Insulation!!

Our initial plan was to do this ourselves.

We planned on spending an entire day blowing this stuff in.

We priced, figured out we needed to probably rent a U-Haul to get it all here .... all that good stuff.

We still have some more valuable than gold these days N95 masks that would keep our lungs safe.

And then hubby talked to someone who knew someone.

I have to tell you that I would recommend these guys in 13 seconds flat. 

They were here at 7:30 a.m. and done at 9:30. 

Four guys spraying while we watched and giggled. I think I can safely use the word giggled. 

The price was a no brainer for us and it was pure delight to watch that insulation fly up that hose into the attic.

And then they were done. 

13 inches of beautiful insulating fluff covered the attic that had become hubby's second home for months.

We spent that afternoon and the next day waiting for the air conditioner to kick on. Mind you, it was a cooler week which we took into consideration. We did have one week where the temps went over 100 and the a.c. ran ALL afternoon. Now ... it wasn't kicking on for HOURS!

I might be the only person in the Valley of the Sun anxiously awaiting my APS bills this summer. This house has thick block exterior walls, large patios, new air conditioner and ducting, new insulation. Next months electric bill should be a good assessment of the benefit of all this work, as long as the outside temps stay pretty much true to last years. Do it once and do it right and hopefully it takes care of us well into retirement. That's the hope!

If I could do cartwheels .... I'd be flipping them all over the place!

If you want a recommendation for the company ... drop me a line and I'll get it to you!

Patio prepping

Another pre-insulation project that needed to be finished was this.
This is the front patio of our home. Deliciously long and shields the house from afternoon sun in a beautiful way.
The patio ceiling sheetrock and was falling down in places. The plan was to match the back patio which as completed last year on Memorial Day weekend!

We had an estimate for someone other than us to do the work. Lifting huge sheets up on the ceiling is not an easy job for hubby and myself. Then COVID-19 hit this country, work slowed down and we started counting pennies. It didn't make sense to blow in insulation with completing this first. We could have blocked the access from attic to patio to keep insulation from blowing out but that didn't make much sense. The insulation HAD to be blown in before it gets hot. Ach!!!!

So we come up with a plan and tackled it ourselves. This part was quick ... bulk trash pickup was coming and we filled that side yard with the bagged ceiling.

Seriously .... isn't this patio just where a person needs to live life?

Then came the fun part. Occasionally we hit a snafu with the measuring business, but this kind of stuff ensued. Make puzzle pieces ....

Say a prayer and tuck it into place. YES!!! 

Note the little white box sitting on the top of the pillar? Electrical oulet! No more extension cords hanging for outdoor lights!! 

Another really bright feature of the placement of that outlet is that it is weather protected. Alexa, or some other app on our phones, runs most of our lights. I can tuck the little dot up there and keep it safe from kids' prying fingers and monsoon storms.

We do have lights on the front of the house wall, but I'm a fan of softer mood lighting myself.

The problem of lifting heavy sheets was still not solved. Hubby is not an "ask for help" kind of person. Nope! Going to get it done and going to do it ourselves. Advice? Yes, that he will ask for. Muscle help? Nope.

After doing three or four sheets with the physical muscle kind of work, he put his thinking cap on and came up with this idea. Seriously ingenious.

Hinges from an extra door that is sitting in the garage attached this large frame device to the beam. At the bottom of it, on each 2x4 was a screw that would hold the sheet in place. We would place the piece of sheeting on the "frame" and, followed by an easy lift up (as you'll note in the next photo), nudge it into place and secure.

Being spend thrifts, he used every bit of the frame to make blocking needed so that the edge pieces could be placed.

The entire ceiling was sheeted, there might be a wee bit of insulation escape space but virtually none.

Why are we sheeting the ceilings instead of using t&g?
I wanted matching patio ceilings and we are talking a great deal of space. Tongue and groove wood would certainly be beautiful, but the cost doesn't align with our budget. To be honest, if we just waited to accumulate funds to do it that way .... none of the other projects would get done around here.

Alrighty then! Paint coming some other day.

These projects don't just happen overnite. They aren't one day deals ... they're typically worked on after a day at work or on a Saturday. They take up time, yet time that we are more than willing to give. We would rather use our time and energy creating something than hire others to do it. There are projects that we aren't capable of doing and freely admit that. Ducting, for example, was not a job for us. We will hire out what we must, but the rest ... I call it a labor of love. The satisfaction of seeing it completed is so flat out rewarding it is unbelievable!

