Dumpster Day

Remember a couple of months ago when we cleaned out our garage and it looked like this?

Well, here’s how it looked last weekend:

Somehow our gabage came back tenfold. And we accumulated a bunch of things that we’ve never owned before — a snow shovel, a wheelbarrow, a couple of Ariondack chairs that we need to store until spring.

That towering white thing in the middle? That’s our dishwasher stacked on top of our fugly old oven.

We like to utilize vertical storage space. There’s also a lawn mower, a weed whacker, another shovel — according to Bradley, one can never have too many shovels.

There’s an overabundance of recyclables because our town only collects recycling once a month. Annnnd they refuse to collect recycling if they think something isn’t sorted correctly. For the last 3 months, we’ve had a standoff with the recycling people because they think we don’t know the difference between glass beer bottles and aluminum cans. Currently the bane of our existence:

Aluminum bottles. Shaped like glass bottles. What is this world coming to?

They confuse the hell out of our recycling collection people. Because of those bottles, they’ve refused to pick up our recycling 3 months in a row. And we keep schlepping it back to the garage in hopes that they’ll figure it out. So far, no luck.

One the other side of the garage:

Piles of wood from past demolitions, an old ceiling fan, a moped and random cement supplies.

Our garage isn’t the only place we’ve been stashing garbage. We put a pile of wood from our dining room demolition under the hideous trellis in the back yard. Here’s Bradley digging them out from under a giant pile of leaves:

There is so much we hate about that trellis. It’s poorly built. It’s ugly. Its only purpose is to support the grape vine. That’s what all of those spidery branches are — they’re part of the grape vine that I was so geeked about when we first moved into the house. Fresh grapes! Stuffed grape leaves!

Turns out our grape vine doesn’t actually put out any grapes. And it’s the location of a ginormous ant hill. Most of the big branches are rotten and full of ants inside. Plus, it’s waaaaay too high-maintenance for us. Are you seeing that pile of leaves? Sorry neighbors. We’re way too busy sprucing up the inside of the house to rake leaves. The grape vine and its accompanying trellis had to go.

While Bradley sawed, I raked.

Jabba supervised:

She went to the vet earlier that day for her annual shots, and she had a horrible allergic reaction to them. Poor little peanut. We had to rush her back to the vet to get a shot of Benadryl. She spent the rest of the day wrapped up like a burrito where we could keep an eye on her.

Aside from a couple of trips to the vet, we spent the entire day loading our dumpster. We booked it for 2 weeks, but it took us one day to fill it up:

Here’s how the garage looks now:

Still a little messy, but at least it’s a contained mess. Most of which, by the way, is the recycling that just won’t go away.

The back of the house looks way less scary with the trellis gone:

We don’t miss the grape vine either:

We’re chomping at the bit to start renovating this part of the house. Right now it makes our house feel like a shanty. It’s an ugly tumor on the otherwise quaint old brick.

The window on the left is to the half-bath. The windows & door on the right are to the laundry room. We’re not really sure what’s going on with the mix-and-match siding:

And the contrasting stairs:

Either way, we won’t get too used to it. We plan on gut renovating those two rooms inside and out. New siding, new windows, and all. We’re counting down days until our self-imposed spending freeze is up. Then we’ll order supplies and get down to business.

We’ve been super busy at our casa — so busy that we’re really, really behind on posts. We’ll be back every day this week with updates. Promise. Stay tuned!

Moving into the Guest Bedroom

We know we’re totally late on the whole Thanksgiving weekends update, but better late than never. We decided to have a low key, low pressure Thanksgiving. That’s code for “We were too lazy to cook a turkey.” We roasted a chicken instead. And the rest of our meal was made from stuff we had lying around the house.

Squash, mashed potatoes, green beans and roast chicken. And ice cream for dessert. Not bad for a very-last-minute feast. We even roasted a dog-friendly version of our meal for Jabba:

I tried to grab a picture of it but by the time I ran back with my camera, she’d already scarfed it down. I caught Smokey mid-scarf:

Canned cat food of the filet minon variety. He horked it down in a matter of seconds. Side note: we can’t wait to rip up that fugly linoleum. We’ve tried everything — even bleach — and it still looks dirty.

We decided to take Thanksgiving day completely off. The rest of our four-day weekend was spent wrapping up the guest bedroom. We gave the French doors a coat of polyurethane, removed the plastic film from the windows, and installed the custom door handles. Then we gave the trim 2 coats of black paint to match the floors and doors. After that, it was just a matter of vacuuming, mopping and moving in.

Here’s how the doors looked before:

And after:

View from the hallway:

We love how much light the hallway gets through the guest bedroom windows. And we’re still smitten with our DIY door handles. We were worried that the black-on-black would look flat, but the pop of texture really helps add some dimension to the doors:

View from the inside looking out into the hallway:

The closet doors are back up:

And, for the first time since April, we have a fully functioning closet:

It feels so luxurious not having to live out of cardboard wardrobe boxes. But even more than that, we’re thrilled to have a closet with doors. Our apartment in Brooklyn didn’t have any closets at all, so we installed an open closet system in the bedroom. Everything was always on display, which made for some awkward times when we had company over. Overflowing hampers happen.

Right now, we have 3 things in the room: a mattress, a rug and a chair. The mattress is on the floor, college student style:

We thought about gussying up the bed. Getting rid of the white duvet that we throw on the bed for extra warmth. Fluffing the pillows. Crisping up the linen. And then we realized, the mattress is on the frikkin’ floor. What’s the point of pretending we’re fancy? We like to keep it real:

We installed a ceiling fan a couple of weekends ago:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we need a couple in our house. The guest bedroom is directly above the dining room, which is where our wood-burning stove is located. Having ceiling fans in the dining room and the guest bedroom will help circulate heat throughout the house.

As far as looks go, fans usual fall somewhere between bland and revolting. Anything even remotely attractive is way, waaaay out of our price range. So we chose fans that are really simple and plain in hopes that they won’t be too noticeable:

The chair is another piece from Bradley’s company. We snagged 6 of these puppies back in June — two with arm rests and four without. They’ll eventually end up in the dining room.

