Yes, I know, been a while since I sent out the latest House update :) But despite broken wrist and mental burn-out, I have continued working on the house...just quite a bit slower! Have a four day weekend, so am using the time to knock out the last of the projects...or at least enough of it to get the house listed for sale this week!
The sunroom, or back room as I usually call it, has actually been most commonly the junk room for most of the ten years I've lived here.
During the three years I sold books online, it actually was the book room - at one point more than 10,000 books were stored back here! That history actually led to the biggest challenge of this room - filling in ALL those holes in the walls from where I had shelving hung on the walls. I went through an entire container of wood putty and half a container of spackling to get all the holes filled in! Granted, they were small containers, but still!
The first thing was to clear out all the junk and trash that had accummulated in here. Brianna and Mark helped me with hauling off the dog sofa, I
sold the futon (not shown) at one of the yard sales, and cleaned up all the just plain trash. The small window was cracked and broken in a bad wind storm, and I'm having fun (not!) finding glass the right size to fit is, as none of the pre-cut glass available at Home Depot or Lowes is the right size. But I'll get it done.
[caption id="attachment_189" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Sunroom north facing, after clearing out"]
[/caption]Despite all the holes in the wall, I expected this room to be the simplest room to make over. The plan was patch the holes, repaint the walls and ceiling, pull out the fugly piece-meal carpeting that was at least 30 years old, paint the floor (it's concrete), and move all my craft stuff in here.
Of course, just like every other room, this room had an unexpected surprise or two...sigh...the big surprise in this room was a humongous crack in the floor. Seriously huge. The floor of this room was actually just a slab, the room was just simply a back patio that was enclosed in 1956 by the owners at the time. When they enclosed it, they installed two huge single-pane picture windows, and reused a storm window as the side window, and built the small window on the north side that is now cracked. They didn't insulate or anything, of course. But they did build the room right over the existing floor, of which a 2-foot by 4-foot section of the south portion had cracked, broken, shifted, and skewed about two inches off the level of the rest of the floor.
OMG, how can anyone build a room on a floor that is OBVIOUSLY broken, without fixing it first!! Sure, I know it wouldn't have been exactly cheap to inject concrete under the broken section, lifting it and releveling it, but to just build right over it without doing ANYTHING at all! They filled the crack in with gravel and sand, and put a very thin layer of morter over it (thin like in less than 1/4", all broken and gone now)! It's amazing to me!
I'm seriously getting sick and tired of finding myself on my hands and knees dealing with floor issues in every single room!!
[caption id="attachment_191" align="alignright" width="300" caption="sunroom south after clearing out - see the crack from hell"]
[/caption]Well, of course I can't fix it properly - which would entail injecting concrete under the broken section, lifting it up and leveling it. For starters, it would be outrageously expensive. Then there would be the problem of the wall that is built over it - lifting the slab would lift the wall, causing at best lots of cracks and a big broken window, but would probably damage the roof and knock the south door out of alignment completely.
The next option would have been for me to pour a new floor over the existing floor with self-leveling cement. I seriously considered this, although pricy (about $100-$150 worth of self-leveling cement) it would have corrected the broken slab issue, and would have leveled the entire floor. But self-leveling cement isn't recommended for situations requiring a leveling over an inch - and the slope of this slab is 2-1/2 inches. I then would have had to redo both exterior doors in this room, cutting them about 3/4" shorter than they are and reframing them, because the floor would then be over the threshholds of both doors.
Forget that. Too much work. As it is, the back door will probably need to be replaced as part of the sale of the house, assuming the potential new owner doesn't want a doggy door.
Sigh... I can't fix this problem the most proper way, as it will simply lead to virtual destruction of the room. But I can improve the situation.
