Front Door Facelift

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No? Well feast your eyes, friends:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We also lightly polished the brass locks using steel wool:

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

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

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

We’re in love.

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

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

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

And this is what it looks like after:

BOOM. Magic happened.

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

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

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

Getting Gorgeous: New Walls For Our Dining Room

Greetings from rainy, grey Brooklyn! We just got in from rainy, grey Pennsylvania last night. We spent our rainy, grey weekend finishing up the insulation and drywall in the dining room. It was actually a two-weekend project. We started last week by installing some temporary fixtures to the dining room doorways:

The dining room is smack dab in the center of the house. Here’s a floor plan:

Even though we leave the windows and door open while we’re working, dust manages to find its way everywhere. We found ourselves dusting pretty much every day, especially in the kitchen. Dust even managed to get upstairs in the hallway and guest bedroom. How? No clue. But it was getting to be a bit much to keep up with. We found these tarp zippers at our local hardware store for $10 a pop:

Basically, they’re a zipper with a heavy-duty adhesive on one side. We stapled some plastic over the doorway leading to the hall and to the kitchen. Then we taped the plastic to the wall and floors to completely seal up the openings. After that, we taped the zipper to the plastic, unzipped it, cut a slit from top to bottom, and we have a plastic doorway:

It looks a bit like a Dexter kill room, but it works like a charm to keep the dust out. We did this for two doorways: the one leading upstairs and the one to the kitchen. We didn’t bother with the door that leads to the living room because dust wasn’t really getting in there to begin with.

Once we finished dust-proofing the doorways, we settled down for a nap on our ginormous radiator:

Not hammy enough? Here ya go:

We dragged the radiator out of the way and saw what was going on behind it:

All together now: ewwwwww…. Luckily that’s not mold we’re looking at. It’s crusty old wallpaper.

It’s the 7th or 8th different wallpaper pattern we’ve found in this house. We’ve lost track at this point. Either way, there was a whole lot of fugliness going on back there. And here’s what we found underneath the radiator:

A giant pile of dust and animal fur. Again: ewwwwww. That picture pretty much sums up why we’ve decided to make radiator boxes. We’re designing them to fit in with the overall look of our house and building them ourselves, so they’ll be more fancy-schmancy than the frumpy radiator boxes we’ve found in catalogs.

Speaking of frumpy, check out what the radiator did to the floor underneath:

We have a little patching and sanding to do. But first, we’re building walls. We started by removing all of the trim:

We talked about it a little in our last dining room post, but we’ve decided not to save and reinstall the old wood trim. The room feels so much more open without it. Once the trim was out, we built our walls.

This wall was, by far, the hardest:

Each rafter was slightly different, so the drywall had to be precisely cut to fit against the ceiling:

It was a bit like Tetris.

We were so geeked to tear down this old doorbell:

We’re guessing it was added in the ’60s or ’70s, and we’ve always hated the way it looks. So we’re replacing it with this:

It’s a small bell. Kind of a tiny version of the giant school bells that we had in our elementary schools. We haven’t installed it yet, but it’s going to look much more subtle than the giant creme-colored box it’s replacing.

Another thing we were super geeked about:

Saying buh-bye to that hideous floral wall border. We’ve been living with that ugliness for over a year now and covering it up was a happy-dance-around-the-room kind of momentous occasion. We may also have shouted “See you in hell, wallpaper!”

Check out our new, ugly-free walls. So fresh and so clean-clean! And so tall-tall, too:

To give some reference to the height of this room, Bradley’s just a bit over 5’10″. The room has always had taller-than-average ceilings, but we added about a foot when we exposed the rafters. With fresh, untextured drywall and no trim, the entire room feels so much bigger.

Here’s Bradley screwing in the last bit of drywall:

And, finally, here’s how the room looks now:

We love how the clean walls make the raw elements in the room pop. The rafters look so much better jutting out of a textureless wall:

And the spot where the rafters meet the brick looks so much better:

It’s finally starting to look more urban loft and a lot less country tacky.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can wrap this room up, though. We’re currently planning out how to replace the entry door:

It’s an old, solid wood door that would look great if we sanded and painted it, but we’re not going to keep it. It’s about half an inch thick and has the thinnest piece of single-pane glass known to mankind. Seriously. We might as well have a Kleenex separating us from the elements. This thing is doing nothing to keep us warm in the winter. So we’re shopping around for new doors. It’s not as easy as it sounds — all of the doors in our house are so old that they’re not standard-sized. Boo! Hiss! We might have to make or order custom exterior doors for the dining room and kitchen.

