Floors, Doors & Scores

Yowza, it’s been a while since we updated with a project. It’s been so long, in fact, that we’re now in a completely different season. (Uhh…when did winter happen??) We’ve always been pretty awful at updating regularly, but the biggest reason we’ve been super sporadic lately is because we’ve both been working more. I started a new gig, and Bradley’s taken on some freelance projects. Plus we’re still working on the house every weekend.

We might not update 2 or 3 times a week anymore, but rest assured, we’re still working away. Check out what we did a couple of weeks ago:

Boom. We painted our dining room floors white. Here’s what they looked like before, for comparison:

And here’s what the same corner looked like a year ago:

Major upgrade, amirite?

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you already know that we painted the floors upstairs black:

We love the black upstairs, but the rooms on the first floor tend to be a bit on the dark side. We decided to go with white to brighten things up. The entire first floor will have white floors, and the second floor will have glossy black. To tie the two floors together and make everything flow seamlessly, we’re going to do a two-tone staircase. Here’s what we’re thinking:

Source: reevesinguam.blogspot.com (found on Pinterest, of course!)

We’ll paint the treads black, and toekick area white. Easy peasy.

We went to our supplier in Brooklyn to pick up a 5 gallon bucket of oil-based glossy white paint:

It didn’t look so white when we opened up the can:

But that was quickly remedied by mixing the paint with a drill outfitted with a mixing attachment:

Mmmph. If that image doesn’t make you crave a latte, you don’t know what’s what.

We followed the same process as when we painted the floors upstairs (you can read all about it here). Our first coat was a mix of 50% paint and 50% paint thinner to encourage the paint to soak into the wood rather than sit on top of it.

Our paint guy told us to do this and we highly recommend it for anyone painting soft pine floors. It helps make the wood harder — less likely to gouge under, say, the claws of an easily excitable 2-year-old doofus:

It doesn’t look like much, but that first coat makes all the difference:

The second coat — undiluted oil paint — went on after a light sanding:

We gave the floor one last sanding and then gave it another coat of undiluted oil paint:

We still need to paint the black metal under the stove, but we won’t get to that for a while. Regardless, we love how it turned out. The dining room’s always been the darkest in the house. The brick wall and rafters make it so much worse. With the white floors, the room feels super bright, even at night with dim mood lighting. We also dig how it adds a crisp, clean feel to a room that has a lot of industrial, raw and gritty elements.

It has all the character and charm you’d expect from 130-year-old floors but it looks a lot less grimy.

While we had the paint can open, we went ahead and took care of a couple of projects we’ve been waiting on for a while. This is some sliding door hardware we snagged from an old building:

The hardware would have ended up in a landfill, but instead, it ended up in our garage. What can we say — reclaimed stuff is our jam. Now that we’re almost done with the dining room, we pulled out the hardware to prep it for installation.

We started by scarping off the remnants of brown paint. Here’s how it looked after a little elbow grease:

And then we gave it a coat of oil-based white paint. We don’t have after pictures yet because we have to give the hardware at least 2 more coats of paint.

We also painted one of the frames we made 3 months ago.

We have plans for that sucker. It needs another coat and then we’ll share a really fun, really cheap DIY project that anyone can do. Super geeked about that one!

Remember this dorktastic magazine Bradley scored at a thrift shop a few months ago?

He matted and put it in one of the frames we made. We haven’t figured out where we’ll hang it yet, but it’s done…3 months after we started. Whee! Gotta love home renovation timelines!

Hope you dig what we’ve done with our dining room floors. We’ll be back to share some built-in cabinets we’ve been working on for the past couple of weekends. Stay tuned!

Vintage Chair Makeover: Before & After

Oh, hey, blog. It’s been a while. We have a huge list of reasons we haven’t updated in a while.

• Roadtrip to Minneapolis
• Sinus infection
• Working a ton
• The flu
• A visit from Bradley’s mom
• Another sinus infection
• The flu again

We’ve been bad bloggers, but we know you’ll forgive us when you see what we have to offer you in return:

A concerned beagle in a turtleneck. You’re welcome, internet.

Bradley’s still getting over the flu, but he was pretty adamant about getting some work done over the weekend. We’ve been dying to wrap up this project for a while, and finally got everything together to get it done.

Way back in April, we found these two 1950s chairs in a thrift store:

It’s OK, you can say it: they’re fugly. But if you look past the orangey-brown wood and blue pleather, they’re downright sexy. At $6 a pop, we couldn’t pass them up. We nabbed both chairs and started tearing them apart right away (you can read the details here).

We stripped the chairs and did a happy dance when we found out they’re solid walnut. We decided to stain them a rich espresso to bring out the beauty of the wood. (Original post here.)

We found out at this point that the chairs were selling for way more than the $12 we spent on them. They were on eBay and etsy for as much as $300. Per. Chair. According to the stamp on the chair, they were made in the ’40s or ’50s by a pretty well-known furniture company from New York. And they’re in amazing condition — the chairs themselves are rock solid once you get past the ugliness.

We decided not to upholster them ourselves and risk damaging the chairs. Instead, we splurged on some that delicious brown calfskin pictured above. Mmmph. It’s so soft and lovely, we wanted to rub our faces in it. We splurged and spent $150 a half-skin. For anyone keeping track, our tab is up to $162.

This is where our little makeover came to a stall. Our upholsterer blew us off for months. Our project is small peanuts compared to the projects he usually gets, so we were on the back burner all summer long. Boo! Hiss! Last week, he finally called us back and we picked up our freshly upholstered cushions.

Bradley assembled the seats, while I squealed with delight at how the brown calfskin looks with the brown stain.

Ooh la la. It’s love.

The upholstery set us back 220 bones. Ouch. We weren’t expecting such a big bill, but this is the first time we’ve had something upholstered. We were happy not having to DIY in this case because we were terrified we’d screw up that gorgeous leather. Not brave enough for that one yet, peeps.

