Putting the labor in Labor Day: DIY Moulding

If it were up to Bradley, there would be no moulding in our house. We’re already doing trimless windows and doors, but he’d go one step further and have drywall go straight to the floor with no trim lining the bottom. Unfortunately for him, we live in reality. It’s way too hard to get drywall just perfect when you have a 130-year-old house with wonky floors. Sometimes molding is necessary.

We kicked off our Labor Day weekend by visiting Lowe’s to check out the trim selection. Unfortunately we weren’t off to a great start — we couldn’t find anything we liked. We wanted something that looked clean and modern but everything they had in stock was fugly curved. It was also ridiculously expensive. Each 8′ piece of trim was $14. Instead of spending major moolah on trim we weren’t in love with, we moseyed on over to the lumber department. We walked out with 2 sheets of 3/4″ MDF for $60. That’s the cost of 4 pieces of trim from Lowe’s, which is barely enough to cover our hallway. Boo-yah!

3 inches is the standard height for floor molding — it gives you just enough to cover the gap between wall and floor, and a little extra in case there were any plaster issues that need covering up. So we set up our table saw to cut 3″ pieces and let ‘er rip.

We got 29 pieces out of the 2 sheets of MDF. We also made enough dust to fake a moon landing in our garage. MDF is basically just sawdust held together by glue, so it shreds like crazy. Check out our dust pile:

We’ve been dying to try out our paint spray gun for a while, and this was the perfect excuse. Bradley grabbed our giant pail of primer:

Annnnd he spilled a bunch of dust in it when he tipped the lid by accident:

He had to skim it out with paper towels — it worked like a charm. After that, he went to set up the paint area while I mixed the paint with the world’s largest stir stick:

I caught up with him as he was reading up on how to get the paint sprayer running:

We purchased this bad boy about 2 weeks BEFORE we had the keys to the house. Seriously. We wanted to start painting so badly that we just went ahead and got it, along with a giant bucket of primer and 2 gallons of paint for the guest bedroom.

They’ve been sitting in storage for 4 months. Guess we jumped the spray gun. Wokka wokka!

Basically it involves putting one hose into the paint and another into a waste bucket. Then you turn the machine on and it starts pumping paint.

Once paint dribbles into the waste bucket, you transfer over both tubes to the paint bucket and you’re good to go.

Neither of us had ever used a paint sprayer before but it was pretty intuitive: pull the trigger and move the nozzle from one end of the wood to the other in a smooth motion.

Here’s something else that’s also intuitive: if you spray paint on your lawn without a tarp, you’ll get paint on your grass.

Whoopsie doodles. At least the paint turned out smooth and perfect, even if our grass did end up looking totally grungy. We finished off one batch of 5 in 46 seconds — yes, I timed it — and then we took a break to set up some tarps before moving on to a new batch.

You’ll notice our half-painted fence in the background. We’re pretty sure that’s the bane of our neighbors’ collective existence. Too bad for them, we don’t plan on renovating the outside of our house until Spring 2012 because we have a whole lotta indoor renovating to keep us busy till then. We like to think of it as increasing property values from the inside out.

Meanwhile, back in our impromptu spray booth… If we had rolled these puppies, it would have taken 2 or 3 minutes per piece of trim. With the sprayer, we were averaging 45 seconds for 5 of them. At this rate, we could get a room painted — floors and ceilings — in 10 minutes!

Another major bonus of spraying instead of rolling or brushing: the paint went on perfectly even and it had no texture whatsoever. We don’t mind the light texture that paint rollers leave behind, but we loooooove the silky smooth textureless look of spraying. The paint also dried super fast. Maybe it’s the thin, even coverage, but every piece was dry-to-the-touch in less than 5 minutes. We gave it about 20 more minutes of dry time and then carried it upstairs to test how it’ll look:

We still have to prime the top, but we wanted to sand the edges a little more before we do that. We’ll probably do it when we’re spraying primer on the walls. The paint sprayer is super easy to set up and use, but it’s a pain in the butt to clean. Waiting till we paint the walls will make life easier.

Speaking of making life easier, someone got a new toy that’s going to speed things up in the angle-cutting department:

We have a lot of frames for artwork and for mirrors that we need to cut, plus a buncha trim for the house. We’re also going to be doing reclaimed plank walls for the laundry room / bathroom downstairs, so we’ll need to cut a lot of angles to get perfectly joined corners. Knowing all of this, we went ahead and splurged on a miter saw.