If you look closely along the bottom edge of the trim behind the chair, you can see that we need some touchup work on the floor paint. Apparently we didn’t get close enough to the wall in this part of the room. We’ll fix that when we paint the floors downstairs.

We also have to do a little touchup on the French doors:

Keepin’ it real.

We picked up a radiator pipe that let us move our tall, skinny radiator a few inches further from the curtain:

We were planning on making boxes for all of the radiators in our house so that they’re not total eyesores. But this one is so close to the window that we might just paint it and leave it exposed.

If we do leave it exposed, we’ll need to touch up some paint on the floor:

The other radiator — the short, wide one we removed — was super heavy and dented the floor a bit. We’ll also need to fix the big, gaping hole that the pipe pokes up from. You can see right down into the dining room through it:

We’re going to find or make some sort of cap to conceal that. And, finally, we’ll need to get a handle for the radiator valve:

It had one but it was so rusted that it broke when we removed the radiator. At the time, we played it off like we had the strength of The Hulk. It’s all fun and games till you realize you can’t find a replacement that’s the right size.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more updates on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words about Margot. We’re completely smitten with this special dog, and we’re thrilled to have her join our family. Now if only we could get this potty-training business down…

Getting fired up.

Meet the latest addition to our house:

Lets just go ahead and get this out of the way — the stove looks completely wonky. We didn’t install it ourselves because installation was included in the cost. And we weren’t around for the installation because the only available day was when we were in Brooklyn. The stove installer clearly does not have a discerning eye. Here’s what’s driving us nuts:

• They didn’t center the stove on the metal sheet underneath.
• The face of the stove isn’t level with the brick wall, so it looks cockeyed.
• They didn’t push the stove back far enough.
• The pipes are crooked. (We’re really not sure how they didn’t notice this one.)
• We asked them to not scratch up the metal sheet and they did. And then they tried to cover it up with….grease? Spraypaint? We’re not really sure.
• The paint on the pipes scratched off during installation.

We freely admit that we’re totally OCD control freaks when it comes to this stuff. We’re designers. It’s in our blood. But, seriously, look at how crooked that stove is:

Not OK. So we called up the stove company and complained. At first they tried to brush us off — it’s not that crooked, there were existing scratches on the steel, the paint didn’t scratch off that much — and we had to get a little New York on them.* We insisted they come out and fix the issue. And that we’d write out the check as soon as the stove was installed properly. That sped things right along and they’ll be back this week to fix the problems. Unfortunately while we’re in Brooklyn again, so we’ll see how it goes.

The moral of the story? If you want something done right, do it yourself.
Or suck it up and learn to live with shoddy workmanship. Whatever floats your boat.

Here’s what we’re loving about our new stove:

There isn’t a gaping hole in our brick wall anymore. That’s a huge plus.

It’s got pull-out “wings” that let you keep beverages warm! Coffee is basically the 3rd member of our renovation team, so we were downright giddy when we found out our coffee will never again go cold. Oh, and it’s pretty good at warming up the house, too:

While Bradley worked on getting the fire going, I took a few pictures of some furniture we haven’t shared yet. Check out our new coffee table:

You can see a couple of dining room chairs in the corner as well. There are four more of those stashed in the garage, and we’ll be designing a table to go with them. And then there’s this maple media console:

The coffee table, chairs and console are all from his company in Brooklyn. So is the tray on top of the media console. His boss gave us a generous employee discount and we took full advantage of it. The jute rug and the handles on the console are from IKEA.

The mix of woods feels like a bit much right now — everything is so loud! — but we’re not worried. Most of this furniture won’t live in the same room. It’s just sort of a hodgepodge situation until we can start actually furnishing rooms.

A few weekends ago, our friend Seryi visited us from New York. She brought us some love housewarming presents, including this:

A box of matches with a sketch of Brooklyn! So cute! At the time she said we’d probably never use the matches because they’re pretty obsolete. Joke’s on her. We’ve been using the matches nonstop since we got the stove:

Gotta love a gift that’s both adorable and practical. Thanks, Seryi!

Before we had the fireplace and attic insulation, our house was constantly freezing. We hated using our oil boiler for heat, so we set our thermostat at 59°F. We pretty much just bundled up and learned to live with it.

With the fireplace, we’ve been sitting pretty at a constant 68-70°F. Our boiler no longer kicks on. And, with the insulation, we’re retaining the heat we’re generating. We still have some old windows to replace and a lot more insulating to do throughout the house, so it’s only going to get better from here.

* New Yorkers have this amazing way of letting you know exactly what you did that is bothering them. It’s not rude and it’s not abrasive — it’s just very, very direct. Honest, almost to a fault. Coming from more passive-aggressive parts of the country, this took a little getting used to. And now we’re all about it.

—

Why we went with a fireplace as our main source of heat:

• Lumber’s a renewable resource.
  Oil? Not so much.
• We cut out the corporations and support a local business.
  One of the biggest reasons we went with a wood-burning stove instead of a pellet stove is that we don’t have to go to a big chain store and buy a packaged product. Our firewood guy lives in our town — he’s one of us. And when he delivers a truck-full of wood to our house, we know it hasn’t traveled very far. We love supporting local businesses!
• We have more control over where exactly our wood is coming from.
  You know us control freaks are waaaay into this one. The great thing about buying locally is that we can always source naturally fallen trees (as opposed to trees that are cut down for firewood).
• We can get our own wood if we want.
  We keep seeing ads in the local paper for “free firewood.” This is basically when a tree falls naturally (like during a storm) and the homeowner wants it removed from their property. They let anyone come in with a chainsaw, cut the wood to pieces and take it home for firewood. Bradley’s all over it — I think it’s mostly cuz he’ll take any excuse to use a chainsaw.
• We’re not reliant on electricity for heat.
  Pennsylvania just had a freak snowstorm that left tons of people without power for days. It’s nice to know that if we’re ever in that situation, we won’t rely on electricity for our heat. Bonus: we could actually cook on top of the stove if we wanted.
• It’s cheap!
  We talked to our firewood guy about buying 4 cords of wood. That should be more than enough to get us through winter. Since we’re buying in bulk, he cut us a deal and charged us $120 per cord. That means we’re spending a grand total of $480 to heat our house for the next 4-6 months.
• Nothing beats a fire on a cold, snowy night.
  Hot cocoa. Blanket. And a dog to snuggle with.

