Concrete Floors: Almost

Just a few days ago we launched our facebook page, Church House Home, where I posted live as we stained our concrete floors. If you missed that, here's what happened:

Our floors are finally prepped and ready for stain! I know what you're thinking. I also thought this day might never come. But preparation is 99% of completion!

Nate mixing the stain with water. Notice the label: "For professional use only."

About 1 gallon of stain down...

About 1 gallon of stain down...

It's dark outside and Nate has almost finished the living room. Two gallons of stain down.

Making our way through the front entry!

That was December 8, which was 35 days after we first started the prep process. That is almost 10% of 2015. Except for work-- as in, our actual jobs-- and Thanksgiving-- when we hosted Nate's sister for the weekend in our back, makeshift studio apartment, bless her heart-- we have been working on these floors non-stop. 

I am going to be honest, I really didn't think it would take so much to do the concrete floors. In fact, my thought process went something like this in the beginning:

-We have concrete floors under this carpet and linoleum!

-We could stain the concrete and have finished floors!

-It will be beautiful and basically free! 

After testing a couple small, inconspicuous areas in the house, I started to believe my husband when he insisted it would be more difficult than that (Nate wants me to mention here that I just made a major understatement). But I never, not in my wildest imagination, would have thought it would be so hard. After all, we're not starting from scratch, we are just re-doing something that is already there. Right?

You might think that all of this is leading to pictures of the finished product. Sorry, not today. It would be unrealistic to lead you to believe that anything happens that fast in a DIY project. We are still cleaning and tweaking and we'll need multiple coats of sealer and wax to bring out the true color. Our floors actually look like this today:

Stained floors without sealer and wax, 12/12/15

What I will do is show you pictures of our inspiration. We did Google image searches using keywords that expressed the idea we were going for, which was wood tones to compliment the walnut stained beams throughout the space. These were our favorites:

Through our research we learned about acid stain, which actually contains phosphoric acid or mild hydrochloric acid and an inorganic metal salt. The acid opens the pores of the concrete and the salts react with the chemicals in the concrete to produce color. The result is not one solid or predictable color but a range of pigments that create depth and movement. This can be so beautiful but you really don't know what you are going to get until you let it do what it's going to do (kind of like life, huh?). And since our slab is over 50 years-old, we'll likely see some old stains and scars, which I won't mind. Those can be the most beautiful parts, to me, though this finish may not be ideal for the perfectionists or control-freaks out there.

As a spoiler, we really are happy with the results. After a few more days and about 5 more layers of product on top, we be ready for the grand reveal. More importantly, we will be ready to move back into our living room!

Hand Scraped Concrete

You've probably heard of hand scraped hardwood flooring but have you ever heard of hand scraped concrete? Of course not. That would be ridiculous.

Yet here we are. For exactly one week, my husband and I have been hunched over our floors, scraping what seems like miles of endless adhesive off of the concrete.

Okay, we haven't been on our hands and knees the whole time. We've had the help of some expensive machines (for rent, of course).

We have spent well over 50 man hours on these floors so far and we cannot even see the light at the end of the tunnel yet. So, how did we get here, you may be wondering. About a month ago I posted about how it takes us forever to finish things because we end up doing all the work ourselves due to outrageous bids or anxiety about letting go of control. I forgot about another very important reason why we might end up doing all the work ourselves: sometimes the workers just don't show up. 

I mentioned before that we were saying goodbye to all our flooring. We took up the carpet, linoleum and tile from about 1200 square feet of the original church building (also back-breaking work but totally worth saving the labor cost. The simplest way to save money while renovating is by doing any work yourself that doesn't require skill). Simultaneously, we moved all our furniture, kitchen appliances, toilet and anything else that might be sitting on top of the floors, into "the back," as we call it. 

A drawing of the area of flooring to be finished.

All this was to make way for the guys at Surface Prep Technologies to come over and grind, stain and seal our concrete floors. This is one job we were willing and excited about hiring out, mostly because of how miserable it seemed and how quickly we knew we wanted to get it over with. So they were all set to come work but never came. They broke up with us via text message, citing one excuse after another, which is totally unprofessional, any way you look at it. And we were stuck living out of this makeshift studio apartment in the back of our house-- the part that doesn't have any heat-- with all the cats and dogs. Even Nathan was starting to get really cranky and uncomfortable.

At that point we wasted no time in calling up the tool rental place. Once you are all moved out of your living space, there isn't a lot of time (or patience) to line up new workers. And we've since made more than a couple trips to the hardware store. 