We are ready for insulation!!!

we are preppers

No, not that kind of prepper. I sometimes wish I was, but really I'm not.

Our work in the attic was almost done the other week. There were a few things that hubby felt needed to be done before insulation was blown in. One of those was removing the only return that had existed in the house with the old air conditioning/evap system. It sat in the ceiling of this small hall space. The ceiling had been lowered to pretty much door height to accommodate all the ducting running above.

Old ducting was removed and is awaiting bulk trash pick up. We place all this good stuff in our side yard at the street every quarter. The metal collecting guys will scarf it up real quick and the city will haul away what is left. Saves so many trips to the dump. With removing the ducting, we were able to raise the ceiling to 8 feet in this space!

This doorway had what, felt like, a very small arch in it. I went a little crazy with "just cut that doorway off as high as you can". That didn't last long. It got built back down to a good height, but it looks amazing! The vent hole to the right of the doorway was for the old system as well. In fact, all the old vents are removed and in the process of being retextured/painted.

This space is ready for texture and paint. I don't have a decent picture of it right now, so this is what you get until it's done ... which should be in several weeks.

"If you Give a Moose a Muffin" seems to be the way of house projects around here. Why just texture and paint this space when the other arch was going away as well? Why not do them at the same time and get it all done? Good plan. I'll share that with you later as well. The second arch is gone ... and when we get home from vacation (we are actually hopping on a plane this week!!) it will get finished.

Can you imagine the mess if this was left for after insulating? It would have been a disaster!

Check this one off the list!

The desk top.

How many pins do you have on Pinterest?

I'll raise you and double that.

I wanted a desk top like one I found on Pinterest. Jari wasn't convinced that I wanted the "cracks" between the wood slices and for a moment I agreed with him. Then I went back to the original plan. This is the plan I sort of followed. We trimmed the boards down from 8 feet in length just to make them even. Otherwise, it is as close to 8 feet as possible. 

So this desk top isn't suppose to be siting like it is. I wanted either several drawer units from Ikea or one more file cabinet. Guess what? By the time I decided to just go for it and purchase the Ikea things, the store was closed and they were not shipping to Arizona. And by the time I was done building the desk I probably had spent about half of what one of those Ikea drawer units would have cost me. Not bad!

So desk top and stacking on top of what we had was the order of the weekend.

A trip to Home Depot yielded wood stuff for me and electrical stuff for hubby.

I missed taking photos of the first step but it's laid out very well in the link above. I probably added more supports than they did because I have a hubby who wants to make sure things are downright solid.

Somehow I got carried away and made some rather deep holes when countersinking the screws. Nothing that a little bit of wood filler won't fix. After the filler was dried and sanded (and let me tell you … I sanded with a belt sander and then my fabulous little round thing) both top and bottom were stained. It sat for a day and then got several coats of my favorite poly to top it off.

I'm all about Plan B. There's always a Plan B. The file cabinet got painted and went from black to white. The hardware on it went from silver to black. I really don't like spray paint. At. All. Then when I went to slide the drawers back in, I managed to nick some of the spray paint off. I'm calling it character until I come up with something different. The file cabinet is lower than the black Ikea unit, so the desk got a wee bit of propping action until I figure out something different. For now ... it works. And five years from now, it will probably still be working. 

Or ... when the world starts revolving again … perhaps I'll find another file cabinet real cheap like and have another go at spray paint! That might be far enough away that I completely forget how much I dislike the process!

The bar stool isn't in there anymore. This old back cannot handle that much bending over. Too many hours on that and my back was in straight up revolt mode. Too old for that business ... altho' the room is certainly convenient to set up a massage table!

He may have lost me ...

I have a space in that bedroom we were working on in February.

For those who may know this house, this is the bedroom that is at the back of the house. There was one window that faced the carport which we have completely enclosed, causing fire escape issues. So, we added another window that exits to the back patio. All indirect sunlight but sunlight it is!

It isn't done done done, but it is done!

I have a place to play ... although the sewing machine has still gone to the kitchen table .. once. Will see if I eventually start sewing in here but for now .... the desk top is covered with "office" kind of stuff.

I'll share more posts with you about how I did some of these things, but the most important thing I want you all to know is that nearly everything in here was recycled. The only things that I purchased in order to put this room together were the wood for the desk top and the colorful little buckets (minus the wire handles and paint that I added from my stash) that came from Ikea for pretty much dirt cheap. Everything else ... I already had.