There are some downsides to relying on firewood for heat:

• We need a backup heating system.
  We’re in Brooklyn 2 days a week, which means we’re not there to build a fire. With all the insulating we’re doing, our house stays comfortably warm while we’re gone. But just in case it doesn’t, we have our boiler set to turn on if the temps drop below 50°.
• Firewood takes up space.
  It would be kinda tough to rely solely on firewood without having extra space to dedicate just for firewood. We’re basically using our basement solely for wood storage.
• Wood-burning stoves require attention.
  They need some tweaking every 6-8 hours to keep them burning all day. This isn’t a big deal for us because tending fires is totally Bradley’s jam. But it’s definitely not something that everyone would be into.

That’s it. We’ll be back soon with more projects and updates. Stay tuned!

Our floors are done!

We rolled on our second and third coats of floor paint this weekend, and we. are. done! Here’s how they look now:

So shiny! It’s hard to believe they used to look like this:

We’ve gotten a lot of emails & comments from people who are in the same boat — they were expecting hardwood floors and got ugly, old soft pine flooring instead. Our first word of advice: don’t panic! There’s hope. We’re going to share all the details of how we got our floors from gross-&-grungy to gorgeous. Remember that this is just what worked for us. It may or may not work the same for you.

It all starts with the right paint. Home Depot, Lowe’s and Cole’s (a local chain) suggested an oil-based primer followed by 3 coats of heavy-duty latex. The paint department employees at each of the 3 stores insisted that latex has come a long way and that the special (aka very expensive) floor paints are super durable. We were pretty skeptical, but decided to give it a show. We got a gallon of the recommended Benjamin Moore primer and paint to test out. Long story short: it sucked. And at $50 per can, that was an expensive lesson to learn. We’re still bitter.

So we decided to talk to a paint specialist instead. We went to a company in Brooklyn that sells only professional-grade paints, stains and other finishing products. These guys know their stuff. Here’s what they told us about painting soft pine floors:

• Never, ever use latex on floors. Ever.
  Oil-based paints are much more durable.
• Make sure the floors are squeaky clean before painting.
  We vacuumed twice, then used wet rags to scrub the floors. We tried using tack cloths, but they missed a lot of dust, left residue on the floors and made our fingers feel sticky. Wet rags worked just fine.
• We want the paint to soak into the wood, not sit on top of the wood. Sooo…
  
  • Sand the floors really well to make them as porous as possible.
    You can read about our floor-sanding adventure here.
  • Don’t use a primer.
    Yup. This totally goes against everything we’ve ever been told about painting. But we want the color to soak into the wood — not the primer.
  • Thin out your first coat for maximum soakage.
    Mix paint thinner into your oil-based paint to make it really runny. We did a ratio of 1/3 parts paint thinner to 2/3 paint and our first coat was very watery. Be careful not to splatter it on the walls. We have a little touch up to do in the guest bedroom from our overzealous rolling.
• Roll a paper-thin coat.
  This is a general rule for painting, but it’s extra important when painting floors. We don’t want any clumps or globs because they might peel up later. Our first coat was so thin, we were worried we that we thinned it out too much. That’s how we knew we were doing it right.
• Lightly scuff the surface in between coats.
  Don’t skip this step. It’s tedious and boring, but necessary. Glossy paint doesn’t stick to other glossy surfaces. Scuffing up the surface gives us a nice, rough surface for the paint to stick to. We used 320-grit sandpaper and an orbital sander.
• Second and third coats: use full-strength oil-based paint.
  Again, roll paper-thin coats and scuff up the surface in between coats. Depending on the paint and the floors, more coats might be necessary. Just keep scuffing and keep painting until the floors are covered.

Our paint guy also gave us a little insight about why you shouldn’t buy your floor paint at general hardware stores. The VOC content of oil-based paint is much higher than latex, and a lot of people are buying low-VOC paints these days. Hardware stores stock up on whatever is selling, so you might have to go to a specialty store to get a durable paint.

We picked up a 5-gallon bucket of glossy black oil-based for about $90. Compared to the $50-a-gallon Ben Moore latex paint, this is a serious bargain.

Time to get to work:

We used a paint mixer attachment for our drill to give the bucket a good mix. The attachment is metal so it’s reusable, and it costs about $8. After that, we poured a little paint into our rolling pan, added paint thinner, and gave it another whirl. Then we rolled it on.

Here’s how our first coat looked after it dried:

Not bad! It wasn’t textured at all and looked more like a stain than a paint.

We let the first coat dry for a full 2 weeks. This is definitely not a requirement, but we thought it might help the floors harden up a little more. Oil-based paints can take 3-4 weeks to reach full-strength. And, sure enough, after 2 weeks of curing, our floors were feeling way better. We tried scratching up the paint in the closet and in areas that will be covered with trim — it didn’t budge.

We also stomped around on the floors in sneakers and work boots to see how the floors held up.

We managed to make them super dirty, but the paint stayed put.

Next step: scuffing.

Not gonna lie: we panicked a little when we saw how much paint we scuffed off. The floors went from a glossy black to a very dull grey. And then we remembered that we have at least 2 more coats to throw down.

We vacuumed the floors and cleaned them with wet rags:

Then we rolled on the second coat:

This is where we started seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. The second coat rolled much more saturated than the first. We wanted a pure black — not a blue-black, but a black-black — and this paint did not disappoint. We were especially excited about painting the guest bedroom:

Those are the “old” floors and are in much rougher shape than the office floors.

