Care & Feeding of Your DIY Volunteers

Here we are two weeks into the biggest project we've undertaken together and so far, so good. We've had some minor setbacks; apparently my mental timeline for how this was all going to unfold didn't really take into account that running brand new electrical is a huge pain in the tookus.

On the upside we're doing really well now that the dimmers have been sorted out. Mainly - and I cannot stress this enough - we are where we are right now thanks to the very determined help of friends and family. I figured since they were instrumental in our getting this far, it might be time to take a Miss Manners look at the whole DIY Volunteering from the perspective of the Helped and the Helper as Jeff and I have been on both sides of the hammer.

Don't feed after midnight, Don't give him a pneumatic staple gun...

To begin, one of the best DIY phrases I've ever heard is that there are three ways to do any project: Cheaply, Fast, or Well -- and you can pick any two of those three. I've watched that play out time and time again in our own home and can say that this is absolute gospel in our experience. 

When you're the helped, it's really important to remember that the people helping are (normally) not experts, not mind readers, and this isn't their project. They are volunteering out of some kind of love for the people they are helping. Generally they aren't obligated to spend any part of their free time helping you with your project.* 

We have found that when we have an abundance of offers to help the best thing is to divide up the day into at least two parts. This helps when personalities don't get along (you may not want persons A and D swinging hammers near one another) and it also keeps everyone helping as fresh as possible. Seriously, those buckets of plaster were not light at all. Who wants to do that for 10 hours? I sure as heck didn't and it's my bloody plaster!

Breaks. Take breaks. Do not scowl when people take breaks. Pile out into the yard, or the porch, or wherever and take fifteen minutes to smoke, drink a lot of water, and laugh. Do not forget to laugh. Breaks and laughter should happen frequently enough that people aren't trudging and infrequently enough that work is being accomplished. Remember, these folks are volunteering parts of their weekends and evening for nothing more than some food and hopefully help later on. 

Food should always be provided by the host. Always. It is the least one can do and it helps everyone trudge through demo and rebuild. I am very lucky that I've been able to ask/beg/plead with my parents to bring over hot food when it's been cold and cold cuts when it's been hot. Water - it should go without saying - but really. Water. A lot of water. It doesn't matter if it's hot or cold, when there is heavy lifting water is vital. That isn't to say food and drink brought by others isn't wanted or appreciated, it is! But the hosts should have something on hand for the people throwing their backs into (and out) the work at hand. It doesn't matter if it is an epic project or a small one, providing food shows that you thought about the comfort of the people helping. 

Tools. This last demo has brought up the point that sometimes we don't have enough tools to go around and we're looking into remedying that. Also, proper safety equipment. I was on everyone about using the masks during our last round of demo because I dislike getting sick. At the same time if you're volunteering: if you have tools, bring them and make sure they're marked with your name. Safety glasses! Gloves! While some things should be provided, it is always a boon if you have your own to bring it (and take it with you at the end of the project).

A plan. The worst thing to happen in a volunteer situation is to have a ton of things to do and no idea what is going on. Don't ask for help and then spend an hour or more having everyone stand around watching you figure out where you want to begin. Don't waste their time, or yours. It is also important to give notice to the people you're hoping to rope into the project. In our case, we had things fall into place for the kitchen rather quickly so there wasn't a ton of notice given. Volunteers: know what you are getting into so you can come prepared in the right kind of tools and equipment. And shoes.

When you're helping it's really important to remember that normally, the people you're helping aren't experts and they're trying to figure out the best way to do all the things they have to do. Try to be patient with them. 

Know your limits in all senses of limits - emotionally, physically, monetarily. If you can't physically lift 50 lbs of crap but you still want to help, ask how else you can be useful. Seriously, some of the best help we had was when folks brought food or beer over and that stopping by forced us to take a needed break. Along those same lines do not overextend your help to the point it hurts you -- if you're spending a ton of gas money to even get to the place to volunteer and it's wiping you out? Be accountable for that and know your limit. Limits don't make us bad people, they make us useful when we know them and don't force ourselves into a dangerous situation. 

Be gentle. Demo is a great time to put holes in walls, but ... well. Make sure they're the right walls. No favors are done when the people being helped end up spending more to have a 'whoops' moment fixed. 

