Baby Name Wall Art: DIY Gift For Expecting Parents

Know what’s nuts? We’re officially at the age where all of our friends are having kids. Scroll down our Facebook pages and it’s basically an endless stream of pregnant women standing sideways holding their bellies. It’s bananas. Apparently we all became adults and didn’t realize it. That fact really hits home this weekend when my brother and his wife have their first baby. And Auntie Leena really, really wanted to make something for the occasion.

Now, we already hit up the stores and did a little shopping for the niece, but nothing felt personal enough. We’ve been DIYing so much over the past year that we didn’t feel right about not physically making something. So this weekend, we threw a little something-something together to hang in the nursery and we like it.

This entire project is inspired by some song lyric art we found on Pinterest. We just put our own twist on it. (You can check out the original at A Beautiful Mess.)

Here’s what we picked up from a craft store for our project:

• 11×14 stretched canvas
• 3″ adhesive letters
• Glossy white spray paint
• Mod Podge
• Sponge applicator
• Patterned tissue paper

We went with a vintage-looking purple and white floral pattern because that’s the nursery’s color palette.

We did a test run to see how everything would look. Basically, you stick some adhesive letters to the paper, then spray paint the entire surface. After the paint dries, you carefully peel off the letters so reveal the pattern underneath. We chose the letters, C, O & P and stuck them to our paper:

We gave it a coat of spray paint:

And peeled up the letters after the paint dried:

The word COP was randomly chosen, but now that we think about it, it might not be a bad idea to whip up some COP art and keep it in the car. You know. In case we need to bribe our way out of a speeding ticket or something. Bat some eyelashes, put a canvas out from the glove box, do a little eyebrow waggling, give a wink. …we’d probably end up in jail.

Anyway, we were satisfied with the way the test run worked, so we went for it. First step: adhere the paper to the canvas using Mod Podge.

We were totally OK with wrinkles and air bubbles, because they’ll add some texture to the canvas. That being said, we didn’t want huge air bubbles, so we used the sponge applicator to smoosh the paper down against the canvas as much as we could. We also followed the instructions on the back of the Mod Podge bottle to a T. We did 3 coats of Mod Podge and gave it 15 minutes to dry in between.

Here’s what it looked like after 3 coats and an hour of dry time:

Air bubbles, creases and wrinkles are ok in our book.

So are brush strokes. We purposely ran the sponge applicator in different directions to get some extra texture in there.

Next step: throw some words out there. We decided to do the baby’s name repeated in a stacked row.

We used a triangle and a ruler to get everything lined up. The N’s were, by far, the toughest letters to lay down straight.

We curled the letters around the top and bottom ends of the canvas:

We ran out of O’s so we used some Q’s for the top and bottom. Shh! It’ll be our little secret.

Then we gave the canvas 4 thin, even coats of glossy white spray paint:

See how the flowers are still visible through the white spray paint? That’s completely by accident. The craft store we went to didn’t carry any of the normal spray paints we get (Valspar, Krylon, etc). They only carried this cheapie brand:

We yelled DO IT! before every coat.

The cheap spray paint turned out to be really horrible. It oversprayed so badly that our grass looks like this now:

And it went on so thin that it took 4 coats (aka the entire can of spray paint) and we could still see the floral pattern. We weren’t sure how we felt about it. Would there be enough contrast? Would the letters even really show up? Only one way to find out:

We waited for the spray paint to dry and then peeled up the letters. There was plenty of contrast. And, since we went with spray paint instead of acrylic, we got crisp, clean lines for the letters. So in the end, we really liked the way the flowers show through the whole canvas.

Here’s how the finished piece looks:

It’s pretty abstract looking until you get up close and see this:

We let the canvas dry overnight. The next day, we flipped it over to paper the back and add a picture hanger:

We gave it another 24 hours to really cure. Then we wrapped it up in tissue paper and put it with all the other baby presents that we didn’t think were personal enough to count. I’ll be delivering them tomorrow. And hopefully my sister-in-law will also be delivering tomorrow. Squee! Fingers crossed for a quick & easy trip to the hospital for her.

This entire project took, maybe, 4 hours from start to finish, minus the drying time. We love how the whole thing can be totally different just by swapping out the paper used for the background and the spray paint used for the foreground. And it doesn’t have to be a name. You could do song lyrics,  a quote you like, a passage from a favorite book, whatever. The possibilities are endless.

We like the look so much that we plan on making one for our house, too. We love the idea of having a HUGE canvas with a really graphic, bold, neon background and a black foreground. We’ll post that when we get around to it. In the meantime, we have a bunch of other projects to share. We’ll be back soon — stay tuned!

