Let the dishes wash themselves.

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

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

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

Because that guy installed our dishwasher! Whee!

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

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

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

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

Not. Attractive.

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

At least the floors look decent:

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

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

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

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

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

A hole on the right side for the power cord:

And one on the left for the hoses:

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

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

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

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

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

After that came the plumbing:

And finally, he hooked up the power:

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

The final product:

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

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

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!

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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.

One man’s blue is another man’s ewww.

I cackled at my own post title for far too long. I may also have snorted and spilled a little coffee on my own lap. Blogging: it’s a dangerous business.

We’ve been talking about painting for months now, and this weekend, it was finally, fiiiiiinally time to put some color on the walls. But first, we had to have a mild freakout about the colors we chose.

See, ever since we told people we were ready to paint, we started getting comments that made us uncomfortable. Like “Ooooh, can’t wait to see some crazy awesome colors!” Or worse: “You’re both designers, so I bet you’ll pick amazing colors!” Cue the clammy hands and schweddy foreheads.

Suddenly our colors seemed like lame and boring versions of the colors we really wanted. We cracked open each gallon and peered at the colors we had been so in love with, and barely recognized them. We felt jilted. Betrayed. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed Benjamin Moore. And then we made a fresh pot of coffee and got to painting.

Here’s the thing, peeps: color is a subjective thang. You may love the colors we’ve chosen or you may hate them. We’re not gonna get our collective panties in a bunch. What’s important is that they fit in our space and with the vision we have for our whole house. So, without further rambling, here’s the color we picked for the office:

That’s Benjamin Moore Shenandoah Taupe AC-36. We looked at approximately 40 billion paint chips before we agreed on it. We picked it because we loved the warm grey-brown tone and because we thought it would make the itty bitty office feel a bit bigger. Our biggest challenge with this room is its shorter-than-average ceilings. Average ceilings are 8′. The office has 7.5′ on the dot.

Here’s the fun part: we dug through our old posts and found the official before pictures. We’ll break down the before and after for each angle. Squee! We’ve been waiting to do this for 5 months now! Lets jump right in:

So. Much. Better. Here’s a view from the hallway looking in. You can catch a glimpse of the Smurf blue carpet we removed the day we picked up the keys to the house:

Standing in front of the brick wall looking at the other end of the room:

Here’s a better look at the recessed lighting. There are 3 that run down the center of the room:

View from the doorway looking in:

Standing in the corner from the last set of photos, looking towards the doorway:

And, finally, the closet. I couldn’t find great before pictures, but you get the general idea. It’s way back in the corner:

And it used to be covered in some really stubborn crusty grandmawallpaper that gave me nightmares and once made me cry:

And a view from inside the closet looking out:

…because we totally expect people to hang out inside our closets staring out into the room.

I’m so proud of the perfect lines dividing the ceiling and wall:

More details on that process in a few minutes. First, lets drool over our trimless windows and DIY concrete window sills:

We love how the taupe looks next to the raw brick:

But nothing made us happier than seeing the way taupe looks with a crisp white:

Ooh la la! We swooned when those went on. We know plain white switch covers aren’t a big deal, but feast your eyes on what used to light up our room:

I rest my case.

Now lets talk about how we roll. Our paint, that is:

We mentioned in an earlier post that we sprayed on our primer but rolled on our colors. That doesn’t mean it took us forever to roll. Not when we have the right tools for the job.

All of the tools above are made my Wooster except for the red thingy, which is made by Shur-Line. Check out the roller in the middle; that’s a standard-sized roller that everyone has and will give you an idea of how big the other items are. The ginormous roller on the left is what saved us a ton of time. It covers the walls twice as fast as a standard roller. No kidding. We used the mini roller for small spaces like the trimless windows.

The paint tray is also a huge time saver. It holds a gallon of paint, so we basically just dumped the entire bucket in all at once. It took a gallon and a quart to paint 2 coats in the office, so we only had to refill once. We covered the tray with some saran wrap in between coats — we painted a coat, broke for lunch, then came back and painted the second coat.

We also have a couple of roller extensions that let us paint the ceiling and the tall walls without having to drag a ladder all over the place:

We own 2 extensions, one of them by Wooster and the other by another company. The one in the picture above is not the Wooster — it’s the cheap one that works fine. I forgot to take a picture of the Wooster (teehee!) but that’s the one we recommend. It’s adjustable to different heights with a flip of a switch. Love it!

