Roadrunner Twice

We've got some people painting our house, because the guy we hired to fix some caulking and flashing up there told us this was pretty much the last year before the current paint job started peeling. And also Ruth's always wanted a purple house.

(I eventually wanted a purple house; naturally there was a saga about paint colors first. I, having seen some nasty-looking purple houses in my time, was initially skeptical. So I said I'd go for it if she could point out an existing house with the exact purple she wanted and got me to agree that it looked good, so we could match that color and skip the whole mindgame hell where it's impossible to imagine what a 3x4" paint chip will look like covering a whole wall. She'd actually found the house she was looking for years ago and lost it, but eventually RE-found it up on N. Skidmore. [We think. The timeline on the paint job doesn't quite match up, but if that's not the same house then we have no idea what the hell happened with the original.] I sent them a card in the mail asking them to text us about paint. This totally worked.)

Anyway, they're out there painting today. But before they could paint, we needed to tear down this pergola thing, which was... I don't even know how to explain what a baffling position it was in, it would take like half an hour and a bunch of speculation about what our lot was used for before it was subdivided, but, just take my word for it, it was completely outrageous.

INTERLUDE: What is a pergola?

Well, it's this motherfucker.

So on Monday we borrowed the neighbor's sawzall (thanks Jim 😭🙏🏼), chopped through the 4x4s, and then spent the entire evening — lo, even unto the dark of night, past last call at the local brewpub so we couldn't even let someone else handle the victory dinner and beer — taking out bolts and cutting through countersunk wood screws to separate the legs from the top.

Anyway, we triumphed. We were concerned we were gonna be stuck with it once it was down, but I put a freebie post on Craigslist and someone came and put it in a damn minivan two hours later. Amazing.

EXTERIOR OF HOUSE, WITH SHOUTED SPEECH BUBBLE EXTENDING FROM INTERIOR:

Successful demolition project, Dracula!!!

Oh hey, here's ANOTHER entry from May that I forgot to post.

OK, so our house is pretty new (2006), and it has a very low level of what-the-fuckery. (Or in the words of the inspector, "no new technology was attempted.")

It's just that, with houses, the scale for what-the-fuckery STARTS at "oh my god" and goes up from there.

What we've been wrestling with lately are the Mystery Wires. There were a few classes of these, and it's taken a while to get to the bottom of it all. (It even involved picking a lock on an ominous metal box in the garage. We didn't pick the lock ourselves, we called Jessica.) As best I understand it right now, we've got:

• Outdoor landscape lighting
• Sprinkler timers
• Burglar alarm

None of this stuff actually works, btw! I don't think it's worked for a WHILE. And we certainly don't want it. (Well... sprinkler timers might be nice. Maybe. But landscape lighting is for when you want your house to look like a consular building, or something you need to break into in an Uncharted game.)

Ruth's dad helped disconnect the landscape lighting, and I tore up the cords and unscrewed the lamps from the cinderblocks. But then we found ANOTHER BRANCH of it, off a timer located in the garage. So, ugh.

I started writing a post about that final push installing the stair treads, and I couldn't finish it, it was just too exhausting and boring! So instead here's a bunch of micro-posts.

I bruised my head on the mailbox while I was vacuuming under the sawhorses on the front porch. I feel like that is a very distinct flavor of chaos.

There's theoretically two orders you could install a stair tread and a riser (riser behind, or riser sitting-on), and I'd decided to do it one way and then it turned out the size of pieces would only support doing it the other way. So I threw a minor tizzy fit.

Anyway, it turned out for the best, because the slight bendiness of the risers would have made the first way look like complete garbage.

All our research said that with stair treads you use nails and glue (well, "construction adhesive") together. I hate glue (on account of it being the worst), but using nails alone is apparently not the move so I sucked it up.

Sam and several other people told us the glue to use was this substance called "Bostik's Best." Here's my review of it: I don't wish any particular misfortune on the families of the people who developed Bostik's Best. It is not complete bullshit.

