Are you Grounded?

This is a simple [read as: kinda boring] post but something that we didn't know when we moved into our 50 year old house.  We had to check to see if our outlets were grounded.  We used this little device our friend Jeff knew about and it's genius.  It couldn't be easier.  You plug it in and it has different lights that tell you if it's grounded or not.  The directions are on the top.  It's a very useful tool. 

So most of our outlets weren't grounded, which we figured, because they were so old and because they were almost all two prong.  So another of our first [and last] tasks was to change out outlets so we could safely plug things in.  

In the photo above the old outlet is on the right and the new outlet is on the left.  [You probably could have figured that one out? Yeah I know.] Anyways, my dad and Daniel ran this new outlet into our living room because the other ones in that room weren't grounded.  We needed to be able to (safely) plug things in like lights [no overhead lighting in the living room] so this was pretty important.  Don't ask me why they set it up the way they did.  [If you would like to know leave me a comment, I will find out for you!]  We plan on replacing the old outlet receptacle [the little box with wires going in that sits behind the switch plate; it holds the little circles where the prongs go in] because some of the other's are dry rotted and we want to avoid any serious dangers that may cause [like fire, or sparks].   

This is what one of the light switches looks like. Some of them have now been replaced, but we still have quite a few to go.  It's a tedious task, but not difficult.  I will try to get Daniel to write a post soon about how to actually replace these! 

This is right inside the door.  Switch plate removed.  There are actually 4 switches right next to each other and the third one controls the lights to the kitchen. So when we [we is usually Daniel and I and/or Jeff who is teaching us how to be handy] updated the lights in the kitchen, [more to come on that later] Jeff, switched out the receptacle.  Eventually all four will be shiny bright white and NEW! Hooray!! I can't wait for that day! You can really see how nasty the other switches are in comparison.  In one of my other posts I was trying to show how much grime was on the switches and now you can really see it! 

Well, that's all I have to say about that.

Love,

Sarah

The Concrete Stain Saga: part 1

The Second project that we did was also in the basement.  If you missed that first post about our Adventure with Drylok click here.  


Our second project was to use concrete acid stain to cover up oil stains in our floor and seal out moisture coming up from the ground underneath the concrete.  Daniel works at a Jewelry store and they have a stained concrete floor.  We both think it looks really awesome!  (I have seen some that have glitter in them, but I couldn't convince Daniel to sparklify our floors) 

Isn't that pretty? (picture from Google search)

The beginning of this and most DIY and home renovation projects is simple:  CLEAN. Clean the surface thoroughly.  Oh-ho-ho my friend, easier said than done. Easier said than done.  If you have ever tried to clean something that is really old, and porous, you'll understand.  You can't clean ALL the dirt off of 50 year old concrete floors.  You'll drive yourself mad.  But, do your best.  I think we could have gotten more dirt off the floor, but we got a lot of it and the rest is sealed up like a time capsule.  

First we swept the floor.  Then swept it again.  Actually, Daniel swept, he is really great at it.  I sucked up the dirt.  Luckily, we had a shop-vac.  Sweeping is boring so I didn't take a picture of that.  

Next up....The Grinder (read it again in a baseball announcer voice) :)
This process involved a diamond tipped grinder.  OoooOooo Fancy.  Nope not really, this thing was a beast.  [And as my knowledgeable, diamond informed husband told me, they may be diamonds, but they aren't jewelry grade, they are not a good color or clarity so they use them on machinery etc.]  We rented the Beast from Home Depot. (Our store of choice) And it's this great big machine that looks like a floor waxer except that it tries to rip off your arms. Alright, I am exaggerating, a little, but only a little. 

This was after when we were cleaning it. 

 So Daniel and his friend and co-worker Joseph rented the beast after work and started grinding the concrete basement floor.  

This is Joseph.

This is the grinder at work.  Honestly, I wasn't strong enough to steer this thing. 

The goal of the grinder is to scuff up the floor so that it will accept the stain and remove any surface stains.  To do this you have to add water to the floor in small doses so that it stays near the grinder's wheel.  If you don't have enough water the Beast can overheat. We added water with a hose that was fed through our window,  but you could easily use buckets or whatever was easiest for you. 

During the grinding process we met with a small hiccup.  Remember how I said we didn't get up ALL the dirt? Because you can't really get up ALL the dirt?  Well add water and concrete dust to really fine old dirt. What did you get? mud? Lots of mud? Lots of soupy icky mud? Well, you would be right.  This wouldn't have been a big deal except that we couldn't see if all our hard word was paying off.  It was impossible to see any scratches in the concrete until it was dry and clean.  So we had to stop and reassess.  

