Well, the time has come my story-book house on Garrison Road…

It’s been almost 6 years since I took the plunge and bought my first house. A young twenty-something with delusions of home-ownership grandeur.

I started a website in 2005 about all of my crazy projects, and kicked it off by talking about how to get rid of that where’s-the-dead-body smell from your new house.

I lived through a waterfall that spanned 3 floors of my house.

I embarked upon a number of crazy projects, such as…

• Learning to install hardwood floors while rebuilding the kitchen
• Building a badass pergola with my Mom
• Finding my own way to cope crown molding (using a dremmel)
• Making a crooked broom for the kitchen, and then for everyone else
• And hundreds of other things

It’s been, um, fun. Instructional. Exhausting. Awesome.

There was a time where I thought I’d spend many more years living on Garrison Road. And then I met a guy who flirted with me and then convinced me to move to the country.

And so, here we are. Sunday I turned over the keys to that awesome couple from Florida who bought the house on Garrison Road, and who I hope will create wonderful memories in their new home.

The first rule of ownership should always be to leave the house in better shape than you found it in… even though that doesn’t happen as much as it should. Still, how’d I do?

Old Living Room

New Living Room

Old Kitchen

New Kitchen

Old Nook

New Nook

Old Basement

New Basement

Old Office

New Office

Old Half-Bath

New Half-Bath

Old Basement Hall

New Basement Hall

Old Back Yard

New Back Yard

And the room I just may miss the most…

Guess which room I’m going to finish in the new house first? I’m just sayin’… life isn’t worth living without a bathtub to sink into after a long day.

But in order to reach that glorious day when my very own master bath will be finished, there had to be some sacrifices. And one of them was saying good-bye to the house on Garrison Road.

It was a good six years little old house. I hope the next six–and sixty– are just as awesome.

And while it was a little hard to walk out the door of my first house for the last time, on my way home to the country I had a feeling that things were going to work out just right.

Oh, and a check that will help put a roof on the new place, but other than that…

Actually, what happened was I stole this pen from the title agency– you know, as a souvenir– and then karma let me know in no uncertain terms that stealing is wrong, and you’ll pay for it with big ink stains on one of the only hole-less shirts you own.

Point for you, karma.

And it sure is a good feeling to have waded through the paperwork-and-house-appraisal gauntlet and come out on the other side in one piece. Mostly.

Garrison Road no longer belongs to me, and I’m going to get real sentimental about that in about six weeks when I have a chance breathe. Until then, we’ve got things to pack, move, clean, build, and haul back from Texas.

UPDATE: Thanks to all of  you awesome people who were sending us good vibes yesterday. Unfortunately the appraiser would. not. budge. Something has got to be wrong with the system when my neighbor 5 houses down linoliumed over all his hardwood and sold his house for $20,000 less than mine, and is now determining the worth of my slate floors. We’re still trying to see if we can work out some sort of deal with the buyers, so I’m still typing with my fingers crossed that we come up with a solution that makes financial sense for all of us, because they really are awesome people.

If you follow me on Twitter, yesterday you got to preview both the good news, and the part where for the second time in my life I wanted to squeeze an appraiser so hard his eyeballs pop out of his head. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The good news is that later this week, we’re going to dig a very, very big hole in the ground.

It would be enough to make me jump for joy, if only I didn’t simultaneously receive an email that the appraisal company valued my house for ten thousand dollars less than I bought it for five years ago.

…

…

…

This is me restraining myself from using the eff word a lot.

…

…

Okay, intellectually I understand the necessity of an appraisal. I understand that we’ve been in a helluva financial situation because people were spending too much money on houses, and taking out loans they could never repay. And the houses they bought are now selling for cheap.

But people, I’ve said I’ll sell my house for a price considerably less that what I paid for the house and insane improvements I’ve made to it. And the buyers are willing to pay that price, and feel like they’re getting a good deal. And the bank is willing to loan them them the money (okay, obviously banks will loan anyone money, but they were pre-approved for a considerable amount over the asking price of my house) . But the appraisal company is sitting in the corner of this little party tapping their fingers together and cackling at all of us.

I mean, this house…

…just sold for $10k more than my house was appraised at.

I just got my ass kicked by aluminum siding.

We’re taking all the necessary steps to get this resolved. Like finding comparable sales in my neighborhood and printing them out to whack the appraiser in the head with them asking for a re-evaluation of the property.

