How we did on our November / December To-Do List

Way back in November, we made a to-do list to get us through our self-imposed spending freeze. In short, we wanted to bulk up our savings account while wrapping up a bunch of loose end projects we’d been putting off (more details here). We’re currently making our Spring 2012 To-Do List, and thought this would be a good time to see where we ended up on our last to-do list.

First, lets talk about the spending freeze. The short story: It was hard. Really, really hard.

When we lived in NYC, we  pretty lofty goal of saving up for a down payment on a house. That meant we basically stopped spending money on anything that wasn’t the bare essentials. We squirreled away everything we could for about 2 years and got used to living like penny-pinching hermits.

Moving to smalltown Pennsylvania after years of living in The City was a financial shock. Our mortgage is super low (the upside of buying a beat-up old shanty) and the cost of living here is a fraction of what we were used to paying. We’re saving $1000 a month just by not paying NYC rent. We suddenly found ourselves in the very lucky position of having disposable income. And, holy crap, we disposed of it just as quickly as we earned it.

In August, we went to Home Depot or Lowe’s 2 or 3 times a weekend — each trip came with a bill of $200+. Sometimes we’d drop $1000 a weekend on stuff that would just sit in the garage because we were buying supplies for projects we didn’t have time to do.

To put a stop to unnecessary spending and to bulk up our savings account, we decided to go back to our old skinflint ways. From November 1st to December 31st, we decided not to spend any money at hardware stores (unless it was a small purchase to finish a project we’d already started).

How did we do? Not perfectly, but pretty damn good compared to how we were spending before. We did spent money at our local hardware store, but it was never more than $50 a trip. And we only purchased what we needed for on-going projects. That doesn’t mean we didn’t spend any money on stuff we didn’t need.

Here’s where we failed miserably and spent way more money than we were planning to:

1. We adopted a dog.
   We sprang Margot from the animal shelter on December 3rd. And then we proceeded to spend a ton of cash on vet bills to nurse her back to health. She got kennel cough during her stint behind bars. Then she gave it to Jabba, so both of them were sick. Then everyone needed an annual check up and vaccinations. Annnnd finally, Margot accidentally bit Jabba on the eyeball and we had to rush her to an emergency vet on a Sunday. So, yeah, we’ve been dishing out some serious cash to keep our four-legged friends healthy. (Worth every cent for the amount of happiness they bring us.)
2. We refilled the oil for our furnace.
   We use our furnace only as an emergency backup heating system when we’re out of town. It only kicks on if the temperature drops below 50 degrees — that way our pipes won’t burst. We haven’t used it at all since we installed our hybrid water heater, so we had 1/4 tank of oil left. We weren’t planning on refilling it this winter.
   Then one week, while we were in Brooklyn, our thermostat crapped out and reset itself to 65 degrees. By the time we got back and realized what happened, we had less than 1/8th of a tank of oil left. Yiish. We shelled out $900 for an oil refill (and $100 for a new thermostat).
3. We lost our minds at an outlet mall.
   On our way to Brooklyn, we pass by a huge outlet mall. We randomly stopped by to check out the J. Crew factory store, and ended up walking away with armfuls of bags. To this day, we’re not even sure how much money we spent. But we tell ourselves it’s worth it, because we look so much cuter in our new clothes.

Despite a few hiccups, we still managed to meet our savings goal and get back in control of our spending. We’re still being frugal these days and only spending money on things we need. So, all in all, our little experiment was a success.

How’d we do on our to-do list? We crossed off almost everything. Boo-ya!

