House Tour: Our Brooklyn Loft (Circa 2009)

Even though this is the first house we’re purchased together, it’s not our first remodel job. Bradley actually remodeled a studio apartment in Minnesota and lived in it for a while. He did the entire thing on his own with a little help from friends. And then we worked together on a loft in Brooklyn. Here’s how it looked on moving day in January 2008:

Yup. That’s a chandelier hung up with a bicycle u-lock. It was, in short, a disaster zone. The whole space was about 550 square feet, but it had super high ceilings with tin tiles and an entire wall of windows. It was the run-down, beat-up version of the funky NYC artist lofts you see in movies.

We signed the lease and moved right in.

The previous tenants had put up some pretty shoddy little walls so 3 roommates could live in the space. There were no closets and the kitchen consisted of one counter, one cabinet, a fridge and a gas range.

But it had so much going for it.

• High ceilings!
  …that were so thin you could hear every word being uttered upstairs.
• Lots of artists in the building!
  …bums, the whole lot of ‘em. We were lucky enough to be surrounded by awesome neighbors on all sides, but the rest of the building was full of turds.
• An entire wall of windows!
  …single-pane and very inefficient. Our heating bill was out of control, and we were still freezing all winter.
• Rent was a “very reasonable” $1475!
  …for the first year, and then it goes up 8% every year after that. It also doesn’t include utilities, so we had to pay for heat, water, gas and a maintenance fee on top of the crazy-high electricity bill.
• The management company was very open to us demolishing and rebuilding however we wanted!
  …that’s code for “kinda slum lords.” Luckily for us, Bradley knows plumbing and electrical. He also hates waiting on a landlord to fix anything, so he just did it himself.
• It was a sewing factory in the 1800s!
  …we’re not sure why that was a selling feature for us, but it was. We’re suckers for old industrial buildings.

I know what you’re thinking: we were insane to sign the lease. But we’ve never claimed sanity. We were young and full of energy and ready to take on the world. (This is, like, 3 years ago, so not much has changed.) Besides, we were New Yorkers. Crummy apartments were a way of life. We knew we could take the space from industrial to industrial-chic if we just put some time into it.

We moved right in and started demolishing walls like we owned the place. Did we mention that after forking over the Brooklyn standard of first month’s rent, last month’s rent and 2 months of additional security deposit, we were flat broke?

Lets just skip to the after pictures. Here’s the loft by the time we finished:

It took, maybe, 2 or 3 months to get it looking like this. That’s the benefit of only having 550 square feet to work with!

Pretty much everything was made from found / salvaged / free objects. The big metal leg that holds up the loft, the bookshelves and even the Japanese prints that we framed and mounted high up on the loft walls. Most of the furniture was custom made by Bradley on a serious budget: the dining room table, the coffee table, even the ladder that leads up to the couch.

If you look closely, you can see we had a little bit of a painted rafter look going on under the loft above the couch. And a raw unpainted rafter look under the bedroom closet:

Looks like we couldn’t decide between the two even back then.

The wood floors were painted years ago with a latex paint. We’re pretty sure they gave it a few coats of the same primer they put on the walls. We actually loved the raw, grungy look against the new furniture, but we’re going with a much more durable oil-based paint for the floors in our house.

The little treehouse up top was the bed loft that Bradley designed and built from scratch. There was enough room for a queen-sized mattress and a nightstand. But we also mounted a floating shelf above the foot of the bed that housed a small flatscreen TV. There was also a hidden window that held a small AC that vented outside.

The big metal shield in front of the tree house? That’s a piece from an elevator in the warehouse that the loft was in.

Not gonna lie: the big wall of windows had a lot to do with us instantly falling in love with the place.

The filing cabinet on the left was found. The tall console with plants on it was made by Bradley years ago. It was one of his first experiments with concrete. The smaller table with the plant on top is one of his latest experiments with concrete. We gave both pieces to a friend when we purged our apartment in the winter. We gave the coffee table to my sister when we moved to a very narrow railroad apartment.