With the second coat of paint, they were looking every bit as slick as the office flooring. Check out how the hallway looks with the black door at the end:

We were worried it would end up being too much black and the hallway would look really dark. The soft grey walls help keep things light, and we think the black floors and black doors look really old-school and sophisticated.

We let the second coat dry for 24 hours. This is how the guest bedroom looked the next morning:

And the office:

The floors were super glossy:

We think it adds a lot of dimension to the rooms. It also makes us want to hang our curtains, because we keep getting blinded by sunlight reflecting off the floors.

The best part is that the old floors still look like old floors. You can see cracks, imperfections and wood grain:

They have all the character you’d expect from 130-year-old floors without all the cracking, peeling and staining. You’ll never see that in new hardwood floors. So all you folks who emailed us about finding soft pine floors — embrace ‘em! They’ll make your house look and feel so much more unique.

We scuffed, vacuumed and mopped one more time, and then rolled on coat #3:

We’re going to let the final coat dry for at least a week before we go upstairs. And we’ll wait 3 weeks before we move any furniture upstairs.

A lot of people have warned us that black floors require constant cleaning, but we’re OK with that. We plan on throwing down some rugs, which will help. We also tend to hang out in socks or flip flops when we’re at home, so shoe grime isn’t a huge issue. We’ll just keep vacuuming and mopping like normal and deal with dusty footprints as they come.

And now for our favorite part of the whole project — the part where we realize how much money we saved!

Cost breakdown for painting our floors:

• 24-hour sander rental + sanding pads = $307.35
• 5 gallons of paint = $90 (we used less than half of the bucket, so we’ll count it as $45)
• Sanding discs for orbital sander = $20
• Paint rollers = $8

Grand total for 2 rooms + hallway = $380.35
Cost of buying hardwood flooring for 2 rooms + hallway = $3000
What we saved = $2619.65!

We’re seriously considering going to a bank to take out $2619.65 in pennies. Then we could fill up a room and swim around in money like Scrooge McDuck.

We should also mention that the estimated $3000 was for the absolute cheapest wood flooring we could find at Lumber Liquidators. And it doesn’t include tax. The total cost for buying wood floors for the entire house? $15,000. No thanks!

A few people have pointed out that we could have gone with an “engineered wood” flooring, but we’re not fans. No matter what HGTV says, fake wood floors never look or feel like the real thing to us. Either way, we’re guessing they would have cost more than 380 beans!

—

What we learned from our floor painting adventure:

• This could take a while.
  Painting floors — the right way — is a long process. Don’t go into it thinking it’s a quickie weekend project. It’ll end in tears. Speaking of tears…
• Get knee pads.
  They sell them at Home Depot in the same aisle as the the sanding pads….and now we know why. We’ve spent a lot of time on our knees the past few weekends. From scuffing the floors to scrubbing them clean, there was a lot of crawling going on. And, hoo boy, we are definitely feeling it now. So far, we’ve painting only about 1/4 of our entire house. We’ll be investing in some heavy-duty knee pads before we paint any more floors.
• Oil-based paints will stank up your house.
  Obviously this means you should wear a respirator while you paint. But it might also mean not staying in your house while the fumes clear up. We’re pretty lucky because we can hole up in the living room downstairs. We leave the doors closed all the time, so we never smell fumes in there. We also don’t have any bambinos running around to worry about. And, best of all, we leave for Brooklyn the day after we paint. By the time we get back, the fumes aren’t nearly as bad.
• Floor paint isn’t forever.
  While we love the look of our painted floors, we know this isn’t a permanent solution. We’re hoping to buy ourselves 5 years of use out of them.  After that, if we have the funds, we’ll revisit the idea of installing hardwood floors. Or we could just sand and paint them all over again. We love the flexibility!

Post-Demo Dining Room

Know what our favorite part of demolition is? The part where we get to show you guys this:

Ta-da! Our brick wall! And our rafters:

It’s pasty looking because we still have some dust that’s hanging on for dear life. We’re talking stage 5 clingers. We had the same problem upstairs, but it was easily fixed: we simultaneously brushed and vacuumed the wall using our shop vac’s brush attachment.

We also have to vacubrush the rafters and tidy up the wiring. Not that we don’t love 100-year-old cobwebs or anything, but creepy really isn’t the look we’re going for.

Still, we think it already looks a bajillion times better than before.

Here’s a better shot of the header. It’s a big hand-hued beam with axe marks still visible:

Some of the brick around the chimney hole isn’t looking so hot:

Our chimney guy’s going to repair that when he installs the chimney liner. We didn’t know until he dropped by to clean our chimney, but he already added brick pointing into his (super reasonably priced) estimate.

We have some floor repair to do, too:

That hole is where an outlet used to be. Right now it’s a straight drop into the basement.

One thing we’re really not looking forward to:

Each of those fuzzy tufts is a staple. Every time we had a staple-plucking day, we end up with a case of the claw hands. Better get the Advil ready — we have approximately 7.2 trillion staples to pull in this room alone.

Check out our fancy new window:

Pretty sure our neighbors hate us and rue the day we moved in, our unwieldy jackhammer in tow.

The rest of the room still looks like it was beaten with an ugly stick, but we’ll get to it soon enough. We’re not demolishing the remaining walls — just building out new walls right onto them, the way we did in the hallway upstairs. So this is rock bottom and it’s only going to get better from here. Unless it gets worse. It’s a DIY home renovation, peeps; everything is 2 steps forward, 1 step back. We roll with it.

We can’t walk into the room without making googly eyes at our brick-and-rafter combo. And if it makes us this giddy in its unpolished state, imagine how we’ll be when we get the room cleaned up, insulated and painted. Every day will be a staring contest with the wall from 8am to 10pm and then we’ll go to bed. We may never get anything accomplished ever again.

Painting the Guest Bedroom

We just had one of those weekends where we were so productive that we need another weekend to recuperate from it. Sadface! We’re still editing those pictures, so in the meantime, we’re going to play catchup. We already shared the before-and-afters for the office and hallway. The guest bedroom is a little trickier.