That brings us to today. I am so tired, sore and hungry and just trying to ignore the voices in the back of my mind that keep telling me we'll never be finished. Today I totally get why those guys didn't show up last week. I never want to show up to work on this place. Showing up is hard to do. 

My husband is amazing and even though he is also tired, sore and hungry he continues to work with a supernatural strength, even as I sit and write this. That's how it is a lot of the time here. It generally works out that when one of us is down, the other is up. Thank God for that. Thank God that relationships and partnerships are rarely 50/50. That they are, more often than not, 90/10 or 60/40. That we can carry each other. 

We will be finished, though. And soon. Every step we take shows us a glimpse of what it might be and we keep chasing that vision. We can see it. Can you?

First Home, Last Goodbye

What a sad day it is, when you say your final goodbye to your very first home. Today is that day for me. The house where my parents brought me home from the hospital when I was born. The house where my dad brought all four of us home from the hospital after his young wife, our mom, passed away. The house where I came home from my first day of preschool and my last day of college. The house of safe-keeping and sibling rivalry, sleep-overs and sneaking out, late night snacks and the unfolding of a million stories. The house where I was always welcome. The house I guess I always thought would be there. At least I never really thought this day would come.

I don't quite know what to say to give that place the honor it deserves. All I know is that every place I've lived since and every place I'll ever call home, will have to share my heart with that humble, orange house. Home was defined for me there. Home means nothing to me without it.

Let Me 'Splain

Normally, my husband is the one with all of the crazy ideas. In our relationship, Nathan is Lucy and I am Ricky. For sure.

He is constantly adding decades onto our renovation with these crazy ideas about how we should move an entire wall three inches or add rooftop decks and swimming pools. The running joke used to be:

Sure, we'll definitely do that. Right after you install the bathroom fan.*

But there was this one time-- and, honestly I didn't even remember it until the other day when Nate brought it up again--  when I was the one with the crazy idea. Let's put a bathroom upstairs. After all, it's just empty space floating above our living room. He nixed it immediately.

"No, it can't be done," he said.
"Why not?" I persisted.
"Because [X, Y, Z]," he said.
"But can't we just [this, that, the other]?" I asked.

He looked into it. I told him about wall-mounted, back-flow toilets. He started to see the vision. Three years later I am priming the walls that didn't exist before and he comes up to me and says, "You dreamed it up, Baby. And now you're painting it into the house."

Inside the bedroom

View of the loft from living room

Granted, this bathroom will contain the world's most extravagant shower and one more sink than I really wanted. My Lucy's always scheming something. But Nate really gave me the reigns with this one. We are constantly making decisions and compromises and the other day I joked that we dream up problems just so we can solve them.

Even with the before and today pictures, Nate questioned me about this comparison. He says he thinks the before looks better, simply because it is finished. But I told him that this blog is not about the before and afters. It's about the during.

After all, we've got some splainin' to do.

Ode To Yellow Linoleum

A lot of people think you should just get rid of all the old, ugly things when you buy a house. Yet some of those things have served us the best during the first five years of our renovation and that is why this will be a bitter sweet day for me as we open a new chapter here in the church house. It is yet another demo day and today we will be tackling an area of our home that has been previously untouched: our floors.

On one hand, I am completely thrilled. No one welcomes this forthcoming change more than me. We have been on top of a patchwork of carpet, linoleum and tile and I am ready to be rid of this flooring schizophrenia. On the other hand, this crazy, icky flooring has been my shalom for the past five years of our life here.

If you don't already know, living in a renovation is hard. Really hard. Okay, maybe not for the guy I live with, who feels content to shed his dirty clothes and leave them on our kitchen table. But for me and most people, this kind of thing is painful. The only way I can make it on most days is to have my own, tiny sanctuary in the midst of the chaos. That sanctuary-- a tiny set-up of my things; sometimes my office, sometimes my closet armoire, sometimes just my bed--  is often like a gypsy tent, moving from room to room, corner to corner as it is expelled from project to project. But this flooring, imperfect as it is, has been finished and in place and that sometimes is all I could hold onto when everything else around me seemed to belong in the eye of a tornado. When the walls are open with its guts hanging out, below my feet is this flooring. When I cannot find anything that I own, below my feet is this flooring.

So, today I would like to give thanks and dignity to my floors:

Ode to you, yellow linoleum. Though you are old-fashioned and bruised, you look so happy next to my blue cabinets and you brighten this otherwise dark kitchen. How many potlucks have you seen? How many happy feet and paws have walked upon you? You have served us well.

