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!

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 Tax Refund Dollars at Work

A few weeks ago, we received our tax refund. And it was the Biggest. One. Ever. Apparently when your employer forgets to change your tax info from NYC resident to way-out-in-Pennsylvania resident, that’s what happens. We hemmed and hawed for a while about what we could spend it on. We briefly considered cashing it out in pennies and making a Scrooge McDuck vault in the basement, but that didn’t work out so well when Peter Griffin tried it.

So we scratched that plan and allocated our funds to 3 things:
1.    The dining room do-over
2.    New kitchen cabinets
3.    Plane tickets for next year’s vacation

Let’s back up for one sec with an update on what’s happening with the upstairs renovation. We’re soooo close to being done with the actual renovation and almost ready to move on to the styling phase (a.k.a. the fun stuff). We still have to seal up both sides of the brick wall in the hallway and paint the trim in the office closet. After that, we’ll build some furniture and bring in the accessories to get those rooms totally finished.

It’s going to take only one weekend to paint-and-seal upstairs, but when we woke up on Saturday, we weren’t feelin’ it. Luckily, Bradley had already ordered everything we’ll need to insulate and drywall the dining room as soon as our tax refund showed up. So we moved all the furniture out of the room and got to work.

Here’s a refresher on what the dining room looked like when we moved into the house:

All together now: ewwwwwwww. The only thing that’s staying is the huge radiator, but we’re going to cover up its ugliness by making a radiator box. Sort of like putting a bag over its head.

Anyway, we’ve already done most of the dirty work in the dining room over the past few months.

We demolished the brick wall and exposed the ceiling rafters.

We sanded the floors.

We got an old-school wood stove so we don’t have to rely on oil for our heating needs.

We installed a (much less hideous) ceiling fan and track lighting.

We replaced the single-pane windows with new ones.

We’re going to beat the ugly out of this room.

With the demolition part of the job pretty much done, we’re going to jump right in with building things. On Saturday, we started building a wall.

We started by making sure there was no power running through the outlets, and then ripped off all the trim.

We had to make a decision on whether or not to keep the woodwork in this room. The cool thing about it is that it’s original to the house. But that’s about all it has going for it. We think that the thick-and-clunky trim weighs the room down. It makes the big windows appear smaller and the 11.5′ ceilings appear shorter. And, most importantly, this look is just not “us.” So we decided to get rid of the trim and go with the same look we started upstairs — trimless windows with concrete sills.

Once the trim was down, we started insulating. This room is completely un-insulated, so we’re basically hemorrhaging heat all winter.

We screwed foam insulation directly onto the plaster to add an R-value of 5. At the bottom of the wall, we noticed that the trim had damaged some of the bricks. Bradley mixed up a batch of cement and patched those spots.

He recently made a door for a fancy apartment in SoHo. When he went to install it, he noticed there was a big collection of old bricks that the apartment owner had removed during her renovation.

They were in great shape and each one was stamped with EMPIRE on one side, so we assume they were made in the Empire City a long time ago. The owner was getting rid of them, so Bradley gladly took them. This way we can have some old NYC brick in our home.

With the foam insulation complete, we taped the seams and sealed the gaps with Great Stuff.

Then we took off the basement door and framed it. That way we can cover it up and it’ll be like the door never existed.

We’ve always hated the way this corner looks. The doors aren’t the same height, which looks odd. Plus, there’s outdoor access to the basement, so this door is redundant.

Now you see it….now you don’t.

Next, we framed the wall for even more insulation.

Fiberglass insulation is my jam. I realize it makes me sound completely insane, but I love insulating. There’s something really satisfying about the click…click….click of the staple gun. And, as long as I wear long sleeve shirts, I don’t get the dreaded itchies that everyone complains about.

Bradley had to do a little electrical work for this wall, so I happily took over the insulation duties. Here’s what it looked like by the time I finished:

The fiberglass insulation has an R-value of 19. Combined with the foam insulation, we’ve brought the R-value of our wall up to R24. From R0. We’re going to be nice and toasty next winter.

You can see Bradley’s electrical addition poking through the insulation. He wired the wall we can install two swing-arm sconces. We saw this baby in the Restoration Hardware catalog and fell in love:

Source

We love the old-school look and the ability to swing the lamp where ever it’s needed. We don’t love the price tag, because this is a really simple DIY project. And our version will hide the cord behind the wall for a much sleeker look. That’s still a few weeks down the road. Right now, we’re building walls.

