Paint, Plaster, and Sweat

Posted By on September 8, 2009

On Sunday it was just the three of us working: me, my dad, and my husband. We put in some hard labor and after several hours got very hungry. We’re not super familiar with the neighborhood yet, and although my husband and I knew where some fast food places were, my dad’s a vegetarian. So we had that to consider.

I remembered reading reviews for Noon O Kabab, and that it was just off the Kedzie stop on the Brown Line. So we headed out, all dirty and gross and paint-ed. We found the restaurant easily, and even found (meter) parking. And then we found that Noon O Kabab is actually kind of fancy. But then! We discovered that they have a take away stand a few doors away! We hustled over there.

I got the joujeh and koubideh combination with insanely tasty dill rice. Nesko got the chenjeh and joujeh combination which also had insanely tasty dill rice. My dad got Shirin Polo, again with insanely tasty dill rice. The portions were immense and the food was really good. Really very good. The meats were flavorful and juicy, the tomatoes were very ripe, and the rice as I mentioned was awesome. I had enough leftovers for a meal the next day. They also threw in a plate of greens and cheese. It included some very tasty, mild feta. The guys enjoyed the radishes and onions.

They deliver for a $2.00 charge (which is pretty cheap), and have a $15.00 minimum order, but that’s easy to reach. While the prices might look a bit much at first the ingredients are top notch and the portions are really large. It’s easy to get two meals out of each take away portion, unless you are unusually famished.

I absolutely want to order from them again, and am also looking forward to putting on some fancy clothes and eating in. They have baklava and other good looking desserts and I definitely want to sample them.

Category: Albany Park, restaurant, review | No Comments »
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Posted By on September 8, 2009

We worked all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and about half of Monday before knocking off to meet some out of town friends.

My dad tore out the bathroom ceiling on Saturday:

From 090809

From 090809

From 090809

It made quite a mess.

From 090809

It made several contractor’s garbage bags full of mess. Hopefully we can put up new drywall for that ceiling this weekend. I had wanted to install an exhaust fan, but as that would involve drilling through brick for the exhaust vent, forget about it. Too much time, not enough pay off.

From 090809

The living room is done except for the trim, built in shelves, and a spot of the ceiling that needs to be primed and painted. The color for the top of the walls is called “Cottage White” and is by Behr. We used it in the dining room, hallway, living room, and sun room. Two gallons covered those rooms just about perfectly; Nesko came thisclose to running out in the living room. We are still going to have to pick up more for the kitchen and the bathroom and the second coat in the hallway, though.

From 090809

The dining room is done except for the ceiling, upper (white) stretch of wall, and trim. The upper stretch of wall will be painted with ceiling paint.

From 090809

The sun room is done except for the central window’s trim and the base board.

The ceilings in the three bedrooms are painted. The walls are very, very filthy.

From 090809

This is the interior of a closet.

From 090809

This is a close up of the hand prints and dirt in it. I’m pretty sure that at some point someone had a toddler-sized mattress in the closet and a little kid slept in here.

From 090809

That closet also has a window. It’s the only closet that does. The window is openable but has been painted shut.

From 090809

This is a random corner. The flash washed out the darkness of the dirt on the walls. All the walls pretty much look like this– and this is after they’ve been washed down.

From 090809

Someone also installed a deadbolt on a bedroom door. A deadbolt. On a bedroom door. This is the same bedroom with the hand prints in the closet, btw. Not at all creepy. This is ALSO the only nice bedroom door. The other two are very cheap hollowcore doors. Of course they picked the nice, solid door to drill giant holes in.

From 090809

The bathroom door is, in theory, nice. It’s very filthy and it has handprints on it; I don’t know if you can see them. The wall behind the door, and the door frame, are also absolutely filthy. At one point (or at two separate points, I guess) the bathroom door had two different locks installed. I think one of them was a hook and eye lock and the other a hasp and padlock.

