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Taylor Homestead: The Old Lady Gets a Facelift and a New Dress

A front view, after Antonio worked his paint magic.

In the last update about the Taylor Homestead, we told you that the nearly 100-year-old pier-and-beam house had been jacked up and leveled. Which is a great thing when a house is about 2 to 3 inches out of level from one side of the house to the other. Since that time, we’ve had a couple of substantial, rare-for-Texas-summer rainstorms, including, thankfully, just a brush with Hurricane Harvey. Taylor got anywhere between 4 and 6 inches of rain and wind gusts not much higher than 35 mph during Harvey. As the project manager, I’ve kept my eye on the sparrow—AKA the level—and am happy to report no movement in our foundation. Also, none of the many trees surrounding the house came down or caused any damage to the house or the outbuildings. Whew!

We still need to build a berm around the Taylor Homestead to prevent, or at least stem, future significant movement of the foundation (it’s going to move—all houses do—but we want to keep that movement to a minimum), but that won’t be done until nearly the end of the project since there will be a lot of people working and walking around the perimeter of the house, probably stomping down the berm, which would defeat its intended purpose.

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Roadrunner Update: Week 4

Water in the drain pan of the water heater.

The water heater didn’t survive cycling the water pressure. Looks like a new one is in order.

Ruben and crew made good progress on the Roadrunner house since last week. As with almost every project I’ve ever worked on, we’re falling behind schedule. But that’s because we keep spending “invisible money” to make things right. And we found more places to spend it.

More often than not, turning off the water to a house exposes a problem with the water heater. While it is in use, water pressure keeps any rust in the tank pressed tightly against the tank walls. When the pressure is eliminated, the rust can settle to the bottom of the tank, exposing small holes in the tank wall. These holes leak when you turn the water back on.

This problem happens often enough that we budget for it in every renovation. If the tank survives cycling the water pressure, that money goes into the contingency budget and often fixes other problems, and the water heater is usually good for years. When it doesn’t survive, we replace the water heater, and our budget isn’t killed with an unplanned expense.

A man sprays texture.

Grillo sprays texture on the walls. When he’s done, the texture throughout the house will be consistent and beautiful. He always does a good job.

Last week I mentioned we had five different textures on the drywall. When skim coating and floating, we discovered that some of the drywall had not been installed correctly, and that caused undulations to telegraph through the skim coat. We removed that, fixed the underlying problems, and reinstalled new drywall—all so we could re-texture it and continue working.

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Meadow Arbor Nears Completion

Painters are a-painting!

Not all our news is bad! We are keeping updated on the Meadow Arbor project, and our project manager (and contractor), Frank, reports that the exterior painting is almost done (there were a few rain delays, but we can’t complain about rain). The house looks very nice.

Inside, he was painting the very tall chimney and taking care of a few extra details. We look forward to photos of the finished interior soon, and to putting this one on the market in a week or two.

The best news, though, is we plan to make an offer on the house right across the street, so Frank can move straight on to another project and use the same vendors and sources he found for the first Meadow Arbor. It pays to network with the neighbors, which is exactly what he did! We strongly believe in making friends with the folks around the houses we work on, just for these reasons.

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Colorful Concepts

Colors keep coming into my consciousness. You may remember I wrote an article on Bobcat Lair color recently. That put me on alert.

I was reading an article in one of my numerous home decorating magazines this weekend, and I came across an article on the trendy colors of the moment. I think it was the print version of this article in House Beautiful. I always look to see if any of the colors I’m using in current projects are popular at the moment. I was rather surprised to see versions of all the colors I’m using in the Bobcat house were in the article, because I literally just grabbed the colors off the giant paint color wand lying around the house.

Most of the Bobcat Lair photos are in this picture.

Colors and Me

Now, most of the house is painted a creamy white, whose name is lost in the mists of my memories of 2014. I’d like to THINK it is a pale shade of mushroom, because I love mushroom. There are also many walls of a medium-light gray that we mixed ourselves to coordinate with the kitchen cabinets. The accent walls are, to say the least, pretty perky for the most part. As a reminder, these are most of the accent colors we are using, minus the grays that we mixed ourselves (see color cards!):

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