Once everything was all cut and 100% ready to go, installing a riser and the stair tread above it involved seven cycles of handing different tools back and forth. It went like caulk gun -> brad nailer -> drill -> shopvac -> caulk gun -> nails and hammer -> nailpunch. And somewhere in there Ruth had to squeeze past me to go stand on the work-in-progress stair tread.

Putting a tiny invisible bevel on one side of a stair tread makes it easier to drop into place.

AS EVER with this sort of thing, the first stair we did had a bunch of bullshit extra complexities that weren't repeated anywhere else.

The only other bad one was the sixth step, because the left side was unsquare in a unique and unexpected way that almost made it come out visibly crooked. I had to cut a replacement sixth tread, then find a narrower stair above where I could re-use the cattywompus one.

The stairs are done. The landing is done. All flooring-related program activities are done. We gave back the power tools we borrowed. I can hardly fucking believe it.

Installing new stair treads took just an outrageous number of steps, if you'll pardon the pun. And we REALLY wanted to finish before our holiday breaks ended, because we knew we couldn't do anything else for however many days it lasted. The overhead of starting and stopping made doing it piecemeal impossible. Sooooo we marathoned it.

The short version is, the original stairs were carpet over plywood, and we wanted hardwood because fuck carpet. There's a couple ways to get from there to here, and our approach (the standard method, afaict) was to tear it down to the plywood, cut the bullnoses off the treads to leave plain box-like stairs, then install single-piece oak treads and poplar risers on top of that with a combination of nails and a really advanced glue. Basically entomb the old stairs under the new stuff. (I had a brief fantasy of future people forgetting this had happened and doing it AGAIN with the upper stairs, until they had like five layers of stair material and the top step disappeared entirely.)

That "short version" is one of the biggest lies I've ever posted on this journal. Even the first part, "tear it down to the plywood," is actually like a seven step descent into madness. We had to tear off the rest of the carpet, tear off the padding, crowbar out the carpet tack strips, vice-grip out the staples from the treads AND risers (SO MANY STAPLES), chisel or plane off the lumps of spilled drywall compound and paint or whatever was underneath the carpet, vacuum up the nasty dust and bullshit (by the way, please wear a respirator mask and safety glasses for all this), and pound in any nails sticking up. Congratulations, you still don't even get to start construction for another five or ten steps.

Sawing off the old noses was the worst and most dangerous part. I used a circular saw to make a plunge cut across most of the tread, then used a pullsaw to cut the ends it couldn't reach. (Then lots of cleanup with the pullsaw and a plane.)

Natasha in our old house loaned me her cordless Milwaukee circular saw for this, so I experienced the difference between good and bad circ saws. The last one we borrowed was harrowing to use, but this one seemed like it was sympathetic to my problems and wanted to help?! And even then the nose-cutoffs were total heck. Awkward positioning, difficult cuts, way too much exertion, and sawdust all over the living room.

Then we floored the tiny bottom landing, which was kind of like an encore performance with Whack Friend returning to take their final bow. AND THEN THE ACTUAL STAIRS. About which maybe more anon, IDK.

Other random baseboard bits:

