New Siding Adventure

This week the siding started. Apparently when you install your windows and siding you always install windows first and then siding because if there's a lot of re framing then your siding goes on top of that stuff. So we did the windows first - windows are in...


But the siding is going up next... We found Rick from a friend of my mother who once worked with her but now her husband and her do construction and contractor work. She typically works with contractors and whatnot to organize projects. But I'm running the show so she just gave me the name of a guy and I called him.

He was super nice on the phone - and really great when he first came out to look at the house and meet me. We had a great conversation and he talked to my mother for a bit while I helped the cable guy who was there to rerun a cable line to another room where the office is now. He was supposed to come back that next monday to measure but totally flaked... but... it was the week of Thanksgiving so.. I sighed and started looking for other names.

A week later he was out at the house apologizing and measured everything. Since then he's been A+. The bid he gave me was WAY beyond my price ... so we had to figure out how to readjust. Once we got to my $10,000 limit with a few adjustments we were good to go.

I chose the color Montana Suede. There is going to be an extra layer of foam that will go on between what we have up now and the new stuff so that we have a bunch of insulation where now... we don't have much at all. All of the windows are going to have caps over the new framing and trim - the posts on the porch will be covered, porch that we repaired earlier this year will now be covered with siding ... and new guttering and flashing to help direct the water away from the house and not to run down between the house and the brick veneer on the lower level.

The hideous Tudor Style boards are coming off and we're taking the house back to its older style pre hideous tudor boards... So my estimation of what it will kind of look like will be this below - except on the right side my mother wanted to see what it would look like if the siding was vertical.. which is stupid but I did it anyway so ignore that part...

The way the house will look via photoshop - except all the stuff on the porch is gone now ...

Yard Work Project From Hell

When the appraiser came through to look at the house before we did any work the first thing he said was that our back yard and in general front yard looked pretty rough. Not just because we have a garage that is literally falling down - but the back yard looks like someone could get lost and perhaps die from carnivorous plants.



So this is what I'm dealing with here.... It's pretty bad. I didn't take a picture of the back side of the garage where I'd found that my grandfather had been hoarding stuff ... and a family of opossums had built a nest.

After six days of raking leaves that hadn't been raked in probably 10 years, cutting down small trees that had grown just a little taller than I am from seeds falling out of other trees - and generally thinning out the poison ivy and various other weeds and whatnot.

Here's what I've got now.

Upstairs Bathroom Progress

Remember this? and then this?

Well the progress has continued :)

The Countertop Question

Few people know Granite is actually one of the WORST surfaces you can use for your kitchen or bathroom counters because the carbon footprint is SO HUGE. I didn't know... had no idea...

I think our universal fascination with granite countertops is due to the material's tremendous strength and durability, and its aesthetic beauty. Until recently, granite was rarely seen in homes except in beautiful furniture pieces. Now we see it in nearly every mid- to high-end home, and you can buy tiles or order custom slabs at all the big-box building supply stores.

But I have a number of problems with granite and marble materials, and I don't consider many of these products at all "green." First and foremost, granite's extraction does irreparable ecological damage, slicing off enormous sides of mountains and leaving behind altered landscapes and dangerous waste. Granite countertops are gas guzzlers—they create a great big carbon footprint from the energy used to mine, transport, and fabricate rough slabs into beautiful countertops somewhere far away from the stone's original source."

So... understandably I've been looking elsewhere. My options at Lowes are ... laminate apparently. I need to go into the store and ask, however... because they might have other options that aren't on the website. Stone was suggested because it can be reclaimed, or I can look for reclaimed stone... and other recycled materials. One of the most interesting options that was suggested was concrete.

Check these out:

From Concrete Network but they're a little too far away from me... but I love this look!

I actually also found two that had information online and I liked their style Advanced Concrete Designs and Artistic Stone Surface - but only one has emailed me back thus far.