The Doors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinterest

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

And then there’s this beauty:

Pinterest

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

Check out the hardware on this simple wood door:

Pinterest

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

Pinterest

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

Pinterest

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

Pinterest

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

Pinterest

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

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

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

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

Our Tax Refund Dollars at Work

A few weeks ago, we received our tax refund. And it was the Biggest. One. Ever. Apparently when your employer forgets to change your tax info from NYC resident to way-out-in-Pennsylvania resident, that’s what happens. We hemmed and hawed for a while about what we could spend it on. We briefly considered cashing it out in pennies and making a Scrooge McDuck vault in the basement, but that didn’t work out so well when Peter Griffin tried it.

So we scratched that plan and allocated our funds to 3 things:
1.    The dining room do-over
2.    New kitchen cabinets
3.    Plane tickets for next year’s vacation

Let’s back up for one sec with an update on what’s happening with the upstairs renovation. We’re soooo close to being done with the actual renovation and almost ready to move on to the styling phase (a.k.a. the fun stuff). We still have to seal up both sides of the brick wall in the hallway and paint the trim in the office closet. After that, we’ll build some furniture and bring in the accessories to get those rooms totally finished.

It’s going to take only one weekend to paint-and-seal upstairs, but when we woke up on Saturday, we weren’t feelin’ it. Luckily, Bradley had already ordered everything we’ll need to insulate and drywall the dining room as soon as our tax refund showed up. So we moved all the furniture out of the room and got to work.

Here’s a refresher on what the dining room looked like when we moved into the house:

All together now: ewwwwwwww. The only thing that’s staying is the huge radiator, but we’re going to cover up its ugliness by making a radiator box. Sort of like putting a bag over its head.

Anyway, we’ve already done most of the dirty work in the dining room over the past few months.

We demolished the brick wall and exposed the ceiling rafters.

We sanded the floors.

We got an old-school wood stove so we don’t have to rely on oil for our heating needs.

We installed a (much less hideous) ceiling fan and track lighting.

We replaced the single-pane windows with new ones.

We’re going to beat the ugly out of this room.

With the demolition part of the job pretty much done, we’re going to jump right in with building things. On Saturday, we started building a wall.

We started by making sure there was no power running through the outlets, and then ripped off all the trim.

We had to make a decision on whether or not to keep the woodwork in this room. The cool thing about it is that it’s original to the house. But that’s about all it has going for it. We think that the thick-and-clunky trim weighs the room down. It makes the big windows appear smaller and the 11.5′ ceilings appear shorter. And, most importantly, this look is just not “us.” So we decided to get rid of the trim and go with the same look we started upstairs — trimless windows with concrete sills.

Once the trim was down, we started insulating. This room is completely un-insulated, so we’re basically hemorrhaging heat all winter.

We screwed foam insulation directly onto the plaster to add an R-value of 5. At the bottom of the wall, we noticed that the trim had damaged some of the bricks. Bradley mixed up a batch of cement and patched those spots.

He recently made a door for a fancy apartment in SoHo. When he went to install it, he noticed there was a big collection of old bricks that the apartment owner had removed during her renovation.

They were in great shape and each one was stamped with EMPIRE on one side, so we assume they were made in the Empire City a long time ago. The owner was getting rid of them, so Bradley gladly took them. This way we can have some old NYC brick in our home.

With the foam insulation complete, we taped the seams and sealed the gaps with Great Stuff.

Then we took off the basement door and framed it. That way we can cover it up and it’ll be like the door never existed.

We’ve always hated the way this corner looks. The doors aren’t the same height, which looks odd. Plus, there’s outdoor access to the basement, so this door is redundant.

Now you see it….now you don’t.

Next, we framed the wall for even more insulation.

Fiberglass insulation is my jam. I realize it makes me sound completely insane, but I love insulating. There’s something really satisfying about the click…click….click of the staple gun. And, as long as I wear long sleeve shirts, I don’t get the dreaded itchies that everyone complains about.

Bradley had to do a little electrical work for this wall, so I happily took over the insulation duties. Here’s what it looked like by the time I finished:

The fiberglass insulation has an R-value of 19. Combined with the foam insulation, we’ve brought the R-value of our wall up to R24. From R0. We’re going to be nice and toasty next winter.

You can see Bradley’s electrical addition poking through the insulation. He wired the wall we can install two swing-arm sconces. We saw this baby in the Restoration Hardware catalog and fell in love:

Source

We love the old-school look and the ability to swing the lamp where ever it’s needed. We don’t love the price tag, because this is a really simple DIY project. And our version will hide the cord behind the wall for a much sleeker look. That’s still a few weeks down the road. Right now, we’re building walls.

Fast forward to a few hours later:

And that’s what our dining room looks like today. We’ve got more framing, insulating and drywalling to do, but we think it’s already looking so much better in here.

