Matt Haughey has a great how-to over at LifeHacker: How to build your own backyard deck. A few weeks ago, Matt and his wife decided that while they were going to leave to professionals the construction of a large deck up against their house, they wanted to try to build a smaller, corner-of-the-backyard deck on their own. After doing a bit of research on deck pier systems, Matt found Deckplans.com, and was able to use the company's online app to design their deck, a process which ended with the automatic generation of both a materials list and custom PDF assembly instructions. He's pretty happy with the results; here's hoping for updates later on to let everyone know how the deck stands up over time!
At T-minus seven days until we arrive at the DC home, I've started thinking about some of the more involved projects I need to take care of in the first week or two of our lives there, and the one that I keep returning to is redoing the vent on our dryer. The house has an unfinished walk-up basement, and rather than do the work to vent the dryer through the exterior brick wall, the prior owner just installed flexible vent tubing and an indoor lint trap. This being suboptimal for about 1,000 reasons, I've decided to fix it, and plan to use 4" rigid aluminum to make the run from the dryer to the brick wall that sits at the back of the house. I'm pretty certain that, while more challenging that my average project, this is going to be easily doable; I estimate that the run from the dryer to the wall is about 20 feet and has acceptable bends in it (one 90-degree bend and two 45-degree ones), and I picked up a good, long masonry drill bit and a foot-long stone chisel to help me install the vent hood through the two-brick-wide wall. Most of the articles and tip lists that I've read on the 'net also stress using foil tape to seal all the duct joints and making sure to avoid flexible or semi-rigid tubing as much as possible, so I'll keep all that in mind, as well.
Anyone have any specific tips they want to share? Specifically, I'd love to hear people's experiences with making holes this big through a double-thick brick wall; it seems that that's the part of the job that might be the trickiest.
I've been thinking about our itty bitty back deck, and that I need to check to make sure it's been recently washed and sealed once we move down there in two weeks. I guess it's pure luck that I stumbled across a great primer on power washing that's set to run in tomorrow's issue of our new local paper -- all information that's good to know. I'm pretty certain that, without the warning, I'd be the exact type of person who puts the nozzle right up against the wood and blow the surface clean off... gotta check that urge.
Lookie what came today -- our house number plaque! In the run-up to moving down to DC, Shannon and I have been concentrating on the big stuff (replace the windows, fix the floor, get a new water heater, etc.), all of which has taken up the clear majority of the time we're able to devote to the new house from here in Boston. About two weeks ago, though, we realized that the new place is essentially anonymous, with nary a marker showing it's number on the block. And in true DIY-style, we figured that this was an opportunity for us to get something nice to put up, something that keeps with the style of the house and lends it a bit of je ne sais quois. We liked the look of the various cast bronze plaques that are a dime a dozen at internet merchants, but didn't know how well they'd hold up to the elements (and accordingly, whether we'd be scrubbing outside wall as the bronze deteriorated over time). That's about when we stumbled upon Bryson's Stuff, a foundry in Pennsylvania that specializes in cast aluminum products. Given the width of the space next to our front door, we opted for the 10" oval plaque, and (as you can see from the picture) it looks just plain awesome. I can't wait to get down there in a few weeks and put it up!
We decided to wait to change the locks on our DC house until after all the contractors were done, so after the window guys finished up last week, I figured I'd take care of that. All the exterior doors on the new house have standard single- or double-cylinder deadbolts and keyed doorknobs, but oddly I've never worked with these before; all of my experience changing out lock cylinders prior to this has been with mortise cylinders, which are more or less the standard in the steel security doors that grace most New York City apartments. (Embarrassingly, we actually never got around to changing the locks on our Brookline apartment!)
