Friday... friday...

It's Friday, and its hot, so we're taking the day off. Energy level in the house is low. Photo evidence follows:

 

Dust-Up

There’s a time in any of my sanding sessions when so much dust accumulates in either the air or on my glasses (safety first!) that I can’t see what I’m sanding anymore. At this point, I usually have dust in my everything.  I take this as the construction god’s hint that it’s time to go watch some Judge Judy with Pharaoh.  (He loves Judge Judy, I can’t explain it.)

 

At this point my wood filler choice seems to have been a bad one. I tried to sand with the belt sander, but the belt was immediately clogged with the stuff.

 

Having more luck with the hand sander, but I’m still having to switch out the sandpaper every few feet. I’m sanding with 120 now, and finding every single scratch, nick, divot, hole, bump, and seam that I missed with the 80 grit.  Also, all of the marks I left with the putty knife are a pain in the rump, I should have been more careful about wiping them up or flattening them.

20 minutes of sanding the wood filler, and my hair is completely gray with dust. There’s not enough Judge Judy in the daytime for the amount of dust this stuff produces. As an example, here’s a picture of my dust mask after 2 days, next to a clean one.  The dust has worked its way all the way through the mask.

 

I’ve also just noticed that the wheel-less shop vac I’ve been dragging around the room to clean up dust has been leaving more scratches.  I think the floor is laughing at me.

Fillerbunny

My first pass at the sanding was done with a belt sander and 80 grit paper.  When I started, I was sort of worried that I was going to accidentally sand my way all the way through the floor and into clown territory. In retrospect, I probably should have sanded away a little more than I did, as there are still some roughish patches. I’m not sure how much these will show when the paint is done, so we’ll see how it goes. This is how it looked in the early stages.

 

There’s a lot of DIY posts out there about painting plywood floors. Most of them agree about the basics, but the one thing I couldn’t find any good information on was filling the floor seams. Some blogs say to use caulk, but its not sandable and can shrink. Some recommend bondo, but it cracks when the seams flex with normal temperature changes.  Several agree that using floor leveler doesn’t work well, because its non-sandable and makes the seams more noticeable after painting. All of them recommend against joint compound, but none seem to have an ideal solution.

After several discussions with my Construction Consultant, and what essentially amounted to putting on a blindfold and spinning around the flooring aisle at Home Despot, I chose this product:

 

It’s meant to be used to fill cracks in hardwood floors, so I’m hoping its durable and flexible enough to meet my needs. It remains to be seen if I have chosen poorly or not.

I’m puttying cracks, seams, knots, and random divots. The wood filler instructions indicate it’s to be troweled onto the whole floor and then sanded down,  so I’m experimenting, one area I troweled completely, and the others I just patched. It has the consistency of joint compound, so I’m a little concerned at how well it’s going to work.

 

 

I knew the job was dangerous when I took it.

Our other home improvement projects have occasioned no end of creative swearing from my Construction Consultant (aka Science-Doctor Dad) because of the shoddy construction.   A few months we remodeled the master bathroom, which required pulling up and cutting up some disgusting particle board, so naturally we thought that the Clown Room would have particle board over the plywood subfloor. I cut up the carpet with this expectation in mind.  In keeping with the construction of the rest of the house, it turns out that this was done wrong by the “hoodyfoopin’ idjits” who built the place.

On the bright side, this means that I can directly sand the plywood and we don’t have to put plywood over the particleboard which is over the plywood.  (Yes, this was the plan.) We opted to cut the carpet around the bookcases (which are bolted to the walls) instead of taking them down and doing things "right", so I take solace in knowing that the next person who owns this house will also be saying nice things about our construction choices.

 

The room also contains some inexplicable mold. we're not sure where it came from, there are no water pipes near this area. Our best guess is that one of our guests has been peeing in the corner. You can see from the pictures that the walls are still the original ugly peachy colour that I prefer to think of as Circus Peanut Orange.

 

 

...Maybe its more of a murder room.

The first step in redoing the clown room floors has been covering the floor-to-ceiling bookcases that my dad put in for me a few years ago. We don't really have enough room to store the bookcase contents elsewhere in the house, so we're going to try to keep out the dust from sanding and leave them where they are.

The result looks like something from Dexter. There is just enough of an opening for my neighbours to look in and wonder what we're up to, though their view is currently blocked by a tiny creepy box of clowns. I fully expect them to call the cops at some point.

Introducing the Clown Room...

