Meet our grande olde livinge roome.

We realized on our last drive to Brooklyn that there are still 5 rooms of our house that we haven’t showed on our shelter blog:

• Upstairs bathroom
  This was updated a few years before us and is majorly boh-ring.
• Downstairs bathroom
  Hot mess.
• Kitchen
  The only thing that’s functioning in there currently is our fridge. If it wasn’t for our grill and rice cooker, we’d probably have starved to death by now.
• Dining room
  Currently my office / our living room. Ugly, but functional.
• Living room
  Currently our bedroom while we renovate upstairs. Uh-may-zing, but needs a lot of work.

Most of these rooms are in such a state of disarray — ahem, downstairs bathroom — that it’s totally embarrassing putting them out there on the interwebz. And there’s that whole weird thing of having your coworkers see your bedroom. Are we the only ones who find that awkward? For the sake of keeping it real, though, we’re gonna put it all out there. Fast. Like ripping a band-aid. Ready? Deep breath. This is the view from the doorway connecting the living and dining rooms:

The ceilings are enormongous — 10’3″ tall — and the bed is queen-sized, if that helps put a scale to things.

If you ignore the burgundy carpet, the room is kinda beautiful. The huge windows with their thick, dark woodwork. The plaster ceiling medallion. Even the damask wallpaper that’s so old that it’s come into and gone out of and come back into fashion several times.

We’re not huge fans of wallpaper, but we fell in love with this white-and-gold pattern so much that we’re considering re-wallpapering the living room with something similar. If we can find damask wallpaper that doesn’t add up to $1000+ for the room. Yiish! Who know wallpaper was so pricey?

The ceiling is in rough shape. It’s covered in wallpaper and has some sags and cracks going on. The plaster needs a little love. In any other room in the house, we’d just rip out the lathe and plaster and put up a fresh, new ceiling, but not in this room. We love the old world olde worlde feel of the room, so we’re going to keep all of the old school details — the huge plaster medallion, the trim, the woodwork, etc. So, yeah, in short: this room is going to be a huge pain in the butt to remodel. We’re probably going to save it for the last room we redo.

Remember when we talked about furniture designer swag? Here’s another one of those perks that ended up in our house:

My shoe closet! This cabinet was a custom piece for a client who loved high heels (yeah, yeah, stereotypical New Yorker!). All of the shelves are adjustable and tilt down to accommodate different heel heights. I fit 19 pairs in there, and the rest are still in boxes. Or, um, stacked on / around / in front of the radiator.

The radiator is easily the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s been painted a flat gold, and we might keep it that way.

Next to the radiator is our closet:

Insert saddest face of all time here.

It’s true: we’re still living out of wardrobe boxes. A lot of our stuff is in boxes in the attic or in the garage, but that’ll start to change once we finish up the office and guest bedroom. We’ll move into those 2 rooms and be able to spread out a little more. Anyway, if you ignore the boxes and the carpet, you’ll be able to see a hint of the woodwork in the room. We’ll get better pictures on a sunny / less overcast day and share them — it’s pretty awesome.

We plan on refinishing the 2 grey pieces of furniture. The one on the left is a shelf full of our jeans, and the one on the right is an old, old dresser we found & reclaimed. The dresser needs new pulls and the drawers are a little tight, but those are pretty easy fixes. And, as is the case with most reclaimed furniture, paint will make the biggest difference.

Here’s another piece of reclaimed furniture we found and finished:

This used to be a very hideous 1940s-grandma-green dresser. We sanded it, stained it, lacquered it and gave it some fancy new pulls. The dresser itself cost $0, and the redo cost about $20 in supplies. Expect to see more of that ’round these parts!

We’re also in the process of redoing our bed, which is why it looks a little funky at the base. We have an IKEA Sultan Alsarp:

Source

Al, for short. The entire base lifts up hydraulically to reveal a whole lotta storage underneath. Perfect apartment bed! Unfortunately for us, there was an incident, and we’re stripping down the cushioned base and replacing it. IKEA hack time! So far, we’ve removed the foam, and that’s the yellow stuff you can see in the picture of the black dresser. That’s all the detail I’ll go into for now — it’s coming up soon!

In other news, our staircase now looks like this:

Drywall is up from top to bottom! And the hallways windows have corner beads:

We had a plasterer come in and give us a very, very reasonable estimate. She seemed totally profesh, came highly recommended, and she’s showing up tomorrow to plaster the office, guest bedroom, hallway and down the stairs. This means we might be painting this weekend. Bradley hyperventilated when he realized what this means: we finally get to use that paint spraygun we picked up 3 months ago! Squee!! So. Excited.

Other stuff going on with us:

• We’re already well into the planning & prep stages for the laundry room / downstairs bathroom.
  We finally came to a decision on the whole bathtub debate and will be doing a bulk supply order in a couple of weeks. Our plan is to start working on those 2 rooms while the floor paint dries upstairs. Not gonna lie: I’m sick of taking pictures of the same 2 rooms. It’ll be so great to switching things up!
• We just got a lot of uber-fancy new furniture.
  We have to fill up a 2000+ square foot house, and it’s no easy task. We’ve been lusting over some pieces that Bradley’s company makes, and last month, we decided to take the plunge. We worked out a deal with Bradley’s boss and got a bunch of furniture at wholesale cost. Score!! We traded in one full month of Bradley’s paychecks for 6 dining room chairs, a media cabinet, a coffee table, a small bench and a bunch of nesting trays. We’ll share pictures of all of that soon.

The Smurf has new clothes.

When we last left the Smurf room, it was looking a little naked:

With the lathe and plaster gone, all that separated us from the outside world was one layer each of wood and brick. Terrifying. We were pretty lucky — the wood in our 130-year old house is really well-preserved. We don’t have to replace the wood, but we do have a little crack situation:

We went upstairs early on Sunday morning to start insulating the Smurf room and found a bunch of gaps around our window sills. We could see the sunlight pouring in through the cracks. Yipes.

It’s hard for us to imagine that people have lived in this house for 130 years without proper insulation. Or maybe we’re just wusses. We couldn’t live like that. Our area of Pennsylvania gets cold in the winter. Not the-barren-arctic-tundra-of-Minnesota level of cold that Bradley grew up with, but still colder than New York City. So once the walls were stripped bare, we wanted to make sure they were properly sealed up once and for all.

We stocked up on fiberglass insulation and foam insulation. The foam insulation comes in a few different kinds — we picked up a couple of cans each of window & door foam and gap & crack foam. Then we got to work sealing up all the cracks around our windows:

Is it weird that I craved a Starbucks latte with whipped cream the entire time we sprayed insulation?

Not that I have the luxury of a Starbucks on every street corner anymore. The nearest one is 9.8 miles away. The second nearest? 16.3 miles. Good news for both my wallet and my thighs. Bad news for the Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away, where I will make demands the likes of which they have never experienced.

Some sweet, small-town kid is going to the suffer the wrath of an early morning Starbucks-deprived part-time New Yorker. My Manhattan glare and a “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN’T MAKE ME AN EXTRA FOAMY GRANDE SKINNY VANILLA LATTE WITH 2 PUMPS OF SUGAR-FREE VANILLA??” Or, more likely, he will try not to laugh in my face as I beg him for a shot of whipped cream on my plain old coffee with skim milk, no sugar.

Jabba came running at the sound of the spray foam, probably also thinking it was something food-related:

We’re simpatico like that, always thinking with our tummies. She stood in the middle of the room and cocked her head side to side with every spray. Then she found a sunny patch and fell asleep for 6 hours. That dog leads a rough life, I tell ya.

After we sealed up all the spots around our windows, we foamed the big gaps in between the wood slats. Some of these gaps were so big, we could stick our fingers through and touch the brick on the other side.

