DIY House Addition: A Week In The Life (Monday)

Ever wonder what a week is like in the life of people who juggle full time jobs, part time contracting on their house, after-midnight blogging, and slightly more alcohol consumption than is strictly healthy?

Hi there, this is my existence.

We’re in the thick of it here at Casa de Crazy, and yesterday after hanging siding and banging my head against the wall for a while I realized we’d reached the epitome of what life is like when you DIY your house addition. So I thought I’d give you a blow-by-blow of my week because 1.) It’s slightly easier than writing regular posts and an inordinate amount of my time this week is going to be spent picking out light fixtures, 2.) someone somewhere may want to know exactly what this is like before they commit to it themselves, and 3.) it helps me retain some bit of sanity as I plow through this week head on.

Plus we have some fun things going on and who wouldn’t want to be in on the excitement when we realize the concrete we just poured is purple? Yeah, I didn’t think you’d want to miss it.

Monday: Mud Day, In a Good Way

1:30 AM – Usually my days don’t start out this early but MysteryMan has unsympathetically woken me up by turning on every light in our 400 square foot living space. Here are the kinds of things that go through my head at 1:30 AM on a Monday:

Holy-effing-christ, I’m blind! Why are you searing my eyeballs out with all the light? What the hell is going on? What is that noise? Oh look, the cat has a mouse and he’s bringing it up on the bed.

This is followed by thirty minutes of alternately catching the cat, catching the mouse, losing the mouse, catching the cat while it has the mouse by the tail and trying to get him outside before he drops it, and begging MysteryMan to please just let me go back to bed because it’s just a mouse.

2:00 AM – Adventure over. Mouse safely outside. My body now contains enough adrenaline to flip over a car. Sleep is a far distant memory.

7:30 AM -Here are the kinds of things that go through my head at 7:30 AM on a Monday:

Holy-effing-christ, I’m deaf! What is with the sound drilling a hole straight through my eardrums and into my brain? What the hell is going on? Why is there a vibrating iPhone stuck to the side of my face?

7:35 AM – I realize that aliens have not abducted me to perform invasive sonic wave experiments on my brain, it’s just time to get up and face the day. I’m nothing but sunshine and rainbows in the morning.

I take a couple of pictures of the siding and upload them for my first post of the week.

8:30 AM – At my Actual Real Job to deal with actual things not involving my house.

11:30 AM– MysteryMan and I meet at the concrete office for last minute color decisions.

12:15 PM– We narrow it down to two colors. MysteryMan likes this one best but we can’t replicate the integral color so we have to take a guess based on the color charts. The release is called Gray Plum. This is slightly worrisome, but it doesn’t look purple… right?

(At the time, it didn’t look purple even though I kept making noises about the name “plum” and kept leaning towards the Colina Tan sample. But I made that really bad call with the cedar beams, so I let MysteryMan make the final decision on this one.  Speaking as someone who is looking at this picture 12 hours later, it totally looks fucking purple. I think we may be able to power wash off the majority of the release tomorrow and just get it down to the buff color.)

12:30 PM – Back to work with other things to worry about.

3:30 PM – Taking a couple of personal hours from work to help with the concrete, which is supposedly on it’s way to the house, but I’ve heard that before and let me tell you I’ll believe it when I see it. Oh…

Holy crap, I think I see a concrete truck at my house.

The crew is already working hard by the time I show up and start taking pictures of them…

pouring

The colored release is brushed onto the form before pouring the mud, and this is where things start to get worrisome…

DSC_0582

So we’ve got yellow concrete, purple release, maroon cedar siding posts, and green siding. Maybe someone should stop us from every picking a color out again. It will be a miracle if this house looks like anything other than Sherwin Williams barfed all over it.

That being said, we know the purple will darken to a brownish gray when the sealer is on. We hope. We really really hope.

5:30 PM– I’m enlisted to help throw the purple release over the top of the concrete. What the hell, let’s go for it.

6:30 PM– Some release got on the porch…

DSC_0594

But it looks like most of it ended up on me.

dirty

7:00 PM – Cleaned up and eating re-heated lasagna that mom brought over yesterday.

7:30 PM – Resume searching for and planning out the locations of light fixtures. I dream about light fixtures.

11:00 PM – My eyes are bleeding from light fixtures, so I move on to editing photos from the concrete pour today. Looks less messy through the camera.

rich_flatwork

11:30 PM – Re-hash my entire day and have another minor freakout about the purple concrete while writing this post.

12:45 AM– Hey look! It’s tomorrow already. Regardless of the color of the concrete, we can call it a good day because we actually have porches now, which means we can actually side a good portion of the house this weekend.

Can’t wait to see if we really did just pour the ugliest concrete that ever existed though. The next 24 hours should be extra fun.

2 Responses

  1. Damn, it’s boring living in the city. No cat and no mouse. Especially no mouse. Absolutely no way is my wife rolling over in bed to go back to sleep while mumbling, “It’s just a mouse, Joe.”

  2. Thank you for posting this day in the life. Sometimes I think no one else would go through the same set of endless days, but reading this means there are people out there like me slamming home work after “work”.

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