How’s It Hanging?

We’ve been bad at updating lately. It’s not that we haven’t been chipping away on projects — it’s just that most of what we’re working on is in progress. Plus who really wants to see pictures of us plastering for the 23,408,324th time? Snoozefest. The things we’re working on right now aren’t super exciting, but whatever, we’re going to post ‘em anyway. Starting with the one project that we fiiiiinally just finished and are thrilled with.

Remember the vintage lighting fixture we found in a northern Pennsylvania thrift shop? It used to look like this:

It looked like this momentarily:

And then this:

After that, it got a serious facelift:

A couple of weeks ago, we went to a local specialty lamp store and picked up all of the parts we needed to wrap this project up because we were in a big hurry to finish up this project. This place ended up being waaaaay overpriced. We got a ceiling cap, 2 feet of chain, some silk electrical cord, and a socket for about $50. Blurgh — not great considering we paid $50 for the actual fixture itself. But we did save a ton of time by not waiting for things to be shipped to us.

First order of business: make the different parts match the fixtures.

We used the same oil-rubbed bronze spray paint that we used on the pendant itself. The ceiling cap looks so much better in ORB than glossy black.

We decided not to paint the chain and socket because we liked the way they looked:

The chain in old, so it has an aged, rusty look that we loved. And the socket is brass — not shiny, tacky, ’80s brass, but dull, aged brass. So we left it as is.

We threaded the silk wire through the chain, then connected the chain to the pendant:

Once the socket was wired up, here’s how the pendant looked:

And here’s how it looks today:

We weren’t sure whether we would hang the fixture at the top of the staircase or the bottom — both areas had crappy old fixtures that needed replacement. We decided to go with the top of the staircase to add a little drama to an otherwise boring area.

Bam. Success. Check out the way the light plays on the walls around the fixture:

We haven’t decided what color we’ll be painting the walls, but we plan on taking the lighting pattern into account.

We went with a long Edison style bulb so we get a nice overall glow without getting blinded when we look at the fixture.

That’s it for our vintage lighting fixture project. We had two goals when we started searching for lighting for the hallway: 1) we wanted something unique that draws the eye up to showcase how ridiculously tall the ceilings are, and 2) we didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg for it. We think we nailed both goals.

The entire thing cost us a hundred bones — $50 for the fixture and $50 for the parts. We did a quick check on our last trip to Home Depot to see what a standard off-the-rack fixture of a similar size would cost. We couldn’t find out as big, but we did notice that a lot of the nicer looking fixtures were well above $100. And ours definitely brings more glam.

What do you think? Did we do this fixture justice?

The orb gets ORBed.

It’s been raining like crazy in our part of Pennsylvania. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that it’s happened for weeks now. Every Saturday morning, we’d put the cushions on the patio chairs. And right around noon, we’d have to run them back into the garage because it would start raining. Not cute spring drizzly rain either, but torrential downpour rain, complete with thunder and lightening.

We finally got a break over the weekend and decided to do outdoorsy projects as much as we could. Even our furballs got in on the action.

Jabba’s perch is on the deck.

Margot’s more of a sidewalk girl.

We let our cat, Smokey, wander around in the back yard for the first time ever. We’ve tried supervised outdoor visits before, but we were worried that he would try to squeeze under the fence and make a run for it. But, uh, he’s too old to run anywhere now, so he lounged in the sun for a few hours.

While they bummed around, we worked on the lighting fixture we scored at a vintage shop in northern Pennsylvania:

We hung the pendant on a nail in the garage and ogled at it for a while. It’s the first time we’ve seen it hanging and we were smitten.

We dusted the pendant, inside and out, to get rid of the cobwebs and dust. And then we shook up a can of ORB spray paint.