Our original plan was to finish the guest bedroom quickly so we could move into it while we renovated the rest of the house. It had been recently renovated and insulated, so it would be a quick fix. We wanted a safety zone where we could escape the dust and paint. Jokes on us — it’s been 5 months and we’re totally not finished.

Instead of simply ripping up the carpet, painting the walls and moving in, we decided to add French doors, remove and cover up the original door, expand the closet and put in trimless windows. And we made a lot of custom pieces for the room, like our concrete windowsills and door handles.

The “quick fix” room basically turned into our work room. Meanwhile, we turned our living room into our dining room. So much for plans! We don’t have a ton of before pictures for the guest bedroom. Here’s the run down:

We couldn’t wait to rip up the Smurf blue carpet, and totally forgot to take an official before picture. The windows were updated, but we hated the trim:

The original doorway was in a corner:

And a shot of the original closet once we got the carpet outta there:

Inside the closet, we found a hole that the previous owners covered with a giant greeting card. You can’t make this stuff up:

Overall, we wanted a light, beachy feel for the room. Think jute carpet, gauzy white curtains, pops of teal throughout. We also wanted a color that would give a nod to the era of the house, so we checked out the Valspar Natural Trust Historic Paint Colors. We picked Cincinnatian Hotel Hannaford.

The Cincinnatian Hotel opened in 1882, one year after our house was built. Perfect! Not so perfect? Trying to accurately photograph the sandy neutral. It never looks as warm or as vivid in pictures as it does in real life. The closest we got was this shot from the hallway:

It wasn’t really something we’d anticipated, but the creamy sand color paired with bold black doorways looks really Parisian. It feels super old school and we love that.

Here’s how the room looked before we put the French doors back in:

See how the color looks way more washed out? Alas! Here’s how it looks after we put the French doors back:

Ooh la la! Here’s the closet without the doors:

We won’t reinstall those until after we’ve sanded and painted the floors. We snuck up early one morning to check out the sunlight situation:

Love how it streams in! We also love how the color works with teal:

And it looks great with green:

We’re planning on teals, greens and whites for the room, so it all worked out perfectly. Hannaford is almost exactly the same color as our window sills, which was a happy accident.

As for the weird hole in the closet, we found a slightly more elegant solution. We can’t just seal up the hole, because there’s wiring behind it. We have to leave it accessible — so Bradley made an access door:

The back (the brown part) is made from masonite, and the panels (the white part) are made from the DIY moulding we made a few weeks ago. We primed it and painted it the same color as the walls:

Here’s how it looks once it’s in place:

To access the wiring, we just need to pop the panel out. It’s no giant greeting card, but it’ll do.

There you have it. We’re ready to sand and paint the floors this weekend. Neither of us has ever finished flooring before, so it’ll be an adventure. Or a disaster. Either way: exciting! We’ll be back soonish with a big update from our house. Hint: it involves a jackhammer. We’re just waiting for the dust to settle so we can take decent pictures. Stay tuned, peeps.

Our almost-done hallway.

Way back in April, our hallway looked like this:

Well, technically it looked a little worse, but we forgot to take pictures before we ripped out the burgundy carpet. Here’s how the same hallway looks today:

Yay! We love doing before-and-afters! We’ve been living with this project day in and day out, so we forget how far we’ve come. Seeing the befores makes us giddy.

We went with Olympic Horseradish on the ceiling (same as the office & guest bedroom) and Valspar Tempered Gray for the walls.

 
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We initially wanted to do something darker, but the halls are so narrow that we decided to keep things soft and light. We’re so glad we did because it makes the hallway feel super light and open. We love the way it looks. Here’s a view from the brick wall looking towards the entry:

We put two recessed lights down the center:

We still haven’t found the right bulbs — some are too white, some are too yellow, others are too long and stick out too far — so we put in plain old 60 watt bulbs for now. It took a lot of finagling but Bradley installed a dimmer switch:

We’re rocking a 75% right now. We’ll probably go lower once we get the right bulbs in.

The trimless windows are a pain to paint, but they looked pretty slick when finished:

So do the French doors:

We haven’t taken the plastic mask off the windows, which is why they look like a 2 year old painted them. They still need one more coat on the flip-side. We went ahead and hung them because we’re getting kinda impatient. We also hung the bathroom door:

It was awkward for a little while thanks to the close proximity of a window that overlooks the street:

So pretty with the hardware installed!

The door frame looks streaky because it only has one coat so far. We’re giving it 2 more thin coats this weekend. We’re loving how the door still looks old. You can see all of the texture and cracking:

It definitely took some time to fix this puppy up, but we’re so glad we did. We scraped off all of the old paint, sanded the door smooth, then gave it one thin coat of primer. After that, we did 3 coats of black paint. The trick to getting a smooth surface was sanding in between each coat and painting paper thin coats.

Check out the flip side of the same door:

I had to stand inside the bathtub to take that shot — that’s how small our bathroom is. We’re not quite ready to show the before pictures of the bathroom because it’s not a remodeling priority. It was redone a few years ago, so it’s not in terrible shape. Just kinda…blah.

How sweet does that hardware look? Spray paint works magic, I tell ya! Speaking of spray paint, lookie what made it into the bathroom:

I think my lookalike hook looks extra Anthropologie against the beat up door. Even Bradley ended up loving it.

We’re still not sure whether to paint the door white or not. Luckily we have our hands full with a bunch of other jobs right now, so we have some time to think about our next move.