The most noticeable difference is how tall the ceilings feel without the hideous wallpaper border along the top. We’re not really sure how that trend became so popular 20 years ago, but all it does is make the room feel smaller. Good riddance.

We’re still in the wishlist stages of planning out our dining room. Here’s what we’re thinking:

• We’re already considering a warm blue-grey for the walls.
• We’ll build a wall-to-wall built-in bench with storage compartments under the seat. This would make some seating for…
• The dining room table we’ll build from some reclaimed spalted maple we recently acquired. (The guy told us we could have it for free if we removed it from his property, and we gladly did.)
• That basement door we covered up? We realized that’s a ton of wasted space under the staircase. We’re going to turn that into a coat closet. More on that when we renovate the hallway.
• We’ve decided to leave the brick wall raw, but we need to clean and seal it. That sucker sheds more than both of our dogs combined.

That’s what we’ve been up to, peeps. We’ll be back soon with updates. What’s going on with you? Any DIY projects in the works? Are you putting your tax refund to good use?

Fab.com is only kinda sorta fab.

Let’s just get this out of the way: we weren’t paid, comped, perked, hugged or high-fived for writing about Fab.com. We purchased everything we talk about in this post with our own moolah, and our opinion is biased only by the fact that we are very cheap & very picky. That’s how we roll.

Let’s also get this out of the way: Bradley doesn’t give a crap about flash sale sites, but I’m obsessed. So when someone sent me an invite to Fab.com, I signed up and found myself completely hooked. It’s sort of like Gilt Groupe meets The Foundary (two other obsessions), but waaaaay more well curated from a designer’s point-of-view.

I basically stalked the site every day, and then one day I found a couple of things that even Bradley agreed were too good to pass up. So we put in an order and a month later — yes, a full freaking month later — we got a box in the mail:

Cuuuuuute branding! I loved the stickers on the box and the gorgeous heavy paper cards inside. But, uh, I was a little peeved that it took an entire month to arrive. Are they shipping from the moon? I would totally understand a week or two — but a month is kinda ridiculous.

On to our purchases:

That is what Fab.com described as a “100% recycled leather kangaroo desk accessory”. It features a couple of pouches to hold whatever random stuff needs containment. Think pens, keys, paperclips, loose change, etc. The pouches are large enough to hold an iPhone and charger. The mouth is made to hold post-its or stamps.

I’m a sucker for anything that can get me organized, so I was sold. I snagged it in a cheerful yellow for $22. The MoMA Store sells it online for $38. With shipping, it ended up being just under $28.

Worth every cent. I can’t say much for the quality of the leather because it doesn’t look much like leather after being painted. It feels really durable, though, and the rivets aren’t flimsy. I ended up putting all of my pens in one pouch and using the other as an iPhone holder while I work.

Here’s where things get a little more meh. We found and loved these two prints from Rococco-LA. Here’s what they looked like on Fab.com:

Source: Fab.com

Source: Fab.com

Now, when I see “print,” I think screenprint. And these 11×14″ prints two are pretty sweet screenprints, right? We got both for just under $58 including shipping. They arrived a month later (boo, hiss!) and this is what we got:

We’re super disappointed. For starters, they’re not screenprints at all. They’re just prints as in from an inkjet printer. Sure, they’re on fancy archival paper, but I wouldn’t pay $58 for something printed on a frikkin’ inkjet printer. I could do that at home.

Also, both printouts are suuuuper pixelated:

It’s hard to photograph, but the images are really blurry and low-quality printouts. And the colors are nowhere near as bright and bold as what we expected. Even the black looks really washed out:

The worst part was that one of the “prints” arrived rolled up in a cardboard tube. It’s all bent and warped from being crammed in there.

We’re trying to flatten it out by setting stuff on it, but there are ripples on the paper that aren’t going to come out.

The octopus lady doesn’t look so bad at a distance:

All in all, we were super happy with the kangaroo and super disappointed with the crappy prints. We feel like the kangaroo was a great deal since it’s a good quality product that’s exactly what they described on the site. We think the prints were misrepresented and we can’t even return them since fab.com listed them as nonrefundable. The fact that it took a solid month to ship our purchase was also really lame.

Will we ever buy from fab.com again? Probably not. But one of us is going to keep checking in every day to get ideas and inspiration for stuff we can buy elsewhere.

While we’re in the office, check out the organized closet:

At the bottom: some home workout gear.
On the shelves: IKEA boxes holding all kinds of crap that, until recently, was scattered through the house.

I even whipped out the label maker to get everything looking crisp:

Not gonna lie: I love that label maker like it was my first-born child. I love it so much I named it Martha and gave it a whole drawer all for itself. Yep. Totally normal behavior there.

