Leaf me alone

Our beautiful, tranquil, isolated yard betrayed us. Stupid Fall.

So what do you do when nature drops a crap-ton of leaves all over you?

You make a trip to Home Depot for lawn refuse bags and rakes, and then return about six times for more bags.

And then you call your parents to come with the truck to help you bring home the sweet deal you found on clearance lawn furniture (thanks Dad!).

And then you rake, and rake, and rake, and rake...

and drag the full bags out to the curb and pray that they're picked up.

Success!

Now we can enjoy our leaf-free (for now) yard.

and gloat that our clearance furniture has doubled in price!

Back to School

All houses have their quirks. You know, the things that you stare at and wonder "why the flip did the last owners do this" (see also: rouge toilet and oven-less kitchen). Well, here's another one.

We have a, well I'll call it a wall. Although I think it's more of a piece of plywood covering a gaping hole between the kitchen and bathroom. As curious as I am to peak behind it, after reading House of Leaves I know better than to crawl through mystery hallways.

So, rather than mess with it, we opted to simply make it fit in a bit better with the rest of our house.

We considered wallpapering it, but that didn't feel right after the weeks we spent tearing down the world's ugliest wallpaper. Instead we decided to paint it, and for fun rather than regular paint, we used:Here's an almost before. I got a little excited to start, and forgot to take a real before picture. Bad blogger. You can see the side of our kitchen cabinets, which hopefully will be white someday, a bit of our metallic backsplash, and then the bathroom door in our gray hallway.

The application is pretty simple. Tape off anything you want to protect, then apply the first coat with a paint brush--the paint is a bit goopier then regular paint, and won't really stick to the wall if you use a roller to start with. Once dry, apply further coats, this time using a roller for the smoothest results. It took us three coats to be happy with the results.

And here it is finished, and serving as the menu board for our Housewarming Party!

Killing a Muppet

Our house came with a green, shag carpet.

What is that you say? Yes, it was really sweet ... in 1976. But for our modern looking house it stood out like, well, like a green shag carpet.

We pulled the rug up and found some pennies, lots of dust, and some report cards from the son of the former owner of our house. Not very good grades so no surprise they were hidden under the green beast.

Erin checked Clifton’s garbage requirements (available on most town websites) and saw that for us to throw out a rug, we needed to cut it into sections. So I armed myself with a blade and a box of twine.

I wasn’t able to cut through the green monster, but I was able to score it with the blade and then bend it over and break it. In the end, I got it into nice, tied-up little piles that the garbagemen gladly took.

The green muppet carpet was in my office, so I replaced it with this.

Time spent: 15 minutes
Cost: $0 to slay the beast, $250 for the rug

I See a White Wall and Want to Paint it Grey

A house with all white walls leaves a lot to the imagination for new homeowners. Years of living in apartments where we weren’t allowed to paint the walls (I admit my Bayonne apartment years totally violated that concept) left us wanting to cover these white walls with Bob Ross enthusiasm.

This was one of the rooms from my old Bayonne apartment. Once described as a “bag of Skittles” we had a green billiards room, a red & black office, an orange living room, and a blue striped kitchen.

Erin had a few color ideas for our living room and bedroom so we went to Home Depot to get some color cards. We brought them home, taped them up on the wall, discussed which ones we did and didn’t like, and ultimately chose to paint the living room “Sparrow,” the hallway and stairwell “Anonymous” and the bedroom “Subtle Touch.” Each a different shade of grey.

To brighten things up we decided to do the kitchen yellow (a contrast to our new black countertops and stainless steel appliances, though we’ll cover the entire kitchen process in a later blog). The other rooms we selected at a later time (we’ll cover each additional room in later blogposts).

Once we selected the colors we went back to Home Depot and brought John, my brother-in-law, with us to help select paint and painting gear. We opted for low VOC paint (VOC stands for volatile organic compound. Paint with VOC is potentially dangerous and often smelly). Knowing we needed at least two coats of paint, we got two buckets of the living room paint, two buckets for the stairwell and hallway, and one bucket each for the kitchen and bedroom). Six buckets of paint set us back about $220 (about $36 each).

We were fortunate to be able to borrow a lot of painting equipment from John but still had to get some painter’s tape (we went with green Frogtape, on John’s recommendation - about $7.50 a roll). We also had to get some small paint rollers and plastic disposable paint tray liners (total for that was $30).