We have a lot of updates for you guys this week. We’re running in high gear right now so we’ll be posting more frequently. Whee! In our next post, we’re going to talk about our plans for the dining room doors:

That’s coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

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?

Hallway Cabinet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s how the cabinet looks fully installed:

Notice the massive gap along the wall and ceiling?

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

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

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

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

And after the doors are one:

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

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

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

Dining room updates.

We’ve been having a back-and-forth on which room we would renovate next — laundry room? half-bath? dining room? All three are in rough shape. But since we’ve already started work in the dining room, we’ve decided to wrap up in there before moving on to another room.

Here’s what we’ve done so far in the dining room:

• Exposed the brick wall
• Removed the carpet
• Sanded the floors
• Exposed the ceiling rafters
• Put in 2 new windows
• Put in a wood-burning stove

Our wood stove installation didn’t go exactly as planned. The chimney pipe was put in at funky angles and it looks really topsy-turvy:

We called up our installers and told them we were unhappy with their installation. So they came back and fixed it, this time with us supervising to make sure we got exactly what we wanted. Here’s how it looks now:

Much better! The chimney pipe makes a nice, straight line up. But the part where it connects to the wall is still at an angle. Our installers told us they can’t do anything about it because this part of our chimney was built at an angle. We hate how that part looks.

We’re also not too crazy about the brick repair around the chimney pipe. That’s not really the installers’ fault — the mortar looks smooth because it’s new. And it’s hard to match up brick just right. We’re working on a solution to cover up the stuff we don’t like.

One that we don’t like about our stove is how much ash accumulates around it:

It mostly just falls on the steel plate we put under the stove.

As long as we’re diligent about sweeping up, the dust doesn’t get tracked all over the floors. Aside from those few snafus, we’re in love with the stove. We haven’t really had to use our oil boiler to heat the house since we got it. We’ve been a little nervous about how much heat is escaping up into the rafters, so we decided to insulate up there:

The heat is going to right up through our floor boards and into the guest bedroom regardless, but at least that room is insulated. The master bedroom isn’t — this should help keep heat out of that room for now.

Once that was done, Bradley decided to do a little electrical work. He’s done a lot of electrical work over the years, but he always keeps this book nearby to reference:

He started by shutting off the power to the first floor. Then he removed the old switch and electrical box. He also removed all of the wires from this area so they wouldn’t be in the way. He outlined the electrical box he wanted to install:

This will give us three switches: one for a fan and two for lights (more on that in a minute). Next, he drilled holes in the corners of his outline:

He made sure he drilled inside the lines, not outside.

After that, he used a jigsaw to cut from one hole to another, following the pencil outline as best as he could:

He cut all around the outline, and the plaster popped right out:

The new electrical box slid right in:

After that came all of the complicated wiring stuff that I know nothing about. Bradley’s the electrician:

I just lurk around with my camera yelling helpful advice like, “DON’T CUT THE RED WIRE!” and “WAIT, THAT’S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK! CUT THE RED WIRE!!”

Flash forward to a couple of hours later and this is what we had:

The switch in the middle controls the fan. The ones on the outside control lights. Each one is on a separate dimmer so we can control them individually.

Next up, Bradley installed the ceiling fan:

We loved the raw, industrial look of the rafters. So we decided to roll with that theme and do exposed conduit and junction boxes. We also decided to do track lights for the dining room so we could have light all over.

Bradley made the fan perfectly centered in the room. And wired that sucker in:

The last time he installed a fan (in the guest bedroom), he assembled it on the ceiling. This time, he assembled the entire fan on the ground and then hooked it into place afterwards:

It was much easier this way. He didn’t struggle with parts and he didn’t drop any screws.

Once the fan was up, Bradley tackled the track lights. We picked up two basic white tracks from Home Depot for $20 a pop.

