Improvising

Cutting a Soffit Grove in the Fascia Board

What do you do when you need to replace a section of 1x4 fascia board and neither Lowes or Home Depot carry the pre-grooved fascia board nor the dado blade needed to cut the groove (into which the soffit board fits)?

You channel your Norm Abram from This Old House and recall that you can use a metal yard stick as a guide and make multiple passes with your skill saw to cut the required groove. Set the skill saw to the necessary depth and then slowly move the guide about a blades width for each pass.

Kind of a pain, and takes some time ...but it gets the job done.

Phase 1 Plan

Layout for the New Addition (Master Bedroom and Bathroom)

We met with our designer (Renee) on the layout for the first phase of our remodel. The first phase will be the new addition off the back of the house.

Renee had prepared two different options for us. One option had the bedroom area of the addition at the back of the addition, and the second option had the master bedroom at the first part of the addition (just beyond the existing wall).

After reviewing the two options, we decided that we liked having the master bedroom part as the first thing that you enter from the existing house, and the bathroom part at the back of the addition. We made a couple of other small changes as we discussed the layout with Renee (like making the new porch longer and at the same height as the existing porch).

Now that we have a plan for the first phase, the next step will be to get some cost estimates from the contractors. At the moment, we have two contractors from which we want to get some cost estimates. Based on what we get from them, we may decide to get one more, or go ahead and select a contractor and get the ball rolling.

A Chipper Off The 'Ol Block

SunJoe Chipper

One of the cleanup tasks on our fixer upper has been trimming the many trees and bushes on our lot. The foliage has not been trimmed in some time. All of this trimming has resulted in several stacks of cut branches and brush.

You can bag up the trimmings and drag the larger branches to the front and let the city haul it away for you. However, Denton does assess a charge for "excess" yard trimmings that are put out for pickup. Also, you are giving up all that potential compost and mulch.

Since most of the branches are pretty small in diameter (albeit, there are a lot of them), I decided to purchase an electric wood chipper to grind them up to use as mulch and compost. I purchasing a 14 amp SunJoe electric chipper from Amazon.  The chipper arrived last Monday (several days later than Amazon's initial "guaranteed deliver date", but that's another story). I picked up the chipper from our house in Carrollton, assembled it, and started in on the brush piles.

So far so good.

I've made it through several of the piles (although there are several more to go) and it seems to be making nice piles of mulch. The mulch should come in handy when I finally get to work on building and planting our flowerbeds and landscaping.

All Paths Lead Home

Flagstone Walkway

While we've been waiting for our designer (Renee) to complete the drawings for our new master bedroom and bathroom, I've been trimming bushes and trees, scraping and priming peeling paint, and digging out the excess dirt in the front flower bed and moving it to the low spots in the back yard.

However, I did take a bit of break and went and bought some flagstone to build a walkway on the west side of the house. It is mostly just dirt on that side and it really needed something to get from the front of the house to the back.

When I complete the scraping and priming on the eve above this path, I'll add a flower bed between the path and the wall with some Columbine and other shade loving plants, since this side of the house is in shade much of the day.

Power to the People

My new (used) portable power generator

When you buy a "fixer upper" there's always surprises.

The first one came when I broke out the power washer to wash the siding (which was filthy) before I scraped and painted the peeling paint. When I plugged in the power washer, it wouldn't run properly. Apparently, the power washer was pulling too many amps for the current power circuits on the house. (Note: The house is getting new circuits as part of the upgrade).

 In order to run the power washer, I was going to need a portable generator.

I went to look at portable generators at Lowes and Home Depot and quickly discovered that they were both sold out. All the generators had been purchased for work going on down in Houston from the flooding and hurricane. So, I offered to purchase the floor model at Lowes. The sales guy said that they weren't allowed to sell the floor model, but he would talk to the manager.

We went and talked with the manager who told me that corporate would not let them sell the floor model. However, she said they did have a used one (with only 60 hours of run time on it) that someone had returned because they needed a larger model. They had marked it down since it was used.

She went into the back and brought it out. Turns out, it was a larger model than what I needed and although it had been marked down, it was still more expensive than the smaller model I was trying to buy.

She thought about if for a minute and then told me that she would sell me this used one for the same price as the smaller model that I was trying to buy. "Sold" I said.

Luckily, when I got it to the Denton house and fired it up, it ran like a champ, and provided plenty of power for the power washer.

Scraping and Priming

Before

After

There is quite a bit of the exterior wood siding and trim that has peeling paint and bare wood. 

One of the first tasks to protect the exterior is to scrape and prime the exterior surfaces that have peeling paint. 

Here are a few pics of the before and after results of the scraping and priming activities. It is likely to take quite a few days to complete.

 

 

Before

After

First Things First

Tools of the Trade

Given that the house had been a rental for ten years, it was quite dirty.

All that I did for the first several days was to clean each room, mostly by wiping down the ceilings and walls and mopping the floors with bleach water.

One of the first rooms that I cleaned was the living area where I setup our blow up bed as my bedroom and base of operation for the first couple of weeks.
 

Home Sweet Home

I also installed a new carbon monoxide and smoke detector, since I was going to be staying at the house while we got things rolling.

In fact, when the ATMOS gas company technician came out to turn on the gas and ran a "pressure test" (to make sure the gas line would hold pressure) the test failed.

He asked if the house had one of those "old gas heaters" in the bathroom. I said that it did. We went in and checked on the heater and it was in the "on" position, which was why the pressure test was failing. As soon as we turned it to the "off" position, the gas line pressure tested fine.

The Offending Heater