Things we borrowed from John that you will need to consider buying:

• Paint rollers (large and mini)
• Metal paint trays
• Drop cloths
• Medium sized paint brushes
• Paint edger
• Paint roller extender poles
• Ladders

If I had to estimate, to paint an entire house with new paint and all new equipment, expect to budget about $500. So yeah, John’s painting supplies saved us at least $100 or so.

After you have your paint supplies you will need to do some prep work. We were lucky to have a few guests (my friend Mike and his wife Katie) stop by to help us.

File photo of Mike & Katie.

So with a force of five, we got the living room ready for painting. This entailed:

• Removing light switch plates and central air vent plates.
• Covering them with painter’s tape.
• Laying down drop cloths.
• Putting painter’s tape around the edges/molding.

Once all the painter’s tape is up, we opened the paint cans with a flathead screwdriver and stirred them with wooden stirring sticks (you can grab a handful for free at Home Depot at the paint mixing area). Lay some cardboard down to place the paint cans, paint rollers, and paint bins on as this will prevent too much paint getting on the drop cloths and getting dragged through your house.

After the paint is stirred, put the plastic tray liners in the metal trays and pour the paint into it. Use the medium paintbrush to clean off the paint can of dripping paint. Once the paint is poured, go around the edges of the room (i.e. where the painter’s tape is at) first with the medium sized paintbrush and then over that with the mini roller. This will give you an outline to paint into and the mini rollers will smooth out the paint (since the brush will leaves brush marks).

Mike taping things up.

Me putting down tape.

Once the room is outlined, just like you learned in kindergarten, use the bigger paint rollers to paint within the lines. I’ve seen on some home improvement shows that you should paint in V patterns, but we did vertical strokes (huh, I said stroke) and it came out fine.

John painting.

Once the paint has dried, add a second coat of paint (and if needed, a third). Paint drying can take a few hours and on humid days sometimes longer. After all coats of paint are done, remove the painter’s tape and voila, you have a painted room. Since we opted to not paint the ceiling or the crown molding, we used the paint edger and the medium brush the ensure straight edges around the molding. We also bought a small jar of white paint to spot touch the ceiling and molding (since no matter what painter’s tape you use, there will be some seepage).

So that’s that. As I mentioned, we will go room by room discussing what we did, the paint we chose and other accessories.

Time spent: Living room, hallway, and bedroom = 2 days
Cost: About $200

It’s a trap!

That’s right, it’s a trap. Two of them, actually. One in the bathtub and one in the bathroom sink. And they are both clogged and leaking.

First off, let me apologize for the lack of blogposts the past month or so. It's been really busy with my travel for work, moving into the house, and doing lots of stuff still (I got a chainsaw...enough said).

Now about the plumbing: my brother-in-law can do some plumbing but since the house is so old the pipes are cast iron and not copper or PVC, meaning I needed to get a professional to help.

Okay, here is a hint. If you hire a contractor to do something, say an electrician, let him know of other projects you also want done. The home repair industry is pretty tight-knit, so either your contractor can refer you to a friend or has a colleague he works with that can do the work. As luck would have it, our electrician works with another electrician who also specializes in plumbing. Score!

So here’s the deal with cast iron pipes. They eventually will need to be replaced. They corrode over time and get a rust/calcium build up that essentially, like a clogged artery, reduces the flow of water to nothing. This is what ours looked like on the inside:

On top of these pipe issues, we also had our plumber install a new shower diverter and put in a new toilet (yeah, we could have done it, but he was doing work in the bathroom anyway). All in all the plumbing work (parts & labor) set us back about $970 ($145 for the new toilet and $50 for installation; $400 for the bathtub drain, trap & lever to be repaired and $375 for the sink to be fixed, new diverter and shower head, and installation).

Since we didn’t get quotes from other plumbers I cannot say if this is on the high-end or not. But a quick Google search seems to indicate it wasn’t that bad (saw some people paying $200 or more for a toilet to be installed), but I advise you to get some quotes if you need similar work done. We went with what was easiest for us and with people we trusted, so even if the price was a tad more, the hassle of dealing with shoddy work/waiting on someone to do the work was worth avoiding.

Time spent: 1 day
Cost: $970

More blogs to come in the following weeks. We'll be covering:

• Painting
• Kitchen Renovation
• Cutting a Rug (Not Dancing)
• Releasing the Kraken
• Removing fuzzy wallpaper
• Moving in
• And more...