Erica’s DIY Dresser

New York is full of it’s-a-small-world-after-all stories. We’ve randomly meet people who know people we know. And bumped into people we went to high school with 10 years ago and 1,250 miles away. That’s the kind of completely chance connection I had with Erica from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

I ended up freelancing at a boutique advertising agency in Manhattan and partnered up with Erica. And then found out we lived on the same block in Brooklyn, just a few buildings apart. What are the odds?

Anyway, Erica and her hubby Alan live in a new nabe now. And they’re busy cuteing up their place for the arrival of baby Max. (Yeah, I made up a word, what of it?) One of Erica’s DIY projects was to gussy up a Craigslist dresser for the nursery. Check out her results:

Frikkin’. Awesome.

I’m currently having a love affair with the color yellow, and those drawers literally made me squeal. Erica decided not to go the boring drawer liner route. Instead, she picked up some (brilliantly mix-matched) paper from Papersource and used Mod Podge to DIY drawer liners.

Bradley and I are coveting this pattern:

We love the way the colors pop against the teal. And that teal? Swoon. Even Bradley swooned and he hates anything that isn’t black, grey or white. (You can take the boy out of New York…)

The best part? Our heads are swirling with ideas for our next dresser. Time to start scouring Craigslist. Thanks, Erica!

—

You can read up on Erica’s DIY dresser here. And, of course, all images are sourced from A Bump Grows in Brooklyn.

—

P.S. Our February / March To-Do List is up. Check it out!

Interior Design Magazine

Happy Friday, everybody! It’s an especially exciting one for me because I spent the entire morning thinking it was Thursday. Then my boss Rebecca Black’d us, and I realized it’s Friday. Let the fun, fun, fun, fun begin! (In case you don’t know, getting Rebecca Black’d is like getting Rickrolled, but much worse. That song’s stuck in my head for at least another 3 days.)

We’re gearing up for a work-filled weekend, but I had to drop by to share a little awesomeness. Bradley’s company makes a lot of furniture for an interior designer in Manhattan. One of the apartments she designed was featured in this month’s issue of Interior Design Magazine — and that means a lot of stuff Bradley worked on was published.

Bradley wears a lot of hats at his job. He’s the metal guy, the lighting guy and the concrete guy. He also makes prototypes and does the more experimental/fun work. We thought it would be fun to show what he works on when he’s not working on our house.

Check out this end-grain screen:

Those are wood blocks inside a black steel frame.

Bradley worked on the fireplace in the next image. It’s the black steel structure you can see in the center:

He also worked on these black doorways:

Those are 1/4 inch steel. Neat! Bradley’s company also made the table in the center (with the funky sculpture on top) and the 2 stump tables flanking the couch. And the little table and bench here:

You can get a better look at the black steel doorways above. So pretty! For the bedroom, Bradley’s company made the bed and the cabinets behind the bed:

They didn’t make that ceiling fan, but I have to point it out because — holy crap! — it’s so hard to find a ceiling fan that isn’t totally hideous. Check out the gorgeous shower:

They made the teak bench inside. And the mirrors and cabinets outside:

You can see more work from Bradley’s company on their website.
You can read the full article here. And, of course, all the images in this post are from Interior Design’s site.

Hope you enjoyed a glimpse at Bradley’s work life. We’ll be back with more updates from our home life after the weekend. (Partying, partying, yeah!)

$50 dresser makeover.

It’s funny how inspiration comes out of nowhere and smacks you in the face. We knew we needed to give our grey dresser a major facelift, but we had no idea what to do with it. Here’s Old Grey hiding under a couple of wicker baskets:

We knew we’d fix it up right when we had the time and felt inspired. A couple of weeks ago, boom, we were inspired:

That’s the 1930s glass knob that lives on our bathroom door. It’s vintage and glamorous and sparkly and chic. In short: it’s a keeper. We thought it would be great to find a mini-version of the same knob to use as drawer pulls. I vaguely remembered seeing some at Anthropologie. And that’s when I remembered this Anthropologie cabinet from a few years ago:

Source

It’s grey on the outside, but opens up to a bright and cheerful yellow on the inside. I loved the secret pop of color. And just like that, we decided to paint the dresser a crisp white with teal drawers and throw some glass pulls on it.

Now that we had a plan, we started gathering supplies. We scoped out Anthro’s drawer pulls:

Source

Those bad boys are $8 a pop — not cheap considering we have to buy 10 of them — and they have mixed reviews. If we’re paying $80 for something, it better not be wonky, wobbly or off-color. And then there’s the whole brass thing. Not our style at all. Pass!

Next stop: the cabinet pull section of Home Depot. We found similar pulls for $3 each.