This wasn't my plan exactly, but I can't get the things I really wanted in this era of pandemic. Maybe someday I'll find them at a yard sale. I'll have to share Jari's office space with you sometime, but I wanted the same type of cabinet we got for him from Ikea. First I hunted everywhere and couldn't find used, then I decided I was going to buy them at Ikea ... and Ikea is closed and has no shipping to any address in Arizona. That settled it and I had to get creative. Creative ended up costing less than ONE cabinet at Ikea would have cost me. And I'm about the penny pinching thing. I'm not quite my mother-in-law penny pincher, but I like to save a nickel and get what I want.

Planners and pens and notebooks and computers and most importantly, a Wifi booster that gets me some pretty good internet connection in this room. 

And then there is color. I don't know what I need all those colored pencils for but I must have used them for something or another at some time. Paint brushes, markers, highlighters and my all time favorites ... colored ultra fine point Sharpies in every color imaginable.

He may have lost me to this room. I can't wait to add some plants and colorful works of positive inspiration to a few places. Maybe my magnetic board will become my dream board. Now ... that's an idea!

Just a swingin’

Last summer sometime, when it was croaking hot, we worked on this porch swing. I had purchased one off some online thing and it probably sat in the backyard for several years. Hubby even moved it to the new house for me. Then he told me that the wood was too shot to even hang up the swing. Well, shucks! He figured it should be able to hold the weight of several generations in one sitting. I think it does now! 

The arms were redone and the body of the swing is made of 2x4's. Seriously sturdy! We hung it out on the back patio and I never got around to finishing it up until last week.

White porch and floor paint from Sherwin Williams is my go to paint for almost anything now. Very hard drying paint for furniture and seems to last very well. The challenge is that the swing also gets rained on when weather happens here. Admittedly, that doesn't happen too often, but it does!

While laundry was spinning, or something equivalent was happening, last week, I added a bit of paint to the ends of each piece of wood. We prepainted before putting the swing together. And then it sat. Why does that happen?!

Anyway, added a wee bit of paint. Sanded some more to make all of it look a bit older than it actually is. Then came several coats of sealer. Now it should be weather proof and easily cleaned.

I know. I have a little white paint on the black metal. I did use some serious tape when I painted and it still got away from me. It will wear off over time and if it doesn't ... I really don't care.

We can still sit and swing our cares away.
Swing our babies to sleep.
Swing just because we all should spend some time on a swing.

Happy Weekend!

Little loves

Here they are!
My precious grandcharmers.

Anna rolled into town last Saturday evening after trekking across the country. We thought she was driving alone with her kids and had no clue that she had extras on her ride. Bridget had hopped in with her three littles as well!!

We have had some times of kids not getting along so well. Is it the ages of these kiddos that make togetherness a treat right now? I don't know what it is, but I love it! Sunday they were all here and it was laughter ringing everywhere. Thankfully, I have a yard that is a great place for them to play. There are 7 boys in that group and 5 are old enough to appreciate a shovel mixed with dirt.

Paisley wasn't feeling so well and was not cooperating with the attempt to get a picture of all of them.
And, of course, I didn't notice all the shadows until we were past done with the business.
God bless photographers who can make a tribe like this sit still for a minute.

Yogurt ... oh yeah, I got this!

Landscape rock, transformers and cars. 

Is there really a need for anything else in life?

I don't think you can understand the depth of my appreciation for this home of ours.

This is what I want. This is what I need.
Okay, sometimes I really just might need complete silence and other times it might just be a nap.
Other than that, what I really want is the ability for my grandchildren to play here. To be children here. To explore. To create. To live as children ought to live. Creatively and at one with the earth God gave us to use.

These three heads are the firstborns of three of our children. I share the firstborn thing with them. I wonder if they will all be alpha children. Each of them has siblings. Each of them walks by a littler one having a momentary problem/challenge and soothes. Each one will have, or already has,  frustrations galore when their projects are interrupted. Each one is going to be an example for the younger ones. They just don't know it yet.

For now, their job is to play.

Imagine how fast 20 years flies by in life.
20 years from now I'm going to sit them down in the dirt and retake this picture.

Whew!!

Just in case this is difficult to read ... it says:

empty spaces. fresh palettes.
ready for inspiration and creativity mixed in with
a little pinterest
and a whole lot of elbow grease.

come see me in april!