It’s electric, boogie woogie woogie

I don’t mess with electric. Seriously, that’s one thing I need to leave to the pros. So when our inspector noted that we had a breaker panel in the basement that was 1) old 2) only 100 amps and 3) found to have caused fires, we decided to bump this up on the must-do-ASAP list.

Our inspector also noted we needed GFCIs in the basement, bathroom, kitchen and garage. GFCI means ground fault circuit interrupter and GFCI outlets are designed to protect electrical shocks. These outlets are required as part of code in kitchens, bathrooms, near pools, outdoors, and just about anywhere that risks having water come in contact with them. GFCIs help avoid electrocution - pretty important, right? You can tell if you have a GFCI installed if it has that little reset, pressy button in the middle, like this:

So I needed to get some quotes for the work. What we needed was to upgrade the meter (our inspector said 150 amps would be fine but 200 amps would be ideal in case we ever decide to build the house up more) and get GFCIs put in the aforementioned rooms. So I Googled “electrician in Clifton. NJ” and came up with an electrician’s network site. I plugged in my info and within minutes I was getting calls from electricians to meet with me and provide a quote.

I got about 4 different quotes for this work ranging from $2400 to $2800. So if you need to get a new panel installed expect to pay $1800 - $2400 (GFCIs are about $80 each or so to put in).

Erin and I both researched all of the electricians who gave us quotes and they all came out clean. So we decided to go with a quote that was slightly higher than the others mainly because he had other contacts that could help us with our kitchen demo, plumbing, sheatrocking and other contractor needs (which he actually organized for us).

In the end, we got this awesome new electric box and the GFCIs installed in only a few days time.

And when they took out the old panel, yeah, there were burn marks. So more than likely there were a few close calls there...

Time spent: 1 week (4 days for quotes and decision; 1 day for official agreement; 2 days for them to do the project)
Cost: $2700

Fixing the house without breaking the bank.

I'm just going to come out and say it, I’m cheap. I hate spending money, and unfortunately, with a whole house renovation in the works, there is a lot of money to spend.

The internet is helping us save money wherever possible. Obviously it makes comparison shopping easier. We noticed that prices on appliances at all the big box retailers varied wildly—up to a few hundred dollars from store to store—so it pays to do a little basic research before heading out.

The next big help has been my bank’s reward program. They offer specials every month for most popular stores, and I can rack up anywhere between 1% and 15% cash back for purchases made online with my debit card. I just have to log into my bank account, and check what rewards they are offering. For some big-ticket purchases (I’m looking at you mattress and box spring) it can really add up.

My last tip is something I just recently discovered. I knew that there were websites where you can sell gift cards that you don’t want. Well, the same sites resell those gift cards. I read about one of these sites http://www.giftcardrescue.com/ on a blog, and was little eerie of it. I decided to test it with a small purchase, and got a Home Depot gift card worth $39.99, paying $36.99. Woohoo, big bucks right? Well, the order went fine, and I got my gift card for the full $39.99.



Since it went well, I ordered another, this one a $285 card that I paid $266.65 for, and again, it worked without a hitch.

Obviously we’re not talking bank breaking sums here, but this means that I can get about 7% off of everything I buy at Home Depot. Ever. Which I think is pretty damn cool.

So I fully recommend giftcardrescue.com. Just two things to keep in mind about it: (1) Both times the card I received was not a gift card, but a store credit card, so don’t be thinking you can be sneaky and buy the cards as presents; and (2) my credit card company flagged the transaction as “suspicious” and I had to call their fraud division to verify that I did place the order (annoying, but not enough to turn me off to shopping there again).

So there are my little tips for making all this spending a little less painful for my fellow cheapskates.

And now, because I almost made an entire post without talking about the Money Pit, here’s a cat. There are three cats in the area that I suspect live behind our garage, this one looks freakishly like Max.

The best laid plans...

So as you read in my last two blogs, I laid down this floating tile and it looks pretty great. But yeah, just want to warn you about something about floating tiles. They float. Not being a wiseass here (okay, kinda am) but due to a certain Hurricane Irene, our backyard turned into a Great Lake.

We have lakefront property now!

And since the water had nowhere to go in the ground, it seeped up through the foundation and puddled up in our basement.

