Getting Gorgeous: New Walls For Our Dining Room

Greetings from rainy, grey Brooklyn! We just got in from rainy, grey Pennsylvania last night. We spent our rainy, grey weekend finishing up the insulation and drywall in the dining room. It was actually a two-weekend project. We started last week by installing some temporary fixtures to the dining room doorways:

The dining room is smack dab in the center of the house. Here’s a floor plan:

Even though we leave the windows and door open while we’re working, dust manages to find its way everywhere. We found ourselves dusting pretty much every day, especially in the kitchen. Dust even managed to get upstairs in the hallway and guest bedroom. How? No clue. But it was getting to be a bit much to keep up with. We found these tarp zippers at our local hardware store for $10 a pop:

Basically, they’re a zipper with a heavy-duty adhesive on one side. We stapled some plastic over the doorway leading to the hall and to the kitchen. Then we taped the plastic to the wall and floors to completely seal up the openings. After that, we taped the zipper to the plastic, unzipped it, cut a slit from top to bottom, and we have a plastic doorway:

It looks a bit like a Dexter kill room, but it works like a charm to keep the dust out. We did this for two doorways: the one leading upstairs and the one to the kitchen. We didn’t bother with the door that leads to the living room because dust wasn’t really getting in there to begin with.

Once we finished dust-proofing the doorways, we settled down for a nap on our ginormous radiator:

Not hammy enough? Here ya go:

We dragged the radiator out of the way and saw what was going on behind it:

All together now: ewwwwww…. Luckily that’s not mold we’re looking at. It’s crusty old wallpaper.

It’s the 7th or 8th different wallpaper pattern we’ve found in this house. We’ve lost track at this point. Either way, there was a whole lot of fugliness going on back there. And here’s what we found underneath the radiator:

A giant pile of dust and animal fur. Again: ewwwwww. That picture pretty much sums up why we’ve decided to make radiator boxes. We’re designing them to fit in with the overall look of our house and building them ourselves, so they’ll be more fancy-schmancy than the frumpy radiator boxes we’ve found in catalogs.

Speaking of frumpy, check out what the radiator did to the floor underneath:

We have a little patching and sanding to do. But first, we’re building walls. We started by removing all of the trim:

We talked about it a little in our last dining room post, but we’ve decided not to save and reinstall the old wood trim. The room feels so much more open without it. Once the trim was out, we built our walls.

This wall was, by far, the hardest:

Each rafter was slightly different, so the drywall had to be precisely cut to fit against the ceiling:

It was a bit like Tetris.

We were so geeked to tear down this old doorbell:

We’re guessing it was added in the ’60s or ’70s, and we’ve always hated the way it looks. So we’re replacing it with this:

It’s a small bell. Kind of a tiny version of the giant school bells that we had in our elementary schools. We haven’t installed it yet, but it’s going to look much more subtle than the giant creme-colored box it’s replacing.

Another thing we were super geeked about:

Saying buh-bye to that hideous floral wall border. We’ve been living with that ugliness for over a year now and covering it up was a happy-dance-around-the-room kind of momentous occasion. We may also have shouted “See you in hell, wallpaper!”

Check out our new, ugly-free walls. So fresh and so clean-clean! And so tall-tall, too:

To give some reference to the height of this room, Bradley’s just a bit over 5’10″. The room has always had taller-than-average ceilings, but we added about a foot when we exposed the rafters. With fresh, untextured drywall and no trim, the entire room feels so much bigger.

Here’s Bradley screwing in the last bit of drywall:

And, finally, here’s how the room looks now:

We love how the clean walls make the raw elements in the room pop. The rafters look so much better jutting out of a textureless wall:

And the spot where the rafters meet the brick looks so much better:

It’s finally starting to look more urban loft and a lot less country tacky.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can wrap this room up, though. We’re currently planning out how to replace the entry door:

It’s an old, solid wood door that would look great if we sanded and painted it, but we’re not going to keep it. It’s about half an inch thick and has the thinnest piece of single-pane glass known to mankind. Seriously. We might as well have a Kleenex separating us from the elements. This thing is doing nothing to keep us warm in the winter. So we’re shopping around for new doors. It’s not as easy as it sounds — all of the doors in our house are so old that they’re not standard-sized. Boo! Hiss! We might have to make or order custom exterior doors for the dining room and kitchen.

We have a lot of updates for you guys this week. We’re running in high gear right now so we’ll be posting more frequently. Whee! In our next post, we’re going to talk about our plans for the dining room doors:

That’s coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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?

Dining room updates.

We’ve been having a back-and-forth on which room we would renovate next — laundry room? half-bath? dining room? All three are in rough shape. But since we’ve already started work in the dining room, we’ve decided to wrap up in there before moving on to another room.