They look and feel just like Anthro’s version, and they’re bronze instead of brass. The catch? They’re acrylic, not glass. Not a big deal to us, since they looked and felt like glass. So we did a happy dance for saving $50 and walked out with 10 pulls. We also picked up a quart of paint for the drawers:

That’s Valspar Monterray Bay Teal in semi-gloss. One quart set us back $15. That’s all we purchased for this project. We had the rest of the supplies on hand: 220-grit sandpaper, wood putty, and half a gallon of the oil-based white paint we used as primer for our guest bedroom doors.

We dragged Old Grey up to the master bedroom (currently our workshop) and got to work. First, the before pictures:

That old thang has been through 2 moves with us. It’s survived being carried up to the top floor of a 3-story walkup, narrow staircase and all.

It’s definitely showing some signs of wear, though. Paint is chipped in some spots.

Hardware is still missing.

The black thingy on the left is actually an IKEA coat rack.

I needed a place to stash my necklaces because they were constantly getting tangled up. So I drilled holes in the side of the dresser and screwed the rack on. It wasn’t the prettiest solution, but this wasn’t the prettiest dresser either. Now that we have more space for storage, we can get rid of the rack and seal up the holes.

Bradley helped me prep the dresser for painting so I could take pictures of the steps involved. We started by taking the old pulls off:

The old pulls need 2 screws to attach to the drawer, but the new pulls only need 1 hole. So we used wood putty to plug up the holes we didn’t need anymore:

We’ll use the hole closer to the middle because it would feel more visually balanced. We also used wood putty to seal up the hole on the inside of the drawer:

Nobody would ever look for a hole on the inside, but we’re thorough like that. After the putty dried, we used our orbital sander to get all the old paint off:

A belt sander would also do the trick. So would a wood block wrapped in sand paper and some good old-fashioned elbow grease. Either way, the goal is to remove as much of the paint as possible and get a nice, smooth surface to roll paint on.

Next up, we wiped down the dresser using a clean rag soaked with paint thinner.

Water would work fine, too. We just happened to have paint thinner on hand so we used it. Here’s our nekkid dresser, ready to be painted:

Bradley moved on to another project and I started painting. When it comes to painting furniture we have a few tips that always give us good results:

• Use an oil-based paint.
  Latex is fine (we used it for the inside of the drawers), but oil is much more durable and long-lasting for furniture that gets frequent use.
• Apply paper-thin coats.
  A lot of people are really skeptical about painting wood because they think it will show brush strokes or have too much of a crafty / shabby-chic look. The trick to getting a smooth, untextured look is not to glob on your paint. We always do 3 (or more!) paper-thin coats instead of 2 very thick coats. Yes, it takes a little more time, but you end up with something that looks way more profesh.
• Sand between coats.
  This is absolutely essential to getting a super smooth finish. It also really helps with durability. Glossy paint doesn’t adhere well to glossy paint. If you don’t sand in between coats, your paint will eventually start flaking off. We use a 220-grit sandpaper or a sanding sponge before every coat. You don’t have to sand very hard — just enough to take the sheen off. Then wipe the dust off and paint the next coat.
• Let it dry completely.
  We’re pretty impatient people, but we’ve trained ourselves to walk away from the paint. We let each coat dry overnight before we went back to sand and paint the next coat. That way the paint has time to cure and harden, and we’re left with a really durable finish.

Just in case you’ve never seen a sanding sponge before, here’s what it looks like:

It’s great for scuffing up surfaces without sanding too much. I used it this on the inside of the drawers and on the curvy parts of the dresser.

Here’s one more look at the before:

And here’s how our dresser looks after a new set of pulls, 3 rounds of sanding and painting, and 24 hours of drying:

Hard to believe it’s the same dresser, right? The crisp white makes it so much more charming.

Then you open a drawer and — BAM! — you get an unexpected pop of color.

We love it!  And we’re still swooning over how the pulls look:

I took the after pictures on a pretty dark and gloomy day which is why they all seem a little dark. We can’t wait to see what the colors look like on a sunny day. And how the dresser looks in a room that isn’t a total disaster zone. Either way, it’s totally charming the crap out of us right now. We’re excited to put it in the guest bedroom and see what our visitors think.

Cost breakdown

• Dresser: $0 (found / reclaimed)
• Pulls: $30 for 10
• White paint: $0 (leftover from another project)
• Teal paint: $15
• Sandpaper: $0 (already had on hand)
• Wood putty: $0 (already had)
• Paint rollers: $5

Grand total: 50 beans. Whee!

In case you’re wondering how we reclaimed this dresser, it’s a case of NYC luck. We found it on the curb outside our loft building in Brooklyn at the end of the month. Leases end, people move, perfectly good furniture gets dumped. That’s when we swoop in and snatch up a piece we think we can work with.