We got back up.  Another shop-vac to help get up all the mud and someone holding the hose full time.  The mud-sucking was the most time consuming part.  If your concrete is newer, outside or if you can clean it better before hand I think the mud would be less of an issue.  I will say that there is going to be mud even if you have brand-new concrete, because the grinder is essentially a giant sander and we all know that when you sand something you get dust and dust+water=mud.  After we finished grinding the whole basement we went back through with the hose and shop-vacs and rinsed the floor.  Let me tell you, all of our backs hurt and all of us wanted to throw those shop-vacs out the window.  While we are talking about it, two things about those shop-vacs: 1) surprisingly, the smaller one sucked up the water/mud better and 2) it was really hard to get just the right angle so the suction would kick in but eventually with practice it worked. 

This is what it looked like when we were done.  We weren't able to get ALL the water up, so we just let the little puddles air dry.  

When it was all dry, it looked like this. ^^^ If you look closely you can see the circular scratches.  We were so proud of those scratches and glad to see that all the work and frustration had been for a reason! 


Ok, I think that's enough for today.  God bless you if you read all the way to this point. :)  This isn't the most thrilling project out there.  Read the next post to see why we did all this: Concrete staining! 

See ya later,

Sarah

P.S. I love comments. I love to know who's reading and hear your thoughts and opinions! Thanks a bunch!! YOU'RE AWESOME! 

Jumping right in...Our Adventure with DryLok

Today I want to start telling you the story of our renovation process: Moisture proofing the basement.  Are you all jumping up and down with excitement? Yeah me neither.   To be honest, this whole blog is probably going to be a little boring at first, but I want to keep an accurate record and some people actually asked about this so...here it goes.  

First there are some things you should know about us:
Daniel, my husband is a very hard worker, go get 'em, don't rest until it's done or he's burned out kind of guy.  While,  I on the other hand, am a work on ten projects at a time slowly getting them all done.  Daniel is a very time focused man.  If it was up to him, we would never be late.  Which of course means that I am the one who makes us late 90 out of 100 times, the other 10 are reasons out of our control. ;-) 

Now that you know those things about us, you can imagine the frustration we both felt over the course of this renovation.  Our first project was hard to decide on.  Where do you start in a house where EVERYTHING (this is really only a slight exaggeration as you will see) has to be ripped out or painted and cleaned?  Well, we decided to start in the basement.  We figured that we could do what we wanted to the basement and then store stuff down there and move our stuff slowly upstairs as the rest of the house was ready.  As often happens with best laid plans, none of that happened, but more on that in a later post.  

First of all, I regret to inform you that for this particular project, I don't have actual photos of us doing the work.  However, in the picture above you can see the white strip of paint around the bottom of the cinder block wall?  THAT is our first project.  It's this fancy stuff called DryLok.  We found one gallon of it at a yard sale for free along with some other fabulous things including our kitchen light! When we started using this stuff we learned 4 things: 1) It's smelly. ewww. 2) It's thick and the cinder block is greedy when you apply it. 3) this was going to take much longer than we thought and 4) we were going to need quite a bit more.  We had several options: 

a gallon? 

A big bucket? 

  

a different brand? 

I had done a little research on this stuff.  DryLok blocks moisture from coming into your basement, specifically through concrete/cinder block walls.  It's called masonry paint.  The big question was: Is this stuff worth it?  Did we really need it?  We sort of agonized over this.  We didn't want our basement to flood or be damp.  It is "underground" on 2 1/2 sides, but it's not in a flood plain or anything so do we even need to worry about it? Looking back, it definitely wasn't the biggest decision (wait until we get to stain color, eeeekkk!)  This stuff was rather expensive though, as far as paint goes and we had JUST made the biggest purchase of both our lives so far.   So being a "thrifty" (read that: cheapskate), I looked on craigslist.  I found some for $10.  YES!  We bought the rest that we needed.  

****For lack of pictures let me tell you about our basement.  It is a large rectangle.  There is a door at one end and a crawl space that runs the length of one side.  It is open except for support poles here and there and the stairs that come down from the main floor.  One of the shorter walls has a door and the other is solidly holding back all the dirt.  The long wall along the back of the house is mostly windows that are underneath the back deck and about 1/3 holding back the dirt.  The long wall along the front side of the house has a crawl-space going along the length of it so not much of it is actually holding dirt back. ****

The plan was to do all of the basement walls, but once we found how difficult it was to apply properly we opted for the whole wall that is all underground and then about 1/3 of the two long walls. The rest of the way around was mostly the bottom 2  or 3 rows of blocks.  We do plan to finish painting the rest of the basement walls with something other than drylok "someday" (I am beginning to become wary of the elusive someday, because it never gets here!!)  

