Front Door Facelift

Let’s talk about our front door. We can see it from the dining room:

And, man, it’s not pretty. At least not from the outside:

Gross, right? That’s a screen door with a net to keep bugs out — it covers up the gorgeous solid wood doors that are on the inside. But that’s not the only problem we have with our front entrance.

Someone tried to stop drafts from creeping in through the 130-year-old doors with weatherstripping foam and felt. Only they did it wrong. The wood doors barely close — we have to push them in and quickly lock the doors before they pop back out.

And, in installing the storm door, the pretty wood details were covered up:

We also hate how the storm door has basically become a home for creepy-crawlies:

We found at least 5 spiders hanging out in the doorway. Blurgh! And did we mention the dust?

No? Well feast your eyes, friends:

It’s a good thing we have 3 entrances to the house, because if we invited people in through this doorway, nobody would ever visit. Ever. And we’d probably never leave either.

Despite all the hideousness, our front door has a lot of redeeming qualities. Here’s what one of the two doors looks like when taken off its hinges:

Bradley looks so tiny standing in front of it…and he’s 5’11″.

Yup. Their size alone makes these doors awesome. And check out this doorknob:

It came with a skeleton key, but we accidentally broke it while trying to jam the door closed, Incredible Hulk style. Whoops. For the record, it’s really, really hard to find a replacement for an ancient skeleton key. Good thing we’re updating the locks anyway.

But before we get to that, we decided to permanently remove the storm door.

We were so geeked to see thing thing go. Especially when we started seeing the woodwork that had been hidden before:

Ooh la la, so purdy! One side was completely in tact. The other side:

…not so much. We were so bummed when we saw this.

To fit the stupid storm door on, someone chipped away some of the original woodwork. Luckily, we think it’s salvageable. With some creative use of wood putty, we think we can reshape the missing areas.

Once the screen door was gone, we vacuumed up all the dust and cobwebs. Then we insulated the gap between the inside of the house and the outside of the house with Great Stuff.

That grey thing Bradley’s standing on? That’s a solid piece of stone. It needs a little cleanup work, but it’s in great shape otherwise. It’s going to be beautiful some day. Not today, though. We have priorities.

Here’s Bradley putting the cast iron plate back in place:

Don’t be fooled — he makes it look easy, but that sucker is SUPER heavy. While Bradley worked on adding insulation, I worked on removing insulation:

I used a paint scraper to remove all of the foam weather strips from around the doorway. They were keeping the doors from closing properly. With the strips removed, the doors open and close easily. We’ll go back in and install new weather strips that don’t interfere with the doors opening and closing.

We had to shim the cast iron plate to make it level:

By shimming it, we raised the metal plate a smidge…and the doors wouldn’t close at all. Not even a little. Our next order of business was to make the door fit properly.

We took the doors off their hinges, posed for the pictures we showed earlier, and then used a circular saw to shave 1/8th of an inch from the bottom of both doors:

And here’s the fun part: when Bradley started sawing, the wood released an unmistakeable smell that caught us totally by surprise. Walnut. These doors are solid walnut. We stopped the saw and had a mini freakout right there on the street.

To get an idea of why we were so geeked, check out the price tag on these solid walnut exterior doors. And those are standard sized doors. Ours are way bigger, way older, and — if we do say so ourselves — way cooler looking. Hence the dancing in the streets.

While we had our walnut beauties off their hinges, we did a few minor repairs on the locking mechanism.

We also lightly polished the brass locks using steel wool:

If you’re a longtime reader, you know we have a serious aversion to brass. Gold metals are not our jam. But this door is an exception. We think the locks and doorknob are badass in brass and we’re leaving them that way. Here’s what the doorknob looked like before we scrubbed it with steel wool:

It’s pretty grimy looking, with a dingy green color due to aging. And here’s how it looks after we polished the raised surfaces:

Two tone! All of the raised edges are shiny orangish brass, and everything recessed is still greenish-greyish old brass. For comparison’s sake, here’s how the doorknob looks next to an oil-rubbed bronze lock:

We’re in love.

