The Veranda/ Art & Music Studio

6/25/2005-

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6/25/2005      We've decided to try to restore the existing windows rather than replace them.  They all have to have their window putty replaced and the counter weights in the walls reattached.  The rope has long ago rotted away.  The glass is the original wavy kind called 'historic' glass when it's found in restoration catalogues.  This room was once a porch where people could sit and watch the sun set over the mountains so we'd like to keep the effect intact if at all possible.
    As a matter of fact, this room is where the original owner was found in a chair after she died.  My understanding is that she used to sit in there and I guess she just passed away peacefully one evening.  Not a bad way to go, I suppose.
7/14/2005      8:30am:  The ceiling was already falling down when we bought the place so it wasn't that difficult to remove a lot of what remained.  I had to do this to get at the floor of the bathroom directly above it.  Filthy work.  The dust is overwhelming at times and whatever that stuff they used to insulate the walls with is again falling out all over the place and requires constant clean up.  I have to use a respirator mask when I'm around it and run various air cleaning devices.
     2:20pm: Man, I cut just one wire and the entire ceiling caved in!  A century of dust and dirt all came down on me at once and created a mushroom cloud of filth, which billowed to the door leading into the dining room but then stopped before it got any further out of control. It took me two hours to clean it all up with the shop vac and four contractor bags.
10/16/2007        The veranda is the next project.  This is where Margaret Foster was found back in the early 1970's. the last owner of the house who is remembered fondly by all the remaining neighbors.  The kids loved her because she would gather them up and buy them ice cream despite the fact that I don't think she made very much money.  She wrote Hallmark Greeting Cards for a living.
    She had no relatives that I know of, only a friend of her deceased daughter.  Later, when the friend lost the house and moved on, there was no longer anyone to remember Margaret at all, only fading recollections of a nice old woman who once lived here.  Most of the people I've spoken to don't even recall her name and simply refer to her as 'the old lady'.
    I'm going to put great care into each movement as I restore this area.  Even though it will no longer be a sitting area  to watch the sun as it sets over the Appalachian Mountains, it was her spot.  I want to make it nice in honor of her memory.
    Maybe I'll put a comfortable chair out there after all,  just for posterity's sake.
    In the meantime, back to business!  The room has that horrible blow-in insulation all over the place from when I renovated the bathroom above and I've been slowly vacuuming it all up so that I don't end up breathing the stuff.  The game plan is to move the washer and dryer to the other end so no one has to look at them from the dining room area.
    I'll be building a custom closet where they've been standing for these past (almost) four years, which will give us some much needed storage room and a place to hang our coats.  
    The floor will all have to be leveled as it is still slanted from when it was an outdoor porch.
    The walls will all have to be taken out and insulated before replacing the plaster with drywall.  Fortunately, this is where we've had all of our dry wall stored since the day we bought it so there won't be too much effort put out in that part of the plan.
     The windows are very old and partially rotted, but they have that neat wavy glass in them and I'm going to do my utmost best to salvage them.
     Here we go again!
10/25/2007     It's a cold, wet day so I spent most of it ripping out old dry wall and collecting that horrible blown-in insulation in bags and throwing it outdoors.  It takes longer to do a demo job in small sections but when a room is as narrow as this one it's a good idea to work in as clean an environment as possible.
10/29/2007      Still removing old dry wall and insulation.  One useful bit of info is that to remove and bag up this junk it takes one bag for each 3-foot by 18" section if the bag is to be something a human being can actually lift.  The insulation material in an area like this pretty much fills the bag and then the dry wall is just heavy enough to pack it down a little and not be too heavy.
     While this may seem like trivial information to some, let's look at it this way:  I've done only one third of the veranda so far and have 18 bags that I now need to take to the dump.  When you're doing cost projections it's important to document such things.
11/8/2007    Spent most of the day sealing up cracks and crevices with foam, stapling Tyvek into the wall and hanging insulation.  Lost of fun, let me tell ya!