And, finally, there’s my new favorite painting tool: the Shur-Line Edge Painter.

Source

Basically, it’s a painting pad with 2 little wheels on the end. You dip the pad lightly in your paint, then put the pad on the surface you want to paint. You gently line up the wheels to the surface you want to follow (in our case, the ceiling). Then you drag with from one side to the other, leaving a clean line of paint behind you.

Taking a picture while simultaneously trying to paint a clean line was just not happening. Believe me, I tried. Here’s a picture I found that pretty much explains everything I just said, only way more clearly:

Source

We actually painted the office and the guest bedroom on the same day — 2 coats in each room, plus the clean up in between where we washed out our paint tray and rollers — so it really didn’t take us that long.

We used to get the cheapie paint tray sets from Lowe’s, but they don’t hold up well over time. We invested in these slightly pricier Wooster tools (the jumbo roller is $16 and each rolling pad is $8), and honestly, they’re worth it. They glide waaaaay smoother than our other rollers so they don’t leave too much texture on the walls. We actually ended up throwing out our cheapie rollers on Saturday because we were super impressed by the Wooster set. We have a lot of painting to do. Might as well use tools that don’t make us miserable, right?

What we’ve learned:

• Go with your gut.
  Our first instincts for each of the rooms we painted ended up being pretty spot on. We knew we were in the right ballpark when we found ourselves gravitating towards one color family (like deep greys and dark tans for the office). After that, it was just a matter of finding the one that matched our ceiling best.
• Don’t pick color palettes for each room. Pick color palettes for the whole house.
  We have 9 rooms and 3 hallways to paint in our house, and it would be super easy to get overexcited and paint each one a totally different color. We won’t, though, because we want our house to have a unified feel. This is why we painted the ceilings in the office, guest bedroom and hallway the same color (Olympic Horseradish) and then chose colors that coordinated with the ceiling colors as well as with each other. Each room will still have its own distinct palette, but it’ll all be part of the big picture. Young House Love has a great post about this that’s worth checking out.
• I just wrote 1365 words about painting one room.
  I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. Yiish.

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None of the brands we mentioned paid or perked us to write this post. We just like sharing the news when we find tools we love.

Meet our grande olde livinge roome.

We realized on our last drive to Brooklyn that there are still 5 rooms of our house that we haven’t showed on our shelter blog:

• Upstairs bathroom
  This was updated a few years before us and is majorly boh-ring.
• Downstairs bathroom
  Hot mess.
• Kitchen
  The only thing that’s functioning in there currently is our fridge. If it wasn’t for our grill and rice cooker, we’d probably have starved to death by now.
• Dining room
  Currently my office / our living room. Ugly, but functional.
• Living room
  Currently our bedroom while we renovate upstairs. Uh-may-zing, but needs a lot of work.

Most of these rooms are in such a state of disarray — ahem, downstairs bathroom — that it’s totally embarrassing putting them out there on the interwebz. And there’s that whole weird thing of having your coworkers see your bedroom. Are we the only ones who find that awkward? For the sake of keeping it real, though, we’re gonna put it all out there. Fast. Like ripping a band-aid. Ready? Deep breath. This is the view from the doorway connecting the living and dining rooms:

The ceilings are enormongous — 10’3″ tall — and the bed is queen-sized, if that helps put a scale to things.

If you ignore the burgundy carpet, the room is kinda beautiful. The huge windows with their thick, dark woodwork. The plaster ceiling medallion. Even the damask wallpaper that’s so old that it’s come into and gone out of and come back into fashion several times.

We’re not huge fans of wallpaper, but we fell in love with this white-and-gold pattern so much that we’re considering re-wallpapering the living room with something similar. If we can find damask wallpaper that doesn’t add up to $1000+ for the room. Yiish! Who know wallpaper was so pricey?

The ceiling is in rough shape. It’s covered in wallpaper and has some sags and cracks going on. The plaster needs a little love. In any other room in the house, we’d just rip out the lathe and plaster and put up a fresh, new ceiling, but not in this room. We love the old world olde worlde feel of the room, so we’re going to keep all of the old school details — the huge plaster medallion, the trim, the woodwork, etc. So, yeah, in short: this room is going to be a huge pain in the butt to remodel. We’re probably going to save it for the last room we redo.