This is our third bedroom that I have nicknamed the Dungeon because it was so dark.
You have to know me just a little bit.
I would live in a place where no windows were covered, the doors wide open and sunlight streamed in everywhere.
I really wouldn't care if I ate dinner with the sun shining in my eyes.
So .. dark spaces aren't my thing.

This room has lost its angled/sloping ceiling which I really didn't mind but hubby did.
We added a window to make it a legal bedroom (at least I thought it needed one) as the existing window now faces an enclosed carport.
That window will never see direct sunlight but it will get light!
Can you just see plants of some kind hanging in front of that window? Or maybe a desk that goes all the way from wall to wall?
Seriously. Call it giddy.

I moved boxes of fabric to the garage. There is stuff stowed everywhere else around here for the moment because the room is filled with loved ones for the next 3 weeks!

The ceiling will get scraped clean of popcorn at some point when we are ready to attack it again and the last ceiling fan to be replaced has been sitting in the garage for months. When there's a deal ... you snap it up.

And I get to play in there! I have all kinds of ideas pinned on Pinterest and they are all rather budget conscious ones. A long desk made of pallet wood for example. Getting hubby to bring home pallets from work might be another problem but I'll accomplish it somehow. Then there is the dust collecting black Ikea furniture. I am so over dust! Do I replace it with something else that costs another half an arm or leg? Or ... do I chalk paint it white? Or .... this is how it goes folks. Lots of those thinking and dreaming moments.

Can't wait to get started and share with you!

That white cabinet thing? A queen size murphy bed that has storage on the bottom for most of the bedding and pillows. Serious lifesaver!

A few days with hubby

Monday after work:  The part behind the plastic was a slanted ceiling. See the line of sheetrock? That's where the ceiling sloped down to. Monday evening it no longer did.

Who doesn't keep their ironing board set up all the time?

This room is so incredibly dark. The window in it faces the carport. That carport is now completely closed it. It may not always be, but for now it is. I'm afraid I've named this room the Dungeon. If I open the blinds (to the right of this picture), the skylight lets in light. That would be it folks. Not very conducive to joyful anything.

A little later Monday: Off to Home Depot. Ought to just rename the store "Home Away from Home".

Back home from our shopping expedition and guess who's still going strong? Well, strong might be a little lie. Somewhere in this evening, he has work to do that doesn't cost money but hopefully earns some. And ... he's dining.

Tuesday: The window is framed and in place. Some kind of mud found in a bag and mixed in a bucket looks so mighty fine hey?

Is there such a thing as wire confetti? He has found a few things. Hot (HOT!) wires sitting inside walls. Not attached to anything but power. Just sort of hanging out and waiting to light something on fire.

This is where we start reading wire. Did you know you can read wire? Seriously. It says things. Not anywhere close to a fantastic Charles Martin novel, but readable. 

Thursday: Several coats of mud and paint have dried. I think in not too many minutes, I am going to stop taking a second glance when I walk by. Eventually this window will get the same darker popout around it as the door has. Eventually. We will have several popouts to redo ... may as well do them all at once. So .... put that one way down the list somewhere.

This week we both worked at our regular jobs. We had other things we also needed to do ... and then there is the frantic rush to get this done. We have new ducting for our HVAC system going into place in only a few days. There is much to be done before that starts.

Friday evening we stayed home and he worked.  The framing of the ceiling was completed, after which we sat around a bonfire with a friend and drank coffee.

See all those wires very neatly tucked up there? They make sense. They go where they are suppose to go, they are safe and this piece of wiring business is done.

Saturday: I worked in the morning at the paying job and Jari worked at home on the house. He moved things around in the living room as that needed to be done before Wednesday as well. I don't know what he did in there all morning, but I do know that not a spec of moss ever grows on his feet. By the end of Saturday, there is sheetrock standing there ready to start hanging.

In the meantime, I wander through Pinterest here and there. Grab an idea or two for what I am going to do with that space when it is done.

Not much makes me nearly giddy, but that sunshine streaming in that window back yonder?
Yup.
Giddy.

We have 19 days from today to have a whole lot of stuff put together.
It's kind of a race around here.

we are still at it!

The attic has been emptied of insulation.

That was a huge accomplishment! 

We had a moment's intake of breath last week when the temps in Phoenix dipped to the freezing zones. All of a sudden we had a frightening thought that now none of our water lines were covered in insulation. The lines survived.

