Dining room update.

First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:

Heh heh. What a guy.

Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:

This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.

We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.

Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.

Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.

The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.

The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:

That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.

In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.

We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.

We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:

Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:

Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.

The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.

We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:

And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.

There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:

The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.

While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:

It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.

It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:

We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:

It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:

We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.

It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.

We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!

Painting the Dining Room

We haven’t been posting much because we’ve been working on the dining room nonstop. We’re really stoked to start demolishing rooms again — our favorite part of renovating! — so we’re hustling to get the dining room finished. Bradley finished plastering on Friday night, and on Saturday morning, we whipped out our paint brushes and rollers.

In case anyone’s wondering why it took us so long to plaster the walls, it’s because we’ve decided to do smooth, sleek walls rather than textured walls. We had to spend a lot of time making sure our plastering was 100% perfect because we can’t just hide the flaws under stucco or spackle. We also did trimless windows, which means we can’t just hide imperfections under trim. But all the work we put in upfront paid off, because we ended up with walls that are perfectly smooth:

Like a baby’s bottom.

On Saturday morning, we vacuumed all of the walls and floors to make sure no dust was left on anywhere. We scrubbed the brick wall to get rid of any lingering plaster and loose bits of mortar:

We love our raw brick walls, but we hate how much they shed. A few months ago, we tried a brick sealer for the walls upstairs and they’ve completely stopped shedding. We picked up another gallon for the wall downstairs:

What we love about this sealer is that it doesn’t look glossy when dry. It darkens the brick a little, but it doesn’t look like it’s been sealed or painted. And it stops the wall from flaking. Here’s how our brick looked after one coat:

Exactly the same as before, but better. We plan on using it on our concrete sills to protect them from stains.

We spent all day Saturday painting the brick and priming the walls. On Sunday morning, the room was ready for some color:

We went back and forth on a lot of colors for the walls. At one point, there were easily 30 paint chips hanging on the walls. The one we both agreed on was this:

SW6204 Sea Salt is a cool blue-green neutral from Sherwin Williams. We went with a low luster finish — it’s sort of a semi-gloss, but without too much sheen.

Before we decided on the color, we hung a paint chip in the room and checked on it at different times throughout the day. We loved how the color went from a subtle greige in the morning to a calm blue-green in the afternoon, and then finally a more dramatic green at night. We were a little panicky when we looked at the same chip in the Sherwin Williams store and it looked white. But that just goes to show you that paint color really depends on the lighting of the room.

Here’s Bradley getting the paint party started:

And now for the fun part — the before & afters. Remember how fugly this room used to be? No? Feast your eyes on this:

That’s how the same corner looks today. Boom! Not fugly anymore! Here’s the set of doors that lead to the basement (left), the front entrance (middle) and the living room (right):

The most obvious change in that corner is that we got rid of the basement door (we have another entrance outside). Can we talk about how hideous our paint color choice looks next to those orangey-brown doors?

We considered removing the doors completely because we like the open look, but we kind of need them. In the winter, we use the doors to direct heat to rooms that we’re using. For example, if we’re in the living room, we can shut the door to the hallway so the air has to flow into the living room. And when we go to bed, we can open the hall door and shut the living room doors (there are 2) so heat bypasses that room and flows up to the bedrooms.

Instead of getting rid of the doors completely, we’re going to replace them with something much more elegant. The door on the left will be a glass sliding door. The one on the right will be a glass pocket door that tucks away neatly into the wall when not in use.

While we’re on the subject of ugly doors, this is what the dining room entry used to look like:

And this is how it looks with our new door, trimless windows and concrete window sills in place:

We went with a basic door and hardware from Lowe’s. The little window above the door was a custom order from a local glass company (the same one we use to get our custom cut mirrors and glass for frames). It cost about $22.

We love how the crisp white looks next to the sea salt blue. It’s such a happy, beachy color.

We’re really happy with the way our windows turned out. The sills have some plaster residue on them that we need to wash off, but we’re really digging the way the textured concrete looks next to the smooth walls.

Here’s a project that we completely failed to photograph and share on the blog:

Bradley whipped up this cabinet one weekend while I was out of town. This is going to be part of the radiator cover that we’ll make next weekend. Check out the bottom shelf:

Routers are total eyesores, no matter how well-designed they are. So we decided to make a cabinet to hide ours — plugs, wires and all. Bradley built this cabinet with a plug-in on the back. Once we have the door on, we’ll never have to see that tangle of wires again. We can store things in the cabinet that we would use in the dining room but don’t necessarily want to see all the time (our pile of boardgames, for example). Gotta love functional built-ins!

If you want to see some more before pictures of our dining room, check out this post. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. 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?

Chuckin’ Wood

A couple of months ago, we were driving somewhere when Bradley saw a woodchuck on the side of the road.

Bradley: “Oh mah gah, a woodchuck!”
Leena: “Where? What’s he doing??”
B: “Chuckin’ wood.”

I missed it. I always miss the wildlife. And I’ve never seen a woodchuck before, so for a second — just one second — I believed him.