Remember when we talked about furniture designer swag? Here’s another one of those perks that ended up in our house:

My shoe closet! This cabinet was a custom piece for a client who loved high heels (yeah, yeah, stereotypical New Yorker!). All of the shelves are adjustable and tilt down to accommodate different heel heights. I fit 19 pairs in there, and the rest are still in boxes. Or, um, stacked on / around / in front of the radiator.

The radiator is easily the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s been painted a flat gold, and we might keep it that way.

Next to the radiator is our closet:

Insert saddest face of all time here.

It’s true: we’re still living out of wardrobe boxes. A lot of our stuff is in boxes in the attic or in the garage, but that’ll start to change once we finish up the office and guest bedroom. We’ll move into those 2 rooms and be able to spread out a little more. Anyway, if you ignore the boxes and the carpet, you’ll be able to see a hint of the woodwork in the room. We’ll get better pictures on a sunny / less overcast day and share them — it’s pretty awesome.

We plan on refinishing the 2 grey pieces of furniture. The one on the left is a shelf full of our jeans, and the one on the right is an old, old dresser we found & reclaimed. The dresser needs new pulls and the drawers are a little tight, but those are pretty easy fixes. And, as is the case with most reclaimed furniture, paint will make the biggest difference.

Here’s another piece of reclaimed furniture we found and finished:

This used to be a very hideous 1940s-grandma-green dresser. We sanded it, stained it, lacquered it and gave it some fancy new pulls. The dresser itself cost $0, and the redo cost about $20 in supplies. Expect to see more of that ’round these parts!

We’re also in the process of redoing our bed, which is why it looks a little funky at the base. We have an IKEA Sultan Alsarp:

Source

Al, for short. The entire base lifts up hydraulically to reveal a whole lotta storage underneath. Perfect apartment bed! Unfortunately for us, there was an incident, and we’re stripping down the cushioned base and replacing it. IKEA hack time! So far, we’ve removed the foam, and that’s the yellow stuff you can see in the picture of the black dresser. That’s all the detail I’ll go into for now — it’s coming up soon!

In other news, our staircase now looks like this:

Drywall is up from top to bottom! And the hallways windows have corner beads:

We had a plasterer come in and give us a very, very reasonable estimate. She seemed totally profesh, came highly recommended, and she’s showing up tomorrow to plaster the office, guest bedroom, hallway and down the stairs. This means we might be painting this weekend. Bradley hyperventilated when he realized what this means: we finally get to use that paint spraygun we picked up 3 months ago! Squee!! So. Excited.

Other stuff going on with us:

• We’re already well into the planning & prep stages for the laundry room / downstairs bathroom.
  We finally came to a decision on the whole bathtub debate and will be doing a bulk supply order in a couple of weeks. Our plan is to start working on those 2 rooms while the floor paint dries upstairs. Not gonna lie: I’m sick of taking pictures of the same 2 rooms. It’ll be so great to switching things up!
• We just got a lot of uber-fancy new furniture.
  We have to fill up a 2000+ square foot house, and it’s no easy task. We’ve been lusting over some pieces that Bradley’s company makes, and last month, we decided to take the plunge. We worked out a deal with Bradley’s boss and got a bunch of furniture at wholesale cost. Score!! We traded in one full month of Bradley’s paychecks for 6 dining room chairs, a media cabinet, a coffee table, a small bench and a bunch of nesting trays. We’ll share pictures of all of that soon.

Haikus for our staircase.

Entryway staircase
clothed in burgundy carpet.
You make me vomit.

Lets send these old stairs
to live on a nice, big farm.
Pass the sledgehammer.

Burgundy carpet,
covered in crunchy plaster,
I will f#*k you up.

(That last one didn’t count as cursing because of the symbols.)

I’m having a raging case of writer’s block. The kind where you just sit and stare at the blank screen for an hour before giving up and doing something more productive. Like watching grass grow. Or picking your teeth. Or watching YouTube videos of a pug in a toilet. I thought a little haiku action would help get the words flowing, but the only thing my little exercise has done is remind me how much I hate our burgundy carpeted staircase.

The wood is promising. With a little sanding and a little painting, it could be a thing of beauty. But we’re having a hard time seeing past all the ugly right now.

Where there should be a fabulous old finial, there’s a crusty little glass bead.

Where there should be a gorgeous old world chandelier, there’s a shiny brass Home Depot light fixture.

