After (yet another) hiatus, I’m back with more news. As some of you may know, my boyfriend, Nathan, and I recently closed on a house in the Portland, Oregon area. We made the move into our new place over Thanksgiving weekend, spending precious feasting hours ripping up carpets at the house and prime Black Friday shopping time packing and driving the U-Haul down from Seattle. The relocation was a result of our decision to be nearer to Nathan’s daughter and followed a move to the Seattle area the year before from Berkeley, California, that brought us closer – but at a three- to four-hour drive, ultimately not close enough.
Now, at no time in my life prior to this had I a desire to visit, much less live, in Oregon, and I certainly knew nothing about it. If pressed, about the only associations I could call to mind – courtesy of an East Coast grade school education – were the clichéd Oregon trail, covered wagons, lumberjacks, evergreens, recycling, and other pioneering things. In more recent years I came to associate the sketch comedy show Portlandia with its namesake city, something which my boyfriend and apparently everyone else from Oregon finds deeply offensive.
Despite my general ignorance and East Coast inclinations, after a year living in Washington, I’ve gotten a better feel for the Pacific Northwest and find it to generally be quite beautiful, with its perennial greenery, snow-capped mountain peaks, and craggy, wind-swept coasts. And when one desires something a little more urban, the cities of Seattle and Portland offer a big city feel with their compact downtowns of stately old buildings housing breweries and coffee shops galore.
Oh and there’s the minor detail of the new house. For, as I made my case to Nathan, if I’m going to be living in the wild west for the foreseeable future, it would be nice to not be in another cramped, transient apartment, but in a house of my own with a yard for the dog and some projects for me to work on. Preferably one of the many charming historic homes that can be found around the Portland area, where, unlike Seattle, we can actually afford to buy a house. And somehow – as in it’s-felt-like-a-long-time-coming-but-I-still-can’t-believe-it’s-real kind of way – that is exactly where we find ourselves today.
Meet the proud and totally in-over-our-heads new owners of a 1910 craftsman in tiny Gladstone, Oregon, conveniently located somewhere between Portland to the north and Oregon City to the south, near several major thoroughfares that can take you to your choice of glorious shopping center or, just a few short miles out of suburbia, to what fast becomes farmland and tracts of forested areas. Gladstone, home to roughly 12,000 souls, is bordered by water on two sides where the Clackamas and Willamette Rivers meet. On any given day, you can visit a particular park at this confluence and find a number of people fishing with their pickup trucks parked at water’s edge on the rocky beach or, somewhat more oddly, racing their remote-control trucks around an outdoor RC track. But there are plenty of parks and a neighborhood coffee joint, plus a barbecue restaurant, an antique store, and – crucially – a metaphysical shop all within a few minutes’ walk, so really, what more could you want?
But now for the house. It’s hard to miss, foremost because it is painted a garish blue that assaults you first with its hue and then with its sweep, for the house is essentially one large box that so happens to be one of the more ample-sized on the street of predominantly modest ranches and bungalows. Around the front yard wraps a diminutive plastic white picket fence with a gap between the neighbor’s chain link just large enough to allow the dog to slip through to the road beyond. The backyard, not much better in terms of canine suitability, consists primarily of a large deck and, not one, but three sheds graciously left by the previous owner that collectively leave little to no yard.
In the care of said prior homeowner, thick carpets in hideous shades of faded blue and green were installed over the hardwoods on both floors of the house. Several of the bedrooms were wallpapered, along with the upstairs bathroom, hall, and the stairway. At some point, someone converted a second floor screened in porch off a spare bedroom (what might have possessed them to do this I cannot say) into one enclosed room that has since become the master bedroom. While this has resulted in a spacious master, it also created a weird wall of windows along one whole side and a raised platform where the porch had been. In its current state, with wallpaper ripped down to the bare, hole-riddled plaster walls, it is a rather depressing place to spend any amount of time. But the potential is there.
Ah yes, so much potential. As has been our – and assuredly every optimistic but under-qualified DIYers’ – outlook towards the ever-growing list of projects to tackle around the house. Though happily, the first and perhaps largest of the bunch has already reached completion via the aforementioned Thankgiving carpet removal party. With Nathan and a friend of his tasked with the actual ripping and carrying out of the carpets, I was left with the less strenuous but highly tedious chore of leveraging a hammer and pry bar to remove all the tack strips that were used to hold the carpet in place around the rooms. Then with the floors exposed, all that was left was to use a pair of pliers to pull out what must have amounted to my post-holiday body weight in staples. Even with gloves on, the pliers gave me a nasty little blister on my thumb that got me out of doing the dishes for a week. Perks of having thin skin.
We then hired professionals to sand and refinish all the floors, some of which had been painted and were in various states of wear after decades relegated under the carpets. We opted for a clear finish on the floors to preserve the distressed look of the century-old fir. While not exactly DIY, the result is far superior to anything we could have done with a rented sander and zero skills or experience. We watched enough YouTube videos to know that getting the job done right would require far more time and patience than either one of us possess.
It was well worth the outsourcing in the end, as the floors did turn out beautifully, though the dog’s nail have already left scratches in the finish. The area rug that is on its way for the living room can sadly only do so much to protect the floors. It will likely be some time before we no longer cringe whenever the dog careens through the house in hot pursuit of a cat or someone drags a piece of furniture across the floor. But we’re slowly coming to terms with the fact that things can’t stay in pristine condition forever, no matter how much you paid to make them so. A house is for living, after all.
There is yet much work to be done. The walls need painting, the kitchen and bathrooms updating, and countless other small and large projects here and there will need to be seen to as time and, more realistically, money will allow. We’ll be painting the exterior of the house come summer when the weather conditions are more favorable. Eventually, we’d like to replace the fence and try our thumbs at a bit of landscaping. Then of course there’s the ongoing furnishing of the house as we slowly build our hodgepodge assortment of apartment-scaled furniture into a a more cohesive collection of meubles and décor fit for the lovely old home that is now our own. And in the meantime, I’ll have endless fodder for my blog.
One thought on “Home at Last: Let the DIY Struggles Begin”