Here’s what we’ve done so far in the dining room:

• Exposed the brick wall
• Removed the carpet
• Sanded the floors
• Exposed the ceiling rafters
• Put in 2 new windows
• Put in a wood-burning stove

Our wood stove installation didn’t go exactly as planned. The chimney pipe was put in at funky angles and it looks really topsy-turvy:

We called up our installers and told them we were unhappy with their installation. So they came back and fixed it, this time with us supervising to make sure we got exactly what we wanted. Here’s how it looks now:

Much better! The chimney pipe makes a nice, straight line up. But the part where it connects to the wall is still at an angle. Our installers told us they can’t do anything about it because this part of our chimney was built at an angle. We hate how that part looks.

We’re also not too crazy about the brick repair around the chimney pipe. That’s not really the installers’ fault — the mortar looks smooth because it’s new. And it’s hard to match up brick just right. We’re working on a solution to cover up the stuff we don’t like.

One that we don’t like about our stove is how much ash accumulates around it:

It mostly just falls on the steel plate we put under the stove.

As long as we’re diligent about sweeping up, the dust doesn’t get tracked all over the floors. Aside from those few snafus, we’re in love with the stove. We haven’t really had to use our oil boiler to heat the house since we got it. We’ve been a little nervous about how much heat is escaping up into the rafters, so we decided to insulate up there:

The heat is going to right up through our floor boards and into the guest bedroom regardless, but at least that room is insulated. The master bedroom isn’t — this should help keep heat out of that room for now.

Once that was done, Bradley decided to do a little electrical work. He’s done a lot of electrical work over the years, but he always keeps this book nearby to reference:

He started by shutting off the power to the first floor. Then he removed the old switch and electrical box. He also removed all of the wires from this area so they wouldn’t be in the way. He outlined the electrical box he wanted to install:

This will give us three switches: one for a fan and two for lights (more on that in a minute). Next, he drilled holes in the corners of his outline:

He made sure he drilled inside the lines, not outside.

After that, he used a jigsaw to cut from one hole to another, following the pencil outline as best as he could:

He cut all around the outline, and the plaster popped right out:

The new electrical box slid right in:

After that came all of the complicated wiring stuff that I know nothing about. Bradley’s the electrician:

I just lurk around with my camera yelling helpful advice like, “DON’T CUT THE RED WIRE!” and “WAIT, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK! CUT THE RED WIRE!!”

Flash forward to a couple of hours later and this is what we had:

The switch in the middle controls the fan. The ones on the outside control lights. Each one is on a separate dimmer so we can control them individually.

Next up, Bradley installed the ceiling fan:

We loved the raw, industrial look of the rafters. So we decided to roll with that theme and do exposed conduit and junction boxes. We also decided to do track lights for the dining room so we could have light all over.

Bradley made the fan perfectly centered in the room. And wired that sucker in:

The last time he installed a fan (in the guest bedroom), he assembled it on the ceiling. This time, he assembled the entire fan on the ground and then hooked it into place afterwards:

It was much easier this way. He didn’t struggle with parts and he didn’t drop any screws.

Once the fan was up, Bradley tackled the track lights. We picked up two basic white tracks from Home Depot for $20 a pop.

Each track sits in the middle of a beam. We spaced them evenly on either side of the fan. The conduit for the track lights were a little tricky to install because we had to bend the pipes at 90-degree angles. Bradley had to use a pipe bender for that:

He told me that you have to buy a different pipe bender for different diameters of pipe. This one is a 1/2″. If we had to bend 3/4″ pipe, we’d need a 3/4″ pipe bender. Bradley only owns a 1/2″ because it’s a pretty basic size for what he uses.

Little bit of a disclaimer here: pipe bending is kind of a science. Bradley admits he doesn’t really do it the “proper” way. He does the quick-and-dirty method that doesn’t involve formulas and rules. He recommends watching YouTube videos if you want to learn the right way.

Here’s how Bradley bent our conduit pipes:

He put the pipe through the bender, stood on the pipe and bent the pipe back:

I helped him figure out a perfect 90-degree angle using a small level:

And we had a bent conduit:

After bending the conduit, Bradley cut it down to size using a hacksaw:

And he installed it to our tracks:

The lightbulb swinging from the junction box in the middle is temporary. We weren’t loving any of the track lights at Home Depot or Lowe’s, so we decided to hold off on buying them.

We turned the power back on, flipped a switch, and ta-da!:

It works!

Bradley had one more trick up his sleeve before the sun went down:

He wired up a second set of switches and an outlet on the opposite side of the room.

This way we can turn the lights off and on as we go into the kitchen.

Next up for this room: insulation. Our spending freeze is almost over — fiiiinally! — which means we can do a big bulk purchase of everything we need to wrap up the dining room. Or at least make it less fugly.