• Your old baseboards had a bead of caulk up top, and you'll need to scrape the remnants off the wall. It's basically a rubbery plastic, and a small wood chisel works great for this. That set of chisels has been kind of an all-star in general, tbh. I got them to deal with replacing the deadbolt, and they've come in handy on every project since.
  • The deal with replacing the deadbolt was, the old deadbolt was Too Secure. As in, it was getting so janky that one of our keys could open it but not close it, and the other could close it but not open it. We're not trying to initiate a nuclear launch, we're just trying to get in the front goddamn door, jesus.
• So, why do wood floors need quarter-round shoe molding? For this, basically.
• Quarter-round sticks out further than the baseboard, so wherever it's going to dead-end (like at a doorjamb) you should do something called a "return," which is basically just doing a negative-length outside corner. It looks like this. Just knowing the name should put you ahead of me; I had the vague sense something didn't add up and had to Google image search until I saw something that looked better. (Then later Ruth told me she'd already known about them but hadn't mentioned it because she assumed I'd learnt all the stuff.)
• We used an 18ga (aka "brad") nailgun on both the baseboards and the shoe. I think the "pro" thing is to use 16ga (bigger) on the boards and 23ga (smaller, aka "pin") on the shoe, but this seems to be working fine. You want to nail the boards into studs, but the shoe just nails into the board so whatever. Find the studs ahead of time and put some blue tape on the floor or above the top of the baseboards.
• Gotta fill in the nail holes. For natural wood you'd probably use wood filler putty, but ours are white so caulk is the move. It turns out a disposable foam earplug makes a good tool for caulking nail holes. A firm makeup sponge would probably also work, but we didn't have those handy because we're bad femmes. The hardware store dude said to use your finger, but that shit has solvents or petroleum distillates or whatever and I'm a big ol wuss about toxics. (Not that you'd fucking know it, for how often I manage to poison myself anyway.)
• More relevant instagrams: pre-caulk, post-caulk, landing, jank from before we got here, the whole fukken journey.
• I could probably do a whole post on caulk alone, but tbh I'm still not convinced I know the best way to do it. Ask someone else about caulk.
• You'll notice The Fucking Triangle looks mostly OK, and I am not even going to talk about what that took because I feel like there's a good chance of hurting yourself if you try it and I don't want to be involved.

Finally: When I took the old baseboards off in our bedroom, I found a,

uhhhhhh,

...a live 9mm hollow-point bullet. There's treasure everywhere, my dudes.

OK, so we've been installing prefinished hardwood floors in the upstairs of our house (which we've been tentatively calling the Corner House to distinguish it from our former place). We managed to get our bedroom and our housemate's room finished before moving in, but missed the stairs, the landing, and the office. The stairs can wait indefinitely (and require a new skill set), and I just finished the landing this weekend, so that leaves the office.

Here's how you lay floor. First, you figure out what direction everything's going and how many different "zones" there are, which I don't even want to get into right now, and then you can tackle each zone (room, basically) separately. For each zone, you measure the length of the room (the width doesn't matter) at every point where the length might be different, and do some nail-biting arithmetic to make sure you won't use any illegal (sub 1") board widths at either end of the room, WHICH I DON'T EVEN WANT TO GET INTO RIGHT NOW. Then you use a frikken laser to draw your start line and nail down the first row by hand, then you nail down all the other rows, making sure you lay out five or so rows ahead so you don't paint yourself into a corner and use an illegal series of board transitions. (Which is yet another thing I'm not getting into today.)

The problem is, to do the main part of the floor you need a lot of boards plus a way to cut them for the ends of rows. What we've been doing is laying out a shitload of wood in the far half of the room, and then running the chop saw in an adjacent unfinished room because it makes a ton of sawdust that we don't want in our work area or living space. But now we're out of adjacent unfinished rooms! 😩

This is sort of the penultimate stage of the sliding-blocks puzzle we've been living in. What we think we're going to do is just run the chop saw in the far half of the room for as long as we can, trying to keep the sawdust mostly in the closet, and then we're going to have to move it somewhere else. But the garage is full! And it's rainy outside! So Ruth had the brilliant idea to run it in the downstairs bathroom, because it's a perfectly square space with almost no squirrelly little fixtures, and the only furniture is a bookshelf or two. We'll still have to carry a bunch of boards up and down the stairs, but at least this looks feasible. So, I guess we'll let you know how that goes.

We haven't been taking as many pictures of the actual flooring process as I'd like, because there's just not a lot of room in the flow of work for that shit. Oh well! I'll try and at least get a short video of Ruth running the pneumatic nailer or deploying Whack Friend.

Last time, on roadrunnertwice:

( AND NOW, THE CONCLUSION. )