Bradley wasted no time testing that sucker out:

We’ll be able to join 2 pieces of trim together with no problem. We even cut this teeny tiny piece for a tight corner:

So that’s it. We made our own trim — enough to cover 232 feet, and it only cost us $60 plus a few bucks worth of primer. The entire project took about an hour of actual work, and about 30 minutes of dry time, so it was a quickie.

Our DIY trim is definitely not a traditional floor moulding with rounded edges and base caps and base shoes and junk, but we’re not really the traditional types. We’re going for a more modern, minimalist look upstairs and these fit right in with our cement window sills and our bold doorways. Once we paint the floors and trim black, they’ll be more of an extension of the floor rather than a moulding along the wall.

What we learned from this project:

• Standard moulding kinda sucks and it’s way overpriced.
• If you’re into that traditional curvy look, all you need is a router and a base board router bit. It’s just one added step in between the cutting and the priming.
• We’re not really sure how much money we actually saved by going the DIY route, but we’re pretty sure it’s enough to fill a small room with coins and swim around in it like Scrooge McDuck. For 60 beans and 1.5 hour of our three-day weekend, we made enough molding to cover all of the rooms and hallways upstairs. We might even have a little extra leftover.
• Spray guns: best $200 we’ve ever spent, hands down.

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Legal junk: none of the brands mentioned or shown have paid or perked us for writing about this post. They’re all things we paid for and we use ‘em because we love ‘em.

We don’t need no stinkin’ doors.

We have big, big plans for our master bedroom. We want to take it from this hot mess:

To this sleek, sexy, sophisticated new floor plan:

Right now, the master bedroom isn’t a big priority. Once the guest bedroom is done, we’ll furnish it and move in. This will free up the living room (currently our bedroom) and the dining room (currently our living room), and we can shuffle things around a bit so we can get started on our next big project (the laundry room / bathroom downstairs).

Still, we’ve made some progress in the master bedroom. A few weekends ago, we demolished the wall that separated the small purple room and the master BR. Here’s how it looks right now:

This weekend, we scratched one more thing off our to-do list. We sealed up the doorway leading to the master bedroom so the only way in and out of the room now is through the purple room. Here’s how the hallway originally looked:

Bradley was directing traffic, I think. Or signaling a right turn. I forget which. Here’s how the same hallway looks with some fresh drywall lovingly slapped right over the door frame:

Ta-da! Doors? We don’t need no stinkin’ doors!

Sorry about the dark photos. Bradley’s doing some electrical work, and we basically shut down the power upstairs until he finished. More on that soon!

Here’s the inside of the master BR last week:

Now you see it. Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. But once we renovate the inside of the master bedroom suite, a little drywall will go right over the door frame. Nobody will ever know that it existed except us. And the internet.

I removed all of the trim and the door, Bradley framed it in with some 2×4′s, and the drywall went over the old doorway, making it seem as if it had never been there to begin with. So our purple room is officially part of the ginormous master BR now. And we’re already busy designing it out in our heads.

Right on cue, a Crate & Barrel catalog arrived in the mail and the theme: fresh Danish. Be still our collective beating heart. We love Danish design! We thumbed through it, soaking up ideas and inspiration. And then we saw this:

Source

That’s it. That’s the wall paint for the master bedroom. We both agreed on it without a fight. Usually there’s a little back-and-forth where I think a color is just right but Bradley thinks it’s too dark / too bright / too blah / too weird. This smokey grey with the white trim and accessories, though, was one we both instantly loved. Bring on the paint chips — let the matching begin!

Anyway, back on the outside, Bradley’s totally done with the drywall, right up to the ceiling.

Our plasterer was held up with another gig, so she won’t be plastering until next weekend. In the meantime, we got everything 100% ready for her visit. All of the windows are drywalled so they’ll have the trimless look we’re going for. And the raw edges of our drywall now have corner beads:

That way we’ll have crisp, clean lines that butt up against those raw, rough brick walls. It’ll look faboo. …if our plasterer ever shows up and gets the job done. Fingers crossed for Thursday!

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?

A project we completely forgot about.

Or maybe we tried to purposely forget about it since it totally breaks our one-room-at-a-time rule.

Our dumpster was scheduled for pickup on Monday morning, so late on Sunday we wanted to fit as much junk in there as possible. The only problem was that we were out of bags of lathe and plaster to throw in there. And that’s when we had a brilliant idea: lets demo the master bedroom.