We’ll be back soon with updates from what we did this weekend. Things are about to get super busy around here. Both of us have December 26-31st off from work so we’ll be tackling a bunch of projects on our to-do list. Stay tuned!

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.

Our biggest rookie mistake so far.

After work yesterday, Bradley and I ran upstairs to check out the plasterer’s progress in the hallway. She’s almost done, and the hallway is looking fantastic. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll be priming tomorrow night!

After checking out this end of the hallways, we went to the other side of the brick wall. And this is what we saw:

Ignore the awesome job our plasterer did on those trimless windows. Look at the brick wall. To the left, brick. To the right, same brick, without paint. One continuous brick wall. Just like the other side. …and that’s the moment we realized we’d made a terrible mistake:

That section of wall is an exterior wall. As in, the only thing separating us from the outside world is a double layer of brick. As in, we’ll be able to feel a draft on a windy day if we stand in front of that brick wall. It was a total “Doh!” moment. How did we not realize this sooner?!

We felt like suuuuuch idiots. We just stood there in the hall, both of us, gaping at our beloved brick wall. Our beautiful brick wall that offers us no protection from the outside world. If we had realized this in the nearly-four months we’ve been living here, we would have insulated and put up some dry wall on that section. Sure it would mean covering up half of the brick wall, but being warm in the winter is pretty high on our priority list. We would have made it work.

After what felt like an hour of headsmacking and “We’re so stupid!” and “How did we not realize this sooner?!” we came up with a solution:

A built-in floor-to-ceiling cabinet with insulation hidden in the back. We can do a couple of inches of foam insulation and build the cabinet right around it. That way we won’t need to mess with drywall & plaster, and nobody will be able to see the insulation. It’ll be hidden neatly behind the back panel of the cabinet.

This solution kills two birds with one stone (sorry, birds, it had to be done). The bathroom at the end of the hall is the only full bath in the house. It’s also incredibly tiny and has no storage. It didn’t even have a single shelf (we broke down and installed a temporary one because we couldn’t take it anymore).

So all this time, we’ve been struggling with ways to work storage into a room that has no space to work with (low ceilings, radiator, no free room around the sink or toilet). Putting a ginormous cabinet in the hallway — just a few steps outside the bathroom — will give us a bunch of space to stash some of our bathroom stuff. We’re thinking it’ll have 3 sections: Costco-sized packages of TP up top, towels and extra toiletries in the middle, and cleaning supplies in the bottom.

We plan on building the cabinet ourselves after the walls and floors are painted. So there we go. Crisis averted. We make dumb mistakes from time to time, and we’re not afraid to share ‘em. Remember when we thought we had an empty space behind our master bedroom wall? And we punched a hole in it, only to discover there was no empty space? Gahaha! …good times.

Anyone else have any oh-my-gawwww-we-totally-screwed-up renovation stories? Come on, ‘fess up.

Our brick wall is done!

Over the past month, we’ve been picking at our brick wall like a four-year-old picks at scabs. Bit by bit, we’re determined to get the plaster off and the beautiful red brick completely exposed. When we left off, the wall looked like this:

The Smurf room is completely exposed now, as is the flipside of the wall. And we removed all of the wood in the doorway to expose even more brick. The only thing left to expose is the little bit of brick surrounding the doorway.

So, bright and early on Saturday morning, I grabbed a hammer, a prybar and a jackhammer and got to work. I removed the plaster up to eye level before my arms felt like they would fall off. Then Bradley took over the jackhammer and finished off the rest. And now our brick wall looks like this:

We also removed the plaster and lathe from the adjoining wall so we could insulate it. You can see the nekkid wall behind the broom.

See that little bit of light creeping in above the window? That’s from a massive gap in the wood and brick on the outside of the house. Eeps! Foam insulation to the rescue!

We sealed around the entire window, and once it dried, we brought out the fiber insulation:

And we followed that up with styrofoam insulation:

The Smurf room, guest bedroom and bathroom are all sealed up. Now the hallway is getting there, too. By the time we’re done (next weekend, maybe??), this little corner of our house is going to be sealed up so tight that we’ll be sweating bullets in winter. Or, at the very least, we won’t freeze our hineys off.

We love the way the raw doorway looks now that it’s exposed on 3 sides. We need to put drywall on the ceiling outside the Smurf room, and then we can put up drywall on top of that metallic styrofoam insulation. Right now it’s hard to walk by it without getting blinding by the reflection.

Not too shabby, right? We still need to add another coat of mud to our seams and screwholes, and then it’s painting time!

So that’s it for our brick wall! It’s done. Lets never speak of it again.

I kid, I kid. We’re done exposing brick in this house. …for a couple of months, anyway. There’s one huge wall in the kitchen that we’ll expose, but we won’t get to that room for a while.