One thing that kinda bummed us out:

The upholsterer kinda scratched up the backs of the chairs. Blurgh. He left some pretty big gouges and messed up the stain in some parts. We were able to touch up the stain easily. The gouges are, unfortunately, permanent. We’d have to completely strip and re-stain everything, and we’re not willing to do that now that the leather is on.

Luckily, they’re not really visible when the cushion is on the chair.

Bradley tested out the chairs and gave them his seal of approval:

He flipped it around and gave it the old Vanna White treatment:

Ooooh. Aaaaah. We love how they turned out. The color of the calfskin gives the chairs such a vintage vibe.

Baby got back.

Baby got front, too.

We did have one issue that we’re not happy about:

It turns out the leather shop was wrong when they told us this leather was good for upholstering. It’s really, really thick and doesn’t have any stretch to it. The upholsterer didn’t realize this until he started working on the back cushion. The leather is really tight across the back and has a couple of big wrinkles in it.

We were a little bummed at first, but it’s not a dealbreaker for us. The leather will stretch a little with use, and it’ll look great as it ages. With the warm colors and the clean lines, we’re still totally smitten:

Total cost for this makeover? $382 for the chairs, leather and upholstery. We figure about $10 for the stain, stain pad and polyacrylic. So we’re coming in at $196 per chair. Not super cheap, but not crazy-expensive either for a solid walnut chair covered in calfskin.

What do you think? And, more importantly, where do you think we should put these puppies? Do you think we should keep them together or split em up? Right now both chairs are living in our guest bedroom. We’re not sure where they’ll end up, but we’re open to suggestions.

Front Door Facelift

Let’s talk about our front door. We can see it from the dining room:

And, man, it’s not pretty. At least not from the outside:

Gross, right? That’s a screen door with a net to keep bugs out — it covers up the gorgeous solid wood doors that are on the inside. But that’s not the only problem we have with our front entrance.

Someone tried to stop drafts from creeping in through the 130-year-old doors with weatherstripping foam and felt. Only they did it wrong. The wood doors barely close — we have to push them in and quickly lock the doors before they pop back out.

And, in installing the storm door, the pretty wood details were covered up:

We also hate how the storm door has basically become a home for creepy-crawlies:

We found at least 5 spiders hanging out in the doorway. Blurgh! And did we mention the dust?

No? Well feast your eyes, friends:

It’s a good thing we have 3 entrances to the house, because if we invited people in through this doorway, nobody would ever visit. Ever. And we’d probably never leave either.

Despite all the hideousness, our front door has a lot of redeeming qualities. Here’s what one of the two doors looks like when taken off its hinges:

Bradley looks so tiny standing in front of it…and he’s 5’11″.

Yup. Their size alone makes these doors awesome. And check out this doorknob:

It came with a skeleton key, but we accidentally broke it while trying to jam the door closed, Incredible Hulk style. Whoops. For the record, it’s really, really hard to find a replacement for an ancient skeleton key. Good thing we’re updating the locks anyway.

But before we get to that, we decided to permanently remove the storm door.

We were so geeked to see thing thing go. Especially when we started seeing the woodwork that had been hidden before:

Ooh la la, so purdy! One side was completely in tact. The other side:

…not so much. We were so bummed when we saw this.

To fit the stupid storm door on, someone chipped away some of the original woodwork. Luckily, we think it’s salvageable. With some creative use of wood putty, we think we can reshape the missing areas.

Once the screen door was gone, we vacuumed up all the dust and cobwebs. Then we insulated the gap between the inside of the house and the outside of the house with Great Stuff.

That grey thing Bradley’s standing on? That’s a solid piece of stone. It needs a little cleanup work, but it’s in great shape otherwise. It’s going to be beautiful some day. Not today, though. We have priorities.

Here’s Bradley putting the cast iron plate back in place:

Don’t be fooled — he makes it look easy, but that sucker is SUPER heavy. While Bradley worked on adding insulation, I worked on removing insulation:

I used a paint scraper to remove all of the foam weather strips from around the doorway. They were keeping the doors from closing properly. With the strips removed, the doors open and close easily. We’ll go back in and install new weather strips that don’t interfere with the doors opening and closing.

We had to shim the cast iron plate to make it level:

By shimming it, we raised the metal plate a smidge…and the doors wouldn’t close at all. Not even a little. Our next order of business was to make the door fit properly.

We took the doors off their hinges, posed for the pictures we showed earlier, and then used a circular saw to shave 1/8th of an inch from the bottom of both doors:

And here’s the fun part: when Bradley started sawing, the wood released an unmistakeable smell that caught us totally by surprise. Walnut. These doors are solid walnut. We stopped the saw and had a mini freakout right there on the street.

To get an idea of why we were so geeked, check out the price tag on these solid walnut exterior doors. And those are standard sized doors. Ours are way bigger, way older, and — if we do say so ourselves — way cooler looking. Hence the dancing in the streets.

While we had our walnut beauties off their hinges, we did a few minor repairs on the locking mechanism.

We also lightly polished the brass locks using steel wool:

If you’re a longtime reader, you know we have a serious aversion to brass. Gold metals are not our jam. But this door is an exception. We think the locks and doorknob are badass in brass and we’re leaving them that way. Here’s what the doorknob looked like before we scrubbed it with steel wool:

It’s pretty grimy looking, with a dingy green color due to aging. And here’s how it looks after we polished the raised surfaces:

Two tone! All of the raised edges are shiny orangish brass, and everything recessed is still greenish-greyish old brass. For comparison’s sake, here’s how the doorknob looks next to an oil-rubbed bronze lock:

We’re in love.

Our last task for the day was to silicone the spot between the cast iron plate and the stone.