The foam went from being soft and tacky to dry and hard in about 15 minutes. After that, we brought out the fiberglass. We decided to go with a formaldehyde-free brand:

In all honesty, we don’t know if the formaldehyde-containing insulation is really, truly bad for our health. The white stuff claims to be better for the house’s air quality, but I work in advertising and I know a thing or two about jazzing up a statistic. I’m equal parts skeptical and cynical. At any rate, the formaldehyde-free stuff wasn’t any pricier than the regular stuff, so we decided to get it. We plan on living here for a while, so we figured we might as well go with the stuff that doesn’t have any cancer-causing ingredients. Better safe than sorry.

Bradley put up the first strip of insulation to show me how it’s done. First he placed the insulation between the studs and made sure it was tightly butted up against the ceiling:

Then he unfolded the sides so the paper sat on top of the studs:

That’s my thumb, not Bradley’s. I wasn’t joking about giving up manicures until this house renovation stuff is over. I’d rather have dirt under my fingernails and a few hangnails than deal with chipped polish. I’m an all-or-nothing kinda girl. Besides, I Googled the nearest place to get a mani/pedi, and lets just say it would be easier to get an extra foamy grande skinny vanilla latte with 2 shots of sugar-free vanilla.

Next, Bradley started at the top and stapled the paper to the stud, making sure to pull it tightly to avoid wrinkles and gaps:

Once he got to the bottom, Bradley lined a spare piece of wood across the insulation and flattened it out. Then he used a knife to cut through the paper and insulation:

And he stapled across the bottom:

The final product was a wall segment with an R-value of 13:

Our area recommends an R-value between 13 to 15, so this is enough for the walls. We have a tendency to go overboard, though — why do it when you can overdo it? — so we came up with a way to sneak in a little extra R-value. We’ll get to that in a minute.

In the meantime, we re-used the R-13 fiberglass insulation we found in the house:

Reduce, reuse, re-insulate:

While I took over insulating with the new rolls, Bradley went to work sealing up the tighter spots where the full strip of batting wouldn’t fit. He removed the reclaimed insulation from its paper backing, and stuffed it in the smaller spots.

He covered the loose insulation with vapor barrier, and taped the plastic to the surrounding paper:

My insulating skills were pretty fantastic as well:

The paper is pulled tight and sits flush against the floors. Each strip of batting was gently tucked into place and all gaps filled with spare insulation or foam. And you better believe all of my staples were perfectly aligned in a row, 2 inches apart, OCD style. It’s nice to know that if I ever get sick of the art direction scene, I can go be a master insulator instead. If there is such a thing as a master insulator. Insulation Director. Chief Insulator. …I’d better just stick to advertising till I figure out a better title.

Now, back to that R-value business. We could have gone with insulation with a higher R-value, but we didn’t for 2 reasons.

1. We’re cheap. We weren’t ready to shell out the dough for a costly spray insulation.
2. We didn’t want to lose any more space in this room.

Yes, spray insulation is the best thing since sliced bread and it saves a ton of money over time. But it’s also very pricey. We have a pay-for-our-renovations-in-cash policy, and spending that kind of moolah right now just isn’t going to work for us. Not when we have a bajillion other things to renovate.

We could have just gotten thicker fiberglass insulation, but then it would be thicker than our studs. This means we would have had to build out our walls to be 6″ thick. The Smurf room is already teeny-weeny, and we didn’t want it to shrink any further. Plus we were feeling a little lazy. Framing walls is a lot of work.

The solution we came up with is to use a styrofoam insulation on top of our fiberglass insulation:

At a mere 1″ thick, these aluminum-faced sheets of insulation pack a serious punch. Each sheet adds an R-value of 6, so together with the fiberglass batting, we get an R-value of 19. Above and beyond the 13-15 that’s recommended for our area.

Added bonus: the aluminum-faced insulation is super easy to work with! We loved how lightweight it is. It was easy to carry from the garage, through the house and up the stairs to the cutting workstation in the guest bedroom.

We used a boxcutter and a makeshift ruler to score the full sheet. Then we snapped the sheet along the cut and sliced through the other side:

We also use a sheetrock saw to easily cut outlet holes:

Once the sheet was cut to the right size, we popped it in place right on top of the fiberglass insulation:

Bradley used his foot to gently nudge the sheet into place. Then I used grip-cap nails to nail the sheet to the stud:

Regular nails have the potential of damaging the foam. Grip-caps have a plastic ring around them that keeps the nail from going right through the foam:

The cap sits almost flush with the foam, but doesn’t rip the aluminum around it.

We did have a couple of incidents where the hammer missed the nail and ripped a hole in the aluminum. And by we I actually mean me. And by missed the nail I actually mean completely missed it by at least 2 inches because I was too busy freaking out about a wasp trying to get in through a window. Whoopsie doodle. Butterfingers.

That problem giant hole was easily fixable. We used a metallic tape to bandage up our boo-boos:

Right around this point, my photography got a little dodgy. Shiny metal is hard to photograph, y’all. And I’m still teaching my camera who’s boss. Go with the flow here.

Once we reached a corner, we used the metallic tape to seal the crack:

With Bradley cutting and setting sheets and me nailing and taping them, we had the entire room covered in metallic insulation. We were on fire.

And then we were on fire. As in melting. It was a 90-degree day and we had all of the windows open in the Smurf room, so we weren’t exactly freezing up there to begin with. But with the added metallic insulation, the sun reflected off of every surface in the room and we had ourselves a nice little sweatbox. It must have been over 100 degrees in the room. We were drenched in sweat and dehydrated by the time we were done.

Even after the sun went down, the room stayed warm. We noticed that if we stood really close to the insulation, we could feel our own body heat bounce back. In a nutshell, we discovered that the metallic insulation works really, really well. Too well. We were overheating, and couldn’t wait to get the sheetrock up on the walls.

The next day, we turned our attention to this:

That, I’m sorry to say, is the Smurf room ceiling. It’s textured. And hideous. The ceiling is so low (under 8 feet) that you can see every crusty detail. Since I work from home and the Smurf room will be my office, we knew we had to either demolish the ceiling or cover it up. Otherwise I’ll never get any work done. I’ll just sit in the office and stare at the ceiling all day, wishing I could sledgehammer it to smithereens.

It was a now-or-never moment because we had to sheetrock the ceiling before we could sheetrock the walls. The walls will help take some of the weight off of the ceiling sheetrock — that’s why the ceiling comes first.

So we went for it:

Getting the sheetrock up was pretty easy. Bradley grabbed one side and I grabbed the other. We lifted the sheetrock up over us and balanced it on our heads while I grabbed my homemade T-bar:

Then Bradley stepped up on an upside-down bucket and we both pushed the sheetrock up to the ceiling. I used the T-bar to hold my side of the ceiling up while Bradley put screws through the sheetrock right up through the plaster and lathe ceiling. He did his side first and then my side. I got a little break for my arms and shoulders while he finished putting up screws. Then we did it all over again with a new piece of sheetrock.

Putting up a ceiling isn’t a particularly hard job, but we wouldn’t recommend doing it alone. Or if you’re not strong enough to hold weight up over your head for 5+ minutes at a time. We would also recommend using a T-bar that is as tall as your ceilings. Ours was only about 4 feet tall, so I basically had to hold it up using arm and shoulder strength. All of my gym-time was totally put to work that day. It’s obviously not impossible to do, but we still wouldn’t recommend it for big rooms — better to have a T-bar that goes all way way from the ceiling to the floor.

My favorite part of the new ceiling process was covering up this gross looking hole where a light will someday hang:

Ta-da! It instantly felt cleaner. Or at least less grody.

One thing worth mentioning is that we staggered our sheetrock. So one sheet would butt up against the right wall, and the next sheet would butt up against the left wall.

