Erica’s DIY Dresser

New York is full of it’s-a-small-world-after-all stories. We’ve randomly meet people who know people we know. And bumped into people we went to high school with 10 years ago and 1,250 miles away. That’s the kind of completely chance connection I had with Erica from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

I ended up freelancing at a boutique advertising agency in Manhattan and partnered up with Erica. And then found out we lived on the same block in Brooklyn, just a few buildings apart. What are the odds?

Anyway, Erica and her hubby Alan live in a new nabe now. And they’re busy cuteing up their place for the arrival of baby Max. (Yeah, I made up a word, what of it?) One of Erica’s DIY projects was to gussy up a Craigslist dresser for the nursery. Check out her results:

Frikkin’. Awesome.

I’m currently having a love affair with the color yellow, and those drawers literally made me squeal. Erica decided not to go the boring drawer liner route. Instead, she picked up some (brilliantly mix-matched) paper from Papersource and used Mod Podge to DIY drawer liners.

Bradley and I are coveting this pattern:

We love the way the colors pop against the teal. And that teal? Swoon. Even Bradley swooned and he hates anything that isn’t black, grey or white. (You can take the boy out of New York…)

The best part? Our heads are swirling with ideas for our next dresser. Time to start scouring Craigslist. Thanks, Erica!

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You can read up on Erica’s DIY dresser here. And, of course, all images are sourced from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

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P.S. Our February / March To-Do List is up. Check it out!

Loo La La!

We have two loos in our house: a full bath upstairs and a half bath downstairs. We haven’t shared any pictures of either one on the blog so far for 2 reasons:

1. We have a one room at a time rule (even though technically we’re working on 2 rooms and a hallways right now).
2. They’re so ugly that your eyeballs would pack up their bags and run away from home. We don’t want that on our conscience.

Still, we’re getting super close to finishing up our guest bedroom / Smurf room / hallway projects — we can practically smell the paint fumes already! — so there’s been a lot of talk about the other rooms we still have to work on. Especially the hideous porch-turned-laundry room and half-bath connected to our kitchen. Those two rooms combined are the bane of our existence right now, and our heads are swimming with ideas.

Here’s what the porch and bathroom floor plan looked like when we moved in:

And here’s a before of the laundry room:

As for the bathroom, imagine the ugliest, most shoddily-put-together bathroom you can think of. Well, ours is a step or two below that. Cheap linoleum tile. Boring, standard Lowe’s sink and cabinet. Oddly shaped single-pane window. Hideous green paneled walls. …with popcorn texture. In short: booooo! hiss!!

We seriously considered the slash-and-burn method of dealing with it, but we’re not sure setting fire to a part of your own house counts as DIY or renovating. And it definitely doesn’t count as sane or normal, so we’re going to skip the arson and and go with a new floorplan instead. Here’s what we have in mind:

• The porch currently leads out to the back yard. This is one of 4 ways to get in and out of our house. It’s a bit excessive. We’re going to seal up the doorway to the outside because we need the wall space more than we need an exit.
• We’re going to seal up the doorway to the bathroom and convert the laundry room door into an open doorway (love those!). This will give us more room for kitchen counters.
• We’re going to re-open the doorway connecting the laundry room to the bathroom. You can see it in laundry room photo above — it’s the crusty white thing behind the dryer.
• One of us (ahem) really wants pocket doors for the bathroom. It’s in the whining discussion stages right now.
• We’re going to put a bathtub or shower in the bathroom. That’s right: we’re turning our half bath into a full bath. Raising property value, y’all!
• We’re going to put a sink in the laundry room area, right outside the bathroom door. Yes, this means we’ll have to go outside the bathroom to wash your hands. We’re hoping this won’t be awkward for guests. Help us out, people — would it make you uncomfortable to have a sink right outside the bathroom rather than inside?

Another thing we’ve been talking about is having white floors in the laundry room / bathroom. The whole house is going to have black floors, but we’re going for a low-key beachy vibe. Something like this:

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White paneled walls, light floors and the perfect blend of modern and antique. It’s half California, half Paris. Le swoon! And then there’s this bit of gorgeousness:

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That tub made us melt. We’re in love with the way they mixed stark white with deep black. Same with this bathroom:

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But then again, there’s something to be said for the classic white-on-white:

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If I had a bathtub that warm and inviting, I would never get out. I’d be one giant prune 24 hours a day. A tub like that isn’t made for bathing — it’s made for soaking. Luxuriating. With bath salts as opposed to the Mr. Bubble we’re so accustomed to. We’d have to become the kind of people who keep bath salts in giant apothecary jars on our window sills. And buy fancy soaps that look too pretty to actually use. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

While we’re in love with the whole claw foot tub idea (and found several on Craigslist for under $100), we’re also thinking about doing something totally insane and unconventional. Keep an open mind and feast your eyes on this:

