farewell, old friend.

We finally moved the two heaviest things in the house - the filing cabinet and the fridge that has our landlord's face printed on it (?!) - to the basement.





I can't say anything nice about the filing cabinet, but the trusty mini-fridge did a bang-up job keeping our Red Bulls and beers cold when we were knocking out walls a couple months ago. Even if it did have that black sludge in the bottom of it.

updates

Apologies for the long delay, but we've hit a couple snags. It's been a bad month.

We thought basement flooding problems would be solved with a three foot wide, fifteen foot long, three and a half foot deep trench in the studio. Sump pump was installed and secured and cemented over. It worked. The groundwater is now redirected through the foundation wall and into the empty field next door.

Now that that's out of the way, the cursed walls of Renard continued to emit moisture - only this time through the sewer and the living room ceiling. It would seem that the upstairs hot water heater has been spewing water, and the new upstairs tenants didn't stem the flow or call the landlord. I guess they didn't know it was such a dire situation. So imagine Brad's surprise this morning to come upstairs to see a lovely waterfall cascading down the living room wall.

It's a long story, but many holes were drilled to relieve the pressure of 70 gallons of water that have all this time been hanging out on top of the drywall. Lovely.

So the studio is dry... but the sewer grate spews all sorts of horror every time the water is used upstairs.

A chain of highly improbably vehicular incidents has left us minus one car and plus hundreds of dollars in parking ticket/boot fees, money that was supposed to be spent finishing the kitchen.

The landlord's younger family members are apparently still under the impression that our house is their playground, and have taken to breaking into the basement and screaming and knocking things over.

Spiders. We have spiders.

The trash-pickers and vagrants of this neighborhood are causing problems with the alley, ignoring the sign painted on our back door, and conducting all sorts of fascinating business just inches from bedroom #1.

There's nothing positive to say lately.

Tribute to the Beast

This is the Beast, a hole in the kitchen floor that goes straight to the basement. We're eventually patching it from beneath so we can finish laying down the hardibacker and start tiling.  But can you believe this thing?

Disasters and discoveries

I had to check the date of my last entry twice. I feel like I just wrote yesterday but I guess it's been a week already. I don't even know where to begin with the updates. I guess I'll start with the bathroom.

We're all geeked on Hardibacker. Have you seen this stuff? We heard about it when we were just about tapped for ideas on the floor which is, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago, a patchwork of cracked cement, linoleum, cracked tile with more tile showing underneath, paint-stained and rotting wood, duct-taped planks (?!) and holes that lead straight through to the basement. At first we thought plywood would do the trick, but research led us to more questions and frustration. Plywood apparently does nothing for unlevel surfaces and is not guaranteed to settle evenly. Hardibacker is risky, tough to cut (heavy) and a bit expensive, but we've heard from multiple sources that it's going to save our necks. 
http://www.onlinetips.org/hardibacker-tile-installation

Installation went pretty well.

We had to take out the toilet to cut the last piece. Tossed the old wax ring once it was determined to be older than all of us combined - gross. After the toilet was taken out and parked in the hallway, we tore out some of the rotting nastiness of the back wall. We found old wood slats for plaster and a ton of mold. It was a disheartening find to say the least. Every day we demo, we find even more unpleasant surprises. We've decided to put up drywall in place of the old wall. We wanted to put up some more Hardibacker and just tile the whole bathroom for the purposes of easy cleaning, except hardibacker isn't really a weight-bearing material. So the idea was scrapped. 

We let the hardibacker set overnight. The next day, Sunday, was all about tiling.

We had a couple minor incidents of tile slippage, but not much else to speak of. And many of the final tiles were put down in the dark. We shut off a circuit due to some shady wiring we keep finding more of. We wanted to grout today, but couldn't because it rained. This may seem like a funny statement, but if you write it with heavy heart over the fact that the search for aforementioned shady wiring left a slight open strip in the ceiling that made way for a roof leak to spill freely onto your new tiling job, it's not quite so amusing.  

Supposedly, the back roof was replaced a few years ago for an astronomical amount of money. So we shouldn't have rain pooling and leaking into the house, but we do. And to top it all off, our search for the source of the leak was hampered slightly by a metric ton of proof that the upstairs resident has decided to let her dogs use the roof as a bathroom... again. Even after promising to stop. We need to work on the gutters and hopefully get a downspout aimed at an open field next to the building. And we need a five-inch cap to cover an old heating vent. That should take care of it... we hope.

Monday was spent waiting for the gas man to come check our meter and do a little inspection. He informed us that our water heater is spewing water everywhere and is costing us money. We were aware of this and just sort of blinked in response. The phrase "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" comes to mind. Water heater on the fritz? Cool. Maybe we'll get to it after we know the bathroom ceiling won't collapse and Jeremiah's done pulling out all the 60-year-old wiring that threatens to, y'know, burn us all to death in our sleep. 