The water wasn’t much and there was no “damage” to anything. Mostly it was an annoyance of having to mop water and push it down a drain pipe.

Note: Erin’s parents got us a wet vac recently so should this happen again it’ll be a tad easier.

This puddle was just an annoyance but with the ground so soaked it seemed like an endless battle.

So the problem is that the water is flowing under our floating tiles since they are not actually attached to the tiles below them. This makes knowing where the water is puddled up almost impossible and it may lead to mold (something we need to keep an eye out for / may mean I need to pull up some tiles to check from time to time).

If your basement takes on any water or is just overall damp, make sure you use a dehumidifier and run it often. It helps to get rid of the moisture in the walls, under tiles, etc. to limit the chance for mold to grow.

As for these floating tiles, not saying I am regretting them, yet, but it may be a good idea to wait and see if your basement gets water before putting them down or just put these in rooms where a hurricane won’t effect them.

Okay, so speaking of Irene, it kind of put me in a tizzy. I’m not built for natural disasters. We just bought a house and it’s endured an earthquake and a hurricane in a week span. My entire family lives in an area that was designated a mandatory evacuation area of New Jersey, so I was scrambling to find places for them to stay, one of which is our empty house. So I’m running around getting the house as livable as possible and going to Home Depot to see what I could obtain.

I was able to find a flashlight, yes! And even though we have a bunch of flashlights, according to the news Irene is supposed to be fricking armageddon - Anthony Johnson from Eyyyyyyyyyye Witness Neeeeeeews said something about four horsemen raining down sulfur while riding the hurricane like the bomb from Dr. Strangelove - so I must get this last flashlight from Home Depot.

Okay, so I’ll need batteries for it. Run over to the depleted battery section. Egads, it’s deserted. But wait, this flashlight runs on a Milwaukee 12v battery. What the hell is that? I go back to where I found the flashlight and find the battery I need. Success! Let there be light. But my paranoid mind wasn’t satisfied. I need more light to survive the storm. I should buy a lamp.

I love lamp.

Now, in retrospect, this makes no sense. But at the time my brain was focused on getting my house as much light as possible, as if having lamps and flashlights would somehow make Irene afraid and go elsewhere.

So I bought a lamp. Which led to this text message exchange with Erin.

We've got to move these refrigerators...

Dire Straits had it right; sometimes you can get money for nothing.

You may remember the Money Pit came sans oven. It did, however, come equipped with this lovely refrigerator.

Why anyone would need a camo colored fridge is beyond me, but hey, it was the 70’s. Of course we needed a new one, something modern, energy efficient, and that actually kept food cold.

As we comparison shopped online, we noticed that most places offer free haul-away for your old appliances. Not having to drag a fridge out to the curb, and call the city to pick it up, not bad, right?

Wrong. Many states have clean energy programs and offer rebates and incentives for getting rid of your old, energy hog appliances. To see if your state offers this program just Google your state + refrigerator rebate, and voila.




So, we scheduled an appointment online, two very nice men showed up in a truck to take our “working” refrigerator away, and now the Garden State is sending us a check for $50!

It’s like the old owners left us $50!

Now, finding a new fridge to fit our incredibly awkward-shaped kitchen? I’ll leave that story for another day.

I’m floored by how easy this was (Part 2)

What’s the difference between peel and stick tiles and floating tiles? No, this isn’t a joke that contractors tell (that I know of). The main difference is that peel and stick have sticky backings that you peel off (or an adhesive glue you attach to them) to stick them directly to a tile. The former owners of the house tried to use these tiles for part of the room and I had to pry them off (more on that later).

Floating tiles, however, sit above the current tiles and connect to each other at the sides. This means if you ever wanted to remove them you wouldn’t need to pry them off and instead just lift them up.

We decided to give the floating tiles a shot, mostly because they were billed as such:

Here is a list of tools you will need for this project and estimated cost. Of course, you may have some of these objects laying around or have purchased them for previous projects, but you know what happens when one assumes.