We still have the dining room table. We just decided that it’s going to be reborn as a bathroom vanity for the half-bath downstairs.

The light fixture and hanging lantern were found objects. There was no closet when we moved in so we had to plan and build that ourselves. All of the wood was salvaged, including the big beams that run under the bedroom loft to support the weight. The dresser was a found object that we painted grey (it used to be a hideous grandma-green).

The stairs up to the bedroom loft were handmade by Bradley. We made a coat rack underneath to maximize space. And the little black dresser was another found object that we stripped, stained and sealed.

From the bedroom loft looking down into the kitchen:

The pot rack was an old security gate. The floating shelves were smaller security gates. the “backsplash” was a Do Not Enter sign and I’m not really sure where we found that, but we thought it looked fun. The blue and white cabinet on the far left was a really old steel medicine cabinet that we found and fell in love with.

The big orb in the middle is a light fixture that Bradley made out of wire. I wish I had a picture of it turned on because it cast some incredible light and shadows.

The kitchen counters are made from salvaged barn wood (you can see the white stripes where lathe strips used to be), and the counters were some discount granite tile we found.

And just in case you’re wondering, Bradley’s ever-expanding collection of tools was hidden in a storage space behind the lofted bedroom:

The pipe that run across the top was a vent for our air conditioner. We had a secret window in the back of the bedroom loft for a small AC unit. And, yes, I did attempt to grow tomatoes inside using a Topsy Turvy tomato planter — it was a disaster.

All in all, we didn’t spend a ton of money totally renovating the place because we found free furniture and salvaged building materials. A lot of this came down to luck and location. We were in an industrial area of Brooklyn so there were lots of industrial dumpsters to dive. They were also renovating a school on our block, which meant wood, beams and steel were ours for the taken (we asked the construction foreman nicely). Bradley made most of the furniture (like the coffee table and dining room table) out of salvaged wood from that wood.

As for the found furniture, we had a high turnaround rate for lofts in our big warehouse. People often left furniture in the halls and when we saw something we liked, we snagged it. We only did this for wood furniture, never for anything upholstered. Living in NYC made us super paranoid about bedbugs.

So there you have it; our first renovation together. It’s not exactly glamorous, but we were way more into the raw / industrial look back then. And it was, hands down, the best looking loft in the entire building. People in the building would sometimes drop by to check it out because they heard about it. We were proud little renters.

We learned a ton and we’re using our past experience to help streamline our new (and much bigger) project. The best part is that we saw what we could do on a super-tight budget. Even though our budget is way less strict now (hooray for moving to the middle-of-nowhere!), we know we don’t have to spend a ton to turn our house from frumpy to fabulous.

What we learned from our loft renovation:

• Contain your messes.
  The loft was basically just one big room, which meant that we had to live in a giant construction mess for a couple of months. It drove us nuts and we fought a lot. We need a safe zone to escape messes. That’s the basis for our one-room-at-a-time philosophy — we don’t have construction messes all over the place so we’re happier and get more done.
• DIY till you die.
  Or at least pass out from exhaustion. It takes a little elbow grease, but we’re way happier with the results and we end up saving a ton of money. Plus our house looks and feels like an extension of us rather than a page out of a CB2 catalog.
• Old stuff rocks.
  They don’t build stuff like they used to. We love IKEA and all, but old furniture was made to last. And it’s not difficult to update — all you need is new hardware, paint or stain, and a little time.
• New stuff rocks, too. If you make it.
  We’re shopping for a house on a budget, which means we’ve been scouring all the usuals. Target, IKEA, Bed Bath and Beyond, Overstock, etc. But we’re never happy with the look or the quality. And we’ll totally admit that we’re yuppies who get severe guilt over buying Made In A Sweatshop furniture. We have a professional furniture designer on staff here and we have Google to teach us whatever we don’t know. We’d be crazy not to do it ourselves. …and share the steps with you.
• Salvaging 101: Learn to tell the difference between what’s worth saving vs. what’s junk.
  We’re salvaging/reclaiming a lot of materials in our house, but we’re not saving everything. Knowing what’s worth saving (like the cool wood planks we’re going to turn into nightstands) vs. what’s not worth saving (like the cheesy trim upstairs) really helps. Ask yourself if it’s unique enough to keep before you decide to hang on to something.
• Mix and match.
  Before the loft, we had a serious case of the matchy-matchies. You know the look — all the wood is the same, all the hardware is stainless steel, everything is glossy, nothing has texture, all the greens are exactly the same shade. The loft renovation basically forced us to embrace different materials, finishes and styles. We found that a really polished, modern coffee table could look amazing on worn, old floors. We starting loving textured surfaces and raw finishes.
• Storage space + organization = sanity.
  We’ve lived in 2 NYC apartments that had zero closets, and we learned very quickly that having storage can make the difference between crazy-cluttered and cozy-cute. We came up with a ton of storage and organization solutions that we’ll share in future posts.
• Stick to your boo-zhey.
  That’s fancy-talk for budget. Whether it’s $10 or $10k or $10bajillion, figure out what you can spend and then stick to it no matter what. Spending less might mean taking longer to get from start-to-finish, but as long as you keep the messes contained and stay organized, you’ll get there. Keep your eyes on the prize and forge ahead, brave DIYer. We’re rooting for you.
• Learn to see the potential of a space.
  That last one is the most important one of all. We watch “Property Brothers” on HGTV sometimes and it drives us nuts when homebuyers can’t look at a space and see what it could be. See the big picture. Don’t focus on the details (till you start renovating!). Keep an open mind. Instead of seeing only the things you don’t like, try seeing the things you can improve.

Hope you enjoyed the tour of our 2009 digs. We’ll be back with more updates on the casa. Stay tuned!

Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are 3 doors on another wall:

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

And then there’s the window wall:

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

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

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

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

Then there’s the ceiling:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

What we learned:

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

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

We saved $1400 on kitchen appliances! Squee!

We went to IKEA to check out some shelves we’re thinking about getting. Instead of the stuff we walked in for, we ended up leaving with a pick-up-later receipt for a range and a fridge. Our biggest impulse buy EVER.

We owned a dishwasher already, which, surprisingly enough, we got from IKEA. We love it to pieces. We even named it. Sven. As in, “Lets sit on the couch and watch movies while Sven does the dishes.” Kind of a big deal when you’ve lived without a dishwasher for 7 years.

Source

We were a little worried that Sven would be chintzy or flimsy like so much of IKEA’s furniture, but it turns out IKEA doesn’t actually make the appliances. They just design appliances to look nice and get Whirlpool to make it for them. They’re not cheaply built. And they’re not exactly cheap in cost, either. Prices are pretty much exactly what we found at Lowe’s, Home Depot and Sears — but for stuff that’s way prettier.

And we needed pretty stuff for our kitchen. Since our house was a foreclosure, so it didn’t come with a fridge or dishwasher. It did come with a super old range. Pardon the yellow pictures. I didn’t take the time to white balance my crusty old point-and-shoot:

It was usable, but it was so old that it didn’t seem very efficient. And it was definitely not easy on the eyes.

We knew it wasn’t something we wanted to keep around forever, so we went ahead and hauled it out to the garage. We’ll eventually donate it or offer it for free on Craigslist. Or hope that it grows legs and walks out on its own so we never have to think about it again.

When we moved the oven, we discovered something lodged in the back.

It’s a brick-sized block of wood with what appears to be a bat carved into the front. And “December 25 1938″ carved into the back. From the look of it, the block might have been a handmade Christmas present that some kid made for his / her parents. An old-school DIYer? A kid after our own heart. We dusted off our 73-year-old find and set it on a bookshelf.