Our last task for the day was to silicone the spot between the cast iron plate and the stone.

We used black silicone so it’s not visible, but it will still keep water and dirt from creeping under the cast iron plate and into our basement.

It feels like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Whee! Here we go. This is what our front door looked like before:

And this is what it looks like after:

BOOM. Magic happened.

We’re not done working on the front door. We have some big plans to make this entrance even better:

• We’re going to replace the old glass with new double-pane glass.
• We’re going to paint the outside of the door a bold color. We have it picked out already, but we probably won’t paint until spring.
• We’re going raw on the inside. We’ll sand the inside of the doors to reveal all that walnut prettiness.

We’re already loving the way the doorway is letting more light into our dark hallway. It’s only going to get better from here. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. We’re going to start ripping apart our fugly kitchen this weekend. But before we do, we’ll share our before pictures. Warning: it’s gnarly looking. Stay tuned!

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?

Back to the daily grind(er)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s what they looked like after grinding:

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

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

Next, I lined everything up on a cardboard box:

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

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

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

And, finally, there were the porcelain door knobs:

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

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

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

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

What we learned from this project:

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

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

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

Yes, it smelled as bad as it looked.

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

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

And here’s how it looks today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahh, memories.

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

Blogging From the Flood Zone and Restoring Our Old Bathroom Door

Holy moly, we just breathed a sigh of relief so loud they probably heard us back in Brooklyn. Our neighbor-friend Jhane (the same one who warned us about the flood) sent us a text while she was walking by our house. Walking. Not swimming. She let us know that our house is still standing and our street is totally dry. Whee! (Thanks again, Jhane!)

We’re still blogging from just outside the flood zone. We’re kinda trapped here because all of the roads around us are closed. Just half a mile away, there are houses covered almost up to their roofs in mucky river water. It’s really scary and sad, and we feel horrible for everyone who lost their homes. We’re really anxious to get back to ours. But in the meantime, we’re going to share another project we started before we had to evacuate.

We’re so close to wrapping up the guest bedroom wing, but there are a ton of loose ends to tie up. Take, for instance, the white door at the end of the hallway:

That’s the door to our bathroom. From far away, it looks great — a standard bright white interior door. And then you get up close and see this:

Jagged edges. Peeling paint. Stains. Pencil marks from where some kid drew on the door and nobody bothered erasing ‘em. They painted over the hardware a few times and it looks pretty crusty.

Still, the old skeleton key lock works and we’re in love with those porcelain knobs. We saw those same knobs at a local antique store going for $30 a pop. We also saw replicas of this exact set going for $70 in a restoration catalog. We’re pretty sure we can restore these puppies for $0 using stuff we have in our garage.

We started by taking the door off its hinges and taking off all the parts we want to save. Everything went into a big glass jar, including all of the screws:

The porcelain knobs went into their own container:

We filled both containers with enough paint thinner to completely cover all the parts:

We did this part outside because paint thinner fumes are no joke. We left everything soaking outside overnight, and came back to scrape them the next day.

The little black toothbrush thingy in front of the paint thinner is a steel wire brush. Bradley was at work so I decided to take care of this easy peasy job on my own. Carpe diem. Girl power. All that stuff.

I drained the paint thinner into another glass jar, pulled out the different hinges one-by-one, and gave them a good scrubbing in the kitchen sink. I brushed the metal in a circular motion and paint starting sloughing off. Perfect. That’s what I was going for. One entire layer of paint came off easily. The second layer, though, wasn’t budging.

I wiped the sweat from my brow. Girl power. I brushed harder and nothing happened. I kicked it up a notch to scrub mode. Still nothing. I scoured, and still nothing. I cursed, I threatened, I spat. Girl! Power! I scrubbed some more, sweat dripping, fingers aching… and then I got a text from Bradley telling me not to use the small wire brush because he had a better idea. He was going to use the grinder with a wire brush attachment and have all the paint off in about 2 minutes. *Single tear.* Everything went back in the paint thinner jar for some more soaking.