This is in case the ceiling ever sags or a seam ever pops. It won’t rip the sheetrock all the way across the length of the room — it’ll just rip until the seam ends. This makes life way easier in case we ever have to repair our ceiling.

Once we had the big sheets up, we went back and added in smaller pieces of sheetrock to the gaps along the left and right walls:

When we were finished, the ceilings looked like this:

We were super proud of our tight seams. They’ll be easy to tape and mud over, and we love it when things are easy. We also love how clean the ceiling-meets-brick area looks now:

We don’t even need a corner bead to clean up the edge because the cut is so perfectly straight.

The whole room feels so fresh and clean without the 4 Smurf-blue walls. It feels bigger, sunnier, more modern.

And definitely less Smurf-y.

We still have to sheetrock the closet and the one remaining blue wall. We also need to replace all 3 windows in the Smurf room with new double-pane low-E windows. After that, it’s just a matter of taping, mudding and getting the walls and ceiling ready to paint. We’re pretty geeked about that last part. Why? Because we’re going to spray paint our walls with our new Graco spray gun!

Get excited, peeps. We are!

What we learned from our insulation adventure:

• Those leathery old ladies who tan with reflectors are onto something. Bradley and I got a little color while insulating the Smurf room!
• We found that the formaldehyde-free fiberglass insulation didn’t make our skin super itchy like the pink stuff did. Either way, it’s probably a good idea to wear long sleeves while handling the batting.
• It took 4 full cans of spray foam insulation for us to seal up an 8.5′x15′ room. And that’s the smallest one in our house. Better buy stock in Great Stuff pronto — we have a lot of insulating to do.

The ugliest room in our house.

We’ve publicly shared some pretty hideous features of our house on Bye Bye Brooklyn. No shame in our game. Our house has 130 years of history in its walls, and some pretty crappy design decisions were made along the way. We’re not worried. The house has really good bones, and it’ll be fabulous in no time.

Still, there is one room that grosses us out so badly that we seriously considering not sharing the before pictures. For the sake of keeping it real, though, we have to document the crustiest of the crusty.

Deep breath. Here we go:

This is the back door to our house, which is actually the door we use most often. It leads out to our back yard and garage, and leads in to the kitchen.

This room’s main purpose at the moment is for sunbathing:

That’s Jabba. She’s not much of a DIYer, but she’s a professional napper. While we’re upstairs demolishing rooms, she’s downstairs sunbathing and snoozing. Or interrupting to remind us it’s lunchtime:

She hangs out in the entryway a lot because it gets great sunlight through its super-ghetto windows:

Someone repaired that glass with clear packing tape. You can hardly see the crack, right? Right??

We’ve also been using this room as a place to store our recycling:

Our bike locks and helmets were thrown in here as well:

The windows overlook the ugly trellis that we’ll be ripping down:

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are no walls. Whoever renovated this room (and I’m using the word “renovated” very loosely), did a pretty terrible job of insulating. Everything is sort of crunched in and mushed down (total no-no), and they never got around to sheetrocking the walls. Or the ceiling:

One cool thing about this room is the exposed brick that’s been painted white:

Here it is on the other wall:

Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That’s not brick. Those are shingles. As in, the stuff that’s supposed to go on the outside of your house. The entire wall is covered with shingles that were painted white to “match” the brick:

All of those black spots you see on the shingles are places where we pulled out nails. The dorm fridge is what we lived out of before we got our shiny new fridge. Not gonna lie: that was a rough couple of weeks. You can also take a gander at our washer & dryer hookup.

We’ve been excited about having a laundry room pretty much since we started looking at houses to buy. We daydreamed about living the kind of life where we could wash our clothes while watching a movie. Throw our wash in the dryer without navigating through screaming kids running laps around the laundromat. Leave our laundry in the dryer overnight. And — oh, bliss — never ever again having to wear bathing suit bottoms as underwear because we’ve been too busy to drag our hampers across the street to the stupid, noisy laundromat.

Anyway, on the shingled wall, you can see a poorly sealed doorway (and even more nails):

Apparently this room was once connected to our half-bathroom, which was also recently “renovated.” It’s nowhere near as horrible as the laundry room, but it’s not pretty either. We’re guessing this space used to be an outdoor porch, and someone converted it into a half-bath and laundry room. And they did a pretty horrible job of it. To seal up the doorway, for instance, they just nailed a piece of plywood to the frame, painted it white, and called it a day.

There is one thing we plan on keeping from this room:

Bradley’s pretty indifferent about it, but I kind of love that faceplate. Can’t you see it painted bronze and looking really fabulous in another room? It’s one of those just-so-weird-it-might-work things that we’re going to try, and if it doesn’t work, then in the trash it goes.

We also found a thermometer in the room:

The Royal Order of Moose? Garbage.

Ugly light? Garbage.

Wait, no, we take that back. This might be salvageable. Capiz shell is all the rage right now, and with new fittings for the inside and a better way to hang it — a way that doesn’t include a cheap brass chain — we might make this work. Maybe. If we’re not totally smash-happy by the time we start renovating this room, in which case, it’ll probably die a horrible sledgehammer-related death.

We’re not really ready to renovate this room yet (we have a one-room-at-a-time policy), but we needed to get that stained carpet out. Luckily, this was a poorly done DIY job. It’s a theme in this room. So we didn’t have to rip up any carpet tacks or deal with any glue. Someone just used a stapler to staple the carpet to the wood. And we’re not sure they used a real staple gun. They looked like normal office staples. Moral of the story: people are weird.

The carpet came up easily, and underneath, we found a perfect preserved  Jackson Pollock painting!

Upon closer examination, though, we found that this was not a Pollock but a cheap knock-off by Scott:

Oh well. You can’t win ‘em all. Or, apparently, you can’t win at all with this room.

…just kidding! When it comes down to it, it’s still a laundry room. And a useable one now that we put a washer and dryer in it:

Whee! When I snapped that picture, those puppies were hooked up and doing one of the four loads of laundry we did that day. No bathing suit bottoms up in this hizzy!

We initially planned on buying new front loaders, but since we decided to splurge on kitchen appliances, we cut back on our laundry room budget. After reading a lot of reviews, we decided that maybe front loaders weren’t that great for us. I’m extremely allergic to mold. We’re sure other people are having great mold-free results with their front loaders, but we’re not going to risk it.

After looking at a lot of top loaders, we decided to buy a used set off of Craigslist.  So many people are getting rid of their 2 or 3-year-old top loaders in order to buy new front loaders. There are tons of deals to be had, plus buying used keeps perfectly-good machines out of landfills. By going to Craigslist, we were able to be both eco-conscious and budget-conscious.

How budget-conscious? Drumroll please! We got our machines for……$150 each! $300 for the set — and there’s nothing at all wrong with ‘em. We’d actually given ourselves a much-higher budget of $1200, so we technically saved ourselves $900.

As far as renovating this room goes, it’s pretty low on our list right now. But we’re already talking about doing a very light, airy look for both this room and the adjoining half-bathroom. Something modern but beachy. We’re taking our cues from the white brick wall and thinking white paneled walls and minimalist cabinetry. We’re also planning on keeping the floors light — either white or light grey — to contrast with the black floors throughout the house.

And, while we know there’s no room in our half-bath for a claw foot tub, we think this works beautifully:

Source

No rush. We’ll get to it when we get to it. For now, we’re sticking to the upstairs renovations. But we’re super excited that we can do our laundry while we’re working on the rest of the house. Or watching movies. Or going out for dinner. Or sleeping…

What we learned from this project:

• We don’t know who Scott is, but we want to have a long talk with him.
• Everyone’s jumping on the front loader bandwagon, which is great for the rest of us who don’t mind an energy efficient machine that’s a couple of years old. Check Craigslist!

