Now that the weather is getting warmer we are trying to do some work on the yard as well as the house.  We have a bush that is taking over the entire landscaping.  It appears that this bush sends our runners and whenever it hits another plant it shoots up a new bush and chokes out what was there.  This thing is everywhere in the yard.  I don’t know what it is and would like anyone who has an idea to post a comment.

Last year I tried to get rid of a few of these bushes.  I read about a little trick online that appears to work.  What I did was cut the bush down as low to the ground as possible.  I then drilled a hole in the stump and dumped salt into the hole.  It appears that the stumps that I did this to are dead this year and the few branches that did pop up the leaves are already rotting and black.  Also, around the hold where the salt was dumped the wood is black.  I’m going to dump some more salt into the same holes and see if it kills the bushes even more.  This is a slow process but it appears to be working.

Now that spring has arrived I’ve located a few new issues with the outside of the house.  I’m looking for some help.  The thing with this house is – I’ve never done this type of stuff before and I’m just learning as I go.
I was not happy to pull in my driveway one night after work and noticed that the wood trim under the gutter of the sunroom was completely rotted out.

I’m not quite sure how to fix this.  My assumption is that I need to get the gutter off and then look at the wood and hope that the studs are not rotted.  I looked on another part of the house and the trim appears to be molding???

Was this a trend back in the 1920’s?  Was this an update to the house?  So should I use molding or just some treated wood?  Anyone’s advice would be helpful.

The upstairs bathroom is an ugly blue color (well a lot of the house is an ugly blue color).  As mentioned in my first post, most of the painted surfaces in the house were latex on top of oil.  This was also the case in the upstairs bathroom.  I’m not sure how many layers of paint were on there but it’s thick.  Not long after moving into the house the moisture from taking showers started to separate the latex paint from the oil paint.  I decided to scrape off the big chuncks of paint and then put some primer on and continue this process until the bathroom is done.  We are not in a big hurry and I figured the primer would keep the moisture from getting into the plaster walls and causing them to deteriorate.

A large section of the wall about the doors had huge hanging, curling pieces of paint.  I grabbed a putty knife and scraped the chuncks off.  I scraped until I could get everything off I could.  Once all the easy pieces were off the entire area was washed with TSP and left to dry for 24 hours.  The next day I got out the Kilz primer and painted the entire area.  This looked ok and I figured it was going to protect the plaster until I was able to scrape another section

The corner looked good for a month or two.  After that the area that had not been scraped all the way down the the plaster started to curl and the remining paint was coming up.  Great, now I have to scrape and redo the entire area!

This time it went to the hardware store and got a paint scraper.  This got the chunks off a little easier and smoother than a putty knife.  Once the area was scraped I sanded it with an electric palm sander with 100 grit paper.  The area looked good and this time I was down to the plaster in most areas.  There are a few areas that still have some paint on them that don’t seem to be coming up.  I am going to prime it again and see what happens.

The dirty work was done for the day and I grabbed the shop vac.  This has got to the be greatest invention for cleaning up after a dirty job.  And with a shop vac the more power the better.

So I vacuumed the floor and around the molding and it looked pretty good.  I was going to wash the walls with TSP and then I though, why not go over it with the shop vac and see if I can get the dust off.  So I did.  While using the shop vac I started going over the parts of the wall that still had paint on them and the vac was pealing the paint off the wall.  WOW this is great!  Much easier than scraping!  So I keep running the vac over the wall until the paint is no longer coming off.  I have to say at this point the shop vac is only pealing off the latex paint and underneath is a layer of cream colored oil paint.  I’m not complaining because a large chunk of the ugly blue paint is gone and it only took a few easy minutes to remove it.

I purchased a house 1 year ago.  We knew it was a fixerupper but we are up to the challenge (or so my wife told me).  I have never done this type of stuff before.  My grandfather taught me how to paint but that is about it.  It is a good thing he taught me how to paint becuase after being in this house for a while it started to become very obvious that the previous owners had painted latex over oil on almost ever surface.  Anyone that knows anything about paint (or oil and water) knows that they don’t mix.  Almost every painted surface in the house is flaking and falling off.  And this us just the beginning!  The house is starting to remind me of the movie “The Money Pit”!  This is what this blog will be all about.  Our experiences as we restore this once beautiful house and my learning to do construction in the process.  I have had lots of hours watching Home and Garden TV and the DYI Network so now it’s time to put this knowledge to work.