Ode to you, brown carpet. You have given softness and warmth to this vast, wide open space. You provide a cozy bed for our pets and our sometimes many visitors. You have taken and hidden the stains of a floor well lived upon by imperfect souls finding peace in this sanctuary. You have taken the beating and spills of worship and weddings, funerals and Young Life club, newborn puppies and weary travelers. The spots below you are more than stains, they are stories.

Ode to you, peach tile. You have welcomed all who enter here. From the first time my husband carried me through the threshold of this, our first home together, you have been our hello. Now we say goodbye. You have served us well. 

Though the ugly floors we are taking out these couple of days may not be anything to brag about, they have been faithful. They say, "Don't worry about me! Go ahead and live a little!" They have carried me through a difficult five years with their constancy and forgiveness. They are humble and their scars are beautiful to me. 

Now, bring on the change. 

The Very Beginning of The End

If you ever find yourself wondering why in the world it has taken us five years to even come close to having a bedroom in this church house, today is a perfect example. We woke up and immediately met with a contractor to bid out the drywall job in our upstairs. Whenever a contractor asks you if you paid a lot for your place, I'm pretty sure it means he is trying to figure out if you are going to get the rich person bid or the regular-guy-like-me bid. In case you are wondering, we are regular guys like him. I'm not sure if he got the picture, though, because it seems like we got the rich person bid. Either that, or he has a three-step scale and didn't realize he should step down to the poor person bid for us. Because his bid was so far out of our league, I can't even believe it. Let me just say that two days ago we turned down a bid for less than half his price. All this is to say we are cheap. So cheap that when we get outrageous bids like that we just throw up our hands, say screw it, and do the work ourselves.

That's what we did today. We dropped everything else and started hanging, taping and mudding the drywall in our soon-to-be bedroom. If you are reading this you are probably not caught up on the upstairs situation so let me give you the lowdown.

I can't seem to find a picture of the very beginning, the before, but it was fine and great. It was lovely, really. People who saw it would say it was like being in an Anthropologie store, which is basically the best compliment you can give me. Then there was the fateful day when my darling husband was like,

I wonder what's above the ceiling here?

This is the part of the horror film when you're yelling at the screen, DON'T GO IN THERE, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD!

So then we decided to take down the rest of the ceiling and replace the sub-floor.

Really, I don't know if we so much as decided, as it was the next logical step to us. I've heard it said that the biggest mistake you can make in remodeling a house is to not go deep enough. To be clear, we never make that mistake.

In the end, it was the right decision to raise the ceiling, add a skylight and heat. This will probably end up being the best room in the house. This, which is the upstairs bedroom, which used to be the pastor's study when it was Granby Presbyterian. 

After the first round of demo, we buttoned her up for an appraisal, which you can read about here. But don't look too closely because she isn't finished. 

Then we got the brilliant idea to tear down all the drywall and re-insulate. That was also not regrettable in the long-run, but still...

Back to today. We are finally at the place where we are ready to put up drywall again. That is, we finished electrical and plumbing and weeks of insulation itchiness. And I do mean WE finished all those things. I don't know if we really are just cheap or control freaks or total idiots, or what. But we have a really hard time hiring out work.

So today we are putting up our drywall and it is so exciting and amazing. This, here, is the start of the really satisfying work. All the stuff before was time and money spent behind the walls, where you'll never see it. That is totally worthwhile, of course. It is important to our house and it is character-building. But this is the pudding in which the proof lies. This is the visible sign of the invisible truth that our house is becoming a home; that we are moving forward and, dare I say, finishing something. I am so excited. I just can't hide it.

Block Party

When we started passing out flyers for the first annual New Church Circle Block Party two years ago, we weren't quite sure what people would think of us walking up to their door as a couple with mysterious literature in hand. Okay, we thought people would think Jehovah's Witness. Wouldn't you? And I'm sure some people did. Once we approached an ajar front door and when I was close enough to see in through the living room window, I saw someone leap off the lazy-boy and onto the floor in a barrel roll. Then as I took a couple steps closer, the front door clicked shut.

A few years ago I watched this documentary on the history of refrigeration in America. In the mid twentieth century when home air-conditioning came about, a strange cultural phenomenon happened: in the summertime people moved from outside in their yards and on their porches, to the climate-controlled indoors. Subsequently, neighbors started spending a lot less time with one another. 

I totally get all that. Here in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, where it is winter almost nine months of the year. people stay indoors. Especially in a small town, where practically everything closes by 6 pm. And people move around so much. I think I read recently that the American homeowner moves, on average, every five years. It is hard to get to know your neighbors when you hardly ever see them and it's hard to want to get to know them when they come and go so often. 