L: “Oooooh, really??”
B: “…..”
L: “He wasn’t, was he?”
B: “You’re not going to live this down for months.”

I haven’t, either. It ain’t easy being a city kid in a small town.

On Sunday, I got my woodchuck on after our firewood guy dumped 2 cords in our driveway.

Bradley was working on some other projects, so I was the designated chucker. It was easy work. Chuck logs into the wheelbarrow, wheel ‘em over to the basement door and dump them there. Repeat a hundred times. Then chuck logs down into the basement. Repeat a hundred times. Then stack the wood into a neat little pile.

Wait. Did I say it was easy work? I meant exhausting. Here’s I didn’t know when I signed up for the job: wood is heavy. Really, really heavy. Each cord of wood weighs 2000+ pounds and we had 2 cords of wood to stack. It took over 7 hours to get our firewood from the driveway into a stack in the basement.

During the last 2 hours or so, Bradley came out to help me before it got dark outside. By the time we finished, my shoulder and back were dead. Hence the trip to the chiropractor yesterday. Now if only I could find a doctor to cure Claw Hands Syndrome. My poor fingers are still aching and sore from all the pick up / put down / pick up / put down action.

Enough rambling. Y’all wanna see pictures? We got your pictures right here:

We picked up a firewood rack kit at Home Depot. It comes with two metal brackets that attach to two 2x4s (sold separately). Bradley assembled it while I chucked wood. Here’s what it looks like after we stocked it:

We wanted something right outside the door so we won’t have to go into the basement every time we need a couple of logs. The rack is conveniently located between the kitchen door (on the left) and the dining room door (on the right). We won’t have to venture far in the cold.

By the way, our ariondack chairs and little patio table were stashed away in the garage for the winter. We’re still getting used to the idea that we have the room to stash things away now. It’s magic. *Poof* gone. …but not GONE-gone. I don’t miss the apartment life at all.

While I chucked even more wood, Bradley gathered together some wood we salvaged from the office. He hammered out all the nails and cut the pieces down to make a wall:

So glad we didn’t toss this wood out when we demolished the office. We had a feeling it would come in handy for something. We used it to section off an area of the basement to use for wood storage.

We didn’t really care how the wall looked because — newsflash! — our basement is creepy as all hell. It’s smelly. It’s humid. It’s dark. Remember when it flooded and looked like this?:

We’ve made peace with the fact that our basement is never going to be fabulous. It’s the place we store our water hater, boiler and firewood. Also, monsters might live down there. So we’re OK if our wall looks like it was made with leftovers. It fits right in.

Here’s what we had at the end of a very long day:

Those are two stacks of wood: one in the back and another right in front of it. We’re having another two cords of wood delivered and we’ll just stack those right in front.

We put an empty 5-gallon plaster bucket in the wood area as well:

That’s a place to toss any wood chips or branches that fall off. We can use those for kindling to start our fires — no more scrounging around for scraps of newspaper!

We put a little work into the rest of the basement, too:

We painted the rafters because we thought it might help harden / preserve the wood (it worked on the floors upstairs!). We used a basic white primer:

We also insulated the rafters:

We got fiberglass insulation with a vapor barrier on both sides. Basically it’s wrapped in plastic. It’s supposed to help keep smells out. Not sure about monsters.

So far, we’ve only painted & insulated the area under our dining room so far. We still have to do the area under our living room, but we wanted to wait to get this sucker out of the way:

That’s the new hybrid water heater we picked up a few weeks ago. We’re hooking it up on Saturday — so excited! — and our first order of business will be to test how hot our water gets. The old boiler / water heater never really got water hot — we’ve been taking mildly warm showers for the past 6 months.

You can see our old boiler creeping in the back behind the new water heater.

Judging by the color and type on this puppy, we’re guessing it’s as old as we are. We’re going to keep it around for a while because we need a backup heating system. That way, if we’re in Brooklyn and the thermostat drops below 50 degrees, the boiler can kick in and keep our pipes from freezing. We’ll replace it later on down the line with something that isn’t reliant on oil.

We’ll be back with more updates on last weekend’s projects. Stay tuned for that!

—

What we learned about chuckin’ wood:

• Bradley is super anal.
  Seriously. Nobody’s going to see this wall except us, but he still used a template to make sure all of the planks were placed perfectly apart. OCD anyone?
• Wear work gloves.
  I didn’t wear gloves at first and I got a few splinters and a couple of callouses within the first hour. Doh!
• It takes time.
  I wasn’t planning on spending an entire day hauling and stacking firewood, but that’s how long it took. Plan accordingly!
• It’s a workout.
  We. Were. Exhausted. Our arms, shoulders and backs were aching by the time we finished, and we’re still a little sore. Chuckin’ wood is hard work!

Working hard or hardly working?

We’ve been MIA, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. It’s been kind of a crazy week for the east coast: first an earthquake (which we felt way out in the boonies!) and then Irene (more like a bad thunderstorm in our ‘hood).

