Farewell!

It is nearly time to say goodbye to this beautiful home, and therefore, to the A Guy, a Girl, & a Really Old House blog. We close the sale in just a couple weeks as we continue to prepare for our move to Panama this summer. Plus, I’m nearly out of storage space on this site! So, I hope you’ll join us on our next adventure at www.lifeontheisthmus.wordpress.com.

Family picture!

Whether you’ve followed our shenanigans the last 7 years or just recently, thanks for being here! We have learned a lot from this place, and it’s certainly hard to let it go (though admittedly much harder for me than for Tony!)

On listing weekend we had 24 showings in 36 hours and ended up with 3 offers, each at or above asking price. I’m so glad this beautiful lady got what she deserved!

The snowy weather on picture day made for some lovely photos. And it covered up how terrible our yard looks from the street restoration!

I’m dropping all the professional photographer’s pics here, because they are pretty incredible. I don’t know how they work that editing voodoo, but it was definitely a gray and cloudy day when they came to take pictures! I’m also making some notes for myself on paint colors and other things I may want to remember someday.

Photo Credit: The Perfect Spot for You LLC

Paint color: Timbermine by Behr

This room looks so boring without the all over damask stencil! Johnny Burnett did some wall repair for us before listing, so the whole room had to be repainted. 😕

Patrick Murphy with Mold Busters did an inspection in the cellar several years ago. He told us how to remediate it ourselves and saved us a ton of money! Foundation Guy put some piers in the cellar too.

Green Expressions from Topeka updated our old wiring in the attic.

Paint color – Teal Lake by Behr

Paint color – Classic Silver by Behr

Paint color – Gray Morning by Behr

Tub and fixtures are from Signature Hardware.

I still wish we could have done something with that back porch ceiling!

Zen Windows did our replacement windows. And we recommend Bryan at Famous Amos Heating and Cooling!

This angle makes our back yard look huge!

Au revoir!

A Few of My Favorite Things…

We’ve been cleaning like crazy the last few weeks to get the house in tip-top shape for listing. The old gal is looking pretty good! And it’s given me a chance to reflect on all we’ve done here over the last 7.5 years. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but we’ve done some pretty darn cool projects over the years! And I hope someone else loves them just as much as I do!

Here are just a few of my favorites!

The Wardrobe

Oh my goodness. I STILL find myself just sitting on EO’s bed and marveling at this wardrobe. You may remember that this was my maternity leave project when I stayed home with GemGem, and it took a little longer than expected… It was so worth it!

This baby can hold SO MUCH stuff! The shelf above all of EO’s little shirts is moveable so this can be an adult-sized closet too.

The Beast

We’ve had some good before and after shots, but this project is the ultimate proof that a little paint goes a long way. Laying on the counter to paint the bottom of the thing is how this shelving unit earned the nickname, “The Beast.” But, boy, is she a beauty!

The bead board backsplash, cabinet redo, and the painted countertop helped too!

So. Much. Wainscoting.

If you’re thinking about adding wainscoting, bead board, or board and batten somewhere in your house, I say do it! Clearly, I think it’s a pretty awesome way to jazz up a boring wall… and to hide pesky drywall cracks.

Clockwise from top left: Half Bath/Laundry, Kitchen Corner, EO’s Room, and the Living Room.

Fabric Wallpaper

Sometimes I get kinda wild ideas… Most people probably think this is one of them! But stapling fabric to the walls in the front hall is one risk I am so glad I took. Of course, exposing that brick chimney was pretty rad too!

The Library

Tony is really going to miss this room. Building a library was his dream when we bought this house! He’s had to take most of his books out to prepare for showing the house, but you can bet that every one of these shelves was full just a few weeks ago!

Master Bathroom

Tony really outdid himself with this project. Sure, it took almost a year to complete, but we got our $80,000 bathrooms (the estimate from a popular remodeling company in town) for under $10,000. Win!

I finally found a ‘before’ photo of the bathroom! It’s the picture that was on the MLS when we bought the house. You can see the cast iron sewer gas pipe that came up from the bathroom below next to the shower. Tony replaced 98% of the cast iron and encased the pipe in walls in both bathrooms.

Know anyone who would love a new old home? Send them our way this weekend!

A Doctor in the House, & Other Life Changes

It’s been 5.5 years, but Tony did it! We can call him Dr. Snethen now! He successfully defended his 150 page dissertation last week, on Zoom of course, about the factors that affect parental school choice in the Kansas City, Missouri School District. He’s feeling accomplished, but also a little sad. It’s sort of that feeling you get when you’ve just finished a really good book.