With 3 burned-out light bulbs that we never changed because we’d rather just yank the whole thing out and toss it in the garbage.

One day after work, I decided I’d had enough. I gathered my ammunition and went into battle:

L to R: mini crowbar, pliers, chisel, screwdriver, gloves, coffee, iPhone.

I’m not sure why I grabbed the chisel and the iPhone. The screwdriver came in handy a few times, but mostly just for picking my nails. I am not a role model. Don’t do as I do, do as I say. Only don’t listen to anything I say because I have no idea what I’m talking about 78.3% of the time.

Anyway, I’m kind of an expert at removing carpet now, so in no time, I had the carpet removed and ready to be taken to the dumpster.

Luckily for me, Bradley came home from work at that exact moment. It was a nice change to have an assistant rather than being an assistant.

Especially when my assistant is a total cutie pie:

Hello, assistant,
will you take the carpet out
to the garbage pile?

Your warm, friendly smile
makes me want to pinch your cheeks.
The ones in your jeans.

If I turn up dead,
it’s because he has killed me
for that last haiku.

Still not sure why he puts up with me, but I’m glad I finally had a reason to use one of the hundreds of shots of his Levis-wearing hiney that I’ve snapped in the past 2 months. Bradley took the carpet out to the dumpster and our staircase suddenly looked a whole lot more naked:

I wouldn’t use the word fabulous just yet.

But at least it isn’t covered in burgundy carpet. Every little step towards a non-hideous home counts, people. Bully for us! We still have to yank out all of the staples and fix some wobbly steps before we can sand and paint. But we’re finally starting to see how pretty it could someday be.

One last haiku before I’m out:

I’m a designer.
I should stick to my day job
and not write bad poems.

You’re welcome, Internet.

The ugliest room in our house.

We’ve publicly shared some pretty hideous features of our house on Bye Bye Brooklyn. No shame in our game. Our house has 130 years of history in its walls, and some pretty crappy design decisions were made along the way. We’re not worried. The house has really good bones, and it’ll be fabulous in no time.

Still, there is one room that grosses us out so badly that we seriously considering not sharing the before pictures. For the sake of keeping it real, though, we have to document the crustiest of the crusty.

Deep breath. Here we go:

This is the back door to our house, which is actually the door we use most often. It leads out to our back yard and garage, and leads in to the kitchen.

This room’s main purpose at the moment is for sunbathing:

That’s Jabba. She’s not much of a DIYer, but she’s a professional napper. While we’re upstairs demolishing rooms, she’s downstairs sunbathing and snoozing. Or interrupting to remind us it’s lunchtime:

She hangs out in the entryway a lot because it gets great sunlight through its super-ghetto windows:

Someone repaired that glass with clear packing tape. You can hardly see the crack, right? Right??

We’ve also been using this room as a place to store our recycling:

Our bike locks and helmets were thrown in here as well:

The windows overlook the ugly trellis that we’ll be ripping down:

And, in case you hadn’t noticed, there are no walls. Whoever renovated this room (and I’m using the word “renovated” very loosely), did a pretty terrible job of insulating. Everything is sort of crunched in and mushed down (total no-no), and they never got around to sheetrocking the walls. Or the ceiling:

One cool thing about this room is the exposed brick that’s been painted white:

Here it is on the other wall:

Oh, wait, I’m sorry. That’s not brick. Those are shingles. As in, the stuff that’s supposed to go on the outside of your house. The entire wall is covered with shingles that were painted white to “match” the brick:

All of those black spots you see on the shingles are places where we pulled out nails. The dorm fridge is what we lived out of before we got our shiny new fridge. Not gonna lie: that was a rough couple of weeks. You can also take a gander at our washer & dryer hookup.

We’ve been excited about having a laundry room pretty much since we started looking at houses to buy. We daydreamed about living the kind of life where we could wash our clothes while watching a movie. Throw our wash in the dryer without navigating through screaming kids running laps around the laundromat. Leave our laundry in the dryer overnight. And — oh, bliss — never ever again having to wear bathing suit bottoms as underwear because we’ve been too busy to drag our hampers across the street to the stupid, noisy laundromat.

Anyway, on the shingled wall, you can see a poorly sealed doorway (and even more nails):

Apparently this room was once connected to our half-bathroom, which was also recently “renovated.” It’s nowhere near as horrible as the laundry room, but it’s not pretty either. We’re guessing this space used to be an outdoor porch, and someone converted it into a half-bath and laundry room. And they did a pretty horrible job of it. To seal up the doorway, for instance, they just nailed a piece of plywood to the frame, painted it white, and called it a day.

