The Housegleaners: A DIY Freestyle Fixerupper Remodel Blog Focused On Salvage, Reuse, and Upcycling

 

Twenty-five years before The Housegleaners blog--and well before blogs even existed--I started photo journaling online with Picture of the Day , which continues to grow and creep forward like a glacier with the weight of half a lifetime behind it. Things were on hold here for a week or so as I laid in bed getting over My First Covid ™️ . Right before that happened, I closed the book on this trilogy, an epic saga of discovery, disappointment, and ultimate triumph. Soon to be a major motion picture!   (((Click images to visit original pages with extra photo links; best viewed on laptop.)))  

After spending most of the past two weeks replacing inefficient aluminum windows and doing a lot of shuffling and reorganizing of materials to make space, today I shifted focus indoors to start getting a sense of what things might look like when we finally get around to finishes. Because so much of what we're doing at this stage is basic structural improvement, we've been resigned to living with the shoddy unfinished drywall look of a remodel that was abandoned midstream. But because we have guests coming, we thought it would be nice to tidy up the west-facing sitting room that's adjacent to the kitchen. The dangling cutout to the left of the heater was particularly irksome both as eyesore and source of drafts, so I started the day by taping and mudding it as well as the seams and corners of that wall (but not along the ceiling as that will be vaulted later). I also finally got around to cleaning up the rough edge from when I tore up the waterdamaged linoleum floor. I used

Things happened fast here last Fall. So fast I forgot I even made this video of a late November weekend trip to move some stuff out and hang a couple of interior doors scored via craigslist/free . It wasn't the most productive visit as I spent a good amount of time by the water, watching a seal circle in on a bunch of languid salmon that were so close to shore I could have grabbed 'em. This video is kind of long and slow. Shots linger in silence. Not much happens. That's sort of the point. I'd been juggling so many things on a tight schedule, racing back and forth from Seattle, that I needed a breather. And a big part of why we moved here is to tune in to nature and settle into its rhythms. And, outside of being on a Washington State Ferry, where else are you going to hear the safety announcement in its entirety? To those who sit through patiently to the end, I salute you!  Doesn't it feel nice to slow down?

If eyes are the windows to the soul, what are windows? The eyes of a home? Like eyes, they do open and close. And when they're 60-year old single pane aluminum frame jobs, they even weep. This condensation is a bad sign of how inefficient they are, and the corresponding high heating bills are enough to make us cry. We should have replaced them first thing, but I got sort of strung along by this guy who kept dangling some nice windows initially advertised as "free" in front of me, and even after I agreed to pay for them he never set a price or timeline, so Sarah finally sourced various bargains on five used double pane 4x6 vinyls--two picture and three sliders.  This is the second one I replaced in the past week. The first went a lot easier but in any event the effect on the indoor temperature was immediately apparent. It feels warmer already and the heaters are running much less frequently. Winning! It was all handtools on deck for window extraction and to expand rough o

The soil here is pretty compacted and not very rich, so to grow food Sarah is relying on hügel beds and planter boxes. Still had some salvaged cedar fence boards left over after building the first planter box , and for the framing I decided to reüze some pressure treated 2x6 deck joists that we found discarded in the weeds here. I know they were deck joists because they were rife with screws standing out about an inch, about one every three inches. I set up a cutting and assembly station outside. At first I thought I'd just leave the screws in, and I cut the legs of the box to length in such a way to avoid the screws. But because the box would be lined with plastic sheeting, I decided to remove the screw tops after all to avoid tearing the lining. Cutting scores of screws with an angle grinder might seem laborious but it took me longer to edit this video than it did to zip them off. Like the first time, I cut the cedar planks to length and assembled them into panels which I then p

  The Optimistic Owners Prior to uS (OOPS) got as far as drywalling the stairwell, but not installing a light. There was, however, power to the switch box and wire to the attic with extra length at the end, so there was flexibility as to placement of pendant light. All I needed now was a scaffold, and wouldn't you know it there was one leaning right there in the hall--a solid wood door I picked up free to replace the hollow core ones that came with the place. It spanned the gap beautifully, doorknob and all, and instantly attracted the cats. Stepping in the middle of it might've been dicey, but standing at the edge provided better footing for drilling the 4" hole for retrofit ceiling fixture. Cats on the ladder impeded my progress, but eventually they let me climb back into the attic to poke the Romex down through the hole. After that is was short work to wire and hang the light, an antique I picked up off a free table years ago. One of those items you take a shine to and