12/12/2007     Traveling to North Carolina and assorted other interruptions have greatly slowed down the progress on this room.  The new leveled floor is now 2/3rds in so the next step will be configuring the appliances.
12/17/2007    The veranda and I are no longer on speaking terms.  I battled with it all day and the old studs all needed added pieces of 2X4 just to line the dry wall up, yet it still had all sorts of peaks and valleys.  That caused a lot of damage when the screws went in and nothing seemed to go right.  Worse, the sheets aren't quite flush so that will mean hours of adding extra joint compound and sanding.
1/1/2010    I am finally returning to the veranda to do battle with it, and I will win.  Since my last entry the world has changed, and not in a good way.  A very poor choice for president was elected last year, one who has utterly destroyed our economy. perpetuated the war in the Middle East, and now he is preparing to completely wreck health care in our country.  Unemployment is at a 50-year high, and money is so tight that our project has practically ground to a complete halt.
     Nevertheless, I have lots of leftover materials to tackle this particular room, and it is doable despite our current state of financial destitution.  We took this on to make sure a piece of America is restored, and it is in that spirit that we'll make this happen one way or the other.
     In other words, here goes nothing.
     At the moment, the veranda is filled from top to bottom with all sorts of supplies, and it's completely unworkable.  This means that I'll have to drag all of it out into the adjoining dining room and library for a while.  Beth never cares for having the finished rooms upset in this way, but it has to be done or the veranda will forever be a junk room, and not the wonderful studio area we've envisioned.
1/4/2010     As tight as our money is these days we certainly don't need new problems added on top of what little we have.  Naturally, everything goes wrong at times like these, so life is giving us the usual kick in the nuts that it has always offered. It just hurts more now, and the problems are affecting the progress on this area of the house in regard to both time and money.
    First, there's our car.  We have almost no brakes left, and one of the tires is making a slapping sound due to the belts which have worn away so badly that the metal is showing, and a long strip is dangling off the tread.  It should blow at any minute, but we have no choice but to drive it that way into Frederick.  If this is the final passage into this web site, you'll now know why.
     On top of that, our dryer died yesterday.  Right now the veranda is the laundry room, so writing about it here is actually very appropriate.  I have not worked on a dryer since 1972 when at 12 years of age I crawled behind my mother's dryer, disconnected the vent tubing and proceeded to get electrocuted.  I was home alone, so it's a good thing that I got off as lightly as I did because the initial 240 volt shock caused my hand to wrap around whatever the hell I was touching, and I couldn't let go.  I probably wasn't sitting there vibrating like a tuning fork for as long as I remember it, but I'd say 15 seconds wouldn't be a stretch.  I recall thinking that if I didn't force myself to push away from the dryer I might die, so I did.  I remember a crackling sound, and then landing on my butt about four feet away.  A concrete wall stopped me from going any further.
     So, yesterday I stood there looking at the dryer in our house, and thought, "I need to be very careful.  I'm old.  This could kill me."
     Meanwhile, Beth is going about her business not knowing if I could fix it or not, but worried that if I failed we would have to start frequenting the local launder mat.  Launder mats are one of those self-perpetuating evils of life in that they eat into the budgeting needed to actually buy a new appliance that will halt the launder mat syndrome itself.  Also, they suck.
     Using the Internet, I was able to get all sorts of good information on how I might locate the problem by simply bypassing all sorts of features until I was able to figure out that it was the "heat sensor" that had failed.  Our exhaust tube had filled up with so much crap and moisture that it had stopped letting out air, and had backed up to the point where the sensor had decided to break.  Fortunately, I was able to order a new one for only $29 with shipping, and on Wednesday I'll see if I can actually install it.
     Seriously, if you saw our donation button on the main page, please don't ever think that donating a dollar won't do anything.  It will.  We know there are thousands of people who read this "blog," and have been doing so for years.  Even a quarter would help if all of you did even that much.  I hate begging, but these are desperate times.