When we first took possession of the house, getting internet hooked up was a priority for me.  I was working nights at the time, so being there to let in the ISP meant doing my day sleeping in an empty house until they got there.  It was only my second visit to the house, so I went poking around at all the new spaces before sacking out on the floor. This turned out to be a bad idea, as in our creepy-dwarf closet under the stairs I found a trap door that goes to the crawlspace under the house.

As I tried to sleep that morning, all I could think of was that something was going to come up from under the house and maim/kill/rob me. Eventually I put the heaviest box I could find in my car on the trap door (because if someone was going to go to the trouble of crawling under the house and up through the trap door, clearly a 20 pound box would deter them…)

Here’s a picture from before we purchased the house, when the room was done up as a nursery. The trapdoor is inside an equally creepy half-sized closet. I hope whatever kid lived here previously was not eaten.

 

My father later found the box sitting on top of the trap door and asked about it. I confessed my fear of monsters-under-the-house. He asked what I thought might come up the trap door from under the house, and my first answer was “Clowns.” Since then, the guest room has been the clown room.  So far we haven’t lost any guests, but the heaviest boxes in the house are still on the trap door, so that’s probably what’s keeping them safe.

At one point, we considered getting hardwood floors for the house. The estimates came in at outrageous (to me) amounts, so we’ve stuck with the crappy old carpet, despite the fact that its unraveling at an alarming rate. The cats love the strings that come out of the carpet and constantly graze on them.  As a temporary measure,  I’ve decided to try to pull up the plywood and paint the floors.  It could be a disaster, or it could be really cool. Either way, I know it’ll be covered once we decide to sell.

The Violet Vengeance

The first thing to understand about my house is that it is the architectural equivalent of Barney.  It is aggressively purple, so much so that the first words out of the mouths of new visitors are almost invariably “It’s so… purple.”

In my defense, the house was this colour when we got it, which is probably why we got a good deal for our area, which tends to prefer boring neutrals.  As the house is tall and on a hill, the purple is visible from about a block away. Since buying the house, every time I meet neighbours they immediately ask when I’m going to repaint.  After five years here, we did repaint last year. Much to their dismay, we used the same color (Sherwin Williams 6818 Valiant Violet) I also dyed my hair to match, so there’s just no mistaking who belongs in the purple house.

Right now I'm working to give the interior some character to match the paintjob. I'll be posting project pictures and ramblings here.

On nice days, I fly a jolly roger from the balcony and pretend the whole house is a pirate ship.  It’s been christened The Violet Vengeance, and it is the scourge of the neighbourhood.

 

I moved to The Violet Vengeance from a crappy apartment in the middle of the city.  My apartment building was cinderblock with an awesome view and a glass elevator which can best be described as treacherous. The first time I had pizza delivered, the delivery guy asked, “Were you here when they found the body in the dumpster?”   The building was month-to-month and falling apart. I had cracks in my ceiling and crack-dealers across the street.  My toilet was pink! My stove was chicky-yellow! There were roaches! It was a building full of character and stories. I still miss it.

The Violet Vengeance, while not exactly in a suburb, is outside of the main downtown core.  It’s high-density residential, my neighbours’ houses are within five feet of mine. When I moved here, I thought having a house would be all fun and games, and that neighbours would come over to borrow cups of sugar while they were making me cookies. In other words, everything I knew about living in a real neighbourhood, I learned from the television. I grew up in the kind of area people go to when they don’t want to have to acknowledge that anyone lives nearby.  On moving here I was plagued by questions the television hadn’t answered for, and was constantly calling friends for advice. “Do I leave my porch light on all night?” (My friends say yes on this one.) “Do I call the cops on the kids bouncing balls off my house?” (Friends: No.) “Is it normal for the neighbours to leave weird passive-aggressive notes about how late I come home at night?” (Friends: Every neighbourhood has a crazy nosy lady; we thought it would be you).  Overall, the reality of ‘hood life has left something to be desired, both in terms of the people and the house.  The VV was built in 1991, and the construction is soulless, boring, and terrible. Other than the paintjob, it lacks any sense of fun or whimsy or… me.

My mother’s family ran a lumber yard while I was growing up, and my parents built their house from scratch. At the tender age of five, I was given a hammer and regularly enlisted in the building process.  My father also did a stint as a contractor when I was in college, and people actually wanted to build things.  Somehow, this all instilled in me a drive to change and improve the space I live in. Or maybe it was a million episodes of Trading Spaces back when I had cable. Either way, I’m currently on a mission to personalize my space to my crazy taste, while still being able to revert back to blah-mode when it’s time to sell.  I think it’s safe to assume that the neighbours will continue to not make me cookies.