There is one thing we plan on keeping from this room:

Bradley’s pretty indifferent about it, but I kind of love that faceplate. Can’t you see it painted bronze and looking really fabulous in another room? It’s one of those just-so-weird-it-might-work things that we’re going to try, and if it doesn’t work, then in the trash it goes.

We also found a thermometer in the room:

The Royal Order of Moose? Garbage.

Ugly light? Garbage.

Wait, no, we take that back. This might be salvageable. Capiz shell is all the rage right now, and with new fittings for the inside and a better way to hang it — a way that doesn’t include a cheap brass chain — we might make this work. Maybe. If we’re not totally smash-happy by the time we start renovating this room, in which case, it’ll probably die a horrible sledgehammer-related death.

We’re not really ready to renovate this room yet (we have a one-room-at-a-time policy), but we needed to get that stained carpet out. Luckily, this was a poorly done DIY job. It’s a theme in this room. So we didn’t have to rip up any carpet tacks or deal with any glue. Someone just used a stapler to staple the carpet to the wood. And we’re not sure they used a real staple gun. They looked like normal office staples. Moral of the story: people are weird.

The carpet came up easily, and underneath, we found a perfect preserved  Jackson Pollock painting!

Upon closer examination, though, we found that this was not a Pollock but a cheap knock-off by Scott:

Oh well. You can’t win ‘em all. Or, apparently, you can’t win at all with this room.

…just kidding! When it comes down to it, it’s still a laundry room. And a useable one now that we put a washer and dryer in it:

Whee! When I snapped that picture, those puppies were hooked up and doing one of the four loads of laundry we did that day. No bathing suit bottoms up in this hizzy!

We initially planned on buying new front loaders, but since we decided to splurge on kitchen appliances, we cut back on our laundry room budget. After reading a lot of reviews, we decided that maybe front loaders weren’t that great for us. I’m extremely allergic to mold. We’re sure other people are having great mold-free results with their front loaders, but we’re not going to risk it.

After looking at a lot of top loaders, we decided to buy a used set off of Craigslist.  So many people are getting rid of their 2 or 3-year-old top loaders in order to buy new front loaders. There are tons of deals to be had, plus buying used keeps perfectly-good machines out of landfills. By going to Craigslist, we were able to be both eco-conscious and budget-conscious.

How budget-conscious? Drumroll please! We got our machines for……$150 each! $300 for the set — and there’s nothing at all wrong with ‘em. We’d actually given ourselves a much-higher budget of $1200, so we technically saved ourselves $900.

As far as renovating this room goes, it’s pretty low on our list right now. But we’re already talking about doing a very light, airy look for both this room and the adjoining half-bathroom. Something modern but beachy. We’re taking our cues from the white brick wall and thinking white paneled walls and minimalist cabinetry. We’re also planning on keeping the floors light — either white or light grey — to contrast with the black floors throughout the house.

And, while we know there’s no room in our half-bath for a claw foot tub, we think this works beautifully:

Source

No rush. We’ll get to it when we get to it. For now, we’re sticking to the upstairs renovations. But we’re super excited that we can do our laundry while we’re working on the rest of the house. Or watching movies. Or going out for dinner. Or sleeping…

What we learned from this project:

• We don’t know who Scott is, but we want to have a long talk with him.
• Everyone’s jumping on the front loader bandwagon, which is great for the rest of us who don’t mind an energy efficient machine that’s a couple of years old. Check Craigslist!

Meet our master bedroom.

No matter how hard we try to wish it, our master bedroom just won’t go away. And it isn’t fixing itself either. The only thing left to do is acknowledge its presence and officially document the before pictures. Take a deep breath, people: we begrudgingly invite you into our master bedroom.

Before we got down to the working part, Bradley spent a few hours spying on our neighbors:

Just kidding. Bradley’s measuring a couple of window that need to be replaced. He’s hiding behind a window roller because it doesn’t technically roll anymore. We have to manually roll it up every time we want a little light in the room.

Most of the other window rollers in the house were ripped down during one particularly hilarious hissy fit. It was very Joan Crawford moment, except instead of NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!! it was more like WHAT KINDA ROLLER DOESN’T ROLL?! So far, only 2 rollers on the entire second floor have survived our wrath. They’re both in the room we frequent the least. Ahem.

