Well this past weekend I sanded the floors in the master bedroom and the ahllway upstairs. Lita had been bugging me for about 2 weeks to sand the hallway floors, because she didn't want the dogs eating anything off the floor. So on Saturday I decided to trek over to the local Home Depot and rent me a drum sander. Mind you I have never used a drum sander before and was very scared of it, but I did get to watch a neighbor of mine (Derek) use one and it didn't seem to hard. What I wanted to do is not take off too much because I wanted to keep it dark looking and old. So anyways, I went to drive to the Home Depot only to be greeted with massive traffic, with my luck I had forgotten it was the week of Florida-Georgia, the biggest outdoor cocktail party. But I still drudged forward and got there. First of all the drum sander is the heaviest thing I have ever lifted. I thought my 30-some inch tv was heavy, but this thing was like a friggin building. Well I got it home dragged it upstairs and started the bad boy up, I did my Our Fathers and set it down the first time. It went right to work and took off the paint and grime right off. I was happy! So after about 10 hours I had pretty much sanded the floors in the room and the hallway. The only bad thing was that the floors must not be too level, because there were areas where the sander didn't even touch it. I guess I will have to go over that with a hand sander and try to smooth it out. I'm not to worried though I want to give it that old home look, so if it's a little unlevel then oh well. Also I have decided to shellac the floor and see how that turns out, heard that it is easier to fix than poly (I have 5 dogs and 3 cats, I'm sure I will be fixing a lot). Well anyways here are the pictures over the weekend and maybe some other things as well:



Here is the hallway after the first pass


Here is the hallway after quite a few more.

Experiment with Peel Away

Well in the recent post, I wrote about buying a product called Peel Away. I wanted to try this out, because so many people raved about how well it worked. So yesterday I put a pretty thick coat on part of my siding and on the top part of my columns to see how well it would work. Just for everyone's knowledge, I bought Peal Away 1, it was much cheaper.

Anyways, after giving it 24 hrs to "cure" I decided to give it the big pull. Regardless of it's name you don't actually peal away the paint. When I tried pealing the paper, only the paper came off, so I had to help the paint off with the included scraper. The paint did come off, but not all the layers. I was left with a green paint layer that was real hard and did not wat to come off. I don't know if this if some kind of super hard paint or what, but it was near impossible trying to take it off. I had to hammer at it just to chip off the paint. So I decided to leave it there and take pictures instead.


This is what is left over after "peeling" off the paper, I don't know what it is, but it's hard to get off.


Here is the top part of my columns. I just hope the paint comes off on this one.


Oh I just added these pictures to show you our new heating system in our house. Sad isn't it? Good thing that we are getting our new system in tomorrow. Yippee!!!!

Long time no blog

Well it's been awhile since I last posted anything. And since then, not much has happened to the house. I live in Florida, so it has been raining and gloomy, now it's cold - so that just makes you want to be more lazy. But I do have some news. First I went to Dogtoberfest about 2 weekends ago, which is a Halloween party for dogs. There they had a costume contest, needless to say we represented our Sprinfield neighborhood well, we won 1st place!!!! Woohoo.

Now onto the house, I recently bought some Peel Away from Ebay and received it yesterday sitting in front of my house. I haven't tried it yet, but am planning to try it on my pillars later today. I will have to post pics of the before and after later. Also, I bought a grinder (and a heavy duty mask) to finish off the sanding of my exterior. After the painter, Enoch, debacle I decided I could do a better job. Even though I am afraid of heights I am willing to try it out. Hopefully I don't ruin all of my brain cells doing this! But I plan to do a little at a time and sand the parts that are already stripped. Then I can prime the exposed areas and slowly work my way up. Well I will post some more pictures as I progress, hopefully I can finish something by this weekend.

Cops and Robbers

While me and Lita were enjoying a good show of Prisonbreak, we looked out the window to see a upclose episode of the show. Looks like one of our nice neighbors were doing something that the police didn't like.



In case your wondering, I never found out what happened. Oh the mystery in Springfield.
Also, we found Charlie's real family and his named happened to be Koda.

Poop be gone

Well after plunging, dranoing, and snaking I finally gave up and called a plumber (actually I had to stop because I broke my snake). The plumber guy, A.J., came out and went to work. He snaked through the bathtub, but got his snake jammed on something. So he had to go outside and go through my drain pipe with his snakes bigger brother, his name is Big Mutha Fu**er. As so he says. Well he opened up the drain pipe and put that sucker in there and when he pulled it out, a big piece of tree root came out too. Turn on the bathtub and it drains like perfect! Yippee!!!! So now I have a unclogged drain and I have poo stains on my bathtub. Oh well.

Oh by the way, you know how people always say plumber crack, well they were right.

Here is A.J. using Big Mutha Fu**er

Here is the culprit root.

And here is plumber crack, maybe that's where those darn roots come from

Holy CRAP!!!!!

Holy CRAP!!!!!