Each track sits in the middle of a beam. We spaced them evenly on either side of the fan. The conduit for the track lights were a little tricky to install because we had to bend the pipes at 90-degree angles. Bradley had to use a pipe bender for that:

He told me that you have to buy a different pipe bender for different diameters of pipe. This one is a 1/2″. If we had to bend 3/4″ pipe, we’d need a 3/4″ pipe bender. Bradley only owns a 1/2″ because it’s a pretty basic size for what he uses.

Little bit of a disclaimer here: pipe bending is kind of a science. Bradley admits he doesn’t really do it the “proper” way. He does the quick-and-dirty method that doesn’t involve formulas and rules. He recommends watching YouTube videos if you want to learn the right way.

Here’s how Bradley bent our conduit pipes:

He put the pipe through the bender, stood on the pipe and bent the pipe back:

I helped him figure out a perfect 90-degree angle using a small level:

And we had a bent conduit:

After bending the conduit, Bradley cut it down to size using a hacksaw:

And he installed it to our tracks:

The lightbulb swinging from the junction box in the middle is temporary. We weren’t loving any of the track lights at Home Depot or Lowe’s, so we decided to hold off on buying them.

We turned the power back on, flipped a switch, and ta-da!:

It works!

Bradley had one more trick up his sleeve before the sun went down:

He wired up a second set of switches and an outlet on the opposite side of the room.

This way we can turn the lights off and on as we go into the kitchen.

Next up for this room: insulation. Our spending freeze is almost over — fiiiinally! — which means we can do a big bulk purchase of everything we need to wrap up the dining room. Or at least make it less fugly.

We’ll be back soon with updates from what we did this weekend. Things are about to get super busy around here. Both of us have December 26-31st off from work so we’ll be tackling a bunch of projects on our to-do list. Stay tuned!

Hot Water Heater

Happy humpday! The week is half over, and we’re still recovering from our work-filled weekend.

We’re on a spending freeze from hardware stores for the rest of the year. We’re taking the time to do odds and ends projects that we’ve been putting off. On Saturday, we installed a hot water heater. And by “we,” I mean Bradley. Because I was off playing with my new favorite toy:

I have a label maker. You know what this means, right? I’m one step closer to becoming a crazy cat lady. I can officially conquer the world. I’ll show you what I did with Labels McGee in our next post. It was exhilarating. I blew my nerd gasket at least twice.

Bradley started out by removing the staircase that leads up to our dining room. We’re sealing up this entrance anyway, so the staircase was a goner anyway. Besides, this guy hasn’t demolished anything in weeks:

He was itching to get his sledgehammer on.

Once the staircase was out of there, Bradley swept up all of the dirt and grime covering the cement floor:

He uncovered a secret message:

March 12, 1949. Which means our basement floor was poured nearly 63 years ago. Yipes. Definitely time for an update, but we won’t get to that until next year.

Next up, Bradley stacked a few cinder blocks in the spot where we wanted the hot water heater to go:

We wanted to elevate the hot water heater just in case we ever get water in our basement again. The cinder blocks are about 8 inches tall, so it gives us a little piece of mind knowing our new water-heating robot won’t drown.

Look at those googly eyes. Cutest robot this basement’s ever seen!

We got our GE GeoSpring back in September and it’s been hanging out in our basement ever since. We got it because it’s one of the most energy-efficient water heaters on the market. And, thanks to a tax credit and a rebate from our electricity company, this puppy cost us only $400.

With the water heater elevated, Bradley got to work on the plumbing.

We’re going to give a brief description of what we did, because a) a long-winded description would put everyone to sleep, and b) the details of what worked for us may not work for every house.

Bradley started by turning off the water main while I turned on all the faucets in the house. This relieved the pressure from the pipes. Next, he shut off our old boiler and started disconnecting the pipes to splice in the hot water heater. He measured out all of his pipes, cut them and then soldered them together:

I asked Bradley what he was doing in the pictures above and this is what he said:

You can say that I was soldering a ball valve. Not a gate valve. Because gate valves suck.

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

He also said that he “tied in the lines” and “spliced in the unit” and “installed a 30-amp breaker for the power feed.” And that, friends, is why I write the blog. Because nobody knows what a power feed splicing unit breaker is. Also, he’s more photogenic. And I have an irrational fear of getting swallowed up by big machines.

In about 3 hours, he had the water heater up and running:

We set it to hybrid mode. This means that it’s going to suck up the warm air from the room and use that to heat the water. It’s also going to use electric coils during peak times.

