Floors, Doors & Scores

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

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

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

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

Major upgrade, amirite?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dining room update.

First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:

Heh heh. What a guy.

Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:

This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.

We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.

Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.

Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.

The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.

The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:

That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.

In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.

We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.

We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:

Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:

Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.

The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.

We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:

And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.

There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:

The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.

While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:

It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.

It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:

We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:

It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:

We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.

It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.

We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!

Painting the Dining Room

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

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

Like a baby’s bottom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s Bradley getting the paint party started:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIY Cheat: Concrete Window Sill

Good news, peeps: we’re finishing off the last of our plastering today! We’ll be priming and painting the dining room later this week. We’re actually ahead of schedule right now because we found a shortcut for making our custom concrete window sills. (If you don’t remember those from upstairs, check em out here.)

In order to make concrete sills, you first have to make a mold. Then you mix up the concrete, pour it, thawp out the air bubbles and wait for it to dry. And finally, you clean them up a bit before installing them. We skipped most of those steps and went straight to the clean-and-install part with these babies:

Those are concrete walkway stones for yards and patios. We went to a local nursery and picked up 3 of them for $80. Each one measured 36″ x 24″ and they’re about 2″ thick.

These slabs are much more textured than ours because they were made to mimic stone:

We went for a super smooth, velvety finish in our DIY version. We’re OK with not having matchy-matchy sills throughout the house if it’s something interesting.

Another big difference between our DIY version and these pre-made slabs is the lack of rebar support. The pre-made slabs don’t have rebar in them, so they’re more fragile than then ones we made. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Since there’s no rebar, we can cut these suckers down to whatever size we want. We just have to be really careful while lifting and moving the slabs because they could easily break if we don’t distribute the weight properly.

We measured out our cuts and drew them on the slab using permanent marker. Then we cut it:

To make our cuts, we used a grinder and a circular saw, both loaded with diamond concrete blades. The slabs are 2″ thick, which means there’s no way we’ll be able to penetrate them with one cut. Instead, we first used the grinder to score the cut.

Then we went over the score line using the circular saw:

It helps keep the dust down if you hose the slab with water once in a while:

We ended up giving each cut 2 passes with the circular saw. The first cut was set so the blade cut one inch deep. the second cut was set so the blade cut two inches deep.

After each slab was cut down to size, we were left with 3 window sills that slid right in:

Each one sticks out a bit, just like the windows upstairs:

And we’re really digging the texture:

We sealed up the cracks between the drywall and the sill with painter’s silicone:

And that’s a wrap: we’re done with the window sills! We saved ourselves about 2 full weekends worth of work with our little shortcut. We also have enough left over to do the window sills for our kitchen, so our $80 spend was stretched to two rooms. Not bad, considering how much time it saved us.

We’ll be back later this week with updates on our dining room. We’re currently duking it out over paint colors, but we’ve narrowed it down to a couple of choices. Stay tuned!

The Doors

Mmkay, let’s talk about these two doors in our dining room:

Here’s what they looked like, without the plastic wrap, right after we demolished the room:

We’ve already covered up the door on the far left — it used to open up to a very rickety, get-ready-for-a-broken-neck staircase that led down to the basement. We don’t miss it. Now we have to decide what to do with the other two doors. We’ve been hemming and hawing over whether to keep them.

On the one hand, the doors are really cool because they’re MASSIVE. It’s hard to capture their scale in pictures. When we stand in front of them and reach up with both hands, we can’t touch the top of the door. We can’t do it even if we stand on our toes. They were built for giants. Or supermodels. Or Amazons. Whatever, they’re frikkin’ huge. They just don’t make doors like that anymore.

On the other hand, though, the doors are kind of a drag. With the doors open, the living room flows into the dining room which flows into the kitchen. Everything feels so spacious and airy and sunny. With the doors closed, everything feels choppy and cut off. The rooms feel smaller.

On the OTHER other hand, we love having doors because it lets us direct airflow when we use the fireplace to heat up our house in the winter. We’re two people living in a 2,050 square foot house — not every single room needs to be toasty all the time. We like being able to close the living room doors so heat goes up the hallway and to the bedrooms instead. When the living room becomes an actual living room (and not our storage-slash-junk closet), we’ll appreciate being able to direct heat there by closing off the hallway door.

So here’s the compromise we’ve come up with: a sliding door. We’ll be able to slide it down to close off one door or the other if we want. Or we can just push it out of the way and enjoy our big, open spaces.

We’ve been ogling a lot of sliding doors on Pinterest lately. Here are some of the doors that have caught our eye:

Pinterest

That room looks like somewhere we would live. Except for the white couch. We can have white couches because we wear really dark denim that rubs off. But those floors, those walls, and even that cowhide rug scream our names. The barn door is icing on the cake.

And then there’s this beauty:

Pinterest

We’re such suckers for brick walls and black floors. But that door is amazing on its own. We love how it lets in light but still offers privacy if needed.

