Tear This Old Kitchen Down

If I had my way. Yeah, if I had my way. If I had my way, I would tear this old kitchen down. Boo and I have been singing that little tune (a take on Samson and Delilah) since we bought this old farmhouse last August. Well, we took a huge leap forward. So, today's post covers it, starting with where it all began.

How We Found It

"One day while Sampson was walking along, looked down on the ground, saw an old jawbone". In many ways, the NewOldHouse kitchen was a skeleton when we purchased the house. The guy we bought the house from had started the demo when Boo worked out the purchase arrangement. The doors and drawers were gone, the stove and fridge were gone and some of the uppers had been smashed. Oh, and it was filthy. It was the most disgusting kitchen I had ever seen.

First Round

during first round

Before I picked up the sledgehammer, Boo removed the remaining garbage that could be seen and then rough-cleaned the floors, walls and ceiling. By rough-cleaned I mean with a floor mop she would wash until the water turned gray and then repeat until she was so sore she couldn't anymore. That got rid of most of it to the point where we could go in there and not feel like we were in a bacteria-laden petri dish. Regardless, we continued to wear rubber gloves and dust masks.

I started with the garbage disposal, simply disconnecting the sewer line, the electrical and then from the bottom of the sink. The disposal looked hardly used, so thinking we will probably re-use it, I stashed it in the garage. Next, Boo and I removed the dishwasher. I was surprised by how little in terms of fasteners are used to hold a dishwasher in place: 2 screws along the front, holding the leading edge to the underside of the counter. Once we started pulling it out, however, we encountered more garbage. We threw our respirators back on and completed the yank into the middle of the kitchen floor. The insulation around the dishwasher smelled like human urine and there was more rat evidence behind it. So yuck. The dishwasher went into the to-the-dump heap, and the garbage went into the weekly street bin.

oh my gross

Feeling fully grossed, I shifted to the upper cabinets. We lacked a power driver that could remove the 3" long mounting screws driven into the studs. So, my method was a little more smashy: crush the cabinets with a sledge until they fell off the wall in pieces. Then, I would chisel around the screws in the rear wall until the real panel fell off. I removed the screws by loosening them with a framing hammer and then hand turning them out. Unfortunately, this gave me tennis elbow in my left arm that 5 months later I am still recovering from and I still didn't get all the screws out of the walls. Still, the uppers came out, went to the landfill pile and then on to the landfill about a month ago.

Sledgehammer Triumphant Return

Once the old house was fully vacated and repairs completed, we were ready to refocus on the kitchen at NewOldHouse. Since both Boo and I are suffering from tennis elbow, we splurged on a DeWalt power driver for removing the screws, and I tried it out on the screws remaining from round 1. Then, we teamed up on removing the iron sink into the garage (will probably reuse with a new fixture) and then removing the counter tops. The counter tops were glue-board with a thin Formica veneer that were attached to the base cabinets with construction adhesive, so they removed once I convinced them to... with the long-handled sledgehammer. It surprised us both how much smell this glue-board stuff retains. Clearly, once the rats get in, there is no escaping the smell they create without considerable effort.

The power driver made the removal of the base cabinets much easier than the uppers were: remove the screws and then pry the cabinets apart with a wrecking bar - the base cabinets had construction adhesive between them. Boo and I removed them from the wall and then out to the landfill pile one at a time. Of course, just like we had a discovery under the dishwasher, we had guh-nasty discoveries under the cabinets along that wall (see picture on the right). Again, once the gross was discovered, respirators went on and the mess was cleaned up.

UnFlooring

flooring coming up

With the cabinets gone, we swept the floor, washed up and grabbed a late-afternoon sandwich. Boo noticed that the linoleum that had been under the cabinets was curling up along the wall. So, with safety equipment back in-place, she started pulling up the linoleum flooring, but her arms (tennis elbow) stopped her after a few minutes. Curious about what lay beneath, we lifted some of the plywood underneath to reveal the original wood flooring. We had been concerned that perhaps there was old tiling (and possible asbestos), but were delighted with original, but damaged, wood floor. So, with a 1-meter wrecking bar, I set to lifting the plywood and linoleum together. As the wood split into pieces Boo collected the debris out to the landfill pile. In a couple of hours, the linoleum and plywood were gone. We swept up and called it "good enough" for the day. Many nails remain stuck into the old flooring, so we will be pulling nails before we can wet-mop the gross-dust on the floor. Between then and now, Boo intends to run our "for nasty things" vacuum on the floor to lift out as much of the dust as she can. For now, we have laid down old carpet on top of the floor so we don't track that dust into the main living space.

done for today

We were fortunate to have a dry relatively-warm weekend day to do this work. We had the windows open, the music playing and got more of the job completed than I think either of us expected. We are thrilled to see that the original floors are there. From this last picture, you can see that the flooring under the sink had probably become damaged as the flooring was replaced with what look like old cabinet doors and drawer faces. Since this will again reside under cabinets, it would not be necessary to finish that area with hardwood. I expect we will replace the hack-job with real water/rot resistant sub-flooring instead. Tuukka was our Safety Agent, making sure we stopped frequently for water and petting breaks. At the point of this picture, he was telling us the workday was over, and now it was time for his dinner. We agreed.