What we learned:

• Low-VOC paints smell, too.
  We used Olympic, Valspar and Benjamin Moore paints over the weekend, and all 3 brands make an appearance in our hallway. Ben Moore was, by far, the least smelly. Olympic was the runner up — it smelled, but not so much that we needed respirators. Valspar was super stinky, but the smell was gone by the next day. Here’s the kicker: the Ben Moore cost almost twice as much as the Valspar! Valspar was $23 a gallon and Ben Moore was $40 and change. Next time we’ll put on respirators, crack a few windows and save ourselves twenty clams.
• Big box hardware stores don’t carry the good stuff.
  We went to three different hardware store chains to find a good floor paint. The paint department employees at Lowe’s and Home Depot didn’t inspire much confidence. They hemmed and hawed, eventually recommended an outdoor patio paint, but couldn’t answer the questions we had about it. Meh. Our local hardware guy recommended a Ben Moore oil-based primer and black latex floor paint. It was expensive. And it’s a good thing we tested it on our doors and doorways, because there’s no way it would last on our soft pine floors. It’s fine for doors, but latex just isn’t durable enough for floors. Totally not talking smack about Big Blue and Big Orange (we love them both!), but they carry standard items for standard houses.
• Next time we need paint for something special, we’re going to a specialist.
  We ended up going to Bradley’s finishing product supplier (aka the paint guy), and this guy has pretty much seen everything. He wasn’t confused by why we would want to paint our floors (instead he said it was the best method for soft pine). And he knew what he was talking about. Here’s what he suggested:
  • NO primer. Instead, sand the floors very well to make them porous.
  • Use an oil-based black thinned down with paint thinner to make it very runny.
  • Put down a suuuuper thin layer of black and let it soak into the wood.
  • Follow that with 2 more paper-thin layers of black, lightly scuffing the surface in between.

  He didn’t recommend a brand. Just that we should leave latex for the walls and do oil-based on the floors. We ended up buying a big bucket of high-gloss black from him.

One man’s blue is another man’s ewww.

I cackled at my own post title for far too long. I may also have snorted and spilled a little coffee on my own lap. Blogging: it’s a dangerous business.

We’ve been talking about painting for months now, and this weekend, it was finally, fiiiiiinally time to put some color on the walls. But first, we had to have a mild freakout about the colors we chose.

See, ever since we told people we were ready to paint, we started getting comments that made us uncomfortable. Like “Ooooh, can’t wait to see some crazy awesome colors!” Or worse: “You’re both designers, so I bet you’ll pick amazing colors!” Cue the clammy hands and schweddy foreheads.

Suddenly our colors seemed like lame and boring versions of the colors we really wanted. We cracked open each gallon and peered at the colors we had been so in love with, and barely recognized them. We felt jilted. Betrayed. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed Benjamin Moore. And then we made a fresh pot of coffee and got to painting.

Here’s the thing, peeps: color is a subjective thang. You may love the colors we’ve chosen or you may hate them. We’re not gonna get our collective panties in a bunch. What’s important is that they fit in our space and with the vision we have for our whole house. So, without further rambling, here’s the color we picked for the office:

That’s Benjamin Moore Shenandoah Taupe AC-36. We looked at approximately 40 billion paint chips before we agreed on it. We picked it because we loved the warm grey-brown tone and because we thought it would make the itty bitty office feel a bit bigger. Our biggest challenge with this room is its shorter-than-average ceilings. Average ceilings are 8′. The office has 7.5′ on the dot.

Here’s the fun part: we dug through our old posts and found the official before pictures. We’ll break down the before and after for each angle. Squee! We’ve been waiting to do this for 5 months now! Lets jump right in:

So. Much. Better. Here’s a view from the hallway looking in. You can catch a glimpse of the Smurf blue carpet we removed the day we picked up the keys to the house:

Standing in front of the brick wall looking at the other end of the room:

Here’s a better look at the recessed lighting. There are 3 that run down the center of the room:

View from the doorway looking in:

Standing in the corner from the last set of photos, looking towards the doorway:

And, finally, the closet. I couldn’t find great before pictures, but you get the general idea. It’s way back in the corner:

And it used to be covered in some really stubborn crusty grandmawallpaper that gave me nightmares and once made me cry:

And a view from inside the closet looking out:

…because we totally expect people to hang out inside our closets staring out into the room.

I’m so proud of the perfect lines dividing the ceiling and wall:

More details on that process in a few minutes. First, lets drool over our trimless windows and DIY concrete window sills:

We love how the taupe looks next to the raw brick:

But nothing made us happier than seeing the way taupe looks with a crisp white:

Ooh la la! We swooned when those went on. We know plain white switch covers aren’t a big deal, but feast your eyes on what used to light up our room:

I rest my case.

Now lets talk about how we roll. Our paint, that is:

We mentioned in an earlier post that we sprayed on our primer but rolled on our colors. That doesn’t mean it took us forever to roll. Not when we have the right tools for the job.

All of the tools above are made my Wooster except for the red thingy, which is made by Shur-Line. Check out the roller in the middle; that’s a standard-sized roller that everyone has and will give you an idea of how big the other items are. The ginormous roller on the left is what saved us a ton of time. It covers the walls twice as fast as a standard roller. No kidding. We used the mini roller for small spaces like the trimless windows.

The paint tray is also a huge time saver. It holds a gallon of paint, so we basically just dumped the entire bucket in all at once. It took a gallon and a quart to paint 2 coats in the office, so we only had to refill once. We covered the tray with some saran wrap in between coats — we painted a coat, broke for lunch, then came back and painted the second coat.

We also have a couple of roller extensions that let us paint the ceiling and the tall walls without having to drag a ladder all over the place:

We own 2 extensions, one of them by Wooster and the other by another company. The one in the picture above is not the Wooster — it’s the cheap one that works fine. I forgot to take a picture of the Wooster (teehee!) but that’s the one we recommend. It’s adjustable to different heights with a flip of a switch. Love it!

And, finally, there’s my new favorite painting tool: the Shur-Line Edge Painter.

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Basically, it’s a painting pad with 2 little wheels on the end. You dip the pad lightly in your paint, then put the pad on the surface you want to paint. You gently line up the wheels to the surface you want to follow (in our case, the ceiling). Then you drag with from one side to the other, leaving a clean line of paint behind you.

Taking a picture while simultaneously trying to paint a clean line was just not happening. Believe me, I tried. Here’s a picture I found that pretty much explains everything I just said, only way more clearly:

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We actually painted the office and the guest bedroom on the same day — 2 coats in each room, plus the clean up in between where we washed out our paint tray and rollers — so it really didn’t take us that long.

