Today was one busy day. It started with us getting around early and doing a million errands in town. We went to a ton of tile shops. I picked out a bunch that I liked but Lee wasn’t quite sold. He wanted a tile that was richer in color. I have already picked out (as of now) a dark slate for under the stove. For behind the stove we are looking at hand painted tiles. That’s what’s hanging Lee up. We are looking for a jade green. Not too light but not too blue but not too bright green and not too shiny. Sounds easy huh? HA! And not only the special color of green but coordinating tile colors to go with it.

Tiles aside we then bought low VOC primer to get part of our house ready for the electrician on Monday and a pressure washer to also do prep work. The below picture is Lee later that night trying to figure out how it went together. I should start a list of new tools that Lee gets to buy for working on this house but I am afraid I’d loose track.

As soon as we got to the house we ended up burning one of our small burn piles. It was the pile of brush that we took away from the side of the house. My Mom and me had a ‘burning’ urge to start something on fire since it was the first burn day of the season. Evidence below that it really happened. We had it put out on time as we were warned by a neighbor that the Fire Marshal lived down the street and was a real stickler for making them be out by 5 p.m.

Lee then went on to vent his frustration on a poor innocent stump. He had to grade soil by the house for the ground rods that get put in on Monday. Yeah new wiring soon!

Lastly my brother Robert came over to help for a while. He is feeling sorry for us because he didn’t realize we were moving in so soon. Robert ripped out the top part of the divider wall for us and a bit of the molding. We always appreciate free labor from sympathetic family members. Thanks Robert.

Wednesday and Thursday my Mom and Uncle Forest came up to help me in the afternoon. Somehow I forgot to take my camera and when I remembered it the next day the battery went dead. Bum timing. Anyways, the cleaning up for the garage sale continued along with massive nail pulling, dry wall tear down, plaster cleanup, and sweeping. One room upstairs was pretty much cleaned up and the hallway and stairs (though my Uncle kept getting it dirty again with his dry wall tearing out).

This Friday Lee bought a shop vacuum. I have decided this is a girls best friend while living (soon) in a disaster zone. That night I vacuumed the upstairs room as shown in the picture above. It was so much fun watching everything get sucked up. I even vacuumed up a huge stinky mouse nest in the upstairs flooring that was uncovered. Dead mouse and all. I did have to pound a little on the nozzle to get the petrified mouse all the way in and up.

Lee started tearing off trim. He and I were very curious about what was under the main floor paneling. Basically he had just uncovered some of it before I wanted to leave.

This was his method of being careful in removing the big trim. We want to reuse the trim boards where we can in the house again. See we knew the awful siding we tore out would come in handy for something. Pry bar wood protection.

So far on this blog it seems that we’ve talked a lot about mummified rats and sorted trash and not much about motivations.  Robin and I have a lot of interests, and many of these entertwine with the purchase of this house and our plans for it — organic gardening, animal husbandry, beautiful fir trees, fine woodworking, anachronism, Arts & Crafts style, reading books, wood burning stoves, renewable energy, environmentalism, .. the list goes on.

Yes, we are guilty environmentalists.  Is there any other kind?  Comedian Cathy Ladman once said that “religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.”  Well, by that standard, environmentalism is basically guilt with different neuroticisms.  It is impossible to read about the many negative side effects of the modern lifestyle and not feel guilty.  This drives some people to don tie-dye and chain themselves to trees.  Others buy a Prius and obsessively recycle their Dasani water bottles.  To make matters worse, the issues are often so complex and interconnected that a simple rule book for decision making is impossible to find.

I was thinking about this a couple days ago while driving a pickup truck load of rigid plastic (about 200 pounds of mostly broken toys) to be recycle.  In the Eugene area Weyerhaeuser Recycling (also called International Paper Recycling, (541) 744-4100) will accept this material at no cost.   Since normally this would just go into the landfill, we did our best to sort it out.  But was this the right decision?

Well, it depends on what factors you want to consider.  From a money standpoint, I made a terrible decision.  The drop bin costs me $65/ton to fill.  That works out to $6.50 if I just threw my truck load of plastic in the trash.  Instead, the recycle center is 24 miles round trip from our house, and my truck presently gets only 9mpg due to an undiagnosed engine problem.  With present gas prices, that 2.7 gallons of fuel cost about $9.30.  Not only that, but I had to take 4 hours of vacation time to get to the center during their 8-5 business hours.  Definitely a bum deal.