Fast forward to a few hours later:

And that’s what our dining room looks like today. We’ve got more framing, insulating and drywalling to do, but we think it’s already looking so much better in here.

The most noticeable difference is how tall the ceilings feel without the hideous wallpaper border along the top. We’re not really sure how that trend became so popular 20 years ago, but all it does is make the room feel smaller. Good riddance.

We’re still in the wishlist stages of planning out our dining room. Here’s what we’re thinking:

• We’re already considering a warm blue-grey for the walls.
• We’ll build a wall-to-wall built-in bench with storage compartments under the seat. This would make some seating for…
• The dining room table we’ll build from some reclaimed spalted maple we recently acquired. (The guy told us we could have it for free if we removed it from his property, and we gladly did.)
• That basement door we covered up? We realized that’s a ton of wasted space under the staircase. We’re going to turn that into a coat closet. More on that when we renovate the hallway.
• We’ve decided to leave the brick wall raw, but we need to clean and seal it. That sucker sheds more than both of our dogs combined.

That’s what we’ve been up to, peeps. We’ll be back soon with updates. What’s going on with you? Any DIY projects in the works? Are you putting your tax refund to good use?

Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

Guess what? We’ve been demolishing things! Whee! Enough with all the sanding and painting and fixing — we woke up Sunday morning wanting to destroy something. So we did.

We started by removing every bit of furniture from the dining room. Not an easy task because it was serving as both the living room and my office. And storage for IKEA goods we’d purchased for the guest bedroom. Annnnd we usually ate dinner on the couch, so it was still functioning as a living room at the same time.

After the room was empty, we took our official before shots:

That’s the doorway that leads to the kitchen. The hole in the wall is a recent addition.

We’re having an old-school wood-burning fireplace installed this weekend, and that hole is where it will connect to the chimney. Our chimney guy told us we’d be better off demolishing the room before the fireplace is put in. The thing is pretty massive and it’ll be hard to work around. Plus we don’t want to risk damaging the chimney or the fireplace.

Soak it all in, peeps. The burgundy carpet. The seafoam green crown molding. The ceiling tiles. That fan. It’s all got to go.

One of the walls features a window waaaaay over on one corner. Another window to balance it out would have been nice. But we’re working with what we’ve got.

There are 3 doors on another wall:

From L to R: the basement door, the door that leads to the front of the house (and upstairs), and the living room door.

And then there’s the window wall:

The door in the middle leads out to the porch and back yard. When we viewed the house before deciding to buy it, we didn’t see any of the crusty features of the house.

It’s like we had blinders on and could only see the cool features, like the 130-year-old solid wood doors, with their skeleton keys:

Still totally charmed by those! Not so charmed by stuff like this:

We’re not really sure what happened in this corner but the molding and the floral border doesn’t line up. At all. And, in case you didn’t notice, it’s hideous. That molding, by the way, is not original. It’s a later addition, and it’s painted the most atrocious shade of grandma green. At least it matches the floral border though, right? Right?? (We’ve been dreaming of ripping it out and smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer.)

Then there’s the ceiling:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we do plan on having 3 ceilings fans in the house (in the dining room, guest bedroom and master bedroom). We’ll need them to help circulate heat from the fireplace and to keep us cool in the summer. We decided to not have air conditioners in the house. Even when it’s 90 degrees outside, our house stays pretty cool in the summer. We do have a window unit, but it sat in the garage all summer and we didn’t miss it. Added bonus: our electricity bill averages $35 a month now! Squee! But I digress…

We’re having ceiling fans, but not that ceiling fan. It’s outta here. The ceiling tile is also gone-zo.

We have some patching up to do in some spots, like the place where the radiator pipe meets the ceiling:

You can see right up into the guest bedroom through that hole.

We plan on stripping the paint off of the radiator and leaving it bare. But radiators aren’t exactly pretty to look at, so we’re making covers for all of the units in the house. That way they won’t collect dust and we don’t have to maintain a paint job. Low maintenance living!

We have a few wall warts to rip out — ugly, unnecessary wall fixtures like phone jacks for land lines. We haven’t had a landline in 7 years and we’ve survived.

And we have 2 original windows that need to be replaced. It’s starting to get cold outside, so our single-panes look like this most of the time:

The room isn’t insulated at all and has 2 walls that face outside, so we have our work cut out for us. But first, we have to demo.

We sealed off the doors that lead to the living room (currently our bedroom), the stairs and the kitchen with thick plastic sheeting:

Then we gently pried off the original molding. We want to preserve the original stuff just in case we can use it in other parts of the house.

