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!

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!

Hallway Cabinet

Remember that huge built-in cabinet for the hallway that Bradley’s been working on since before Christmas? Well, it’s fiiiinally done. The painting and installation took a few weekends, but the as soon as the paint cured, we put this sucker to work.

We won’t go into the details of how the installation went because the whole process was a long and complicated pain in the butt. Tools were thrown. Curses were muttered. Fist were wrenched. And, somehow, Bradley ended up jamming his finger and now has to grow out a (seriously gross) black fingernail. If anyone’s interested in the sexy, nerdy art of cabinet-making, we’re making a floating cabinet for the office. We can do a from-start-to-finish instructional post on that puppy. (And, um, the next cabinet won’t take 3 months to make — we promise.)

Here’s a shot of Bradley screwing the cabinet into the wall:

The silver stuff up top is the insulation. No more drafty hallway!

I’d love to share the color of the yellow paint we got for the inside of the cabinet, but I can’t:

Apparently a lot of colors are being discontinued from the Valspar lineup, and this yellow was one of them. The Lowe’s employee who mixed our paint told us she had to eyeball it. They ended up wasted 4 gallons of paint because the color was off — too mustard, too buttery, not bold enough, too bold — but finally, we ended up with a color that we were happy with.

It’s was like sunshine in a can. Whatever the color is, we’re smitten. We’re even considering doing a yellow-white-and-grey bathroom to match.

Here’s how the cabinet looks fully installed:

Notice the massive gap along the wall and ceiling?

That’s because the cabinet is perfectly level and the walls aren’t. The trick to taking a cabinet and turning it into a built in is painter’s silicone. Check out how it looks after:

We’ll eventually paint over the silicone with the same grey as the cabinet and walls. That way the silicone will completely blend in and become invisible.

We splurged on some really fancy hardware for the insides. It took a little finagling, but we adjusted the hardware so the doors line up perfectly with the panels on the sides.

Here’s how the sides look before we put the doors on:

And after the doors are one:

We got a bunch of white baskets from Lowe’s to keep stuff organized:

And that’s it! Our 3-month-long-pain-in-the-butt cabinet is complete.

We’re determined to get caught up on all those projects we never posted about. If we don’t, we’ll keep getting heckled by our friends and family on Facebook (way to lay on the guilt, guys!). So coming up tomorrow: our super easy DIY headboard. Stay tuned!

Post-Demo Dining Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have some floor repair to do, too:

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

One thing we’re really not looking forward to:

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

Check out our fancy new window:

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

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

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

Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are 3 doors on another wall:

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

And then there’s the window wall:

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the ceiling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

What we learned:

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

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

Our almost-done hallway.

Way back in April, our hallway looked like this:

Well, technically it looked a little worse, but we forgot to take pictures before we ripped out the burgundy carpet. Here’s how the same hallway looks today:

Yay! We love doing before-and-afters! We’ve been living with this project day in and day out, so we forget how far we’ve come. Seeing the befores makes us giddy.

We went with Olympic Horseradish on the ceiling (same as the office & guest bedroom) and Valspar Tempered Gray for the walls.

 
Source

We initially wanted to do something darker, but the halls are so narrow that we decided to keep things soft and light. We’re so glad we did because it makes the hallway feel super light and open. We love the way it looks. Here’s a view from the brick wall looking towards the entry:

We put two recessed lights down the center:

We still haven’t found the right bulbs — some are too white, some are too yellow, others are too long and stick out too far — so we put in plain old 60 watt bulbs for now. It took a lot of finagling but Bradley installed a dimmer switch:

We’re rocking a 75% right now. We’ll probably go lower once we get the right bulbs in.

The trimless windows are a pain to paint, but they looked pretty slick when finished:

So do the French doors:

We haven’t taken the plastic mask off the windows, which is why they look like a 2 year old painted them. They still need one more coat on the flip-side. We went ahead and hung them because we’re getting kinda impatient. We also hung the bathroom door:

It was awkward for a little while thanks to the close proximity of a window that overlooks the street:

So pretty with the hardware installed!

The door frame looks streaky because it only has one coat so far. We’re giving it 2 more thin coats this weekend. We’re loving how the door still looks old. You can see all of the texture and cracking:

It definitely took some time to fix this puppy up, but we’re so glad we did. We scraped off all of the old paint, sanded the door smooth, then gave it one thin coat of primer. After that, we did 3 coats of black paint. The trick to getting a smooth surface was sanding in between each coat and painting paper thin coats.

Check out the flip side of the same door:

I had to stand inside the bathtub to take that shot — that’s how small our bathroom is. We’re not quite ready to show the before pictures of the bathroom because it’s not a remodeling priority. It was redone a few years ago, so it’s not in terrible shape. Just kinda…blah.

How sweet does that hardware look? Spray paint works magic, I tell ya! Speaking of spray paint, lookie what made it into the bathroom:

I think my lookalike hook looks extra Anthropologie against the beat up door. Even Bradley ended up loving it.

We’re still not sure whether to paint the door white or not. Luckily we have our hands full with a bunch of other jobs right now, so we have some time to think about our next move.