I could use some good vibes from the internet this week… both on not tripping and falling into that bigass hole we’re going to be digging, and on the appraisal company seeing reason.

Two weeks ago my life could be summed up like this:

• I had people from Florida coming to look at my house in 3 weeks and needed to move all of my junk out of the house and finish up all miscellaneous projects.
• I had a week of classes to attend until 10 PM each night

And let me tell you, I was pretty busy, but I figured I’ve done plenty worse, so I could handle it. You know what having a thought like that is called? Tempting fate.

What happened next was I received an email from the lovely couple from florida saying they had moved their travel up and would now be here in two weeks, essentially cutting the number of weekends I could devote to working on the house in half.

And I thought, things are going to get a little busier, but I can handle it.

Then I was contacted by ehow.com about fact-checking 500 of their home improvement articles in the next two weeks. And when you’re building a house on limited funds that needs to have a roof and walls before winter, you will take any job that comes your way…

So now I had:

• People from Florida coming to look at my house in 2 weeks and needed to move all of my junk out of the house and finish up all miscellaneous projects
• A week of classes to attend until 10 PM each night
• 500 how-to articles to fact check

And I thought, okay, I’m not going to get very much sleep, but I can handle it.

Then, MysteryMan had an opportunity to spend a long weekend in Florida with a cousin that he doesn’t see very often and won’t have a chance to visit for the next year once we start the house. And the stress of being locked in the dungeon with the house plans was taking a toll on him. I love the guy so how could I do anything but encourage him to spend the weekend relaxing*?

And I thought, I’ve just sent my backup crew to the other end of the country, but my URL says “DIYdiva” so I must be able to handle it.

As I’m in the midst of proving that to myself– painting the bathroom, making curtains for under the basement stairs, packing up clothes, cleaning the baseboards, and any number of other things between the hours of 6PM and 3AM– one of the accounts I manage for my Actual Real Job explodes. Not literally, but with enough emotional force to necessitate a trip to Rhode Island in the 5 days I have left to accomplish an ever increasing list of tasks.

Now I had:

• People from Florida coming to look at my house in 7 days and needed to move all of my junk out of the house and finish up all miscellaneous projects
• 500 how-to articles to fact check
• Builders classes to attend until 10 PM
• A trip to Rhode Island to coordinate the day before the couple from Florida arrives
• A lumberjack in Florida who had to believe I had everything under control so he wouldn’t get an ulcer

And I thought, I am now at my limit. The universe cannot possibly ask anything else of me, and as long as nothing goes wrong I can handle it.

Sure, I went off food, stopped brushing my hair, and developed a twitch in my left eye but — by god– I was handling it.

Then I walked into work the day I had to leave for my trip to Rhode Island and then come directly back and put the finishing touches on my house before the potential buyers rang my doorbell… and there were fifty balloons being inflated 5 feet from my desk.

Here’s something you don’t know about me… as a general rule I don’t have irrational fears. I like snakes and spiders and mice and clowns and guns and airplanes. But I Fucking. Hate. Balloons.  And, okay, I know I’m crazy, and I can only attribute this loathing to the fact hat I hate to be startled. And where there are balloons there is always one asshole who’s going to stomp on them or poke them with a pen or run their fingers over them so that it makes that horrible squeeky I’m-going-to-pop-any-second sound that makes my chest constrict.

And just maybe my co-workers thought about calling the psych ward when I started shaking my fist at the ceiling and shouting, “You think this is going to stop me, universe? You think 100 pink balloons is going to be the thing that puts me over the edge?!” Because 100 pink balloons very possibly was going to be the thing that put me over the edge.

But guess what universe? Not only did I get my house ready to show a lovely couple from Florida in two weeks, and attend 8 hours of contractors classes, and fact check 500 home improvement articles, and fly to Rhode Island and back in 24 hours, and survive an invasion on overinflated pink balloons…

I SOLD MY HOUSE. Using only the internet and a $20 sign.

I thought the actual “letting go” of  my house would be a difficult thing, but the truth is I couldn’t have picked a couple** I would want to own Garrison more than this one. They love the house and its unique features, and they appreciate all the work that has been done to it. They admitted after we signed the purchase agreement that when they walked in the house it already felt like home.