1/13/2010      Okay, I finally started the project today.  Of course, the first thing I had to do was to get everything that had piled up in there out so I have some swinging room.  This meant first clearing out the dining room so that the supplies had a place to go.  I also christened the room by losing control of a sheet of drywall, and letting it go right through a window. That old wavy historic glass breaks very easily. 
    The next step was to put Beth's dining room table in the library. carefully cover it with bath towels, and then utilize it as an alternative storage table for all of the small items.  You'd think that Beth would object to this, but I found a good trick.  The last time I tried this she said, "No, I'm not going to have clutter all over the place again."  
     I thought this over, and described a really bad plan for how I wanted to arrange things.  Of course, Beth hated my plan.
     I then told her the real plan, and since it sounded much better?  No problem.  Go for it! It's not what you say, or how you say it.  It's the sneaky way you go about it that really counts.
     Another interesting part of the project set up was all the discoveries I made while excavating the veranda after, what?  Two years?  Not only did I find some tools I thought were long gone, I even found decorations we'd purchased for the veranda that we'd both completely forgotten about such as high-end brass register covers, and a little cherub shelf that I believe was supposed to go over the door.  I'm not exactly sure anymore.
     Rogue and Sasha found the whole process very interesting, and ate some drywall to help me. By the time I noticed that they had things in their mouths they had sucked on them until the drywall chunks looked like smooth white cakes, and since I had no idea what they could be, my mind instantly assumed the little morons had discovered some long-forgotten D-con mouse or ant poison.  I dropped to my knees in worry, and started checking their vital signs, smelling their breath for an almond scent (I'd seen this in movies), and checking their heartbeats.  They loved all the attention they were getting, and lay very still, which only worried me even more, so I tasted the cakes.  Tasteless.  Odorless.  It had to be poison!
     I then surmised that I was being a complete idiot, and went back to working on the room while they continued stealing my things, and generally getting in my way.
     Beth collects old enamel top 1950's cabinets, and she's already talking about where she wants them.  They'll never fit, but what the hell, right?  If Beth's happy, I'm happy.  I'll figure out something.
     Money-wise, things still completely suck.  My budget is a big fat zero until we get our tax refund checks next month.  This also means I can't work because I can't advertise.  If I can't advertise, I can't find customers.  The health insurance business is a terrible industry.
1/14/2010       6:51 am- I just woke up because the pups, with their combined weight of 170 pounds, jumped on my head thus rescuing me from a subconscious affair I was about to have with Courtney Cox.  Gee, thanks, guys!  (I have to stop glancing at old episodes of "Friends.")  The last thing I wanted was to experience impure thoughts about another woman.
     Even Courtney Cox.
     Even Courtney Cox the way she looked in that one season where she was unbelievably beautiful.
     Even Courtney Cox, who happened to be fully naked in my dream, and had just said to me, "Anything you want", as Rogue was attempting to shove his tongue in my mouth.
     There was no coffee waiting for me downstairs (no surprise there), so I checked on our online Ebay store, The Gabled Attic, and was happy to see that we've made about $250 since Sunday night when I posted around 75 items onto auctions.  This is a good thing at many levels.  We really needed to make some money, and we also needed to get rid of some things around the house as we were starting to look like an antiques store.  The auctions will end in four days, so that's money in the bank, and we still have the last-minute bidding frenzies coming this Sunday.  If we make $500 we can buy enough heating oil to last for three weeks to a month!  And if we sell more than that, we can buy food, too.  Last night I said to Beth, "I really miss food sometimes", but Beth said I was just being a sentimental old fool as she gently patted my knee, closed her eyes and went into a coma.