Behind the molding, we found a big gap between the floor and the wall. Stuffed inside was some old-school insulation:

Newspaper! We carefully unfolded the delicate pieces of paper and looked for a date:

December 12, 1932 — the newspaper is nearly 80 years old.

We were pretty geeked. This confirmed what we’d suspected for a while — the “new” part of the house was added on in the 1930s. That includes the kitchen, both bathrooms, laundry room and office. The original house was already 50 years old at the time. Crazy!

Once the molding was off, it was time to get serious. Our plan for the day:

• Expose the big brick wall
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Remove all the carpet from the room

Did we mention we had less than 8 hours to get all of it done? Annnnnnd we were off:

This is the same brick wall that we exposed upstairs in the hallway and office, so we knew the brick would be in good condition. It came off pretty easily:

We didn’t bother covering up the carpet because we knew we’d just roll it up and throw it away at the end of the day. It made things so much easier.

The only downside to the jackhammer is that it’s insanely loud. We waited till 11:30am to get started so our neighbors wouldn’t hate us. I was also worried about how Jabba the Mutt would react to the noise since she was hanging out in the next room. This is what I found when I went to check in on her:

She was curled up on the couch, napping right through the jackhammering. What a trooper.

After de-plastering the wall, Bradley showed me how to take down the ceiling tiles (just yank on ‘em on a little):

That hole wasn’t always there. Bradley punched it out to see what was behind the tiles. No shocker there: it’s lathe and plaster. I took over tile removal while Bradley “fixed” the doorway:

Just like the doorway upstairs, we wanted to get rid of the wood frame and have exposed brick sides:

And, just like upstairs, we have a neato header sitting above the door.

Those scars are chop marks from an axe. And the wood is so old that it’s turned grey — we love how a little bit of natural wood color peeks out from the scars. It adds a lovely bit of texture and dimension to the room.

We salvaged the original trim and the planks from the doorway just in case we want to use them later.

We already have big plans for the planks — they’re going to be reborn as nightstands for the guest bedroom! We’ll post the step-by-step on that when we get to it. But, rest assured, that pile of wood will eventually look mega-fabulous.

After all the tiles were out, it was time to pry the furring strips out:

The furring strips were nailed to the original lathe & plaster ceiling and the tiles were stapled right on top. After that, things got a little dusty:

We’ve demo’d our fair share of lathe and plaster walls, but never a ceiling. This was, by far, the dustiest job we’ve done in the house so far.

Bradley tore down the ceiling while I bagged debris. We learned a lot from our last big demo upstairs, so this time around, things were surprisingly fast. Everything seemed pretty under control, and then this happened:

A rogue lathe strip fell from the ceiling and crashed right through our single-pane window. The funny thing is that this was moments after I told Bradley not to break a window.

Me: “I’m gonna go outside and eat a sandwich. Don’t break any windows.”
Bradley: “Yes, honey, duuuuuh, of coooourse I won’t break any windows.”

Moments later, glass smashed inches from my turkey breast on whole wheat:

Mistakes: we make ‘em, too. The only difference is that we taunt each other mercilessly about them for at least a week afterwards.

We finished up everything — carpet removal and all — at 9pm on Sunday night. We were too exhausted to take after pictures. Plus it was too dark and dusty anyway. So we decided to wait a few days and let the dust settle before we did that. Those pictures are coming up later today. Get excited peeps. We are!

—

What we learned:

We actually learned what not to do from our demo upstairs. So this time we had it down to a science. Here’s how we streamlined the demo and cleanup process and got it all done in one day:

• Leave the carpet till last. We took out the carpet before we demolished upstairs. If we had left it in, we could have just rolled up the dust with the carpet and tossed it all out at once.
• Bag the plaster, not the lathe strips. The wood has nails in it and they poke through the bags.
• Sort the lathe strips into 2 sizes: long and short. Bind the piles together using twine. Stack the bundles together like firewood.
• Use shovels, not dustpans, to gather up the smaller debris and dump it into bags.
• Cut the carpet into strips and then roll it up instead of rolling it all up in one piece. Bind each roll with twine. Waaay easier to carry.
• Cut the carpet from the bottom instead of the top. Your knife won’t snag.

Flashback to June and sneak peak into October.

If you’ve been following the blog pretty consistently, there’s one thing you’ve probably picked up about us: we love a good deal. We also don’t believe in credit cards. Just like we don’t believe in leprechauns, unicorns and pixie magic, we don’t believe in Future Money. That’s our personal philosophy on money, and not a judgement on anyone else’s. We simply think we either have the money for a purchase, or we don’t. So sometimes we decide to make a big purchase and it doesn’t happen until we have the cash-money to pay for it.