Be clear about the plan. Ask questions. 

If you say you're going to be there, be there. The people you're helping have taken your help into account. If you can't be there after you've said you'd be there, call them. text them. send smoke signals, whatever, so they know you're not dead in a ditch. 

If you ask for help and you receive help, you are in debt to the helpers.* Flat out, no amount of pizza and beer actually clears that slate. What does? Helping them. Help each other. Time is a gift we are all given and that time can't be won back through any other means. Whether we like it or not absences are noticed most especially when help is not reciprocated in kind. And on the flip side, I've also had to remove myself from volunteering from projects that went well beyond my comfort zone and into abuse, or have had to put my foot down and say I'm sorry, but I am not available because there just wasn't reciprocity over a long period of time. It goes back to knowing all one's limits. 

There is always something to do. No seriously -- even if it is (as I have discovered) taking my lunch break and going home and pulling nails (three billion down, four trillion to go), there are always tons of little things that people may not being thinking about that need to get done. Not all  Most DIY isn't glamorous. There is a long, messy pause between the beginning and the shiney end. Not everyone can rock the sledge. Sometimes just sweeping the floor fifteen thousand times is the help that is needed. 

We are incredibly blessed with friends who work hard and play hard. We are incredibly blessed with family who has been around their fair share and then some of home projects and can pass on that knowledge to us. DIY projects can be a source of laughter, mirth, and awesome memories when the projects are handled well and with good spirits. When handled poorly, they can destroy relationships and bank accounts. Gratitude goes a long way on both sides of the hammer.

* This is the tricky part about obligation - if you recieve help you should give it in kind. Obviously we are all different and expect different things so your mileage may vary.

Harvesting Nails and Other Bits.

It is the first harvest of the fall cycle and we are busy, busy people. With an abundance of gratitude for the friends who came by and lent their strength and time helping gut the kitchen, we have the shell beginning to take shape. 

I am both relieved and bummed that we're in the process of doing this. We are a far cry from where I had hoped to be - I wanted to be canning pickles and making blueberry pie filling to stuff the larder with - but when one hasn't a stove, well. Priorities, people. Priorities. I am bemused that my grand plans for the garden and storage of food completely fell apart this year and instead I am neck deep in dust and chaos. 

But it's good chaos. Next year then for a massive can-a-thon. The farmers market vendors will fear my coming as they will hear Flight of the Valkyries playing when I peel into the parking lot with a mad look on my face muttering something about bread & butter pickles and fondling all the peaches. 

One small portion of the mess. 

In the meantime, I am spending my evenings trying to help with the little things like pulling penny nails out of the studs, or running errands (new cabinets are in! now I just need to go and pick them up!), or trying to catch up on laundry and ignore my filthy house.

My dad has a story about the first job he ever had, working with his step dad in the shop. Along with sweeping the floor he had to take the nails that were pulled from various jobs and straighten them out to be reused. As I am pulling hundreds of nails out of the wall that we missed on our first pass through while ripping out the lathe, I am reminded of a small boy with a hammer, dutifully tapping on each nail.

It has been hard filling a 20 yard dumpster with wood, plaster, and virtually new sheet rock. I know where it is going and it always breaks my heart when I realize that I am part of a cycle of waste. The lathe might have been reused for something - we aren't entirely sure what at the moment - but the plaster was not reusable for anything other than fill. The sheet rock, new when we moved in, was only in place due to the constraints of our loan. Even then we knew we would be ripping it out as soon as we started the kitchen. It bothered us both but the point was getting the house, not fighting with the loan company about the waste we'd be creating.

I learned so much about waste and recycling, really re-using materials when I lived in Ireland and a lot of the time I feel like I am doing a huge disservice to that experience. It's a matter of cost and output here. I could spend the time pulling the nails out of the lathe, finding something for the lathe, storing it until we found a way to reuse it, but it is wholly inconvenient and it is exactly that inconvenience that drives our culture. The cast iron sink that was apparently the second kitchen sink to be used in the house is being reused in our basement primarily because I forbade Jeff from getting rid of it. Other than cosmetic issues, it is a perfectly serviceable sink and as we are finding throughout the house, materials are not made like this anymore. When our house was built in 1902, that plaster and lathe was meant to be there for the entirety of the life of the house. They didn't consider needing to do rewiring or the like.