What we learned from our brick exposin’ adventure:

• Nothing. We learned absolutely nothing from this weekend’s de-plastering job. We’ve done this over and over again for weeks now, and we feel like we could expose brick in our sleep. Seriously.

Have you hugged a brick wall today?

We admit it: we have an unhealthy obsession with brick walls. It’s a problem. It seems like every other post we write up has something to do with exposing brick — sometimes accidentally. This weekend was no exception. We had a happy accident with our brick wall that made us fall even more in love with it.

The whole thing started when I removed all of the window and door trim in the hallway. There’s nothing really wrong with the the way the previous owners put up window and door trim — it just seems a little big and clunky to us. We plan on redoing it all.

While prying the trim on the flipside of our brick wall, I realized the solid planks of wood framing the door weren’t solid at all. Basically, we were expecting the back to look more like the front:

The wood sticks out about 1/4″ past the brick and is grey and aged. On the flip side, it looked like this:

The wood doesn’t reach all the way to the back. They faked the look by using trim covered with plaster. Doh!

After a few choice profanities and whole lot of hemming and hawing, we decided to remove the wood frame. This meant we would have to replace our old wood doorway with new wood to make it jut out 1/4″ on both sides and get that super modern look we were going for. We weren’t exactly happy about having to cut out the beautiful grey wood — we thought it had a lot of character — but Bradley cheered up when he realized this was a really good excuse to pull out his Sawzall:

Look at that concentration.

Sawzalls. Are. Intense. Proper sawing technique requires both furrowing of brow and flaring of nostrils. Clenching of jaw is optional, but highly recommended.

Bradley sawed through one side, then switched to the other:

Then he broke the top in half using a crowbar:

And removed the wood on the side, which revealed the butt end of the brick wall we’ve exposed:

Not gonna lie: the entire time, I was cowering in the bathroom and asking Bradley for reassurance that the ceiling wasn’t going to fall down on our heads. He explained that the header — that big block of wood above the door frame — is supporting the weight of the wall. The door frame was in there loosely. It wasn’t even nailed to anything. So it wasn’t supporting any weight at all. It was mostly there because doorways are supposed to have frames. In other words: just ‘cuz.

I felt safe enough to come out of the bathroom:

And immediately regretted it. Nothing like 130-year-old dust to wake up those sinuses! Once we had the wood out and let the dust settle, Bradley checked to make sure the wall was level:

Both sides were perfectly level. Bradley rejoiced:

Then he went around the corner and said, “Oooh, now we have to expose this other side.”

I caught him mid-ooooh. And he’s right:

On the left, you can see Bradley scraping our freshly exposed brick to get the dust and plaster off. On the right you can see the brick wall in the Smurf room. And that white crap in the center? That’s the little bit of plaster that’s separating the two from being one long, continuous piece of interior design eye candy.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the jackhammer with us (it’s at Bradley’s workshop), so we won’t expose the rest of the brick until next weekend.

For now, we’re giddy about the way our frameless raw brick doorway looks:

We were planning on replacing the door frame, but we like the way this looks better, so we’re going to leave it. Frames? We don’t need no stinkin’ frames!

What we learned from our happy accident:

• Roll with the punches. Being flexible about our end result is one way to avoid being constantly heartbroken about things not going the way we plan.
• Different is good. We were a little freaked out at the idea of having a frameless doorway — it just seems so different — but the more we looked at it, the more we liked it.
• We’ve come a long way, baby. Sometimes we get down on ourselves about not working fast enough or not getting enough done on a Saturday. Then we look at our before pictures and realize how much we’ve accomplished in a month. Check out what this hallway used to look like:

Mudder’s Day.

Happy weekend! It’s been the kind of week where we started wishing for the weekend on Tuesday. We’ve both been crazy busy with work, but not so busy that we didn’t sneak in a little work on the house.

The Smurf room is completely insulated and drywalled, which means it’s time for taping and mudding. We grabbed our supersized bucket of joint compound and got down to business.

I learned something new: sheetrock is a brand. So it should be capitalized. I also learned that Sheetrock and drywall shouldn’t really be used interchangeably. And that “sheetrocking” is not a verb. In short, I learned that I have no idea what I’m talking about 72.3% of the time. Lets pretend that the last 3 weeks worth of posts never happened, OK? Thank you.

This was my first time mudding, so Bradley showed me the ropes before putting me to work.

He started by scooping some joint compound into his bucket. Not so much that it’s too heavy to carry around. And not so little that he has to go back for a refill every 10 minutes. Not too much, not too little: he Goldilocksed it.

I like to take words that aren’t verbs and turn them into verbs. Don’t judge me.