Let’s talk about this paint for sec. We went through a ton of color possibilities when we decided to paint our pendant — turquoise, navy, grellow, glossy white, bronzey-bronze and more. We decided to go with oil-rubbed bronze for two reasons:

1. We didn’t want it to look cheap/plastic.
   There’s a trend right now of painting objects in bold colors like yellows or blues. It’s cute and it’s fun, but it also makes the object look like it’s made out of plastic. We love the way it looks for some stuff (like Young House Love’s adorbs candlestick!), but not for everything. To us, making this metal lighting fixture look like a plastic lighting fixture just feels wrong. It’ll look like some cheap thing we picked up at IKEA. Especially if we went with glossy white — IKEA looooooves glossy white. We’re not saying we’d never paint something yellow or glossy white. We’re just saying it doesn’t feel right for this particular pendant.
2. We don’t want it to look dated next year.
   We don’t really like following home decor trends. Basically, if everyone is doing it, we won’t. Why? Because next year, the trend will be sooooo-last-year and everyone will be in sooooo-over-it mode. We don’t want to update our space every 2 years. We’d rather set it up so it stays stylish for 10 years. That means setting it up in a way that that makes it hard to figure out when exactly it was decorated. And, more often than not, that means ignoring what’s popular. There’s a saying in the advertising biz: when everyone zigs, zag. (This isn’t relevant just for home decor trends. Tribal tattoos, anyone?)

That’s why we decided to go with ORB instead of something more funky. And we think we made the right choice. Here’s how the pendant looked after one thin, coat of ORB spray:

You can see the little specks of bronze that make the paint look metallic instead of just glossy black. And here it is after 3 thin, even coats of ORB:

The trickiest part was painting the inside:

We basically had to shove the can through the hole at the bottom and squeeze a fist through to spray paint inside. Not the most elegant solution, but it worked!

Here’s the full pendant in all its ORB glory:

We’re still totally smitten with this lighting fixture. It’s a perfect fit for the modern-meets-vintage look we’re going for.

The next step is to get it in working condition again. Currently, the pendant has old wiring:

We’re going to yank it all out and replace it with new wiring. We’re dying to wrap up this project, so we’re visiting a specialty lamp store this weekend to find something that works. Stay tuned for updates!

Quick update on the vintage lighting fixture.

In our last post, we revealed our plans to weld and spray paint this brass pendant we found:

People kinda freaked. Brass is not our thang, so we thought it was no big deal to take some spray paint to it. Apparently we struck a nerve with brass lovers, both in blog and in face-to-face comments.

Well, good news: the pendant is most definitely NOT solid brass! It’s also not copper. The brassy color is either a paint or patina. A commenter suggested it might be copper because of the way it’s gone green, but we polished down a section and it’s definitely not copper. We’re not entirely sure what it is — aluminum? steel? iron? — but we’re definitely going to follow through with our plans to spray paint that sucker. First we have to schlep it back to Brooklyn so Bradley can weld it.

We’re hoping to get it completely finished and ready to hang by next Saturday. In the meantime, we’ll be back with updates on our dining room reno. Stay tuned!

How To Find a Find: Our Thoughts on Thrift Stores

We got absolutely no work done last weekend. Instead, we went camping. We spent the weekend hiking, fishing and huddling up around a campfire with the dogs.

Our motto is, “Why do it when you can OVERdo it?” And that’s basically what we did last summer and fall. We were in a zone. Every week was spent working on work stuff, and every weekend was spent working on house stuff. There were entire months where we didn’t do anything but work, work, work. Remember how all-work-no-play made Jack Nicholson go all axe-wielding maniac? We decided we’re going to put a stop to our workaholic ways before we get to that point.

Instead of work-work-work, we’re going for a work-play-work. That way, we don’t totally burn out like we did this winter. Added bonus: getting out gives us the chance to score some sweet finds for our house. We’re talking thrift shopping, baby! On our way back from camping, we stopped at an antique store and took a look around.

We didn’t find anything on that trip, but we did recently acquire some vintage stuff that we later found elsewhere for more than what we paid. Remember these chairs that we nabbed for $6 a pop at a Salvation Army?

While we were sanding those puppies down, we found a manufacturer’s stamp:

It’s basically a little metal coin that’s set into wood so it sits flush. We didn’t notice it before because it’s in a really discreet spot on the leg. We Googled and found out that the W.H. Gunlocke Chair Company is now known as just Gunlocke, and they’re still producing chairs.

Based on the logo on our chairs, these suckers were built sometime between 1940 and 1969. A little more Googling and we found a few places selling those same chairs for way more than $12 a pair. A pair sold for $300 here. There’s one chair for sale on Etsy for $300. Yeah. $300 for one chair. And these are in “vintage” condition — they need to be refinished and reupholstered. So nabbing a pair for $12 was seriously lucky.