Way back in June, we revealed that we wanted a fancy hybrid water heater — one that dehumidifies while saving the energy and the planet. It should really come with a superhero cape.

Source

Fast forward to September and we still hadn’t gotten our water heater. We had 2 very good excuses: 1) we’re crazy busy working on the guest bedroom / office / hallway upstairs so there’s no time for basement work, and 2) we were 67.5% sure it was going to go on sale soon. So we stashed away the dough for later.

Last week, we went into our local hardware store and bumped into Our Guy, known to the rest of the world as Ray. Ray loves Bradley. Bradley loves Ray. I love how his hardware store has free coffee and shiny things to stare at. Ray told us he’d been waiting all day for us to come in because it was time to buy the water heater.

GE just dropped the price by $300 and our electricity company just started offering a $300 rebate on hybrid water heaters. You just fill out a form and they send you a check. And  then there’s the $300 tax credit for buying an energy efficient appliance. Bradley gave Ray a big, fat kiss on the lips (not really), whipped out his wallet, and set up a delivery for this Friday.

Wanna know how much we paid? We’re happy to (over)share.

Original price: $1300
GE sale price: $1000
Minus $300 electric co. rebate: $700
Minus $300 tax credit: $400
Our final price: $400

Yup. We saved ourselves nine. hundred. smackers. Which, coincidentally just happens to be how much our next big purchase is going to cost us in October. (How’s that for a segue?)

We haven’t shared a view of our dining room yet because we haven’t done any work on it (we’re taking it one room at a time). Until now. Feast your eyes on this monstrosity:

Our dining room is currently our living room. And our living room is currently our bedroom. It’s a crazy-mixed-up world we live in. Here’s a breakdown of what we’re looking at:

That Hugh Jass hole in the wall wasn’t always there. It’s actually the first step towards renovating this room while simultaneously reducing our carbon footprint:

Source

That, my friends, is a wood-burning stove. We’re not sure if that’s the exact one we’re getting. We’re still in the shopping around phase. That one, though, is available at a farm supplier near us for $900 and we’re thinking about going with it.

We’ve been spotting old wood-burners in modern spaces more and more in lieu of brick fireplaces. There’s something about an old-timey cast iron stove that bring so much character to an otherwise modern space. It’s the interior design version of the Emeril Lagasse “BAM!”

So the hole in our dining room’s brick wall was to gain access to the chimney. Our chimney guy is making us a custom chimney liner so we can install a wood-burning stove in our dining room and use it to heat our house. We’ll still have our oil boiler to use as backup — in case the temperature ever drop below 50 degrees inside, our radiators will kick on and heat up the space enough to keep our plumbing from freezing when we’re not home. But for the most part, we plan on using good old-fashioned firewood to heat our home.

So our big purchase for September was the water heater we’ve been coveting and our big purchase for October is the stove / chimney liner / installation.

We’ve already started making a list of all the things we plan on redoing in the dining room:

• Expose the brick wall (the stove will sit in front of raw brick)
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Rip out the carpet, sand + paint the floors
• Make a dining room table
• Make a floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelf with window seat
• Tear down all the walls, insulate & put up new walls
• Replace 2 windows
• Replace or repair the door to the porch
• Paint the 3 other doors in the room (they lead to the hallway, living room and basement)
• Make a radiator cover

We won’t get started on that for a while. Next on our gut-renovation list: the laundry room / half bath. Then the kitchen. We have our work cut out for us!

What we learned last week:

• It’s good to hold back.
  We have a million purchases we have to make to get our house looking and functioning the way we want. If we tried to make them all at once, we’d be broke. Or worse: in debt.
• Our one room at a time rule helps us keep our sanity, more money in our pockets and a cleaner house.
  If we limit our purchases to only whatever we need to renovate 1 or 2 rooms, we’re not starting projects all over the house and causing construction messes everywhere. We’re also not wasting money and space by hoarding supplies for projects that won’t get started till Spring 2012. Win-win situation.
• Know when to make exceptions.
  The stove and water heater are exceptions to the one room at a time rule. Our old oil boiler is really inefficient and really expensive — and winter is right around the corner. Both purchases also have the added benefit of alleviating our hippie-guilt over being reliant on oil.
• This is not the first wood-burning stove in our house.
  Way back in the 1880s, when our house was a young’un, there was a stove hooked up in the dining room and it was definitely used for cooking. The dining room / living room areas are the “old” part of the house. The kitchen area was added later (we’re thinking the 1920s-30s). So weird to think that someone used to cook their meals where we now watch TV.
• Confession: even though we’re very anti-credit card, we still use ‘em.
  When we  have the cash-money to make our big purchase, we put it on a credit card that gives us airline miles. Then we pay them off right away. Sometimes before it’s even due, because we’re anal like that. We’re saving up miles for a trip after the house is done. (Thailand, here we come??)