Thanks, as always, for following along. This was not technically difficult, and it wasn't really all that physically challenging until we got to the flooring. For that, I was sweating like it was summer and breathing hard. I cannot wait to get the nails out and see what this flooring looks like after a good mop. Knowing that we will be expanding the doorway into the main living space, we may find that the flooring needs some replacement, but we'll deal with that if/when it happens.

Hapy Lives Again

For the first time in maybe 8 months, I have a car-repair-based update. I got Hapy running again, so today's post covers that.

Flatbed Again

At some point, I would love to go back through all my pictures of Hapy, so I could identify how many times he has ridden on a flat bed home. I know he got a lift home from a few of the Eugene trips, many of the 4Peaks Festivals, and his most recent was the 500 feet from our old house to NewOldHouse. At no point have we ever questioned whether Hapy is "worth it". Hapy is a family member; we just do what needs doing. So, a few weeks ago when Hapy wouldn't start, he got towed to NewOldHouse (See Four-Wheeled Friends to NewOldHouse) and was dropped off alongside the attached garage. That was not his designated spot, however, so our friend John and I used many meters of chain to move him into position with a come-along. We wrapped a soft strap around a decent-sized apple tree at one end and another one around Hapy's front sway-bar (Hapy's front tow-hook was pancaked before he came to us, so I removed it). In between, we ran chain between the tree and the come-along in front of Hapy. In about 20 minutes we had Hapy on the tarped area with his tires sitting on the patio blocks beneath.

No Start Diagnosis

I started my consideration of the no-start issue without preconceived notions about cause. While intuition might be accurate, it can also send you down an unnecessary path. Still, I ordered a replacement rebuilt Bosch starter (from AutoHausAZ.com) so I would have it on-hand in case the starter proved to be part of the problem. The day after we left the old house for the last time, I headed out to Hapy with his ignition key. I wanted to refresh my memory of the sound when I turn the key. It was a metal-on-metal grinding. If you get a rur-rur-rur noise or no noises at all, it might be your battery needing a charge. The metal-on-metal indicated that the gear on the starter was not engaging with the gears on the flywheeel -or- the engine was seized and it was engaging, but unable to turn the engine. Our wet-crappy winter has been well documented, but we have not had deep-cold that would have foiled the anti-freeze, causing the block to fracture, though. There could have been other reasons for the engine to lock up, but I did not want to entertain those thoughts just yet. So, I ruled out the engine-broken possibility for the moment and looked at other things: namely, the starter was not engaging.

To look at the starter, I had to slide under the bus. Over the years, I have worked on Hapy out in the elements for practically the entire time I've owned him. Most of the time, he was parked on concrete or tarmac, so sliding underneath was a quick slide on a sheet of cardboard. Now, like a period of time in Lake Oswego, he is parked over dirt. In Lake Oswego, it was a dished out mud puddle, marking the absolute low for working conditions. Here, the ground is uneven and lumpy, with a rise just forward of the main crossbeam. With the rear anti-sway bar now installed, the space to access the starter was more difficult that some other times. Of course, with the tarp, rain can pool. To remedy, I swept the puddles off with a broom. So goes. One day, a garage, but at this point, I am looking forward to just a simple concrete pad.

Starter Not Engaging

which would you use?

Once I got under the bus, I figured there could be 2 possible reasons for the starter not engaging: starter bad OR starter not aligning (or both). Before I went hunting for tools, I tried to give the starter a wiggle and it shifted fairly easily by hand. So, of course, the starter would not engage: the starter would get triggered and the torque of trying to grab the flywheel would bump the starter, preventing the teeth from meshing. Because the TDI starter does not natively fit the 002 bellhousing, I purchased and then customized an adapter designed for a Vanagon. The starter was firmly attached to the adapter, but the adapter had loosened from the bellhousing. I hoped simply tightening the adapter would fix the issue, so I went hunting in the ToolShed for the Allen sockets and a matching ratchet.

