Pseudo bathroom makeover

With Clint being ridiculously busy in preparation for his show, I realized this weekend I either drown Clint in a cacophony of “I’m bored”, or I could figure out a way to keep myself busy. With less than three months away from the big due date you may be asking “Is she finally getting around to the nursery?” In short, the answer to that is no, for a variety of reasons. As much as I want to get it done, it is by far the most complicated room with needs ranging from electrical to wood stripping, all of which lie outside my area of expertise or outside the range of safety for me to take part in while pregnant. Much of that will wait until after Clint’s big show, which is now only a little more than a week away.

Instead I turned my sights to the crowning jewel of hideousness in our house- the bathroom. We have long been holding out on doing anything to this area for several reasons, the most critical being that we loathe doing anything (and spending the money on something) twice. As many of you know, in the bathroom lies the water heater- walled in like the ancient artifact it is. It’s long past it’s prime so we’ve literally been waiting for the whole thing to go. At that point we’re planning on putting a tankless heater in the crawlspace, and rearranging to the floorplan in a much more usable manner. We’ll also address issues like the lack of a ventilation fan for the humidity, the area where floor slopes towards the water heater because of it’s weight, and the subfloor where the toilet has sunken into it. As you can see this is not a small job.

When we moved into the house almost a year ago I was planning on doing a quick and dirty makeover. Pull down the wallpaper which was literally held up by thumbtacks, paint the walls white, and live with it until the water heater necessitated otherwise. Like many projects with the house, I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into until the paper came down. It took with it layers of paint in some areas, the drywall paper in others, and it left behind its backing in bits and pieces. Any attempts to remedy this resulted in losing more drywall paper, which ultimately has to be mudded over before painting. Not wanting to put the effort into something we know we’re going to gut, we left it and have been living with it for a year, affectionately referring to it as our “meth lab”.

Flash forward to this weekend where I was a. threatened with boredom, and b. probably going through some early nesting. In short I decided to take on what we’re calling our “ghetto makeover”. I’ll wait for details until I can post pictures and I get the last few pieces wrapped up, but all in all I will say, it looks much better, although to be fair, there’s almost nothing I could have done to make it look worse.

Operation "Vacation": Day 6 & 8

It is done. The problem that has been plaguing us since- well since we bought the house is now officially taken care of. I'm referring, of course, to our crumbling chimney, or what once was our chimney anyway. We were to the point where we would cringe every time the wind blow hard enough or a storm came through, expecting to hear the rumblings of bricks showering down from our house onto our neighbor's. We got a few estimates from chimney companies to do the work, and they ranged from a shocking $2,500 to $4,000. We took this conundrum to the all knowing family, who promptly sent a team up to help. We cannot say enough about how grateful we are for their help, or the value of their collective expertise. They even brought their own lunch thanks to Grandma!

Day 1 began by taking care of the active wasp nest (and the wasps themselves) settled just under the peak of the roof.


Then came the demolition. John became quite adept at making sure the debris fell on the correct side of the house, and aiming the bricks as he tossed them down so they landed squarely in our yard.


After he came down he showed us what was left of the mortar, in essence it was the equivalent of taking a handful of crackers and crumbling them in your hand.

Following this the team quickly mobilized to clean up the yard and dispose of the bricks. The chimney was taken below the roofline...


...and the hole was covered enough to keep out rain, which naturally sprang up. Plans were made to return Saturday to finish the job.

In the meantime Clint and I spent much time trying to figure out what to do with the rusted-through exhaust pipe for the furnace. The long and short of it is that we'll more than likely go with a 90% furnace that vents out the side, rather than pay half that cost to get our chimney and exhaust up to code (I suppose that's important with the baby coming and all). We're a bit early on the furnace, it's only 14 years old and expected to last 15-20 but we'd rather spend the money on something we would have to eventually, than throw half of it away in a short-term solution that would only last as long as the existing furnace. So after consultation with the family, it was decided that Saturday's work would consist of closing off the roof.

They all returned in the morning and got straight to work. Unfortunately it was a sweltering 90 degrees, which wasn't much fun for anyone, particularly those seated on the roof.


They wrapped it all up by early afternoon, and as quickly as they came, packed up their tools and were off. There is no way I could put into words what a relief it is to no longer have to worry about that, and especially how wonderful it is to not have to pay thousands of dollars out to have it done. We are incredibly grateful to have so many that not only have the talent, skills, and know-how to do it, but also the generous hearts to come up for two days to help us out. Thank you Grandpa, Bob, John, Andy & Robby.

Operation "Vacation": Day 5 revisited

We're a day behind in posting so bear with us while we catch up.

Day 5 was the official finishing of the closet. We laughed about how when first considering the project I thought it was a weekend job. Weekend...or a little over two months of weekends. In retrospect we realized how much we were biting off- getting an electrician in to wire through a wall 3/4" thick with lathe and plaster, repairing an almost 2 foot hole in the wall, installing what was in the end a rather complex shelving system, laying flor carpet tiles which had to be individually measured and cut to 1/16th of an inch in order to fit properly, cutting, staining and shellacing trim both around the door and the baseboards, and finally, Clint putting his crowning touches on the furnace pipe. But enough about the work, let's admire the results.