Next, he scooped a little mud onto his blade:

And he smeared it across the holes where we screwed the drywall to the studs:

At this stage, he was pretty generous with the mud and spread it several inches around the screwhole. Teehee, screwhole! I was trying to avoid saying it. I really was. But it’s so much easier to say than “the holes where we screwed the drywall to the studs.” Screwhole. Sorry, family.

Once all of the screwholes along the stud were covered, Bradley set his blade at an angle at the top of the wall:

And then dragged it all the way down to the floor to scrape up all of the excess mud:

The result:

All of our screwholes are filled with mud. …eww.

After Bradley gave me the Mudding 101, I took over the easy jobs — screwholes and small seams that didn’t require as much taping finesse. Bradley handled the harder seams, like the old doorhole we sealed up.

It used to look like this:

Then, for a while, it sat around looking like this:

We were pretty excited about taping, mudding and forgetting that this awkward doorway ever existed. I wanted to make a video of the whole thing. Maybe throw together a quick tutorial on how to tape and mud the crooked seams and big gaps. Unfortunately, when it came time to do the video, Bradley totally shot me down. Mr. Bashful said he felt too self-conscious to do a tutorial video, and that we should just stick to photos.

So I took photos instead of shooting a video. Then I pieced the photos together to make a bootleg video animated gif of Bradley patching up the doorhole:

See? Motion is way more fun. I’ll convince him to do a video some day.

Here’s how the guest bedroom doorhole looks with one coat of mud:

We’ll need 2 more coats on that before it feels smooth and ready to paint, but we’re getting there!

We finished mudding all of the screwholes and the less complicated seams in the Smurf room:

We still have to give our screwholes a second coat and tape all of the big seams, but at least we’re making progress.

No more blue walls! And — squee! — no more granny wallpaper in the Smurf room closet:

It’s funny to call this the Smurf room now that it’s halfway through a facelift. It feels like a completely different room. Less of a kid’s room and more of an office. And that stunning brick wall definitely turned the whole look around:

We mentioned in an earlier post that we chose a paint color for the Smurf room:

It’s a very soft white — horseradish, to be exact. Our color scheme for the office is a mix of whites and soft greys with yellow accents. I also have my heart set on a white bookshelf with the back painted a bright yellow:

Source

That’s been the plan ever since we got our hands on the house keys: whites, greys, yellows.

After we exposed the brick, though, we weren’t sure how our color scheme was going to work in the room. The red brick seemed so bold. We were worried that it would compete with the bright yellows we wanted. It could end up looking really chaotic.

We considered whitewashing the brick to soften the look. But the more we stared at it, the more we loved the raw red brick. We then considered changing the color scheme for the room. That also ended up being a no-go. We’d been daydreaming about a white-and-yellow room for so long that we were completely lost when trying to come up with new colors.

Finally, after going back and forth for days, we decided to give yellow-and-brick a shot. Maybe they wouldn’t look so bad together. We went to Lowe’s and picked up a bunch of yellow paint swatches. We stuck them to the brick to see the colors side-by-side:

We love it! Turns out our red brick looks just fine with most shades of yellow. The brighter, the better. So we wasted a solid 2 weeks fretting over something that ended up not mattering one bit. In the end, we’re saving a lot of time by not whitewashing the brick, and we still get to keep the color scheme we’ve been loving in our head. Win-win!

What we learned from this project:

• We finally understand why so many people have textured walls — it’s to cover their crappy taping!
• Mudding a ceiling? Get ready for sore shoulders.
• We found that holding our blade at about a 45° angle worked really well for scraping mud. If we held it at too much of an angle, we got streaks.
• Mud dries fast, so you have to work fast. If you need a break, cover up your mud with saran wrap to keep it wet.
• Messed up your mud-job? It’s not the end of the world. You can always sand the excess and apply a new coat or two to get a smooth wall.

The ugliest room in our house.

We’ve publicly shared some pretty hideous features of our house on Bye Bye Brooklyn. No shame in our game. Our house has 130 years of history in its walls, and some pretty crappy design decisions were made along the way. We’re not worried. The house has really good bones, and it’ll be fabulous in no time.

Still, there is one room that grosses us out so badly that we seriously considering not sharing the before pictures. For the sake of keeping it real, though, we have to document the crustiest of the crusty.

Deep breath. Here we go:

This is the back door to our house, which is actually the door we use most often. It leads out to our back yard and garage, and leads in to the kitchen.

This room’s main purpose at the moment is for sunbathing:

That’s Jabba. She’s not much of a DIYer, but she’s a professional napper. While we’re upstairs demolishing rooms, she’s downstairs sunbathing and snoozing. Or interrupting to remind us it’s lunchtime:

She hangs out in the entryway a lot because it gets great sunlight through its super-ghetto windows:

Someone repaired that glass with clear packing tape. You can hardly see the crack, right? Right??