This might have been the last book he read for pleasure before starting his program!

Tony loves school and has really loved the academic research component of his Educational Leadership and Policy PhD program. At some point he’d probably like to be a professor and continue to conduct research. He has another presentation that was accepted to the American Educational Research Association Conference in April, and he and his dissertation advisor are now turning his dissertation into a paper for publishing in an academic journal.

Sounds pretty fancy, huh?!

In other news, the time has come to put our house on the market! We’ve poured our hearts (and quite literally our blood and sweat) into this house over the last 7.5 years. We brought a handsome puppy and two precious children home to this place.

Look how little they all were!

But now it’s time for a new adventure! So we’ve spent the last couple months, cleaning, tossing, fixing, and giving away in preparation for listing our old beauty next week.

Watch for some reminiscing posts over the next couple weeks!

Kitchen Bench

After our project heavy Spring, we laid pretty low around here through the Fall. But over Christmas we finally completed a project that’s been in “the plan” for years – a mud room style bench in the kitchen.

Aaaannndd it will probably never be this neat again!

Tony whipped this baby up so fast I could hardly get any pictures! He used mostly MDF for the base, 3/4 inch, I believe. The top is a nice maple plywood project board with some maple trim.

Here it is all dry fitted, before the trim was put on.

Do you remember that corner 6 years ago? The fridge covered the light switch and prevented the back door from opening all the way!

How many years did that cabinet just sit on top of the fridge? I don’t even remember!

Of course, relocating the fridge and adding the bead board and hooks was a huge improvement! The deep freeze sat in this spot, hiding the missing chunk of floor?! Tony did cut out the linoleum before attaching the bench to the wall. It was the right thing to do.

That little door in the middle of the wall contains the water shut off valves for the second bathroom upstairs. Tony ran the plumbing up that way because as an interior wall it would be unlikely to freeze in cold weather. Plus, there was already water in that corner from the fridge ice maker.

Even though the bench’s footprint isn’t that much smaller than the deep freeze, it sure feels like we have a lot more space in the kitchen! I like to sit on it to put my shoes on, and EO tosses his backpack there after he gets off the bus.

Floor Fixing

A year or so ago this random guy stopped by our house while we were out trimming trees. He said he lived in this house in the nineties and occasionally drove by to see the place. It was a great opportunity to hear more about the history of our home, so we invited him in. He talked about an old stove that was in the kitchen, the shower that was in the downstairs bathroom, the doors that used to hang between each of the rooms downstairs, and even told us the floors were painted when he lived here. (What?!?)

Our wood floors are original, as far as we can tell, and are in decent shape. Charlie’s done a number on them, of course, but they’re not terrible… except for one really bad spot between the front hall and the dining room.

Shortly after moving in we followed the advice of This Old House, which involved stuffing a length of rope between the cracks. It didn’t go well, but we’ve been afraid to tackle anything with the floors since then. So we finally hired a carpenter guy to came over one day, and he had it done in three hours!

He had to use big screws, rather than little finish nails, to attach the boards to the floor joists because this part of the house is right by the exposed chimney that has pulled the house downward over the last 130 years. The floor boards bent as the chimney sank, and they were super bowed. Because we weren’t replacing all the floor boards, we needed to keep some of that bow in order for there to be a smooth transition from old board to new.

And, by the way, I’m calling them “new boards,” but they are actually reclaimed from our master bath remodel. Tony ripped up carpet, stripped several layers of linoleum, and used a drum sander before pulling the boards up for future repairs, rather than covering them back up with tile. We’ve had a whole pile up in the attic since then.

So, after carpenter man did his thing, we filled those screw holes with Bondo wood filler. By the way, I don’t recommend that product. It smelled awful, and its “stainable” label was less than accurate. In order to match the stain color, we had to color over all those screw holes with Crayola marker! (We tried sharpie at first, but Crayola blended the best!)

Then we sealed the stain with polyurethane, and it looks fantastic!

Unfortunately, in fact, it now looks way better than the rest of the floor. I’ll be honest, this was part of my previous hesitation to carry out any floor repair. But I’ll try some Restore-A-Finish on the old floor to deepen the color and that shiny new polyurethane will fade a bit in time, and it won’t even be noticeable. I’m just glad we are no longer in danger of losing anything down those old cracks!

(Yes, that really did happen! Carpenter Man found a toy of Edmond’s down in the crawl space that had slipped through the floorboards!)

A Facelift for the Birthday Girl!