Anyway, the window panes are so old that they have a wavy look to them, and they make everything look a little blurry.

Check out the Freestyle Painting around the glass. Maybe there was a masking tape shortage when they last renovated the house. Yeah, that must be it. The Blue Tape Shortage of Aught-Nine.

Single-pane glass has an Energy Star rating of Your-Heating-Bill-Will-Bankrupt-You, so we want to get these swapped out pronto. Ahhh, the joys of buying a 130-year-old house. No insulation, crusty windows, energy-sucking boiler. Our goal is to fix all of those problems before Old Man Winter shows up and drains our wallets. We’re starting with the 3 Smurf Room windows and 2 master bedroom windows. These are the 2 master bedroom windows that need help:

The thing in the middle that juts out a little is a chimney. And on the other wall is the radiator:

You can get a better idea of the ceiling height there. Bradley’s 5’10″ if that helps scale it. The ceilings are 112 inches tall, which is about 9.333333 feet. The height really helps open up the room and make it feel even bigger.

On the flip-side of the chimney wall is the entrance to the room. You’ll see some more Freestyle Painting around the door frame:

Please ignore the pile of insulation. That’s the stuff we pulled out of the guest bedroom / hallway wall. We were too tired to carry it up to the attic, so we piled it up in front of the master bedroom until we could barely see the door. It’s all part of our delusion master plan.

We’ve already shared our faux marble turquoise light switch covers:

Those are perfectly complemented by our faux marble pinkish-red plug-in covers:

What color would you call that? Off-red? Rose? Mauve? Also, how exactly do you pronounce mauve? Moev? Or mawv? We say mawv, but it sounds a little too New Yorker to be right. Like kaw-fee (coffee) or bee-a (beer). My absolute favorite New Yorkism ever: brawr (bra).

However you pronounce it, that mauve monstrosity is not going to last much longer in our house. There was some talk of gathering up all of the colorful faceplates and repeatedly running over them with our car, but it didn’t seem like a productive use of our time. It also didn’t seem very sane, so we’re playing it safe and just tossing them in the trash. We’re laughing maniacally as we throw them away, though, so sanity is a moot point.

One of the biggest challenges we’re having right now is figuring out where we’ll put a king-sized bed in this room. All of the walls have something going on:

The fourth wall has a door smack in the middle. After years of living with a queen-sized bed and no bedside tables, we’re being pretty bratty about our master bedroom setup. We want a king-sized bed, 2 bedside tables with drawers, and lamps. The only wall that might work is the wall with the closet, but we’re not sure the bedroom door will fully open with a bed there.

After taking window measurements, we found ourselves staring at the walls, wondering how on earth we would make this a functional bedroom. And that’s when we had a brilliant revelation. We took a couple of measurements and confirmed it: the wall had a hollow space behind it!

We could remove the entire wall, move the closet somewhere else, and have a nice set-in section that would give us plenty of room! Bradley couldn’t wait to have a look at how much hollow space was behind the wall. He ran out of the room and came back with the sledgehammer:

Doesn’t he look so ecstatic? He made the same face when we ate at a Sonic for the first time ever:

Burgers and sledgehammers: it doesn’t take much to keep the boy happy.

Bradley used the sledgehammer to smack a hole in the wall, but the hammer just kept bouncing back. It wouldn’t crack through. Um…turns out he was hitting a stud. Oops! So he knocked another hole next to it:

There was lathe behind the wall, just like we were expecting.

We pulled the wood strips out, reached in to see how much room we had, annnnnnd…

….saw the back the guest bedroom closet. Oh. Crap. The wall was hollow, alright, but there are only about 4 inches to work with. Somehow we got our measurements wrong by a couple of feet.

We blamed it on the fact we had been doing manual labor all day before we got to this project. Our brains weren’t working at full capacity. Maybe we were holding the tape measure upside-down. We needed a nap. The dog ate our homework. No matter what excuse we came up with, we knew it all came down to this: we screwed up.

After a few choice profanities, we grew silent and just stared at the back of the guest bedroom closet through what used to be a perfectly good wall. Then we walked out of the master bedroom, closed the door behind us and stacked our insulation in front of it.

Mistakes: we all make ‘em. But it takes a special type of person to walk away and pretend like it never happened.