What we learned:

• Low-VOC paints smell, too.
  We used Olympic, Valspar and Benjamin Moore paints over the weekend, and all 3 brands make an appearance in our hallway. Ben Moore was, by far, the least smelly. Olympic was the runner up — it smelled, but not so much that we needed respirators. Valspar was super stinky, but the smell was gone by the next day. Here’s the kicker: the Ben Moore cost almost twice as much as the Valspar! Valspar was $23 a gallon and Ben Moore was $40 and change. Next time we’ll put on respirators, crack a few windows and save ourselves twenty clams.
• Big box hardware stores don’t carry the good stuff.
  We went to three different hardware store chains to find a good floor paint. The paint department employees at Lowe’s and Home Depot didn’t inspire much confidence. They hemmed and hawed, eventually recommended an outdoor patio paint, but couldn’t answer the questions we had about it. Meh. Our local hardware guy recommended a Ben Moore oil-based primer and black latex floor paint. It was expensive. And it’s a good thing we tested it on our doors and doorways, because there’s no way it would last on our soft pine floors. It’s fine for doors, but latex just isn’t durable enough for floors. Totally not talking smack about Big Blue and Big Orange (we love them both!), but they carry standard items for standard houses.
• Next time we need paint for something special, we’re going to a specialist.
  We ended up going to Bradley’s finishing product supplier (aka the paint guy), and this guy has pretty much seen everything. He wasn’t confused by why we would want to paint our floors (instead he said it was the best method for soft pine). And he knew what he was talking about. Here’s what he suggested:
  • NO primer. Instead, sand the floors very well to make them porous.
  • Use an oil-based black thinned down with paint thinner to make it very runny.
  • Put down a suuuuper thin layer of black and let it soak into the wood.
  • Follow that with 2 more paper-thin layers of black, lightly scuffing the surface in between.

  He didn’t recommend a brand. Just that we should leave latex for the walls and do oil-based on the floors. We ended up buying a big bucket of high-gloss black from him.

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!

Our biggest rookie mistake so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things get a little batty. (Wokka wokka!)

We were perusing through some of our pre-renovation pictures and came across this before shot of the upstairs hallway:

Hard to believe that was only 3 months ago! When we last left off a few weekends ago, we were busy insulating the hallway:

Here’s how it looks today:

Amazing what some new dry wall, French doors, a jackhammer and a dumpster can do, right?

Here’s what the hallway looks like from inside the guest bedroom:

We put up new drywall at the end of the hall, too. This is the space between the brick wall and the bathroom, right outside the office:

Even without the taping and mudding, everything feels so fresh and clean (so fresh and so clean, clean!). We set up one more trimless window. All it needs is plaster:

And we put up drywall on the office doorway:

We’ve been randomly signing “Scott” on the walls as an homage to the artwork we found in our laundry room, attic and garage:

Don’t worry, we plan on priming right over it so nobody except us will know it’s there. Here’s a view from the end of the hallway looking towards the stairs:

That end of the hallway was Bradley’s big project yesterday. He wanted to add a header in the doorway (we’re big fans of the play-it-way-too-safe method of construction, and this doorway didn’t have a header at all). We’re going for a trimless look for all of our doors upstairs, so we wanted to install and wood frame on the inside of the doorway. And, of course, both sides of the wall need some fresh drywall.

When we removed the trim from around the doorway, we found some neat wallpaper underneath:

Whoever lived here sure loved wallpaper — this is the 5th or 6th pattern we’ve found, and we’ve only been working in one wing of the house. Speaking of wing, check out who decided to visit us on Saturday night:

We were curled up on the couch in the living room — also currently our bedroom — watching TV when something came swooping into the room, inches above our heads. At first we thought it was a bird, but quickly realized it was a bat. He kept swooping down on our heads, so I did the only thing I could think of at the time: I curled up in a ball and started screaming bloody murder.

Bradley ran into the dining room and came back with the first thing he could find — a baseball bat. A bat for the bat. So then my screaming turned into words like, “DON’T HURT HIM!” and “CATCH AND RELEASE!”

Bradley went back into the dining room and came back with an umbrella. He used it to steer the bat into the living room, and that’s when our cat got in on the action. I slammed the living room door and then cracked it open a tiny bit so the dog and I could watch.

Bradley used the umbrella to steer the bat towards an open window and to keep the cat from lunging at our new furry friend. Eventually, the bat made it to the window and wedged himself between the glass and the screen. We gently closed the window, and suddenly the big, bad bat didn’t look so scary anymore. He was smaller than my fist, and with his wings folded in, he looked kind of like a gerbil with beady teeny tiny eyes. He was cuuuuute….but only because he wasn’t flapping in my face. I snapped a picture, and then we went back to watching TV.

Our bat eventually figured out that the screen was open at the bottom, so he flew off. We’re pretty sure he’s back in our attic now, pooping on all of our moving boxes that we haven’t unpacked yet.

When we took the trim off of the hallway entrance, we noticed there was no header above the doorway. What we didn’t notice is that we had basically opened a giant hole into the attic:

The bat must have shimmied down between the walls and come down to explore. Pretty sure he won’t be doing that again — my high-pitched screeching might have permanently damaged his sonar — but just to be on the safe side, Bradley’s working on sealing it up today.

What we learned this weekend:

• We still really hate plastering.
  We actually enjoy putting up insulation and drywall, but plastering is the bane of our existence. We hate it so much that we’re dragging our feet and causing a big delay in finishing up the hallway, guest bedroom and office. We decided to hire out the plastering so we can get on with things. Someone is coming in to give us an estimate today, and if the price is right, he’s hired!
• General rule of life: if all else fails, curl up into a ball and scream till you lose your voice.

Our brick wall is done!

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we followed that up with styrofoam insulation:

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

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

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

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

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

What we learned from our brick exposin’ adventure:

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