Before we closed on the house, we planned to set aside $1000 for both a range and a fridge. We wanted to score something great on mega-sale. Or just get something that would get us by for a few years, even if it wasn’t exactly what we wanted. Then we realized that it’s totally the wrong thing for us to pinch our pennies on. We love to cook, and we eat home-cooked meals 90% of the time. Since we’d be using our fridge and stove a lot, we figured we should get something we’re totally in love with regardless of cost, and budget tightly for other stuff we don’t use as often.

And then we met the Datid Pro D51:

Source

Datid is really wide and really industrial looking. Better yet, it FEELS really industrial. The matte black, the cast iron grates, the silver toggles on the knobs. And there’s a wok burner in the center. A wok burner! We swooned! We also loved how it doesn’t have a back panel to it, so we can set this in to our custom-made island and have it be flush with the rest of the surface. But that’s not the best part.

Original price: $1,749.00
What we paid: $799
Saved: $950. That’s 54% off. (That’s the best part!)

We got the range at a super deep discount because IKEA is discontinuing this sucker. Apparently nobody really buys black appliances anymore. We, on the other hand, embraced its hue. We think we can make it work in our kitchen, because we’re not going matchy-matchy with our appliances. It doesn’t really bug us that the dishwasher is white but the stove is black. The stove will be set into some stark white cabinets. We might even do white concrete countertops for added contrast. Why hide the stove? Why not make it stand out?

Besides, the original cabinets in the kitchen — the super old ones from the 1880s — will be stained dark as well, so it’ll fit right in. And our backsplash might be a black, grey & white tile number we rip off off Dexter Morgan’s condo kitchen.

Long story short, we can make this work.

After spending $799 on that stove, we were thinking about cheaping out on the fridge. And then we walked right into Nutid:

Source

Having lived with craptastic apartment fridges for years, we might have shed a tear or two as we stood there in awe of this boxy beauty. Look at how squared off that baby is. All of the other fridges we saw have curved fronts or curved handles. This one doesn’t have a curve on her. We loved it! Plus she has a digital display, an ice maker, tons of pull-out drawers in the fridge & a side freezer. “A freezer like that,” Bradley said, “was made for Costco shoppers.” And then we reached for our wallets.

Fridges similar to Nutid were in the $2000ish price range when we looked online. Fridges not quite as squared off were cheaper, but still hovering around $1500.

Original price: $1,349.00
What we paid: $899
Saved: $450. That’s 33% off!

We think we walked away with a great deal.

Our pretax total for the fridge and stove came out to $1698. We cut our costs further by picking up the appliances ourselves from the New Jersey warehouse instead of having them delivered to the house for a bajillion dollars. (We’re not sure what IKEA’s delivery charges are, but we’re pretty sure it would be between a jillion and a bajillion to deliver to Pennsylvania.) In the end, we came in $648 above our budget for kitchen appliances, but we think it’s worth it because we smile every time we open the fridge or walk by the stove.

Moving our new appliances into the house wasn’t easy. We rented a hand truck from Home Depot and loaded up the fridge first:

The thing weighs, like, 500 pounds. Luckily for Bradley, I go to the gym and lift heavy weights. And I gave up on the idea of manicures right around the time we started crushing walls and hauling lumber. No prissiness up in our hizzy. So we rolled up our sleeves and somehow got the fridge out of the van (which has no ramp), onto the handtruck, and safely onto our patio (which also has no ramp).

Getting it inside was an even bigger ordeal.

Big ol’ fridge. Teeny tiny door. We removed all the styrofoam and cardboard packaging around the fridge and squeezed it through (barely). And then we had to get it through the living room and into the kitchen, which — surprise! — was an even bigger pain in the butt.

The fridge came with a little plastic protector base that was about 1/2 inch too wide for our door frame. We didn’t have the right socket set to remove it. After a few choice profanities, we ended up laying the fridge on its side and then hacking off the plastic feet with a handsaw.