And I would live the last two weeks again a dozen times for things to turn out this way, and to know that I had a hand in creating something that this wonderful couple will call home.

*I just want to point out that before MysteryMan left, he re-wired the bathroom light, installed the new sink, stripped the paint from the front storm door, touched up the paint on the house, and hauled 4 loads of junk to Memorial without any assistance from me. I did not, by any means, manage to get all of this done by myself.

** They were so awesome, in fact, that when I asked them to reenact the ceremonial removing of the for-sale sign so I could get a picture for my website, they didn’t even bat an eye. Meanwhile, MysteryMan rolled his eyes at the lot of us.

Another project on the list of “things I should have finished in the last five years but didn’t” is the half-bath in the basement of the Garrison house.

Sometimes when I look at pictures of what this house looked like before, am at a loss as to why I felt compelled to buy it. For way too much money.

Continuing on the monochromatic color-scheme of the basement (before I got my hands on it) this bathroom was blue. Walls, door, doorknobs, and ceiling. The toilet and sink were blessedly white. Ish.

The floor– shudder– I don’t even want to talk about what I found under those tiles, but suffice it to say I used a years supply of bleach to clean it up.

I don’t know what it is with me and prison bathrooms, but they follow me everywhere.

I started on this re-model a few years ago. Which is to say I painted the walls red…

Tiled the floor…

And called it good enough to pee in. Until last week, when– for under $100– it finally reached the rustic elegance it was meant for.

For the light fixture I knew I wanted something fun, cheap, and fancier than you might expect to find in a basement bathroom, but not too over the top. Sara @ Russet Street Reno gave me the idea for this small shell pendant from the World Market with her dressing room redo.

I went for the smaller coffee colored fixture.

MysteryMan, to his credit, only rolled his eyes at me once for the fanciness. He also wired the fixture to a switch instead of a pull-chain. Damn engineers are handy to have around, I tell ya.

The mirror was something I had laying around and seemed to fit, and the new sink was $77 at Home Depot.

Slight improvement over this, I think…

And if my house sells tomorrow, I’ll be glad I finished this room off right.

Maybe I should clarify that first part. “Last big project for the next two weeks at Garrison” is probably more appropriate.

For the uninitiated, Garrison is the house I bought 5 years ago, and which is currently for sale. Not to be confused with the Memorial house, which is the one that 1.) stinks,  2.) has a gas station we’re moving into, and 3.) will be the future home of our miniature donkeys. And us.

Only one of those things is contingent on us selling the Garrison house in the next 12 months. Like the part where we eventually move out of the gas station and into a finished house.

In the last five years I have essentially stripped out every piece of this house that wasn’t nailed down and refinished, tiled, painted, or rebuilt it. (I actually used a contractor for part of that work — the part where my water meter got installed backwards and the tile got installed wrong, so if you’re wondering why I have a website on doing it yourself, there you go.)

But there was one last place of the house that hadn’t been touched, and that I really felt needed to be finished, first, for my own personal sense of satisfaction, and second… did I mention I want to sell this house in the next year.

And the basement hallway still looked like this…

The best I can figure, someone got a good deal on 20 gallons of battleship gray paint. The stairs, walls, ceiling, and floor were all the same color.

We’re not talking shades of gray, we’re talking shade. One. Though the door had a little white on it, so I guess that’s something.

A few months ago I dug in and started stripping the gray paint of those beautiful hardwood stairs.

For more scintillating information on this project you can check out how I bruised and burnt myself, didn’t give up,  and almost burnt my house down with a sander that looks like an armadilla.

That fun little adventure did result in the absence of gray paint on the steps in the end, which is all that matters.

After the stairs were stained, I attacked the epoxy-painted brick walls with an oil based primer…

And a sunny latex paint.

There was a time when I thought I was going to cross a line and put stick=tiles on this floor instead of real ceramic, and then I remembered that I have morals when it comes to fixing up a house other people will eventually live in. If it’s not good enough for me, I’m not going to patch it up real quick and sell it to someone else…

And who doesn’t love a good grout job, anyway?

Looking for some how-to goodness on tiling? Find it here. (I incurred no injuries in the tiling of this floor. Unless you count the frostbite from using my wet-saw outside in 20-degree weather.)