But environmentally, it was the right thing, right?  Um … maybe?  According to this Grist article, recycling one ton of plastic saves 685 gallons of oil.  So my 200 pounds of plastic save 68.5 gallons of oil?  That’s a good deal for only 2.7 gallons burned to deliver it, but the forklifts at the recycle yard also run on petroleum, as do trucks that will haul away the giant dumpsters, and the factories that will grind it up, melt it down, and turn it into fresh Polystyrene.  I seriously doubt that those oil savings numbers really took into account all the factors either.

The point of all this is not to argue the merits of plastic recycling, but to highlight the challenges of making good “green” decisions.  Renovating a home is nothing but a continuous stream of decisions, and most of them–roofing products, water and space heating, insulation upgrades, flooring and wall materials–have environmental, aesthetic, and monetary advantages and disadvantages.  Assuming the complexity doesn’t drive us to madness, we’ll probably share a lot of those decisions along the way. In the end, we can’t hope to have the perfect ‘green’ house … just a less guilty one.

Today was a busy day in which we got a lot cleaned up outside. Lee’s parents Sallie and Jim came down again to help and my sister Jessica came up with me. The whole afternoon was spent hauling trash to the dumpster, burnables to the burn pile, sellables to the yard sale area or in the waiting to be cleaned areas, and recyclables in the recycle piles.

Behind the barn is all clean. It looks awesome.

I forgot to take an after picture but this is Jim working on a trash pile. The pile that he is working on is now gone.

Sallie is in this picture. All the stuff around in this shot is now sorted and gone.

Same here with Jessica. It is all gone.

After I drove Jessica back home and relaxed, I came back up to get Lee. He had been busy himself that evening. Most of the of the back downstairs room is ripped out now. Here are two pictures of the uncovered stairway. The closet where he was working was a newer addition so some of the stairs had to of been changed.

In this part we discovered some newer studs in the wall. So we are not sure what was there or happened originally.

This last picture makes me really nervous. It is a line of mouse poop along the ceiling. The dry wall has been ripped off on the wall but the not the ceiling. And when you can see a long line of mouse turds stretching the ceiling line you know you are going to be in for a big nasty.

Today we found death everywhere. And while surrounded with death somehow I am not at all sad about it. The first example I have to show you is Jim holding a fine rat specimen which he found while cleaning outside. It was quite petrified.

The next example is inside the house. Lee was unscrewing a light switch and as he did mouse droppings rained down. As soon as he got it off he started laughing and motioned me over. There was an hazel nut inside the switch. Notice the mouse poop stuck against the wall in the first picture. But the real surprise was when he took off the dry wall. There is a dead mouse on the opposite side with an hazel nut in sight.

But then the kicker was when he finished pulling back all the dry wall and we found a whole family of dead mice at the bottom of the same wall. Something tells me that the walls in the house must have been noisy with all the nuts dropping and mice running around.

Or .. maybe they just got lucky.  I’m still trying to figure out which category our house falls into.  Each new wall we expose reveals new mysteries to decipher.  Today brought two of them.  Tearing down drywall in the stairwell revealed the floor joist framing.  I don’t have a picture yet, and I need to tear out a ceiling somewhere to get a better view .. but I’m certainly puzzled.  And just while I was mulling over the floor joist system, I came upon this:

This interior wall separates the back bedroom from the kitchen/laundry area.  It had lath but no plaster on the bedroom side.  The horrible veneer side was on top of that.  When we pull off the lath, that strange zig-zag pattern of cross bracing appeared.  What’s even more strange, is that the outside wall immediately to the left has the same zig-zag bracing behind the fiberglass bats.  I’m thinking perhaps a sheer wall .. but since nothing in the interior has been obviously “load bearing” I don’t know why this inside wall has the bracing too.  The outside walls on the second floor didn’t have this.  Also, sheer bracing is usually let-in by cutting notches in the vertical 2×4’s, not the other way around.

Obviously I will be taking comments from people more in the know than I am.

Today Lee cut out of work an hour early so we could drive up to Willamette Graystone before they closed. We are trying to figure out what we want for under the stove. I hate most everything and a lot of the pictures you see are with built-in fireplaces. So that makes it harder for ideas. The guy at Willamette Graystone said that the cultured stone is the easiest for people who are doing it themselves. Then we told him that we had a 1930’s farmhouse and wanted something that fit in with the style. He then said that we should probably go with regular bricks. He also told us that it is hard for average people to do all the mortar right so we may need to have someone do it for us. Which isn’t what we wanted to hear as we really want to do most everything that we can ourselves.