We have also discovered more work that needs to be done sooner rather than later which is normally how these things go in old houses. The old chimney that is no longer in use sits in one corner of the kitchen. Our plan is to eventually take it down once we get to the roof in a few years but between now and then we'll need to clean it up so it's not a complete eyesore or crumbling out which means I get to read up and make a grand mess of re-pointing and acid washing. Should be a fascinating learning experience.

We are making a point to purchase reasonably quality goods. The cabinets are not the solid wood that we had originally priced out, but they are very sturdy and will last us our life with the house and beyond. The counter tops we are looking at are quartz, durable and long lasting without the same problems of granite. I'm choosing classic fixtures and colors - black and white tile for the galley, marble back splash - because as much as I know they'll go out of style, they will return again. At least, these are the stories I tell myself in the hopes that in thirty years or more, the new owners won't need to rent their own 20 yard dumpster to repeat the process. This might just be wishful thinking though.

While I harvest nails and Jeff harvests little shocks from rewiring the electrical, I am focusing on being grateful for the abundance of help and excellent know-how from family and friends, the luck that has gotten us this far with our home, and the love that is going into making each inch of space count. It's not pickles and blueberries, but it means a great deal regardless.

This Kitchen Will Be The Death of Me

My post today had originally been something a bit more thoughtful on the whole how it is that I practice and perceive being Heathen.

Instead it's about the kitchen. Why the kitchen? Because the boyfriend and I are gearing up for quite possibly the biggest project we've ever undertaken together. We are taking this:

That right there? Some kind of Sexy. 

and trying to turn it into say, this: 

Gorgeous. Bright. WHITE. 

This of course poses multiple dilemmas. One, money. Two, time. Three, our kitchen is not from a magazine and is roughly the size of a large post stamp with eight, count them! eight egresses of some form or another. The stove cannot be moved to an outside wall, so there is no vent unless I do a recirculating vent (which has been the point of many a frosty argument between my darling dearest and I) The fridge really must be recessed otherwise it eats up a good eighth of our floor space. The sink is currently in the galley which is great when I want to ignore the dishes for a week (don't judge!) but if one is going for something resembling hygienic, perhaps it should be a bit more you know... in the way. Which interrupts every other design dream I had. 

The galley. Of Doom.

We have a few weeks if we are lucky of Jeff being home. We have the cabinets stored in our basement, an awesome craigslist score from February. We just have to you know, gut the two layers of sheet rock, plaster, lathe, and all that, rewire everything, put new sheet rock back up, and ... then we can put the cabinets in? Except that in between now and then, I am fussing over the semi-original design plan that looked like this: 

The pretty mock up the cabinet people did for us... and then wanted $14,000 to build the cabinets. Not the counters, not installed. Just.. cabinets. No. 

Which is lovely and mostly wonderful, and basically... turning the galley (to the far left of that picture) into a butlers pantry (say it with me now, ooooo!), putting a normal sized sink in the island with a dishwasher and just giving up on my absolute need/lust for a marble island, and ... trying to convince the boyfriend that we can put a small bar area in the galley. With a prep sink. Which when I mentioned, he actually looked like he might help me pack. 

The other thought was putting the sink to the counter area to the left of the main room (marked in red). Eventually the area to the right of that which is currently all brick from the main chimney no longer in use, that will all come out. So we could put in a bit more counter and cabinet. In like five years when we redo the roof and the chimney comes out from the third floor on down (The expression on Jeff's face while trying to explain to me WHY we can't take out the chimney only in the kitchen? Poor devil. Someone buy him a drink, will you?)

I forsee a long weekend of pencils, pizza, and alcohol while we hash this out. Gods help us. 

The Main Bathroom, or How We Knew We Were on the Right Track

Narrow, ugly, not functional. 

A very cold day in January we found ourselves in our new-to-us house with friends, sledgehammers, buckets, pry bars, and masks. We we going to begin the process of ripping out the yellow and blue tiled cave of a bathroom. We thought it would take a weekend to gut. We thought it would be dirty, but mostly easy work. After all, we have burly male friends who love to blow things up! How hard could it be?