I alluded to the finishing touches last weekend…

And for under $200 (don’t even get me started on the number of man-hours though) we go from this…

to this…

‘

One of the lucky things about this old house? It came with 12 miscellaneous doors, from who-knows-where — one of which MysteryMan helped me trim down to use in place of that blue-and-white one.

If you’re curious about what’s behind curtain number one… that’s another before & after for later this week, along with a how-to on the fabric panels for under the stairs.

And speaking of stairs. A couple of coats of dark walnut stain and satin polyurethane finish? Worth. Every. Burn.

With the dates for the Hauling Ass Tour of 2010, and ground-breaking for the house bearing down upon us, I’ve begun repeating the coming weeks (and whats expected of us) in a desperate kind of litany…

Next week we visit my adorable honorary nephew a few states away, the following two weeks we build the donkey shed, the week after that we drive to Texas and back again, and the next week we move into the Station. Then we have people coming to look at the Garrison house, and approximately one month to sell it before the tax credit expires.

During one of the several times I was mumbling this under my breath in the last week, MysteryMan looked at me and say, “You know, if there’s anything that still needs to be done before you sell your house, you have to do it this weekend.”

Then my eyeballs fell out of my head and rolled across the floor.

I currently have a smattering of white and yellow paint-freckles across my hair and face, tile adhesive under my fingernails, a bruise on my arm from hauling a new vanity into the downstairs bathroom, and I’m pretty sure there are little lightning bolts of stress shooting out of my ears.

So basically 1.) I’m fighting a constant low-grade urge to vomit, and 2.) I’m in DIY heaven.

I’ve found that the handy thing about doing it together is that- gasp!- you can divide and conquer projects when you need to.

It’s humbling to admit that MysteryMan does not need me to run the bigass miter saw after all, and in fact did a wonderful job of finishing the Station ceiling without me.

That is just all kinds of awesome, is it not?

Other than a few touch-ups I did manage to finish texturing all of the walls last week, which means we are a few gallons of paint and some cabinets away from being done with the “living” portion of the station.

I spent my weekend holed up in the basement of Garrison, doing things I’ve meant to do for the last five years. Like turning the “battleship gray” basement hallway into something that looks less like a dungeon.

And that should serve as a nice little preview to the posts that are coming on “how to install a tongue-and-groove wood ceiling”, and “tiling your basement floor:101″.

Did I mention I have 8 hours of Contractors class to attend this week as well? Basically I’m going to need my Superwoman costume, a bottle of valium, and a bible to survive the next month.

Excuse me while I go put my head between my legs and breathe into a bag for the next ten minutes.

Because this house saved my life on one occasion, and my sanity on numerous other occasions. It’s seen me through the hardest and most exhausting experiences of my life, and also the most fun ones. I’ve learned innumerable lessons, bought enough tools, lumber and drywall to supply a small country, and sacrificed things like showering on a regular basis to bring some projects on this house to fruition.

And… that’s enough waxing philosophic about it. Because on one hand, I love this house. On the other hand, can you say miniature donkeys? Yeah. The benefits… like building a home for MysteryMan and I to call ours… outweigh that constant low-grade urge to hyperventilate. Almost.

So: To the 10% of DIYdiva readers who are Toledoians, if you know anyone looking to buy, please refer them to here:

http://3748garrison.info

Because you had to know that I’d create a website to sell this house, and that it wouldn’t be just another lame real estate site, didn’t you?

(Although Internet Explorer users… the slideshow doesn’t work for you, which is lame. Although you should be using Firefox anyway. But I’ll be sacrificing a few more hours of sleep this week to fix that little glitch.)

So here’s to washing the permanent spots of paint out of my hair, having time to update this website, and getting 8 consecutive hours of sleep sometime in the next week!

Spending some quality time sitting on the basement steps waxing philosophic about life and/or paintchips has become a part of my daily routine over the last week or so. Overall I’ve switched from the heat gun to the orbital sander, which isn’t to say I didn’t receive yet another burn on my hand today, because seriously? My life is no longer complete if there isn’t skin blistering painfully on one of my knuckles. But enough about me.

I had one step left that hadn’t been touched yet, so I decided to make an example of it.

The step before- wallowing in it’s battleship-gray glory:

After being stripped down and having its soul bared via heat gun:

What’s next? Well hello there beautiful:

Add this one to the list of power tools Ricky’s never going to see again. Did you read that Dad? From my Cold. Dead. Hands.