Check out the hardware on this simple wood door:

Pinterest

We swoon. We fan our faces and have a fainting spell. It’s like the perfect blend of barn-meets-loft. We considered doing a really traditional looking barn door like this:

Pinterest

But we’d do it with a serious pop of color like this:

Pinterest

Or this next color, which we’re completely smitten with at the moment:

Pinterest

Those doors win on so many levels. We love the inset handles and the bold black hardware. We could rock that look in our house. Or we could take it in completely the opposite direction and inject a big dose of industrial chic in our dining room:

Pinterest

Don’t get us started on those floors. They’re ridiculous. We’d make out with them if we could. And we’re ready to adopt that giant fire door and make it part of our family. The only problem we can see is that it wouldn’t let light into our sorta-dark-half-the-time dining room. Which is why we keep going back to this glass paneled look:

Source (with step-by-step DIY instructions!)

So there we go. We have a plan of what we’re going to do with our dining room doorways, but we just need to pick out what kind of doors we want. We’ll probably twiddle our thumbs and hem and haw about it until the weekend we need to install something. Then we’ll make a last-minute decision that will be exactly what we should have done the entire time. That’s how we roll, people.

What do you think of the sliding doors? Any favorites?

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!

Getting fired up.

Meet the latest addition to our house:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

There are some downsides to relying on firewood for heat:

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

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

Dining room plans.

We weren’t planning on remodeling the dining room next. For months now, we’ve been daydreaming about attacking the laundry room. Literally attacking it. With sledgehammers. That room is a wart on the rest of our house, and we always assumed we’d start ripping it apart as soon as we moved upstairs into the guest bedroom and office.

Then the temperatures started dropping and we freaked out. We really don’t want to be reliant on an oil burner all winter — it would cost a fortune and isn’t exactly eco-friendly. So we decided to put in a wood-burning stove in the dining room. And, just like that, our laundry room went on the back-burner and we started making plans for our other wart. (We have a multi-wart situation going on ’round these parts.)

Here’s what our dining room looks like in 2D-birds-eye land:

No renovation would be complete without a few challenges:

• We have to work around a wood-burning stove.
  See the grey box in our floorplan? That’s a steel plate that has to sit under our wood-burning stove just in case sparks fly out. We can’t have furniture too close to the stove for the same reason.
• We have to insulate 2 walls.
  The top and bottom walls in the above floorplan face outside and need to be insulated. This means we’ll lose over one foot of width. The room is currently 16′x16′, so it’s not that huge a deal, but it’s still a bummer.
• The dining room is the central hub of our house.
  We have to walk through it to get to different sections of the house. The kitchen, laundry room and half-bath are on one side of the dining room. The living room, front door and stairs leading up to the bedrooms and office are on the other side. High-traffic to the max.
• It’s our way in and out of the house.
  There’s no street parking in front of our house (really old, narrow street made for horses, not cars). We have a 2-car garage and a small driveway, but they’re located behind the house. So the dining room entrance is the closest and most convenient way in and out of the house, and that’s what we use. Our front door (put up in 1881) is basically just eye candy. I think we’ve used it, maybe, 3 times in the past 5 months.
• There are so. many. doors.
  There are 5 doors / doorways in this room alone, and we have to leave enough room to work around those.

We were pretty stumped about what to do, so we made a wishlist of all the things we wanted in the room:

• Exposed rafters and brick (got a head start on that one!)
• A window seat
• A place to sit around the fire
• A place for our 4-legged friends to nap by the fire (Jabba’s a fireplace fanatic)
• Somewhere to sit down and take off our shoes when we enter the house
• Somewhere to stash things we like to grab as we’re leaving (keys, gloves, hats, scarves, umbrellas, etc)
• A dining table big enough for 6
• Firewood storage area so we’re not constantly running down to the basement

Yup. Kind of a tall order; when we wish, we wish big. We didn’t know if we could fit everything into one 16′x16′ 15′x16′ room. We talked over a lot of options; having a 4-seater dining table, having a round dining table, even having no dining table. And then, out of the blue, we came up with this:

• Get rid of the basement door.
  There’s another entrance to the basement through the porch. If we get rid of the one in the dining room, we have enough space to….
• Build a wall-to-wall bench with storage cubbies underneath.
  That way we get a biiiiig window seat by the fire. And we can stash firewood in the cubbies right under our seating. Plus we can use one of the cubbies to house a bed for Jabba. How perfect is that?? Added bonus: we know an upholstery guy who can whip up one long bench cushion in whatever fabric we supply. And a matching cushion for our furry friends.
• Find or build a rectangle dining room table.
  We want something that can seat 4 people in chairs and 2 people on the bench. It has to fit the space in a way that boxes in the whole fireplace / dining table area, so we may have to build this one ourselves. Fun!
• Build an mini-mudroom setup by the entrance.
  We’ll build another bench setup by the door with storage cubbies underneath for all our grab-and-go stuff. There will also be a boot tray to keep mud off our floors. And we’re still working on a coat storage solution. (Our coat racks always end up being total eyesores because we overload them.)

We’re still working out the design of the bench, but we’re starting pinning things that catch our eye. We’re thinking something simple like this:

Source

But waaaay longer and with a cushier seat. We’re talking sofa-like cushiness. We also dig the more minimalist look:

Source

As soon as we’re done upstairs, we’ll start shopping for fabric and get this sucker going. And, of course, we’ll share the step-by-step with you guys. Stay tuned for more updates from our casa.