And that’s exactly where we left them when we evacuated on Thursday. We’re guessing that after a solid week of soaking in paint thinner, we won’t have to do much scraping to get the gunk off.

While the hardware soaked, we got to work on the door. Up close you can see how gunky the paint is:

It’s not all bad, however. There are some spots where cracks and lines give the door character:

Our challenge is to get rid of all the crusty, gunky bits while keeping the interesting areas in tact. We don’t want to restore this door and have it look like a brand new door from Lowe’s — we want it to look aged and interesting.

We’re pretty sure there’s lead paint in these old doors, so we vented out the room with a window fan and I put on my hot pink ventilator mask (safety first, fashion second!). I spent about 30 minutes sanding this door, and it wasn’t going the way I’d planned.

The sander was scuffing the surface, but the paint wasn’t coming off. Scuffing wasn’t going to do the trick with these doors. The old paint had bubbled up over the years. It needed to be completely stripped off. I needed paint stripper.

Meanwhile Bradley ran out of the caulk he’s using in to seal off the cement window sills so we made a run to the hardware store. We cackled the entire time about getting some caulk and a stripper. Hehe. It still makes me snort. We’re basically 13-year-olds on the inside.

Back at the casa, Bradley showed me how to strip (har har!):

The trick is to put your index finger on top of the blade and use that to apply downward pressure so the blade slides under the paint. Easy peasy. Here’s what the door looked like after scraping off all the loose gunk and giving it a sandjob (once it starts, it’s hard to stop):

The white paint was latex and it came off easily. The yellowish paint underneath? That’s lead paint. Eeps! Bradley was pretty impressed by how hard the layer of paint is (“Say what you will about lead paint, that s**t is durable.“), and we decided to leave it alone. Why bother creating lead dust if we don’t have to?

We were worried that the cracks would disappear if we removed too much old paint, but they were fine. Next step:

Yup, floor & patio paint. For our bathroom door. We spent at least an hour chatting it up with the paint guy at our local hardware store and this is what he recommended for our floors, baseboards, door frames and doors. Each gallon cost a whopping $50, but we splurged on it, but from what we’ve seen so far, it’s worth the extra dough.

We decided to skip the primer because the door was stripped down and scuffed up enough and this black paint gives some serious coverage. Here’s how it looked after one coat:

Still pretty crusty, right? We wanted to get a smooth, even paint application so we decided to do several paper-thin coats. It’s a little more work, but it always results in a very slick paint job. We scuffed the paint lightly with some 120 grit sandpaper:

And gave it a second coat:

This part was really hard to photograph because it was dark outside. I was planning on photographing it in the morning, but then this whole flood thing happened. Still, you get the general idea. What once was clumpy and goopy is now lookin’ pretty lovely. Check out the lovely cracking at the bottom that showed up when the paint dried:

We think it might need a third coat, but won’t be able to tell until we get back to the house. We also have to flip the door over, strip it and paint it white. So the door will be black on the outside but white on the inside. A black door seemed a little too overwhelming for a teeny-tiny bathroom. We’ll wrap that sucker up next weekend and get some better pictures up here.

What we learned from this project:

• Lead paint kinda rocks…if you overlook that whole lead poisoning thing. Stuff was made to last a long, long time.
• Strip first, then sand, and your old door will end up smoother than a baby’s butt. Only with more cracks and wrinkles.

We don’t need no stinkin’ doors.

We have big, big plans for our master bedroom. We want to take it from this hot mess:

To this sleek, sexy, sophisticated new floor plan:

Right now, the master bedroom isn’t a big priority. Once the guest bedroom is done, we’ll furnish it and move in. This will free up the living room (currently our bedroom) and the dining room (currently our living room), and we can shuffle things around a bit so we can get started on our next big project (the laundry room / bathroom downstairs).

