Learning to Toss "The List"

I have to be completely honest with you, faithful audience. As I write this blog post I find myself falling into sameness. The last few posts have felt the "same". Update certain project I already posted about on Facebook...Try to make it unique...Maybe a swear word...Maybe a few swear words. But lately I've felt really dull. This project is never-ending and though I'm sure all 10 people still like checking it out from time to time, I feel soooooo booooring.

Momma, please don't be so zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Though, if NASA can finally get to Pluto after nine years, I can get my damn house finished...right? RIGHT!

Okay, so here's the update. Forgive me if it's blah and please continue to check out The Mannsion page on Facebook for smaller, more frequent and less self-deprecating updates.

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My mom likes lists. Ever since I can remember she's made lists on little slips of scratch paper she cuts up. I too like lists. There's something so satisfying about thoughtfully creating one and then crossing off each item when it's finally completed.

Don't get me wrong, lots of great things have been getting done. It's just that they're things that aren't quite at the top of my, very particular, list. Though getting cabinet doors below the kitchen sink were way up there. I mean, if I had my way, we'd have fully completed the outside (only two little spots remain unfinished) and inside (trim mostly, but the rest of the kitchen cabinets haunt my dreams). Honestly, the entire inside would be been-there-done-that. And also bookshelves. Lots of bookshelves.

When RJ and I agreed to give our neighbors our old garage, I thought, "Great! What a nice project for next year". Little did I know that he was talking about now. Originally, RJ wanted to move the garage to Mike and Deb's house two houses over and build himself (yes, himself--apparently this garage will ensure he gets out of his tv chair and into a project) a new one. Then we got caught up worrying about budget and that plan was nixed. We would redo the ugly garage that was falling apart. But THEN, with the help of my Aunt's generosity post-mortem, Plan A was on again. So, a few weeks ago, we cleaned out the garage once and for all, RJ and Jess braced it as well as they could, and pulled its rickety ass over to Mike and Deb's. It's a miracle it survived.

New Home!

But now it's leveled and much less rickety. Mike and Deb have plans for a tool shed/big deck. And they're keeping the "WoMen Working Asses Off" sign up. Yay.

Yesterday we poured most of the concrete for the new garage. We were a couple yards short, so the final truck will be coming tomorrow. It's hard to get a good estimate of how much concrete you'll need. Unless it's ALL you do, you usually have too much or too little. And it costs more for every truck you have as there is a delivery fee. So with any extra, we're putting a little pad off to the west side to store lawn mowers, bikes and such.

Though I'm still in awe of what seems like starting a really huge project BEFORE we've finished what I want to get finished--this is actually great. Once the bones are up, RJ will have a place to store tools. He'll have a car and workshop so he can work inside despite how cold it is outside. This will expand and enhance his business. And with a near fully equipped wood shop up at his parent's property, he'll be able to get our inside trim done in a flash.

So. Boring lesson of the day: Sometimes compromise ends up being more beneficial than you thought.

<sigh>

But there are still times when I wish for a genie. Or a wand. Or a shotgun. Kidding.

Yay for new (to us) tools!

John workin', RJ standin'

Be Our Guest: And Join Me for a Shower!

We hit a milestone on Wednesday. We finished the bathroom downstairs. Which means, except for the cabinetry in the kitchen, we are finished with all the large projects.

...

I'm just gonna...excuse me for a second...

<runs outside> "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
<runs back inside>

AND. Last week, leading up to this current milestone, we finished the guest bedroom. One major change was that we dropped the ceiling in order to sound proof the room. Originally, the beams and 2 inch tongue and groove were a cheap yet decorative option. But we noticed as time went on, that you could here everything upstairs. And I'm not being pervy, it was just noisy. Every dang little step or bump was audible!

So, the soundproofing consisted of dropping down the ceiling by adding insulation up there, and putting up more blue-stained (aka beetle kill) pine. We do love it so (plus it's cheap). RJ finished the closet and added some gorgeous trim. He also made a simple, yet custom, bed frame. Add a pillow-top cover (courtesy of my Aunt Mary Lou), a fancied up IKEA dresser, and we're ready for guests! Plus, as a lovely guest, you'll no longer hear the tv blaring upstairs. Or the dog run upstairs and flopping down clumsily on the floor above you. Yay.

Ooooooooooo

Ahhhhhhh

Eeeeeeeeeee! 