An added bonus is that it dehumidifies the air in the room. This means our always-muggy basement might finally dry out. And hopefully be less stanky in a few weeks. We’ll keep you posted.

Bradley insulated all of the water pipes in the basement. Here he is putting pipe insulation on the hot water line:

And the cold water line:

This improves efficiency because it keeps the warmth in the hot line and reduces condensation on the cold line.

Bradley also put gaskets around the basement door to help stop drafts:

That’s the only way in and out of the basement now. It needs a little….aesthetic help:

We’ll get to that eventually. Right now, we’re telling ourselves that it looks rustic and quaintly old-fashioned. We like to mix our Kool-Aid with equal parts denial and ignorance. That’s the juice that keeps us going!

We’ll be back soon with more updates on our weekend projects. Stay tuned, peeps.

—

What we learned from this project:

• This is Bradley’s fourth hot water installation, so he didn’t learn anything. Good thing I asked a lot of questions because I learned a lot.
• There might be a little air in the lines, but it’ll pass. Basically this means you might be in the middle of a nice, hot shower and suddenly get blasted with icy cold water. I speak from personal experience when I say this suuuuuucks.
• Before soldering, sand the pipe and the fitting. Shiny pipes are clean pipes. And that helps the solder stick.
• Make sure your pipes are totally drained before you solder. Otherwise it’ll produce steam that will keep the solder from absorbing into the joint.
• Apply flux to both pipe and fitting.
• Use MAPP gas, not propane, when soldering. MAPP gas burns hotter. (It’s the stuff that comes in a yellow tank.)

Insulation blows.

We kicked off our Halloween weekend with a good ol’ fashioned panic attack. Why? Because this happened:

Ohhh, the horror!! How are we going to survive winter with an uninsulated attic?

OK, it’s not completely uninsulated. But it might as well be. There are only 4 inches of the fluffy stuff upstairs. That’s an R-value of approximately 9. Or basically nothing. With snow falling and temperatures dropping, we decided it was time to stop fighting the inevitable. We needed to insulate.

Once we insulate the attic, we won’t be able to use it for storage anymore, so we had to make sure and completely empty the attic. We also won’t be able to walk around the attic  anymore because it would crush the insulation. We had to figure out a way to access the wires and other stuff we might need someday. And, finally, we needed a way to insulate the entrance to the attic:

We started by building a ledge to keep the insulation contained:

Bradley showed me how to install baffles along the edge of the attic:

I took over that job while Bradley built the catwalk:

The catwalk is basically an elevated trail that we can crawl along to access anything we might need without disturbing the insulation.

Here’s how we sealed up the entrance:

We stacked two sheets of 4″ foam right on top of the ledge. That gives us an R-value of 20. The staircase leading up to the attic will also act as an air pocket and hopefully help retain some of our heat downstairs.

While we were working, we heard a rustling noise in the corner. And then a squirrel popped out out of the old insulation:

He took a few steps towards us and just stood there. But something was off. The squirrel seemed…drunk? He was teetering and his eyes were all droopy. Before we could figure out what was happening, he climbed back into the insulation and hid under the floor boards.

Bradley checked out the situation and it seemed like our new squirrel friend was napping. We gave him a few gentle prods with the end of a broomstick and he refused to budge. So we grabbed a hammer and pried the floor boards up to see if we could scare him out:

And that’s when we realized our squirrel was actually not napping, but dying. Rapidly. We got him out just in the nick of time. Poor little guy. We actually feel really lucky that he came out and warned us rather than just dying quietly under the floorboards. That could have been really gross and smelly.

On a less sad note, here’s how the baffles looked when finished:

After that, we used Great Stuff to seal up the cracks between the floor and the ledge:

Next up: insulating!

Before we rented the insulation blower, we measured out the square footage of our attic — it’s 950 square feet. Then we went to Home Depot to buy our insulation and pick up the blower. The rental desk employee helped us figure out how much insulation we would need to add another 12 inches to our attic. It would cost us $750. Not bad! Unfortunately the blower was checked out by someone else, so we went to Lowe’s instead.

This is where our whole squirrel-died-Home-Depot-was-a-bust day turned around. Lowe’s had a blower available. They also had a different brand of insulation that was formaldehyde-free. That brand ended up being waaaaay cheaper than the brand Home Depot carried. Adding 12 inches to our attic would cost us only $435 at Lowe’s! That’s $315 cheaper. Whee! We love saving moolah!