We used black silicone so it’s not visible, but it will still keep water and dirt from creeping under the cast iron plate and into our basement.

It feels like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Whee! Here we go. This is what our front door looked like before:

And this is what it looks like after:

BOOM. Magic happened.

We’re not done working on the front door. We have some big plans to make this entrance even better:

• We’re going to replace the old glass with new double-pane glass.
• We’re going to paint the outside of the door a bold color. We have it picked out already, but we probably won’t paint until spring.
• We’re going raw on the inside. We’ll sand the inside of the doors to reveal all that walnut prettiness.

We’re already loving the way the doorway is letting more light into our dark hallway. It’s only going to get better from here. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. We’re going to start ripping apart our fugly kitchen this weekend. But before we do, we’ll share our before pictures. Warning: it’s gnarly looking. Stay tuned!

Painting the Dining Room

We haven’t been posting much because we’ve been working on the dining room nonstop. We’re really stoked to start demolishing rooms again — our favorite part of renovating! — so we’re hustling to get the dining room finished. Bradley finished plastering on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, we whipped out our paint brushes and rollers.

In case anyone’s wondering why it took us so long to plaster the walls, it’s because we’ve decided to do smooth, sleek walls rather than textured walls. We had to spend a lot of time making sure our plastering was 100% perfect because we can’t just hide the flaws under stucco or spackle. We also did trimless windows, which means we can’t just hide imperfections under trim. But all the work we put in upfront paid off, because we ended up with walls that are perfectly smooth:

Like a baby’s bottom.

On Saturday morning, we vacuumed all of the walls and floors to make sure no dust was left on anywhere. We scrubbed the brick wall to get rid of any lingering plaster and loose bits of mortar:

We love our raw brick walls, but we hate how much they shed. A few months ago, we tried a brick sealer for the walls upstairs and they’ve completely stopped shedding. We picked up another gallon for the wall downstairs:

What we love about this sealer is that it doesn’t look glossy when dry. It darkens the brick a little, but it doesn’t look like it’s been sealed or painted. And it stops the wall from flaking. Here’s how our brick looked after one coat:

Exactly the same as before, but better. We plan on using it on our concrete sills to protect them from stains.

We spent all day Saturday painting the brick and priming the walls. On Sunday morning, the room was ready for some color:

We went back and forth on a lot of colors for the walls. At one point, there were easily 30 paint chips hanging on the walls. The one we both agreed on was this:

SW6204 Sea Salt is a cool blue-green neutral from Sherwin Williams. We went with a low luster finish — it’s sort of a semi-gloss, but without too much sheen.

Before we decided on the color, we hung a paint chip in the room and checked on it at different times throughout the day. We loved how the color went from a subtle greige in the morning to a calm blue-green in the afternoon, and then finally a more dramatic green at night. We were a little panicky when we looked at the same chip in the Sherwin Williams store and it looked white. But that just goes to show you that paint color really depends on the lighting of the room.

Here’s Bradley getting the paint party started:

And now for the fun part — the before & afters. Remember how fugly this room used to be? No? Feast your eyes on this:

That’s how the same corner looks today. Boom! Not fugly anymore! Here’s the set of doors that lead to the basement (left), the front entrance (middle) and the living room (right):

The most obvious change in that corner is that we got rid of the basement door (we have another entrance outside). Can we talk about how hideous our paint color choice looks next to those orangey-brown doors?

We considered removing the doors completely because we like the open look, but we kind of need them. In the winter, we use the doors to direct heat to rooms that we’re using. For example, if we’re in the living room, we can shut the door to the hallway so the air has to flow into the living room. And when we go to bed, we can open the hall door and shut the living room doors (there are 2) so heat bypasses that room and flows up to the bedrooms.

Instead of getting rid of the doors completely, we’re going to replace them with something much more elegant. The door on the left will be a glass sliding door. The one on the right will be a glass pocket door that tucks away neatly into the wall when not in use.

While we’re on the subject of ugly doors, this is what the dining room entry used to look like:

And this is how it looks with our new door, trimless windows and concrete window sills in place:

We went with a basic door and hardware from Lowe’s. The little window above the door was a custom order from a local glass company (the same one we use to get our custom cut mirrors and glass for frames). It cost about $22.

We love how the crisp white looks next to the sea salt blue. It’s such a happy, beachy color.

We’re really happy with the way our windows turned out. The sills have some plaster residue on them that we need to wash off, but we’re really digging the way the textured concrete looks next to the smooth walls.

Here’s a project that we completely failed to photograph and share on the blog:

Bradley whipped up this cabinet one weekend while I was out of town. This is going to be part of the radiator cover that we’ll make next weekend. Check out the bottom shelf:

Routers are total eyesores, no matter how well-designed they are. So we decided to make a cabinet to hide ours — plugs, wires and all. Bradley built this cabinet with a plug-in on the back. Once we have the door on, we’ll never have to see that tangle of wires again. We can store things in the cabinet that we would use in the dining room but don’t necessarily want to see all the time (our pile of boardgames, for example). Gotta love functional built-ins!

If you want to see some more before pictures of our dining room, check out this post. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. Stay tuned!

DIY Tree Stump Side Tables

We just realized it’s July 30th. As in, almost August. Which means that summer’s more than half over. Boo! Hiss!! We thought we’d be renovating our kitchen by now, but we’ve had a pretty major setback in the dining room: we have to plaster the walls ourselves. Plastering is the bane of our existence. It’s boring and it takes us way too long to do it. But since our plasterer (who did a fabulous job upstairs) completely blew us off, we’re stuck doing it. Not easy when this is going on outside:

That’s why there haven’t been a ton of updates lately. We would show you a million pictures of ourselves plastering, but they all kinda look like this one:

Also, we’re frowning pretty much the entire time we plaster.

