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?

Let the dishes wash themselves.

Happy Saturday! Bradley’s busy working on a project today while I’m busy recovering from the flu. It’s been a rough couple of days, but I think all of the chicken soup and couch time has really helped. It seems like all of the ladies in this house are sick right now.

Margot picked up kennel cough at the animal shelter, and she and Jabba were both sick all week. They’ve been good couch companions. And now that Margot’s feeling a little better, she’s starting to come out of her shell.

Life is good! Wait, scratch that. Life is great. You know why?

Because that guy installed our dishwasher! Whee!

Up until recently, our dishwasher was in the garage, piled on top of the old stove we removed when we moved in:

We delayed the installation because we weren’t sure where we would put it. Our plan has always been to refinish the old cabinets in our kitchen. So we thought we’d wait it out until we renovated the kitchen.

After 7 long months of living sans-dishwasher, we’d had enough. We also realized that we don’t want to keep the old cabinets after all. They were cobbled together poorly and they’re basically falling apart. Bradley dismantled the drawer cabinet by hand:

Seriously. He popped them right out with his bare hands. I don’t have a before picture because he was in such a big hurry to get started, but here’s how the cabinet looked with the drawers gone:

Not. Attractive.

We’re not sure we could have kept the old cabinets even if we wanted to. They’re attached right to the plaster. The plaster is just a thin layer right over the brick. So we would have had to remove the cabinets to insulate the walls behind them — and based on how rickety they are, we’re pretty sure they’ll fall apart in the process.

At least the floors look decent:

We’ll have to peel up that hideous linoleum and pry up the plywood underneath. Hopefully the glue didn’t cause too much damage to the kitchen floors.

While removing the cabinets, we noticed that they weren’t as old as we thought they would be:

They’re put together using commercial nails that are newer than the big square nails we’ve found throughout the rest of the house. Either way, removing the drawers has sealed the deal: these cabinets are outta here.

Once Bradley had the drawers removed, he used a hole saw attachment to drill holes for the dishwasher pipes:

The hole saw does exactly what the name implies: it saws a perfect hole.

A hole on the right side for the power cord:

And one on the left for the hoses:

The hoses went into cabinet under the sink where Bradley could plumb them in:

That spot may be my least favorite in the entire house. We’ve cleaned it as much as we can, but it will never stop looking gross. We can’t wait to rip up this cabinet and get rid of everything underneath. Especially the nasty, peeling wallpaper:

Once the wires and pipes were threaded through the holes, Bradley gently pushed the dishwasher into place:

Then he used some spare hunks of wood to make up for the difference between our deep dishwasher and our not-so-deep cabinet:

It’s not the prettiest solution, but it’s very temporary. We’ll rip everything out when we renovate the kitchen anyway.

After that came the plumbing:

And finally, he hooked up the power:

It starts getting dark here at 5:30 now, so Bradley’s been using his camping flashlight headgear to get work done once the sun goes down. One of our neighbors keeps asking him if he’s a coal miner.

The final product:

Ta-da! It’s not pretty, but it’s a temporary fix to our problem. Our problem being that we were both really, really sick of washing dishes by hand. We cook most of our meals at home, so it felt like we were always washing dishes. And standing in front of a sink full of dirty dishes after a long day of renovating or a hard day at work was getting old fast. Now we just load up the dishwasher after dinner and listen to the hum of dishes washing themselves while we watch TV on the couch. Oh, luxury. How we missed you!

We’ll be back soon with another update. Both of us have been crazy-busy with work lately and we’ve gotten a little behind in our posts. Lucky for me, I’ve got a sick day to get all caught up. Stay tuned!

Hot Water Heater

Happy humpday! The week is half over, and we’re still recovering from our work-filled weekend.

We’re on a spending freeze from hardware stores for the rest of the year. We’re taking the time to do odds and ends projects that we’ve been putting off. On Saturday, we installed a hot water heater. And by “we,” I mean Bradley. Because I was off playing with my new favorite toy:

I have a label maker. You know what this means, right? I’m one step closer to becoming a crazy cat lady. I can officially conquer the world. I’ll show you what I did with Labels McGee in our next post. It was exhilarating. I blew my nerd gasket at least twice.

Bradley started out by removing the staircase that leads up to our dining room. We’re sealing up this entrance anyway, so the staircase was a goner anyway. Besides, this guy hasn’t demolished anything in weeks:

He was itching to get his sledgehammer on.

Once the staircase was out of there, Bradley swept up all of the dirt and grime covering the cement floor:

He uncovered a secret message:

March 12, 1949. Which means our basement floor was poured nearly 63 years ago. Yipes. Definitely time for an update, but we won’t get to that until next year.