The only catch with Lowe’s was that we had to buy a minimum of 20 bags to get the blower for free. We only needed 15 bags to add 12 inches, so the other 5 bags would be extra R-value. We loaded up and drove home.

We had a 100-foot hose to work with, so we didn’t even have to carry the insulation upstairs. We just ran the hose along the banister and up the stairs.

The attic is dark and creepy and smelly, so I volunteered to load the machine while Bradley sprayed. I was a little worried that I’d somehow hurt myself. Maybe the machine would eat up my fingers. Maybe my sleeve would catch on a gear, and I’d get swallowed up.

Every project starts with me wondering if I’m going to fall into a machine and get eaten. It’s totally irrational. Especially when the blades are covered with an inch of soft rubber. So, I flipped the switch and let ‘er rip.

I fed the machine with a quarter block of insulation at a time. The blades fluffed up the insulation and blew them up to the attic where Bradley sprayed it in soft piles:

It looked like a winter wonderland up there.

The next step was to carefully clear the catwalk so we knew where it was:

Bradley used a small broom to gently push insulation off and to the sides. Here’s how it looked when we finished:

We started out with 4 inches of insulation and an R-value of 9. We ended up adding 16-20 inches. We’re not sure what the R-value is now, but it’s over 44. The recommended amount for our area is 38, so we’re geeked. And we can feel the difference already. The second floor used to be so cold, we couldn’t hang out there for long unless we were working. Now? Nice and toasty.

The whole process took us about 6 or 7 hours. It was one of the easiest, most mindless jobs we’ve done around the house. The hardest part was not getting bored to death. Even if you’re not handy, you can totally insulate your attic in a day. Best part: you’ll save a ton of dough. Check out our budget breakdown.

What we spent
20 bags of insulation = $580
Blower rental = $0

Grand total = $580 for more than R-44.

Cost of buying R-38 insulation at Home Depot = $750
We saved $170 by going across the street.

Cost of having Lowe’s install R-38 = $1,881
We saved $1,301 by doing it ourselves.

—

What we learned:

• Shop around.
  We got lucky that Home Depot didn’t have a blower available so we had to go to Lowe’s. We saved a ton of money. Check both places before you rent!
• Prep your attic the day before you rent your blower.
  On Saturday, we cleaned our attic, built the ledge and catwalk, and went to Lowe’s to pick up the insulation and blower. On Sunday, we insulated for 6 hours straight, then took the blower back.
  
• You will feel scratchy all over.
  It’s unavoidable. Wear long sleeves, pants and gloves. And, for the love of Pete….
• Wear goggles.
  We didn’t and we’re still regretting it. Our eyes are totally scratchy and raw.
• Dress your dog up for Halloween.
  It has nothing to do with insulating, but it’ll make you feel good. Trust us.
  

We’ll be back with some more updates on what’s going on in our casa. Hint: it’s getting hot in here. We’ll take off all our clothes. Not really.But at least we’re no longer going to bed in sweaters and wool socks. Stay tuned for that, coming up soon!

Our biggest rookie mistake so far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creeping down the staircase.

We mentioned in our last post that we’re hiring a professional plasterer to do our mudding for us. Turns out that’s way harder to do than we expected. 3 of the plasterers we found in the phone book didn’t pick up the phone when we called. Only one of them called us back and set up an appointment to give us an estimate….and then he never showed up for it. He also didn’t pick up his phone when we called him twice after he blew us off. Yup. Some people must haaaate making money.

We called our lumber yard — Bradley’s BFFs with the guys who work there now — and they recommended a plasterer who the local contractors love. We were feeling pretty burned by the last guy, so we weren’t expecting much, but when we called, she picked up her phone(!), sounded competent and professional(!), and is showing up early on Saturday morning to give us an estimate(!).

Since there’s not a whole lot we can do in the office and guest bedroom until the plaster is done, we decided to continue insulating down the stairs. And by “we”, I actually mean Bradley. He did this project mostly solo while I did other stuff we’ve been procrastinating on (ahem, laundry). I snuck in at regular intervals to take pictures.

