torley manor

After finding out that the varnish on our floor contained lead, we did a little research about the best way to handle getting rid of it. Emma hunted down a product called Franmar SOY-Gel that is carried by our local eco-friendly building supply store Artemis Environmental. So we picked up a small bottle of it and proceeded to do a test area. After initial results looked promising, we bought the larger gallon size of the stuff and moved forward with removing the rest of the cracking/chipping varnish from the middle room.

Of course, between the time we did the test area and the rest of the room, temperatures and humidity levels soared, making the process of using the SOY-Gel much more difficult. Ideally the stripper is to be left on several hours while it works its magic. Unfortunately, due to the higher temps, the stripper was drying out before it was given the opportunity to work completely. However, our main goal was to get rid of the cracking/chipping areas of the floor and to not be too concerned about the varnish was happily sticking to the wood. After several long and messy sessions, the middle room was complete.

After having gotten some floor painting advice from a couple different sources, we settled on using a Behr Porch and Floor paint. The color we decided on is called “Sunflower”, which is a pretty bright intense yellow. On Saturday I picked up the paint and supplies and got to work priming a test area (this whole project is beset with test areas as we want to make sure things work out before doing both downstairs rooms and the front hallway. Also, on July 11th we are having an event at the house, so figured we’d wait until after that to do any major sections of the floor.) Check it out…

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A home lead test kit tonight showed a definitively positive result for lead in the varnish on our floors. Ugh. Last week we consulted with the staff at a local paint store about our options for the soft pine floors we’ve recently un-carpeted, and she recommended doing a lead test just in case, even though it wasn’t paint on the floors. I read some more about it, and yep — even varnish had lead in it until not too long ago.

And so the next step: figuring out a safe way to strip the varnish. The tiny victory here is finally feeling glad that the previous lazy owners of our house only varnished around the edges of the room!!!

Today, a friend shared these building plans for a living wall, which is basically a fence made of a bunch of connected window boxes. Now my gears are churning, and the thought of expanding our growing space vertically seems so obvious! Why have I never thought of this??

Our yard is currently surrounded by a plank fence in pretty crappy shape, evidenced by this photo from about two years ago (it’s even more beat up now):

Our yard has so many more things in it now! Two blueberry bushes, another raised bed, a huge peony ….

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Let’s make a list, to catch up:

• LIFE: This spring, I quit my job of nearly 7 years, which has proven to be (so far) one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I feel like I’m coming out of a cocoon!  I also turned 29. I think 29 is going to be a good year. Largely because our Chinese mantis babies hatched on my birthday. Auspicious?



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Living room, with carpet and no furniture.

Why, it’s layers of various wood stain, just as you suspected!

In an allergic panic a few weeks ago, I convinced Q that tearing out the carpet in the living room would be a good project for the day. We ripped it out (still have to tear out the dining room and hallway carpet, and then THAT IS IT! NO MORE CARPET IN THE WHOLE HOUSE!) and then realized we had no idea what we actually wanted to do about the floor.

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Our house has a little bit of a funny facade. The front is a stone facade, in pretty good shape and very similar to a lot of houses in the neighborhood (not so many on our street, but a lot of houses on a street not far from us). The other three sides were a remarkably weird faux brick siding — not Insul-Brick, but actual thin slices of brick cemented on to chickenwire. I can’t imagine it was intended for outdoor use. It seems like something a home improvement TV show designer might recommend for making the interior of a kitchen more “rustic.”

A few years ago, we had contractors tear off the brick siding on the two most exposed sides of our house, insulate, and re-side with cement fiberboard siding. We couldn’t afford to do all three sides at once, and cement fiberboard really means putting your money where your mouth is, compared to most siding options (There will be no poison vinyl siding in my future. No sir.).

We’ve got contractors doing the third side of the house now (see pumpjacks and unpainted siding on our house, which is on the right), and we’ve learned a bit about the house this time. Last time all I can recall learning is that it really was true, our house had no insulation in the exterior walls. Who builds a house in Pennsylvania without putting insulation in it?