It finally slid through the door frame and over to its current resting place (not its permanent home). We took a minute to bask in its glow:

It wasn’t easy, what with the hideous linoleum tile and the fruit-themed wall border. But we basked as best we could.

The stove came in with such little drama that I completely forgot to take a picture of it. We haven’t fully assembled it since our gas isn’t turned on yet, but rest assured that it looks fab-u-lous in its new (temporary) home. Especially when compared to what used to reside in its place:

See that thing big silver thing hanging out of the wall? Doesn’t it look like a cartoon robot arm?

Source

That’s the old venting system for this stove. It’s plugged into the back of the oven and into the chimney. We’re not sure it actually did anything. All we know is that we giggled maniacally when we ripped it out of the wall. And we giggled even harder when we tossed the old Dumpy McGoo stove in our garage and pushed our sleek new Datid in its place.

What we learned:

• Nobody has cleaned behind that stove since at least 1938. Gross.
• Someone lost a dry chunk of Ramen down the burner.
• It’s OK to take the cheap route, but some things are totally worth splurging on.

Feeling exposed.

Hey & welcome, new readers! We were so geeked to be Freshly Pressed — we did a happy dance and everything — and excited to have someone following our whole house renovation. Someone who isn’t related to us and thereby forced to read our DIY dorkiness, that is. We’re just getting started, so you joined us at the perfect time!

When we left off, we’d just finished installing our French doors. After that, we cleaned up the walls and got them ready to have new sheet rock attached.  That’s when we came across something that made us hyperventilate in our ventilator masks:

A brick wall tucked behind some wood and drywall! Technically we knew this was there from the day Bradley crawled around the space between the kitchen ceiling and the office floor. You can see it waaaaay back there in the picture he took using his Droid.

We planned on exposing this brick wall in the kitchen, but we didn’t really consider exposing it upstairs. Not until we saw it behind the wall, just begging to be let out. How cool would it be to walk up the stairs and see an exposed brick wall at the end of the hallway?

It didn’t take much to talk ourselves into it. We grabbed a crowbar and hammer and removed the molding around the door. Then we started chipping away the plaster in the hallway.

One of us would chisel while the other picked up the falling chunks of plaster and tossed them in a garbage bag. Then we’d trade positions to give the chiseler’s arms a break.

Bradley showed me a tuft of horsehair he found in the plaster:

Ignore the filthy hands. De-plastering’s a dirty job.

He told me they used horse hair to keep the plaster clumped together back in the day. Sure enough, when I looked through the plaster, there was horsehair everywhere. I asked him how he knows this stuff. He said, “I read up on it.” Keep in mind that this is coming from the same guy whose idea of a good beach read is this:

Source

We had to be careful to chisel only the plaster and not remove the mortar from between the bricks. For the most part, it came off easily in big chunks. Then we’d use the back of the hammer to loosen the more stubborn bits of plaster and use our (workgloved) hands to brush off the brick.

We were loving the raw look of the brick. It’ll totally modernize the space, but also give it a hint of old-school cool.

The raw, unfinished texture of brick isn’t really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of modern interiors.
A lot of people associate modern design with super slick, new walls with no texture or color. But we love it when a modern space has rough edges.

Source

The perfect balance of old and industrial mixed with sleek and shiny:

Source

And we love how old red brick looks with wood furniture:

Source

We were so excited to find that the brick-meets-wood look was already built into the house. When we exposed the area above the door frame, we found that the header was an old wood beam:

That thick block of wood supports the weight of the brick wall above the door frame. You can also see a bit of the original door frame underneath the beam. It’s turned grey with age, but it’s solid wood and it’s as old as the house is.

It needs a little cleaning, but the wood is beautifully preserved.

Sadly, we ran out of daylight before we finished exposing the entire wall. We wanted to finish the sheet rock in the hall before the day was over, so we switched projects halfway through.

We haven’t taped, plastered and painted our wall yet, but we already love the way the new wall butts up against the old brick wall.