And the step after that invigorating exfoliation from the orbital sander:

You know I couldn’t help myself and had to bust out the stain, just to see how it would take:

Seriously? When I’m done these might be the prettiest basement steps ever seen on a house this side of eighty.

Remember kids: Heat gun, sander, stain, and seal. Rinse and repeat as necessary ’til you’ve washed that battleship gray (or better yet, avocado green) right out of your lives!

Granted, I have burns on two of them, and twin bruises on my shins, but MysteryMan will tell you I can sustain those kinds of injuries making myself a bowl of cereal, so overall the weekend was a success.

Documentation of Injuries:

None of which show up very well on the iPhone camera, but suffice it to say there’s a burn below my index finger, a blister on my thumb, and I’m pointing to my shin bruises.

Any guesses what kind of DIY goodness causes these kind of injuries?

Here’s a hint…

One of my good friends called this weekend, and this is how our conversation went:

E: What are you doing?
Me: Stripping paint off the basement stairs.
E: …
E: Of course you are.

I guess I’m getting predictable.

This is a project I started, um, five years ago. And other than a lot of painting I’ll be doing in the coming weeks, it’s the last big hurdle to getting Garrison ready to sell.

Side Note: About two decades ago, when my mom was in her “country” phase she used to collect these little wood cutout buildings, and in each one there was a black cat painted somewhere. Some days I feel like that is my life.

Anyway, I have “before” pictures somewhere, but suffice it to say when I bought this house, the entire basement (floor, walls, ceiling, pipes, stairs, and doors) was painted with this gray epoxy paint. The stairs underneath that paint are truly beautiful, but it’s taking a lot of coaxing to get them come out of their shell.

I still have 3 stairs left to strip (and the railing) then I’m going to hit the whole thing with a belt sander before I re-stain and seal them. Which begs the question… why not just sand them down as is?

This is what MysteryMan asked me today after I explained to him about the bruises on my shins from leaning up against the lower stairs while scraping off paint, and shortly thereafter recieved my second burn. (Lack of hand-eye coordination + heat gun = bad combo.) The answer is that I have no idea why I’m not just sanding them down, except for that my gut instinct is telling me that judging by how thick the paint is, and how pliable it becomes when heated up, it will just gunk up the sander instead of being sanded off. Anyone try sanding epoxy paint off anything before?

My guess is, not a lot of people would epoxy-paint wood, so there’s probably not many circumstances in which you’d be sanding it in the first place.

In any case, there’s something oddly satisfying about using the heat gun on paint. Like when we used to let glue dry on our hands in kindergarten, just so we could peel it off later.

I’ve had very good luck with it on the house so far, and that may be because the previous owners didn’t believe in priming before they painted.

Here’s my tip for anyone using a paint gun… keep it moving over an area of paint until it starts to bubble under the surface. If you keep moving the gun in wider circles, the bubble will become larger and larger. Take the heat off it briefly (2-3 seconds) before scraping it with a putty knife. What I’ve found is if you get it real hot and then try to scrape it, the paint just gets gooey, and you end up with smears.

It started happening on the railing a bit:

By letting the paint cool a second before scraping it, you’re allowing it to get back to a more solid consistancy so you can get it off in those big sheets like I did above.

(You can see in the background there, yet another object I began scrapin paint off of and need to finish. I’ve never tried chemical strippers before, but I might give them a shot on that door, since getting the heat gun too close to that glass makes me nervous.)

I haven’t found any really good articles on using heat guns for stripping paint. I mean, point gun at paint, keep it moving, scrape paint with putty knife… it’s not rocket science. (This one isn’t super informative, but it does have some pretty pictures, and a slew of safety tips… none of which I followed. Hello injuries.)

After the stairs are done I’m going to stick-tile the floor… I’m thinking something like this:

And you’ve just witnessed me cross the line of “things I will do to the house to sell it that I wouldn’t do if I was planning to live here for the rest of my life.” Because if I was going to live here forever, I would spend the time and money putting real tile down. I’m trying not to feel too hypocritical about that, but I also put around $20k into this house that I’m never going to see again, so to the future owners of my house: You’re getting a badass pergola, brand new plumbing and kitchen, hardwood and slate floors throughout the house, and stick tiles in the basement.

Also on the agenda: Painting the walls to hide that blue-gray mess.