We also had some visitors. Bradley’s mom and her sisters were visiting NYC for the weekend until Irene screwed that up. Turns out their hotel was in the evacuation zone. Instead of just evacuating the zone, they decided to evacuate the state. And they hopped over New Jersey, too, just to be on the safe side.

We felt so sorry for them — can you imagine thinking you’re going to see New York Effing City and then you end up in Middle-of-Nowhere Pennsylvania? With two dorky hosts who just moved here and don’t get out much? The best we had to offer them was this: “There are lots of Amish people here. ….and farms.” (Sorry, ladies. We have a Lonely Planet book now and we’re studying up on rural Pennsylvania awesomeness for your next trip.)

Bradley’s mom hung out with us while Irene blew through, and we wasted no time putting her to work:

Yup. We’re the worst hosts ever. Our big project for the day was making 3 cement window sills for the hallway. This is our second time making cement window sills, so we’re total experts now. We’re also total cheapskates, so we reused the wood strips and masonite boards from our last batch. We simply flipped the masonite over so we had a fresh, smooth surface to work with. (Bee tee dubs, you can read all about our first batch of DIY sills we made for our guest bedroom and office here.)

Jackie (aka Bradley’s mom) sanded the old wood strips to get rid of any cement debris left over from the last batch. She’s a pro at the whole DIY thang. She and Bradley’s grandfather basically built an entire house from scratch, so she’s no stranger to power tools. We didn’t feel at all guilty about the forced labor asking her to help us out.

Everything went way faster this time because we’ve already done it once. After Jackie was done sanding, Bradley assembled the frame and caulked the seams on the inside.

The last time we made sills, we used regular caulk and it didn’t work out all that well. It sort of dissolved because of the water in the cement mix. This time, we used plumber’s caulk — the kind you’d use around a toilet, sink or bathtub. It’s water resistant, so we hoped it would give us sharper edges. The only downside was that the caulk has to set for 4-6 hours before it can come in contact with water. We leaned our molds against the garage wall to dry:

We went upstairs and put Jackie to work sanding the office window sills:

Jackie was a trooper — she worked all day and never complained. (Thanks, Jackie!)

Have we mentioned that the office is plastered and ready to paint? Squee! So exciting! Here’s what it looks like now:

Bradley installed 3 recessed lights down the center of the room. The ceilings are really low, so our options were pretty limited, but right now, we like the look of recessed lighting more than track lighting.

Our plasterer did an amazing job with the trimless windows. Look at these clean lines:

The edges are so crisp I could shave with ‘em. But not until we have curtains up. The neighbors already think I’m a weirdo after they saw me doing an Insanity workout in the living room. It was awkward. For them. I just kept going because I’m 93.7% shameless.

Anyway, here’s how the hallway is looking these days:

Outside the master bedroom:

And down the staircase:

I wanted to give our plasterer a big wet kiss when she finished. It took her 30 hours to do the office, hallway, a few spots in the guest bedroom, the whole area outside the master BR and down the stairs — and that included tall walls, ceilings and 8 trimless windows. It’s basically a third of our house. The whole shebang cost us $600 and saved us a whole lot of time. It would have taken us 6 months to do all of this. Seriously. We only have time for reno work on the weekends, and we’re way slower than her. She’ll be back to do some of our other rooms (and maybe next time we’ll take pictures of her working on her stilts!).

While Jackie sanded the cement sills, Bradley cleaned up the base to set them in. He had to shave a little wood from some of the windows so the sills could slide in easily.

He smeared a little construction adhesive along the base of each window:

He moonlights as a cake icer. Not really. Cakes don’t last long enough around him to get iced. Don’t be fooled by his lithesome 160-pound boyish figure. With the wood shaved, the sills slid right in:

Sorta. Some of them needed a little extra whacking.

After that, he checked to make sure everything was level, and viola:

They look fantastic looking down. The sides needed a little more finagling:

Nothing a little plaster can’t fix:

Bradley put on 3 coats of plaster, and we still need to sand the area smooth, but here’s what it looks like now:

Funny story about the mug: we were in Jamaica when we found out our offer was accepted. It was halfway through our trip, and we had to scramble to fill out forms for our mortgage on our laptop in the hotel lobby where we had wifi access. We had to Skype with our realtor to get things in order. There were a million trips to the lobby to check our email to see if there were any updates. We lay out on the beach all week talking about all the renovation ideas we had for the house that wasn’t ours yet — but we knew it was The One. And there was even talk of starting up a blog to document all of our renovations. That’s what I think about every time I have coffee in that mug, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Or that could just be the coffee. I’m a junkie — I get the warm and fuzzies just thinking about coffee.

More updates coming. Hint, they involve this stuff:

All together now: FIIIIINALLY!

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.

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!

Meet our grande olde livinge roome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next to the radiator is our closet:

Insert saddest face of all time here.

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

In other news, our staircase now looks like this:

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

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

Other stuff going on with us:

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

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?