Still, we’ve made some progress in the master bedroom. A few weekends ago, we demolished the wall that separated the small purple room and the master BR. Here’s how it looks right now:

This weekend, we scratched one more thing off our to-do list. We sealed up the doorway leading to the master bedroom so the only way in and out of the room now is through the purple room. Here’s how the hallway originally looked:

Bradley was directing traffic, I think. Or signaling a right turn. I forget which. Here’s how the same hallway looks with some fresh drywall lovingly slapped right over the door frame:

Ta-da! Doors? We don’t need no stinkin’ doors!

Sorry about the dark photos. Bradley’s doing some electrical work, and we basically shut down the power upstairs until he finished. More on that soon!

Here’s the inside of the master BR last week:

Now you see it. Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. But once we renovate the inside of the master bedroom suite, a little drywall will go right over the door frame. Nobody will ever know that it existed except us. And the internet.

I removed all of the trim and the door, Bradley framed it in with some 2×4′s, and the drywall went over the old doorway, making it seem as if it had never been there to begin with. So our purple room is officially part of the ginormous master BR now. And we’re already busy designing it out in our heads.

Right on cue, a Crate & Barrel catalog arrived in the mail and the theme: fresh Danish. Be still our collective beating heart. We love Danish design! We thumbed through it, soaking up ideas and inspiration. And then we saw this:

Source

That’s it. That’s the wall paint for the master bedroom. We both agreed on it without a fight. Usually there’s a little back-and-forth where I think a color is just right but Bradley thinks it’s too dark / too bright / too blah / too weird. This smokey grey with the white trim and accessories, though, was one we both instantly loved. Bring on the paint chips — let the matching begin!

Anyway, back on the outside, Bradley’s totally done with the drywall, right up to the ceiling.

Our plasterer was held up with another gig, so she won’t be plastering until next weekend. In the meantime, we got everything 100% ready for her visit. All of the windows are drywalled so they’ll have the trimless look we’re going for. And the raw edges of our drywall now have corner beads:

That way we’ll have crisp, clean lines that butt up against those raw, rough brick walls. It’ll look faboo. …if our plasterer ever shows up and gets the job done. Fingers crossed for Thursday!

Office Door

Wanna know a dirty little secret about the interior design business? A lot of designers don’t just get paid by the client — they also get a commission from the furniture designers they hire. They’ll take a certain percentage from each piece they sell to a client. Sometimes they’ll take a custom-built piece instead of a cash commission. And sometimes they’ll have a custom piece built and then decide it’s not right for their space so they’ll give it away. And that’s when we get to snatch up something really cool, like this custom-built door, for free:

That’s right. Free. Gratis. Zero dot zero zero dollars.

This beauty is a custom sliding door made for an interior designer that Bradley’s company works with on a regular basis. She thought it was lovely, but she decided she didn’t want a visible sliding door track in her space. So she gave the door back to Bradley’s company and it sat in a cold, dark basement until a few weeks ago when Bradley’s boss generously offered to let us have it (thank you, Andre!).

It’s the perfect height and width for the Smurf room office, and once we set it in place, we fell in love with how it looked. Here’s how it looks after it slides closed:

Feel free to oooooh! and aaaaaah! We did.

We may have overdone the leaning-against-the-wall bit. We were a little scared we’d somehow knock it over and break it before it ever made its blog debut, so we went overboard.

Anyway, we love how it looks next to the brick wall. We were originally planning on making a custom door and using chalkboard paint on the side that faces in to the office. Something like this:

Source

We loved the idea of being able to write stuff down on the back of the office door, but when we saw the free designer door in place, it just felt right. It looked more sophisticated than a simple chalkboard door.