I spoke with our local DC hardware store (actually more of a locksmith that also sells basic tools and whatnot), and they said that they could re-key the cylinders from the deadbolts and doorknobs for $10 each, way cheaper than buying new equipment. Happily, getting at the cylinders in these kinds of deadbolts is totally simple, at least in my Schlage ones; it involves removing the outer and inner assemblies from the door, and then removing a single screw on the back of each assembly which holds the cylinders in. It was easy enough that I figured I could take the cylinders out of the keyed doorknobs as well, but quickly learned that that wasn't quite as simple. (If you look at the picture, all those pins and springs shouldn't be liberated from the mechanism!) Oops. I decided to just take all the other doorknobs to the locksmith intact. After a few hours, I had ten newly-rekeyed cylinders to install back into my doors.
The nice thing about changing all the locks is that we moved from two different keys (one for the front of the house, another for the back) to one key for everything. Now, I just need to install a new deadbolt on one of the exterior doors and replace two inside-door locks to which we weren't given keys by the seller, and we'll be all done.
To me, part of what makes me happy to DIY is also knowing when it's time to LOPDI (let other people do it). One example of this: the replacement of all of the windows on the front of our new house, something that is clearly beyond my means. So once we closed on the house, we enlisted the help of a local DC window replacement company who set us up with an estimate, measured the seven frames, and ordered replacement Weather Shield wood windows.
The old windows on the front of the house were in pretty bad shape. They were all wood windows (in the Capitol Hill historic district, that's mandatory for homes like ours), but they had suffered the punishment of time -- they had about a thousand layers of paint on them, they were pretty warped in the frames, the decrepit hardware varied from window to window, and a lot of the sash cords and balances just plain didn't work. Add to that the fact that they were all single-pane (and only a few of the panes were the original leaded glass, the rest having been replaced with more modern pressed glass over time), and thoughts of our heating and cooling bills made it pretty easy to justify starting to price out replacement windows. I talked to a few different companies serving the DC metro area, and settled on the folks at American Windows and Siding.
It took about five weeks for the windows to be made and delivered, and the installers came this past Wednesday. They did a great job, working like machines to get the old windows out and put the new ones into the existing frames. The new windows are double-hung and tilt into the room for easier cleaning (and painting!), and they're double-paned, with argon between layers of low-E glass, so that we don't hemorrhage money for heating and cooling. They come primed on the outside, so we now just have to prime the insides and then paint 'em all (more taping off, yay!), and we're entirely done with the major items on our pre-move-in checklist.
One other thing I like about the new windows: the indentations in the wood of the bottom sashes, used to open and close the windows. There's probably an economic motive for Weather Shield to do this rather than provide hardware on the windows themselves, but I quite like the look of the smoothly-rounded indentations. I wonder if they'll get dirty as all sin as we stick our grubby fingers in them; only time will tell!
Today brought a mid-morning trip down to DC so that I could get a permit for our window replacement job (starting tomorrow!). People who've lived in the District put the fear of God into me about how long the whole permit process would take, and how this would be my introduction to the bureaucracy that will rule my life from here on out, but the reality was almost the exact opposite: from start to finish, getting the permit took me about an hour.
Our new house is in the historic district of Capitol Hill, so any work on the front-facing portion of the house requires not just a permit, but also a sign-off by the Historic Preservation Office. So I started off there, info in hand, to present my case for window replacement to the officer assigned to our district. I had to wait about 10 minutes for her to get out of a staff meeting, but once she was available, her involvement in the process took about three minutes. She asked to see pictures of the front of the house and what kind of windows we were using as replacements, and then after explaining that our two-over-two windows might not be historically accurate, she granted the permit. (She actually first asked whether I'd consider putting one-over-one windows into the main bays, but I told her that our contractor had already had the windows made and was ready to install them. She then wondered what I would have done had she not granted the permit, and I reminded her that that's why I had had this entire conversation with her a month ago, via email, and that she had reassured me that two-over-two windows were fine.) That done, I headed over to the main DCRA office for the final sign-off and permit.