We’ll be fully moved into the house in 9 days(!), and we’ll tackle the rest of the wall then. We have to expose the rest of the brick, move the smoke detector, clean the brick with a wire brush, wash the wall to get all the debris off, and get the door frame ready for painting.

When we’re done with that, we’ll have our very first before-and-after pictures for the blog! Get excited — we are!!

What we learned from our brick exposing project:

• Bradley would be the master of Trivial Pursuit’s Construction Edition.
• No jackhammer necessary — just a hammer & a small pry bar were enough to remove the plaster wall.
• Plaster dust blows. Literally. It blows everywhere. We forgot to hang up some plastic sheeting to keep the dust contained and now the second floor is covered in white dust. Oops!
• When exposing brick, wear a ventilator, long sleeves and a hat or hoodie. 3 shampoos later, I still feel like I have plaster in my hair.

DIY: Demolish It Yourself

One of our favorite parts about renovating is the demolition part. Call us destructive, but there is nothing more satisfying than smashing a sledgehammer through some perfectly good sheet rock.

Wait. I take that back. There is nothing more satisfying than smashing a foot through some perfectly good sheet rock. We’ve done it. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

But before we could get to the foot-of-fury part of the project, we had take care of one of our least favorite parts about renovating: planning. Booo! Hiss! Boring!! …but totally necessary. We started by setting a goal.

Here’s what we planned on doing over the last weekend:

1. Tear a big ol’ hole in the wall separating the guest bedroom from the hallway
2. Install French doors.
3. Seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole (yes, door hole is a real term)

After we developed our game plan, we gathered our supplies. We put together a list of all the supplies we’ll need: sheetrock, lumber, nails, screws, etc. Bradley did all the estimating of how much of everything we’d need. I mostly just smiled and nodded and pretending to know what furring strips are. (Note: it has nothing to do with foxes or minks. Or leg waxing.)

We padded our list pretty heavily with extras. For instance, we know we’ll be putting up a lot of new walls upstairs, so we went ahead and ordered enough sheetrock for the whole floor. Our local lumberyard charges a flat $15 for delivery, so we took full advantage of it.

Our delivery arrived bright and early on Saturday morning, and we tossed  all the extra supplies (gently) into the garage for storage until they’re needed.

Ohhhh, the luxury of space. The whole garage thing is new to us, and we are loving it!

We had already researched French doors to find a good deal. We knew we wanted 60″ wide x 80″ tall doors, and found that all the places we checked charged around $350. We ordered our door from Lowe’s and picked it up ourselves to save on delivery charges.

Source

Then finally — fiiiiiinally! — the big day arrived. We’d rested up. We’d stretched out. We’d made sure our tetanus shots were up-to-date. We’d said our goodbyes to the wall on the left:

Some disclaimer-y type stuff before we get into the meat & potatoes sledgehammers and sheetrock. This kind of work is usually better left to the pros. This guy:

…is a pro. He was born with a hammer in one hand and a level in the other. (Not really sure how his mother pulled that one off, but kudos to her.) He’s torn down walls and put up walls. He knows how to re-wire the lights, and he can plumb with the best of ‘em. He also knows how to throw a perfect put-down-the-camera-and-help-me glare:

In short, he knows what he’s doing. If you’ve never done anything like this before and want to try, get help from a professional. If you attempt to do this on your own, you will die. …just kidding. You might get hurt or destroy your house, though, so play it safe.

We started our demo day by making sure we weren’t about to demolish a load-bearing wall. That would be bad. Ceiling-crashing-down-on-your-face-while-you-sleep bad. Once we figured out our wall was a-OK to demolish, we turned off all the electricity so we wouldn’t end up Benjamin Franklining ourselves. Little Pennsylvania humor for ya there. Wokka wokka!

Bradley removed all the baseboards with a big ol’ crowbar. We plan on reusing as much of the original lumber as possible, so we stashed it away for later. After that, he used a box cutter to score the edges of the wall we wanted to remove:

At this point, we put on our respirators to protect our lungs from any potential lead paint dust.