Say goodbye to the Smurf room!

The Smurf room may be tiny in comparison to our other bedrooms, but we have big, big plans for it. And, like a lot of our plans lately, it involves demolition.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and removed all of the trim from the room. We labeled it “Smurf” so we could find and reuse it later.

The room is roughly 8.5 feet wide by 15.5 feet long, and the ceilings are just over 7.5 feet short tall. There are 3 windows in the room, and they’re all super old, single-pane suckers that need to be replaced.

Here’s how the room looks from all 4 corners, starting with me standing in the doorway and working clockwise:

From in front of the closet:

From the radiator corner:

And the last corner across from the doorway:

The flooring is newer (and in better shape) than the rest of the house, and the room gets a ton of sunlight. Plus we can see some big hills / small mountains off the distance.

It’s not a bad room. Just kinda tiny.

The short ceilings certainly don’t help.

Neither does the color scheme. It just makes the room look really squat. Still, we decided it would be great for an office. And with a pullout couch, it could easily double as a guest bedroom.

Bradley had another Saturday-morning project going on in the guest bedroom (more on that soon!), so he handed me the crowbar and sledgehammer and told me to go to town. I had some aggression to work out.

You see, earlier that morning, Bradley ran into our very sweet, very old and very pig-headed old-fashioned neighbor, who chastised him for “making” me move heavy furniture across our yard. Bradley told him that I wanted to move furniture because I haven’t been getting enough gym time lately and have been complaining about not getting a decent workout. Our neighbor replied, “They weren’t built for physical labor.” And by “they,” he didn’t mean sassy bloggers.

I made 2 demands when I found out: 1) that we go sign up for a gym membership immediately so I can get my guns ready for some sleeveless flaunting all up in our neighbor’s face, and 2) that I get to smash something. I also told him I was going to blog about our neighbor because he’s 100 years old and probably doesn’t read blogs. So, neighbor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for stereotyping you.

Anyway, on to the smashing and bashing. When I removed the trim, I found a couple of surprises in the wall:

A valentine (awwww!) and a hunk of bee hive (ewwww!). Luckily there seemed to be no sign of bees, so I kept smashing walls until I was too tired to lift the sledgehammer:

That’s when Bradley dropped by and took over. We had to move a radiator to get to the wall behind it. Here he is demonstrating how not to pick up something that weighs a bajillion pounds:

I asked him to pose for a radiator-lifting picture and that’s what I got. Come on, Bradley, rules are in place for a reason. Lift with your legs, not with your back. Don’t lock your knees. Look both ways before crossing the street. I before E, except after C. No white after Labor Day. Rules rule!

We haven’t decided what to do about the closet door at this point. In fact, we’re not even really sure whether we want the closet to be a closet. Our bathroom is right next to the closet — you can see the plumbing for our bathtub through the hideous hole the wall. We’re not renovating the bathroom for a while, but we could use the closet space to expand into it. We could kill 2 birds with 1 stone: remove an awkwardly shaped closet and add a considerable amount of space to the tiny bathroom.

If we do decide to keep it as storage for the office, we can always install some shelves. We also talked about designing and making our own sliding door for it. We already plan to make a sliding door for the main entrance to the room, so we could make a second one to match and hang that for the closet door. There will be a long desk that goes between the closet doorway and the main doorway. The desk will be designed to accommodate the sliding door (or doors) behind it.

Told you. Big, big plans for this little room. For now, we know we have to insulate the two outward-facing walls in the closet regardless, so we have time to plan out our next move.

When we ripped out the plaster and lathe around the window frames, we found weights hanging on the inside:

There was one weight on each side of each window, so 6 weights altogether.

Plus several other weights at the bottom. The ropes must have ripped off or the windows must have been replaced.

They’re rusted and covered in dust right now, but we think they’re really neat looking. We’re saving them to reuse somewhere — maybe in a sculpture.

A very heavy sculpture. Each weight is 6 pounds. We have 11 weights so far and we’ll find at least 10 more weights in the house from the other old windows.

We made a rule recently that limits the amount of hours we work on the house on weekends. We start right after breakfast — around 9:30 — and work until 6PM. At 6:00 on the dot, it’s pencils jackhammers down. Our self-imposed cutoff is so that we take time to relax a little on weekends. Both of us have full-time jobs and work at least 10 or 11 hours a day. When it comes to working on the house, we have a tendency to go go go until bedtime.

Between our long work hours, our 2 days a week spent in Brooklyn, and all of our renovating, we could easily burn ourselves out. We’ve got a long way to go, baby! We don’t have time to burn out! So we set up a strict deadline, and after 6PM, it’s all hot showers, BBQ grills, beers and Netflix. This way we can keep up the energy and excitement we need to keep on renovating.

At the 5:30 on Saturday, we had demolished the entire Smurf room, but we hadn’t gotten into the closet yet. And we had 14 contractor garbage bags full of plaster and lathe from the 2 walls we ripped down. Each 32-gallon bag weighed over 100 pounds:

Everywhere we turned there was a giant bag full of old walls staring us in the face:

I was so beat from an entire day of swinging a sledgehammer that I wanted to leave the bags overnight. I’m not sure how Bradley mustered up the energy, but while I took care of sweeping up the room, he carried every single one of those bags down stairs and out to the garage.

Mah hero! Mah poor, passed-out hero!

The next morning, we woke up and went back in for more demolition. The plaster and lathe were all gone, leaving behind only some studs and boards that separated us from the exterior brick.

It’s hard to imagine how people lived in this house without any insulation. I can understand it 130 years ago, but people were living here last year. They must have frozen their butts off every winter!

I spent my Sunday morning doing a pretty brainless task (the best kind of task to take on until the coffee kicks in!). I demolished the walls in the closet, creating 4 more bags of debris that had to be hauled downstairs. Meanwhile Bradley demolished another wall in the Smurf room:

That’s right: we exposed some more brick! We can’t help ourselves. It’s a culmination of all those years of living in apartments that had brick walls, but landlords who refused to set them free. Or maybe we just really, really love carrying 100-pound bags of plaster down stairs.

This is the flip side of the same brick wall we exposed in the hallway. It turns out there are actually 2 layers of brick. The brick on this side is in way better shape. We won’t have to do any re-pointing at all on this side! This is excellent news because we plan on exposing this same wall in the kitchen. This means less work for us! Squee!!

We were also pretty happy to see that the plaster is much, much thinner on the Smurf room side so it didn’t take a ton of work to get the brick exposed. Bradley used only a jackhammer for the entire wall — no hammer & chisel!

While Bradley jackhammered, I grabbed a regular hammer and moved on to brainless task #2. Every single stud in the room had about 30 nails in it:

That’s how the lathe strips (the wood strips from earlier photos) were attached to the studs. Lathe gets nailed to stud. Plaster gets smeared on lathe. Viola! Walls!

Bradley’s job was way more exciting than mine.

I kept offering to take over, but he really wanted to do this wall on his own. I think he secretly really wanted to expose the hallway brick, but he was too busy working on other projects and missed out on all that fun.

So I let him have his glory.

We finished at 6PM, and didn’t have any time left to clean up the rubble. Not that it mattered anyway. We were so beat from 2 days of demolition (sore shoulders, sore back, sore hands, sore arms, sore everything), that we couldn’t have cleaned up even if we wanted to. All we wanted to do is shower and go out for dinner before hitting the hay, so we didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before taking our in-progress pictures:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hazy, yes. But still very lovely.

We haven’t decided yet whether we will leave the brick raw or white-wash. I love the look of white washed brick. It looks so earthy, and much softer than red brick:

Source

The color palette for this room will be white, yellow and greys, so I think a white-washed wall will work better. Bradley’s not totally sold on it. We’ll probably rock-paper-scissors over it, but in the end, I’ll be spending much more time in this room than he will. So Leena crushes rock, paper, AND scissors. Just sayin’.