We’ve also been using this room as a place to store our recycling:

Our bike locks and helmets were thrown in here as well:

The windows overlook the ugly trellis that we’ll be ripping down:

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are no walls. Whoever renovated this room (and I’m using the word “renovated” very loosely), did a pretty terrible job of insulating. Everything is sort of crunched in and mushed down (total no-no), and they never got around to sheetrocking the walls. Or the ceiling:

One cool thing about this room is the exposed brick that’s been painted white:

Here it is on the other wall:

Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That’s not brick. Those are shingles. As in, the stuff that’s supposed to go on the outside of your house. The entire wall is covered with shingles that were painted white to “match” the brick:

All of those black spots you see on the shingles are places where we pulled out nails. The dorm fridge is what we lived out of before we got our shiny new fridge. Not gonna lie: that was a rough couple of weeks. You can also take a gander at our washer & dryer hookup.

We’ve been excited about having a laundry room pretty much since we started looking at houses to buy. We daydreamed about living the kind of life where we could wash our clothes while watching a movie. Throw our wash in the dryer without navigating through screaming kids running laps around the laundromat. Leave our laundry in the dryer overnight. And — oh, bliss — never ever again having to wear bathing suit bottoms as underwear because we’ve been too busy to drag our hampers across the street to the stupid, noisy laundromat.

Anyway, on the shingled wall, you can see a poorly sealed doorway (and even more nails):

Apparently this room was once connected to our half-bathroom, which was also recently “renovated.” It’s nowhere near as horrible as the laundry room, but it’s not pretty either. We’re guessing this space used to be an outdoor porch, and someone converted it into a half-bath and laundry room. And they did a pretty horrible job of it. To seal up the doorway, for instance, they just nailed a piece of plywood to the frame, painted it white, and called it a day.

There is one thing we plan on keeping from this room:

Bradley’s pretty indifferent about it, but I kind of love that faceplate. Can’t you see it painted bronze and looking really fabulous in another room? It’s one of those just-so-weird-it-might-work things that we’re going to try, and if it doesn’t work, then in the trash it goes.

We also found a thermometer in the room:

The Royal Order of Moose? Garbage.

Ugly light? Garbage.

Wait, no, we take that back. This might be salvageable. Capiz shell is all the rage right now, and with new fittings for the inside and a better way to hang it — a way that doesn’t include a cheap brass chain — we might make this work. Maybe. If we’re not totally smash-happy by the time we start renovating this room, in which case, it’ll probably die a horrible sledgehammer-related death.

We’re not really ready to renovate this room yet (we have a one-room-at-a-time policy), but we needed to get that stained carpet out. Luckily, this was a poorly done DIY job. It’s a theme in this room. So we didn’t have to rip up any carpet tacks or deal with any glue. Someone just used a stapler to staple the carpet to the wood. And we’re not sure they used a real staple gun. They looked like normal office staples. Moral of the story: people are weird.

The carpet came up easily, and underneath, we found a perfect preserved  Jackson Pollock painting!

Upon closer examination, though, we found that this was not a Pollock but a cheap knock-off by Scott:

Oh well. You can’t win ‘em all. Or, apparently, you can’t win at all with this room.

…just kidding! When it comes down to it, it’s still a laundry room. And a useable one now that we put a washer and dryer in it:

Whee! When I snapped that picture, those puppies were hooked up and doing one of the four loads of laundry we did that day. No bathing suit bottoms up in this hizzy!

We initially planned on buying new front loaders, but since we decided to splurge on kitchen appliances, we cut back on our laundry room budget. After reading a lot of reviews, we decided that maybe front loaders weren’t that great for us. I’m extremely allergic to mold. We’re sure other people are having great mold-free results with their front loaders, but we’re not going to risk it.

After looking at a lot of top loaders, we decided to buy a used set off of Craigslist.  So many people are getting rid of their 2 or 3-year-old top loaders in order to buy new front loaders. There are tons of deals to be had, plus buying used keeps perfectly-good machines out of landfills. By going to Craigslist, we were able to be both eco-conscious and budget-conscious.

How budget-conscious? Drumroll please! We got our machines for……$150 each! $300 for the set — and there’s nothing at all wrong with ‘em. We’d actually given ourselves a much-higher budget of $1200, so we technically saved ourselves $900.

As far as renovating this room goes, it’s pretty low on our list right now. But we’re already talking about doing a very light, airy look for both this room and the adjoining half-bathroom. Something modern but beachy. We’re taking our cues from the white brick wall and thinking white paneled walls and minimalist cabinetry. We’re also planning on keeping the floors light — either white or light grey — to contrast with the black floors throughout the house.