Yes, ladies, my ventilator is hot pink. Safety first, fashion second.

Once our noses were secure, out came the sledgehammer and we bashed the wall down….carefully. We wanted to keep the other side of the wall — the inside of the bedroom — in tact, so we only removed one side of the wall. The sheetrock removal process was a lot like Operation Ivy: grab, yank, toss, repeat.

We were a little surprised to find random bits of insulation stuffed into the walls. Whoever put up the wall must have had leftovers and decided to throw in them. Either way, they’re not doing any good in this interior wall. We removed the insulation stashed it away for later use as well.

We found some fun stuff within the wall. Like this bit of floral wallpaper:

This floral border on top of the floral wallpaper. Someone sure loved flowers on her wall:

The biggest surprise was the Gold Bond brand drywall:

And here I thought Gold Bond only made foot powder. Crazy!

Eventually the entire wall was naked, the wood was exposed and all the old sheetrock was put away in four huge contractor trash bags:

Next, we needed to cut the hole to set our French doors into. Bradley drew out the dimensions for the door on the other side of our bare wall, making sure they were level and perfect.

And, because, we’re total nerds who can’t ever walk away from a Beetlejuice reference, we drew knobs on the door and knocked 3 times.

Nobody answered (sad face). So we pulled out the Sawzall and started cutting:

I’d never used a Sawzall before, so Bradley let me have a turn. It was love at first whirr. I was totally the girl who took shop class in middle school and metal smithing in high school and college, I became pretty scared of loud power tools. I had an accident in a metal class and sliced into my left thumb and forefinger. All the way to the bone. I had to get 22 stitches and — ew ew ewwww! — I felt every single one of them because the local anesthetic didn’t quite kick in. So after that traumatic experience, I’ve been a little hesitant to jump back into using things that could chop my fingers off.

After using the Sawzall, though, I’m ready. I’m back in love with power tools, and I can’t wait to try them all. Good thing we have a lot of work to do around the house!

Anyway, we Sawzall’d right through all the wood on the bare side of the wall, but used a handsaw to finish off the parts closest to the floors so we didn’t accidentally cut through them:

The wall popped right out and we removed it to reveal our new door hole:

Door hole! We knew right away that our hunch about putting in a French door was spot on. There was so much light coming in from the bedroom windows and from the windows in the hall. We could open up all the windows and let a breeze through. Everything felt so much more open and big and airy. We had time for a quick high-five and then got back to work moving some outlets around:

We also had to cut and install a header to sit above the door. Basically, a header takes the weight of the wall off the door:

See? I told you he knows what he’s doing. Once we had the header and frame in, we made sure everything was level. And, easy peasy, we slid the door right in:

OK, not really. When we went to slide the door in, we found out that it doesn’t really fit. No matter what we tried, the door seemed too big for the door hole. We had a minor panic attack. I didn’t get any pictures of it because we were too busy running around trying to figure out what happened.

We quickly figured out what we did wrong: we were being way too precise. Our measurements and cuts were so exact that the door wouldn’t slide in. D’oh! Our jobs are kind of all about making things look perfect. Bradley’s a furniture designer and I’m an art director. With our work, when something is off by 1/16th of an inch, it looks wrong. You have to get things exact or else they look weird or ugly or off. So we measured and cut our door hole to perfectly fit our door. Turns out walls don’t really work that way. Type A / perfectionist FAIL.

We had to go back and widen some of our cuts and make a few adjustments. There were door shims involved:

After another 30 minutes of tweaking, the door finally slid in and looked fabulous.

Toot freaking toot. That’s the sound of us tooting our own horn. Above is a shot from the stair looking down the hall. And below is a shot at the end of the hallway looking down towards the stairs.

And here’s a shot of the doors open, so you can get a looksie at that the header I was talking about earlier.

Before the day was over, we had one more task. We had to seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. We still have to tape and plaster and sand and paint, but we won’t get that that till next time.