     Today will be a lot of fun.  My goal is to pull the washing machine out of the way, finish the exterior wall so that the great outdoors stays outdoors, and perhaps finish ripping out the rest of the interior walls.  If I get lucky I may also level off the rest of the floor, too.  Beth commented that the room is a lot smaller than she remembered, but I think it will be perfect for my artistic needs and wants.  I have a vision of myself toiling away in my studio, producing great works of art and maybe even incorporating my music and writing into that room, too.  That would be my ideal situation!  Some guys dream of having a "man cave" full of sports crap, but not me.  I want to paint!  I want to record!  I want to write! And I am most surely going to eventually become "that crazy old bastard up on the hill."
1/16/2010      It's a Saturday, so that means more work.  When renovating, Saturdays mean nothing when compared to other days of the week.
     Yesterday was a good one in that I was able to hang the last of the exterior insulation, and start the floor leveling process.  There's a 3-3/4" difference across the floor, so walking on the already-leveled areas feels weird after so many years.  I( can't w3ait until the entire room has the same weird feeling.  I don't like the off-center way I feel when I walk in a lopsided room, especially one with an all glass wall overlooking a steep cliff.  It feels like being on the Titanic in it's final moments.  Once it's level it will be more of a nice perch overlooking the town below.  I suppose the townies will also be able to look up at us when the trees are bare of leaves, and see me painting as my easel will be on the wall.
     "There he goes again, that painter feller.  Wonder what the hell he's paintin' now."
     Beth has decided that this room will be white, which is very strange for color addicts such as ourselves, but using a color might affect my artwork, so I quickly agreed with her logic.
     Two things worth noting here:
     1)  Ran out of insulation, so I had to spend $48 that we didn't have in our budget.  Ouch.
     2) Had to disconnect the dryer's power source.  There were two breakers marked "dryer", and I shut down both.  Well, I guess there's a third that is now flipped because as I was taking the plug apart, 240 volts bit into my screw driver melting the wires to the metal.  It scared the hell out of me.  I really need to map out the wiring one of these days.  I'm not sure if I'd even survive a 240 volt shock in my condition.  I probably would, but since I'm a male my nature is to seek out sympathy when injured or sick.
1/17/2010      10:20 pm, and I'm bored out of my freaking mind!
     The floor is finished, at least the leveling portion of the job.  Beth is leaning toward a light, stone-textured tile, and the job will run about $225 in materials.  I suppose that it's a good choice in that it cleans up easily, and I'm a bit of a pig when I paint.  I tend to take shortcuts when I get a bad case of painting fever, and that can mean anything from leaving the caps off of paint tubes to leaving dirty brushes precariously balanced where they can easily fall on the floor.  Carpet is definitely not an option with me around.
     If I could have it all, I'd put this computer in there, too.  My sounds studio is a computer program called Sonar, and with the way my fickle brain works, it would be great to be able to have it all in one area so that I could effortlessly bounce from music to writing to painting without having to do much more than spin in my chair.
     I guess I'll get back in there despite the hour.  It's a terrible mess, and it will be much nicer to start work tomorrow in a clean room.  I really hate late night cleanings.
1/18/2010      "Learned a ton off your blog, hope this helps."
     That was the note attached to our very first donation from a reader all the way up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in Canada.  Jack paid for three square feet of the tiles we're saving for, and his generosity is a great reflection of the kind of people who do truly nice things.  Of the many hundreds (thousands?) of people who cruise our site, he's a great example of the type of person who puts out real effort instead of just saying, "Someone else will do it."
     I really can't say how touched we are by his effort.  Just a few clicks, and he made our day!
     And now, back to the regular business...
     This morning will be filled with putting up the drywall at the end of the room where a floor-to-ceiling closet will one day exist.  For now, it will still house our washer and dryer, and we can't wait to get them back into place again for obvious reasons.  We have laundry piling up all over the place, and Rogue must have rolled in groundhog droppings again.  The result was a nauseating stench from his rolling on his comforter, which is now outdoors while it waits to be washed.