Also an option - Lithistone...?

seen here from Lithistone.net
They're located in Colorado... closer to us... but still a little far away, right? Using local workers is both green and helps promote the state. I'm a fan.
Another option - Ice Stone
From IceStone.biz this is SUPER hawt looking and THEY have a vendor in Tulsa, OK


These guys need better photos that are more detailed and bigger, but another favorite is a company called EnviroGLAS which mixes recycled glass and concrete. Their black version looks pretty much like black granite. Video


Obviously, cost is going to be a major part of this. I hadn't intended to do counter tops but I got a lecture from my mother that if I'm going to renovate the kitchen... I should do it right. To her that means putting in new countertops which would, she said be costly. Little did she know I was going to eliminate granite from any options to begin with.

Ideas? Thoughts? Opinions? Feel free to weigh in any time :)

The quick fixes

This is the before photo of my grandfather's bedroom. He chose the color... a little too much for me :) but its what he wanted.


Kitchen we installed a new ceiling fan that puts off more light, removed the awful flowered wallpaper on the soffit and painted it red. The red actually matches the color in my grandmother's dishes that are in the cabinet. On the actual wall I put up a beige wallpaper that looks like bricks.

Before Photo



Before Photo

Before Photo - the coolest thing about this room is the door there. You might remember from the original photo that there was a giant mirror, well once we removed the mirror to freshen up the trim, doors, molding etc... we found that the original owner of the house had signed behind the door. SOOO cool so we kept that part, and I hope to find one of those frames you can put around stuff like that... put a plaque on the wall or something neat.
Before Photo




Paint color is something I can't remember but I can find it on the sample and share later. The linens in the "piano room" which is now a guest room of sorts were on sale at Target. All of the wallpaper has been removed, plaster patched, and painted. Molding, trim, and doors have been painted with a high gloss white. And you can't see on the built ins in the Living Room but the knobs are these great crystal knobs I got from ebay for like $2 each.

Going Green

Hello again!

So a big part of this project is about going green and greening my grandpa's house. Its a great old house build in the late 1920's and the second floor was put on in the 1930's. Not a time when energy efficiency was the standard. The windows and doors aren't sealed, indeed its amazing they are still in the wall, and there are pretty big gaps even with storm windows on the outside.

As a result my grandfather usually has months in the winter when his gas bills are over $300 sometimes over $400 - and that's keeping the temperature at below 70. He's got an electric blanket and an electric space heater and that helps too but then his electricity bill is over $200 too.

In the summer its worse. There is very little insulation in the house or what is there wasn't installed in the most efficient way. In the upstairs room (that I use as my room) the attic was built out into the roofline for a beautiful HUGE room. The problem is that the sun beating down on the roof makes the walls hot during the summer, and the windows in that room get pretty much full sun all day. Its impossible to air condition!

So a big part of this renovation is making it more energy efficient. Once we get to the point where we're doing the major renovation we're looking at new windows, siding with insulation underneath it, new back door, sealing all of the plugs, putting in a tankless water heater, new furnace and A/C unit for both floors, energy efficient appliances, and finally everything we put up or do if we can do so in a greener recycled way.

Lowe's has a neat little pamphlet my grandfather brought me that basically lists out all of their energy efficient materials, LED Certified stuff, and ways to get that energy saving tax credit. I've been doing a lot of reading and studying to figure out how best to do this and stay within our budget. It isn't easy being green :) At least its not easy to fit it into our budget, but I'm going to do whatever we can.

Where it all began

When you work in politics moving every 6 months isn't outside of the realm of possibility, and when you are willing to move anywhere for any job your experience, resume, and connectivity expands by leaps and bounds. So after college I agreed to go anywhere to work on campaigns or for organizations. I started out as a finance director helping candidates raise money, but in my free time began experimenting with online media - this was right after the House Dean email fundraising year in 2004.