This entire project took roughly 6 hours or so. We had a few other projects going on at the same time, plus we had to take a time out to accept our delivery and run to Lowe’s and Home Depot. We’re pretty geeked about our new door and how it totally opens up the cramped hall.

Stuff we learned from this project:

• Handcrafted tables and well-designed brochures can never be “too perfect.” Door holes on the other hand…
• Power tools are not toys, but they sure feel like it.
• You can’t put on a respirator without making some kind of Darth Vader joke. We dare you to try.

Our 130-year-old house has history. Who’d a thunk it?

Our house was built in 1881, which makes it exactly 100 years older than me and 101 years older than Bradley. Right after closing, we met a really nice man who came over to turn our water on. He told us that Old Mrs. Thompson owned the house and that the entire area flooded in the early ’70s. That’s all the history we knew about the house. (We also found out that they levied the creek after the big flood, so we’re totally out of the flood zone. Phew!)

Up until yesterday, that’s all we knew about the history of our house.

We dropped by after work yesterday to drop off some boxes & furniture, and to check the mail. We still haven’t officially moved in yet — that won’t happen until we finish the 2 rooms we’re renovating. Anyway, our neighbor Skip saw us lugging boxes into the house and he dropped by to introduce himself. Skip and his wife have lived next door for 30ish years. They moved into what they thought was a starter home, and never left. So cute!

We were so excited to meet him. Not just because we’ll be living next door to him for an indefinite amount of time, but because we had a ton of questions about the house itself. Ever since we got the keys, we’ve been wondering who lived in our house before us. Were they happy there? And, more importantly, whhhhhhy would they paint the walls the exact same blue as the carpet? Or use roof shingles to cover an indoor wall. Or cut a giant hole in a wall and — instead of covering it with an access panel door like a sane person — tape it shut using a piece of cardboard and a giant Mother’s Day card. Yeah. Really. Photographic evidence coming soon.

When Skip dropped by to chit-chat, we finally got a chance to talk to someone who might know. We’re nosy people. We can’t help ourselves.

Skip told us that an old lady owned the house (Old Mrs. Thompson!), and she was a lifer. She purchased the house as a foreclosure during the Great Depression, and lived there until she died. She was 104 years old. The house was already “old” by the time she moved in — it had been around for 50 years!

The nerds in us couldn’t help but marvel at the similarities. We purchased the old house during the Great Recession, also as a foreclosure. Who knows — maybe we’ll live here until we’re 104!

Skip said that Old Mrs. Thompson took great care of the house, and maintained it beautifully. The exterior always looked immaculate. Skip and the water guy never mentioned an Old Mr. Thompson or Little Baby Thompsons pitter-pattering around the yard, so it sounds like she lived there by herself.

After Old Mrs. Thompson died, some allegedly nuttier people moved in and they didn’t take very good care of the house. They put up the half-painted privacy fence. I’m guessing they’re also responsible for shingled wall, the Mother’s Day card access panel door, and the all-blue Smurf room that we’re currently re-doing. And then there’s the all-purple room:

Yup. Purple walls, purple trim, purple doors. And the pièce de résistance: purple floors. At least they held themselves back a little and made the floors a very light lilac. I think our eyeballs would have exploded if the floors matched the dark purple trim. We’ll share all the charming features of the purple room (permanently glued butterfly stickers on the walls!) once we take our hammers to it. For now, we’ve closed the door and are in full denial of what lies behind it.

Anyway, we didn’t learn much about the latest owners of our house, but they weren’t around for very long. Skip didn’t seem very sad to see them go.

What we learned about our house just made us love it more. When we found out that a little old lady lived there and loved the house and took a lot of pride in keeping it beautiful, we got even more excited about restoring the house to its previous level of fabulousness. It’ll be like the purple room never happened.

The fun starts this weekend with our first how-to feature. We’re going to tear down a wall and install French doors and share all the details of how we did it. Whee! Stay tuned.