The rest of the walls are totally naked and ready for new windows, insulation and sheetrock.

No more wallpaper in the closet!

After taking these pictures, we used a sheet of plastic to completely seal up the doorway. There’s no door anymore, so this will help keep the dust confined until it settles. Next time, we’ll just vacuum it up and move along.

Still left to do in this room:

• Seal up cracks with spray foam insulation
• Insulate all of the naked walls
• Sheetrock (plus tape & mud)
• Replace windows
• Paint
• Sand floors
• Paint floors
• Replace trim
• Make and install a sliding door (or two?)
• Cry sweet tears of relief

It looks like a long list, but we’re getting there. Demolition always seems to take way longer than putting things back together, so we’re optimistic that this room will be done by the time our first set of visitors come out to see us (July 4th weekend…eep!).

What we learned in this project:

• Plaster is really, really heavy.
• Chuck Taylors: cute, comfortable, not meant for construction work. (Plaster is really, really heavy.)
• It takes approximately 4 weekends for us to create enough construction garbage to fill one standard dumpster.

How (not) to remove wallpaper.

Remember our hideous closet that someone covered with granny shabby chic flowery wallpaper?

I marched into the closet early on Saturday morning, determined to deflower all 3 walls by lunchtime. Here were my weapons of choice:

L to R: scraper, spray bottle, fabric softener.

I saw some remodeling show on HGTV where the designer said that her favorite way of removing wallpaper is hosing it with a mixture of hot water and fabric softener, letting it soak for a few minutes, then peeling up the paper. Her wallpaper came off in big strips, easy peasy. She didn’t break out in hives or throw a crying fit like so many of my friends who shared their wallpaper horror stories. I was sold.

I went into the closet and doused all 3 walls with the fabric softener / hot water mixture. I went down to the kitchen to slam a cup of coffee and stomped back upstairs, ready to annihilate some wallpaper. That stuff was coming down in big strips.

Only that’s not how it worked out. Even though I had sprayed the walls really well and let them soak for 10 minutes, the edges of the wallpaper weren’t coming up. I ended up using my scraper to peel underneath:

Then I basically had to scrape up and down until little shreds of paper tore off and fell to the ground. I’m not sure what they used to glue that stuff to the walls — Gorilla glue? Super glue? Pixie magic?! — but it wasn’t coming off at all, let alone in the big strips I had hoped for.

I worked for a solid 15 minutes. I broke out into a sweat, I bit back tears, I threw every curse word I know at that wall and then invented new curse words so I could keep on going. But the wallpaper wasn’t coming off. At. All. No matter how hard I scraped or how much I sprayed the wall.

That’s the moment when Bradley came in and asked, “What are you doing? We’re demolishing those walls. You don’t need to take the wallpaper off.”

Uhhhhh…..oops.

What we learned from our attempt at deflowering our wall:

• HGTV lies.
• Communication is very, very important.
• Sometimes the best way to take down wallpaper is to tear down the entire wall.

Meet our master bedroom.

No matter how hard we try to wish it, our master bedroom just won’t go away. And it isn’t fixing itself either. The only thing left to do is acknowledge its presence and officially document the before pictures. Take a deep breath, people: we begrudgingly invite you into our master bedroom.

Before we got down to the working part, Bradley spent a few hours spying on our neighbors:

Just kidding. Bradley’s measuring a couple of window that need to be replaced. He’s hiding behind a window roller because it doesn’t technically roll anymore. We have to manually roll it up every time we want a little light in the room.

Most of the other window rollers in the house were ripped down during one particularly hilarious hissy fit. It was very Joan Crawford moment, except instead of NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!! it was more like WHAT KINDA ROLLER DOESN’T ROLL?! So far, only 2 rollers on the entire second floor have survived our wrath. They’re both in the room we frequent the least. Ahem.

Anyway, the window panes are so old that they have a wavy look to them, and they make everything look a little blurry.

Check out the Freestyle Painting around the glass. Maybe there was a masking tape shortage when they last renovated the house. Yeah, that must be it. The Blue Tape Shortage of Aught-Nine.

Single-pane glass has an Energy Star rating of Your-Heating-Bill-Will-Bankrupt-You, so we want to get these swapped out pronto. Ahhh, the joys of buying a 130-year-old house. No insulation, crusty windows, energy-sucking boiler. Our goal is to fix all of those problems before Old Man Winter shows up and drains our wallets. We’re starting with the 3 Smurf Room windows and 2 master bedroom windows. These are the 2 master bedroom windows that need help:

The thing in the middle that juts out a little is a chimney. And on the other wall is the radiator:

You can get a better idea of the ceiling height there. Bradley’s 5’10″ if that helps scale it. The ceilings are 112 inches tall, which is about 9.333333 feet. The height really helps open up the room and make it feel even bigger.

On the flip-side of the chimney wall is the entrance to the room. You’ll see some more Freestyle Painting around the door frame:

Please ignore the pile of insulation. That’s the stuff we pulled out of the guest bedroom / hallway wall. We were too tired to carry it up to the attic, so we piled it up in front of the master bedroom until we could barely see the door. It’s all part of our delusion master plan.

We’ve already shared our faux marble turquoise light switch covers:

Those are perfectly complemented by our faux marble pinkish-red plug-in covers:

What color would you call that? Off-red? Rose? Mauve? Also, how exactly do you pronounce mauve? Moev? Or mawv? We say mawv, but it sounds a little too New Yorker to be right. Like kaw-fee (coffee) or bee-a (beer). My absolute favorite New Yorkism ever: brawr (bra).

However you pronounce it, that mauve monstrosity is not going to last much longer in our house. There was some talk of gathering up all of the colorful faceplates and repeatedly running over them with our car, but it didn’t seem like a productive use of our time. It also didn’t seem very sane, so we’re playing it safe and just tossing them in the trash. We’re laughing maniacally as we throw them away, though, so sanity is a moot point.

One of the biggest challenges we’re having right now is figuring out where we’ll put a king-sized bed in this room. All of the walls have something going on:

The fourth wall has a door smack in the middle. After years of living with a queen-sized bed and no bedside tables, we’re being pretty bratty about our master bedroom setup. We want a king-sized bed, 2 bedside tables with drawers, and lamps. The only wall that might work is the wall with the closet, but we’re not sure the bedroom door will fully open with a bed there.

After taking window measurements, we found ourselves staring at the walls, wondering how on earth we would make this a functional bedroom. And that’s when we had a brilliant revelation. We took a couple of measurements and confirmed it: the wall had a hollow space behind it!

We could remove the entire wall, move the closet somewhere else, and have a nice set-in section that would give us plenty of room! Bradley couldn’t wait to have a look at how much hollow space was behind the wall. He ran out of the room and came back with the sledgehammer:

Doesn’t he look so ecstatic? He made the same face when we ate at a Sonic for the first time ever:

Burgers and sledgehammers: it doesn’t take much to keep the boy happy.

Bradley used the sledgehammer to smack a hole in the wall, but the hammer just kept bouncing back. It wouldn’t crack through. Um…turns out he was hitting a stud. Oops! So he knocked another hole next to it:

There was lathe behind the wall, just like we were expecting.

We pulled the wood strips out, reached in to see how much room we had, annnnnnd…

….saw the back the guest bedroom closet. Oh. Crap. The wall was hollow, alright, but there are only about 4 inches to work with. Somehow we got our measurements wrong by a couple of feet.

We blamed it on the fact we had been doing manual labor all day before we got to this project. Our brains weren’t working at full capacity. Maybe we were holding the tape measure upside-down. We needed a nap. The dog ate our homework. No matter what excuse we came up with, we knew it all came down to this: we screwed up.