This weekend, we decided to wrap up a way-more-fun-than-plastering project. We finished our tree stump side tables.

This is the kind of project that we live for. You take something that’s essentially garbage and you turn it into something beautiful and functional. We also love that it’s super easy to make, doesn’t cost much and doesn’t require a ton of special tools. Ready for the step-by-step? Us too. Lets go.

First things first: you’ll need a tree stump. We found a pile of them by the side of some railroad tracks near our house. We picked out the two with the most interesting shapes, threw them in the back of our car and brought them home. Here’s what they looked like way back in January:

Next, you’ll have to dry the stumps out completely. This is arguably the hardest step because it requires a lot of patience. We put our stumps in our garage’s uninsulated attic for a few months. It’s 100+ degrees up there every single day, so it basically acts like a kiln and thoroughly dries out the stumps. If you don’t have access to an attic or a kiln, you can leave the stumps in a dry spot for a few months. Elevate the stumps on a couple of shims so air can circulate underneath. This will keep mold from growing on the underside.

How do you know when the stumps are dry? The bark will fall off really easily. If you can grab a hunk and easily rip it off, they’re ready. Which brings us to the next step: remove the bark from the stump.

We used a chisel and a prybar to remove the stumps in big chunks. You have to be careful not to damage the wood underneath the bark. If the stump is truly dry enough, it won’t be a problem. But if you find yourself having to jam or shove the prybar between the bark and the stump, walk away for a few days.

With the bark completely removed, we’re ready to level the table top. To do this, we need to get the stumps on a level surface. We swept all the dust off of a section of the garage floor and then checked to see if it was level. First we check it in one direction:

Then we checked it in the other direction:

And we were happy to find that it was perfectly level:

Maybe happy isn’t the right word. It looks more like he’s in pain.

Next, we need to figure out if our stump is level. To do that, we moved the stump to our level spot and then tested it:

Fail. Our stump was not level at all. So we have to plane our table top.

We used a planer and shaved off the side of the table that was too high.

If you don’t have a planer, you could use a belt sander…but it’s going to take you forever to level off your top. A planer gets the job done in minutes. This is how much sawdust we shaved off from just one table top in order to get it level:

Yeah. Don’t try this with a belt sander. You’ll go through so many belts that you’re better off buying a cheap planer instead.

Next, we have to remove the gouges that the planer left:

And that’s where a belt sander comes in handy:

We used 80-grit for this task.

It’s important to keep checking to make sure the top is level. Once the gouges are gone, we can flip the trunk on its side and start cleaning it up:

We used an orbital sander with 180-grit sandpaper. 180 is coarse enough to get any leftover bark off, but it’s fine enough not to completely strip the wood. Check it out:

We sanded only the bottom half in the picture above. The dust and grime are gone, but the neato bug trails and scars are still completely visible. A closer look post-sanding:

After sanding the trunks, we need to do clean up the cracks and crevices.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a tree some funky knots and cracks and textures. We think these are the things that give a tree stump table character. Both of our stumps had spots where the bark grew in big lumps and knots:

We don’t want to remove the lumps and knots — we just want to remove the fibrous bark and dirt that’s built up on top of them. So we used a chisel and a rubber mallet to gently pry off anything that seemed loose. After that, we cleaned this area with 80-grit sandpaper. We didn’t use a sander. Instead, we used a sheet of sandpaper and followed the curves of the stump.

We also had some deep cracks on the top of one table:

We cleaned this out by shoving a folded-up piece of 180-grit sandpaper into the crack and then wiggling it around to loosen dirt up. Then we used our air compressor to blow the debris out. (If you don’t have an air compressor, you could use a can of compressed air.)

With everything cleaned up, we were ready to give our tables something to sit on.

We decided not to do legs on our stumps because we like how low they are. Instead, we purchased 2 packs of furniture glides from Lowe’s.

They’re little discs with a nail on one end and a felt pad on the other end. They’ll serve two purposes:

1. They’ll keep our floors from getting scratched up.
2. They’ll elevate the tables off the floor just enough so that air can circulate under them.

That last one is super important because even if you dry your table for a solid year, it’s still going to have some moisture in it. And moisture means mold if air isn’t circulating. We used a moisture meter to check our stumps (Bradley borrowed it from work) and even though they pretty much baked in our attic, they’re still not 100% dry. Lifting the tables up a little lets them air out.

We carefully flipped our tables over and hammered 4 glides to the underside of each table. Also, we flipped them so our freshly sanded tops were on a soft mat instead of the hard floor. Highly recommend that if you don’t want your top to get scratched up!

Now we’re ready to seal these suckers up.

We moved the stumps to a work table and flipped them over so they’re sitting right-side-up. Here’s how they look all clean and ready to finish:

We love the texture in the knotted crack that runs down one stump.

We were originally debating between bleaching the stumps and then staining them white or staining them a dark espresso. After we cleaned them up, we decided that we liked them raw. So we used a water-based polycrylic to seal them:

Here’s how they looked after one coat:

The whole thing got much darker.

We love how the streaks are much more visible. The different shades of brown pop. We let the trucks dry for 30 minutes (timing varies based on the brand, so read the package label!) and then sanded the whole thing with 320-grit sandpaper:

After the first coat of sealer, you might notice that little fibers of wood stand up all over the stump. Kind of like tiny raised hairs. Don’t panic! This is normal. Basically, the wood is dry when you start painting so everything feels super smooth. The dry wood soaks up the wet sealer and plumps up. Sanding with 320-grit will smooth everything back down. Just take your time and don’t rush through the sanding — it’s really important to get a smooth finish or else the table will look kinda shabby.

Here’s how you check to see if you’ve sanded enough. Run the palm of your hand softly across the surface of the table:

Feel any snags? Keep sanding. Feel like velvet? Awesome. That’s what you’re looking for here.