It’s our last major demo project upstairs, so we grabbed our sawzall and our hammers and smashed some plaster.

This is the wall that connects the master bedroom to the purple room. We drew an outline of the hole we wanted (hard to see because it’s in pencil), and then we started bashing away at it.

Bradley used the sawzall to cut the doorway.

Once we got to this stage, we decided that the entrance didn’t seem wide enough. It just didn’t feel right yet. So we expanded it and ended up with this:

Much better!

We left the studs up for now because we didn’t have time to properly frame the door. This isn’t a weight-bearing wall so it wasn’t totally necessary, but we like to err on the side of caution.

We love the way the lathe and plaster stained the wood:

We plan on salvaging it and maybe turning it into a set of stacked floating shelves.

We ended up removing the radiator when we expanded the entryway because it was in our way. We’re not sure we’ll be putting it back. The master bedroom has a big radiator and it should be enough to heat both rooms.

Here’s a view from the purple room looking into the master bedroom:

And from the master bedroom into the purple room:

We’re going to seal up the door in the master bedroom so the only way to get in and out will be through the purple room. And we’ve started our hunt for some cushy chairs to put in the purple room so we can turn it into a reading nook. More on what we plan to do here.

One last thing before I have to go spend my Saturday morning pulling staples out of the freshly de-carpeted floors:

We found another Scott original behind our attic door! Jealous??

Have a fabulous weekend. We’re off to gather more material for blog posts — and maybe eek a little closer to having one room finished in this house!

We’ve been busy.

We’ve made so much construction debris from the 2 rooms and 1 hallway we’ve demolished that we were up to our ears in garbage.

OK, not really. But the pile was waist-high and took over one half of our 2-car garage.

Most of those bags are filled with plaster crumbles and lathe strips, and even my poor camera lens didn’t make it through our demo days without getting covered in little bits of plaster dust.

For the past 2 months, one side of our garage has been the landfill, and the other side has been our supply storage:

From L to R: bad graffiti, studs, planks, sheetrock, foam insulation, new windows, more sheetrock, more bad graffiti.

Apparently some neighborhood kids broke into the garage before we got the house and left some pretty terrible graffiti on the walls:

“Reject of Society” still cracks us up every time we see it. Can 13 year olds be any more dramatic?

Check out our new low-e windows for the Smurf room:

We kept looking at them longingly, wishing we were installing windows instead of doing grunt work. See, our garage was so full with garbage that we decided to rent a dumpster.

And we spent half of Sunday hauling bags and planks and rolls of disgusting old carpet from the garage to the dumpster.

We filled up the entire thing within the matter of hours. And we saw something we haven’t seen in a very long time:

The floor of our garage! Look closely and you can see our dishwasher. We miss that sucker like nobody’s business. Someday it’ll live in our kitchen, but for now, it’s in renovation limbo.

We found something else on the newly rediscovered garage floor that totally freaked us out:

At first glance, we thought it was mouse poo, but then we found the culprit sleeping in the rafters of our garage attic: a teeny, tiny bat! We were totally grossed out by the poo all over our stuff, but at the same time, we thought the bat was….kinda cute. Plus she’s keeping bugs out of our garage, so she’s earning her keep. But in the end, the poo is too gross to deal with. We’re going to wait until she leaves one night and then seal up all of the cracks in the garage’s attic. Sorry, little bat!

After we finished garbage duty, we split up and worked on two different projects. Bradley mudded the hallway and Smurf room, and I emptied out our guest bedroom.

Spoiler alert! We’re putting up closet doors in our guest bedroom! More on that later. We’re getting sooooo close to finishing up the guest bedroom. It’s almost painting time! Exciting!

I also removed all of the trim around the guest bedroom windows:

We weren’t huge fans of the wood trim in all of the rooms, so we’re going with something more modern and clean: trimless windows. They’re going to be sheetrocked all around, and we’ll make concrete sills for the bottom. That’s coming up soon!

After removing the trim, we were pretty excited to see that someone had already used foam insulation to seal up the cracks:

One less thing we have to do!

Anyway, we’d been using the guest bedroom as our work station. All the tools were stored here, as well as our saw horses and other supplies we might need. I relocated everything to the master bedroom, and I got my Type A on by totally reorganizing everything.