Shhhhhhhhhhh

Now to the icing on top. This shower...is awesome. It fits two people comfortably if you ever need to be efficient (or sexy.) It has a great shower head and, most importantly, it's beautiful. And that is because of John Stynchula--our friend and the best tiler in Creede. A huge thank you to John and Allie Quiller, who, along with RJ and myself on tile cutting duty, put this bad boy up last week.

I won't waste any more of your time blabbering. Here are some pictures:

The shower pan. Two layers of blue stuff (my term) that protects the floor of the shower. You then need flexible pieces of tile, as the shower pan is ever so slightly a funnel to lead the water to the drain.

John starts on wall number one. 

John came over after paying work, several evenings last weeks. As well as a few days spent finishing and grouting.

Second wall. Easily hundreds of pieces have to be measured and cut.

Closer...

Once all the tile is laid down with mortar and dries for a day, you can grout. This fills in the space between tiles. 

Drying.

Then, about 48 hours later, you can add the shower kit (head and nozzle) and the door. Done. 

PS. I have created a Facebook page titled, The Mannsion, where I post day to day updates of projects. Check it out.

Doo says, "good job, guys!"

A Finicky Fact About Finishing

I love completion. I love closure. So, you can imagine an ongoing house project like ours has been a challenge for me. I have to break things down into little victories. Because with this thing, it often seems like the more you finish, the more you notice what ISN'T finished. A prime example was yesterday afternoon when RJ and I bickered about which paint colors to update on what part of which piece of trim. That then turned into a discussion that the paint color for the addition is actually quite different from the main part of the house (the hardware changed paint formulas in the 2 years between paintings) and that we should try to paint it all the same color...now THAT is something I can postpone. Let's get the remaining 3.8% of the house painted first for the love of...!!!

But. I digress. Let's focus on the positive, which is always the better choice, though slightly less amusing. 

We finished the back of the house!!! This means that all the soffit and trim is up, painted and ready for prime time. This led us to the hard truth that with the back looking so pretty, we REALLY need a deck ASAP. (Keep it positive, Berry!)

C'est Fini!

Flair.

We also trimmed out most of the windows on the rest of the house. This was something, due to time and money, we postponed. We had initially just painted the wood around the windows to look like it was finished when we were trying to increase curb appeal for an appraisal.

Ooooooo...

Ahhhhhh...

RJ also surprised me with a couple of projects that weren't even on my list, but really fantastic to see. He got some bricks from a friend for cheap and created a walkway to the front door. And, he built us a bed frame. Because of my disdain for cheap, metal bed frames, I have kept my mattress on the floor since probably 2007. I feel like a real adult now! It only took me until almost age 40. 

Willkommen!

Bricks!

The older I get, the better I have to become at accepting life's constant lack of closure--in friendships, work and home life. I do love the phrase "it's the little things". I have no idea who said it first, but it pretty much sums up my continuing attitude on this project. Much like an actor at an audition, focus on what you have control over and let the rest go...which is HARD. I may not be able to build elaborate shelves for my books or tile my shower, but I can sand, stain and paint until I break out in hives from some chemical in the oil based primer. (No really, that totally happened.) 

Peace, Friends. Go accomplish something small today. Like re-painting your bedside tables, or taking a shower. You'll feel better, I promise.

Grown. Up. Bed. 

Spring Awakening.

Weeeeeee...it's global warming spring time in Creede, which means the slow climb of progress can lurch on with slightly more gusto.

My last post was at the end of December. And now it's March. Crap! The truth is...not too much has happened. We did build a little masking for the refrigerator and add some trim on part of the hallway. New items for the house were acquired, thanks to a trip to Chicago to help go through my aunt Mary Lou's belongings. These things are always an odd process. Packing up the house of someone who didn't plan on dying so soon. It's frozen in time. You feel like you're invading their home.

Ahem...anyway...the stuff! My paternal great grandfather, Rush K. Berry, made a cedar trunk for his girlfriend Oletha, in 1912. Two years later they married. The trunk sits by our front door and holds winter items as well as a kick ass sewing machine, also from ML. She taught home ec for decades and had more sewing machines than I've ever seen one person own. Now I just have to get around to making something...

I like a good lookin' trunk. 

ML and my father's mother, Mary Ann Berry (Mamaw to the grandkids) was a tiny person. Maybe 5'1'' in her youth. Papaw made her many stools so she could reach items in the kitchen and elsewhere. We've got one of those too. Maybe the dog can learn a new trick and fetch us some crackers.

Stool Boom. 