Our house is 130 years old this year, and isn’t she a beauty?!

Well, she had been looking a bit shabby, with faded and peeling paint and stained gutters.

The porch was painted last year, but the new colors didn’t match the old ones.

Tony swore he’d move rather than paint this house, with its multiple colors, intricate details, whole house trim, and high peaks. Well, here we are almost 8 years later, and we haven’t moved yet! So… he painted it!

EO “helps” Tony with the sprayer.

I chose a base color that was a little more gray (Behr Letter Gray) without the brown undertones that were in the old color, but it’s pretty hard to tell the difference in photos.

The wall near the ladder had just been sprayed as Tony started on the front of the house.

While Tony did 96.5% of the painting himself, even the high peaks, any accent colors were my responsibility. I also helped with some of the white trim.

35 flowers painted and just 97 to go!

The flowers still aren’t finished, but I’ve enjoyed laying in the kids’ saucer swing and admiring our handiwork!

Paneled Living Room Wall

From all cracked up (left) to neat and orderly (right).

There’s nothing like a project to take your mind off a pandemic! Actually, I’ve been planning… Er… putting off… this project for months, and a whole week off work (Spring Break) with a forecast in the 40s and rainy seemed like the perfect time to tackle it. That, and Tony didn’t know what to get me for my birthday, so I conned him into helping me with the wall! Who knew what a regular old Spring Break would turn into…

Anyway, you see these cracks along all these sheetrock seams? They have gotten worse and worse each year, and they drove me crazy. We’ve fixed them once before, but they’ve gotten so bad again that the paint/wallboard was literally falling off onto my couch!

Well, I’ve had such luck just covering over those unsightly seams (like in the small bedroom and the front hall), that I thought I’d do it again!

As with all projects in this old house, nothing is straight, level, or plumb, as evidenced from this photo on Day 1. Check out that gap at the ceiling!

Day 1

And at one point, likely where the 2nd chimney is tucked behind, the wall bows out at least an inch. So, it definitely took two of us to get those boards up… if only because neither of us could use both levels to match up the boards, hold the wood, and pick up the nail gun by ourselves (especially at the top, standing on the ladder)!

Day 2

The first day we got the top pieces up (after A LOT of sanding to conform to that wonky ceiling) and all the verticals before the kids woke up from naps, but we finished all the horizontals on Day 2. I nailed while Tony cut, then we measured, leveled, but ultimately just eyeballed it, and did another set. This is why projects are so frustrating for Tony – his core screams out that everything must be level, but that just makes it LOOK crooked! Days 3 and 4 were spent wood filling, sanding, filling, sanding, and caulking!

Day 3

But, then, the painting! Cue angels singing, because we finally got to the best part! The part that just pulls everything together!

But then I realized the color isn’t quite the same, so I repainted the whole room. No biggie.

Day 5

That also meant wall repair, new caulking at the trim, a fresh coat of trim paint, etc. I’m still working on all that, but the paneled wall part is complete!

No more cracks!! Now I just have to figure out how to decorate it!

A few things I should probably note:

• Our top boards are 8 inches wide by 8 feet. That’s because there’s another seam 8 inches from the ceiling that needed hiding.
• All other boards are 3 inch strips of cabinet grade 1/4 inch plywood that Tony ripped (cut to size) on his buddy’s table saw – thanks Nate!
• I used wood filler to fill the gap between our top board and the ceiling because it was up to an inch in some places. Then I applied a thin bead to caulk at the ceiling.
• Tony taped the ceiling (I couldn’t reach it!) before I caulked, then we immediately pulled it off – best caulking line ever – great trick! We don’t have the ceiling paint for that room, and it’s tinted, so it was super important to have a clean caulk line.
• I didn’t use this tip, but I wish I had – shim behind the boards with folded paper to ensure the boards come off the wall at a uniform height.

Plumbing Problems

Words no home owner wants to hear: “I’ve never seen a sewer problem like this one!”

Damn.

It was 17 degrees yesterday when the workmen arrived to continue their work. The previous day they removed our House Trap. (Know how your sinks and toilets have a “P” Trap? That U-shaped bend is designed to contain sewer gasses. In addition to a Trap on all our fixtures, we had one located just outside the cellar wall – a Whole House Trap. I’m sure they were quite common in the 19 teens or 20s, when we believe our plumbing was installed. Now, notsomuch.)

I should add, though, we have had only two sewer issues since moving into our house – one last year about this time, and one last month, both related to the Trap. So when I heard a quiet gurgling sound coming from the kitchen sink the other day, I figured it was time to follow through on our plans to replace the House Trap.