Bradley started out by making sure the walls were level:

Bradley’s aunts in Texas will be happy to note that his underwear is not showing in that picture. Treasure it, ladies. I can’t promise you many more of those. The man’s pants have a mind of their own.

Surprisingly, the wall that runs along the staircase is almost perfectly level. This means we won’t have to go shim-crazy like we did in the hallway. Remember that fun project?

We remember. No matter how hard we try to forget, we can’t.

The ceiling is slightly off, but we’re not worried about it right now. That’ll be next week’s headache. Aaaahahahaha! Hahahaha!…haha….ha. Heh.

The next step was to put up furring strips, so we have something solid to attach our insulation and drywall to:

The silver square in the middle is a leftover piece of styrofoam insulation. Bradley used it as a template to space out his furring strips at an equal distance. After that, he attached some furring strips along the top and bottom of the wall:

In case you’re wondering how Bradley got way up there to put up furring strips, feast your eyes on this:

That, friends, is the Little Giant Select Step ladder. We picked it up at Home Depot, on sale for $134, down from $199. Whee! We’re writing up a (totally unofficial and completely not-compensated-for) review of that right now and it’ll be up later today. Or maybe tomorrow. Or, probably, 2 weeks from now. We’ve been pretty bad bloggers lately.

Next came the first layer of styrofoam insulation:

Bradley came up with a shortcut to quickly cut the angled pieces along the top and bottom:

He made a template using 2 leftover pieces of wood. He butted up one piece of wood against the vertical furring strip, and lined up the other piece of wood against the angled furring strip. Then he screwed the two pieces of wood together in 3 spots so they won’t move at all.

Then he just lined up the template’s straight edge with the styrofoam’s long edge and cut along the angle.

The cut pieces easily slid into place, and then Bradley nailed them directly to the plaster. He had a bunch of triangle pieces left over:

They fit perfectly into the taller parts of the wall, where the insulation didn’t quite reach all the way to the bottom:

He just had to cut them along the top and side to get the right width and height, and then nailed them directly into the wall.

After the first layer of styrofoam insulation came a second, slightly thicker layer of styrofoam insulation. Unfortunately we ran out halfway down the stairs, so this is what it looks like today:

Bradley switched gears and went back into the hallway to seal up the bat cave and finish putting up drywall on the doorway:

Bradley put a header above the door frame (easy) and then had to figure out how to make the doorway level both visually and technically (not easy). Our 130-year-old house has settled over the years, so our floors and our ceilings have a little bit of a lean to them. The hallway is one of those places where the lean is especially obvious.

Bradley ended up making the doorway un-level on purpose so that it looks visually level when you’re standing on the staircase. It made more sense than making a level staircase that looked totally wonky. He had to skim like a mad man to get the wall level on both sides.

Here’s how all the shimming looked from underneath:

Luckily nobody will ever know what’s really going on under there, because the whole thing is now covered with a layer of drywall:

Bradley put some drywall up on the hallway ceiling while he was at it:

And even more drywall along the bottom of the staircase that leads up to our attic:

And that’s when we ran out of drywall. Bradley’s picking up more styrofoam insulation and drywall tonight. He has the day off from work tomorrow, and he’s spending it finishing off the hallway. His big challenge will be to drywall the hallway outside the master bedroom and purple room:

The door on the left leads into the purple room. The door on the right leads into the master bedroom — and we’re going to remove the door, put in some studs and cover the whole thing up with drywall as if it never existed.

Right now the master bedroom suite looks like this:

We’re not sure when exactly we’re going to gussy up in inside of this room, but after talking about it for nearly 3 hours on our last drive to Brooklyn, we finally have a game plan on the order of the rooms we’re renovating. From next up to last-in-line:

• Laundry room + downstairs bathroom
• Kitchen
• Dining room
• Master bedroom
• Living room

After that, we’ll move to the basement, garage, exterior of the house and the yard. But we’re not planning that far ahead. One room at a time. Unless we’re doing 2 rooms and a hallway. And some stairs. Just sayin’.

Stay tuned for our review of the Select Step ladder and some other random stuff that we couldn’t cram into one post. How’s that for an exciting outro?

Things get a little batty. (Wokka wokka!)

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

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

Here’s how it looks today:

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

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

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

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

And we put up drywall on the office doorway:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we learned this weekend:

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