     Clean clothes!  What a luxury that will be!  I have a tendency to shower after I've done all my dirty work for the day, so the townspeople have been getting a dose of me in very bad states of filth.  Imagine a 50 year-old guy covered with dust, his hair unruly and probably not smelling all that nice, walking into the local post office or convenience store.  "Mentally ill" will probably never be a fashion statement that will catch on, trust me on this.  The only positive side of this is that I get really fast service as people try to get me out as quickly as possible.  The temptation to act crazy is always there, and it could only be made better if I were to shower, put on a suit, and return to the establishment with a photograph of my filthy self so that I could ask the clerks, "Excuse me, but this is my brother.  Have you seen him?  He broke out of his cage last night, and he's extremely dangerous.  If he returns, just try to be very nice to him.  He rarely attacks."
    Guess I'd best be moving.
    7:42 pm... Okay, if I can teach anyone anything about this restoration jazz, it's this: REMOVE ALL NAILS FROM THE EXISTING STUDS BEFORE HANGING NEW DRY WALL!!!  It should be overly obvious, but I'll be damned if I didn't do it.  I thought the entire room was nail free, but nooooo, I had to be overly confident, and it cost me.  I spent God only knows how much time measuring and mapping out a very intricately-cut section.  It included a light switch, an outlet, a special cut to get around a pipe, and an L-shaped cut to get over a door.  I finally had it just right, so I started popping it into place, and CRACK!  I lost the part that went over the door, and that part is absolutely critical.  (Click here to see why if you're a newbie handy person.  You'll be glad you did.)  Anyway, I'd missed not one, but two old square nails like the kind they show horses with.  Oh, well.
1/24/2010      Busy week!  The Veranda photo page tells the tale, and the work is going exceptionally well with terrific results.  It's hard to believe that we made it through this far with only two trips to the home improvement store to get a gallon of paint.  We also hit Habitat for Humanity where we were pricing floor options.  Habitat for Humanity shops are great!  A lot of their stock is brand new, and is sold at half price.  Our first choice was ceramic tile, but then Beth decided that wood might be easier.  
     By a stroke of extreme luck, we found several cases of cork flooring for only $30 a case!  Cork is a gorgeous flooring material, and not an option we normally would have picked because of its high price tag.
     The second trip to Home Depot was made tonight.  We picked up the framework for the suspended ceiling.  Since we already has the tiles the trip was a very inexpensive one.  The only problem we ran into was that the wall supports come in 12' lengths, and the Veranda is 13' long.  My solution is a pretty cool one.  I plan to shorten the ceiling by building a permanent book case that will start at the ceiling, and come down just low enough to hold one rack of art books.  This will also free up space on the shelves I built in the library so they they don't look so overcrowded.  Clever, no?
1/25/2010      It's a horribly wet, rainy day.  I have so much shipping to do with our Ebay business that no work can be done on the Veranda until much later today, but business is business.  If I don't respect my customers I'll blow my 100% satisfaction rating, and that would be a very bad thing.
     We watched the HDTV show, "Holmes on Homes" last night.  This particular episode had him building a bar in some fortunate couple's basement, and the results were nothing short of spectacular.  We like this show because it doesn't send out the wrong message of "anyone with a hammer can do this."  It instead says that competent craftspeople are always necessary to do a job correctly, and that's a very responsible message indeed.  Kudos to Mr. Holmes for that.
     The reason I mention this is the suspended ceiling he put in.  Beth admired the tiles he chose, and the thought occurred to me that I'd completely forgotten what kind we'd purchased.  It's been a very long time, and they'd been stashed in their unopened containers in the junked-up Veranda for a couple of years.  This morning I opened them up, and what do you know? They are the exact tiles that Mr. Holmes chose!  This delighted Beth to no end, and I was happy because it meant not hearing her say that she wished we'd bought something else.  Frankly, I was also glad because I'll be spending quite a bt of time in there, and the nicer it looks, the better.
     I just wish I had Holmes's crew here.  I'd give anything to have them do the Master Bathroom.  Oh, well.