Next stop involved going to Jerry’s where I found three books with fireplace examples. Needles to say every book had about three pictures of wood burning stoves while the rest were built-ins. I did find a picture that used tile (which I usually HATE!!!!) that wasn’t to bad. The tile was green and was in the Arts and Craft type style. If we did do it in tile then it would be really easy for Lee to do it himself. And we could leave the special wood working around it for later. I feel a mental breakdown coming on!

Anyways…we got to the house rather late but decided to start working for a little bit before heading home again. Today’s small project was gutting out the back bedroom on the ground floor. YEAH! Oh, and take notice of the window install job that someone did. It really doesn’t go with the rest of the house. I don’t know what they were thinking.

I worked for a little while upstairs pulling nails out of the ceiling. It makes your arms start burning after a while. I really hate nails.

I went downstairs to help Lee. We were very curious about the inside wall. We wanted to know what we would find. And guess what? It was lath again. But this time minus plaster. WOOHOO! So our guess is that they got lazy and figured out that they didn’t need to break it all out in the upstairs room and just glued paneling on top of it. After Lee ripped the paneling off I got busy and started taking the lath down. I must say that throwing things out the downstairs window does not have nearly the thrill as the upstairs does.

The room still isn’t all the way gutted but at least we made progress.

Lee ripped out the rest of the remaining ceiling drywall. As he was pulling it down he told me that he was getting showered with mouse droppings. All he could think about was mice being carriers of bubonic plague. Doesn’t that just make you want to came spend a night at our house?

Most of the mice dropping piles centered around the light fixtures. They made big nests around the lights, probably to keep warm. At least that was our theory.

Next up Lee ripped out all of the drywall around the stairwell.

By the time we were finished basically the whole upstairs was completely gutted. There is only finishing up work left to do. Like ripping out nails, shoveling out plaster, and a few remaining lath boards to clean out.

Lee is taking a breather here. It looks as if he is contemplating how much work we have left to do. Though maybe he is just thinking about random odd things… “Do these coveralls come in red? Why doesn’t the bank also show the temperature in Kelvin? Is there a psychological name for being obsessed with nails?”

Today was the grand toy sale. I didn’t get as much sold as I would have liked but that was okay. I met a lot of nice people and made a few dollors so it was fun. Almost all of the small toy stuff I am going to gather up and give to Goodwill. Hopefully I can get that done tomorrow. I was going to do it tonight but it was FREEZING and I was tired from getting up at 5:50 a.m. for the sale.

Lee got some stuff recycled at the dump today. Unfortunatly the dump part that takes broken plastic toys for recycling was closed. We have lots of those to get rid of. My Mom and sister helped get more stuff put in the burn pile, dumpster, and next weeks yard sale. The top of the barn is finally free from all the garbage that was up in it. And then I impressed Lee into digging on the front of the house.

The first picture is of the trash and recyclables in the shed that Lee was working on. And in the second picture you will see his truck with his special tye downs that he put on today. We didn’t want to be losing trash out the back while driving to the dump.

I suppose that it doesn’t sound like a whole lot but I am TIRED! What I am really looking forward to is when the garbage (treasure?) is all gone and the demolition in the house is done. Then the fun of putting the house back together begins, making the land look nice, gardening and flowers started (YEAH), and animals added. I am very anxious for my little flock of chickens.

Lee took the closet out of the second upstairs bedroom. And behind it we found a secret closet. Okay that makes it sound way to exciting. This is nothing like when Lee’s Uncle found a hidden drawer in a staircase with two antique ladies pistols. We actually knew that this closet was behind the newer closet that was torn out. We had seen it from looking back into the roof after the insulation was pulled out. It was the original closet. I’m not sure why they made the new closet over the old one. In the opposite upstairs bedroom it had both the new closet and the original old one.

I didn’t get Lee in any man action Sawzall sawing the closet shots. But I sure heard him. I was out picking up piles of fake paneling and lath. Sounded like the house was having something very bad happen to it.

Lee said that he came upon a pile of dead mice. As he was Sawzalling his way through them he said it made a cooking mouse smell. Um, what does that smell like? And then it exploded into grey dust. Uh, may I say “YUCK”! He said that he also threw one out the window. I wonder if that was the one that was perfectly preserved that he saw. So I guess we can add this to the dead animal list. Two dead cats (one very preserved), one dead squirrel (very preserved), and dead mice (one very preserved). I’m surprised we haven’t found a dead squirrel inside the house as we keep finding nut shells in the walls.

The above picture is of Lee’s most favorite tool at the moment. The Sawzall.