In case you’re wondering what the status on those chair is, we managed to completely sand one down before we ran out of sanding pads. We haven’t stopped by the hardware store in a while, so the chairs are just sitting there, waiting on us to get moving again. As far as fabric goes, we’re considering leather. Upholstering leather makes us a bit nervous, but we’re studying up on YouTube and trying to figure out where we can score some vintage cigar leather.

Another lucky find happened just a couple of weeks ago. Bradley’s boss owns a cabin in a teeny town in northern Pennsylvania. (We’ve been calling it Upstate Pennsylvania, but it’s not catching on.) We spent a week there in April, and learned the hard way that teeny towns don’t do street signs. We saw some people sitting around outside a barn, so we stopped to ask for directions. When we got a peek inside the barn, we realized it was actually an antique store. Way out in the middle-of-nowhere.

The people were nice enough to give us really detailed directions on how to get to the nearest highway, so we had to stop and take a look. They twisted our arm with their niceness. And this amazing pendant that was peeping out from a corner:

That’s a huge brass pendant. There’s a spot inside for a bulb and a hook at the top so it can be hung on a chain like a chandelier. The two pieces on the floor next to the pendant were removed at some point (probably for rewiring) and they need to be reattached. Easy fix.

We knew right away that this was The One — the fabulous lighting fixture for the top of our staircase. We walked away with the pendant and a huge gold frame (that we haven’t photographed yet) for $65. $15 for the frame and $50 for the pendant. We didn’t haggle over prices because a) they seemed like really nice people and b) we’re pretty sure that, based on the location of this shop, we were their only customers all week. We thought $65 was totally reasonable when we took that into consideration.

Cut to a few weeks later and we’re trolling through Emily Henderson’s blog for color palette inspiration. Emily is the host of HGTV’s Secrets of a Stylist, which we think is the only show on HGTV worth watching. We loooove her and her show, so we were kinda floored when we saw this pendant she posted about:

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Pretty similar to the one we found, no? Only the price tag on this one is $375. Ours is a bit bigger and more ornate, but it’s basically the same style — and we spent $50! It’s going to take about $15 and 2 hours of labor to get ours fixed up. We need to weld two spots and spray paint it. We might also change out the wiring. Not hard, time-consuming or expensive. So we think we got an amazing bargain.

As for the frame, it’s going to be spray painted and turned into a mirror for the half bathroom downstairs. We just need to have a mirror cut for it. We haven’t decided on a color yet, but we’re thinking something bold like matte black. Or something unexpected like a bright teal. We’ll figure it out once we start renovating the bathroom. Pictures of that find soon — pulling it out of the garage to photograph has taken a back seat to a couple of other projects going on right now.

Inspired by our recent good luck, we’ve been making more frequent trips to thrift and antique shops. We know it can be totally overwhelming — how do you figure out what’s A Find versus what’s junk? Here’s what works for us when we go shopping for vintage housewares:

• Partner up.
  It’s inevitable: when we go to an antique shop, one of us will get all googly-eyed over something and the other one will give it a “meh.” We’re both designers and we’re both extremely opinionated on decor. A lot of time, those opinions clash. That goes tenfold for vintage items, which can be really bold statement pieces. When we clash on those, we really clash. We have a rule that we won’t buy something unless both of us agree on it. Getting a second opinion hasn’t failed us so far.
• Take cash. But not too much.
  We usually don’t go to antique stores with more than $100 cash on us. If we see something we love that costs more, we’ll go to an ATM and take out more cash. That gives us some time to think about whether we love-love it, or whether it’s a heat-of-the-moment thing. It really keeps the impulse spending to a minimum. And, so far, we haven’t even had the urge to go to an ATM.
• Don’t force it.
  We’ve found that one of the best indicators of whether something “belongs” in our home is whether we can imagine where it will go. Usually this is a gut reaction. We saw the brass pendant and immediately thought it would look great at the top of the staircase. We saw the frame and knew it was the perfect size and shape for a above-the-sink bathroom mirror. If we find something and can picture exactly where it will fit in to our house, then ring us up. If we find ourselves hemming and hawing over where we would put something or what we would use it for, we move on.
• Is it worth fixing up?
  The best deals we’ve gotten have been on things that need some work to restore. Restoration equals time and money, so we try to balance that out against the initial cost. The pendant, for example, needs spot welding and spray paint. We have access to a welder for free and spray paint is cheap, so we jumped on it. We’ve come across other objects that are awesome, but need a ton of work that we just weren’t willing to put into it. Why buy something that’s going to sit in the garage, right?
• The antique shop is not the boss of you. You don’t have to buy anything.
  A couple of months ago, we drove to a huge antique warehouse about an hour away. We made a day out of it. We took the scenic route, we had a nice lunch at a brewery nearby, and we planned on coming back with a car full of treasures. We looked at every frikkin’ thing in that warehouse, and it was a total bust. We didn’t find a single thing that jumped out at us. At one point, we felt like we had to buy something or the day would have been a waste. But what’s actually a waste is buying something that’s not right for you or your house just because you feel like you have to. We left empty-handed, but still spent quality time together and had a lovely day off.
• What’s it worth to you?
  Here’s the thing: when it comes to vintage stuff, the worth of something is pretty much a made up number. So we make up a number. If we find something we love and think it’ll fit into our home, we’ll mentally put a price point on it before looking at the price tag. Then if we look at the price tag and it’s equal to or less than what we anticipated, we’ll get it. If it’s way more than what we expected, it’s not such a great deal for us. There are lots of shops where they don’t have set prices and the owner will just ask “what are you offering?” Or they’ll throw out a number and see how we react. In that case, we might have to…
• Haggle like a pro with a conscience.
  When it comes to haggling, we kinda don’t. We hate feeling ripped off but we also hate ripping off the shop owner. That $10 that we might be arguing about is their livelihood. More often than not, these people aren’t exactly making six figures a year. We try to remember that we’re not haggling with a vending machine — we’re talking to a human being — and we all walk away happy. That doesn’t mean we’ll shell out more money than what we think something is worth. (Remember, you don’t have to buy anything!)
• Talk to the face.
  When a shop owner throws out a price we don’t like, we let our faces do the talking. They might see us pulling a =\  and adjust the price down right away. Or they’ll ask us, “what did you have in mind?” and we’ll tell them the truth. There’s no point in low-balling, because if we think a frame would be a great deal at $15 then it IS a great deal. If they accept our offer, awesome. If our idea of what something is worth doesn’t mesh with theirs, we politely let them know it’s out of our price range and walk away. If they’re willing to lose a sale, then it’s obviously worth more to them. We don’t feel ripped off. They don’t feel ripped off. No harm, no foul.

How about you? Find any amazing vintage goods lately? How do you feel about haggling?

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:

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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?

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Table

Or office desk, rather. Take a look at what Bradley worked on yesterday:

That’s our new office desk. It’s over 8-feet wide and has plenty of room for both of us to sit side-by-side. The desk top was actually a counter that Bradley’s company started creating but then abandoned to work on something else. It was wrapped in furniture blankets and exiled to the basement until a few months ago, when Bradley’s boss did some spring cleaning. He didn’t want to throw out the counter, but also didn’t want to keep it. So we offered to take it off his hands.

It looks like wood, but it’s actually plywood covered with a 1/4″ spalted maple veneer.

That crazy pattern — spalting — is caused by fungus. Basically the tree died and rotted naturally. And then it was reborn as a fancy veneer.

You can see some little holes throughout the table top:

Those were made by worms and bugs.

Here’s how Bradley took an unfinished counter and turned it into a desk. First, he had to veneer the sides because they were unfinished.

He attached a thin strip of veneer to the table using heavy-duty wood glue. He taped the veneer to the desktop to make sure it dried in perfect position. The wood strip was both longer and taller than it needed to be. You can see it sticking up along the edge of the table:

The next step was to shave off the excess wood and get a nice, smooth edge. Bradley used a router for that:

After that, it just was a matter of attaching the legs:

We stayed in Brooklyn for an extra day so Bradley could weld a set of 3 legs for the desk. (They haven’t moved the metal shop out to Pennsylvania yet, so that’s where all the welding happens.) He used 1.5″ angled steel for the box part and a piece of steel for the “wings” that connect to the wood.

