Monthly Archives: March 2011

Steps and Old Metal Fence Demo’d

Posted on March 29, 2011 | 2 Comments

This patio project is probably going to be one where I hate taking pictures along the way.  Tasks that take a couple hours and are critical to moving forward don’t really make the area look any less depressing.  At least with jobs like exposing the brick, each day things looked better in some way…or even tiling.

The demo’d Bilco door yielded 160 lbs of scrap steel which I sold at a scrap yard in Dundalk on Saturday morning…for $16.  I did however get some good money for the 16 lbs of copper pipe scrap that had been in the basement since the new plumbing rough-in.  The weather fluctuation around here lately has held up pouring back a new curb around the pit, so it still looks a lot like it did the last time I posted.  The only thing different about the pit at this point is that I pulled all the brick pieces out and filled up that trash can which is subsequently unrealistically heavy.  I may use some of it to back fill the curb and take the rest to the dump this weekend if I get some time. 

I actually was able to dig up some relatively old pictures of the patio before much of anything was done to it. The entire area was a complete after thought as we were doing the bulk of the house so I don’t even have a good shot of the original “deck” which really was only a tiny bit larger and had a rickety old aluminum railing around it.  The first chunk of which was cut off to allow access for my Dad and I to install a new basement window.  All of that is pretty well represented here:

Saturday morning I got out the saws-all and took care of both of the above tasks.  The result was this:

Please excuse the paint testing.  Those were maroon mixtures for the front door.  I haven’t decided what to do about the color on that door or if I am going to keep the obnoxious red on the garage door.  That is the least of my worries right now.  Demo’ing the deck got me about 3 ft of space between the bottom of the stairs and the garage door.  It also bought me a little space to the side where the basement pit is.  The whole process was actually really not bad at all.  I made a couple of cuts just behind the supports at the back of the stair stringers, threw out the old deck and slid the stairs up against the house.  The deck previously was not secured to the back of the house at all.  I have not secured it yet as I figured my Dad and I may want to move it again when we build the fence on that side so that we have access to set a post closest to the house.  I am also trying to figure out how to repaint it…because its obviously very dingy looking.  I was thinking white everywhere but the treads and maybe paint the treads brownish or something.  I debated replacing the treads with trex or something, but who am I kidding, it can’t possibly be worth it.  Paint will do just fine for now.

I think this picture gives a good idea of why I was using the pictures I posted previously as an inspiration for my space:

The furniture will probably not stay where it is, but there is no room in the garage for it now as Beth gifted me her bistro set from her apartment this past weekend.  The two love seats I have were my grandfathers and he got them from his time in the marines.  I sprayed them with several coats of black rustoleum last summer and stored them away.  Ollie’s of all places had yellow cushions that fit for $19.99 a piece so I bought 4 of them last weekend.  I figured it wasn’t worth setting them up and taking pictures as they would like starkly out of place in the largely unfinished rest of this mess.

In keeping with my $1,000 budget for this project, I don’t know if pavers are anywhere near in the cards, so a good power-washing…which has probably never been done will have to suffice for this year.  I’m already expecting the fence materials to eat up a large chunk of that $1,000.  With furniture taken care of at cost of $0 + approx. $85 worth of cushions I may have some wiggle room to do some other things.  I hope when my Dad and I tackle the fence I will have a better idea of where plants can go.

Here is the style of fence I hope to achieve:

 This is the wall where the metal fence once stood.  I’m not sure what decade my neighbor’s addition was built in, but I’d venture to say that window some how snuck past code…if there was any at the time.  Truthfully the window creeps me out.  My neighbor is very nice from my brief interactions with her, but its mere existence has sparked brainstorming about some pretty outlandish ideas to block her view of the patio without blocking the window.  If you’re actually standing in the back yard it is its over 6′ off the ground so I plan to run the fence right up to the bottom of it and then figure out a plant that can strategically grow upward.

This is the other side getting fence.  The middle of my neighbor’s ridiculous deck gives a little bit of glimpse into why their address and mine were on the same deed at one point in the 19teens and 20′s.  Here the top of their deck rail is something like 7′ 6″ or maybe a hair more, so I will run my fence up to about that height.  