Here's the before of the closet floor:


and the after:


Looking towards the door:




Here's the trim around the door installed (note the nice patching job above):


And finally- Clint's flourishes:





A little bit of background on those... this spring Clint travelled with miranda sound to Dubuque IA where they stayed at the Julien Inn. On their way the bassist, sean, informed the group that it was a hotel once owned by Mr. Al Capone and often used as a hideout when things got "too hot". This pattern appeared on wallpaper in the hotel and Clint was quite taken with it. So here we have it replicated in a painstakingly hand-painted manner. Yes, we fully realize this is a closet, that is a furnace pipe, and it is a lot of work for something others will rarely see, but we see it, and we love it. If you were here for the graduation party this May, and were one of the people who had to stack your coat in a pile, on a chair, in the dust-filled closet- you have to admit- we've come a long way.

Operation "Vacation": Day 4 revisited

We obviously didn't make our nightly posting so I'll try to do a quick recap. This one will be short and sans pictures because our plan is to finish up the closet this morning, at which point we'll post the pictures of the final product. Yesterday we managed to sand and recoat the mud, give the closet it's final coat of paint and touchups, Clint finished what we're calling "the flourishes" (you'll see). We wiped down the floors and walls (it's amazing how much dust the sanding generates) and continued our work with the flor tiles. I was convinced we could get it done last night, but after 4 short hours of tediously cutting carpet squares we headed out for some bbq and fireworks. We have about 5 more tiles to cut, then we install the whole thing- put in the shelving system and we're done. Pictures soon.

Operation "Vacation": Day 4 in progress

Let me say how disturbing ;) it was to have the first piece of "artwork" we hang be one of my posters. Unfortunately, it matches what we had done perfectly (serendipitously so). That, and it's also hard to argue with a pregnant lady (not that I put up that much of a fight).

MORE TONIGHT!

Operation "Vacation": Day 3

Although we started the day off a bit slow, and took many breaks to run errands for food and tools, we actually ended up getting quite a bit accomplished, although admittidly not as much as we were hoping for. As Clint pointed out though, it was much more than we would have gotten done had we both been at work.

We often mentioned the closet and I know it seems like it should be done by now (believe me- I know) nevertheless we've had a seemingly endless to do list for that room. Having the professional acrobat/electrician gut part of the wall didn't help the list any, so that's where we started.

We cut a giant drywall patch and hammered it in creating a rainstorm of plaster. We then applied a combination of drywall tape and plaster in a way that I can only describe as haphazard and full of complete disregard for any norms of perfection. That should be dry by our child's fifth birthday (hopefully) at which point we can sand, put a final coat on, and paint.


The next step was filling in some missing boards around the furnace return pipe, and levelling out the floor with shims.


We weren't kidding around with those:


Finally we got started installing the Flor tiles. These are 17" carpet squares we're putting down for as you might recall, when the floors were refinished they couldn't put the drum sander in the closet for fear of crashing through the crawl space door. I'll admit I thought this was going to be way easier.


Put simply, it's not- in fact it's one of the more difficult things we've done so far. 3 hours later we have 6 (of 14) installed. We're quite optimistic about tomorrow though, we're hoping we now have the hang of it.

Operation "Vacation": Day 1 & 2

About a month ago, we both took off this week for an anniversary/4th of July trip to Ocean City, MD. As the week got closer and we started considering finances, the state of the house, my increasing girth and anticipation of how much harder it will be to do things as the months go on, and the need to get certain things done by the time baby reno arrives- we decided that instead we would declare war on the house and see how much we could get done in a week. At the end of day 2, I must say, we're pretty
optimistic. Although we're deliberately avoiding setting expectations of what the place will look like in a week, if the last two days are any indication we just might have the place done. Of course I'm kidding, but seriously- these have been two of the more productive days we've had in the new place- and that's saying a lot.

We started in the dining room, largely because I was itching to see what the new rug would look like down. We took it out of its packaging for the first time Friday night, and decided the walls might look good green. Since with all the renovations we've practically duplicated Sherwin Williams' wall of paint samples in our home, we went to our stash and picked out "Lemongrass", and thus we were off. In the last two days we did copious amounts of mudding and spackling, painted the ceiling, painted three of the walls green, one wall brown, and the cubby hole clay. After this was done we realized we had some prints that would look great, and proceeded to hang our first pieces of artwork in the house (only about 1 year later!) And I must humbly say, it all looks fantastic. Keep in mind the trim is a ways off from being done in this room, thus you have the unpainted areas around all the doors and floors which will one day be covered.

This was where we were mid-Sunday morning-



and our progress by early evening-



Per the usual for us this meant working through our anniversary, but we decided that making progress on the house was the best gift we could give each other. We did get the chance to head to dinner and we tiredly celebrated 2 years together. They have flown by, but they have been so much more than we could have asked for.



Our goal this week is to post our progress at the end of the night so stay tuned to see what we get to next!