Ranch House Revamp

We're not done yet, if you look really close you will see the lack of downspouts and the gutters are still white and the doors are not painted. Other than that, we now do not own a ghetto ranch house anymore.

The next time this house gets painted, it will be by someone else. That is, if we can stomach hiring someone else.

Notice I've included NO photos of the interior. It's currently less than impressive. I think we need a break from the remodel for a bit. It is starting to feel like a second job.

Old house- a week after we moved in.

Construction Is NOT For Girls

Girls- have you ever tried to use a drill at an odd angle? Held a pneumatic nailer? Hand nailed something over your head? Maybe some of you have amazon hands and hand-eye coordination that I lack because I have a heck of a time with construction type work. As I said before, I don't know my fractions so I have to add and subtract in my head...slowly. This tends to make the foreman (ie Jarred) REALLY angry. I also lack the skill to use a roofing nailer in my left hand while standing on a ladder holding up a piece of siding. When the foreman says, "Don't be a weenie, just push the thing into the house, it will work." but my hand is shaking and the siding is now crooked, I know that construction is not my calling. But here I am, on a ladder with a roofing gun. Over the summer I realized that most tools are not made for girls. They're heavy and large. Not conducive to girl hands. What does this mean? It means that when a couple takes on their own large house project, the girl is stuck going to to the dump, or caulking the siding for hours at a time, or sweeping, or picking up nails with a magnet..... My least favorite job this summer was caulking. All the seams between the siding must be caulked before we paint. This is a tedious job. The seams are never ending, just when I thought I was done, Jarred would slap up another 18 pieces of siding and I'd start all over again. My second least favorite job was going to the dump when it was hot. It was hot when this photo was taken and I had a truck and trailer full of old siding, roofing materials, tar paper, ect... I had to stand at the stinky dump and unload all of this myself. Why myself? Because tools are made to fit a man's hands.

The Man That Can

We live on the corner of a fairly busy residential road. While we generally ignore the traffic, we realized as we worked on the house this summer that they do not ignore us. Initially we noticed that people would slow down as they passed the house. As we took more notice of the gawkers, we found ourselves giggling when we'd see them, mouths open, trying to figure out what our overall plan was with our house. We'd already had a plethora of comments about our fence, and they didn't stop once we started working on the house. I posted a previous blog post about the guy who told Jarred he could have really screwed the fence up, had he not had an eye for design. He came back once we had the siding up and spent about a half an hr. grilling Jarred on siding. Upon returning to work, I received a number of questions about our overall plan for the house, why we picked the materials we did, ect....I'm not sure if everyone liked what we were doing, but they sure were curious. As most of you know, Jarred is a busy guy. He's so busy and sees so much to do in the world, he's notorious for starting one project or hobby, doing it for awhile and then just moving on. This habit has allowed him many adventures, but it doesn't bode well with large house projects. We knew that ripping the siding off the house would be a big project as we would need to replace rotten studs, the windows we were putting in were not the same size as the old windows, we needed to put all new soffits in and replace a good portion of the fascia boards. We also needed to re-do the interior dining room and had aspirations of putting a climbing wall in, instead of boring old sheet-rock. I was a bit worried that we'd get a week or two into the project, Jarred would get bored and we'd have a half finished house for the next year or so. Luckily, for some reason, Jarred got into this project. He was diligent and worked super hard all summer. He also proved his stellar skills as a carpenter and made me appreciate the fact that I live with someone who isn't afraid to dig in and do it himself. Overall, he managed really well. Nothing on our house was straight anymore (if it ever was) and I think that and the negligent past owners, practically drove Jarred crazy but he persevered and we actually had most of the siding done by the time school started.

I like this photo- shows the true ghetto of the old siding.

I also appreciate Jarred's eye for design. He's constantly thinking about design and new ideas and while I complain that most of them don't come to fruition, I guess I should appreciate the ones that do, because they're usually great.

Soffits

I really hope the guy who created soffits sits on a cactus one day. While soffits represent the "finished" house, one who has been built with love and care, they also represent an aspect of design which could have been avoided but has somehow become mainstream, like drywall. Our house had soffits but they were poorly built and equated with much of the rot we found as we tore into the back of the house. They had to go. But did they have to return? I pleaded with Jarred that we not put them back in but he scoffed as if I was insisting we also NOT put in the windows and simply cover the window holes with tarps. As we worked on replacing the soffits around the WHOLE house, I bitched like a teenager. It was my job to drill the soffit holes and whlile I was drilling it was hot, the drill was heavy and the drill bit sucked. My morale about the whole project was little help and I think Jarred would have rather just done the project without me. Now that we have nice soffits though, I'm glad we do and I'm now obsessed with looking at other houses and critiquing their soffits. I'll also rest well now knowing that our soffit holes are evenly matched at 3 inches apart and they offer ample venting.
*By the way, a great way to a quick tan? Hang out near a black tar papered house during the summer. This photo was taken just after we put the tar paper up on the last dreary day of summer.

The Remodel that Never Ends

I've been avoiding this blog post because I have not figured out where to start and have not made the time to sit down and begin the story...until last week the weather was good, still prime remodel weather. Now that the rain has hit, it's time to reflect. Jarred and I have this masochistic obsession with remodeling houses. We've finally admitted to ourselves that we'll never make money on real estate. We've also admitted that we don't really know why we remodel houses as we don't really like the work, we're not home bodies and we've yet to live in a house long enough to actually enjoy the remodel work we do. We tell ourselves this house will be different.

We purchased the Camas house a little over a year ago. We knew it needed work but wanted to suffer through a year of National Boards work before we dug into the house. After having fun with the fence, it was time to get down and dirty and address our dining room- the poorly built addition. The dining room looks like I built it. I'm no carpenter; I don't know my fractions, I measure with my eye and I'm not meticulous with my cutting. The floor on our dining room slopes down slightly and the roof was built with tongue and groove, a bit of particle board and some tar paper. Needless to say, we were one winter away from a leaky roof and buckets inside. The minute school got out, Jarred rallied the free help (thanks a ton Randy and Tyson) and they dug into the dining room. I gallivanted off to my parents for the weekend and came back to a new room (almost).

The photo above shows the true ghetto-ness of the dining room. It feels like so long ago that the house looked like this! Long ago we also decided we wanted metal siding. Actually, our dream is to have a metal roof AND siding but the teacher pocket book does not allow for such extravagances, so we went for partial metal siding. Our goal was also to make a boring ranch house into a "modern gem." Ok, that's a bit Sunset-ish but our goal was to show that ranch houses can be cool too.

*I dumped a myriad of photos on facebook for those really interested in the process. Facebook is the lazy man's blog.