After a few choice profanities, we grew silent and just stared at the back of the guest bedroom closet through what used to be a perfectly good wall. Then we walked out of the master bedroom, closed the door behind us and stacked our insulation in front of it.

Mistakes: we all make ‘em. But it takes a special type of person to walk away and pretend like it never happened.

To help cleanse ourselves of the residual guilt, we decided to do something uber-productive and totally necessary. Like go up to the attic and look around at stuff. We’ll do whatever it takes to forget.

The attic door, in case you forgot, is in the Purple Room:

Purple walls. Purple trim. Purple door. Purple floors. Prince called. He wants his palette back. Or he wants to move in and pay rent. I forget.

The Purple Room is another one of those close-the-door-and-let-it-get-sucked-into-a-vortex rooms, but it does have one huge redeeming quality:

Brick! We’re such suckers for exposed brick. It’s going to take all of our will power to not go completely overboard and expose every inch of brick in this house. We sometimes struggle with taking things too far — why do it when you can overdo it?? — but admitting we have a problem is the first step. Still, when we need a hit of brick, we go peek at the attic wall. It fills a need and keeps us from going jackhammer-crazy all over the place.

For all of you who have wished us luck in finding some antique artifacts in our attic:

We found some shutters! They’re easily as old as the house itself and are covered in inches of grime. There are 4 windows on the front of the house and we found 3 shutters that look like a perfect fit. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll find a fourth lying around!

We’re honestly not sure these shutters are even salvageable because they’re so covered in nastiness, but we’d be willing to give them a power wash if we find the missing one.

Those shutters, by the way, are the only thing we found in the attic. A few weeks ago, a sweet elderly couple dropped by the house to chit-chat, and they told us they were hired to clean up the house after the foreclosure. Apparently there was a lot of “junk” in the attic and garage, and they got rid of everything. We were a little sad, but also a little relieved because it means less work for us.

Sorry to disappoint, but unless we find something really cool hidden in a wall somewhere, our biggest finds have been a block of wood, a tin of flux, a roll of wire, a DVD and a half-empty can of beer. And that busted chimney that someone sealed up and hid under the guest bedroom floor.

What we learned from our venture into the forbidden zone:

• Measure twice, bust through wall once.
• The master bedroom may end up being the guest bedroom, and the guest bedroom may end up being the master bedroom.
• None of our friends are going to visit us after they see that last bullet point.

The outside of our house.

Our new camera finally arrived, and we didn’t waste any time putting it to use. We have a lot of pictures of the guest bedroom and hallway to share, but we’re still working on those posts. We didn’t get into Brooklyn until super late last night, and it’s been work-work-work ever since. Also, it turns out that writing about putting up sheetrock is as boring as actually putting up sheetrock. Yiish. Give us a couple of hours to work that one up.

In the meantime, we’d like to share with you the reasons we moved from Brooklyn to the middle-of-nowhere. A lot of our friends think we’re insane for moving to a small town, and double-insane for buying a fixer-upper. They they don’t understand why we would keep our NYC jobs and drive back 3 hours to sleep in a friend’s closet just to show up at the office 2 days a week.

We think this makes it all worthwhile:

We start seeing those rolling hills about an hour into our drive, and both of us get super excited.

By the time we get up into the hills, we’re in a completely different state of mind. We’ll roll down the window and breathe in the fresh air, and marvel in the greenness of everything. Everything is so lush.

Everything is so quaint and quiet.

Sorry. It’s quaint and quiet and cute. Did we mention there’s a trolley? Even the word itself is cute. Trolley — instant cuteness.

But the most important reason we moved out here is this:

The minute we saw her, we knew she was The One.

Sure, she needs a coat of paint, and we’re not crazy about the white screen door, but we still thought she was stately and classic. She had presence.

Even now that she’s all naked without her ivy.

Once we stepped inside and saw the original details, we were smitten. Check out the front door from the inside:

Ignore the pup. That 90lb attention-seeker isn’t ours. We were dog-sitting for a friend, and Paulie wouldn’t get out of my door shot no matter how nicely I asked. He’s pretty geeked about his 5 minutes of internet fame.

To give a frame of reference, those doors are so tall and neither of us can reach the latch up top to lock the door. I’m 5’5″ and Bradley’s 5’10″ (and Paulie’s a bit over 4′). We need a chair to get way up there:

It was love at first sight. And that, overly-judgmental friends, is why we became part-time New Yorkers and full-time small townie homeowners. For those of you who requested a peek at the outside of our house, we hope you enjoyed the pics. Coming up next: that brick wall we were exposing is done-zo and we have the before-and-afters to prove it!

The bad and the ugly.

We’ve talked a lot about how much we love our new (old) house, and how amazing it’s going to be when we’re done with it. What we haven’t really brought up is all the stuff we hate about it. This is mostly because we don’t really like dwelling on the negative — we like to demolish it and replace it with something better. Also, we like our Kool-Aid mixed with equal part denial and disbelief.

Some of this crap, though, is too good not to share. So, without further ado, here’s a tour of some of the less desirable parts of our home. Lets start with a tour of the various light switch covers in the house. There’s this charming I’m-a-creepy-cat-lady number:

And this homage to Pennsylvania Dutch that would be cute in a Grandma’s house, but not so much in the house of two not-quite-30-year-olds:

And then there’s our favorite. The turquoise faux-marble plastic covers that show up in several different rooms. Here’s one in the hallway:

And another one in the master bedroom:

That bile green paint on the walls? Whoever did that didn’t use painters’ tape. They just free-handed it around the door frame, dribbled a bunch on the floors, and then left it. While we’re in the master bedroom, check this out:

Someone had a mild obsession with floral wall borders. There are more floral borders in the kitchen and dining room. We even found some behind the walls. Also check out the popcorn ceiling — that cottage cheese textured monstrosity that was so popular in the ’70s and ’80s. Those are in several rooms, including the office and the kitchen. Some rooms also have popcorn textured walls. Feel free to ugh and ew. We did.

Also in the master bedroom, we found this lovely grey rug left here by the previous owners:

Yes. That is a slit to accommodate the radiator. No, they didn’t even try to hide it. And yes, the floors are painted barnyard red. This is why the master bedroom is not the first bedroom we’re working on. We like to close the door and pretend it doesn’t exist. We haven’t even hauled the rug out to our garbage pile garage yet. Someday we’ll confront it. Till then — master bedroom? What master bedroom?

Since we’re looking at floors already, take a gander at what we’ve been whining about:

We can look past the chocolate-poo-poo-brown color. What we can’t get over is how someone didn’t throw down a drop cloth or a plastic tarp before plastering and painting the rooms. They just smeared white paint all over. Side note: a man asked me today if I played soccer. He said he asked because of my bowlegged legs. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or both.

Anyway, it seems like freestyle painting is a theme throughout our house. Here’s one spot on the floor where someone spray painted a radiator and didn’t bother with a tarp:

I suppose it doesn’t matter much since all of our floors will be getting the up-close-and-personal treatment with a belt sander. Check out our splintering and peeling pine:

No flip flops in this hizzy. Not for a while. And I don’t think we’ll be going barefoot till at least 2015. We might even have to sleep in our shoes for a while. That’s how splintered our floors are.

There are also some pretty serious gaps between the floorboards and the baseboards. If I were a mouse, I’d be so happy about this:

We’ll figure out some way to either fix the floor gaps, or at least stuff a wad of steel wool and disguise them. Or just put chairs all over the place so we can scream bloody murder and jump up on a chair, cartoon style, at the sight of a mouse.

We’ve already shared the Smurf room on here a few times, but we haven’t shown a view of the floor like this:

Take a good look. That’s not a shadow you’re seeing. Someone painted the floors around a rug. Instead of rolling up the rug and moving it out of the room. They just painted right around it. Yep.