Also to be tackled in some creative way are my ancient AC unit lines.

Until I can afford to replace this beast, I want to disguise the lines as best as I can and maybe build a lattice screen around the thing.  The cheapest solution I have come up with to date as far as the lines go is buying a length of corrugated black drain pipe and cutting a slit down the top of it.  This would act as a gigantic wire wrap and make it look more like a drain pipe.  I know its not really important but its ugliness bothers me.

Also uncovered from storage in the garage since last March when I snatched them off Ebay, a pair of Yamaha outdoor speakers that I got for $40.  I will be putting together the wiring and volume control knobs to tie them into the rest of the whole house system eventually.  Whats great is they make volume controls just like the ones in my walls that are meant to be installed outside.  This way the music can be adjusted without having to run to the living room or using one of those cheap Ipod docks.  I am contemplating running a set of RCA’s from the receiver back to the patio so that the Ipod or a computer could actually be carried right out back to select music.  I figure its safe to wait to order that stuff until the important stuff gets taken care of.

Stay tuned.

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Posted in fence, patio, steps

Brick Curb Demo

Posted on March 14, 2011 | 1 Comment

Another warm day led to another attempt at progress.  I set out to level off the brick curb surrounding the basement door well.  The brick curb was one course wide and maybe 6 or 7 courses high.  Embedded between the bricks and concrete was a little bit of rebar that wound its way through the courses.  Thankfully only these top few courses of the whole well were tied together like this or I would have made alot more damage for myself.

Before I post more pictures I have to preface them by saying that I learned the following today:

1. As with everything I have done thus far to this house, this will likely cost more, take longer, and be much more difficult then I see it in my head.
2. What appeared to be not many bricks filled an entire trash can…and theres still more in the pit I didn’t clean up.
3. I still don’t know the best way to cover up this useless pit.

Here we are after today:

I stood around for quite some time staring at the mess I had made.  I think my initial thought is to form up and pour concrete onto the ledge area you can see in this pictures.  It is supposed to rain this week so I am going to try and get the last of the mess up from the bottom of the pit so that I can monitor how much if any rain water goes down into the well.  If there isn’t much or it all seems to drain down where the condensate goes, we’re in business for plan A.

Plan A:

This may not be exactly the shape or style, but there seems to be a number of companies that will custom size a steel window well grate for a relatively reasonable price.  That is at least one site even has a calculator you plug dimensions in and it spits out a rough number.  Throwing roughly 30 x 32 into the calculator resulted in a grate weighing about 18 lbs and costing approximately $130.  Not too bad considering what a hatch or Bilco style door costs.  Plan A would involve blocking up half of the existing doorway with cinder block to keep water out and installing a window in the top half.  The intent would be for this grate to but right up against the window.  Steel grates like this have a very high weight capacity over such a short span so I would be able to place a grill or furniture over top without worrying.

There are more commercial based options like grates like this:

But based on some commercial stair treads and decking I priced at my previous job, I’m guessing it would be super expensive.  Most of the companies that produce metal grating like this sell it by the 20 or 24 ft length.  However as the astro turf investigation proved, maybe they have “remnants.”  I guess we’ll cross that bridge if I have to consider something like this.

Plan B:

I wish I had a second option at this point, but I really don’t.  I think some how using deck boards wouldn’t look or fit right, but maybe it will end up being an “easier” option.  If the rain water really is an issue I may have to turn to some sort of plexi or non perforated option to keep the water out.  I guess I really don’t care what it is made from as long as it can hold weight and be (close to) flush with the patio.

I don’t see my self pouring any concrete this week so maybe just some cleanup until the weekend rolls around again.

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Posted in brick, demo, grating, patio, window well

Bye-Bye Bilco Door

Posted on March 13, 2011 | 2 Comments

Being that it was 60 degrees today, I felt obligated to at least take a step forward in getting the patio usable.  I have posted enough times about the thing and yet haven’t made much progress since then.  I didn’t get to go price out fence materials this weekend, but I did manage to tear out the old rusty Bilco door covering the exterior basement access. 