The wood frame is a solid maple and it’s velvety soft to the touch. The handle is stainless steel. But here’s the part I love best:

The center panel is a thick opaque plastic with a corrugated look. It lets in just the right amount of light from the hallway. There’s plenty of privacy (not that it’s a big issue with just the two of us living here) but the room stays bright and sunny.

We also love that it’s sort of like the French door we put in the guest bedroom and the door we plan on putting in the master bedroom. But at the same time, it’s totally different.

Now that we have a door, all we need to do is mount it. Here’s a gorgeous sliding door I added to my Pinterest a while back:

Source

We picked up a similar sliding door mounting system at Farm & Fleet for $40. We just have to finish plastering and painting the walls and sanding and painting the floors. That’s all that stands between us and a finished office. ….a whole lotta work.

Stay tuned for that. We took the past 2 weekends off because we had some visitors one weekend and then we skipped town for a wedding the next weekend. We’re back and we’re chomping at the bit to get back to work. Lots of updates coming up!

DIY Door Handles Part II

Remember those door handles Bradley welded for the guest bedroom French doors? They ended up sitting in our garage for a week until we finally got around to finishing them.

The first thing Bradley did was drill holes down the center of each handle. He also used a special drill bit to countersink the holes so the screws will sit flush.

The steel had rusted a bit from sitting there, so after drilling, Bradley grabbed his grinder and cleaned up the metal.

After that, he sprayed each handle with 3 coats of clear lacquer to keep it from rusting again.

And dragged both handles upstairs for the exciting part — the installation.

Bradley started out by checking to see that everything fit properly. In order for the door to sit in the frame properly, we had to cut a little notch at the top of each handle. Bradley measured and marked each handle, and then pulled out his grinder again.

With the notch cut out, the door closed all the way and sat perfectly flush within the frame. The only problem was that the added metal made it harder to close both doors at the same time. The metal would rub together and eventually the lacquer would wear off.  And we really, really don’t want to re-lacquer these things ever couple of months.

Bradley begrudgingly removed both doors.

We moaned and groaned about how frikkin’ hard it was to get the doors installed properly the first time around. A lot of threats were bandied about (“If it doesn’t go back up easily this time, lets just smash it,”) but we had no problems getting the doors back up afterwards.

Bradley made a guide to help him cut straight, and then used a circular saw to shave off a 3/8″ piece from each door. He could have taken the doors downstairs, across the yard and to the garage where his table saw is, but it seemed like way too much trouble for such an easy cut.

Once the doors were the right size, Bradley screwed the handles to the doors:

He used black screws so they wouldn’t be as noticeable.

And then he put the doors back in place.

He also added hardware to the top of each door so they stay shut.

It’s a basic ball-and-catch setup that keeps the doors from swinging open every time a breeze blows through the hallway (super annoying for the past few windy weeks!).

Here’s how the doors looked once everything was in place:

The doors will be painted black to match the floors. Or white to match the floors. We’re back on the black-or-white wagon and really can’t decide what colors we want our floors. In all honesty, it’ll probably be a last-minute decision made at Home Depot when we’re at the paint counter. That’s how we roll.

The handles are velvety smooth — no texture at all — and glossy from the lacquer:

But they have an etched look from the marks left by the grinder:

We love the contrast of the soft, smooth feel and the textured look. We also love how low profile the handles are. They stick out just enough to fit your fingers behind to pull the door closed. And, most of all, we love how they take a pretty generic French door and make it look really different.

In much less exciting news, we also installed the guest bedroom closet door handles:

Not custom and not unique, but we think they look pretty nice.

Plus, they make it way easier to open the closet doors. We were jamming our fingers under the door to pry those open in our pre-handle days.

What we learned from this project:

• Clothes make the (wo)man. Handles make the door.
• Each custom door handle cost about $20 to make. Each teeny weeny door knob we got from Lowe’s cost about $6 to buy. We might be making a lot more of our own handles.

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!