We used to get the cheapie paint tray sets from Lowe’s, but they don’t hold up well over time. We invested in these slightly pricier Wooster tools (the jumbo roller is $16 and each rolling pad is $8), and honestly, they’re worth it. They glide waaaaay smoother than our other rollers so they don’t leave too much texture on the walls. We actually ended up throwing out our cheapie rollers on Saturday because we were super impressed by the Wooster set. We have a lot of painting to do. Might as well use tools that don’t make us miserable, right?

What we’ve learned:

• Go with your gut.
  Our first instincts for each of the rooms we painted ended up being pretty spot on. We knew we were in the right ballpark when we found ourselves gravitating towards one color family (like deep greys and dark tans for the office). After that, it was just a matter of finding the one that matched our ceiling best.
• Don’t pick color palettes for each room. Pick color palettes for the whole house.
  We have 9 rooms and 3 hallways to paint in our house, and it would be super easy to get overexcited and paint each one a totally different color. We won’t, though, because we want our house to have a unified feel. This is why we painted the ceilings in the office, guest bedroom and hallway the same color (Olympic Horseradish) and then chose colors that coordinated with the ceiling colors as well as with each other. Each room will still have its own distinct palette, but it’ll all be part of the big picture. Young House Love has a great post about this that’s worth checking out.
• I just wrote 1365 words about painting one room.
  I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. Yiish.

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None of the brands we mentioned paid or perked us to write this post. We just like sharing the news when we find tools we love.

Getting our paint on.

I edited down our pictures from the weekend and there was a definite theme going on: white. Kinda ironic since this is our first post about painting, but we’ll roll with it.

We planned on spraying on our primer coat with our paint spray gun. We took it for a test drive a few weekends ago with our DIY moulding project:

We were super happy to find out that the gun paints a perfect, even coat really fast. And not-so-happy to learn that it sends paint flying everywhere. It’s incredibly messy. So we decided to go the overkill route and spent half of Saturday carefully taping and masking everything we didn’t want to paint. Like our windows and our homemade concrete window sills:

And our just-painted-em-black doorways, plug-ins and light switches:

We then cleared everything out of the room, including one very heavy, over-sized radiator. We didn’t bother laying down tarp because a) we’re going to sand & paint the floors anyway and b) because taping wasted half a day and we were ready to get painting.

Bradley got a special outfit for the occasion:

I asked him to look excited, and that’s what he gave me. I also asked him to give me a supermodel pose and this is what I got:

He’s no Heidi Klum, that’s for sure. Or maybe he’s Heidi Klum with a broken hip. I don’t really know what he was going for there. Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, maybe.

Bradley got an extension attachment for the spray gun that let him spray the ceilings without using a ladder:

He fired up the gun, and started priming the guest bedroom:

He started with the perimeter of the room, then the ceiling and finally the walls. The guest bedroom walls were already a creamy-white color, so it doesn’t seem like a drastic change in the after pictures, but it felt like a huge difference to us.

Before priming, the walls had scuffs and marks:

After priming, everything felt so fresh and so clean-clean:

That’s with one coat of primer. Our spray gun gives us insanely even coverage!

While the guest bedroom dried, we emptied the office and prepped it for painting. It looked like a Dexter kill room by the time we were done:

Just as a refresher, here’s how the office looked a couple of months ago. This is after we ripped up the baby blue carpet:

And here’s what it looks like now. The office formerly known as The Smurf Room:

Not a hint of Smurfiness left. Thank. Goodness. Even the dark-&-creepy closet ended up looking really nice:

So how did we like our gun for indoor painting? I’ll put it to you this way: Bradley would marry the gun if he could. I might settle for a steamy affair, but only because my heart really belongs to the jackhammer.

It took us less than 45 minutes to prime all 3 spaces, including ceilings and closets. The pictures we’ve posted are after only one coat. We would’ve had to roll on 2 coats to get that kind of coverage. So we’re really digging our gun for that. We would have been priming all weekend without it. The only downside is the amount of spray that ends up on the floors:

Again, this is no big deal for us since we’re going to sand and paint our floors soon. But for someone with nice, hardwood floors, this is no bueno. If you do use a spray gun indoors, mask, tape and drape like crazy. Also, wear a bunny suit so you can bust out a supermodel pose every once in a while:

We waited until the next day before we cracked open a gallon of our ceiling paint:

I know what you’re thinking: it looks white. Well, it isn’t. It’s Olympic C151 Horseradish, smartypants. I used this same paint to update the vintage owl bookends I got for my birthday way back in June. It’s a warmer shade that looks white until you paint it on fresh white primer:

We chose Horseradish for the ceilings because it matches the colors we want in all 3 spaces. This way we have something that totally unifies the different rooms, even though they all have different palettes.

Bradley showed me how to cut the corners using a shield. We don’t plan on putting up any trim up top, so we have to get our lines as clean and sharp as possible. While I cut the ceilings in all 3 areas, Bradley rolled:

We decided to roll on the colors instead of spraying because we didn’t want to go through the trouble of taping and masking all the walls. We embrace our laziness.

See how it’s a warmer white than the super-pasty-white primer? The result is subtle, but we think it makes a big difference in the feel of the space. Bradley reinstalled the recessed lighting after the paint dried so we could ooh and ahh about how the lights looked with the paint:

Meanwhile, I admired the way the ceiling paint looks against the brick wall:

And against the original beam we uncovered back in our demolition days:

I also tried to get a good photo of the wrong lightbulbs we got from Lowe’s that we have to return. We accidentally picked up a box of floodlights instead of recessed lightbulbs, and they look pretty awful. Instead, I took a picture of a little speck creeping along our freshly-painted ceiling:

Eek! Baby spider! We’re having kind of an infestation of spiders right now. No idea where they’re getting in, but most of them are not making it out alive. It’s death by flip-flop for those unlucky enough to wander inside. And then there’s this big mama I found attached the outside of the house:

That thing was — I kid you not — the size of a semi truck. Or my thumbnail. I kinda forgot which one after I caught it looking right at me:

It turned around and I saw it’s big, googly eyes. Not gonna lie: I dropped my flip-flop and ran. Spider 1, Leena 0.