• Guest bedroom / Office / Upstairs Hallway
  • Put up trim
  • Paint the trim
  • Hem and hang curtains
  • Re-veneer the bed  Build a new bed from scratch
  • Make legs for the desk
  • Install ceiling fan in guest BR
  • Install guest BR closet
  • Make custom shelves for the office closet
• Dining Room / Living Room / Stairs
  • Remove all the staples from the staircase (there were stragglers)
  • Remove carpet from the living room and entry hallway
  • Replace two dining room windows
  • Install ceiling fan in living room
  • Prime the walls outside the master BR and down the stairs
• Basement
  • Install hot water heater
  • Insulate rafters
  • Install shelving system
  • Demolish staircase
  • Mildew-bomb the stinky corner
• Master Bedroom
  • Move all the stuff from the attic to the garage
  • Reorganize tools, toolboxes and bins (currently a hot mess)
  • Move paints, paint supplies, hardware and electrical stuff for storage in basement
• Other Stuff
  • Demolish hideous trellis outside laundry room
  • Insulate the washer pipes
  • Polyurethane the white dresser
  • Thanksgiving weekend: load dumpster
  • Install dishwasher

The stuff we didn’t finish is getting moved to our Spring 2012 To-Do list. We’re still working on it and will throw it up here shortly. Also coming up: updates on that darned cabinet (it’s thisclose to being done!). Plus we’re gearing up to build some bedroom furniture. We’ll share our plans and step-by-step instructions for building a bed and some night stands. Stay tuned!

6 Month Houseaversary

It’s official: we’ve been homeowners for six months now! We haven’t burned down the house. The ceiling hasn’t collapsed. The flood didn’t wash us away. It’s a happy time in our home.

We celebrated by taking the weekend off to catch our breath and recharge our batteries before the final push. We slept past 10am, re-watched the entire first season of The Walking Dead, and did a little shopping at some local vintage shops. It. Was. Awesome. The only downside? We don’t have any check-out-what-our-house-looks-like-now pictures to share. (They’re coming up next week!)

We’ve made some serious progress since the day we picked up our keys. Both on our house and on our blog. We added a House Tour page where you can see pictures of what our house used to look like. And you can get a breakdown of what we’ve done so far on the Projects page.

In the meantime, we thought we’d open up the comments to answer any questions our readers might have. Our favorite place to shop for rugs? Websites we’re stalking? Where we get tattooed? Ask us anything. We’ll answer.

We have a plan.

We’re making some serious headway on the Smurf room and guest bedroom. We’re hoping to be done in a couple of weekends — whee! The only problem is that we already have several guests visiting us this summer, and we can’t hole up in the guest bedroom forever. So next up on our renovation list is the master bedroom.

Or the bastard bedroom as we’ve been calling it. It’s the red-headed stepchild of our second floor. We were feeling so frustrated by the huge-but-not-really-workable room that we were ready to give up on it and just start renovating the kitchen instead. Then, out of nowhere, something clicked and we came up with a plan. Our eureka moment: we’re going to merge the 6′x6′ Purple Room and the master bedroom to make a master suite! 

It sounds insane. And it probably is, judging by the amount of work we just created for ourselves, but we’re pretty geeked about it. Here’s what we’re thinking:

You come up the stairs and walk through a single French door to enter a little seating area. There will be 2 cushy chairs with a little table between them where we can sit down by a window and read (or more likely, blog). There’s a doorless entryway that connects the reading room to the master bedroom.

Once you enter the master bedroom, you won’t see a chimney jutting out in the middle of the room. Instead, there will be a flush wall where we can set a king-sized bed in between the 2 windows. There will be a big custom closet in the room, as well as the tiny old closet that we’ll glam up with a modern sliding door that we’ll design and build ourselves. And we’ll turn it into a shoe closet. Yes. A shoe closet. Be jealous. After years of living with a strictly enforced new pair in / old pair out policy, we’re letting ourselves revert back to our shoe-obsessed ways.

The size, shape and location of the custom closet aren’t set in stone. We could actually do a really big L-shaped closet if we wanted. Or place the closet against the same wall as the shoe closet. We haven’t planned that out yet.

With glossy black floors, open doorway and even more sunlight, we’re thinking the master bedroom is going to be super sexy when we’re finished. We’re also thinking that by the time we’re finished, we’re going to go pass out in here for at least 200 years. We have a whole lotta work ahead of us…

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?

One room at a time.

Even before we “had” the house, we were all over floorplanner.com drawing the floor plans to our house. We just had a feeling about this one. Plus, we don’t have cable, remember? We have to make our own fun. And what could possibly be more fun than spending your entire weekend hunched over a computer, drawing walls and picking just the right hideous shade of red carpet? …wait, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.

