It's Not Easy Being Green

We've been experiencing the unusual in Portland for the last two weeks now - a snowy winter. We generally get snow at least once every winter here in Portland, but it usually melts within a day or two. This snow just won't go away! In fact, it just keeps snowing more! Luckily I have an all wheel drive Subaru plus chains so we've still been able to make it over to the house and our daily trips to Lowes and Home Depot.

With the frozen weather, both of us have had plenty of time off of work which means plenty of time to work on the house. We didn't leave the house until after 11:00 pm most of the past week. We are working our buns off to get this place as done as possible by next week because no matter how far along we are, we have to move on the 31st. The good news is I finished painting the other two bedrooms this week. The bigger bedroom (which we'll probably rent out) is a light brown and the smaller bedroom (which we'll use as an office) is a buttery yellow. I'm really happy with the colors and how everything turned out. Choosing the color for the living room has been an entirely different story.

We decided that we wanted to go with a green for the living room. Turns out that green is a really difficult color to get right. Thank goodness Lowes sells their paint in sample sizes. The first green we chose was too "pea soup." It reminded us a bit of The Exorcist. The next green was too minty, kind of like the color of hospital scrubs. The third green was getting better but we felt it was too gray. At this point we felt maybe green just wasn't meant to be, so we tried a red. We quickly scratched that idea thinking it might be too dramatic for our living room. We decided to go back to green and keep trying. The fourth green had too much of a teal undertone. At this point I was pretty fed up. We had spent the last two days working on the house for over 11 hours each day. It was still freezing and snowy and I hadn't finished my Christmas shopping. I was beginning to get frustrated with the whole process. I decided I was choosing a color and sticking with it. I went to the display area, chose green and said, "This is it, what do you think?" Jesse's response: "looks good, but are you sure you want to do this? You're going to buy a whole gallon of this before trying it out on the wall? What if we don't like this one either?" My response to Jesse: "I don't care! I just want to be done with this. If we don't like it we'll have to live with it for a couple of years until we get up the effort to redo it." We tried it out on the wall next to the four other greens, waited for it to dry...and we liked! I think it's what we were looking for all along. The winner is the one on the far left.


While I've been working on the painting, Jesse has been tiling the bathroom floor. My mom was planning on coming up to help us with the tiling. She's done many tiling projects over the years and was going to be the expert. Well, with all the snow she couldn't make it up to our place. We knew that we needed to get the tiling down in order to put a sink and toilet in and we were worried about waiting any longer on this project. So we decided to go for it on our own. After a phone converstation with my mom and some internet research, we started laying the mortar and tile. Jesse spent many hours on his hands an knees getting every tile perfect and making sure everything was level and staright. I am very impressed with finished product.

We headed down to Crow to spend Christmas with my parents and sister and her husband. We woke up to it snowing outside (of course!), had breakfast and opened our gifts. Jesse got a tool belt and some new tools to put in it and an iPod Shuffle. It was the Christmas of hats for me. I got a Seattlt Sombrero for the rain, a soft knit earflap hat and a Universtiy of Oregon baseball cap. We having a full Turkey dinner tonight and Pavolova for dessert. Pavlova is an Australian dessert I fell in love with when I lived their in college. It's meringue, whipped cream and fresh fruit. Delicious!

We head back to Portland tomorrow. We still need to grout the floor, tile and grout the shower, paint the hall and paint the living. Hopefully we finish this over the next few days. Uh....yeah.

Happy Holidays everyone! I hope your all with family and loved ones celebrating the season!

One down, Five to go!

So, we finished one room! Our bedroom is painted, polished and ready for move in. We won't have anywhere to shower, go to the bathroom or cook our food, but we'll have a place to sleep. Because that's really what's most important - sleep. Relieving oneself and eating are way overrated!

We are currently T-13 days until we have to be out of our apartment. This means 13 days to finish the bathroom, finish the two other bedroom and finish the living room, plus we have to pack up our apartment and move. Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Yeah, you could say I'm beginning to get a little nervous. We gave up working on the kitchen until we actually move in. For the first couple of months is looks like we'll be eating off of a hotplate, microwave and crockpot. I just keep reminding myself that it will all be worth it in the end.

Last weekend we worked with a cabinet guy at Lowe's to design our kitchen. Lowe's has the best price on cabinets, plus they have 20% off their cabinets right now - that's a huge savings if you're spending thousands of dollars. The program they use to design the kitchen is pretty cool. We measured all the walls and chose our cabinets and then the Lowe's cabinet guy plugs it all into his magic program and designs us a kitchen. We played around with a bundle of ideas, but I think we came up with a winner. The main thing we wanted to do with our kitchen is take out some walls in order to open the kitchen into the living room. We wanted to create more of a great room rather than a separate kitchen and living room. We feel like we achieved almost exactly what we wanted. Our plan as of right now is to go with granite tiles for the counters - much cheaper than one large granite slab. We are still deciding about the floor. I lean towards slate tiles, but we've also talked about cork floor or wood floor. I really like the look of the slate tiles, but we also worry about the breakability factor - drop anything on this tile and it will shatter. But then again, you drop something hard enough on wood floor and it will shatter. We're going to go with stainless steal appliances. We still have many final decision to make with the kitchen, but we're well on our way to designing what we want.

Update on the bathroom: We replaced all the sheet rock surrounding the shower with hardy backer and green board to prep it for our tiling. We're laying the sub-floor to prep it for tiling as well. We're hoping to start the tiling this weekend when my mom "the master tiler" helps us out. Once we have the floor tile down, we can put in the toilet and sink. We going for the black and white tile theme. The picture to the above provides an idea of what we're going for. *This is not our bathroom.* I wish this was our bathroom because that would mean we were done with it. I'm not sure what color we're going to paint the walls. How about some blog participation: What color do you think we should paint the walls in the bathroom??? Anything goes with black and white, so we're open to ideas. Comment to this blog post with what you think would look best.

White Out!

Look out people it's a blizzard! We're currently experiencing our annual snow storm and let me tell you, Portland is not a city that plans for snow. We don't have plows so people just drive over the snow and compact it into a sheet of ice covering every road. Or what will happen is that it will be raining here like it always does in the winter and the temperature will dip below freezing at night. When you wake up the city is covered in a glossy sheet of ice which shuts us down because we don't put salt on the roads either.

Anyway, here is our house covered in snow. Well not covered exactly but dusted. This was Monday and I got the day off due to this extreme weather. I went to work Tuesday but today I also got the day off because it is unsafe to travel. Becky has had every day off this week and probably won't work Thursday or Friday either. Sounds cool, but school district protocol is to make up these days in June.


Yep, no plows. Its pretty funny for someone who grew up in New England to see a city shut down by this. Look you can even see grass poking out next to the sidewalk.

Our friend Lindsey hosted a 'white out' party the day before the arctic blast. The drink of choice was White Russians and of course the attendants were clad in white. I finally had an occasion to wear my Oregon for Obama which I ordered on the website and didn't actually arrive until the day after election day.

You might notice white specks on the floor in this photo on the right, those are feathers. They were left over from a costume Lindsey made for 'Junk to Funk' a recycled fashion show she puts on every year as a fundraiser for a local organization called ORLO.


Anyway, this is a typical Portland winter. We've got to fight off the S.A.D. somehow and this is one of our favorite methods: theme parties.

As far as progress on the house? We're still working on it...every day!

House Pics

Ok so we've had a few requests to post some pictures of the outside of the house so here it is. Sorry it took so long to get this up, we'd been working on it at night so we couldn't take any pictures of the outside. I took these this weekend when we were ripping out the bathroom.


This is the front of our house, that's Doogie's truck in the driveway, it barely fits down our street. Seriously.



this is our backyard and pear tree. The lot is a little larger than most others on the block which will be great for BBQs and for setting up a disc golf basket to practice my putting.


Oh and the coolest part is is we are 3 houses away from a field all the locals take their dogs to play at. We are so getting a puppy as soon as possible. Our plan is to wait until spring or, ideally, summer when Becky would be able to be home with it, but I don't know if we'll be able to wait considering that we'll be looking at doggies all day.