Next up, Bradley stacked a few cinder blocks in the spot where we wanted the hot water heater to go:

We wanted to elevate the hot water heater just in case we ever get water in our basement again. The cinder blocks are about 8 inches tall, so it gives us a little piece of mind knowing our new water-heating robot won’t drown.

Look at those googly eyes. Cutest robot this basement’s ever seen!

We got our GE GeoSpring back in September and it’s been hanging out in our basement ever since. We got it because it’s one of the most energy-efficient water heaters on the market. And, thanks to a tax credit and a rebate from our electricity company, this puppy cost us only $400.

With the water heater elevated, Bradley got to work on the plumbing.

We’re going to give a brief description of what we did, because a) a long-winded description would put everyone to sleep, and b) the details of what worked for us may not work for every house.

Bradley started by turning off the water main while I turned on all the faucets in the house. This relieved the pressure from the pipes. Next, he shut off our old boiler and started disconnecting the pipes to splice in the hot water heater. He measured out all of his pipes, cut them and then soldered them together:

I asked Bradley what he was doing in the pictures above and this is what he said:

You can say that I was soldering a ball valve. Not a gate valve. Because gate valves suck.

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

He also said that he “tied in the lines” and “spliced in the unit” and “installed a 30-amp breaker for the power feed.” And that, friends, is why I write the blog. Because nobody knows what a power feed splicing unit breaker is. Also, he’s more photogenic. And I have an irrational fear of getting swallowed up by big machines.

In about 3 hours, he had the water heater up and running:

We set it to hybrid mode. This means that it’s going to suck up the warm air from the room and use that to heat the water. It’s also going to use electric coils during peak times.

An added bonus is that it dehumidifies the air in the room. This means our always-muggy basement might finally dry out. And hopefully be less stanky in a few weeks. We’ll keep you posted.

Bradley insulated all of the water pipes in the basement. Here he is putting pipe insulation on the hot water line:

And the cold water line:

This improves efficiency because it keeps the warmth in the hot line and reduces condensation on the cold line.

Bradley also put gaskets around the basement door to help stop drafts:

That’s the only way in and out of the basement now. It needs a little….aesthetic help:

We’ll get to that eventually. Right now, we’re telling ourselves that it looks rustic and quaintly old-fashioned. We like to mix our Kool-Aid with equal parts denial and ignorance. That’s the juice that keeps us going!

We’ll be back soon with more updates on our weekend projects. Stay tuned, peeps.

—

What we learned from this project:

• This is Bradley’s fourth hot water installation, so he didn’t learn anything. Good thing I asked a lot of questions because I learned a lot.
• There might be a little air in the lines, but it’ll pass. Basically this means you might be in the middle of a nice, hot shower and suddenly get blasted with icy cold water. I speak from personal experience when I say this suuuuuucks.
• Before soldering, sand the pipe and the fitting. Shiny pipes are clean pipes. And that helps the solder stick.
• Make sure your pipes are totally drained before you solder. Otherwise it’ll produce steam that will keep the solder from absorbing into the joint.
• Apply flux to both pipe and fitting.
• Use MAPP gas, not propane, when soldering. MAPP gas burns hotter. (It’s the stuff that comes in a yellow tank.)

Post-Demo Dining Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have some floor repair to do, too:

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

One thing we’re really not looking forward to:

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

Check out our fancy new window:

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

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

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

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.

Stairs, stairs, stairs.

A couple of weekends ago, we removed all the carpet from the staircase and did a happy dance about how great our staircase looked.

Yeah. Our definition of looks great! might need a slight adjustment, but we were still thrilled to see the burgundy carpet in our garbage pile garage. The next project at hand: removing the 5000+ staples on the staircase. And, since this falls under the early morning cavewoman work category, I decided to get it over with on Saturday.

To make my job a little easier, Bradley found this weird little tool at Lowe’s and picked it up for me:

It’s a tool for pulling out small nails.

The prongs weren’t quite small enough to fit under the skinny staples we have under our carpet, so Bradley used a grinder to thin out the ends a bit.

It worked like a charm! Way easier than the old stapler / pliers / blood / sweat / tears routine. The only real hazards of this job:

Little tufts of discarded carpet padding would staple themselves to the soles of my sneakers. Very, very dangerous: if I wasn’t careful, this could have annoyed me to death.