Stupid me didn’t take a picture of the rusty mess before, but its not really important.  I initially thought maybe I could sell the thing but as I tried to undue the bolts they all started breaking.  The ones that didn’t break had to be cut with the sawsall.  It is now stacked in 5 or 6 pieces in the garage awaiting a dump run.  I also hacked up the rest of the old sewer pipe that had been sitting back there since last spring and threw the in the garage.

The good news is that curb that runs around the outside of the basement opening is made of brick with a coating of cement smeared on the face of it.  I hit it with the maul a couple times before cleaning up to see what I had to look forward to dealing with.  I’m hoping I can knock the bricks down so that the curb doesn’t stick up above the level of the concrete patio anymore.

Now I have to figure out the best way to fill this thing in.  I’ve kicked around a number of ideas and I am still not sure.  I want to block up the bottom half of the door opening and install a window in the top half to get some extra light in the basement.  As for the put itself, I’d prefer to not fill the thing all the way with concrete or something crazy like that.  There are some companies online that will make metal grates of varying types for like side walk type applications, or I could really cheap out and some how just run deck boards flush with the existing patio.

Whatever I end up doing, it just needs to be flush with the patio so that I can either install pavers over the whole area or at least be able to put furniture on top of it without losing valuable square footage on an already tiny outdoor space.

I hope that next weekend I can demo the old deck and convert it to just stairs.  That should be the last of things to do as far as freeing up space so that I can move forward from there.  I’m guessing we won’t have consistent warm days like this until April so every little bit helps. 

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Posted in bilco door, demo, patio

Patio Planning – Take Two

Posted on March 8, 2011 | Leave a comment

It was a weird night at the Locust Point Rowhouse last night, at least it seemed that way this morning at 5 am.  As the day went on the more I realised that it really wasn’t much different then any other day around here.  What I mean by that is what can happen, will happen.  Maybe that’s just Murphy’s law.  If I had a third cliché saying to throw in here I would.

Exhausted from a long Monday and a few glasses of wine for my Mom’s birthday down the street at the Wine Market (shameless plug) I nearly passed out the second I hit the couch.  It was the first time I had actually eaten at the Wine Market as previous to that I had only been in to buy booze.  I also seem to recall several Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays I tried to go, but it was already booked up.  The food was very good and if you’re reading this locally, Monday night was relatively calm (yet crowded in comparison to the traffic most places see on a Monday) and enjoyable.  20% off entrees and $18 bottles of wine… but I digress.

In an attempt to catch up on some sleep, I went to bed early.  The second I got into bed there was a power surge of some sort and everything went out.  I went outside and my entire side of Fort Avenue as far as I could see was pitch black.  It was pretty eerie considering how accustomed you are to the amount of light there always is at night in the city, especially on a main street.  I’m not really sure when the power came back on, but whatever happened last night managed to trip the breaker to the master bedroom leaving me clueless to the fact that the power was even back on.  It was a fitting supplement to a weekend filled with other house issues including, but not limited to a gas leak and a day without hot water.

Not much has gotten done work wise around here as it has been a busy few weekends since my last post, but I did get a priceless gift from Beth and her Grandmother.

Hard to believe I outsourced my laundry until now.  With Beth’s Grandmother moving out of her rowhouse in Dundalk she quickly thought that if it fit in the basement there, then maybe I could get it in mine.  Two separate trips and two weekends later, both units were in the basement.  It wasn’t entirely terrible getting them downstairs.  I did have to break out the saws-all and crowbars to remove an extra 2×6 in the stair opening to buy myself the extra inch I needed to squeeze the 26 1/2″ wide washer and dryer down the stairs.  I’m not sure on the reasoning for having 3 2×6′s framing out the opening other then as a filler to compensate for the stair width and where the floor ended.  Needless to say, it wasn’t load bearing or anything.

The dryer is gas and I had originally roughed in for an electric dryer but when someone is giving you a pair for free, you adapt…and man does that dryer dry things fast.  A few bucks later and I had a gas connection added.  A connection which required the plumber to come back and replace a scratched compression fitting that was slowly leaking gas into the house…but that’s all going back to the whole “if it can happen, it will happen” deal.  All told, I am incredibly thankful for the gift and am happy that Beth’s Grandmother is moved into her new apartment up in the county.