The internet guy came on Monday afternoon too. Not to borrow from "Money Pit" again, but the look on the poor installation guy's face was priceless when he walked into Renard. There was a sink and toilet in the hallway, tools and hardware scattered through the work area, tile debris and dust on every square inch of the living room, a crazed chihuahua running laps around the kitchen, and junk everywhere. I was barefoot, drinking coffee and watching "Maury," now mostly oblivious to our quaint little disaster area. I half expected him to make a crack about bomb testing. But he quietly went about his work and left. The internet still doesn't work. Our account has been open for two weeks and we've had nothing resembling a connection. AT&T has bungled this operation from day one. They've fought us on every step of the way, be it through delays, outright lies, lack of communication, general ineptitude, you name it. We've spent many hours on the phone with AT&T and only tonight discovered that (surprise) it's a wiring problem on our end.

Brad has finally been able to start work on his room. This is going to be the bachelor pad to end all bachelor pads, people. He moved a drafting table and a swanky-looking fish tank setup down there before anything else and has said he's going with plexiglass walls, so I'm pretty excited to see how it'll turn out. With few space constraints, he's breaking ground on a big expanse of the basement. They started building today. But first they had to power wash everything and start painting over years of bad graffiti. 

 

The studio saga is ongoing. Jeremiah has determined that the studio floor is just shy of a two-inch thick slab of cement, and then dirt. This explains the mold and perpectual wetness. We aim to lay cement this week. 1200 pounds of it. The landlord is going to brick up some of the walls and then we can get cracking. But first, he'll have to pull out all the dirt someone cleverly used as insulation. This move was almost as creative as the cardboard crammed in the ceiling that Brad found when he was priming the basement walls.

Jeremiah found a bag of rat poison in the basement. It was unopened and the receipt placed the purchase to way back in 2000, but at least we know there is some here. We'll have to figure out a way to clean up any more that's probably in the house.

And it would seem that the one problem that's been plaguing us since the day we found the space has finally been solved - the arrangement of the kitchen. The major appliances are in place and three of our four cabinets were bought today and over the weekend. We found an arrangement that fits. We're drawing up plans for an island (that Brad's kickass dad is going to help us with). By the end of this week we aim to stain the cabinets, find a sink, lay down hardibacker and tile, hook up wiring and outlets to the appliances, and maybe even build a wall between the kitchen and living room. 

It never ends. But at least now it's happening quickly.

Progress, regress, progress: 3 steps forward, 1 step back

We first looked at the space around Valentine's Day.  Less than a month and a half later, progress is finally starting to show (pics to come).

Both bedrooms were primed fully, one bedroom has been painted with bedroom #1 getting its first coat of paint last night.  Bedroom #2 has had some IKEA TUNDRA laminate flooring installed (about 90% complete).  With paint and a floor, it actually looks liveable and serene.

The bathroom plumbers brought a shower pan in (48" unit), and started to move the pedestal sink over.  We're hoping for a working sink and shower by week's end, which leaves us the gritty work of laying down tile to complete it.  We were hoping for a slightly larger shower unit, but every plumber we talked to said avoid the 60" models for fear of cracking them.  Weird how decent plumbers will actually say no to more money if they know things won't work well.

The basement looks great -- all the walls and studs were removed, most of the sewage concerns have been handled by the same plumbers, and powerwashing of the walls continues slowly to remove decades of grime, mold, mildew, and who knows what else.  We found a few minor basement floor water spots where water is coming up from underground.  We're planning on patches these moisture areas ASAP so we can start working out of the space come May 1st.

The plumbers have run the kitchen faucet lines awaiting my purchase of a sink and faucet.  That'll be the last "first step" stage completion for a almost-liveable work-live space: bedrooms, bathroom, kitchen.  We're still unsure what we're doing with the kitchen space (cabinets and appliances aren't cheap), but once we have the bedrooms and bathrooms done, we'll knock the kitchen out in a matter of a week or so.

Now that we're working during the day, the south-facing bedroom sunlight is amazing.  With bedrooms big enough to handle a bed, a couch and work desks for all, we're excited to utilize the space for all our needs: business, lounging and entertainment.  Our hope is to have a grand opening party for friends and family around the second week of June.

Today I'm battling with Comcast to get Internet service installed, but we keep running into problems.  They're saying it's a commercial space (about 3 times as expensive to run Internet to), we're saying it's a live space.  More details to come in a week after their business department reliquishes the space to their residential department.

The printshop business acquired its first two customers last week, and we're hoping to get our first orders this week.  Much excitement there.

everybody likes a picture post.

Just a few pictures Michelle took over the past couple of weeks, since I've fallen majorly behind on documenting everything.

Bathroom wall has been knocked out to make way for the shower. Step two was smashing all the tile out.

Hotel Renard hot springs. Just kidding, it's one of two surprise open-sewage pits in the basement.

I wasn't joking about the mold.

Power-washing seems to do the trick, though.

This will be Brad's room.. some day... eventually..

25,000 hours of priming

also known as "The dark days of which we do not speak."