Brick: To Paint? Or Not To Paint?

January 2013

After I finished staining the mantel I spent the week applying the poly protective coats.  It took three coats that I applied with a foam brush.  By Thursday, I knew I could no longer ignore the lower portion of our fireplace.  This was my dilemma: I love brick, heck I am from Virginia.  Our clay soil means we are the biggest producers and users of brick in the US (I just made this fact up, but it could be true).    Our brick had problems- big problems. One, it was not the nicest brick, just kinda of a boring 'I am brown' brick, not that I was going to hold it against it.  Worst, the mortar was pink, yes, pink.  Urgh I hated that mortar.  On top of all of that: the brick was covered with 80 years of soot and general dirty house funk.  Just to remind you what the brick was looking like:      

I had some choices.  I could clean the brick. There were several methods I found online that were home made and involved a lot of elbow grease.  There were also several expensive solutions I could purchase where I slathered some goopy gel on the brick wait a day and then according to the pictures have an amazing before and after moment.  The problem was none of these options would help my pink mortar.  This meant I would have to pay someone to come and repoint my fireplace with more attractive mortar- namely any other sensible color such as gray or tan. Read between the lines: very expensive for little change.

The other option was to paint the brick and mortar and be done with the darn thing.  Gulp.  This was tough, there was no going back, once painted brick would be painted forever. There is no stripper for brick. I liked our rustic living room and painting brick felt modern and cold to me.  The problem was I didn't really want to spend any more money of this fireplace. I looked online and searched painted brick fireplaces. Honestly they did make a huge difference to rooms. Rooms that felt old and tired looked fresh and bright.

On a Saturday, I decided to do a quick clean to brick to see if it made a difference. I cleaned the brick and cleaned and it looked exactly the same: sooty sad brown.  I made the decision- we were painting. 

The next step was what to paint the brick?  We could go with the same brown as the chimney breast or the standard bone white of all of our trim and ceilings.  Josh and I decided since our new surround was dark brown we should paint the brick Bone White to stand out.   I bought masonry primer and with way more confidence then I felt I started painting the bricks. 

It was pretty quick work, one coat of primer on Saturday night, then two coats of bone white acrinamel the next day. Getting in the cracks and mortar lines took a long time.  Luckily, small detailed oriented projects are my jam. The best part was since it was January and I had my Downton Abbey to replay over and over.  I had to make sure I had memorized every scathing Maggie Smith reproach.

By the end of the weekend the fireplace looked like this:

Regret it- no, Love it- maybe not totally?

The Fireplace Shake Up

January 2013

Josh and I did some traveling for the holidays and enjoyed relaxing around the house.  We were able to catch up with friends and finally watch some of our favorite tv shows.  But, after two months off I was itching for another project.  I don't know what it is about the holidays but I got the urge to strip some woodwork again.   For Christmas, we had asked my parents for a new fireplace surround.  For those of you who don't remember it looked like this in 2010:

Then in 2012 it looked like this:

Our chimney lacks a damper so we knew we lost a fair amount of our heating through our rattling unsealed brass fireplace surround.  Combine that with its poorly working accordion doors and general sooty appearance and we were ready to break up. As a side rant, do accordion doors work on anything?  Seriously, every house I have ever lived in had some janky accordion closet door that you fought with until you pulled it off it's track.  Poor design.

Our new surround came, looking all fancy and oil rub bronze, but alas there was a good number of things wrong with the fireplace.  The mantel has always made me feel a little let down.  We have a pretty big mantel, which I love, but it lacked the character that I had hoped for.  Taking a cue from our dining room built-in, I thought about stripping the top half.  It would tie the dining room and family room together and hopefully showcase another awesome piece of 80 year old wood that was hiding behind layers and layers of paint.

Josh bought me a heat gun for Christmas and it was all I could do not to remove our stockings and garland and go to town.  I waited, and was excited to get moving.   I started one weekend in the corner and by the end of the day I had stripped the top of the mantel.  I learned alot, mostly, that I am not a huge fan of heat guns. Holding the heat gun and a scrapper is exhausting work.  The place immediately smelled of burning paint which no one in the house was thrilled with.  A side note, I was sure there was probably one coat of lead paint wedged in there so I was wearing a mask and googles. While it was faster then stripper, I found it much more work and potentially more toxic for my family.  After finishing the top I decided to use gel stripper the crown moulding portion. 