This is where Nate and I are old-fashioned, I guess. Plus, we don't have air-conditioning. You see, the idea of getting to know our neighbors and being a good neighbor really means something to us. We didn't grow up in the same place but we both grew up in wonderful suburban neighborhoods where neighbors knew one another and took care of each other. We had neighborhood watch programs and block parties. Also, Jesus had some pretty powerful stuff to say about neighbors, like doing good to them, with love.

So this year we threw our third-annual New Church Circle block party. It doesn't take much, really. I print off a bunch of flyers and Nate and I walk around to each house a couple weeks in advance and pass them out. We provide burgers, hot dogs and drinks and ask everybody to being a side or dessert. Admittedly, we buy the cheap stuff but nobody really cares. Last year I went into Trader Joe's and asked what their best "value" beer is. You know, tastes good but affordable for a party. I've been buying their Simpler Times Pilsner ever since, and people love it. Plus, could there be a better theme for your neighborhood party than Simpler Times?

As great as the whole thing is in theory, this year I started to have my doubts. The party "starts" at 4 but by 4:45 then 5:15 no one had come. I took my dogs for a walk around the block as a friendly reminder that we exist and, by the way, there is a block party today. Then at about 5:30 some regular attenders from down the street showed up with their potluck offering. Then another and more and more. We still didn't have the showing we usually have but there was something nice about being able to sit and really talk with everybody there, introvert or not. And when it was just a few of us, with the Bob Marley Pandora station playing softly in the background, one of the ladies sitting next to me in our lawn chairs looked intently at me and said:

Thanks for doing this. Really. Thank you. It means a lot. 

It may be hard for twenty-first century Americans to want to show up to for an evening with neighbors but I think that deep down we believe it is important and positive.

This may have been the least attended of our block parties to date, but I cannot help but feel like it was the most successful. For one, there was a big part of Nate and I that did not want to do it. I didn't want to print off flyers and walk around the neighborhood or buy burgers and beer. Then when nobody was showing up we thought we might be off the hook.

Look, nobody wants to do this thing. We should just throw in the towel. It'll be easier, anyway. 

But we did do it. I printed off flyers, we spent a couple hours passing them out and I spent about sixty bucks in preparation. When nobody was showing up for the first hour and a half, we kept the music going and started the grill anyway. Part of being a good neighbor is just showing up. It may actually be the biggest part. That day we may have had to talk ourselves into it, but we decided that even if nobody else showed up, we would. We would keep inviting people and we would be here. Success.

Then there is the hospitality. The state of our house is definitely not perfection, nor has it been for the past three block parties. We really are still living in a construction zone over here. The first year we were painting the outside of our house and so it was a combination of old brown and new gray. Last year we were tearing up our landscaping. This year we had been using our patio to store scraps of insulation and wood from our upstairs project. But you know what, we cannot wait for our house to be finished before we have a party. We would never have a party.

Front patio before: a cluttered mess of building materials

Don't get me wrong, we definitely cleaned up beforehand. That is still important, I think. But as long as the environment is clean and safe, who cares if it is perfectly functional or beautiful?

Front patio after: a clean slate

Once when I was in college I heard this lady say that the primary difference between entertaining and hospitality is that entertaining is about me-- what I can display, how I can entertain-- while hospitality is about my guests-- making them comfortable and safe and providing an environment where they can feel at home. With entertaining, your guests are an audience but with hospitality, your guests are the main players. And anyway, last time I checked nobody feels like their home is ever finished or perfect. So if mine isn't either (and it isn't) then I figure people are more likely to feel at home. Success.

Then, just about every day for the week between our party and the start of school, we had a new visitor in our home. A six year-old redhead from down the street would knock on our door and come inside to hang out for hours. We didn't have to babysit her, she was content just to watch cartoons on Netflix, climb on our stairs and feed our cats treats. When I was her age I would also show up to a neighbor's house and hang out for a while and so it means so much to me to be able to pay that forward. And it means so much to me that I have this grown-up house now, where kids can come and feel safe and happy. Success.

Sure, you can come in and hang out. We're neighbors. 

Are Nate and I amazing people and excellent Christians because we host a bock party every year? Not necessarily. I'm first to admit that we still have yet to be able to really serve people when and where they most need it. But for us, the block party is when we meet and get to know our neighbors by name. We learn more about what questions to ask them when we see them on the street, we learn what tools they'll need to borrow for their next project and find out that we can be praying for their daughter with cancer. The block party may just be the tip of the iceberg but it is also the ice-breaker.