Here is a sample picture of what it looks like to apply drylok, notice she is using a high nap roller.  This means that there are longer strands on the roller so it can hold more paint and reach all the crevices. (photo from Google)

*Sorry, for the lack of interesting and eye catching photos.  I think I kept track of most of the other projects we did.  Also, I will check with Daniel and see if he has better photos of the drylok project.

 

**My husband would like to point out that proper application of drylok involves etching the walls first, which calls for another product (etching power etc.).  This is tough to do because it is hard to wash cinder blocks without a hose. (Both pictures below are from Google)

      

***David my brother also helped out by doing some minor patching along the floor.  I don't have pictures of him doing it but here is a picture from the internet (Google search) of someone else doing the same thing.  We got the product (drylok fast plug) with the drylok we bought from Craigslist. 

So do you have any questions I didn't answer?  Do you have experience with this stuff?

I would love to know! 

See ya next time,  

Love,

Sarah

The Foster House--House Tour (before)

Ok guys, bear with me, this post has a LOT of pictures! 

The Foster house.  Our house.  <3

       

This "F" came from one of our dear friends, he said "Now
you have a big F in yard" :)

Our cute little front porch

Our ultra retro kitchen....yeehaw. 

The door from the kitchen to the carport.

Our bathroom.  The only room in the house to have prior renovations. 

We think that the shower area, which is HUGE, used to be a Cinderella tub. 

something like this was probably in that shower space.
 (picture from retrorenovations.com a great source for retro inspiration!)

Another angle of the shower

I was so stoked about the new house!!

Daniel's closet.  The Master has two closets this size. 

The closet I claimed had only shelves. yes, has is past tense. 

This is a wide angle of our room.  Two great big windows! 

This is the guest bath, dubbed the "blue bath", the original wood floors

blue blue blue!!!

view from the hallway

The guest room closet was painted green....

the "office"

the Hallway

The dining room after we removed the light fixture

The back deck that we have high hopes for....someday soon. :)

The living room, with it's big ole' window!
You can really see the smoke damage around the vent. YUCK!!!

SO,  I hope that gives you a good idea of what the house looked like before.   I am excited to share with you in the coming days and weeks what the house looks like now!!!

Love,

Sarah

Welcome to Life at the Foster House!

Hey there! I'm Sarah.  I've been wanting to start a blog for months and months.  I just never knew how to start.  I don't really have any idea today either, but you've got to start somewhere.  

Right?

So figuring out what to call the blog was pretty tough.  There were several different options and maybe one of them would be catchier but I thought that if I want to write about my life that I should start with that.  First of all, NO I did not come from foster care or have any foster children.  I have friends in both categories and have the highest respect for them.  No Foster is my married name.  There is a "punny" joke that my family likes to tell about me.  My maiden name is Beach (yes, I know it's pretty awesome!)  So the [dad]Joke goes: "You moved from the Beach house to the Foster house, kind of a downgrade don't you think Sarah?" Har, Har, Har.  :) 

I am starting this blog for two reasons. 

Reason 1. I love reading fashion/lifestyle blogs.  Some of them I want to steal ideas from, some of them I don't.  Some of them spend way more money on clothes and such than I would ever dream and others inspire me to invest more in my look.  Yeah, sometimes it's a catch 22, but that's just the way it goes.  It's a fun challenge to find that balance!

Outfit I wore to work last summer!

From National Shoe Lovers day
(you'll learn how much I love shoes eventually)

   

    

Shopping at Loft with my Momma

                                                      

 Reason 2.  My husband and I bought a house back at the end of August.  It was (yes mostly that is past tense term) a total wreck, but had incredible potential and great bones.  We have almost 7 months sprucing up our house and making it ours.  Aaaannnd, we are still at it!  We only JUST put our oven and dishwasher in two weeks ago!  We had to wait so long because that is when we put our kitchen floor in!  Man, we waited SO long for that! I would have liked to start blogging at the beginning of our home renovations, but we were working non-stop.  My husband and I both have full-time jobs and so now that things are settling down a little I hope to be able to go back and share all of our renovation stories with you!! 

I was so excited to take pictures of the house!
(I'll share more of those later!)

Our obligatory house keys picture in front of our door

....and one more of this cutie, because I love him!! 

 There are so many things I am excited to share with you!  I look forward to sharing my heart and improving my writing/blogging skills and hopefully learning about myself (and YOU!) in the process.  I hear if you are good at this blogging thing you end up making friends with your readers, well at this point if you read this today (the birthday of Life at the Foster House) I am probably already friends with you, so THANKS for reading my dear friends and I hope to see more of you!!  

Love, Sarah