No More Flood Zone! Plus Some Odds & Ends Projects.

You know that feeling you get when you come back from vacation and sleep in your own bed? Multiply that by about a bajillion and that’s how we felt when the flood watch ended and we came home on Saturday afternoon. Even when we opened the basement door and found this:

Yes, it smelled as bad as it looked.

Our sump pump is easily 30 years old. It works, but every now and then it shuts itself off and you have to give it a swift kick to get things going. We added that to our list of ancient things we need to replace, and spent the rest of Saturday cleaning the entire first floor. On Sunday, we were back to renovating as usual.

Right now we’re trying to finish up some odds-and-ends projects upstairs so we can start painting walls and sanding floors. Here’s a shot of how our hallway looked before the Labor Day weekend:

And here’s how it looks today:

Yup! We’ve been painting doors and doorways! The bathroom door in the hallway isn’t totally finished. I just leaned it up against the doorway (accidentally upside-down) to show what it’ll look like once it’s in place. The hardware is still drying and we need to strip and paint the flip-side, but that won’t take long. The guest bedroom French doors are drying against a wall and need one more coat before they’re DONE-done:

The guest bedroom closet doors are dry and ready to be put back in place:

We never loved these cheap closet doors from Lowe’s. We got them because they were the least ugly of all the doors Lowe’s had to offer. And I practically had to wrestle and hog-tie Bradley in the closet door aisle before he agreed to buy them. They’ve been the bane of his existence ever since. Once the paint dried, though, he was all oohs and aahs. Up close, they don’t really look painted — they look stained:

While our doors and doorways dried, we fixed up a few things that were bugging us about the brick wall. Here’s our before shot again:

See all of those black cracks in our exposed brick wall? Those are spots where the mortar has chipped away. There’s also a big black rectangle at the top right hand corner of the wall where a couple of bricks were removed. We’re not really sure why, but based on lathe strip and old square nails that were used to patch the hole, it was done a long, long time ago. There are also some gaps on the floor where the wooden door frame used to be:

Bradley mixed up a batch of mortar and filled in the gaps:

He scooped mortar into the gap, patted it down flat, and then scraped his trowel across to get a smooth, even surface. Here’s how that spot looked when it dried:

And here’s how the filled gaps will look with our DIY moulding against them:

As for the brick wall, Bradley only wanted to patch the areas that will eventually be covered by a storage cabinet. This way we can experiment with what looks better, a meticulous brick-pointing job or a NYC-style patch job. We see the patch job a lot in old exposed brick walls in NYC. Basically, you take some mortar and smear it right across the brick face:

No need to be neat about it; a patch job is supposed to look industrial and old-school. When done properly, it can give a brick wall a lot of character. Since this spot is going to be covered with insulation and a cabinet, Bradley decided to leave a secret message in the wall. I didn’t even notice it until it was all dry:

30 years down the line, maybe some feisty whippersnappers will rip out our OMG-that-is-sooooo-dated custom cabinet and discover our graffiti. And they’ll get all huffy and puffy about it the way we do when we discover “SCOTT” written all over the house. It’s our way of paying it forward. Setting up challenges for future generations of DIYers. (Insert evil laughter here.)

Here’s how the big patch by the ceiling looks after drying:

Here’s our “in progress” pic again that shows how the dried mortar looks from a distance:

And, just for funzies, here’s what the hallway looked like waaaaay back in late April when we picked up the keys to our house:

Technically, that’s the cleaned up before picture. When we got the house, the hallway was covered in hideous burgundy carpet. We waited about 30 minutes after our closing before we started ripping up carpet, and in all the excitement, we forgot to take a true before picture. (Read all about it in our very first post.) Here’s the earliest documented before picture of the hallway, taken when I was halfway done ripping out carpet tacks:

Ahh, memories.

We have a lot more updates to share from our very busy Labor Day weekend. And unless some other insane force of nature disrupts our progress (Tornado? Tsunami? Locusts?), we’ll be firing up our spray painter this weekend. Can’t. Wait. Stay tuned!