This of course doubled the time of the project.  It took three passes to get the mantel completely paint free and each coat took about 24 hours to work.  It was slow, but I got back in my rythmn of coming home each day and scrapping off some paint and then applying more stripper to another section and covering with with plastic wrap.   I was laborious but I think it only took me a full week.   Also based on another awesome blog I read I used stainless pot scrubbers dipped in mineral spirits to remove all the paint that was trapped in the grain.  In the past, I had used a brillo sponge, this was much better and held up great!

Once I sanded the mantel down I went ahead and started applying stain. By now I was pretty good with staining and busted out our old Gunstock stain and my trusty staining clothes.  It went pretty quickly, I did one coat a night with a steel wood sand in between.  It ended up taking 4 coats to completely cover the areas.  There was some paint I could not get out of the tight crown moulding.  I cheated and took a stain colored sharpie (yes they make these) and colored all the paint bits brown and then stained overtop.  It feels cheap and wrong, but honestly, you would never know, and it saved me breaking down to get dental tools out.

At the end of two weeks this is what I had to show:

Happy Christmas 2012

December 2012

Happy Christmas.... in April.  One day this blog will catch up and I won't be posting these in the off-season. Every Christmas I like to document our decorations and general festiveness.  This was our second big Christmas in the house and we made some additions.  Unfortunately, we did not celebrate in the house as both Josh and I were visiting family but I still really enjoyed the decorating.

The mantel got it's fresh cedar garland and poinsettas, I hung our christmas artwork above and broke out our christmas gnomes.   Add some new awesome personalized stockings made by Josh's aunt Connie and it was starting to look legit.

The snow village was back out and wood bead garlands on the chandlier.  We added some small Christmas trees to the hutch and added an Elf on the Shelf to our liquor selection.

We tried a new tree this year, we moved away from our Noble Fir and tried a Blue Spruce.  We loved it, it dropped less needles, it is more open and allowed us to get all of our big ornaments up.  I will give it negative points for the fact that you now can see the wires for our lights, but still I think this might be a new tradition.  My favorite addition this year- this awesome moss covered reindeer I got on a whim at Target- so awesome-sauce. 

Outside, we lit our Mountain Oak, added candles in the windows and even hung icicle lights from our porch gutters.  Add to that my new wreath and we felt our halls were decked!  We spent a wonderful weekend up at our friends beach house in Rockaway and got our Christmas sweaters out- Gus joined in as well.

Merry Christmas!

 and of course, just to prove I am not a true blogger my centerpiece says happy fall.... I can't help it gourds never die.

Battening Down the Porch

October 2012

You have probably seen most of this post in the earlier photos but here is some more back story.  Once we had finished the beds and laying out our paths we still need to install them.  The concrete pieces were all different heights and so we needed to use mortar to set them level and flush to one another. 

This is a backbreaking process which we did in the rain.  Which is most likely why we did not photograph any of it.  First we had to dig out some areas as well as raise some other areas to get the stones to line up.  If we had actually used pavers this would not have been a problem.  With nice normal stones we could have laid a nice level bed of sand and simply tapped them into level.  But that would be easy and where is the fun in that.  Instead, our reused concrete bits required a fair bit of wrestling.  To say we got them all level would be a complete lie, this no ADA accessible pathway.  But for all intensive purposes it is perfect, it's a pathway of stones that you can walk on. 

Once the pieces were level we used mortar to set them.  This required roughly 12 bags bought at Lowes and simply mixed with water.  We chose to mix one to two bags at a time in our wheelbarrow with shovels and trowels. It was a bit of an inexact science, some mixes being more of a slurry and some being closer to sludge but in the end it didn't make a big difference.  If you are thinking of doing something similar I suggest more of the sludge consistency.  This helped us level some of the stones.  We spent the entire morning on our hands and knees shoveling and eventually grabbing handfuls of the mortar and placing it under each individual stone.

Once we had set all the stones we reused some existing pea gravel we had on site to fill in the gaps and create a level surface between the stones. We waited about 24 hours before fully walking on the surface and sweeping the excess pea gravel off.  When we were done I have to say it looked pretty darn good.  When you consider the concrete was free and the bags of mortar are about 6-8 dollars it was pretty cheap. We used some existing pea gravel, but if we had to buy it I would say it was about a yard which is about $80 plus delivery.