And, while we know there’s no room in our half-bath for a claw foot tub, we think this works beautifully:

Source

No rush. We’ll get to it when we get to it. For now, we’re sticking to the upstairs renovations. But we’re super excited that we can do our laundry while we’re working on the rest of the house. Or watching movies. Or going out for dinner. Or sleeping…

What we learned from this project:

• We don’t know who Scott is, but we want to have a long talk with him.
• Everyone’s jumping on the front loader bandwagon, which is great for the rest of us who don’t mind an energy efficient machine that’s a couple of years old. Check Craigslist!

Say goodbye to the Smurf room!

The Smurf room may be tiny in comparison to our other bedrooms, but we have big, big plans for it. And, like a lot of our plans lately, it involves demolition.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and removed all of the trim from the room. We labeled it “Smurf” so we could find and reuse it later.

The room is roughly 8.5 feet wide by 15.5 feet long, and the ceilings are just over 7.5 feet short tall. There are 3 windows in the room, and they’re all super old, single-pane suckers that need to be replaced.

Here’s how the room looks from all 4 corners, starting with me standing in the doorway and working clockwise:

From in front of the closet:

From the radiator corner:

And the last corner across from the doorway:

The flooring is newer (and in better shape) than the rest of the house, and the room gets a ton of sunlight. Plus we can see some big hills / small mountains off the distance.

It’s not a bad room. Just kinda tiny.

The short ceilings certainly don’t help.

Neither does the color scheme. It just makes the room look really squat. Still, we decided it would be great for an office. And with a pullout couch, it could easily double as a guest bedroom.

Bradley had another Saturday-morning project going on in the guest bedroom (more on that soon!), so he handed me the crowbar and sledgehammer and told me to go to town. I had some aggression to work out.

You see, earlier that morning, Bradley ran into our very sweet, very old and very pig-headed old-fashioned neighbor, who chastised him for “making” me move heavy furniture across our yard. Bradley told him that I wanted to move furniture because I haven’t been getting enough gym time lately and have been complaining about not getting a decent workout. Our neighbor replied, “They weren’t built for physical labor.” And by “they,” he didn’t mean sassy bloggers.

I made 2 demands when I found out: 1) that we go sign up for a gym membership immediately so I can get my guns ready for some sleeveless flaunting all up in our neighbor’s face, and 2) that I get to smash something. I also told him I was going to blog about our neighbor because he’s 100 years old and probably doesn’t read blogs. So, neighbor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for stereotyping you.

Anyway, on to the smashing and bashing. When I removed the trim, I found a couple of surprises in the wall:

A valentine (awwww!) and a hunk of bee hive (ewwww!). Luckily there seemed to be no sign of bees, so I kept smashing walls until I was too tired to lift the sledgehammer:

That’s when Bradley dropped by and took over. We had to move a radiator to get to the wall behind it. Here he is demonstrating how not to pick up something that weighs a bajillion pounds:

I asked him to pose for a radiator-lifting picture and that’s what I got. Come on, Bradley, rules are in place for a reason. Lift with your legs, not with your back. Don’t lock your knees. Look both ways before crossing the street. I before E, except after C. No white after Labor Day. Rules rule!

We haven’t decided what to do about the closet door at this point. In fact, we’re not even really sure whether we want the closet to be a closet. Our bathroom is right next to the closet — you can see the plumbing for our bathtub through the hideous hole the wall. We’re not renovating the bathroom for a while, but we could use the closet space to expand into it. We could kill 2 birds with 1 stone: remove an awkwardly shaped closet and add a considerable amount of space to the tiny bathroom.

If we do decide to keep it as storage for the office, we can always install some shelves. We also talked about designing and making our own sliding door for it. We already plan to make a sliding door for the main entrance to the room, so we could make a second one to match and hang that for the closet door. There will be a long desk that goes between the closet doorway and the main doorway. The desk will be designed to accommodate the sliding door (or doors) behind it.

Told you. Big, big plans for this little room. For now, we know we have to insulate the two outward-facing walls in the closet regardless, so we have time to plan out our next move.

When we ripped out the plaster and lathe around the window frames, we found weights hanging on the inside:

There was one weight on each side of each window, so 6 weights altogether.

Plus several other weights at the bottom. The ropes must have ripped off or the windows must have been replaced.

They’re rusted and covered in dust right now, but we think they’re really neat looking. We’re saving them to reuse somewhere — maybe in a sculpture.

A very heavy sculpture. Each weight is 6 pounds. We have 11 weights so far and we’ll find at least 10 more weights in the house from the other old windows.

We made a rule recently that limits the amount of hours we work on the house on weekends. We start right after breakfast — around 9:30 — and work until 6PM. At 6:00 on the dot, it’s pencils jackhammers down. Our self-imposed cutoff is so that we take time to relax a little on weekends. Both of us have full-time jobs and work at least 10 or 11 hours a day. When it comes to working on the house, we have a tendency to go go go until bedtime.