We’re almost ready to move upstairs, folks. That means we have a ton more furniture-related updates coming up soon, including a pretty awesome IKEA upgrade. Stay tuned!

Loo La La!

We have two loos in our house: a full bath upstairs and a half bath downstairs. We haven’t shared any pictures of either one on the blog so far for 2 reasons:

1. We have a one room at a time rule (even though technically we’re working on 2 rooms and a hallways right now).
2. They’re so ugly that your eyeballs would pack up their bags and run away from home. We don’t want that on our conscience.

Still, we’re getting super close to finishing up our guest bedroom / Smurf room / hallway projects — we can practically smell the paint fumes already! — so there’s been a lot of talk about the other rooms we still have to work on. Especially the hideous porch-turned-laundry room and half-bath connected to our kitchen. Those two rooms combined are the bane of our existence right now, and our heads are swimming with ideas.

Here’s what the porch and bathroom floor plan looked like when we moved in:

And here’s a before of the laundry room:

As for the bathroom, imagine the ugliest, most shoddily-put-together bathroom you can think of. Well, ours is a step or two below that. Cheap linoleum tile. Boring, standard Lowe’s sink and cabinet. Oddly shaped single-pane window. Hideous green paneled walls. …with popcorn texture. In short: booooo! hiss!!

We seriously considered the slash-and-burn method of dealing with it, but we’re not sure setting fire to a part of your own house counts as DIY or renovating. And it definitely doesn’t count as sane or normal, so we’re going to skip the arson and and go with a new floorplan instead. Here’s what we have in mind:

• The porch currently leads out to the back yard. This is one of 4 ways to get in and out of our house. It’s a bit excessive. We’re going to seal up the doorway to the outside because we need the wall space more than we need an exit.
• We’re going to seal up the doorway to the bathroom and convert the laundry room door into an open doorway (love those!). This will give us more room for kitchen counters.
• We’re going to re-open the doorway connecting the laundry room to the bathroom. You can see it in laundry room photo above — it’s the crusty white thing behind the dryer.
• One of us (ahem) really wants pocket doors for the bathroom. It’s in the whining discussion stages right now.
• We’re going to put a bathtub or shower in the bathroom. That’s right: we’re turning our half bath into a full bath. Raising property value, y’all!
• We’re going to put a sink in the laundry room area, right outside the bathroom door. Yes, this means we’ll have to go outside the bathroom to wash your hands. We’re hoping this won’t be awkward for guests. Help us out, people — would it make you uncomfortable to have a sink right outside the bathroom rather than inside?

Another thing we’ve been talking about is having white floors in the laundry room / bathroom. The whole house is going to have black floors, but we’re going for a low-key beachy vibe. Something like this:

Source

White paneled walls, light floors and the perfect blend of modern and antique. It’s half California, half Paris. Le swoon! And then there’s this bit of gorgeousness:

Source

That tub made us melt. We’re in love with the way they mixed stark white with deep black. Same with this bathroom:

Source

But then again, there’s something to be said for the classic white-on-white:

Source

If I had a bathtub that warm and inviting, I would never get out. I’d be one giant prune 24 hours a day. A tub like that isn’t made for bathing — it’s made for soaking. Luxuriating. With bath salts as opposed to the Mr. Bubble we’re so accustomed to. We’d have to become the kind of people who keep bath salts in giant apothecary jars on our window sills. And buy fancy soaps that look too pretty to actually use. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

While we’re in love with the whole claw foot tub idea (and found several on Craigslist for under $100), we’re also thinking about doing something totally insane and unconventional. Keep an open mind and feast your eyes on this:

Source

That, my friends, is a bathtub made from a horse trough. And we’re kind of madly in love with that idea. It can also be set up as a shower:

Source

We love how they raised that shower up with blocks. It looks almost Japanese. And Bradley thinks it feels more complete with legs rather than just setting the tub on the ground. The look is a little bit country and a little bit rock & roll. But with a galvanized tub, we were thinking it might be a little too much on the country side for us. And that’s when we found this:

Source

Ooh la la, that bathtub. When we saw it, we fanned our faces to keep from having a fainting spell. It’s super modern and super old-fashioned at the same time. We love how it’s black and white instead of galvanized. And can we please talk about the wood back rest? Mercy. In a very white bathroom with touches of black, we think it would look super elegant and totally swoon-worthy.

Our idea so far is to visit a farm supply store and buy a galvanized horse trough. We’d paint the outside and inside so the tub won’t rust, and we could make a really comfy back rest to help facilitate our hours-long soaking. And — best part — we could do all of this for under $200. A horse trough costs about $100. Paint and wood definitely won’t cost us $100, but we like to pad our estimates…just in case.