Remember the weird missing chunk of floor in the guest bedroom? We had to peek inside.

In our defense, we get bored easily. We can’t help ourselves. We were hoping for some sort of Depression-era buried treasure. A coffee can full of money. A secret stash of jewelry. Love notes from a WWII sailor. Something. Anything.

Instead we found that crusty old pipe. Lamest buried treasure ever. But, because we’re inquisitive little turds, we couldn’t leave it at that. We used some pliers to pry open the pipe.

Still no buried treasure. All we found was a wood cork stuffed inside. We think it’s a sealed up old chimney. And that’s 15 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.

When we peeked inside one closet, we saw a giant mother’s day card hanging on the wall. After careful examination, however, we realized that it was a piece of cardboard taped to the wall, with a giant mother’s day card taped in front of it to disguise a giant hole in our wall:

Same thing in the Smurf room, except this time, they used a piece of scrap metal and nailed it into the wall:

Say hello to our plumbing! I think the thing that bugged us most about this one is that they didn’t even use a saw or box cutter to make a real access panel. They just punched in the wall with a hammer. That’s quality craftsmanship right there, folks. Brought to you by the same people who’ve never heard of a tarp!

The Smurf room is chock full of surprises. Like this hook-and-key lock:

…which wouldn’t be that weird except it happens to be on the outside of the room. Creepy much?

Some of the things that drive us nuts aren’t even the big in-your-face things like holes in walls or crusty ceilings. Little things like upside-down outlets in the guest bedroom get under our skin like nobody’s business:

We like to think our guests will be sooooo busy being charmed by our cute house and our cute faces that they won’t notice something as trivial as upside-down outlets, but we’re not taking any chances. After a few days of attempting to ignore the outlets while tackling some bigger issues in the room, we just couldn’t take it anymore. We grabbed some screw drivers and fixed the outlets in a matter of minutes. We’ll sleep better at night knowing that our outlets are right-side-up:

A lot of people have been asking about a full house tour. One of the reasons we don’t have it yet is because most of our light fixtures currently look like this:

Our point-and-shoot isn’t fancy enough to take decent pictures in dark rooms, and our new camera didn’t arrive in time to photograph the whole house. So we’re in house tour limbo until the next time we drop by with another batch of moving boxes (maybe this weekend!).

Still, we feel like we have to share a picture of the one cool lighting fixture in the whole house:

It’s a massive blackened gold fixture in the middle of our ginormous living room. The room is so big that all of our worldly possessions can fit in it. With the two of us and our dog and our cat. And 3 of our closest friends. And a car. OK, not really, but it’s big. Here’s a better look at the light fixture:

What’s not to love, right?

Well, for starters, the “blackened gold” color we thought we saw is actually gold spray paint. And, once again, someone didn’t bother with stuff like painters’ tape, so there’s gold spray paint all over the place. You can also see the gold and white Awesome ’80s texture that someone sponge-painted onto the ceiling. Luckily it doesn’t look so cheesy with all the lights off, so maybe we’ll just take down the light and leave crusty old wires hanging out of the ceiling. Then it would match the lights in the rest of the house.

And, last but not least, there’s this rusted handle in the middle of the hall upstairs. We think it might have been placed there to help an elderly person get up the last 4 stairs. We haven’t removed it yet, mostly because we’re scared we’ll get tetanus just by touching it:

Hope you enjoyed the not-so-charming features of our old house. We’re still in the process of moving in and haven’t completely left our Brooklyn apartment yet. We’re hoping to have all of our stuff outta here Saturday morning. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Here’s what’s coming up next:

• We sheet rocked the French door hallway — still need to share all the dusty details!
• We have half of our brick wall exposed. We’ll finish that up and show you some dramatic before & afters.
• We discovered that the Smurf room has zero insulation. Yipes! We’ll show you how we’re insulating them.
• We’re tearing down another wall in the guest bedroom to put in a big, industrial closet.
• We have to remove some of the most stubborn wallpaper in the world, and we’re doing it without shelling out the dough for renting a steamer.

And that’s all in one wing of the house. Yiish. Stay tuned!

DIY: Demolish It Yourself

One of our favorite parts about renovating is the demolition part. Call us destructive, but there is nothing more satisfying than smashing a sledgehammer through some perfectly good sheet rock.

Wait. I take that back. There is nothing more satisfying than smashing a foot through some perfectly good sheet rock. We’ve done it. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

But before we could get to the foot-of-fury part of the project, we had take care of one of our least favorite parts about renovating: planning. Booo! Hiss! Boring!! …but totally necessary. We started by setting a goal.

Here’s what we planned on doing over the last weekend:

1. Tear a big ol’ hole in the wall separating the guest bedroom from the hallway
2. Install French doors.
3. Seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole (yes, door hole is a real term)

After we developed our game plan, we gathered our supplies. We put together a list of all the supplies we’ll need: sheetrock, lumber, nails, screws, etc. Bradley did all the estimating of how much of everything we’d need. I mostly just smiled and nodded and pretending to know what furring strips are. (Note: it has nothing to do with foxes or minks. Or leg waxing.)

We padded our list pretty heavily with extras. For instance, we know we’ll be putting up a lot of new walls upstairs, so we went ahead and ordered enough sheetrock for the whole floor. Our local lumberyard charges a flat $15 for delivery, so we took full advantage of it.

Our delivery arrived bright and early on Saturday morning, and we tossed  all the extra supplies (gently) into the garage for storage until they’re needed.

Ohhhh, the luxury of space. The whole garage thing is new to us, and we are loving it!

We had already researched French doors to find a good deal. We knew we wanted 60″ wide x 80″ tall doors, and found that all the places we checked charged around $350. We ordered our door from Lowe’s and picked it up ourselves to save on delivery charges.

Source

Then finally — fiiiiiinally! — the big day arrived. We’d rested up. We’d stretched out. We’d made sure our tetanus shots were up-to-date. We’d said our goodbyes to the wall on the left:

Some disclaimer-y type stuff before we get into the meat & potatoes sledgehammers and sheetrock. This kind of work is usually better left to the pros. This guy:

…is a pro. He was born with a hammer in one hand and a level in the other. (Not really sure how his mother pulled that one off, but kudos to her.) He’s torn down walls and put up walls. He knows how to re-wire the lights, and he can plumb with the best of ‘em. He also knows how to throw a perfect put-down-the-camera-and-help-me glare:

In short, he knows what he’s doing. If you’ve never done anything like this before and want to try, get help from a professional. If you attempt to do this on your own, you will die. …just kidding. You might get hurt or destroy your house, though, so play it safe.

We started our demo day by making sure we weren’t about to demolish a load-bearing wall. That would be bad. Ceiling-crashing-down-on-your-face-while-you-sleep bad. Once we figured out our wall was a-OK to demolish, we turned off all the electricity so we wouldn’t end up Benjamin Franklining ourselves. Little Pennsylvania humor for ya there. Wokka wokka!

Bradley removed all the baseboards with a big ol’ crowbar. We plan on reusing as much of the original lumber as possible, so we stashed it away for later. After that, he used a box cutter to score the edges of the wall we wanted to remove:

At this point, we put on our respirators to protect our lungs from any potential lead paint dust.

Yes, ladies, my ventilator is hot pink. Safety first, fashion second.

Once our noses were secure, out came the sledgehammer and we bashed the wall down….carefully. We wanted to keep the other side of the wall — the inside of the bedroom — in tact, so we only removed one side of the wall. The sheetrock removal process was a lot like Operation Ivy: grab, yank, toss, repeat.

We were a little surprised to find random bits of insulation stuffed into the walls. Whoever put up the wall must have had leftovers and decided to throw in them. Either way, they’re not doing any good in this interior wall. We removed the insulation stashed it away for later use as well.