We sanded every exposed part of the stump (we didn’t bother with the bottom), then gave it a blast with the air compressor to get rid of any dust. After that we gave it another coat of polycrylic. Lather, rinse, repeat.

We gave each stump 4 coats of polycrylic and sanded with 320-grit between each coat. It sounds like a lot more work than it actually is. The first coat and first sand is always the hardest and most time-consuming. The other 3 coats are a piece of cake. And remember, you don’t sand after the last coat of polycrylic.

We loved the color of the stumps after the sealer dried:

But we hated how shiny it looked. If you looked carefully, you could see brush strokes in the light. The shininess combined with the brush strokes made our stump tables looks less high-end / modern and more crafty / country chic. But we have one last trick up our sleeve to get rid of the shine and make these tables look fabulous:

The final step is to go over all visible surfaces with grade 0000 steel wool.

Check out the sheen on the side of the table:

We rubbed the ball of steel wool up and down (with the grain) the stump using moderate pressure:

Way less shiny:

Here’s another view. We used steel wool in one corner of the table top to show how it removes the way-too-glossy sheen:

See how it’s blindingly glossy all over but then there’s one dull area? That’s what steel wool does. It takes the edge off. Here’s how the top looked after we steel wool’d the entire surface:

The sides looked a lot better, too:

Annnnd that’s it. They’re done! Now we just need to make a sofa* to sit in between them and our living room will be in good shape.

Let’s talk money. We spent just under $10 on this project. We already owned the polycrylic, the sandpaper and all the tools. The stumps were, of course, free. The only thing we purchased were the 2 packs of furniture glides. And, just in case you’re wondering, for $10 we could have purchased one IKEA Lack side table. Yup. We like our tables better. Viva DIY!

We’ll be back soon with a few more projects to share, including a super-easy shortcut for our DIY concrete window sills. Stay tuned!

* Yes, we’re going to make our own sofa. We have a look in mind and have started planning out the details. Exciting!

Carpet Diem

The last time we really talked about our living room was way back in August 2011. It’s gone through a lot of changes since then:

• The living room was our makeshift bedroom until we could get the guest bedroom and office renovated.
• After we moved upstairs, the living room became a storage room. We closed the door and pretended the mess didn’t exist.
• Then we started construction on our dining room — which was being used as a makeshift living room — so we cleared out the living room and moved the couch & TV in there. That’s how it’s been for a few months ago.

Despite going through a lot of functional changes, the living room looks exactly the same as it did on the day we moved in. We’ve been trying to stick to our one-room-at-a-time rule so we don’t have construction messes all over the place, so up until Saturday morning this is how the living room looked:

Burgundy carpet. We’ve lived with this for 15 months, people. And we’ve survived to tell the tale.

This room and the adjoining hallway are the last two burgundy carpet strongholds, and we decided Saturday would be a good day to attack them. We’ve ripped out so much hideous carpet in this house that we’re basically experts. In fact, Bradley moves so fast when ripping that I can’t even get a decent photograph. Check it:

Step one: use a boxcutter to cut through the carpet from one end of the room to the other.

Step two: peek underneath carpet and gag.

Step three: cut along the wall if necessary (sometimes carpet is under the floor trim).

Step four: yank.

Step five: roll.

Step six: keep rolling while holding breath so as not to gag from the smell that comes up from underneath the carpet. (Kind of a mix of the subway, grandma’s attic and sour milk.)

Step seven: play Guess the Stain™ — fun for the whole family!

After that, it’s just a matter of rolling up the foam pad that sits under the carpet and yanking out 10 billion staples. While I yanked staples, Bradley removed the linoleum tiles from the main entrance.

Linoleum is typically glued to a baseboard which is either stapled or glued (or sometimes both) to the wood floor. We were really, really hoping for no glue. Glue would mean an increased risk of damaging the floors underneath and a lot more effort when we have to sand.

It definitely felt glued down. There was a lot of prying, groaning, cursing and more prying. And finally the baseboard came up enough for us to peek underneath:

The good news: no glue!
The bad news: someone went way overboard with the stapler. There were at least — and we’re not exaggerating at all here — a bajillion staples holding the baseboard to the floor. It took a solid hour to pry just that little bit up, and we had to break for lunch in the middle because it was so exhausting.

Here’s how it looked after I yanked the staples out:

Still ugly. But at least the nasty-meets-grimy combination of burgundy carpet and cheap linoleum is outta there!

The floors need to be sanded and painted, but we won’t get around to that until we’ve completely renovated the dining room, living room and hallway. This is what we’re going to live with for a while:

We’re OK with that. The floors were painted chocolate brown at some point, so we’re not worried about splinters or anything. And cool wood feels so much better under our bare feet than carpet.

There is one last remnant of burgundy carpet that we haven’t removed yet:

This is, by far, the biggest radiator we have ever seen. It’s super wide and super heavy. We will eventually have to move it to get the carpet out, but we’re not really sure how we’ll do it. We have two plans so far:

1. Make 7 or 8 beefcake friends at the gym and conning them into helping us.
2. Leave the carpet and just build a radiator box to cover the whole damn thing.

For now, we’re just happy to see (nearly all of) the carpet gone.

When we moved into the house in April 2011, we were heartbroken to find soft pine floors under the carpet. Now, we love them and can’t imagine covering them up with new hardwood floors.

There’s something really warm and comforting about rustic, beat-up, old flooring. It feels cozy. And even more important, it feels right for our 130-year-old house.

We have more updates coming up, including a 101 on making frames. Stay tuned!

How’s It Hanging?

We’ve been bad at updating lately. It’s not that we haven’t been chipping away on projects — it’s just that most of what we’re working on is in progress. Plus who really wants to see pictures of us plastering for the 23,408,324th time? Snoozefest. The things we’re working on right now aren’t super exciting, but whatever, we’re going to post ‘em anyway. Starting with the one project that we fiiiiinally just finished and are thrilled with.