Right now, we’re in our daydream phases. Who knows? Our plan might changes a hundred times. We won’t get to these two rooms until after our next project: the master bedroom. So geeked about getting that one started. There’s something about sealing up doors and making new doorless entryways that gets us all worked up!

So what do you think? Does a painted galvanized tub sound like a good idea? How about that sink outside the bathroom? Do you prefer bath salts or Mr. Bubble? We’re dying to know!

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!

Say goodbye to the Smurf room!

The Smurf room may be tiny in comparison to our other bedrooms, but we have big, big plans for it. And, like a lot of our plans lately, it involves demolition.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and removed all of the trim from the room. We labeled it “Smurf” so we could find and reuse it later.

The room is roughly 8.5 feet wide by 15.5 feet long, and the ceilings are just over 7.5 feet short tall. There are 3 windows in the room, and they’re all super old, single-pane suckers that need to be replaced.

Here’s how the room looks from all 4 corners, starting with me standing in the doorway and working clockwise:

From in front of the closet:

From the radiator corner:

And the last corner across from the doorway:

The flooring is newer (and in better shape) than the rest of the house, and the room gets a ton of sunlight. Plus we can see some big hills / small mountains off the distance.

It’s not a bad room. Just kinda tiny.

The short ceilings certainly don’t help.

Neither does the color scheme. It just makes the room look really squat. Still, we decided it would be great for an office. And with a pullout couch, it could easily double as a guest bedroom.

Bradley had another Saturday-morning project going on in the guest bedroom (more on that soon!), so he handed me the crowbar and sledgehammer and told me to go to town. I had some aggression to work out.

You see, earlier that morning, Bradley ran into our very sweet, very old and very pig-headed old-fashioned neighbor, who chastised him for “making” me move heavy furniture across our yard. Bradley told him that I wanted to move furniture because I haven’t been getting enough gym time lately and have been complaining about not getting a decent workout. Our neighbor replied, “They weren’t built for physical labor.” And by “they,” he didn’t mean sassy bloggers.

I made 2 demands when I found out: 1) that we go sign up for a gym membership immediately so I can get my guns ready for some sleeveless flaunting all up in our neighbor’s face, and 2) that I get to smash something. I also told him I was going to blog about our neighbor because he’s 100 years old and probably doesn’t read blogs. So, neighbor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for stereotyping you.

Anyway, on to the smashing and bashing. When I removed the trim, I found a couple of surprises in the wall:

A valentine (awwww!) and a hunk of bee hive (ewwww!). Luckily there seemed to be no sign of bees, so I kept smashing walls until I was too tired to lift the sledgehammer:

That’s when Bradley dropped by and took over. We had to move a radiator to get to the wall behind it. Here he is demonstrating how not to pick up something that weighs a bajillion pounds:

I asked him to pose for a radiator-lifting picture and that’s what I got. Come on, Bradley, rules are in place for a reason. Lift with your legs, not with your back. Don’t lock your knees. Look both ways before crossing the street. I before E, except after C. No white after Labor Day. Rules rule!

We haven’t decided what to do about the closet door at this point. In fact, we’re not even really sure whether we want the closet to be a closet. Our bathroom is right next to the closet — you can see the plumbing for our bathtub through the hideous hole the wall. We’re not renovating the bathroom for a while, but we could use the closet space to expand into it. We could kill 2 birds with 1 stone: remove an awkwardly shaped closet and add a considerable amount of space to the tiny bathroom.

If we do decide to keep it as storage for the office, we can always install some shelves. We also talked about designing and making our own sliding door for it. We already plan to make a sliding door for the main entrance to the room, so we could make a second one to match and hang that for the closet door. There will be a long desk that goes between the closet doorway and the main doorway. The desk will be designed to accommodate the sliding door (or doors) behind it.

Told you. Big, big plans for this little room. For now, we know we have to insulate the two outward-facing walls in the closet regardless, so we have time to plan out our next move.

When we ripped out the plaster and lathe around the window frames, we found weights hanging on the inside:

There was one weight on each side of each window, so 6 weights altogether.

Plus several other weights at the bottom. The ropes must have ripped off or the windows must have been replaced.

They’re rusted and covered in dust right now, but we think they’re really neat looking. We’re saving them to reuse somewhere — maybe in a sculpture.

A very heavy sculpture. Each weight is 6 pounds. We have 11 weights so far and we’ll find at least 10 more weights in the house from the other old windows.

We made a rule recently that limits the amount of hours we work on the house on weekends. We start right after breakfast — around 9:30 — and work until 6PM. At 6:00 on the dot, it’s pencils jackhammers down. Our self-imposed cutoff is so that we take time to relax a little on weekends. Both of us have full-time jobs and work at least 10 or 11 hours a day. When it comes to working on the house, we have a tendency to go go go until bedtime.