That phrase -- "How hard could it be?" is every first time homeowner/DIY's first, and unlikely last, mistake. 

The house itself was built around 1902. It's a lovely, simple prairie box/four square design. Sears & Roebuck sold these houses back in its hay day for a few hundred dollars. It was an immediate success being that it was simple, easy to customize and modernize, and could look luxurious for a pittance of what the old Victorian houses cost. 

The haze of debris does not deter

Because our house was in such a bad state (read as uninhabitable), we needed to get a special loan (203k for those of you who are home-loan savvy) which meant we needed to have contractors lined up to do a lot of the major repairs as most banks do not really want your random homeowner doing the work for a lot of good and weird reasons. To save money on the loan, we worked it out with our contractors that we would do the demolition - get everything in the bathroom torn out down to the studs and cleaned up so that they could come in and redo all of the plumbing, the electrical, the wallboard, the new bathtub, and the tile. We were responsible for the hauling away of all the old materials and purchasing the fixtures. 

But before they could do their work, we had to do ours. There was plaster, horsehair, and lathe. Old cast iron pipes. And before we could even get to that we needed to get through the mortar and tile. At first, the guys thought this was AWESOME. I mean, here we were saying please, put holes in our walls.

Three hours later it was much, much less awesome.

By the following weekend, there was talk of setting explosives.

Three hours in and barely a dent. A lot of mess, but not a dent. 

Three inches of mortar on top of peaked joists. Hitting the walls with sledges barely cracked it. The overhead storage that made the bathroom such a cave did.not.want.to.come.down. We had men hanging from the rafters, we had men bracing themselves in bathtubs while trying to pull off the metal lathe, we had men throwing the 1930's cast iron built in (not claw footed) tub off my bedroom balcony into the yard below on Super Bowl Sunday.

In short, we had absolute chaos. And pizza.

Dear Clark, I'm going steady with Jim. Love, Pat 

In the midst all of this, we started to find clues to the personality of the people who lived there before us. An old playing card tucked in the wall. Newspapers from 1937 when a years subscription cost $9.00 used as filler for the ceramic soap dish. Our favorite, the literal Dear John letter that must have been stored in the attic and fallen into the bathroom ceiling - a letter from a woman who had decided to become an airline stewardess and date another man, dated 1958 in envious, looping script.

Binghamton Press, 1937.

While all this was going on, I was also scouring the craigslist ads for fixtures. We knew we wanted to keep the history of the house in mind when we added new details so I convinced (begged/pleaded) the boyfriend to purchase a gorgeous double ended claw foot bathtub, brand new. I found a pedestal sink, also new, for cheap on craigslist,and we got the faucet on sale. The light fixtures might be another story altogether but sufficed to say I do have a crystal chandelier in my bathroom and I do not regret it for a moment. Even if I have been mocked mercilessly by my loving peanut gallery.

The tile though, that proved to be a sticking point. When I thought about the bathroom, I wanted my baths to remind me of being in the warm waters in Corfu. The tile had to be just right -- matching my desire for a mini vacation and the history of the house -- white hex tile then. And we found it, not cheap, but from a small, local shop that had done work for my parents marble bathroom.

Horrible picture plus cat! 

Of course, once we had ordered it and paid the deposit I got cold feet which my boyfriend pointed out was quite possibly the worst time to feel like I had made a mistake as the money had been paid and there were emphatically no refunds. I fussed about it for a few days and finally gave up, telling myself it was floor tile and my life was not going to be made or broken by the size and color of my flooring.

That was the day the guys found that same exact tile in between the floor joists from the first version of the bathroom, small white hex tile perfectly matched to what we had purchased. I knew then that we were getting somewhere.

Even though the bathroom took the better part of a year to complete even after the contractors had done their job, I can safely say it was worth it. All the swearing with the measuring of the board and batten, my paint splatter that I had to scrub off later, my bitter disappointment with shower curtains and the complete lack of anyone understanding my vision and you know, having it on sale, all of it came together into a room that I love. There are still things that need touch-ups or finishing: the octopus stencil on the dresser, finding the right prints for the frames, a small shelf behind the shower for our soaps and things. All that being said, baths have never been quite this delicious.