Remember the vintage lighting fixture we found in a northern Pennsylvania thrift shop? It used to look like this:

It looked like this momentarily:

And then this:

After that, it got a serious facelift:

A couple of weeks ago, we went to a local specialty lamp store and picked up all of the parts we needed to wrap this project up because we were in a big hurry to finish up this project. This place ended up being waaaaay overpriced. We got a ceiling cap, 2 feet of chain, some silk electrical cord, and a socket for about $50. Blurgh — not great considering we paid $50 for the actual fixture itself. But we did save a ton of time by not waiting for things to be shipped to us.

First order of business: make the different parts match the fixtures.

We used the same oil-rubbed bronze spray paint that we used on the pendant itself. The ceiling cap looks so much better in ORB than glossy black.

We decided not to paint the chain and socket because we liked the way they looked:

The chain in old, so it has an aged, rusty look that we loved. And the socket is brass — not shiny, tacky, ’80s brass, but dull, aged brass. So we left it as is.

We threaded the silk wire through the chain, then connected the chain to the pendant:

Once the socket was wired up, here’s how the pendant looked:

And here’s how it looks today:

We weren’t sure whether we would hang the fixture at the top of the staircase or the bottom — both areas had crappy old fixtures that needed replacement. We decided to go with the top of the staircase to add a little drama to an otherwise boring area.

Bam. Success. Check out the way the light plays on the walls around the fixture:

We haven’t decided what color we’ll be painting the walls, but we plan on taking the lighting pattern into account.

We went with a long Edison style bulb so we get a nice overall glow without getting blinded when we look at the fixture.

That’s it for our vintage lighting fixture project. We had two goals when we started searching for lighting for the hallway: 1) we wanted something unique that draws the eye up to showcase how ridiculously tall the ceilings are, and 2) we didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for it. We think we nailed both goals.

The entire thing cost us a hundred bones — $50 for the fixture and $50 for the parts. We did a quick check on our last trip to Home Depot to see what a standard off-the-rack fixture of a similar size would cost. We couldn’t find out as big, but we did notice that a lot of the nicer looking fixtures were well above $100. And ours definitely brings more glam.

What do you think? Did we do this fixture justice?

Skeletor Decor

There’s really no delicate way for us to segue into this project so we’re going to throw it out there:

We found a deer skull and painted it. And we like it. A lot.

Here’s the thing: we know this post is going to turn some readers off. Frankly, we don’t care. Our house is a reflection of us. This is not a cookie-cutter, buy-this-at-Target kinda house, and we like it that way. So if the sight of naked skulls grosses you out — come back tomorrow and check out our freshly-painted vintage pendant light.

The rest of you, feast your eyes on this:

We have kind of a thing for skulls. We also have kind of a thing for nature. We love to camp and kayak and fish and hike. That’s how we stumbled across our friend Yorick. A couple of months ago, we went on a hike and found a full deer skeleton. Actually, we found two full deer skeletons, but one of them wasn’t, um, clean yet. The other was completely stripped clean and when we picked up the skull, we realized it was in perfect condition.

The deer died of natural conditions, and had obviously been lying out for a long time. We picked up the skull and took it home with us. We also grabbed one spinal vertebra because it looked cool.

Both the spine and the vertebra were completely picked clean. There was only one problem we could see:

The areas that were partially buried in dirt had become stained brown.

We could have soaked the bones in bleach to whiten them. Instead, we decided to bronze our skull.

Oil rubbed bronze, that is. We shook up a can we had lying around and got to work.

Here’s how Yorick looked before:

You can really see the staining in that picture. Here’s how the skull looked after one coat of ORB:

Right away, we could make out details in the skull that weren’t as obvious when it was a plain old white skull. Like these holes above the eyes:

Or the interlocking seam down the center of the skull that formed when the skull fused together.

We did 3 thin coats, spaced an hour apart and here’s what it looked like after it dried:

We think it doesn’t really look like an organic object anymore. Instead, it looks like it’s cast out of solid metal.

It’s like it would be heavy if you picked it up. We totally expect people to pick this thing up, by the way. Which is why we made sure the bottom was perfectly painted as well:

We loved the ORB skull so much, we decided to paint the vertebra to match:

Right now, the deer skull and vertebra are living on a bookshelf in the living room:

This is only temporary housing. We’re planning on building more bookshelves and we’d love to have one in a crisp white to set the bronze skull in. Wherever they end up, we’re pretty smitten with the way they turned out.

Now the only question that remains is what we’re going to do with all the other deer and cow skulls we have in a box in the garage? Oh, did we forget to mention that? We’ve found a ton of skulls over the years — most of them are from Bradley’s aunt & uncle’s ranch in Texas. They’re just sitting around waiting for us to do something with them. We’re not sure if they’ll all end up as skeletor decor inside the house, but we’re pretty geeked about experimenting with different spray paints to get different looks. So far, we’ve agreed on glossy white, bright yellow and bold blue. We’ll keep you posted on how those turn out when we get around to it.

 

Stuff we learned from this project:

 

• We can’t please everyone. We admit it: we had a little anxiety about this post. We like our readers and we don’t want to piss ‘em off. But at the same time, we have a vision for our house and it’s not based on popular opinion. This is who we are peeps. If you don’t like it, there are other blogs.
  
• We’re not the only weirdos out there. Check out all of these deer skulls for sale on Etsy. And, if you’re ever in NYC, make sure you stop by The Evolution Store in SoHo. It’s like a natural history museum you can shop at. We’re like two kids in a candy store there.