We didn’t know that our ancient clay pipe (which apparently was only made to last 40 years and has likely been around at least double that) would make a 90 degree turn toward a different street than the one we thought it went to (therefore running under all the trees in our side yard) and would have a collapse at 43 ft. to the point that the workmen couldn’t run their equipment through it to replace the pipe.

It’s snowing/icing/raining today, so the two giant holes in our yard remain unfilled, and the new pipe sits on the easement, ready to install.

Plumbing issues suck. And spending so much money on things that get buried in the ground is never fun. It’s necessary though, and we have many reasons to be thankful about this project and its timing:

1) Our crew from Bob Hamilton Plumbing has been incredibly kind and hard working. I have been very impressed by each of them as they explained things clearly and answered all our questions. They worked outside all day in frigid temperatures without complaint, and they’ll likely be back again tomorrow, a Saturday, to finish the job.

2) The city is replacing our sewer main line as part of the road refurbishment project that’s just getting underway. Their part of the project won’t start until summer, but since they will be replacing the main and all the connections to the main underneath the sidewalk, our crew doesn’t have to dig up any concrete. Two of the guys who are in charge of the project even came out to talk with our workmen and mark where the city’s part of the replacement will end. By the time the street refurbishment project is complete, our entire sewer line (and water line, since we replaced that a few years ago) will be brand new, as will all the plumbing inside the house, since Tony did that when we remodeled all the bathrooms. If the city wasn’t already planning to replace our connection to the main, this project could have run us $30,000+.

3) We have savings, and thank the Lord, we don’t have to use all of it on this project.

I’m hesitant to publish this post, since the work isn’t yet complete, but maybe you can help us out. If you’re the praying type, send up a good word for us that the workmen can get things finished tomorrow without any more trouble!!

White Sand Christmas 2019

It’s 17 degrees outside here in KC, which seems like the perfect reason to reminisce about our recent trip to Indian Rocks Beach, Florida!

We left our house at 3am on Christmas Eve and took 3 flights before noon, but look at these goofballs!

Last Christmas Gem wasn’t walking yet, and she spent most of her beach time sleeping in the tent. This year we set her down on the sand that first morning, and she burst into tears. Once we got her a bucket and a shovel, though, she was happy as a clam!

Our days were blissfully predictable: breakfast, beach, lunch, naps for the children and reading on the lawn for mama, then sunset on the beach, dinner, ice cream, and bed!

Indian Rocks Beach, known locally as IRB, is about 45 minutes from the Tampa airport and is just a few beach towns north of Treasure Island, where we stayed last Christmas. The weather was cold on our first and last days, but it was sunny and mid 70s all the days in between!

We went to the same spot on the beach, just across the main road, and built a different sand castle each day. The children started off very excited each time we picked up the buckets, but I’ll admit, most of the actual building fell on Tony and myself.

EO’s preferred project was The Great Blue Hole…

… and trips out on the paddle board, of course!

We took one morning off from the beach to go out on the water with Captain Glenn.

Glenn was our neighbor last year at Christmas, and EO loved sailing with him. This year Glenn was captaining the Tiki Boat. We must have looked pretty funny tooling around in this thing at 9:30am!

We ate most of our meals at our rental house, because toddlers. Just at the end of the block, though, was a little hole-in-the-wall place called Groupers that was so good we ate there 3 times! Their grouper sandwich was fantastic, as was the shrimp. We also went out to Crabby Bill’s, which was actually worth all the hype. (Though not the two hour wait! We found a spot in the bar instead.) Our favorite ice cream place (We tried all 3 in town.) was a couple doors down from Crabby Bill’s, though The Kooky Coconut was good too.

No trip is perfect. Our groceries weren’t delivered on Christmas Eve like they were supposed to be, so I had to take an Uber to the only store that was still open at 6pm. That affected our afternoon plans, but I was still able to get to a Christmas Eve service at the church down the street after the kids were in bed. At various points both children were sick too, but we took them to the beach anyway. Salt air heals all, right?

It was a great trip to sunny Florida. We even found a couple great parks to play at when it was too chilly for the beach.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we visit IRB again sometime!

Christmas Decor

Each year I try to remember where to put the Christmas decorations… since I couldn’t find last year’s pictures, I’m creating a post so I can refer to it next year!I used cuttings from our tree to make the banister swag, and I’m loving our photo ornaments!

Looking at this tree, I can’t help but be reminded how truly blessed we are to have a beautiful family and a beautiful home. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year!!