Perhaps the same braingeniuses who used steel flashing!

I’ve finally confirmed my suspicions that the kitchen door once had a transom over it. If you look closely at the photo, you can see some wads of insulation being held in with baseboard trim. Yes!

And there was another window in the little bedroom upstairs! I would NEVER have guessed that, and I think if we had known it was there, we might have had it put back in. But we didn’t know, and now there is siding over it again, which hopefully we will not need to replace until we are old. It’s a pretty sunny room anyhow.

I try not to love Things, but I sure love this house.  Q and I have been talking a lot lately about how easy it was and continues to be for us to put our roots down here, and to make plans to live here until we die. It feels like a lot of folks we know buy a house and plan to stay a while and then move on, but we’ve put so much energy into making this a place we want to be and live …. it’s hard to imagine just sending it along to another owner in our lifetime.

Cheers to feeling settled and sure, eh?

Here’s the test of the screen for this year’s blues fest t-shirts. If you’ve got something you’d like to have this printed on, holler!

Neither of us took one single photo, but sweet sweet Sara K. took a great set of photos that can be found here:  Sara’s Flickr Set.

We’re currently importing/editing/uploading the video, which is a much bigger project than I realized. Video is kind of a pain, and I am now more grateful for people who tape shows and upload the video so I can watch it. Thanks people!

It was a good time — a great mix of new friends and old friends, brand-new-first-gig-ever performances and done-this-blues-thing-a-thousand-times performances. Q and I played three songs, all covers:

• “one of these days” by neil young, which was a fairly true cover.
• “reigned” by Io, who were an amazing local band. this song would not be recognizable in cover format except for the breakdown.
• “in the pines” — a version with half traditional lyrics and half lyrics taken from an old song by the NYC band The Syndicate.

Here’s a photo of us playing, taken by Sara. We’ll let you know when the video’s ready!

Things have been pretty quiet lately — we finished up the bedroom project: hammered the nails out of the quarter round, repainted it, repainted the baseboard, re-attached the quarter round and gave a finish coat of paint to the baseboard. You know — the little things that make you wish you were already done!

And so:

It’s so much brighter in our room now — the light bounces back up from the floor and everything glows a little bit.

I’m pretty pleased with the project — not too expensive, products made in the US, went pretty quickly and smoothly, the change in the room feels immense.

What next???

I spent a good portion of my weekend laying down the new floor in our bedroom (see previous post about ripping out the carpeting!) We ended up getting the Tundra flooring from Ikea. We went with the Antique finish.

BEFORE

Taking a break after getting things started

Progress!

AFTER!

More AFTER!

The final tricky corner –> into the closet!!

Overall the project was pretty simple. Luckily our bedroom is pretty simple. The hardest parts were working around the main doorway and the closet doorway. Normally I guess they would recommend taking off the door trim, laying the floor, cutting the trim down and re-installing, but we opted not to do that. Instead I did a little bit of fancy jigsaw work around the trim and we’ll fill that in either with some caullk or wood putty or something. Still an unresolved detail.

Tomorrow Emma will start tackling touching up the baseboard and quarter round trim which got a bit beat up when we removed the quarter round. A coat of primer and a couple coats of paint will make it look good as new.

The new floor looks great and so far this project is turning out to be one of the quickest projects we’ve ever undertaken (of course its not finished yet, so i’m sure we could make this drag out awhile longer if we really wanted to).

Having successfully eliminated 99.9% of the drop ceiling in our home (there are still 2 tiles in the front “foyer” between our exterior door and our interior door), we are now on a quest to rid our home of the rest of the old beat-up, dirty carpet that was here when we moved in. As stated previously in this blog, its been a bit of a tug-of-war between Emma, who grew up in a house with no carpeting, and myself, who grew up in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting. While I recognize the ill effects that carpeting has on my allergies/asthma, I also realize that my feet like the comfort of carpet.
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