In this moment, I really missed my black tool cabinet and was reminded of so many of my earlier efforts spending considerable time looking for tools. There was one effort back then where I dumped my toolbox contents on the driveway so I could find tools faster. I found myself growing frustrated with the current state and then embraced one of Boo's teachings: combat the frustration with gratitude. "How's that," you ask. I recognized that I was experiencing a true 1st-world problem and perhaps I could be grateful that I have so many things, I cannot find what I need. I could be grateful to have a dry locked space to keep my tools and parts so they don't get lost or stolen. I could be grateful for even having a vehicle to work on. Last, I do not need this vehicle to get to a job in the morning or get my kids from somewhere, adding stress; Hapy could sit like this for weeks and it would have no material impact on my life. The fact that he was broken down in my new yard rather than along a roadside somewhere was reason enough to be grateful.

Feeling re-centered, I found the #8 Allen (that fit the mounting bolts) and tried to tighten the adapter. The next attempt to start also resulted in the grind, but the engine turned a little bit. This told me 3 things: the engine was fine, the starter might still be the problem and the adapter may still be the root issue.

Starter Swapped

Before I went any further, I disconnected the battery positive cable from the battery with a 10mm socket. Then, with a pocket full of sockets, and corresponding ratchet with long extension, I supine army-crawled back under the bus. The main power cable is held to the front (front is front) of the starter with either a 12mm or 13mm nut. In the image above, you may be able to see that the old one was 13mm, the new one is 12mm. With the power cable disconnected, I unplugged the trigger signal by squeezing and pulling it off the tab. Last, I loosened and then removed the upper and then lower 19mm mounting bolts. With the old starter free, I could consider the adapter plate. I wanted to remove the bolts, put some thread-lock on and re-install. I was unable to find my tube of blue thread-lock, though. Believe me, I tried. Knowing the bolts could eventually work themselves loose again, I simply made sure they were tight. Even after my earlier tightening attempt, the upper adapter bolt had some room to fully seat. The upper starter mounting ear partially blocked that mounting bolt, though, so I really needed to get the starter all the way off before I could torque it down. When the day comes that I return to this with thread-lock, that upper bolt will need it.

I pulled out the rebuilt starter and compared it to the one I had just removed from Hapy. Note the picture above. The one I had removed (top of picture) was not as good a rebuild, at least cosmetically. The black paint was done after it was assembled, and got all over the place. The gear had some chips from the miss-starts and there was rust on the solenoid. Since the replacement in-hand was virtually perfect and cost around $160US (before core deposit), I was inclined to install it. Since I had to put a starter in at this point anyway, I put in the new one: main mounting bolts first (19mm), then the main power cable (12mm) and then the trigger wire (clip clicks in).

Hapy Starts and Runs Again

I put the main positive battery cable back in place and tightened it down (10mm). With hope in my heart, I jumped into the front seat and turn the key to "run". All of the expected lights came on, but I wondered if I had run the battery down with my prior start attempts. I turned the key to start, and Hapy fired right up, settling into an idle fairly quickly. I let him run for a few minutes to charge the battery back up before shutting him off.

I wanted to take Hapy for a drive but we have had considerable rain since I moved Hapy over to NewOldHouse. In fact, it rained while I was diagnosing and swapping the starter. The reality is that between Hapy's rear bumper and the street lies 20 meters of long grass in squishy soft earth. Simply put, I didn't want to get stuck. Well, the next day, Boo had ToyoTruck loaded with steel recycling and ran out of time to get the load to the recycler. I had to get to Hillsboro, so I took Hapy. As has become his norm, he fired up and drove great. We reversed over the soft earth without really making an indentation into the grass so my concerns may not have been warranted. Considering how badly that same ground got torn up by ToyoTruck, I love these Destination A/T Firestone tires (See Hammered Rims Part 3) on Hapy even more.

Because I have the luxury battery still in off-season mode (disconnected to retain the charge), the trip to Hillsboro was radio-less, but fun. His throttle responded well and the noise-killer I had installed last year really cuts down on the low-frequency noise. Because there were so many posts on and during the noise-reduction, I'll list them out below instead of putting them in-line like I usually do. There are leaks around the front doors, creating a pair of whistles, but overall the noise level is significantly reduced. As has been his behavior for as long as I can remember, the drive home was highlighted by something going wrong. This time it was a fail causing the cooling fans to stop. His temperature did not climb above 190*F, though. I had expected one of the wires had shaken loose on my spirited drive home, but after checking things with the multi-meter I found that wasn't the case. The main power run from the battery-top fuse to the relay was not sending juice all the way to the relay. Why? I had spliced a 4-inch section of wire at the end of one long wire and that splice had failed: I had voltage at the splice, but not at the female wire connector 4 inches later. I redid the connection with a new female connector and without the 4-inch section. The fans operate again. This serves as more evidence that using one single wire (of the right gauge) rather than splicing wires is better for longer term operability / maintainability.