Here it is for your perusal. Our house:

The entire house is just over 2000 square feet. That’s the size of four of our Brooklyn apartments put together. No joke.

Sometimes we look at the sheer size of the house we have to remodel and get a little pukey. We have full-time jobs, so it’s not like we can do this all day, every day. The idea of living in a messy, half-finished house freaks us out. And we might as well just take our wallets over to Lowe’s and hand everything over now. When we start thinking of what we’ve signed up for, we panic.

Luckily there are 2 of us, so one person can be the calm, rational one while the other person puts her head between her knees and breathes into a paper bag.

Our mantra: one room at a time.

After several breathe-into-the-bag episodes, we decided not to start a bajillion projects all at once. It’s a pretty easy way to get overwhelmed. Our plan is to take on one room from start to finish. Then move on to the next room and the next until the entire house is done. That way we can have some “safe zones” throughout the house where we can escape the sawdust and plaster, and pretend like it doesn’t exist. Denial is a beautiful thing.

As zen as our motto sounds, we’re already cheating and doing 2 rooms at once:

We decided to reach for the low-hanging fruit first and knock out the 2 rooms that will be the easiest to redo. Here’s our plan for the second floor:

• The guest bedroom is the most “finished” room in the house. Someone already insulated it, put up new walls and a coat of white paint. We could have just painted it and moved in, but we like making things harder than they should be.
• The Smurf room is pretty small — 8.5 feet wide by 15 feet long — and its floors and walls are in decent shape. We can bang that out pretty quickly.
• The full bath is dead last on our remodeling list because it was recently redone by whoever owned the house before us. We don’t love it, but it’s perfectly fine for now.
• The hallway pretty much just needs the floors sanded and painted. Since we’ll already be painting the floors in the Smurf room and guest room, we might as well finish off the hallway at the same time.
• We decided to blow more insulation into the attic, so we’re losing all the storage space up there. We decided to turn the 6′x6′ room into a storage room for all the stuff we don’t want to see on a day-to-day basis. Camping gear, suitcases, etc. We can probably knock out this room in one weekend because it’s so teeny. But we’re not going to deal with it now.
• Master bedroom? What master bedroom? It needs so much work that we’re ignoring it for now.

Once we’re done with the guest bedroom, Smurf room and upstairs hallway, we’re going to tackle the kitchen:

The kitchen renovation is going to be a huge job. We’re going to rip out the ceiling, rip up the floors, insulate the walls, make a custom island, redo the doors. We’re going to salvage the existing sink, but pretty much everything else is out of there. We go back and forth on the kitchen cabinets. They need a lot of work, and we also have to remove them to insulate the brick wall behind them. We have big, big plans for that room. So excited for when we get to it!

We’re also going to take a weekend to deck out our back yard with some sweet chaise lounges and a small outdoor dining table. We’re moving in right at the start of BBQ season, and we plan on eating while remodeling our kitchen.

After the kitchen:

• The stair case, dudes. Ohhhh, the stair case. It’s going to be a thing of beauty after the burgundy carpet is gone and we take a belt sander to it. And then stain it. And varnish it. Repeatedly.
• We’ll probably do the hallway at the same time as the staircase.
• The dining room is in pretty good shape, but definitely needs that carpet and ceiling redone. We might add in a Ben Franklin fireplace and set up a hookah lounge instead of a formal dining room. We’re nuts like that.
• The living room is amazing, but needs a lot of work. Ripping down wallpaper and repairing cracked crown molding kinda work.
• The bathroom in the kitchen blows. Same with the porch. We’re going to gut those suckers and completely redo ‘em. We can’t wait to take a sledgehammer to those hideous walls…but we will. One room at a time. One room. At a time.

There’s also an attic and a basement, but they’re not worth showing. They pretty much look like rectangles. You’ll be seeing a lot of pictures of those soon(ish), because we have some work to do there. Blowing in some insulation upstairs, reinforcing some old beams and maybe pouring a new cement floor downstairs. We also have to replace our boiler and water heater.

Oh mercy. It sounds like a lot when I list it out like that, doesn’t it? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a paper bag to breathe in. Get excited; we are!