• Tape measure ($8)
• Pencil (I don’t know, $0.50?)
• Paper (I used the paper that came in the tile boxes, so save some cash and save some trees and do the same)
• Utility knife/box cutter ($10)
• Boxes of tiles (TBD - based on type of tile and size of flooring, will go into more detail on this)
• Grout ($10)
• Sponge ($1)
• Ventilation mask ($14)
• Scraper ($7)
• Work gloves ($4)
• Goggles ($10)
• Pliers ($5)

Step 1: Measure your floor

Use the tape measure and get an idea of the size of the floor space you need to cover. This will help determine how many boxes you will need. We did this project in piecemeal fashion so we bought a few boxes at a time each trip to Home Depot. I actually overestimated by a box and a half, which is no biggie because it’s good to have some extra tiles for the future and I was able to return the unopened box for full store credit. If I haven’t mentioned this in previous blogs, save all receipts in a folder or binder. It’s great to be able to track what you spend on home repairs plus it can help to show what improvements were done to increase the value of your house.

Step 2: Pick out the tile style you want

Floating tiles have an array of styles available, including wood finishes for a faux-wood floor look. I opted for the Sedona tiles since I wanted to brighten up my basement area a bit. A box of these tiles goes for about $50 each and has 12x36 planks that can cover 24 square feet. We had a very large space to cover and needed 12 boxes, so it came out to be $600 for the tiles. This is a lot less expensive then getting a professional tiler (talking thousands here for labor and material). As I mentioned, we did this a few boxes at a time since we were in no huge rush to get the floor done. If you can do a little at a time, the cost won’t even seem as bad. Towards the end, I decided I wanted to get the project finished in a day I had off from work, so Erin and I went to Home Depot to get the rest of the tiles. We had to bug someone to get them down for us.

Step 3: Suit up

If you need to remove any pre-existing peel & stick tiles off of your possibly asbestos tiles and/or you need a creepy Halloween costume on the cheap, put on a vent mask and gloves.

Step 4: Remove any peel & stick tiles

Simple enough. Just use the scraper to get under the tiles and they pry off easily. For tougher ones, you may need to tap the scraper with a hammer. If you find the peel & sticks to be tougher than I describe, I apologize. Ours were pretty easy. Do some research if you come across tough ones, but I’ve seen using a heat gun (?) or rent a stripper machine (get your mind out of the gutter) as solutions.

Step 5: Try to follow the highly complicated instructions, get frustrated, and just guess how to do it

Man alive, for being the easiest tiles in the world the written instructions were pretty bad. Erin and I are both college educated individuals (not to say that is the end-all be-all to intelligence), but it means we should, in theory, be able to read non-technical instructions on laying floating tile. It got to the point where I got the gist of what needed to be done and I put a plank down in the corner and started aligning planks next to one another, connecting them with the sticky parts.

Step 6: Realize what the instructions were trying to say but also realize it’s too late and you need to improvise to fix it

Yeah, so those instructions were trying to say don’t align the tiles with the wall, since walls are usually not a straight line. Instead, align the tiles with the tile next to it to avoid gaps. My bad...

But here is how I a) fixed it and b) gave it a pretty realistic tile-look. I got some grout that matched the faux-grout color on the tiles and I filled in the cracks (heh, heh) with the help of my lovely partner in crime Erin (who found that she loves to use grout). Now the proper way to put grout down is to use a grout trowel, drop it into the crack (why is crack such a funny word???) and wipe away excess with a sponge or towel. I started to do that but found it to be faster for this project to just use my hands.

Step 7: Edges, smaller sections and curved areas, oh my!

Basically, you’ll want to measure these sections as best you can with the tape measure to see where you will need to cut the tiles to make them fit. Once you’ve done that, use the paper to trace a pattern and then using the utility knife, trace the pattern onto the tile plank.

Note: Whenever using a utility blade on a surface that may break the blade, please wear goggles.

Once the etching is on the plank, use the blade to score the etching a little deeper (don’t try to cut through the tile; it’s useless and a lot of work for nothing).

Once you’ve scored the section, you can use an edge of table or something and bend/break the tiles over it. And there you go, the sections fit in place!

Step 8: Grout some more, fill in the weird areas with smaller sections of tile, and stand back to admire your awesomeness

That’s pretty much it. If you did this correctly, you won’t need the grout, but you’ll probably need to cut a lot of smaller sections. These are tough to bend/break, so use a pair of pliers to assist you.

Overall, this project was pretty easy (or at least it got a lot easier once I fully understood what the hell I was doing). I think I can and would enjoy doing this again and it would take me less time.

Time spent: 20 hours (over the course of two weeks)
Cost: $670 (this will be more or less depending on what materials you already have and how many boxes of tiles you need).