We found some fun stuff within the wall. Like this bit of floral wallpaper:

This floral border on top of the floral wallpaper. Someone sure loved flowers on her wall:

The biggest surprise was the Gold Bond brand drywall:

And here I thought Gold Bond only made foot powder. Crazy!

Eventually the entire wall was naked, the wood was exposed and all the old sheetrock was put away in four huge contractor trash bags:

Next, we needed to cut the hole to set our French doors into. Bradley drew out the dimensions for the door on the other side of our bare wall, making sure they were level and perfect.

And, because, we’re total nerds who can’t ever walk away from a Beetlejuice reference, we drew knobs on the door and knocked 3 times.

Nobody answered (sad face). So we pulled out the Sawzall and started cutting:

I’d never used a Sawzall before, so Bradley let me have a turn. It was love at first whirr. I was totally the girl who took shop class in middle school and metal smithing in high school and college, I became pretty scared of loud power tools. I had an accident in a metal class and sliced into my left thumb and forefinger. All the way to the bone. I had to get 22 stitches and — ew ew ewwww! — I felt every single one of them because the local anesthetic didn’t quite kick in. So after that traumatic experience, I’ve been a little hesitant to jump back into using things that could chop my fingers off.

After using the Sawzall, though, I’m ready. I’m back in love with power tools, and I can’t wait to try them all. Good thing we have a lot of work to do around the house!

Anyway, we Sawzall’d right through all the wood on the bare side of the wall, but used a handsaw to finish off the parts closest to the floors so we didn’t accidentally cut through them:

The wall popped right out and we removed it to reveal our new door hole:

Door hole! We knew right away that our hunch about putting in a French door was spot on. There was so much light coming in from the bedroom windows and from the windows in the hall. We could open up all the windows and let a breeze through. Everything felt so much more open and big and airy. We had time for a quick high-five and then got back to work moving some outlets around:

We also had to cut and install a header to sit above the door. Basically, a header takes the weight of the wall off the door:

See? I told you he knows what he’s doing. Once we had the header and frame in, we made sure everything was level. And, easy peasy, we slid the door right in:

OK, not really. When we went to slide the door in, we found out that it doesn’t really fit. No matter what we tried, the door seemed too big for the door hole. We had a minor panic attack. I didn’t get any pictures of it because we were too busy running around trying to figure out what happened.

We quickly figured out what we did wrong: we were being way too precise. Our measurements and cuts were so exact that the door wouldn’t slide in. D’oh! Our jobs are kind of all about making things look perfect. Bradley’s a furniture designer and I’m an art director. With our work, when something is off by 1/16th of an inch, it looks wrong. You have to get things exact or else they look weird or ugly or off. So we measured and cut our door hole to perfectly fit our door. Turns out walls don’t really work that way. Type A / perfectionist FAIL.

We had to go back and widen some of our cuts and make a few adjustments. There were door shims involved:

After another 30 minutes of tweaking, the door finally slid in and looked fabulous.

Toot freaking toot. That’s the sound of us tooting our own horn. Above is a shot from the stair looking down the hall. And below is a shot at the end of the hallway looking down towards the stairs.

And here’s a shot of the doors open, so you can get a looksie at that the header I was talking about earlier.

Before the day was over, we had one more task. We had to seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. We still have to tape and plaster and sand and paint, but we won’t get that that till next time.

This entire project took roughly 6 hours or so. We had a few other projects going on at the same time, plus we had to take a time out to accept our delivery and run to Lowe’s and Home Depot. We’re pretty geeked about our new door and how it totally opens up the cramped hall.

Stuff we learned from this project:

• Handcrafted tables and well-designed brochures can never be “too perfect.” Door holes on the other hand…
• Power tools are not toys, but they sure feel like it.
• You can’t put on a respirator without making some kind of Darth Vader joke. We dare you to try.

Surprise find: top secret trap door!

Anyone remember the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice?

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It’s one of our absolute favorite movies in the world. We’ve watched it at least 20 times together, and probably twice as many times on our own. We can’t go to the grocery store to pick up a carton of orange juice without reciting “Orange beetle…beetle breakfast….beetle….juice? Your name is Beetlejuice?” We don’t have cable, ya’ll. We have to make our own entertainment.

Anyway, we’ve had a lot of Beetlejuice moments ever since we decided to buy a house. For starters, we’re a couple of New Yorkers moving to a small town far, far away, but close enough to go back whenever we feel like it.

Our house has skeleton keys, just like the Deets’ house:

We also passed by this adorable covered bridge near our town that totally reminded us of the Winter River Bridge from Beetlejuice:

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And this is the Winter River Bridge from Beetlejuice:

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They could be twins, I tell ya!

We’ve also been having a lot of Otho moments. Otho, in case you haven’t seen the movie recently, is Mrs. Deets’ diva interior decorator friend. There’s one closet in particular that pulled out the Otho in us. We opened the door, sighed, and I couldn’t help but bust out this classic line:

“UGH. Deliver me from L.L. Bean.” We love Otho. He’s 2 snaps and a headwave. Here’s the horrible closet that brought out our inner prima donna:

OK fine, there weren’t any headless ghosts in the closet. It was more of a reaction to the wallpaper. And the super narrow shape. And check out the weird angled corner that’s going to make shelving a huge pain in the butt. Luckily this is the office closet, so it’s not like we need to hang clothes in there. Instead, we plan on making custom shelving for all the office stuff we don’t want want to see all the time: printer/scanner, paper shredder, garbage and recycling. We loved the old hooks that were in there — they’re acorns! — and I unscrewed all of those so we can get the paint off and reuse them elsewhere in the house.

While I was busy pulling carpet tacks, Bradley was putzing around in the office closet and discovered a loose section of flooring. He jammed his screwdriver under it and found a trap door! Here he is climbing in:

I know what you’re thinking: Skinny McGee should really eat a sandwich. After I watched him crawl into that tiny hole, I started wondering what else he could fit through. A doggie door? Maybe. After that I started thinking about sandwiches. That’s pretty much how my brain works. Though A. Thought B. Food. Mmmm….fooooood.

We’re not really sure why there were broken lightbulbs on the floor. There’s no outlet in the closet. Yup. One more thing we’ll be rigging up!

We weren’t planning on climbing down any funky crawlspaces, so we didn’t bring a flashlight with us. Bradley used the flashlight app on his Droid to take a peek, and then took some pictures using his phone’s flash. I have Droid envy. My iPhone camera doesn’t have a flash. His pictures turned out a little blurry, but you can make out some stuff:

Brick wall! Pipes! Planks! Tubes! That purple thing in the middle is a can of beer someone abandoned long ago. Beer!

You can see the floor of the Smurf room up top, and it’s held up by some huge, old beams. Down below is the ceiling to the kitchen. We were straight up giddy when we saw how much space is between the kitchen ceiling and the floor above. Why? Because this means we can take our sledge hammers to the kitchen ceiling and expose all that beautiful, beamy, floory goodness going on up there! This is going to add at least 3 feet to the height of our kitchen!

We’ve been talking about exposing the beams above the kitchen ever since we first saw the house, but we weren’t sure what was going on behind the tacky drop ceiling we currently have. We were scared we might find asbestos-covered pipes, or worse: mice. Instead, we found a brick wall, some beams and a can of beer. That’s what I call winning! We can also expose the brick wall if we want….and we do want. I have no idea how to expose brick, but Bradley tells me it involves jackhammers. Squee! The kitchen is #3 on our list of renovations. #1 and #2 are the guest bedroom and the office. We’re dying to get in that kitchen and start making it what we want. We love to cook. And eat. See — I’m back to food again.

I’ll leave you with another clip from Beetlejuice that pretty much sums up how we’re feeling right now: