Garage painting, continued! & Fence assembly!

This robot dude (and the chair) was hiding in the garage.

All of my fingers are sore, and my knees are sore, and my back is sore. I had stomach flu all week, and I've been sick pretty much since October... so this is more moving around than I've done in a while but I am SO excited about all the work that got done today on the house.

For starters, the tenants/property managers still have a ton of crap in our way, so we moved it behind their car so they can't get out... Not that they were really using this car anyhow, but still. It's the thought that counts. Get your crap out of my way or I'll put it in yours.

Mandi and Dayla hacking away at the wall with scrapers!

This side of the garage does not have the 50's mint green underneath, but was just as flaky as the other side.

We decided to take a shortcut with this wall. Instead of spending days hacking away at every rough edge of the plaster until we'd removed all of it that we could, and then fine tuning it with the orbital sander, we only spent about half the day scraping away at it. Just the bits that were easily coming off were removed. Then because I'm a ditz, we had to run to Home Depot for rollers, because I forgot the orange bucket o' stuff at home. Mandi and Dayla did a great job then wiping down the wall with a rag and a mop, and got the first coat down. Hopefully we'll get the second one on tomorrow. (And hopefully I'll remember to take a photo.)

While Dayla and Mandi worked on the wall, Spencer and I were on fence duty.

We buried each of the poles the same depth, and decided to cut them afterward, so they would all be level. Still not sure if this was really the best way to do it, but oh well. In any case, you really have to put some muscle behind this saw to cut through the poles, even though I bought blades that were supposed to slice through metal like butter.

Another annoying note: The battery died after the first pole. When I bought it monday, I plugged it in to charge, and within 20 minutes, the light stopped blinking indicating it had fully charged. Then magically after less than 10 minutes of use it died. It wasn't like it was freezing cold out either, high forties today. At first I was worried that we killed the saw with all the work it was doing to cut through the poles, but after about another hour of charge, it cut through the rest just fine. Tools should not have attitude.

This photo looks a little confusing. See that black horizontal pole coming in from the left? That's top bar. The top bar was obnoxiously close to the last pole. Sad day. Should've cut two long ones so it wouldn't be so embarrassingly close to the end.

The opposite side of the garage went much quicker to snap into place once we had the hang of using the saw.

Once the top bar was in place, it was time for fencing. This proved to be the most time consuming part, because the ground is not level, we had to snip away at the bottom of the fence as the ground sloped up. We wired it in place as we went along, to make sure we were pulling it taught, and trimming in the right place. We ended up being a little over excited for the first few cuts and it was a little higher than necessary, but it ended up not being a huge deal. 

The beautiful end result. Stay off my garage roof, y'darn hooligans! 

In all honesty I don't think this would really keep kids from getting on top of the garage, because they could likely slip between the fence and the house, but hopefully it will at least deter them, and is satisfactory to the inspector. It was expensive, and a lot of work to put up. We didn't have time to put the fencing on the other side, and hopefully that will also be done tomorrow. 

After this small fencing experience, I certainly feel like I am capable of fencing the entire yard (if I have awesome friends like these around to help) but fully believe it is worth it to pay a professional to just get it over and done with rather than fiddling with it on your own. I also was probably more picky about this than necessary, I went to a local fence dealer for black vinyl-coated fence rather than a big box store for the cheap plain old steel stuff. But I know that one day I will want the rest of the yard fenced in for the dogs, and I want it to look good, and match what I'll be getting. 

New toys

I added a new tool to my collection tonight... the Ryobi Reciprocal saw! Very excited to use it this weekend. I opted for the one+ battery, it's more compact and holds more power. I was a little sad that you have to purchase the saw and the battery and charger separately though. A little deceiving to look online and go "Oh awesome, it's only $40!" Nope, you're going to have to fork out another $60 for the battery and charger. Good news is it is compatible with all of Ryobi's other battery powered tools, so I guess I've committed myself to continue purchasing their products.

The other unfortunate thing is the length of the two blades that come with the saw, they're pretty short... likely too short to cut fence posts this weekend so I'll have to go hunt down some longer ones.

I also purchased this super awesome compact bolt cutters. It folds up nice and small to fit in my toolbox!

What's that, 'you have a toolbox?' you ask?

I do now!

Look at all those compartments! Sadly though, the compartments on the left side are not long enough for most tools, I think they're more meant for screws and other fun such things, but I'd much rather have things like my screwdrivers and pliers and such organized up top than in the big bucket below. Either way, I love this little thing. My car was becoming so unorganized and messy with all the house tool crap floating around in there, and this helps me keep it all contained to one area so that passengers aren't stepping on my tools.