Our 2-Hour $0 Salvaged Materials Bed

In our previous Brooklyn lives, we lived in an apartment that was just a wee bit over 500 square feet. We didn’t have much storage. Or, to be more accurate, we didn’t have a single closet in the entire place. Seriously. No closets. All we had were 3 wall-mounted cabinets in the kitchen and a little under-the-sink storage. It’s pretty amazing what can pass as an apartment in NYC.

We had to get a little creative without storage solutions, so one of the first purchases we made after moving in was the IKEA Sultan Alsarp:

Source

The slatted base lifts up to give a whole lot of storage space underneath. Smart! We also loved the fact that the bed is slip-covered. The white fabric you see on the base is actually velcroed on. We loved how we could just slip it right off and wash it whenever we felt like it. ….until we actually washed it and it shrank and fell apart.

Reading instructions: we suck at it.

Al’s skirt didn’t last through one wash cycle. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed IKEA, but still loved the bed. So we marched on down to our local IKEA and asked where we could find slipcovers for old Al. And that’s when FAIL #2 happened: Al doesn’t have replacement slipcovers.

One slipcover comes with the bed, and that’s the only slipcover you can have. For the rest. of. your. life. There was much gnashing of teeth and wrenching of fists, and in the end we vowed never to shop at IKEA again. (That didn’t last long.) But, because we hadn’t been pooped on enough yet, FAIL #3 happened a few days later:

Under Al’s slipcovered skirt is a foam padding. We were planning on DIYing a slipcover to go over it, but someone decided to shred the padding instead:

The foam padding had been chewed on, clawed at and torn off. And the evidence of little bits of yellow foam found in his whiskers both proved his guilt and the dog’s innocence. After that incident, our plans to sew a slipcover got tossed out the window.

We were going to reveneer the entire bed and make it super fancy, but when we took a close look at the bed, we discovered that it was literally coming apart at the joints. Another FAIL. We’ve lost count of our FAILs at this point.

Morale has been kinda low ’round these parts. With the crappy weather and the never-ending cabinet project, we’ve been moving pretty slowly. So, to stir things up a bit, we did a freestyle project. One that involved no planning, no over-thinking, and — best of all — no money. We woke up on Saturday and decided we had one day to build our bed with whatever we could find. It took us 2 hours.

We started by gathering materials.

We salvaged the slatted frame from our IKEA bed. It’s in perfect condition and made from a very durable steel. We also found these five blocks of wood in our garage:

Those are leftover pieces from a big oak beam. The big ones are 9″ cubes and the smaller one in the center is about 4″ across. They’ve been stained and sitting around for a long time, and we thought they would be perfect legs for our new bed.

Those are the only 2 elements of our super modern / minimalist bed: the slatted frame and the beam legs. Plus a few screws to hold it all together. Really. That’s it.

With our materials ready to go, we set up our table saw with a dado blade:

The kerf of a standard blade is 1/8″. Kerf is, oddly enough, not a word that Bradley made up to mess with my head. (I had to take it to The Googles.) It means the width of the saw cut. With a dado blade, you can change the kerf to whatever you need. Our saw has a maximum kerf of 3/4″, so that’s what we set it to. Here’s some kerfing in action:

The stink-face is an absolute mandatory when using a table saw.

Basically, using a dado blade lets you take out strips instead of fine lines.

In no time, our blocks had matching grooves:

Next step: sanding. This is what the blocks looked like after a quick run with a belt sander:

Ignore the nosy dog in the background.

Our initial plan was to stain or paint the blocks. But covering up this gorgeous wood felt wrong:

We loved the distressed look. How some parts have a blackened pattern and others are completely bare. We decided to roll with it and see how the bed looked with naked legs. If we hated how it turned out, we could always paint them later.

The assembly took about 15 minutes. First, we put the legs in place:

The four big blocks are the legs, and the small block in the middle is support for the middle of the bed. We ran out of felt furniture pads, so we improvised with some extra rug pads we had lying around:

We cut those into 8″ squares and slipped them under the legs that sit on on wood floors. That way they won’t scratch up the paint. After that, we plopped the frame right on top:

And, finally, we screwed the frame to the legs to hold everything together:

We don’t want the screw head sticking up at all, but we didn’t have a countersink bit with us. We had to improvise. Bradley drilled his pilot hole with a small drill bit. Then he used a much bigger drill bit to make a countersink.

The trick is to gently drill away a layer without going all the way through the hole. That way you end up with a cone-shaped hole for the screw to sit in:

See how the hole is wider at the top and smaller at the bottom? That’s how you get a screw to sit flush against a surface instead of sitting on top of the surface:

Bradley put 2 long screws into each leg. We picked up the bed and moved it across to room to make sure it was sturdy, and it was. So we vacuumed the rug, moved the bed back and dropped the mattress on top. Here’s what our bed looks like now:

You can’t see the frame at all from a normal vantage point, so the bed looks like it’s floating on beams. From underneath, you can see the slatted frame:

We’re on the hunt for deep teal bedding right now. With the right duvet, the frame shouldn’t be visible at all. And we’re hoping the natural wood legs will really pop against a bold color. Check out that streaked wood:

We love the way those legs look against the jute rug.

Our next big task is to make bedside tables. Right now, we’re using some trays to keep our lamps and bedside messes contained.

We picked up those lamps at Target a few weeks ago. We wanted something simple and neutral enough to work in any room. That way we can move these to the living room later if we want. We’re just starting to get a feel for the kind of textures and colors we want in this room, so we might get some other lamps for this space down the line. Right now, we’re digging ‘em.

We’re also digging the white dresser in the funky angled corner:

We’re not sure if we ever shared after pictures of that sucker in use. So far, the paint hasn’t chipped a bit even with daily use. The secret is all in the polyurethane — two to three coats, sand in between!