I set up the saw horses in the middle of the room. We’re using an old door that we removed as our table top:

The master bedroom is way bigger than the guest bedroom, so we have a little more room to spread out. The guest bedroom was getting a little cramped for the amount of stuff we had in there.

The plastic box on the left has a bunch of hardware. The brown cardboard box in the back has all of our painting and staining supplies. The Corona box in front holds all of our electrical stuff like wires and outlet boxes and lightswitch plates.

Next to the boxes, I set up an insulation corner: vapor barrier, fiberglass batting, metallic tape, foam insulation, and a little tub of spackle. The little pieces of wood next to the insulation are shims for our doors and windows.

There’s a bunch of leftover sheetrock leaning against the wall, and then a little metal rack that I nabbed from the garage:

The bottom of the rack holds powertools. The top rack is has a toolbox that holds just screws and nails (the box that says Husky). Extra nails and screws in cardboard boxes are next to the toolbox.

On top of the radiator is a little organizer thingy with a bunch of drawers. That holds hooks, boxcutter blades small hardware and a bunch of random things we may need (length of chain, anyone?). There’s also a tool bag that holds hand tools.

Scrap wood leans up against one corner. I tossed all of our salvageable wood on the floor against the wall. This is the stuff that escaped the garbage pile. Smaller scraps of salvageable wood lean against the corner:

We put all of our extra foam insulation in the closet. We read that the foam degrades when exposed to sunlight for a long time, so we put it in our dark closet. Better safe than sorry!

And, finally, in the last corner, we have our air compressor:

Hey, how’d that hole get there?

We got a super long hose for the air compressor so instead of schlepping it room to room, we can leave it in the master bedroom and run the hose to the room we need. So much easier that way. And easier on the ears too — air compressors are loud.

Speaking of air compressors…

I think Bradley’s in love. He finally got to use his air compressor when he framed the guest bedroom closet:

It took him all of 30 seconds to get all of the nails in. And it drives the nail down deep enough so he doesn’t have to set the nails. We love it!

What we learned over the weekend:

• Getting organized saves a ton of time in the long run. At least we really hope it will, because we wasted half a day doing it.
• One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Our neighbor came over and asked if he could snag some trim from our dumpster. Hooray for keeping stuff out of a landfill!
• Elmer’s makes more than just the glue we ate in elementary school:

• Also, wood filler looks a lot like peanut butter mousse. Nom nom nom!

We have a plan.

We’re making some serious headway on the Smurf room and guest bedroom. We’re hoping to be done in a couple of weekends — whee! The only problem is that we already have several guests visiting us this summer, and we can’t hole up in the guest bedroom forever. So next up on our renovation list is the master bedroom.

Or the bastard bedroom as we’ve been calling it. It’s the red-headed stepchild of our second floor. We were feeling so frustrated by the huge-but-not-really-workable room that we were ready to give up on it and just start renovating the kitchen instead. Then, out of nowhere, something clicked and we came up with a plan. Our eureka moment: we’re going to merge the 6′x6′ Purple Room and the master bedroom to make a master suite! 

It sounds insane. And it probably is, judging by the amount of work we just created for ourselves, but we’re pretty geeked about it. Here’s what we’re thinking:

You come up the stairs and walk through a single French door to enter a little seating area. There will be 2 cushy chairs with a little table between them where we can sit down by a window and read (or more likely, blog). There’s a doorless entryway that connects the reading room to the master bedroom.

Once you enter the master bedroom, you won’t see a chimney jutting out in the middle of the room. Instead, there will be a flush wall where we can set a king-sized bed in between the 2 windows. There will be a big custom closet in the room, as well as the tiny old closet that we’ll glam up with a modern sliding door that we’ll design and build ourselves. And we’ll turn it into a shoe closet. Yes. A shoe closet. Be jealous. After years of living with a strictly enforced new pair in / old pair out policy, we’re letting ourselves revert back to our shoe-obsessed ways.

The size, shape and location of the custom closet aren’t set in stone. We could actually do a really big L-shaped closet if we wanted. Or place the closet against the same wall as the shoe closet. We haven’t planned that out yet.

With glossy black floors, open doorway and even more sunlight, we’re thinking the master bedroom is going to be super sexy when we’re finished. We’re also thinking that by the time we’re finished, we’re going to go pass out in here for at least 200 years. We have a whole lotta work ahead of us…

Meet our master bedroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we learned from our venture into the forbidden zone:

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