Tomorrow’s Wednesday, which is the day I go downtown to pick up my husband’s paycheck. This means it’s the day my mother in law takes the baby for the day. I’m going to spend the day (minus a noon-ish excursion for check pick up and deposit) painting the top half of the bedroom walls. This is more challenging than it sounds because I have an utterly ridiculous and irrational fear of heights. Going up a ladder really freaks me out. However, I’m so sick of our current apartment and its many flaws that I’m hoping that will trump my terror of ladders and falling to my death.

No, we do not have unusually high ceilings. I’m just crazybrain.

We have colors picked out for our bedroom and Nick’s bedroom. I don’t know what colors the office will be, because it’s essentially going to be painted with whatever pain we have left over.

In positive news, the roach population (or at least the VISIBLE roach population) is way down. The last few times we’ve been over there, we’ve only seen one roach total each visit, and each time that roach was a baby roach. The bait traps are apparently working really well, but I absolutely want to stay on top of the situation. Essentially, we’re going to act like we have roaches in an attempt to make an inhospitable living situation for them… keeping the place super clean, keeping food carefully packaged in non-paper or cardboard containers, replacing bait traps regularly, etc.

We’ve also determined that the “tin tiles” in the front entryway are actually textured wallpaper that’s been painted over. Which means it’ll be easy to replace, heh. We want to eventually tear out the plaster and lathe walls in the front entryway because they’re in bad shape and replace them with drywall. I’d like to put textured wallpaper up on the lower half of the walls again because those walls DO take a beating, and I think that will both strengthen the walls and help disguise the various knicks, dings, and dents those walls receive over the years. When looking online for textured wallpaper, I’ve found an awful lot of sites decrying textured wallpaper, which is kind of hilarious.

Category: cleaning, painting, previous tenants, roach abatement, tin tiles, wallpaper, walls | No Comments »
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Posted By on August 17, 2009

It thunder stormed all day today, which means I was unable to finish off laundry here at home. It’s supposed to be overcast but not rainy tomorrow, which means that in theory I can paint.

My mom and my youngest brother are coming up to help out tomorrow. Mom’s going to watch the baby, brother’s going to help me at the new apartment. The baby wrangling is especially helpful, because the apartment is so roachy that I absolutely don’t want to bring him there. If we didn’t have a roach problem, I’d set up the pack and play, pop him in it, and get to work. He’s good at amusing himself, and he takes at least one really long nap during the day. But the apartment is still foul, and I don’t want him there, so baby logistics are really complicating matters.

They are complicating matters so much that I had anxiety dreams all night involving huge shouting fights with my husband. We never fight. Not that we have some magical perfect unicorns-farting-rainbows marriage. We disagree about stuff, we have different opinions on stuff. But we don’t fight, and we aren’t cruel. And in the dreams, it was bitter and nasty and cruel and I kept waking up, all upset. And then when I tried to get to sleep again, my mind kept churning over all the stuff we have to do.

I really hope it doesn’t rain and isn’t crazy humid. If that’s the case, we can paint the sun room ceiling, and possibly paint the top half of the walls, and we can paint the utility room. Maybe Brendan can clean the ceiling/tops of the walls in the living room, and let it dry while he paints the sun room ceiling, and while he’s doing that I’ll paint the utility room (the ceiling in there is acoustic tiles/drop ceiling) and then start cleaning the hallway walls.

An old friend of mine is coming up on Wednesday, when it’s supposed to rain again. If it does rain, we can clean more walls/ceilings and caulk more.

There is so much to do, and I’m really feeling the time crunch. The biggest looming thing is the roaches. If we weren’t so infested, we could paint a few rooms and then start moving stuff over, storing it in those rooms. But I don’t want to give the roaches any more places to hide, or anything else to eat (paper, glue, that sort of thing). So we’re tripping over boxes at home and just, argh. ARGH. The second biggest looming thing is the weather, which is another thing we can’t control. We cannot paint if it’s raining. And lately, it hasn’t been just sprinkling, it’s been pouring. I worry we’re going to get badly behind schedule. If it were just a day or two of rain we could concentrate on cleaning during those days, but the entire week could well be lost to rain.