We sat with a kitchen designer at Lowes today. He's going to draw up a few plans for us to give us a few ideas about what we can do with the space. We'll meet with him again on Saturday. It should be another fun weekend full of knocking stuff down. We'll keep you all posted!

Black Boogers

This weekend we started work on the bathroom, started painting the south bedroom, and stripping layers two and three of wall paper. Becky's parents, Doug and Jackie, came up to Portland to help us with the project. It was a whirlwind weekend in which we were trying to cram in as much work as possible, but I guess I should get used to it because this was the first of many.

To refresh your memory, here is a picture of what the bathroom looked like prior to this weekend. What you can't see in this photograph is that there is no fan in this bathroom, and the only electrical outlet is a single plug right below those lights you can see on the right, almost completely inaccessible due to the mirror right below. So, our plan was to add a bathroom fan, as well as a an outlet since we'd have to fuss with the electrical anyway.

While Becky and Jackie prepped the bedroom for painting, Doug and I found a plug in the middle bedroom near the back wall to serve as our starting point - that's where we bashed our first hole. We had to continue the wiring from the the original plug in the bedroom into the bathroom, over to where we wanted the plug and switch for the fan, then up into the ceiling, all behind the wall of course. The hardest part was trying to fish the wire behind the wall through two tiny holes in the studs Doug drilled. We almost had to take the whole damn wall down, but finally I was able to hit the target.

Next we had the pleasure of crawling up in the attic to try to drill a hole down in between the bedroom and bathroom walls so we could fish the wire down from where the fan was going to be to where we'd made the hole for the switch.

Here's what it was like up in the attic, hence the title of this post:

On top of the insulation was a four inch layer of this flaky dust that was probably sprayed in in the fifties. The hole we were trying to drill was at the corner of the roof so we had to lay down in this nasty stuff with our faces right in it. After struggling for what seemed like an eternity to drill through six inch studs (apparently they used 2x6's back then instead of 2x4's) we decided to try a different approach. Oh, and to go to Lowe's and get some masks.

As you might guess after spending time in this attic I think I got the black lung. My tissues at the end of the day looked like I was blowing soot out of my nose. Anyway, at the end of day one we had the fan casing up in the ceiling, but we ran out of light to actually do the electrical work so we started ripping the linoleum off, patching the holes we'd made in the wall and working on other projects.

On Sunday we finished up the ceiling fan (we had to go back up there to connect ducting to one of the roof vents, although this was cake compared to Saturday's work), then the real fun began: Tearing up the bathroom floor! Doogie got his saws out - all three of em' - and cut slices in the plywood so and I pried them up to get to the bottom layer of flooring. We did this so that when we put in the new floor it is flush with the hardwood in the hall.


Here is the result of our labor. Next up for demolition is the pink tile in the bathroom and the drywall behind it.

The bedroom is starting to take shape. The hideous brown trim that you can still see in the bathroom and which is still all over the house is now gone and the ceiling is painted, we just have to do the walls and maybe out another coat on the doors.

Tomorrow's task is to measure the kitchen so we can go to Lowes on Tuesday where they will create a computer model of our new kitchen, that's going to be rad!

Whew. Like I said, it was a whirlwind but it has been satisfying (except for the lying in four inches of dust and getting the black lung. That part sucked).

Strip Club

It was pretty darn satisfying walking into our new home and knowing we could do whatever we wanted with it. Even more satisfying than that was ripping down that hideous wallpaper. The joke was on us though because there was another, even more hideous layer underneath!



The picture below is a great example of the three different layers of wallpaper that exist in one of our rooms. The first layer was actually really easy to get off, but I think the next two layers may give us a bit more trouble. The house was built in 1951 so that means the original layer of wallpaper is over 55 years old! This will be one of our many on going projects over the next month. We're just going to keep on stripping until there is nothing left to strip!

Now the place looks like a haunted house - brittle wall paper clinging to the walls, exposed plaster which happens to be crumbling underneath. We are finding out very quickly that every planned project is ending up to be about twice as hard as we were anticipating. It looks like now we will need to replaster and texture all the walls.