Halfway through the staple-removal, I called Bradley over and we decided to do something about this weird platform at the top of the staircase:

It looks like something that was added on, and we’re not quite sure why. In order to go from the bathroom (down the hall on the right) to the master bedroom (on the left), you have to step down and right back up on the platform. It feels clunky and unnecessary.

And don’t even get us started on this:

Just don’t. We could go on for days, and we have way too much work to do ’round here. It has to go.

Bradley grabbed a hammer and a prybar and peeked under one of the steps:

As we’d suspected, there was solid floor underneath. The platform was a later (and confusing) addition. So we happily subtracted it:

We plan on putting up drywall over all of this lathe & plaster stuff in the hallway, so a little crumbling wall didn’t faze us. With the platform removed, we instantly felt like the staircase looked better:

The only thing that’s bugging us now is how the bottom step leading to the hallway ends so abruptly:

But there are a ton of solutions we’ve already started discussing. We could simply continue the step all the way to the end. We could install a big built-in bookshelf that’s the exact depth of the staircase. We could do floating shelves from floor to ceiling.

The floor is totally solid (we did a jump test) and it was nice to see unpainted wood underneath. The plank flooring is actually not bad when you see it without chocolate brown paint and white splatters everywhere. We’re feeling a little less pouty about it these days.

We salvaged the planks from the platform and will use it to patch up the master bedroom floors when we get in there.

After the platform was out, I spent a few hours removing staples, and by the time I took the after pictures, the lighting was completely different:

The staircase looks like a totally different shade of brown at sunset.

With the staples and the tufts of padding gone, the staircase is starting to look less and less hideous. We still need to repair a few loose bars in the railing and secure some of the steps that have gotten wobbly over the years. After that, it’s time to sand and paint.

What we learned from this project:

• Having the right tool for the job makes things way easier.
  The last time I spent 5+ hours pulling carpet staples, my wrist ached for days. The $11 tool made a huge difference.
• Pulling staples is tedious, boring work.
  Our strategy? Throw on some Bob Marley, grab a beer and get to yankin’. We see lame jobs like this as an opportunity to turn our brains off and go on autopilot for a couple of hours. Sure, it’s not fun, but it’s not exactly work either.

A project we completely forgot about.

Or maybe we tried to purposely forget about it since it totally breaks our one-room-at-a-time rule.

Our dumpster was scheduled for pickup on Monday morning, so late on Sunday we wanted to fit as much junk in there as possible. The only problem was that we were out of bags of lathe and plaster to throw in there. And that’s when we had a brilliant idea: lets demo the master bedroom.

It’s our last major demo project upstairs, so we grabbed our sawzall and our hammers and smashed some plaster.

This is the wall that connects the master bedroom to the purple room. We drew an outline of the hole we wanted (hard to see because it’s in pencil), and then we started bashing away at it.

Bradley used the sawzall to cut the doorway.

Once we got to this stage, we decided that the entrance didn’t seem wide enough. It just didn’t feel right yet. So we expanded it and ended up with this:

Much better!

We left the studs up for now because we didn’t have time to properly frame the door. This isn’t a weight-bearing wall so it wasn’t totally necessary, but we like to err on the side of caution.

We love the way the lathe and plaster stained the wood:

We plan on salvaging it and maybe turning it into a set of stacked floating shelves.

We ended up removing the radiator when we expanded the entryway because it was in our way. We’re not sure we’ll be putting it back. The master bedroom has a big radiator and it should be enough to heat both rooms.

Here’s a view from the purple room looking into the master bedroom:

And from the master bedroom into the purple room:

We’re going to seal up the door in the master bedroom so the only way to get in and out will be through the purple room. And we’ve started our hunt for some cushy chairs to put in the purple room so we can turn it into a reading nook. More on what we plan to do here.

One last thing before I have to go spend my Saturday morning pulling staples out of the freshly de-carpeted floors:

We found another Scott original behind our attic door! Jealous??

Have a fabulous weekend. We’re off to gather more material for blog posts — and maybe eek a little closer to having one room finished in this house!

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:

We’ve been busy.

We’ve made so much construction debris from the 2 rooms and 1 hallway we’ve demolished that we were up to our ears in garbage.

OK, not really. But the pile was waist-high and took over one half of our 2-car garage.

Most of those bags are filled with plaster crumbles and lathe strips, and even my poor camera lens didn’t make it through our demo days without getting covered in little bits of plaster dust.

For the past 2 months, one side of our garage has been the landfill, and the other side has been our supply storage:

From L to R: bad graffiti, studs, planks, sheetrock, foam insulation, new windows, more sheetrock, more bad graffiti.