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That, my friends, is a bathtub made from a horse trough. And we’re kind of madly in love with that idea. It can also be set up as a shower:

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We love how they raised that shower up with blocks. It looks almost Japanese. And Bradley thinks it feels more complete with legs rather than just setting the tub on the ground. The look is a little bit country and a little bit rock & roll. But with a galvanized tub, we were thinking it might be a little too much on the country side for us. And that’s when we found this:

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Ooh la la, that bathtub. When we saw it, we fanned our faces to keep from having a fainting spell. It’s super modern and super old-fashioned at the same time. We love how it’s black and white instead of galvanized. And can we please talk about the wood back rest? Mercy. In a very white bathroom with touches of black, we think it would look super elegant and totally swoon-worthy.

Our idea so far is to visit a farm supply store and buy a galvanized horse trough. We’d paint the outside and inside so the tub won’t rust, and we could make a really comfy back rest to help facilitate our hours-long soaking. And — best part — we could do all of this for under $200. A horse trough costs about $100. Paint and wood definitely won’t cost us $100, but we like to pad our estimates…just in case.

Right now, we’re in our daydream phases. Who knows? Our plan might changes a hundred times. We won’t get to these two rooms until after our next project: the master bedroom. So geeked about getting that one started. There’s something about sealing up doors and making new doorless entryways that gets us all worked up!

So what do you think? Does a painted galvanized tub sound like a good idea? How about that sink outside the bathroom? Do you prefer bath salts or Mr. Bubble? We’re dying to know!

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:

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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:

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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.

If you’re thinkin’ about my baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.

By “my baby,” I actually mean “our floors.” And it kinda does matter whether they’re black or white. Sorry, MJ. Sorry to you, too, for getting MJ stuck in your head.

And while we’re apologizing here, I’m gonna go ahead and say sorry for the crusty cell phone pictures I’ve posted so far. The art director in me is soooo embarrassed about the dark, blurry, crusty camera phone pictures. We forgot the point-and-shoot at home, and have been putting off buying a real camera an SLR for a while. Last week, I finally gave in and ordered this beauty:

Quickie nerd aside: it’s the same price as and comparable in quality to the Canon D3000, but it’s a micro four thirds dSLR so it’s tiiiiny and weighs 2lbs. So much better for travel than the clunky Canons.

As soon as that arrives, I promise, no more eyesore pictures. Like this one:

(…sorry.)

We were expecting beat-up-but-still-beautiful-in-a-grungy-way hardwood floors under there. What we found was pine softwood floors, and there were more on the beat-up-and-ewwwww side. It scratches and splinters easily, so traipsing around barefoot is out of the question. And — oh my gah — what’s with the stains? What do you think that is? Wait, no, nevermind. I don’t want to know.

Once we saw what was lurking under the carpet, we had a minor panic attack, and decided to put new hardwood floors down. And then quickly un-decided it when we crunched the numbers and realized exactly how much it’s going to cost: a lot. A LOT-lot. The wood alone is going to cost more than we budgeted for the entire second floor.

After some whining and pouting, we realized that hardwood floors are on the wish list, but they’re not really essential right now. We have to figure out a way to live with what we have.

Our options are carpet or paint. We’re not carpet people. We couldn’t handle it. Carpet is for people who traipse around barefoot, don’t have dogs, don’t take food out of the kitchen and never ever spill anything. It’s not for dog-loving, shoe-wearing, food-eating, clumsy oafs like us. We say bring on the paint! The only thing is, we don’t know what color of paint we want.

We hate the chocolate-mocha-poop color that some previous owner painted the floors:

So we’re limiting ourselves to something clean, classic and neutral: black or white. Both have the potential of looking modern and sophisticated. We just can’t decide. I hit The Google hard to dig up some inspiration. Sadly, what I found didn’t make our choice any easier.

Black floors can look so traditional and old-school:

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Or not:

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Can we talk about that last picture for a sec? I’m in lust with that house. The bauble chandelier above the dining room table. The cushy sheepskin chair. The crazy-wild-haired-scientist domes filled with butterflies and shells. *Le swoon*

And then there’s white floors. They seem so shabby-chic, and remind us of cute little cottages in the south of France. We’ve never been to the south of France, so we’re not really sure why. We just roll with it:

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Then again, white floors can look so clean and modern:

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Again, house-lust. The square lines of that coffee table. The piles of books stacked on the table. Those ginormous floor-to-ceiling windows. Two words: I die.

We love the way colors pop against an all-white room:

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But we also love how a crisp white pops against black floors:

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So we’re no better off than we started. It’s like MJ said: It’s black, it’s white. It’s tough for you to get by us to decide.

What do you guys think?
Black floors?
White floors?
Favorite Michael Jackson song?