What we learned from this project:

• Paper > Plastic. We used both paper and plastic to mask our windows and sills. Plastic is a huge pain in the butt — it’s hard to cut, doesn’t tape well, and paint splatter takes forever to dry. Paper wins.
• We heart our spray gun, but it requires a LOT of prep work and a lot of clean-up time. We still highly recommend it for exterior painting, new construction, and priming gut-renovated spaces, but not so much for spraying color in interior spaces.
• We paid extra for low-VOC primer, but it was still super stinky. Next time we’ll go with the regular stuff, wear respirator masks and leave the windows open for a few days.
• Spiders: not cool. Ever.

Back to the daily grind(er)

When we last left off with our bathroom door makeover, our hardware and doorknobs were taking a nice, long soak in some paint thinner:

We were initially planning on soaking them for 24 hours, but it ended up being a solid week thanks to the flood evacuation chaos. In the meantime, we went to our local hardware store to pick out some spray paint.

We know a lot of people are totally gaga over oil-rubbed bronze spray paint right now. (Pretty sure Sherry from Young House Love is singlehandedly responsible for that obsession!) ORB spray looks great on YHL’s door hardware, and that’s exactly what we planned on buying when we went to the hardware store.

When we found the spray paint aisle, though, we starting hemming and hawing. The ORB spray suddenly didn’t feel right for us. It seemed too glossy. Or too bronze. Or too traditional. Or not traditional enough. On the one hand, we knew it was tried-and-true. Everyone is doing it, so it works. On the other hand, everyone is doing it…

Maybe it’s because we’re both second-born children and have a constant underlying urge to rebel. A need to zag when everyone zigs. Even when it doesn’t really make sense or much of a difference. We’re not really sure. All we know is that we stood in the spray paint aisle for much longer than any normal person should, and we debated over ORB vs flat black door knobs like it meant the difference between life and death. It. Was. Dramatic. In the end, we walked out with the flat black.

We fished out our hardware and tried to scrape the paint off.

We thought that the extended soak would make the paint melt right off, but it was still hanging on for dear life. Time for Plan B: Bradley put a stiff wire brush attachment on his grinder and handed it to me. And then he told me to be extra careful about where I place my hands because the wire brush could cut my fingers. I handed the grinder back to him.

Now this is a definite case of do as we say and not as we do: if you’re going to use a grinder with a stiff wire brush attachment, you should wear protective gloves. Bradley has been using this tool on an almost-daily basis at work for years now. He told me he never wears gloves because he knows his grinder like the back of his hand. I yelled at him, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t hear me over the noise of the grinder. I’m currently considering supergluing some leather work gloves to his hands while he sleeps.

After about a minute of grinding, here’s what the lock looked like:

We loved the dimpled texture on the face of the lock so much that we almost considered not painting it. (We zigged, we zagged, we zogged.) The only problem with leaving the lock unpainted is that it would definitely rust. We could have use a clear spray paint to seal it up, but we’re not crazy about the shiny clear-coat look. After the lock, Bradley cleaned up the hinges:

These were tricky because there were so many nooks and crannies filled with paint. Bradley cleaned off as much as he could, and then I scraped the hard-to-grind areas out with a pocket knife. Here’s what one cleaned-up hinge looked like with the pin removed:

We also decided to grind and paint the original screws, because it’ll be a pain to find the perfect sized screws for all of our hardware. I found a spare hunk of wood and screwed all of the screws just enough so they held firmly upright:

We only need to clean up the parts we’ll see once the hinges are in place. You can see all of the paint buildup on the screw heads:

And here’s what they looked like after grinding:

I actually faced my fear of the grinder for this part and cleaned up the screws myself. It wasn’t nearly as terrifying as I thought — just very, very loud. After that, I used a knife to clean out the buildup inside each screw head:

It sounds like a lot of work, but it really wasn’t. The grinding and scraping only took about 5 minutes. It actually took longer to set everything up for grinding.

Next, I lined everything up on a cardboard box:

I propped the hinges up so the visible side would be totally covered:

The lock was easy, because there’s only one side you’ll be able to see:

There was also the round piece that goes around the door knob and the cap to the keyhole:

And, finally, there were the porcelain door knobs:

I wasn’t sure how best to mask these puppies, so I went the overkill route. I wrapped up all visible parts of the porcelain, mummy style:

Next step: spray painting. I did 3 light, even coats and let each coat dry for 10 minutes in between. We let the final coat dry overnight, and here’s what they look like now:

We’re really glad we went with flat black and not ORB, because we’re 99% positive that the world would have come to a screeching halt if our hardware was any shinier. No sarcasm there. We’re too uptight and buttoned up for jokes. Laughter is not allowed up in this hizzy.

Up next: we have to finish painting the bathroom door and then we can finally put it back in place. That’s right, folks. We’ve been living without a bathroom door for over a week now. It was funny at first, but then we discovered just how much of our bathroom can be seen from the street. Showering has been kinda awkward ever since.

What we learned from this project:

• We’re idiots for not wearing work gloves.
  I mean, seriously, look how close his fingers are to that wire brush.
• Renovating? Save your cardboard boxes and glass jars!
  Cardboard makes a great surface to paint on. Glass jars are great for soaking brushes and other stuff in paint thinner. Just dump all your stuff in the jar, pour paint thinner over it, pop a lid on that sucker and let it soak as long as you need.
• It’s OK to sweat the small stuff.
  We know our ORB vs flat black dilemma sounds ridiculous because — hello! — it’s only hardware. Who notices hardware? Well, we do. We’ll have to live with this stuff day in and day out for a long time, so we’re pretty determined to make our space just right for us. Sometimes that means spending way too much time at Lowe’s. Sometimes it means biting our nails down to the nubs as we fret over whether we made a mistake painting our doors black. Sometimes it means redoing a project because we couldn’t get it right the first time. It’s all part of owning a space — really making it ours. And we’re OK with that!