Finally, some AC

So I finally got the Air Conditioning for downstairs installed today. It may not look all too impressive, but it'll make a world of difference.

I also finished prepping all the walls and ceilings for paint, so now that the humidity is controlled inside I can start some "finishing work".

Updated Pics of the outside

Up Next, HVAC!

I've been doing all of this work so far without air conditioning in the house. Early June was really mild so it was only about 80 inside. It's been hitting the high 90s this past week though...

You can see how old the downstairs AC is...it's original to the house, 26 years old. If I were to fix this and run the AC, it would probably cost about $400 a month in electricity and it would NEVER cycle off. The new stuff should be less than half of that...

No joke, it was 95' in the house today. Next Sunday, I have my friend Jon and a guy from his HVAC company coming over to help me put in 2 new systems--one upstairs and one downstairs. I'll post pics when we finish up. I'm really excited to be doing my next projects in a 73'F house with tolerable humidity!

Garage Staging area...

I have half the garage filled with appliances, a few new toilets, and a ton of paint...waiting to finish up the messy stuff before I put everything in upstairs.

You can see the storage area at the back of the garage in this pic. Right now it's empty except for the yard stuff, but the ceiling is high enough for me to swing a golf club. Put 2 and 2 together...virtual driving range?

Wallpaper Is Bad. Taking it off is worse...

The top half of the wall is after the skim coat of joint compound.

The bathroom is next...

A few more pics of the ceilings post popcorn removal...

See ya, Boston

Progress

With the texture gone from the ceilings, I spent most of yesterday and today removing the wall paper in the downstairs half bath and the kitchen. When they built the house, they put the wall paper directly on the finished sheetrock. Despite my scoring and wetting the paper with paste solvents, I still managed to remove most of the paper that's attached to the drywall. So now, I pretty much have a kitchen and bathroom that looks like a cardboard box fort. I'll post some pictures when I get back into town later this week.

I started putting a skim coat of joint compound on ALL of the walls in the kitchen and bathroom. This takes a ton of time, probably more time than putting up new drywall. I'm not going to spend $300 on new sheetrock, so this is the method of choice. I WILL have flat walls, just going to take some time to do everything.

So far, in 12 days, here's the list of what's been done. I'll post pics when I can.

• Downstairs ceilings de-textured
• Replaced the locks
• Replaced the motion sensor light outside the garage
• Replaced the two lights outside the front door
• Put in a garage door opener
• I've mowed the lawn a few times
• Sprayed the weeds with the first coat of RoundUp
• Removed all the wallpaper in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom
• Filled 3 32gallon trash bags with dirt, ceiling texture, and trash from the house and garage

I've probably spent about 30 hours working on the house. I need to add up the receipts, but I think I'm up to about $1200 at home depot, including 30 gallons of paint and primer than I'm hoping to put to use sooner rather than later. I've also got 400 feet of 4 5/8" crown molding sitting in the garage just waiting to go onto my newly flattened ceilings and primed walls...

Off to Boston for a few days for work. I'll post some pics when I get back Wesnesday.

Popcorn. I hate popcorn!

So, like most houses built in the 80s, mine had lovely popcorn textured ceilings. The very first thing I did, starting the day after I bought it was lay down some plastic and start scraping the ceilings. I got a garden sprayer, filled it with water, and soaked the ceilings for about 15 minutes so it would loosen everything up. Then, using a 4" putty knife, standing on a ladder, I began to scrape.

It's tough to see from the pictures, but the popcorn is about 1/8 of an inch of raised texture on the ceiling. Once coated in water and soaked, it comes off in "sheets". If you get the timing right, you can remove a 10x10 section of it in about 20 minutes. It took me the whole dining room and half of the entry way to perfect the method, but I figured it out.

Here's the dining room after I finished...

Drywall dust is extremely fine and powdery. It gets everywhere. Plastic, rosin paper...doesn't matter how well you prepare the floors. It gets everywhere. I have a 12 gallon shop vac that I have running in the room to try to pull the dust. I have to empty it and clean the filter every 30 minutes or so to keep it pulling in the dust and debris.

All in all, I finished the whole downstairs in about 25 hours, working mostly evenings after work and all day the first weekend.

I'll post some more pics of the finished ceilings with the texture removed. I spent most of this weekend patching any spots in the ceiling where I went through the paper with some joint compound, then lightly sanding everything.

Few more pics, pre closing

Here's a shot of the back deck and the garage.

I ended up closing June 1st, after a few weeks of delay thanks to a Mortgage broker that was busy scouting out bartending schools and Bank of America being the bank we all know and hate.

I'll get some updated pics of the outside next time I'm over there. The bank finished painting the boards they had replaced, so it doesn't look quite as bad as these pics make it seem. At least it was all one color by the time I signed the paperwork.

It's a start

This is what it looked like the day I drove up for the first time. It was built in 1983...pretty good year. A lot of cool things happened in 1983. Space Shuttle Challenger made it's first flight. Toyko Disneyland opened. I was also born in 1983, but that didn't come up in the top results when I googled "What happened in 1983"...

Anyway, I knew I wanted to buy something in Roswell...it's 4 miles from my office and less than a mile from Downtown Roswell--a cool little strip of shops and decent bars. I found it on zillow.com. It was the first house I actually looked at. Not quite love at first sight, but I liked enough to turn it into my money pit.

It was a bank owned foreclosure, and judging by the condition inside and out, the previous owner had an affinity for builder grade finishes from the early 80s...everything was original to the house. Bathrooms, kitchen, flooring, paint, lighting. Even the air conditioning was from 1983.

It sits on about a half an acre, on a cul-de-sac. It's 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths, about 1900 square feet. There's a drive under garage with an unfinished basement room.

The bank was "kind" enough to do about $13k worth of roof work, replaced the gutters and soffets. They put in "new" carpet. That's it though, everything else you see on this blog was replaced, scraped, sanded, cleaned up, painted, or installed by me. Crazy how 10 years of random jobs for painting contractors, HVAC companies, landscaping, and general construction projects will come in handy!