I had been told that homeowners could short-cut a lot of the red tape at DCRA by using the Homeowners' Center, so that's where I headed. I discovered a small three-person office next door to the main permit desk, an office in which I was the only person other than the three DCRA staffers. The man who processed my permit application had me run across the hall to get a signature from the Construction Inspection Branch which would prevent problems with the installation of a DirecTV dish (something we decided to add onto the permit for the sake of completeness), then run downstairs to pay the $33 fee, and by the time I came back -- probably about 20 or 25 minutes total -- my permit was waiting for me. It really was a cinch. (It actually was enough of a cinch that I braved the DC Department of Motor Vehicles, and came out with a new DC driver's license about 90 minutes later.)
I'm sure that more complicated construction or renovation plans might take longer to get cleared, but I have to say that this whole process was easy as pie. And with all of our new neighbors telling us how quickly contractors get stop-work orders placed on them without valid permits in Capitol Hill, it was worth every penny to know that our windows will be in by the end of tomorrow.
When we went down to DC last weekend to get all the painting done, we figured that we'd need a ladder or two for various parts of the work, and Shannon's father was kind enough to put this onto his list of things to drive down. One of the ones he brought was a four-section articulating ladder (I'm pretty sure it was this ClimbTek 12-footer), a kind of ladder I'd seen all over the place but never used. I gotta tell you, I liked it a lot -- pretty light, extremely versatile, and just perfect for the kinds of tasks that end up needing to be done around a small house. I made a mental note of it, but at just over $200, it found its way onto my "when I really need it" (rather than the "as soon as we move in") list.
With this in mind, imagine how happy it made me to see Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools mention a good, sturdy, less-expensive alternative to the ClimbTek today, the Gorilla Ladders 13-foot Multi Position Aluminum Ladder. People seem to talk well about them (they compare more to the $375 Little Giant ladders than they do to the ClimbTeks), and the $99 price is a near-perfect reason to think about moving the ladder onto the "as soon as we move in" list. If I get one, I'll let you know what comes of it!
(And as a postscript, ever notice that "ladder" is one of those words that, the more you say or type it, the more ridiculous it becomes? "Ladder! Ladder. Ladder?")
While we're talking about painting, it seems like the right time to mention the taping-off lessons we've learned over the past few years. Every indoor painting job begins with taping off the room -- masking the ceiling, floor, and trim -- and I'm pretty convinced that putting a little more time and energy into doing the job right means that you actually save time painting and cleaning up afterwards. That being said, it can get a bit tiresome and annoying, so anything that makes the taping-off process easier is welcome in my book.
Shannon and I painted every room in our place in Brookline three years ago, and came to love Scotch Ready Mask painting tape. It's actually an impermeable paper tape that has adhesive on only part of its width, meaning that only one edge sticks to the wall (rather than the entire tape). All I can say is that it worked well -- it created nice edges, and it was trivially easy to get off the wall when we were done. Needless to say, when we started planning our trip down to DC to paint the new house, I grabbed a bunch of rolls and put them into the supply crate.
Imagine my confusion, then, when the tape gave me problem after problem as soon as I started using it in DC! I began taping off our guest bedroom, and within minutes of its application, all the Ready Mask tape came peeling down from the walls. I'm not sure if it was the humidity (DC certainly was more humid last weekend than Brookline was three years ago during our month or two of painting) or if the walls were a bit dusty, but in any event, within an hour we had made a trip to our local Capitol Hill hardware store and come back with good ol' Scotch Blue painter's tape. And while it went on without a hitch, we found that it took the occasional bit of ceiling paint with it when we took the blue tape down -- not ideal, but certainly better than a tape that didn't stick in the first place.
The one bit of painting that we have left (other than touching up the ceiling edges!) is the seven new wood windows that are being put in next week, and I'm not sure which painter's tape I'll use for those. I assume that the Ready Mask tape will stick to the glass better than it did to the walls, but window painting is tedious enough without having to deal with masking problems, so I have a feeling that the blue tape will get the call again... we'll see.