Instead of using chemicals to color the steel, we decided to leave it as is.

We liked how the edges were a shinier grey and the rest of the was a more dull black. Bradley gave the legs a clear coat of varnish:

Then we carried it up to the office so he could assemble the legs:

He put a couple of felt furniture pads on each leg to keep them from scratching up the painted floor:

Then we flipped it and pushed it against the wall:

Ta-da!

We brought up one of our zebrawood chairs to try out the desk. Bradley mock typed for me:

Those chairs are actually for our (currently nonexistent) dining room table, and we’re not really sure if they’re working with the table.

Both wood grains are so unique that we were worried they would fight for attention. The spalted maple is much quieter than the super obnoxiously loud zebrawood chairs. So we’re considering using these as our office chairs. They’re much more comfortable than they look — I promise.

After setting up the desk, we got super geeked about how finished the room is looking. Sure, we still have to putting up and painting the trim, but — holy crap! — we have furniture in there. Finally! With our spending freeze officially over, we decided to go shopping for office accessories.

Here’s how our desk looks today:

Finding those two lamps at Target was nothing short of a Christma-Hanu-Rama-Kwanzaa miracle. Bradley and I do not agree on lamps. We’ve been vetoing one another’s lamp choices for months now. He thinks my picks are too girly-grandma-chic. I think his picks are too boring. But these puppies, we both agreed on right away:

They’re a good mix of vintage and classic and modern and industrial. And the oil-rubbed bronze fits right in with the black floors, doorways and desk legs. We snagged two of those for $30 a pop.

We also picked up this big apothecary jar:

Since I work from home a lot, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the office. Which means my four-legged friends will be spending a lot of time in the office, too. So we’re using the apothecary jar to stash dog treats in. Margot’s obsessed with it:

She keeps sneaking off into the office to stare at the jar.

We’re thinking about moving it closer to the middle of the desk just in case she gets tempted to climb up there. (She jumped up on the coffee table and ate an entire bag of treats a few days ago. Total brat!) We also picked up this cute ramekin to use as a water bowl for the pups:

We keep a water bowl in the kitchen, which is right under the office. One of our dogs is no spring chicken, and walking up and down stairs is getting harder for her. So we decided to put a water bowl upstairs so she doesn’t have to go far.

The varnish that we used on the desk legs has a really strong fresh paint smell. It’s going to take a few days to fade out. In the meantime, we’ve picked up a diffuser to help de-stink the office.

We liked the cute printed bottle, and the lemongrass smell is so fresh and so clean-clean. We liked it so much that we picked up another one of these for the guest bedroom. We also got couple of letter trays to keep our paper messes under control. His:

And hers:

A set of 3 magazine boxes helps divide the desk in half. The boxes and the trays were on sale for $4 each. Not bad! We also got a small waste basket to sit under the desk:

We liked how plain and simple the little metal bin is. What we don’t like: those cords in the background. Once we have our laptops and phones in the office, there are going to be even more cords under the desk. We’re working on a solution for that and we’ll share it soon. One more thing we’re working on:

We need to find a rug that fits the room. This grey IKEA rug used to feel so massive in our Brooklyn apartment. Now it looks tiny. We might use it for the laundry room later on, but we’ll leave it in the office until we find something that fits better. For now, it’s a good perch for Margot to keep an eye on that treat jar:

Still there. Good.

Here’s what’s left to work on in the office before we can call it officially done:

• Install shelves in the closet
• Finish putting up trim (in the closet and along the brick wall)
• Paint the trim
• Install bookshelf (or bookshelves?)

We’ll also eventually put in a dimmer for the recessed lighting because it’s too bright otherwise. But there’s no rush on that.

Oh, hey, remember when the office used to look like this?

Every now and then I like to dig up the before pictures to make the “work in progress” pictures look even fancier:

We’ve been working hard to cross everything off of our November / December To-Do list, and we’re getting close. We’ll be back with some more updates — including one biiiiig project — soon. 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!

Our almost-done hallway.