A Trip to the Metal Shop: DIY Door Handles

We’ve mentioned before that we go back to Brooklyn two days a week for work. We were there on Tuesday, and had a little time after work to putz around in Bradley’s office. I use the word “office” very loosely. You won’t find any desks or chairs or computers here.

Bradley’s boss purchased an enormous building in Greenpoint before it was cool to own an enormous building in Greenpoint. Or anywhere else in Brooklyn, for that matter.

It was in really rough shape when he purchased it, and he renovated it himself. A lot of work went into this place. Cute story: his mother helped cut the glass for each window in the warehouse. All together now, awwwwww!

I love how it always smells like sawdust on the main floor. And all of the colors and textures of the different tools and woods and metals all over the place. Most of all, though, I love watching this guy work:

He got to experiment with a new cement process that his company is considering, and I got to experiment with my camera. And when he was finished, we went down to the basement to his metal shop.

He’s so at peace in the metal shop.

Soot on his skin, grime under his fingernails, grin on his face. This is where the magic happens. The dirty, dirty magic that leaves his white t-shirts stained black and makes me super glad we have a laundry room in our house now.

Anyway, our project for the night was making door handles. We searched high and low for door handles for the guest bedroom French doors. We wanted something modern and sleek, and we weren’t finding it Lowe’s or Home Depot. A quick search online showed us that the look we want will cost us an arm and a leg. So we decided to make custom handles instead.

Bradley went to one of his metal suppliers and picked up $50 of angled steel. Then he took it to his giant metal saw to give it a cut. He measured twice:

And let ‘er rip:

If you look closely, you can see a white liquid pouring down from the saw onto the steel. This is to lubricate the steel and keep metal slivers from flying everywhere. After the cut, Bradley drained the liquid from the steel:

And we were left with a perfect cut:

The steel is an L-shaped piece that we’ll attach to the door with the angled side out. The result will be a flat bar that’s the exact height of the door. Basically, it’s a little ledge you can slip your fingers under to open the door:

We want it to be the same on both sides of the door, which means we need to weld two pieces of L-shaped metal together to form one U-shaped piece.

Bradley set up his welding station:

Nerd alert! Can you spot Yoda on the top of his arm?

He put the two L-shaped pieces of metal together and clamped them down to his welding bench:

And then he put on his metal smith jacket — what I call his cropped leather bolero jacket — so he didn’t burn his arms while welding:

There were a lot of bullfighter jokes flying around. Olé! He also put on his welding mask so he didn’t burn his face or eyeballs:

And then it was time to weld.

Bradley was spot-welding, which means he welded the two pieces of metal together in just a few spots — he basically made dots of welding that will hold the two pieces together. I threw together a little time-lapse to show what we mean:

R: pre-weld, L: post-weld. The little silver dot on the left piece is the weld.

One side of the U will be on the outside of the door and the other will be on the inside of the door. This means the spots where Bradley welded — the center of the U — will sit flush against the door. The welds were sticking up a little, so Bradley took a grinder and leveled them out.

Little bits of hot metal flew in every direction, so I kept my distance during this part.

It was like a Katy Perry video, except the fireworks were shooting out of Bradley’s back instead of his bra. Not that he wears a bra.

Cropped leather bolero jacket, yes. Bra, no. He draws a line somewhere.

We could have kept going, but we decided to go to our favorite sushi spot for dinner and a beer instead. This is what the door handles look like right now:

They’re ready to be cleaned, painted and installed. Maybe even this weekend.

What we learned from this project:

• Can’t find exactly what you’re looking for? Make it yourself.
  We realize this is way easier when you have access to a fully stocked metal shop, but even if you don’t, there are tons of ways to make this same basic idea work.
• Modern design is crazy-expensive, and we can save a ton of money by going the DIY route.
  We paid $50 for the steel used to make 2 door handles, and we have a bunch left over. This means each handle is roughly $20. That’s way cheaper than any modern door handles we found online. It’s even cheaper than most standard door handles we found at Big Orange and Big Blue.