1/26/2010      Not a very productive day in regard to doing, but a very good one in terms of learning.  I put in all of the necessary wires for suspending the ceiling frame, and then ran the center tiles.  Then came the cutting and trimming of the side pieces.  Each one needs to first be cut down to width.  Then the convex shaped need to be trimmed down so that they lay flat on the edge molding.  The cool thing that I discovered through trial and error was to use the spare T molding as both straight edges and jigs for cutting.  It's very late, and I'm extremely tired so the rest of the job will have to wait until morning, but I can't see any reason the ceiling can't be finished by tomorrow for sure.
     Besides, we're in another one of those weeks where money is tight, so what else is there to do?
1/30/2010      I had to pack and ship 17 packages of things I sold on Ebay today.  You'd think that nothing would have been done after all that, but the weather has turned cold again (9° at the moment), which meant drafts all over the place.  I spent a few hours running about with special insulation tape, and a few cans of Great Stuff Gap Sealant, and probably saved us a small fortune in heating oil for the effort.
     The suspended ceiling is almost finished.  I also found a few minutes the finish wiring in the overhead lights, so this was the first day in all these years that we could flick a light switch, and have real lights in there.  I have a ton of paperwork to take care of over the weekend, but the goals I've set are to wrap up the ceiling work, insulate all the sockets, and see if I can modify one of our glass doors so it can be hung. The glass will allow the dining room to still get all that good evening light.
     I'm so bone tired right now.
2/2/2010     We decided to replace the thermostat in the Living Room to see if we could save a few bucks, so yesterday there wasn't too much action as far as renovating goes.  Most of the day was spent taking care of personal matters followed up by a trip to the Ranson, WV Home Depot.  We prefer that store because of the great service, and it's very clean.  The driving time gave us the opportunity to once again plan which steps needed to be taken next, and it looks as though in order to complete the Veranda/Studio we'll need to first complete the second Guest Room Closet.....so that we can run the water lines.... so that we can move the washer and dryer upstairs.... which means moving the 2nd Guest Room door so the appliances will fit.... which will mean moving the air ducts that are in the closet.... and then we can finish off the Veranda.
     Kid's stuff!  I could do it in my sleep.    
2/3/2010     I've finally finished off the ceiling, and the window trim.
2/8/2010     All of the work came to a halt on the 4th as we had to clear a work space for the Sears appliance repairman to look at our washing machine.  I say "look" because he misdiagnosed the problem, and it still leaks.  On the 5th, the Big Snow Storm of 2010 hit us, and boy did it hit.  We had 32" of snow by the morning of the 6th, and our entire area was paralyzed, so all of our attentions were placed on shoveling, worrying, and just keeping warm as we watched the reports of power outages on cable TV.  We took some nice pictures of the event, about 100 in all, but I only posted a couple of dozen, which I felt captured the beauty of the snow without focusing on the bad.  There was enough of that on CNN.
    I think Beth is now getting a bit tired of the Dining Room and Library being turned upside down, so today's task will be to get those areas back under control before commencing with the work in the Veranda.  A word of advice for all of you males reading this: Never overestimate your spouse's ability to handle chaos in her home.  I don't care if she's right there at your side swinging a hammer; women do not appreciate having their homes turned upside down.  Don't push it.
     And a quick mention here regarding the Superbowl.  I predicted that New Orleans would thump the Colts by 15 points.  I knew people thought I was crazy, but in the end they pulled it off by 14 points.  Way to go, Saints!  They aren't "my" team, but I like that New Orleans has taken one more step in the right direction for getting back to normal.
2/11/2010      In order to put the laundry machines upstairs, I began work on the 2nd Guest Room Closet directly above so that I'll be able to run the water and electricity.  his was slowed by yet another major snow storm, this second storm adding another 20" to the first.  The region has many new records, most of which beat all recorded weather history.
    Anyway, that's my reason for not doing anything more in this room, and nothing more will be done until the upstairs closet is completed.