Between our long work hours, our 2 days a week spent in Brooklyn, and all of our renovating, we could easily burn ourselves out. We’ve got a long way to go, baby! We don’t have time to burn out! So we set up a strict deadline, and after 6PM, it’s all hot showers, BBQ grills, beers and Netflix. This way we can keep up the energy and excitement we need to keep on renovating.

At the 5:30 on Saturday, we had demolished the entire Smurf room, but we hadn’t gotten into the closet yet. And we had 14 contractor garbage bags full of plaster and lathe from the 2 walls we ripped down. Each 32-gallon bag weighed over 100 pounds:

Everywhere we turned there was a giant bag full of old walls staring us in the face:

I was so beat from an entire day of swinging a sledgehammer that I wanted to leave the bags overnight. I’m not sure how Bradley mustered up the energy, but while I took care of sweeping up the room, he carried every single one of those bags down stairs and out to the garage.

Mah hero! Mah poor, passed-out hero!

The next morning, we woke up and went back in for more demolition. The plaster and lathe were all gone, leaving behind only some studs and boards that separated us from the exterior brick.

It’s hard to imagine how people lived in this house without any insulation. I can understand it 130 years ago, but people were living here last year. They must have frozen their butts off every winter!

I spent my Sunday morning doing a pretty brainless task (the best kind of task to take on until the coffee kicks in!). I demolished the walls in the closet, creating 4 more bags of debris that had to be hauled downstairs. Meanwhile Bradley demolished another wall in the Smurf room:

That’s right: we exposed some more brick! We can’t help ourselves. It’s a culmination of all those years of living in apartments that had brick walls, but landlords who refused to set them free. Or maybe we just really, really love carrying 100-pound bags of plaster down stairs.

This is the flip side of the same brick wall we exposed in the hallway. It turns out there are actually 2 layers of brick. The brick on this side is in way better shape. We won’t have to do any re-pointing at all on this side! This is excellent news because we plan on exposing this same wall in the kitchen. This means less work for us! Squee!!

We were also pretty happy to see that the plaster is much, much thinner on the Smurf room side so it didn’t take a ton of work to get the brick exposed. Bradley used only a jackhammer for the entire wall — no hammer & chisel!

While Bradley jackhammered, I grabbed a regular hammer and moved on to brainless task #2. Every single stud in the room had about 30 nails in it:

That’s how the lathe strips (the wood strips from earlier photos) were attached to the studs. Lathe gets nailed to stud. Plaster gets smeared on lathe. Viola! Walls!

Bradley’s job was way more exciting than mine.

I kept offering to take over, but he really wanted to do this wall on his own. I think he secretly really wanted to expose the hallway brick, but he was too busy working on other projects and missed out on all that fun.

So I let him have his glory.

We finished at 6PM, and didn’t have any time left to clean up the rubble. Not that it mattered anyway. We were so beat from 2 days of demolition (sore shoulders, sore back, sore hands, sore arms, sore everything), that we couldn’t have cleaned up even if we wanted to. All we wanted to do is shower and go out for dinner before hitting the hay, so we didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before taking our in-progress pictures:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hazy, yes. But still very lovely.

We haven’t decided yet whether we will leave the brick raw or white-wash. I love the look of white washed brick. It looks so earthy, and much softer than red brick:

Source

The color palette for this room will be white, yellow and greys, so I think a white-washed wall will work better. Bradley’s not totally sold on it. We’ll probably rock-paper-scissors over it, but in the end, I’ll be spending much more time in this room than he will. So Leena crushes rock, paper, AND scissors. Just sayin’.

The rest of the walls are totally naked and ready for new windows, insulation and sheetrock.

No more wallpaper in the closet!

After taking these pictures, we used a sheet of plastic to completely seal up the doorway. There’s no door anymore, so this will help keep the dust confined until it settles. Next time, we’ll just vacuum it up and move along.

Still left to do in this room:

• Seal up cracks with spray foam insulation
• Insulate all of the naked walls
• Sheetrock (plus tape & mud)
• Replace windows
• Paint
• Sand floors
• Paint floors
• Replace trim
• Make and install a sliding door (or two?)
• Cry sweet tears of relief

It looks like a long list, but we’re getting there. Demolition always seems to take way longer than putting things back together, so we’re optimistic that this room will be done by the time our first set of visitors come out to see us (July 4th weekend…eep!).

What we learned in this project:

• Plaster is really, really heavy.
• Chuck Taylors: cute, comfortable, not meant for construction work. (Plaster is really, really heavy.)
• It takes approximately 4 weekends for us to create enough construction garbage to fill one standard dumpster.