As you can see, the basement isn’t the most enjoyable place to hang out, but to me wasting valuable floor space to have laundry on one of your main living floors isn’t worth it.  Inevitably I spend more time in the living room and kitchen which are just above the basement then I ever do upstairs.  I remember the couple weeks my Dad and I tried to find a place to fit laundry upstairs without ruining the floor plan.  In the end the best decision for me was to put it in the basement.  I have a couple white cabinets leftover from a commercial job that I hope to make some sort of defined laundry area with, but at this point it is not a necessity.

I do have plans for the useless door in the right side of the picture though.  It doesn’t lock, its narrower then every door in the entire house, the glass is broken, and it leads to a hatch which only serves to take up valuable square footage on the patio.  I hope to infill the bottom half and install a window on the top half.  Unless I mysteriously come upon 15k to excavate the basement, I seriously doubt a means of egress for a bedroom will be necessary in a space which is at best 5′ 11″ tall.

See…I knew you were wondering when the patio was coming into all of this…

I guess the beauty of the majority of the present and future projects here a the Locust Point Rowhouse is that none of them really NEED to get done immediately.  This leaves plenty of time to plan, re-plan, realise you can’t afford them, start and stop, etc.  I tend to get pretty fixated on an idea I like in the very beginning.  It happens all the time.  In the past it has led to impulse buys.  In the present, I try and avoid making those same mistakes.

The artificial pet turf is a perfect example.  The stuff seems like a great idea.  I did a lot of reading and even contacted a few companies.  I talked to a local company who wanted $10-12 a s.f. installed.  Wow.  I talked to a company in Florida that had remnants for $3ish a s.f.  I was pretty close to moving forward with it and making it a DIY project.   I tried to brush away comments my Mom and Dad made regarding “how bad it was going to smell” and “how will it be sitting back there amongst Huey’s piles.”  I kept telling myself “I already pick the poo up when we go to the park, how will this be different?” and “no, the say its mould and mildew proof and hoses off easily.”

All of those questions were answered during the rain storm Sunday.  As I mentioned before, I have one of those small pieces of fake turf that sits on a catch basin known as the “Potty Patch” (as seen on TV obviously) that Huey uses now when I am too lazy at night to take him across the street.  I thought about how long it had been since I hosed the thing down and thus made a trip outside to dump it thinking the heavy rain would wash it away nicely.  It smelled AWFUL.  Like trigger my already weak gag reflex into hitting its puke threshold in a split second awful.

This timely revelation has opened the door to some new ideas, so back to the drawing board we go.  The turf was going to account for more then half of the measly budget I had dedicated to making the patio space usable.  A Google search of “small urban patio” yielded a few new ideas.  One site in particular (http://heavypetal.ca/tag/garden-tour/) had a number of posts on peoples finished patio projects.  The one I was drawn to in particular featured the horizontal style fence I like so much and some re-purposed metal framed furniture that looks unbelievably similar to the love seats I already re-sprayed black.

I am going to do a new plan in Sketchup, but I think my latest idea is to do the following:

1.  Demo the existing “deck” and replace it with just steps going from the kitchen door to the patio surface.  This will free up some valuable square footage and remove an eye sore I was forced to work around.
2. Demo Bilco door (hopefully sell it).  replace useless exterior basement door with a window of some sort.
3. Add fence on either side of the patio.
4. Cushions for the furniture I already have.
5. Price out some pavers. (dream about having basalt ones like in the pictures above).  Maybe just end up power-washing the existing concrete.
6. Free grill from Chuckbama.
7. Work some greenery in.  Would love to have some built in planters, but we’ll see.

The patio featured above was listed as 13′ x 15′ so with my limited area of 12′ x 13 1/2′ I will use this as inspiration for my next design. More to come on this.

In Huey news, the cone came off a couple weeks ago…

They eyes are healed (2 surgeries later). As you can see he has settled back into his routine of be a spaz around others and a couch potato when he is alone with me.  Hes pretty spoiled.  A bath and trip to chase his “cousin” in the county is in order for Saturday morning.

Stay tuned.

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Posted in gas, Huey, laundry, patio