That's it for today. I expect to return to unpacking/nesting or kitchen demo. While I was driving Hapy, I realized how much camping gear I had stowed in him. He is kind of a rolling shed, so I may unpack him a little bit so he can be a more viable, load-carrying-capable daily-driver... once I figure out where to put the gear. More first world problems, for which I can be grateful-

Thanks, as always, for following along-

 

Noise Deadening posts:

Hapy Noises (Part 1) - discussed materials 

Hapy Noises (Part 2) - more material discussion plus db level readings

Noise Control Update - applying the Constrained Layered Dampener (CLD)

Noise Control Continues - rear and mid interior deadened

Hapy Cab Gets Quiet - the cab gets the noise deadening treatment

We're Out

Similar to a prior post (We're In), this post serves as another major milestone, marking when we got the last of our things out of what we have been calling "existing house" and leaving it for the last time. I posted about moving the garage to the ToolShed (see Shop to ToolShed) and about moving the vehicles (See 4-Wheeled Friends...), so I'll skip that here. Those significant steps completed while the things below were happening. The first 2 pictures dramatically depict the significance of what has been resolved with the current state at the top and those same 2 rooms after we had them 90% empty only to receive a 1-bedroom apartment's worth of belongings.  

Moving Flotsam

living and dining ready

The end of a move can be incredibly elusive. You move the big things, and the boxed things and think you're practically done. Then, there are all the things you had not boxed for various reasons. That stuff ends up taking 80% of the time. At least, that's the way it's always been for me, but that could be because I don't buy, like, 100 boxes and box everything up ahead of time. We box and move the critical, or the rarely used, leaving everything else to be solved in a subsequent pass. In our case, our level of flotsam was increased by the influx of all of my parents' stuff and my siblings taking so little of it (no judging, of course. Is what is). Regardless of how it appears, it takes forever to get it all moved. Of course "moved" does not mean "relocated" in that we have stacks of things that need resolution in NewOldHouse. It doesn't matter. It is no longer at the other (once called existing) house so we are taking the win.

Clutter Peak 

Overall, we donated at least 5 pickup truck loads to GoodWill. 2 truck loads went to family friends and our sectional couch was taken by niece J and significant other C down to LeisureLand in the coast range west of Eugene. We recycled a considerable amount of paper, plastic and glass, leveraging containers at both houses and still occasionally having piles next to the bins on garbage / recycling day. Another 2 or 3 pickup truck loads of larger items were moved to the back of NewOldHouse to eventually route to metal recycling or the waste processing center.

NewOld Attic

One thing this new place has that our old house didn't is a real attic. The old house had small cubby-style attic crawl accesses where small things like banker-boxes could be stored, but they were spread around the upstairs, preventing central organized storage. NewOldHouse has an attic that runs the width of the house. It is not very tall (I have smacked my head multiple times), nor fully floored, however. Still, we can store things up there. In an earlier post, I mentioned that all of the sporting goods, like camping gear and ski/snow stuff went up into the attic. In truth, almost everything which used to line the wall next to Oliver ended up in the attic as well as some of the things from the ShedRoom which hadn't found another home. Even with all that has been moved up there, we have considerable space remaining. We don't intend to fill it, of course, but better to have the space and not use it than the alternative.

Big Pile of Shame

Pile of Shame

In the end, there seems to always be a big pile of stuff that is moved near the end which doesn't have a clear destination. Or, lack of time forces an additional level of chaos leading to the pile. In all of my moves, one or both have happened, and I think in each case the pile has had different stuff but the Pile of Shame has appeared in the same place every time: the garage. "But wait," you say. "Isn't NewOldHouse garage already full of new-to-you kitchen cabinets?" Yes, it is. So, our pile of shame is on top of those cabinets in one of the least attractive, least manageable piles of any of my moves. It includes things like the white metal rack which used to hold laundry supplies, some building materials, some cleansers, yard chemicals, a traffic cone? Yeah, the picture really tells the story, complete with a shelving unit all catawampus. Not my best work.

If this move were like my prior ones, this pile would be among the last things solved for. Since it is the most significant eye-sore that we get to walk past every day, this move is different. In truth, between the time I started writing this post, and it's completion, the mess has been mostly resolved. It needed to be early in the organizing process because it was preventing the kitchen cabinets from being installed, and we cannot live with the camping-kitchen indefinitely. I felt that we could not in-earnest return to the kitchen work until this was solved. I organized some of the pile of shame up into garage shelving, sorting the rest into logical places (garden chemicals to the garden shed, eg).