As the technologies expanded so did my perception of how to use them to help candidates. I used MySpace to target rural and minority communities in 2006 and when Facebook opened up in 2007 I began to use it to help elected officials connect with their constituents. Now... online media is the standard, and blogger outreach is a must for any Democratic candidate.

In 2007 I had a great opportunity to work in a family foundation in the Bay Area, that specifically worked to increase the outreach to young people in politics. Youth trend more progressively, and in 2004 they were the only age group to vote for John Kerry. If we wanted to win the White House back in 2008, youth outreach was a must. In 2007 I started working on becoming an expert. I studied and wrote about the Millennial Generation, I looked closer at demographics for social networking sites, and I experimented with previous candidates and current elected officials I'd worked with before as a volunteer to see how we could use these technologies to help be more accessible and transparent.

And 2008 became the election of technology.

During 2008 I had worked closely with several campaigns in the Midwest that didn't understand technology outreach. I hammered into their heads what this could do and how it could be effective. The result was several converts who have now also become genius technology people always looking for what's next. After the 2008 election we all developed an online media and marketing firm in Kansas City called Mixed Media.

But in the spring of 2009 we got our first out of state client - which was also the biggest client we have in Oklahoma - where I'm originally from and where my parents and family live. In efforts to expand Mixed Media beyond Kansas and into the rest of the Heartland I moved back home and began work with our clients here.

When I did that was when the "adventure" began. I had planned on staying with my grandfather, who I lived with in my late teens before I went to college in Kansas. He and my grandmother bought their house in the old part of downtown Yukon, Oklahoma in the early 1980's. They loved that house, my grandmother especially. My entire childhood she worked on making it better. They built out part of the attic into a large room on the 2nd floor, they wallpapered, re-carpeted, painted, everything... But in 1987 she was killed in a head-on collission on Route 66 when her car slipped on a piece of ice.

Her death left my family devastated, my grandfather especially. Since 1987 nothing changed in the house. Well, I should say, very little changed. In 1989 he caught the kitchen on fire while making french fries for me and a friend that were playing in another room. It caused about $50,000 in damage and the kitchen was remodeled, wallpaper was redone, and everything was freshly painted and cleaned.

Living Room mid 1980's






















Random event Dinning Room mid 1980's



This is someone being silly at a gathering in the house. This room, however, is the upstairs room they had just built out into the attic. Lots of great sloped ceilings in this room.


But basically since 1989 - nothing has changed. Twenty years later the house was falling apart. It was dirty, infested, molded, saturated, and a complete disaster. Oklahoma had some flooding in 2007 and while his house didn't flood - the 40 straight days of rain took its tole on the house. With rooms closed off moisture festered and mold grew on furniture. My grandfather never turns on the A/C so there was no way to de-humidify the house, especially in rooms that he'd closed off.

The roof of the porch was falling off because at one time there were two skylights that had leaked - while the roof had been fixed the ceiling of the porch had rotted wood hanging down with critters crawling around above it. In 2003 there had been a major ice storm and a tree fell on the detached garage causing it to lean pretty substantially. My grandfather put in an insurance claim and used the money (which of course couldn't pay for a new building) - not to rebuild the structure but to "fix" the structure. The entailed tying a big thick rope around the whole building and tying it to a tree. I'm not kidding...

The house was infested with bugs, mice, fleas, ants, ticks, and at one point in 2008 a opossum crawled under the house and died leaving a stench that lingered for months.

With me living full time in Oklahoma, and invested at least until the close of the 2010 election I finally convinced my grandfather to make some major home improvements. We began with the little things that I could do, having ZERO experience in home remodel. My grandfather had been working part time at Staples but technology wasn't his strong suite and he went to work next door at Lowe's. For someone with 100% experience in tools and fixing things, not to mention a certification as an electrician apprentice he was perfect to work for them... and it resulted in a 10% discount on anything in the store and 10% above cost on all special orders.

It seemed the universe was telling us this was the time to save the house.

(last year I lost my hard drive, but I know I have the pre-renovation photos somewhere... I'm looking)