So I decided to just patch the crack, and feather it out as much as possible to at least smooth out the juncture between the intact slab and the
[caption id="attachment_193" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="Working on the crack"]
[/caption]broken portion of the slab. I'm not worried about the slab sinking or shifting anymore - it obviously hasn't moved since the room was built in 1956. I suspect the crack originally occured during the first ten or twenty years of the house's life. It looks that old. Following the advice of my neighbor Matt, who used to pour concrete foundations and patios for a living, and the advice of Trey, who just simply knows a little bit about everything, I first dug out all the broken crap out of the crack, I then chipped the crack wider, by about an inch, I then poured a layer of resin down the crack, then using repair morter, actually filled in the crack, about 1/2" at a time, letting it dry and cure for about 2 days between each layer. It took nearly two weeks just to repair the crack. Although the slope where the floor is cracked is still obvious, it's a lot less drastic than it was - no one will trip over it now!
No wonder nobody has moved the carpet pieces in this room in decades! I've lived here 10 years and never noticed that the floor was different there either - wow!
I found a gallon of "oops" Behr floor-and-porch paint at Home Depot for $5, tinted the most perfect shade of light blue with just a bare touch of green to it - very 1950s. I love the "oops" paint shelf :) I wish the guys in the paint department made even more tinting mistakes ... I swear almost all the paint in my house is "oops" paint :) Anyway, $5 for a gallon of paint that normally runs around $28 is awesome :) I painted the floor, and used Behr's paint chips ($7.95) to "fleck" the floor to give it some interest, and also to detract from the crack :)
I must admit this room was the most fun to paint :) Whoever last painted it was a total slob - they painted right on the glass, dripped all over the floor. Since I knew I was painting the floor, I didn't care if anything got on the floor. No need for drop clothes! Since I was going to have to
[caption id="attachment_194" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Painting and flecking the floor"]
[/caption]scrape 30 or 40 year old paint off the windows anyway, I didn't bother masking them. When I painted the floor, I just poured the paint right on the floor and rolled it out :) Very fun :) I managed not to paint myself into a corner, too :)
Of course, I kept forgetting to CLOSE THE DAMN DOOR! Both dogs and Lassie the Cat all stepped in the wet paint at least once!
When it came time to paint around the windows, I discovered that the caulking around the windows was cracked, brittle, and even missing in some places. I also discovered that one of the picture windows wasn't framed in at all - the caulking was the ONLY thing holding the window in place. I'm stunned the dang thing hasn't fallen right out. Lucky, too. Using some scrap wood, I built a quicky frame around the window, painted it, and after cleaning out what little remained of the existing caulking, I caulked both windows.
I then moved the white cabinet that used to be in the kitchen into this room, and moved all my craft and sewing stuff that was previously strewn around the entire house into this one room. It's all organized now... which is really quite scary :) I even repurposed a bunch of small plastic containers and sorted through all my notions, storing them into containers that are now labeled and stored in the cabinet :)
[caption id="attachment_195" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Organization!"]
[/caption]Yes, I said *organized* and *labeled*. Yes, two words not normally used in conjunction with me!
I put all my patterns into a binder. Did the same thing with all my stencils :)
On the other side of the room (not pictured, batteries died in the camera, gotta recharge them!) I put the dog and cat food into to large plastic bins and set them up neatly in the corner. I then hung my aluminum can crusher on the wall next to the back door, and set up three other plastic bins for my recycling - paper, plastic, and aluminum. Looks nice and neat, and is colorful, if I don't say so myself :)
I cleaned all the thermal insulated curtains I had hanging up over the windows, they look much nicer now, but I have not rehung them up. Although they do a remarkable job of keeping this room warmer during the winter and cooler during the summer (the room isn't heated) I decided the room looks much nicer with the sun shining in - it'll show better.
Voila! The notorious junk room is now a multi-purpose craft and recycling room :) As you can see in the pictures, I do still have some craft stuff to finish organizing - that's the pile on the cabinet - and the window still needs to be repaired. I've got all my tools sitting in there right now, those will get stowed back in the garage when I'm done with all this house rehabbing stuff, but it's nice to have the tools in just one place now while I finish up all the work I'm doing on the house.
[caption id="attachment_196" align="aligncenter" width="1024" caption="Just about all done!"]
[/caption]Costs:
$5.00 for "oops" floor and porch paint
$7.95 for Behr paint chips
$7.98 for a gallon of white paint for the walls and ceilings
$4.90 for spackling and wood putty
$12.80 for repair mortar, which will also be used to patch some small fine foundation cracks.
Total: $38.63
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