Between our long work hours, our 2 days a week spent in Brooklyn, and all of our renovating, we could easily burn ourselves out. We’ve got a long way to go, baby! We don’t have time to burn out! So we set up a strict deadline, and after 6PM, it’s all hot showers, BBQ grills, beers and Netflix. This way we can keep up the energy and excitement we need to keep on renovating.

At the 5:30 on Saturday, we had demolished the entire Smurf room, but we hadn’t gotten into the closet yet. And we had 14 contractor garbage bags full of plaster and lathe from the 2 walls we ripped down. Each 32-gallon bag weighed over 100 pounds:

Everywhere we turned there was a giant bag full of old walls staring us in the face:

I was so beat from an entire day of swinging a sledgehammer that I wanted to leave the bags overnight. I’m not sure how Bradley mustered up the energy, but while I took care of sweeping up the room, he carried every single one of those bags down stairs and out to the garage.

Mah hero! Mah poor, passed-out hero!

The next morning, we woke up and went back in for more demolition. The plaster and lathe were all gone, leaving behind only some studs and boards that separated us from the exterior brick.

It’s hard to imagine how people lived in this house without any insulation. I can understand it 130 years ago, but people were living here last year. They must have frozen their butts off every winter!

I spent my Sunday morning doing a pretty brainless task (the best kind of task to take on until the coffee kicks in!). I demolished the walls in the closet, creating 4 more bags of debris that had to be hauled downstairs. Meanwhile Bradley demolished another wall in the Smurf room:

That’s right: we exposed some more brick! We can’t help ourselves. It’s a culmination of all those years of living in apartments that had brick walls, but landlords who refused to set them free. Or maybe we just really, really love carrying 100-pound bags of plaster down stairs.

This is the flip side of the same brick wall we exposed in the hallway. It turns out there are actually 2 layers of brick. The brick on this side is in way better shape. We won’t have to do any re-pointing at all on this side! This is excellent news because we plan on exposing this same wall in the kitchen. This means less work for us! Squee!!

We were also pretty happy to see that the plaster is much, much thinner on the Smurf room side so it didn’t take a ton of work to get the brick exposed. Bradley used only a jackhammer for the entire wall — no hammer & chisel!

While Bradley jackhammered, I grabbed a regular hammer and moved on to brainless task #2. Every single stud in the room had about 30 nails in it:

That’s how the lathe strips (the wood strips from earlier photos) were attached to the studs. Lathe gets nailed to stud. Plaster gets smeared on lathe. Viola! Walls!

Bradley’s job was way more exciting than mine.

I kept offering to take over, but he really wanted to do this wall on his own. I think he secretly really wanted to expose the hallway brick, but he was too busy working on other projects and missed out on all that fun.

So I let him have his glory.

We finished at 6PM, and didn’t have any time left to clean up the rubble. Not that it mattered anyway. We were so beat from 2 days of demolition (sore shoulders, sore back, sore hands, sore arms, sore everything), that we couldn’t have cleaned up even if we wanted to. All we wanted to do is shower and go out for dinner before hitting the hay, so we didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before taking our in-progress pictures:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hazy, yes. But still very lovely.

We haven’t decided yet whether we will leave the brick raw or white-wash. I love the look of white washed brick. It looks so earthy, and much softer than red brick:

Source

The color palette for this room will be white, yellow and greys, so I think a white-washed wall will work better. Bradley’s not totally sold on it. We’ll probably rock-paper-scissors over it, but in the end, I’ll be spending much more time in this room than he will. So Leena crushes rock, paper, AND scissors. Just sayin’.

The rest of the walls are totally naked and ready for new windows, insulation and sheetrock.

No more wallpaper in the closet!

After taking these pictures, we used a sheet of plastic to completely seal up the doorway. There’s no door anymore, so this will help keep the dust confined until it settles. Next time, we’ll just vacuum it up and move along.

Still left to do in this room:

• Seal up cracks with spray foam insulation
• Insulate all of the naked walls
• Sheetrock (plus tape & mud)
• Replace windows
• Paint
• Sand floors
• Paint floors
• Replace trim
• Make and install a sliding door (or two?)
• Cry sweet tears of relief

It looks like a long list, but we’re getting there. Demolition always seems to take way longer than putting things back together, so we’re optimistic that this room will be done by the time our first set of visitors come out to see us (July 4th weekend…eep!).

What we learned in this project:

• Plaster is really, really heavy.
• Chuck Taylors: cute, comfortable, not meant for construction work. (Plaster is really, really heavy.)
• It takes approximately 4 weekends for us to create enough construction garbage to fill one standard dumpster.