Oh, nature! Roaches and rain, making my life harder than it has to be.

Category: anxiety, baby wrangling, cleaning, family, painting, time, walls | No Comments »
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Posted By on August 16, 2009

My parents met us at the new apartment this morning so we could clean etc. I walked into the kitchen and saw a dead roach on the counter (not surprising, we have a roach problem). What was surprising was the tiny white somethings writhing around on top of it.

“UGH!” I hollered, like the classy woman I am, “I think we have MAGGOTS.”

My mom came in.

“Oh, those aren’t maggots, those are baby roaches. They just hatched.”

I really didn’t need to know what newly hatched roaches looked like.

She went on to point out that regardless of all the various and diverse poisons we put down, we’re still going to have roaches for a month or so AT LEAST because existing eggs will continue to hatch.

We have already put down COMBAT poison gel, RAID bait traps (with two types of food roaches love!), and three bug bombs/foggers of a brand I don’t remember. We also picked up a spray jug of Ortho roach spray, that you spray along walls and windows and stuff to both kill roaches and keep them out. On the plus side, every time we enter the apartment there’s less living roaches. On the negative side, I had to scrub roach poop off the counter with a scrub brush and those fuckers are EVERYWHERE.

Our current plan of action is:

Spray the front and back stairs/entryway with Ortho spray
Bug bomb/fog basement
Continue cleaning walls, ceiling, floor; removes all food sources for roaches while also removing scent trails
Double check that upstairs tenants have put down bait traps appropriately, have Nesko spray Ortho spray and put down poison gel
Paint ceiling, walls, trim
Spray walls, cabinets, windows, etc with Ortho Spray
Change out existing bait traps
Bug bomb/fog apartment AGAIN
Scrub down kitchen AGAIN
Wipe down all flat surfaces (windowsills, large trim, built in shelves, etc)
Hope it works

Category: cleaning, forbidden knowledge, roach abatement, vermin | No Comments »
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Posted By on August 11, 2009

From apartment_before

When Nesko and I first got a place together, we used The Apartment People. Nesko had worked with them in the past and felt that they were (and are) a quality, professional company that is good at matching people with what they want and need. They helped us find a large, sunny, apartment in our very tiny price range. We looked at a lot of apartments before we settled on that one, though.

Most of them had the same newel post in the top image. It seems pretty endemic to older buildings in Chicago. Did a specific company make them? During a specific year or time frame? Or were they just generic crap that everyone had access to and used? I must be using the wrong keywords and phrases in google because I can’t find anything out about them. When I look at newels at architectural salvage companies, they tend to be super fancy ones.

From apartment_before

I think these are tin wall tiles, but I’m not sure. Again, my googlefu is apparently weak, because I can’t find anything about tin wall tiles online except for modern fake-tin back splashes for kitchens. I used to work at a restaurant that had an embossed tin wall behind the stove and main work space, and behind the trash can. Part of my job involved scrubbing dried pasta sauce out of the embossing. I know that embossed tin walls and wall tiles exist, but I can’t find anything about them online.

There’s been damage to the tin part of the walls (and to the non tin part, but that’s easier to repair) and I’d like to repair or replace them. It’s hard to do that when you can’t find the product. At the very least we’ll sand down the plaster/spackle so it’s smoother and then paint over the whole thing.

From apartment_before

I like the red color on the tin tiles, but it at the very least needs to be touched up. The wall above desperately needs painting. The carpet on the stairs needs to be replaced. The stairwell is dim, and could stand a stronger light source–especially in the winter.

The building has good bones, and a lot of original features have been left untouched. I’m looking forward to digging in.

Category: common areas, front stairwell, restoration, tin tiles, walls | No Comments »
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