As the weather has improved, we finally got around to cutting out the gingerbread for the back of the house. We're very close to finishing up the backside! A few trim and soffit pieces remain--to be put up so then I can then paint them. I know all anyone really wants in this life is a nice looking backside.

Nice ass, House!

I also want to introduce a SECOND blog that I have created:

It's called Onward and Upward. At the end of last year, RJ's parent's (Roger and Sheri) paid off their mortgage and decided to invest in a second property in Creede. They also decided to hire their first born, my dear RJ, to build it. It's going to be an epic addition to the Mann dynasty. We've already torn down some super old and crappy shit in order to make way for the new. This includes moving an entire structure around on the property. But more on that later. If you are interested in reading about more Mann shenanigans, stop over to this page...

End of the Year Schmear

To the Dear and Faithful Reader:

Ufffff, it's been a while since I've done one of these. And as I snuggle up in my comforter while it's minuswhateverbelow outside in Denver, I realize it's almost the end of frickin' 2014! It's the end of the third year we've been working on the house, and the one year anniversary of living in it. And I am...working in Denver aka not in the house. <tear>

But a lot was accomplished this year! We've been slowly chipping away at little and big projects, and with just a little more time and warmer weather, a lot of those projects will get finished. This is an ongoing process as you all know, but I've started to be more okay with the idea of constant transformation. (I may say this every year, but it does get more and more true...) It's just what this project is. Don't get me wrong, I can't WAIT for the house to be mostly done. But I've lightened up slightly re: the need to constantly explain to people why it isn't done. Most people get it and love the amazing things we've done so far.

This Year:
1. You can go potty and wash your hands in the downstairs bathroom. (The toliet flushes and everything!)
2. The trim upstairs is pretty much ALL INSTALLED!
3. We put up the siding on, and painted, the addition.
4. RJ created beautiful cedar trim for the living room.
5. Found an amazing deal on a wood pellet stove, keeping the house warm and toasty in the winter without using a ton of propane.

Recent Bits and Pieces:
1. We've put up a smidge of trim on the addition--but that's the main project where the weather just has to agree with us in order to move forward. And for most of the fall when we had time, the weather cried. And then I died...inside...Ahem.
2. RJ installed a couple more cabinet doors in the kitchen.
3. He replaced the boring-looking and kind-of-shitty IKEA overhead light in the dining room with a much cooler chandelier his parents found.
4. We temporarily fixed a couple of the hanging kitchen lights--shortening them and finally installing the ceiling covers to cover ragged, ugly drywall holes. A temporary fix until we can put up ceiling wallpaper, but SO much better looking.
5. A cool vintage light fixture on the back of house. Now we can see possible intruders! But mostly so we don't fall down if we have to go out the back door at night.

As we say goodbye to 2014, there's a lot more to do. But I'm (honestly) confident that by the end of 2015, we'll have most everything done. #famouslastwords

And in a year of tragic and difficult losses, I dedicate this final 2014 post to William Nunn, Molly Glynn, and Mary Louise Berry. Your lights continue to shine brightly in my heart.

Happy New Year, Folks.

Pellets!

Pretty light fixture in the ever more awesome living room

ohmygodadoor!!!

The Kindness of Creede, or The Benefits of Small Town Living

As I write a post about Creede from Colorado Springs, I'm pained that in my downtime, I can't work on the house. The show I'm doing, Psycho Beach Party, is going well and I'm having a hell of a lot of fun, but being away from one's handmade house creation has been difficult. RJ's working hard on other projects, meaning the house waits for me. Next weekend I'll be able to get to Creede to hopefully finish up the trim and soffit on the addition. Send good weather thoughts, everyone!

But on to the kindness part. Every once in a while, amidst the pain of waiting for things to get done or builder friends to have the time to help you, you get something amazing. Since last winter, we'd been looking into purchasing a pellet stove for the house. Our place is very well insulated (I should know) but winters in the mountains of Colorado give you several months of 40 below temps overnight. Up in the high country, the cost of heating a place can be pretty major.

When I lived in Chicago, I always lived in apartments with radiator heat. It was included in the rent and I typically lived on the top floor where I frequently found myself turning down the radiators as far as they would go and sometimes even opening windows. Heat was an abundance I didn't think much about.