When my boss told me that things always go wrong right after you buy a house, he was right. A few days ago, I noticed that the downstairs bathtub was backing up with water. So I took the plunger and stabbed it into the heart of the water a few times. That didn't seem to work. So I bought some Drano and poured it down the drain. All is well and the water receded. The next morning when I walked to the bathroom it was full of sludge like water! I couldn't believe it, again. So I left it as it was and went to work, when I came back home it was gone. I wasn't too sure what was going on, then it hit me, literally. My wife was upstairs and she was using the toilet, a few seconds after she flushed the toilet, it looked as if Old Faithful had come up in my bathroom. Now I knew what the problem was. I just didn't know exactly what it was. I knew that there must be a clog somewhere in my drain. Now the downstairs bathroom sits right next to the main sewer pipe, well I think that what it is. I took some more Drano type solutions and forced it down the drain. That didn't work. I plunged it 1,245,636 times and that didn't work. I bought a snake, auger, whatever it is and pushed that through the pipes, that didn't work either, but I could tell that there was something there. There was one point where the snake wouldn't go any farther and I couldn't seem to screw it through. When I pulled the snake back out I saw some roots on it, so it seems that tree roots have invaded my pipes. ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH! What to do what to do. I just hope that my pipes aren't totally screwed over. I don't have that kind of money to put in new sewer lines. I guess after all that hard work I will have to try and call a pro, boy do I hate having to do that. Of course I could always rent a power auger from Home Depot. Well I guess you will have to wait and see. If anyone has sugguestions please leave me a message. I need help. Holy Crap, literally.

Painter Debacle!

Well by now I should have a gleaming newly painted house with a horrendous interior, but instead I have a horrendous interior and horrendous exterior to the nth degree. The story goes... my painter Enoch was suppose to strip and paint my house for an incredible deal of $5,000.00 and he said he would do it in a months time, the deal also included us paying him $1,000.00 for the first 2 weeks and then he would receive the remaining amount after the work was completed. The first two weeks were good he came on time and worked and made some progress on the stripping. Then came week 3, where he started not showing up and the work looked to remain the same. Remind you this was like 1 month ago since he last worked. We finally had a talk with him, since it was so hard getting in touch with him, and decided that my dog would do a better job at stripping and painting then he would.

Well now my house is half stripped and needs much attention. I only hope that I can continue with what is left and finish the job soon. Too bad I live in FLORIDA!!! Freakin A!!!! Well I guess I will have to wait til winter, where it gets to about 80 degrees. Haha. Other than that my wife has started on her garden, which I can't say is much, but at least she's trying and I am still working on our master bedroom. Seems to me like I have been stuck on 40% for 3 yrs, I need to start steppin'. Oh well at least I am having fun and finally have my first home... ever.

We made it!!!!

Well this morning when I woke up, we were both alive, no ghosts, robbers or murderers. So we made it past our first night!!!! Well the neighborhood isn't that bad, but we were concerned a little. I guess it helps when you have a big dog in the house and soon we will pick up the rest of our dogs and have a whole house security system. Our job today is to finish picking everything up and setting up our mock room. After that we will start finishing our master bedroom. But this post was to alert everyone that we were alive.

Our first night!

Well we finally moved everything in today, except the dogs and cats. And what a surprise we got a new dog as well. He is a black lab and was roaming the streets, very tame and nice. He must have had a previous owner because he knew the commands 'come' and 'sit', but looks to have been out on the streets for awhile, because he had no tag and was so hungry (he practically ate a whole bag of cat food). Anyways here are a couple pictures of our mock room while we are still working on our master bedroom. Now we can put more time into our home. Hope this helps our renovations a lot quicker.

And another note, our painting is on hiatus as of right now, some issues with the workers and money plus a little bit of reliability issues.

Anyways here are the pictures, we named the new dog Charlie, hes a great black lab (I think thats what he is, hes sleeping in this picture since it's 1:40 in the morning)

Moving day is near!

Well last weekend Lita and I rented a Budget truck (U-Haul sucks!) and moved everything heavy and big into the house. It was a real big task, but we had our downstairs neighbor help us. The real news is that this weekend we will have finally moved everything into the house and will be our first night there. What to expect? I don't know, maybe some ghosts, dirty clothes, the smell of an old house, I'm not sure but we're very excited, well besides the ghost thing. We still got a long ways before our house is even close to being complete, but we're gonna take it slow. Hopefully by winter we can have the Master bedroom and finally have AC/Heat done. Until then we will be sleeping in raggedy room with sanded floors and no AC or heating. Hope the dogs won't mind. Well wish us luck cause I know we will need it.

Some pictures uploaded

:Here is a picture of the floors I have been sanding with a belt sander (It is actually a lot more better now)


:Here is me trying to take an early swim in our new clawfoot tub we bought for $100


:This is Lita taking a pose next to her new favorite toy


:This is the floor nearest the door, seems like it is a different type of wood, but I don't know what kind it is. The other wood is the picture underneath


:Here is the other type of wood, which I believe is pine. This one is way lighter than the other wood and a lot less character, but I don't care. That's what makes my house unique.

Will update more pictures when I can. Have fun with these!