Repair, Clean and Paint

closet repaired

Once the last of our things were moved, the house had to be readied for whoever lives there next. While I completed the evacuation of our stuff, Boo focused on painting, starting with the first floor baseboards. Then, she re-painted all 3 bathrooms, the master bedroom, another bedroom and the front door. I cut-in one of the rooms and did the super-high work in the entry, but she did everything else. Meanwhile, our friends Lana and John completed the closet repairs in the upstairs hallway closet, started and abandoned by the mess-making handy-person I mentioned in the garage lament in Shop to ToolShed. For background, Boo and I had done the demo to install a stackable washer/drier in the hallway prior to the NewOldHouse saga starting. Walls were gone so we needed to enclose things again. With the painting completed, the closet complete and our stuff out, we set to cleaning the place.

We figured that we could save some house-cleaner money if we did some of the more time-consuming things. This list started with dusting the walls, mopping the hardwood and cleaning windows. Before we knew it, Boo had cleaned the bathrooms (down to disassembly/re-assembly of the shower doors), the kitchen (cupboards, fridge and oven too) and the hot tub. We contracted out shampooing the carpets, but Boo did an incredibly thorough job. Last, there is considerable concrete around that house, from the long driveway (flag lot) to the back patio, the opportunity for moss to grow in western Oregon is significant. So, John, Lana and I power-washed the patio and the worst of the driveway.

Reflections

ShedRoom ready

With the house in the best possible shape we could have made it, we handed the keys over to a rental management company. This has been a very long slog. We were not ready nor really thinking about moving when NewOldHouse came to us. I imagine most folks who consider a move do some elimination of things they are not moving prior to the start of the actual move. We had the inverse happen: a 1 bedroom apartment's worth of stuff arrived maybe a month after we started that "elimination of things" and months after the move was decided.

I don't think the emotional impact of leaving a place we called home for 6 years has really hit us yet. When we started to move in, we had 4 sons and a niece moving with us but our family shape seemed to change every 6 months. By the time our things moved, son K had decided to live with his girlfriend instead, so we were already in flux. By the end of that first Summer, our niece had returned to Montana. Shortly after that, C decided to live with his mom full-time and did so for 2-1/2 years before returning at the end of the 2018 school year and then stayed with us until Fall 2022 when he retuned to his mom's to attend Portland State. In the middle of that, T continued to bounce between homes, staying with us increasingly. Then, he went to University of Nevada, Reno for a year and returned to stay with us full-time for a year before heading to Eugene and then LA. Barely missing an overlap with C, K2 shifted to living with his father full-time at the end of the Summer of 2019. That's a lot of moving pieces, and the amount of overlap between them was very light. After that first summer, we rarely had more than 2 kids with us at any time.

master complete

Boo and I had moved into that house to create a stable home for our 4 boys where they could really become brothers. We didn't achieve that goal; there were too many changes of who was there for large periods, and even at the week-to-week level, we lacked fixed periods together as all of them would do short periods at their other parent's house. Boo's ex-husband was very supportive of our create-brotherhood effort as he also recognized the gift of 2 brothers to his sons. He was quite flexible to accommodate days/nights/weekends/holidays to allow for more overlapping time with all 4 boys. Unfortunately, my ex-wife only saw our brother-building effort as some kind of a threat to her. She had and has an all-too-common misbelief that love, joy, happiness and contentment are all constrained resources to be horded for one's self, and thwarted for others. So, she actively undermined our efforts both in words and in actions. She would purposefully schedule things that would force the kids apart, and was completely unwilling to shift things unless we sacrificed additional days/nights/weekends/holidays for the favor. It is unfortunate she was unable to rise above the petty for the benefit of our children, but that's just who she was. Perhaps she has since grown.

One might think that leaving a place where our boys lived their last years together would be difficult. Honestly, we are leaving a constant reminder that we failed to create that nurturing space for them, but not from a lack of trying. Today, their relationships span from strained to non-existent. So, we have a sadness, but not for what was, rather for what we could not manifest.

As winter tries to turn into spring (we had snow flurries on the morning of 3-April), Boo and I both remain positive that the NewOldHouse is and will be a great place for the 2 of us. Going forward, our attention will be split between (a) getting the random stacks resolved and (b) the demo and construction of the kitchen. Of course, I have some cars which need attention as well, and I expect I will get some time very soon.

Thanks, as always, for following along. This move has been an incredible, and unexpected, journey. I hope to be returning to more typical activities (and blog topics) very soon-