So, yes, I'd say our third-annual New Church Circle block party was a success.  I think we'll do it again next year. 

up on the rooftop

Since people have been wondering and even asking me in the grocery store parking lot, "What are you guys doing up on the roof?" I'll tell you: Today Nate and I put in a chimney.

I'm belaying the chimney while Nate makes adjustments

This is about a week after we took out the beast, which weighs more than me, and lowered it more than 25 feet to the ground for repairs. Repairs like relocating the flashing and painting it copper, along with figuring out how to keep the roof from leaking and down-drafts from smoking out the house from here on out. This is the chimney from the original building and it really is part of the original silhouette, so I feel responsible to make sure that in updating its function, we don't change the aesthetic.

The story behind this is that the chimney vents the original fireplace in our kitchen. When we bought the house in 2010 there was nothing connecting that fireplace to the chimney coming out of the roof. When we opened up the drop-ceiling in the upstairs bedroom, we found they had simply cut out that middle section, presumably to avoid bringing the chimney up to code when they added a dormer to the upstairs room in the eighties. About a year and a half ago, Nate put in some stove pipe to get the fireplace working again and we found that it functioned horribly. It would smoke us out every time. The solution, in our case, turned out to be to add height and insulation to the pipe outside.

Kitchen fireplace

My husband is really quite amazing and can, among a thousand other things, fabricate metal and make this whole thing happen. The boring things I can tell you about today are that we 1) hoisted the chimney two stories up onto our steeple with the knowledge and skills only rock climbers possess, 2) drilled and bolted through metal and into rock and 3) secured roof flashing. If you don't know what "flashing" is (I didn't, before home-ownership), it's the metal collar around skylights, chimneys and such on a roof, which keeps water out of the seams and, subsequently, your house. At one point I said to Nate:

"People get paid a lot of money to do what you do." 

"Too bad I'm not one of them," he replied.

Nate and our neighbor, Mike, in a brainstorming session

It occurred to me today, while I was on the tippie-top of the roof of our church house, that the reason I love this place isn't because I feel fondly for her, it's because I serve her. My husband and I give so much of our time, money and bodies to make her better and therefore her successes are our successes and her failures are our as well. It also occurred to me that it's the same with people. Love, that is. It's so hard to pinpoint how love is more than a feeling but the reality is that love is not love unless it costs us something. Then, standing there on the steeple of this old church, I realized that this place isn't just my home or my project, she is also my teacher.

My rooftop classroom

Nate perched on the steeple, waiting for sunset

moving to granby

It has been five years since we moved here to Granby, Colorado and I can't think of a more perfect way to kick off my new blog than this highlight video. Nate made this shortly after we moved in and I'm glad he did. It starts at our house in St. Louis with some friends helping us disassemble the rock climbing wall he built in his spare bedroom and the sound studio he built in his basement. I think that was an important time for my husband because undoing those spaces sort of forced him to let go of the past in order to move forward with his new wife and start dreaming new dreams. He had lived in St. Louis his whole life, 31 years at that point, and he had built a lot there, both inside and outside of his house. I was a seasoned wanderluster myself, familiar with the growing pains of moving away from the important people and things in each place, keeping only what could fit in and on top of a car. This time I had a partner and we moved much more than a carload.

Since my husband was a mechanic we bought this 24-foot yellow moving truck, which we affectionately called "Big Bird," AKA, "Banana Boat." We packed it full of Nate's tools, gadgets and homemade furniture, our clothes, my grandparent's dresser and our circle couch. We figured, when it was all said and done, we probably ended up about $350 ahead after we sold her, fuel and repairs included, but we paid for it in our time and we also bought some stories along the way. Driving from St. Louis to Kansas City normally takes four hours but took us ten thanks to some issues under the hood. We thought we might never make it out west.

We were pulling my Corolla behind Big Bird on a car dolly at that point, but parted ways in Kansas City so I could go ahead to Denver, where I closed on the Church House at a title company downtown. I waited there another 24 hours for Nate as more mechanical troubles plagued the Banana Boat just outside the Kansas/ Colorado border and he limped her in to the next exit, by the skin of his teeth and the light of a flashlight, after the headlights went out in the middle of the stormy night.

We finally met up, we were finally both in Colorado and the Church House was officially ours. All that was left was to drive up into the mountains and open the door to our new home. Our new life.

If you have about seven spare minutes, take a look at the video and feel our anticipation during the long, eventful drive and the excitement of opening our doors for the first time. Follow the adventures of our dashboard bobble-head, Carmen, and the curiosity of our pets, Max, Stella and Happie. This was the beginning of it all. This was when we got to open what we believe to be one of God's greatest gifts to us, which should be noted, was not delivered on a silver platter.