To help cleanse ourselves of the residual guilt, we decided to do something uber-productive and totally necessary. Like go up to the attic and look around at stuff. We’ll do whatever it takes to forget.

The attic door, in case you forgot, is in the Purple Room:

Purple walls. Purple trim. Purple door. Purple floors. Prince called. He wants his palette back. Or he wants to move in and pay rent. I forget.

The Purple Room is another one of those close-the-door-and-let-it-get-sucked-into-a-vortex rooms, but it does have one huge redeeming quality:

Brick! We’re such suckers for exposed brick. It’s going to take all of our will power to not go completely overboard and expose every inch of brick in this house. We sometimes struggle with taking things too far — why do it when you can overdo it?? — but admitting we have a problem is the first step. Still, when we need a hit of brick, we go peek at the attic wall. It fills a need and keeps us from going jackhammer-crazy all over the place.

For all of you who have wished us luck in finding some antique artifacts in our attic:

We found some shutters! They’re easily as old as the house itself and are covered in inches of grime. There are 4 windows on the front of the house and we found 3 shutters that look like a perfect fit. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll find a fourth lying around!

We’re honestly not sure these shutters are even salvageable because they’re so covered in nastiness, but we’d be willing to give them a power wash if we find the missing one.

Those shutters, by the way, are the only thing we found in the attic. A few weeks ago, a sweet elderly couple dropped by the house to chit-chat, and they told us they were hired to clean up the house after the foreclosure. Apparently there was a lot of “junk” in the attic and garage, and they got rid of everything. We were a little sad, but also a little relieved because it means less work for us.

Sorry to disappoint, but unless we find something really cool hidden in a wall somewhere, our biggest finds have been a block of wood, a tin of flux, a roll of wire, a DVD and a half-empty can of beer. And that busted chimney that someone sealed up and hid under the guest bedroom floor.

What we learned from our venture into the forbidden zone:

• Measure twice, bust through wall once.
• The master bedroom may end up being the guest bedroom, and the guest bedroom may end up being the master bedroom.
• None of our friends are going to visit us after they see that last bullet point.

The outside of our house.

Our new camera finally arrived, and we didn’t waste any time putting it to use. We have a lot of pictures of the guest bedroom and hallway to share, but we’re still working on those posts. We didn’t get into Brooklyn until super late last night, and it’s been work-work-work ever since. Also, it turns out that writing about putting up sheetrock is as boring as actually putting up sheetrock. Yiish. Give us a couple of hours to work that one up.

In the meantime, we’d like to share with you the reasons we moved from Brooklyn to the middle-of-nowhere. A lot of our friends think we’re insane for moving to a small town, and double-insane for buying a fixer-upper. They they don’t understand why we would keep our NYC jobs and drive back 3 hours to sleep in a friend’s closet just to show up at the office 2 days a week.

We think this makes it all worthwhile:

We start seeing those rolling hills about an hour into our drive, and both of us get super excited.

By the time we get up into the hills, we’re in a completely different state of mind. We’ll roll down the window and breathe in the fresh air, and marvel in the greenness of everything. Everything is so lush.

Everything is so quaint and quiet.

Sorry. It’s quaint and quiet and cute. Did we mention there’s a trolley? Even the word itself is cute. Trolley — instant cuteness.

But the most important reason we moved out here is this:

The minute we saw her, we knew she was The One.

Sure, she needs a coat of paint, and we’re not crazy about the white screen door, but we still thought she was stately and classic. She had presence.

Even now that she’s all naked without her ivy.

Once we stepped inside and saw the original details, we were smitten. Check out the front door from the inside:

Ignore the pup. That 90lb attention-seeker isn’t ours. We were dog-sitting for a friend, and Paulie wouldn’t get out of my door shot no matter how nicely I asked. He’s pretty geeked about his 5 minutes of internet fame.

To give a frame of reference, those doors are so tall and neither of us can reach the latch up top to lock the door. I’m 5’5″ and Bradley’s 5’10″ (and Paulie’s a bit over 4′). We need a chair to get way up there:

It was love at first sight. And that, overly-judgmental friends, is why we became part-time New Yorkers and full-time small townie homeowners. For those of you who requested a peek at the outside of our house, we hope you enjoyed the pics. Coming up next: that brick wall we were exposing is done-zo and we have the before-and-afters to prove it!