Way back in April, our hallway looked like this:

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

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

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

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

We put two recessed lights down the center:

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

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

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

So do the French doors:

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

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

So pretty with the hardware installed!

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

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

Check out the flip side of the same door:

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

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

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

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

What we learned:

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

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

One man’s blue is another man’s ewww.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

View from the doorway looking in:

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

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

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

And a view from inside the closet looking out:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rest my case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we’ve learned:

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

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

Let there be (recessed) light.

There was a lot of crawling around in a dark, smelly attic over the weekend, but we went from this:

To this:

Recessed lights in the hallway! Whee! And not a moment too soon. I was getting pretty tired of literally running through the dark hall to get to the bathroom at night. The hallway is pitch black, and there are spiders everywhere. Or at least that’s what I tell myself once I get to the end of the hallway and click on the bathroom light. I’m not a scaredy cat — I’m just being cautious.

Here’s how the project went from down below. Bradley’s used a template to trace a circle on the ceiling. And then he cut it out using a jig saw:

He’s such a pro with the jigsaw. Check out his nearly perfect circle:

Once the hole was cut, Bradley crawled through the attic and installed the lights:

He also did all the electrical work to get those suckers in working order, but I didn’t take pictures of that because he was working by flashlight. Electrical work is definitely a Bradley job. I mostly just held up the flashlight for him and fetched him tools when he needed them. And constantly reminded him to be careful. And asked bajillion times whether he had shut off the power to the entire house, just in case. Cautious to the max.

Besides having to work in a smelly, dark environment, we also had the annoyance of having zero plug-ins. We had to drag up a long extension cord to plug power tools into. Bradley put up with it as long as he could (approximately 6 hours total) and then decided to install and wire a light and a plug-in in the middle of the attic:

There were a lot of “LET THERE BE RECESSED LIGHT!” and “LET THERE BE LIGHTBULB!” jokes going on. Mostly from me. Bradley was busy wiring-slash-ignoring my corny self.

On the left you can see boxes full of all our worldly possessions. Down the center you can see some storm shutters we found in the attic and might eventually clean up and hang. And up top you can see the rafters that the bats hang out in and poop from:

I long for the days we didn’t have light in our attic and I was none the wiser. Ignorance is bliss. I’ll never climb up there in flip-flops again. *Shudder*

As for as boozhey goes — that’s the fancy, French word for budget — these lights rang up to be $19 a pop. We paid just over $12 each for the cans and $7 each for a plastic piece that went inside. We also picked up a 6-pack of energy saver bulbs for about $18.

A couple of weeks after we got these, we found the recessed light cages on a clearance rack at Lowe’s for $1 each. They weren’t the type that can be installed in an attic full of insulation so they won’t work upstairs, but we could definitely install them in the drop-ceiling we plan on doing in the kitchen. We snagged all 5 that were on the shelf for a mere six bones. They were originally over $10 each, so we scored them for 90% off.

We ended up buying 11 total recessed lights — the 2 we put up in the hallway and the rest for other spots. We don’t want to sound like we’re going recessed-light-crazy here, buying em up in bulk and slapping them up all over the house. We’re placing them strategically in areas where a hanging light fixture just won’t work.

The office has a super low ceiling (under 8 feet) so having recessed lights is a nice way to have lighting without constantly bumping our heads on some fixture. And the spot right outside the bathroom also has a low ceiling.

You can see those wires dangling all the way down the hall, so even hanging a really small fixture will be visible. It kinda of ruins the whole huge-brick-wall-at-the-end-of-the-hallway thing we’re going for.

In other news:

• Our plasterer called us this morning and she’s showing up tomorrow morning to get things started. Whee!! I may or may not have squeaked out a single tear at the thought of fiiiiinally getting these rooms done-zo.
• The Ariondack chairs are stained! They need a second coat of varnish and then I’ll share all the deets with you guys. Stay tuned for that!
• We realized a few days ago that we’ve lived without a stove / oven for over 3 months! Because all of our moolah is going into our house projects right now, we’ve put the kibosh on eating out. Instead, we’ve been relying on our grill, rice cooker and microwave for all of our cooking. How crazy is that?
• We’ve also been without a dishwasher for over 3 months. I may or may not have squeaked out a single tear at the thought of that, too.