Cut to five years ago when I moved into a cabin in Creede, where we lived for four years. There, I became much more aware of having to work for heat. The cabin is not really equipped for winter living. It's old, poorly insulated and drafty. It has a forced air furnace run by propane, but it's 40 years old and the pilot light blows out if any sort of wind picks up. It has an wood burning stove which is also old, and itself not terribly well insulated. It burns very hot for several hours, then usually goes completely out by the morning leaving the cabin at a chilly 50 degrees. Sometimes colder if the pilot light on the furnace has gone out. Suck City. Also, we would go through about 10 cords of wood each winter even with a backup source of heat. That's a lot. A LOT. Of wood.

In Creede, wood is basically free as all you pay for is the permit to cut the wood down. But what you save in money, you use in the manpower chopping down trees and cutting them into a useable size. You can easily spend an entire week doing this.

Figuring out how to heat your new home on a budget in the mountains is a huge consideration. The most popular ways are a wood burning or pellet stove (some daring mountain men of the wild west use ONLY this form of heat), radiant heat (aka in-floor heating, which is much more expensive up front to install), electric panel heaters (price based on cost of electricity), and propane. Forced air furnaces run on propane here. Each individual home has its own propane tank and it costs around $250 to $300 each time you fill it up. Depending on how well insulated your house is, you can go through that quickly. When we were delayed getting into our house last year--we aimed for October but ended up getting in there late December, well into the cold season--we had not stocked up on enough wood to heat the cabin. We went through over $500 in propane in one month.

Sorry for the mountain heating lesson. Most of you reading this have probably never thought this much about heat. I surely hadn't.

SO. After all this, we were looking into supplemental heat during the really cold months--typically Dec-Feb. Those are the months when the furnace is constantly on and with a pellet stove, it would cut down on propane costs immensely. Newer pellet stoves are fairly quiet, burn much cleaner than wood stoves and require much less installation and cleaning.  According to my research, the cheapest but still decent ones (from Home Depot) are about $1100--and the majority of good, solid stoves cost about $2500-$3000. Though it will save us money and pay for itself in the long run...Gah, that's a lot of money! Well, Creede kindness prevailed and a friend of RJ's happened to have a gently used, high quality pellet stove he wasn't going to be using. He recently sold it to us for $600 including installation as he knows how to do it properly. Once again, through the kindness and favors of friends in Creede, we were given an affordable option that will last and save us money for years to come. As you know, fair readers, I'm a Doer and not the most patient person in the world. But when I start to get depressed and anxious about how long this process is taking, RJ rightly reminds me that it does pay to be patient. So what I really want to express is Gratitude, Kindness, all those hippie dippy words that really do mean something in this magical place called Creede.

It's so cute! It still needs to be installed but this is where it'll live.
(Please excuse the dirty, pink chair. Mr. Dorky Doo has been using it as a perch while I've been gone. Ahem...)

My Kingdom for a Wrench!

Dammit. 

Dammit, dammit, dammit. 

Another (just peachy) variable in the house-building-saga would be the weather. RJ and I both have the day off today and the goal was to finish the soffit and trim on the outside of the addition. But...it's raining. And not like a-little-sprinkle-here-and-there raining. Like, a consistent drizzle and wetness all the livelong day. 

I've gotten a lot better about being patient with the inevitable wrenches that get thrown into this giant undertaking. I am not the world's most patient individual to begin with and I've had to get used to the stopping and starting of a project like this; when often you can't work on the certain project that you want to due to any number of reasons--time, money, assistance, etc. 

But today is slightly more annoying because, in about 48 hours, I leave for a six-week, out of town acting job. My first since the spring of 2013. The first since we've moved into this house. The first since I've put more of myself--physically and emotionally--into this project than most any other project of my life. I don't often miss things, or people for that matter. I'm very good at being by myself. Maybe it's being an only child growing up. But I have a strong feeling that this time I'm going to miss the whole package--the home itself, the working-on-the-home in my spare time, and the person I work on the home with. 

I also HATE leaving a smaller project unfinished. Last fall, when RJ and I were full speed ahead on the house and he'd want to stop for a break, I'd usually prolong mine until I'd finished staining or sanding a particular pile. I like to tie up my little project into a nice, neat bow or I feel mentally unfinished and a little bit sad. Ridiculous? Maybe. OCD? Probably. But you can see why living in a house with a bunch of half finished projects in it has been an adjustment for my particular personality. 

So, leaving town with such a big portion of a project half done is really HARD for me. There's a lot of stuff wrapped up into this place for me. This is serious. This is home. 

Now please excuse me while I go move some lumber into the garage while the rain takes a breather...

Hey, at least I got to do SOMETHING today. 

And I guess these yahoos are ready to come in out of the rain too...