Apparently some neighborhood kids broke into the garage before we got the house and left some pretty terrible graffiti on the walls:

“Reject of Society” still cracks us up every time we see it. Can 13 year olds be any more dramatic?

Check out our new low-e windows for the Smurf room:

We kept looking at them longingly, wishing we were installing windows instead of doing grunt work. See, our garage was so full with garbage that we decided to rent a dumpster.

And we spent half of Sunday hauling bags and planks and rolls of disgusting old carpet from the garage to the dumpster.

We filled up the entire thing within the matter of hours. And we saw something we haven’t seen in a very long time:

The floor of our garage! Look closely and you can see our dishwasher. We miss that sucker like nobody’s business. Someday it’ll live in our kitchen, but for now, it’s in renovation limbo.

We found something else on the newly rediscovered garage floor that totally freaked us out:

At first glance, we thought it was mouse poo, but then we found the culprit sleeping in the rafters of our garage attic: a teeny, tiny bat! We were totally grossed out by the poo all over our stuff, but at the same time, we thought the bat was….kinda cute. Plus she’s keeping bugs out of our garage, so she’s earning her keep. But in the end, the poo is too gross to deal with. We’re going to wait until she leaves one night and then seal up all of the cracks in the garage’s attic. Sorry, little bat!

After we finished garbage duty, we split up and worked on two different projects. Bradley mudded the hallway and Smurf room, and I emptied out our guest bedroom.

Spoiler alert! We’re putting up closet doors in our guest bedroom! More on that later. We’re getting sooooo close to finishing up the guest bedroom. It’s almost painting time! Exciting!

I also removed all of the trim around the guest bedroom windows:

We weren’t huge fans of the wood trim in all of the rooms, so we’re going with something more modern and clean: trimless windows. They’re going to be sheetrocked all around, and we’ll make concrete sills for the bottom. That’s coming up soon!

After removing the trim, we were pretty excited to see that someone had already used foam insulation to seal up the cracks:

One less thing we have to do!

Anyway, we’d been using the guest bedroom as our work station. All the tools were stored here, as well as our saw horses and other supplies we might need. I relocated everything to the master bedroom, and I got my Type A on by totally reorganizing everything.

I set up the saw horses in the middle of the room. We’re using an old door that we removed as our table top:

The master bedroom is way bigger than the guest bedroom, so we have a little more room to spread out. The guest bedroom was getting a little cramped for the amount of stuff we had in there.

The plastic box on the left has a bunch of hardware. The brown cardboard box in the back has all of our painting and staining supplies. The Corona box in front holds all of our electrical stuff like wires and outlet boxes and lightswitch plates.

Next to the boxes, I set up an insulation corner: vapor barrier, fiberglass batting, metallic tape, foam insulation, and a little tub of spackle. The little pieces of wood next to the insulation are shims for our doors and windows.

There’s a bunch of leftover sheetrock leaning against the wall, and then a little metal rack that I nabbed from the garage:

The bottom of the rack holds powertools. The top rack is has a toolbox that holds just screws and nails (the box that says Husky). Extra nails and screws in cardboard boxes are next to the toolbox.

On top of the radiator is a little organizer thingy with a bunch of drawers. That holds hooks, boxcutter blades small hardware and a bunch of random things we may need (length of chain, anyone?). There’s also a tool bag that holds hand tools.

Scrap wood leans up against one corner. I tossed all of our salvageable wood on the floor against the wall. This is the stuff that escaped the garbage pile. Smaller scraps of salvageable wood lean against the corner:

We put all of our extra foam insulation in the closet. We read that the foam degrades when exposed to sunlight for a long time, so we put it in our dark closet. Better safe than sorry!

And, finally, in the last corner, we have our air compressor:

Hey, how’d that hole get there?

We got a super long hose for the air compressor so instead of schlepping it room to room, we can leave it in the master bedroom and run the hose to the room we need. So much easier that way. And easier on the ears too — air compressors are loud.

Speaking of air compressors…

I think Bradley’s in love. He finally got to use his air compressor when he framed the guest bedroom closet:

It took him all of 30 seconds to get all of the nails in. And it drives the nail down deep enough so he doesn’t have to set the nails. We love it!

What we learned over the weekend:

• Getting organized saves a ton of time in the long run. At least we really hope it will, because we wasted half a day doing it.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Our neighbor came over and asked if he could snag some trim from our dumpster. Hooray for keeping stuff out of a landfill!
• Elmer’s makes more than just the glue we ate in elementary school:

• Also, wood filler looks a lot like peanut butter mousse. Nom nom nom!

We have a plan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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