Nesting a bit

Beyond my recent obsession for pinterest and all things home decor, I have apparently been nesting a little. I decided to buy a friend's dining room set from him. Without even seeing it in person! I can't wait to get home to WI to see it in my mom's garage at Christmas and tote it back here to MN. Here are some lovely photos of the table and chairs in his home. They are a gorgeous mid century modern set that look like someone took great care of them before him. I hope I can find a similar rug to go beneath them in the dining room, I really like the orange and yellow combo he had.

Sand sand sand, paint paint paint

These railings needed some love. By some, I mean a LOT. Not just the railings, but the stairs, and top of the deck also were chipping, and have a good amount of water damage. The peeling paint needs to be fixed for FHA Approval, so: sand sand sand, paint paint paint.

Here's a close up of the edge of one of the stairs, most of them were cracking paint like this one.

Here's the top of the deck sanded down, you can see at this point the railings in the corner of the photo have already been painted.

The paint was still wet when we left, so I couldn't quite yet take an 'after' photo of the deck... but my guess is it'll need some touch up coat, and sealer before it's really done anyhow. 

So remember that wall from hell in the garage? We finally finished scraping the crap off of it. I had originally purchased America's Finest exterior paint base to cover the wall with... this stuff is crap. It was a super goopy consistency and just didn't roll on great. You could barely tell we'd painted the first coat. Probably a good reason it was $8 cheaper a gallon than Behr... after one coat I said fuck it and we went to Home Depot to get some nice Behr Premium Exterior Ultra White paint and it came out pretty nice.

first coat, you could still see the mint green peaking through pretty well

second coat with Behr

We also bought some light bulbs as you can see for the two sockets on this side of the garage. Helped a ton to see what we were doing over there.

It felt great to say "this wall is done" after we spent so much time and energy scraping all that crappy, flaky plaster stuff off. It looks ten times cleaner and brighter over there already.

FHA Requirements

This is going to be a big first post... I signed the purchase agreement for my house 8/24... spent about a month waiting for the short sale to go through and then was told it'd move things along faster if I went ahead and got my FHA Appraisal. So, the things that must be changed before FHA approval can happen are:

Paint all peeling and cracking stucco on the exterior
Paint all peeling and cracking paint on exterior railing to upstairs unit, and back door/step
Paint all cracking paint inside the garage walls
Put up a railing or fence barrier so that people don't have access to the garage roof

After waiting a few weeks to see if the bank or seller would pay to fix these items (it's a short sale so neither are budging) I decided to forge ahead and get working on them.

Last weekend I went to the house to peel off a few bits of the stucco so I could get a paint sample done. Surprisingly, Home Depot did an AMAZING job of color matching and even though the bits we're not painting are weathered, you can barely tell we're only spot painting the exterior. Looks great so far!

This past weekend, we got to work on sanding and chipping away the paint inside the garage

The top layer (gray) chipped away easily in most places, revealing a 50's mint green.

I don't think this is actually paint. I think it's plaster or something. It's a thick layer of stuff, and in most places just flaked off under our paint scrapers. Eventually we fired up my $30 Ryobi orbital sander and that helped smooth out areas that didn't want to chip away.

Mandi with the orbital. The current tenants refused to remove their car, so it's covered in paint dust.

A nice, mostly cleared patch

 3 people worked on this 26ft wall almost all day and it's still not all cleared. Hopefully this week we'll finish scraping and paint it nice and clean white.

We also worked on drilling/digging holes and putting in fence posts on either side of the garage. On Friday, I drove over to midwest fence to pick up my order and haul it over to the house, and thankfully they helped me tie it down on top.

This is a poor photo, but I had fence pole coming off the front and back of my Forester. Thankfully I had a friend to help me get it in the garage for safe keeping until Sunday.

I rented an auger at Home Depot, it's a pretty fun toy... and I had expected it to make my life super easy and make all the hard work and manual labor disappear.... NOT THE CASE!

Some intelligent being decided it'd be a great idea to just throw a huge lump of concrete in the lawn next to the garage. We found this under just 2" of dirt. It's not a pipe or buried cable... just a weird, large lump of concrete. So we ended up digging by hand for the first post and most of the second. 

The next few holes went much easier though, and eventually we threw in the quikcrete. I used 300lbs of the fast setting stuff, which we mixed right in the hole and made sure was level before and after pouring concrete (thus the wonky, deceiving, uncentered pole in progress).

Made sure to leave my mark on one of them.

Then when the concrete had set, we covered it with the upheaved soil and it's like a real-life fence post! The fence hardware and material will be added later, when we've for certain painted all the chipping stucco in that area.

The poles setting in the east side of the garage. Kind of hard to photograph... but there they are. 

I forgot to take pictures of peeling stucco, and the amazing color match home depot did. I'll be sure to get that in the next post.