It was starting to get cold and rainy in Portland and we had run out of good working days to keep going.  I took advantage of some falls sales and grabbed some hydrangeas at 30% off.  I planted three white lamb hydrangeas along the beds and purchased a large Limelight for the corner under the kitchen window.  Honestly, I cannot wait to see them bloom, because buying twiggy dormant plants took some imaging. A few plants that were not successful in other parts of the yard also found their way over to the corner to provide a little bit of evergreen color. 

The last step before we could call it good for the year was to install some doors on either side of the porch.  The doors to the driveway were a definite need as this was the last step to enclosing the backyard and allowing Gus to use his dog door again.  Our friend Gordon, a la dishwasher, staircase beadboard fame, made us some doors and we put them in late October. They look a bit silly since they have their screening and nothing else does.  But it made the project feel more finished! As the rains kept coming we battened down the hatches on the back porch with promises of more work next spring.

A Cap, A Wall, An Arbor, A Path, and Back Pain

September 2012

To start off, I have explain that for about three months I did not take one picture of any of the work we did.  It was kind of like I blacked out.  Now I find that I only have pictures of our current progress which means there will be several entries and weeks of efforts shown in each picture.  They were also taken in wet, gray, sad Portland winter.  I apologize and promise to never do this again.

Since Josh had worked hard for weeks putting up the beds, I took on filling the beds with dirt-oooo so much dirt. I think it was about 3-4 yards of topsoil even with the 2 yards of native soil we already had on site. I put the first two yards in, then promptly hurt my back and actually had to ask Josh to finish up for me.  Fail.

While this was going on we had to tackle the area between the porch and the garage.  We needed to put up a fence to keep the dog in the back yard. At first we had designed a nice open railed fence to connect from the end of the raised bed to the garage.  However, we soon realized that this would mean anytime we mowed our lawn we would have to take the mower through the porch to get to the backyard.  Which was not going to work with our outdoor cozy room feeling.  I searched around and then my parents bought us an arbor/gate from Plow and Hearth for my birthday.  Yay!

Do I think we could have built an arbor/gate? Yes. Did I want to try and build one-- not really.  I put the arbor together- not so bad.  And we set it tight to garage giving us a kind of hidden path/entry into the backyard.  Our favorite cedar tree lent a secret garden air.  I liked it.  However, we now had about 3 feet from the raised bed to the arbor.  It seemed silly to design and make a fence that would only be 3 feet long.  We instead decided to build a wall, similar to the raised bed to wrap around the tree and connect to the arbor.  It's pretty formidable but would look a little less chaotic. Josh was now an expert and quickly built this and started working on the cap while I started brainstorming our path ideas. 

We had kept out some of the best concrete pieces from our depave to use as pavers.  I thought we should build a little path from the arbor out to the yard, then use the same pathway to connect the porch doors to the driveway, and then another pathway from the porch to the garage.  I am pretty honest about the fact that I am average at a lot of things.  I am a solid B at a variety of hobbies, tasks, mental capabilities.  There is one real thing I excel at: puzzles.  Honestly, tetris is my jam.  So I spent two whole days arranging the pavers (concrete chunks) to: fit close together, use a variety of sizes, keep straight edges were we needed them (along the driveway, the fence line, and the garage) and allow organic edges where it was not required.  It had to look thoughtful and at the same time random. It was on.  This is, of course, where I hurt my back.  Lifting, at times 60 lbs concrete pieces over and over again was a recipe for pain.  After I laid out the pieces they stayed that way for a few weeks before I could muster up the courage to mortar them in.

The good news was it was laid out and Josh had finished the cap, wall, and even built the half wall to close in the small area up against the house.  The space was really starting to look finished.

Raising the Beds

August 2012

Since Josh had created a nice pretty foundation for his beds and is the builder in the family.  I was left to my own devices.  You really don't need two people in a wood project.  My main purpose was occasionally to help carry a long board, or hold something in place.  I occupied my time doing some pruning (aka attacking the jungle that is our backyard).  I also cleaned the garage (shocker) and generally kept house life moving forward.