Below you can see one of our three big piles after our stripping. It's nice to have proof of your accomplishments. The disappointing part is we still have two more layers before we're done with it all.


Once we were done with all of our stripping we realized that we didn't own a garbage can. After being renters for the last 10 years there are certain things you take for granted - like having a garbage can supplied for you. So we had to take a trip down to Fred Meyers and buy our very own garbage can. I was convinced that the can was too small to fit all of the scraps, but Jesse just hopped up inside the garbage can and jumped around on it. I didn't realize our new garbage can came with a trash compactor.

Today we took yet another trip to Lowes to buy all our tile for the bathroom. Doogie and Jackie Mom are coming up this weekend to help us out with the bathroom. We want to do a classic 1950's black and white tile bathroom. Hopefully our vision will come to fruition. We'll update you after the weekend with how it all went.

We bought a house!

On November 26th, Jesse and I officially became home owners or I should say the bank is lending us a home for the next 30 years AND THEN we'll be home owners. It's kind of crazy because with Portland's real estate market I never thought I'd actually be able to own a house in this city. Hooray for recessions and bursting bubbles!

It is far from our dream house, but it's a good size, in a nice neighborhood, large yard and has good bones. I know what you're thinking. It's like when your friend is trying to set you up and she's says "He's all right looking, BUT he is sooo nice and sooo funny and just a really great guy!" Then you finally meet him and he has the acne problem of a 15 year old boy going through puberty, the odor problem of yet again a 15 year old boy going through puberty and he happens to be about 50 pounds over weight. Not really what you were thinking when your friend said he was "all right looking." That kind of what I mean when I say it has good bones. In reality, the interior needs some serious updating!

The first thing you see when you enter the living room in wallpaper - big giant floral wallpaper. Then you turn the corner and see the real gem of the house - the kitchen. They say kitchens and bathrooms sell houses. Not in this case. Both the kitchen and the bathroom are hideous. I mean really bad. Let's talk kitchen first.

Four words: carpet in the kitchen. Who does this? Who thinks to themselves "You know where I need to put some carpet? In the kitchen." Totally, because it's not like you spill lots of liquids in the kitchen or cook smelly stuff that can get embedded into the fibers of material. The kitchen is totally the most logical place for carpet. And hey, while we're at it, lets just install the brightest ugliest carpet we can find. That's pretty much the kitchen in a nutshell. That and it hasn't been remotely updated since about 1965.

The bathroom has recently been updated - in 1984. The bathtub and tiling in the bathtub are original form 1951 when the house was built. The tiling is just weird. It only goes up about half way and the rest is sheet rock, so if you take showers you are basically begging for rot and mildew. The vanity, toilet and vinyl flooring are all very 1980's - lots of mustardy brown.

Needless to say, we have some major projects ahead of us. We already started stripping the wallpaper and were lucky enough to find another layer of wallpaper under the current layer. In the dining area there is even a THIRD layer of wallpaper underneath it all. Lucky us! We tackle the bathroom this weekend. My parents are being the awesome and handy people they are and are going to help Jesse and I redo our bathroom, since we are not very handy. That's the silliest thing behind this whole home purchase. We bought a fixer upper, yet we aren't really all that handy. Should lead to many ridiculous situations in the future.

These are interior photos of the place. Pretty much everything you see will be different within two months.
This is a view of the living room from the front door. There is wood floors through out which falls into that "good bones" category.
Check out those curtains!
This room right here is what made is fall in love with the place...yeah right.
Oh yes, that's pink and mauve tile in the tub.
This is our bedroom.
The office. We plan to rip out the built ins. I know they look cool in the photo, but really they're not.
Guest bedroom which is a mirror image of our room. We'll probably end up renting this room out to help us pay our mortgage.
This is our HUGE basement. This really was one of the selling points of the house. We have big plans for this basement in the future.
Our garage - nothing fancy.

Well, this is our starting point, thanks for checking out our blog and please stay tuned for updates. It should be interesting...