There you have it. We made a bed in 2 hours. It felt so good to sleep in a “real” bed last night. Just having the mattress up off the floor really helps make the room look more finished. Our guest bedroom is finally starting to come together. We still need to:

• Get some new bedding.
• Build a couple of night stands.
• Do a quickie IKEA-hack console table.
• Hang some art.
• Get some color in there, pronto. Love neutrals and all, but this room is pretty boh-ring without color.

We’ll be back soon with updates on the never-ending cabinet and a couple of other small projects. Stay tuned!

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Table

Or office desk, rather. Take a look at what Bradley worked on yesterday:

That’s our new office desk. It’s over 8-feet wide and has plenty of room for both of us to sit side-by-side. The desk top was actually a counter that Bradley’s company started creating but then abandoned to work on something else. It was wrapped in furniture blankets and exiled to the basement until a few months ago, when Bradley’s boss did some spring cleaning. He didn’t want to throw out the counter, but also didn’t want to keep it. So we offered to take it off his hands.

It looks like wood, but it’s actually plywood covered with a 1/4″ spalted maple veneer.

That crazy pattern — spalting — is caused by fungus. Basically the tree died and rotted naturally. And then it was reborn as a fancy veneer.

You can see some little holes throughout the table top:

Those were made by worms and bugs.

Here’s how Bradley took an unfinished counter and turned it into a desk. First, he had to veneer the sides because they were unfinished.

He attached a thin strip of veneer to the table using heavy-duty wood glue. He taped the veneer to the desktop to make sure it dried in perfect position. The wood strip was both longer and taller than it needed to be. You can see it sticking up along the edge of the table:

The next step was to shave off the excess wood and get a nice, smooth edge. Bradley used a router for that:

After that, it just was a matter of attaching the legs:

We stayed in Brooklyn for an extra day so Bradley could weld a set of 3 legs for the desk. (They haven’t moved the metal shop out to Pennsylvania yet, so that’s where all the welding happens.) He used 1.5″ angled steel for the box part and a piece of steel for the “wings” that connect to the wood.

Instead of using chemicals to color the steel, we decided to leave it as is.

We liked how the edges were a shinier grey and the rest of the was a more dull black. Bradley gave the legs a clear coat of varnish:

Then we carried it up to the office so he could assemble the legs:

He put a couple of felt furniture pads on each leg to keep them from scratching up the painted floor:

Then we flipped it and pushed it against the wall:

Ta-da!

We brought up one of our zebrawood chairs to try out the desk. Bradley mock typed for me:

Those chairs are actually for our (currently nonexistent) dining room table, and we’re not really sure if they’re working with the table.

Both wood grains are so unique that we were worried they would fight for attention. The spalted maple is much quieter than the super obnoxiously loud zebrawood chairs. So we’re considering using these as our office chairs. They’re much more comfortable than they look — I promise.

After setting up the desk, we got super geeked about how finished the room is looking. Sure, we still have to putting up and painting the trim, but — holy crap! — we have furniture in there. Finally! With our spending freeze officially over, we decided to go shopping for office accessories.

Here’s how our desk looks today:

Finding those two lamps at Target was nothing short of a Christma-Hanu-Rama-Kwanzaa miracle. Bradley and I do not agree on lamps. We’ve been vetoing one another’s lamp choices for months now. He thinks my picks are too girly-grandma-chic. I think his picks are too boring. But these puppies, we both agreed on right away:

They’re a good mix of vintage and classic and modern and industrial. And the oil-rubbed bronze fits right in with the black floors, doorways and desk legs. We snagged two of those for $30 a pop.

We also picked up this big apothecary jar:

Since I work from home a lot, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the office. Which means my four-legged friends will be spending a lot of time in the office, too. So we’re using the apothecary jar to stash dog treats in. Margot’s obsessed with it:

She keeps sneaking off into the office to stare at the jar.

We’re thinking about moving it closer to the middle of the desk just in case she gets tempted to climb up there. (She jumped up on the coffee table and ate an entire bag of treats a few days ago. Total brat!) We also picked up this cute ramekin to use as a water bowl for the pups:

We keep a water bowl in the kitchen, which is right under the office. One of our dogs is no spring chicken, and walking up and down stairs is getting harder for her. So we decided to put a water bowl upstairs so she doesn’t have to go far.

The varnish that we used on the desk legs has a really strong fresh paint smell. It’s going to take a few days to fade out. In the meantime, we’ve picked up a diffuser to help de-stink the office.

We liked the cute printed bottle, and the lemongrass smell is so fresh and so clean-clean. We liked it so much that we picked up another one of these for the guest bedroom. We also got couple of letter trays to keep our paper messes under control. His:

And hers:

A set of 3 magazine boxes helps divide the desk in half. The boxes and the trays were on sale for $4 each. Not bad! We also got a small waste basket to sit under the desk:

We liked how plain and simple the little metal bin is. What we don’t like: those cords in the background. Once we have our laptops and phones in the office, there are going to be even more cords under the desk. We’re working on a solution for that and we’ll share it soon. One more thing we’re working on:

We need to find a rug that fits the room. This grey IKEA rug used to feel so massive in our Brooklyn apartment. Now it looks tiny. We might use it for the laundry room later on, but we’ll leave it in the office until we find something that fits better. For now, it’s a good perch for Margot to keep an eye on that treat jar:

Still there. Good.

Here’s what’s left to work on in the office before we can call it officially done:

• Install shelves in the closet
• Finish putting up trim (in the closet and along the brick wall)
• Paint the trim
• Install bookshelf (or bookshelves?)

We’ll also eventually put in a dimmer for the recessed lighting because it’s too bright otherwise. But there’s no rush on that.

Oh, hey, remember when the office used to look like this?

Every now and then I like to dig up the before pictures to make the “work in progress” pictures look even fancier:

We’ve been working hard to cross everything off of our November / December To-Do list, and we’re getting close. We’ll be back with some more updates — including one biiiiig project — soon. Stay tuned!