Do you just love the lighting up here? The lights are moving out to the front patio when they're done up here. Love the multi-purpose thinking he has.

I got home from work one day last week to this. Water line was going in. The lines across the attic are in. We aren't running new lines down the walls until we redo bathrooms. They will sit up there ready to hook up when we are ready.  

Facetime is can be a serious time saver. He tells me what he needs me to do down below and I can show him exactly what it is I'm looking at. Works perfect and saves him a million and two trips up and down from the attic.

Almost done with that. The rest of the line is stretched out in the yard trying to get it unwound before he carts it up there and sets it in place to be hooked up later!

I use to think (when the kids were small or when I'm trolling Pinterest) that an attic room would be so fun! Not anymore!

On to the next thing!
Can you believe this room?! It usually doesn't look like this, but I started cleaning out the closet on Saturday and trying to organize my creative space. Why is cleaning out things such a mess??!! Donation piles, trash piles ... all that good stuff.

In between cleaning that space, I was running to help him out. Electrical was next up on the list. The wires in the attic look like my Christmas lights usually do. A mess. One breaker runs different parts of multiple rooms. A nightmare if you're trying to figure things out. It will all make sense when he's done with it! We haven't redone the front patio ceiling, so handy little holes for running line are lifesavers.

Rolls and rolls of this good stuff.

I know how fortunate we are.
First, he has the ability to do all this stuff and we aren't paying someone else to do the work.
Second, we enjoy doing it together and seeing the progress.
Third, we appreciate the final result so much more!

Electrical in the guest room and garage are redone and labeled.

That room I was working on cleaning? You should see it today. Oh my goodness.

House project #9.768

Here goes! At this posting, we are into this project for about 3 weeks. It has been a project chalk full of fluidity.

Hubby is a researcher. When he lights upon an idea to do something he hasn't done before, he starts to research. He spends hours figuring out how he is going to do something.

We did have someone come out and give us a bid to remove all the insulation out of the attic. Now that we are into it ourselves, we know that whoever would have signed up for the job would have walked off in a heartbeat. It is a mess up there. Not only is there blown in insulation, there is roll insulation that can't be vacuumed out, drop ceiling in pieces, trash galore. All of that makes it a job and a half. But .... we are almost there! (I use we loosely.)

This is how the brainchild started. A hose runs to a 55 gallon drum and then through a shopvac and out to a collection device. Don't ask me. I'm not the science person. However, the suction in the drum was quite awesome.

Then the ShopVac became unnecessary as a plain old leaf blower was added to the top of the drum and did a great job of pulling insulation and blowing it.

Closing off insulation leakage holes with rags. No big pieces can be sucked in or it gets stuck. Easy enough to unplug tho'.

At the end of week 1, there was serious progress going on! The red circle is around 1/2 a piece of ancient luggage. It is a serious trash and treasure trove up there!

Where is all that blown insulation going? To a bag outside the garage. They sell insulation collection bags at over $200 a pop. Hubby came up with the idea to use sheets sewn together. I went to Goodwill and found that duvets are sold for the same price as sheets. A whole lot less sewing involved when 3 sides are already done for you! Air moves through the fabric (the cheaper the sheet, the better it works) and allows the insulation to sort of pack in a bit. Not as tight as would be nice, but we have a whole lot of these bags full.

This would be the insulation removal team. Day #1 we did this with no protection over our breathing spaces. I've been coughing for the 2 weeks since then. And insulation fibers? We may be throwing clothes away when this is all over.

The blower finally decided it had enough. (We did figure out a way to stop the collection of stuff around the top there.) It just worked itself right out of commission. Plan #267 came into play shortly after that and works well!

This is 1/2 of the trash bags we filled at the end of week #1. There is another pile that is just as big. Can you just imagine the weight that has been hanging on our ceiling?

These are duvets of insulation. Not exactly good bedding material anymore.

Why are we doing this?

Before it warms up and the temp in the attic hits triple digits, we hope to have new and sensible electrical wiring up there. The plumbing will all be redone up there. New ducting for our heat/air conditioning system will be done. And then .... we will blow in new insulation.

There are wires running all over creation up there. Pipes that go nowhere. Ducting that sends our air conditioning straight to the attic instead of inside the house.

It is a huge job but will be so worth it in the end!
I'm actually looking forward to seeing an electric bill!

More updates soon ...