 

We wanted to match the raised beds we had done two years ago, so Josh notched each board so that they dove tailed together.  It was a slow process.  The porch cover was mostly square, the concrete patio beneath it was completely un-square and our rough sawn lumber was a little 'organic'.  By the end of Saturday we only had one layer of 2x12s. The next day Josh finished the second layer of 2x12's and added a 2x6 ring around the top to bring the beds up to 32". We still had to add our cap which was made up of a 2x4 and a 2x6  so our total height would become 36". This was deemed the appropriate height for me to be able to reach the back of the beds and not be so low it was a potential knee basher.

This time Josh used screws to the hold the beds together.  On the front, we had used nails, but over time the weight of the dirt and the swelling of the wood had led certain pieces to shift and gaps to appear.  We hoped screws would stand the test of time since their threaded ends would bury into the wood. To attach each ring to each other we used simple stainless flat brackets and screwed them together. We did this about every 2-3 feet to stop shifting.

Once the walls were up and before we put the cap on my job came in. We decided to wrap the interior of the wood beds with plastic.  I am sure it would take MANY years for the raised beds to rot through solid 2" cedar but we felt better making sure our wet Portland dirt wasn't sitting directly up against it.  I lined the sides and simply stapled the tops to hold it in place.  The cap will cover these staples so I was not worried about making it look pretty. Once that was done we started placing our huge pile of concrete in the bottom.

 

There was multiple reasons for this.  1. We had to get rid of all the concrete and we're too cheap to get another dump bin 2. This would actually provide some drainage for the beds so that they didn't stay too wet 3. This would prevent groundhogs/moles from getting up into the beds 4. Zombie land protection. Seriously, it was insane, we took all the biggest pieces and the smallest pieces and piled them in and pretty much were creating a castle wall. This porch could withstand a siege. While we were putting the pieces in I talked to Josh about something I think about often.

"Remember how when we do projects and we open something up and go 'WHO WOULD DO THIS?' because someones earlier laziness/cheapness/lack of knowledge is now making our life so much harder? Yup, we are doing that right now." Some poor soul will at some point need to remove these beds, either because they don't like them or they have started to rot.  They will believe it is a simple wood bed filled with innocent movable soil.  Instead they will encounter 3 tons of concrete chunks at the bottoms and curse us.  I wonder if I will feel it when it happens?  Will I be 45 standing in my kitchen and feel the hair on my neck stand up- that will be someone discovering our little secret.

In the meantime, we got rid of 90% of our concrete and then started on the dirt pile next to it. The year of piles was slowly coming to end! Yay!

Concrete 1; Us 0

July 2012

We were so impressed with how quick and easy the back porch cover went up that we didn't fully estimate how much work we still had to do.  We were really only about 1/5th of the way into the project.  Our next step was to remove the remaining concrete that surrounded the porch that we longer wanted or needed.  

We had cut the concrete back in May when we depaved the driveway, but due to the unexpected depth, we realized we would not be able to remove the pieces in slab form and would instead need to break them up further with a jack hammer.  I was honestly dreading this part more than anything.  We had spent three weekends already jack hammering and moving large concrete pieces around.  I had breathed a sigh of relief when they removed the dumpster a month earlier.  Now here I was again.

 The good news was that the weather was much better.  Also, our friend let us borrow a jack hammer so we did not have any additional costs.  Since Josh was a pro at it we devised a system where he jack hammered a section for about 5 minutes and then took a ten minute break while I picked up the pieces and carried them to a tarp in our backyard.  This would be the THIRD tarp in our backyard filled with debris.  Urgh. 

This system worked great and most of the concrete came up pretty easy.  Within one morning session we had successfully removed all the remaining concrete. Hurray.  Unfortunately, we were now left with a dirt wasteland from our car to the porch and a very intimidating concrete pile.  Honestly, I cannot imagine how much our neighbors hated our Saturday concrete removal.

 

With the big equipment spent, we ordered more Western Red Cedar from the same guy who got us the wood for the front yard raised beds.  Our goal was for them to look as identical as possible.  We also had a bunch of left over wood we were excited to use up and get out of our garage.  While we waited for the wood to be delivered.  Josh leveled the area where they new raised beds would go.   He used some of our broken concrete pieces to act as a sturdy foundation and we spread pea gravel over the area to help make sure the wood would not be sitting directly on the wet earth.

This picture makes it look like we are building a fortification structure around our patio. Apparently we needed to ward off a Garden Gnome attack.

 

 

By the end of the weekend there was not much to show for our hard work except more piles.  But freeing up all that soil for more planting space felt great and we were excited to move forward with the raised beds.