How we did on our November / December To-Do List

Way back in November, we made a to-do list to get us through our self-imposed spending freeze. In short, we wanted to bulk up our savings account while wrapping up a bunch of loose end projects we’d been putting off (more details here). We’re currently making our Spring 2012 To-Do List, and thought this would be a good time to see where we ended up on our last to-do list.

First, lets talk about the spending freeze. The short story: It was hard. Really, really hard.

When we lived in NYC, we  pretty lofty goal of saving up for a down payment on a house. That meant we basically stopped spending money on anything that wasn’t the bare essentials. We squirreled away everything we could for about 2 years and got used to living like penny-pinching hermits.

Moving to smalltown Pennsylvania after years of living in The City was a financial shock. Our mortgage is super low (the upside of buying a beat-up old shanty) and the cost of living here is a fraction of what we were used to paying. We’re saving $1000 a month just by not paying NYC rent. We suddenly found ourselves in the very lucky position of having disposable income. And, holy crap, we disposed of it just as quickly as we earned it.

In August, we went to Home Depot or Lowe’s 2 or 3 times a weekend — each trip came with a bill of $200+. Sometimes we’d drop $1000 a weekend on stuff that would just sit in the garage because we were buying supplies for projects we didn’t have time to do.

To put a stop to unnecessary spending and to bulk up our savings account, we decided to go back to our old skinflint ways. From November 1st to December 31st, we decided not to spend any money at hardware stores (unless it was a small purchase to finish a project we’d already started).

How did we do? Not perfectly, but pretty damn good compared to how we were spending before. We did spent money at our local hardware store, but it was never more than $50 a trip. And we only purchased what we needed for on-going projects. That doesn’t mean we didn’t spend any money on stuff we didn’t need.

Here’s where we failed miserably and spent way more money than we were planning to:

1. We adopted a dog.
   We sprang Margot from the animal shelter on December 3rd. And then we proceeded to spend a ton of cash on vet bills to nurse her back to health. She got kennel cough during her stint behind bars. Then she gave it to Jabba, so both of them were sick. Then everyone needed an annual check up and vaccinations. Annnnd finally, Margot accidentally bit Jabba on the eyeball and we had to rush her to an emergency vet on a Sunday. So, yeah, we’ve been dishing out some serious cash to keep our four-legged friends healthy. (Worth every cent for the amount of happiness they bring us.)
2. We refilled the oil for our furnace.
   We use our furnace only as an emergency backup heating system when we’re out of town. It only kicks on if the temperature drops below 50 degrees — that way our pipes won’t burst. We haven’t used it at all since we installed our hybrid water heater, so we had 1/4 tank of oil left. We weren’t planning on refilling it this winter.
   Then one week, while we were in Brooklyn, our thermostat crapped out and reset itself to 65 degrees. By the time we got back and realized what happened, we had less than 1/8th of a tank of oil left. Yiish. We shelled out $900 for an oil refill (and $100 for a new thermostat).
3. We lost our minds at an outlet mall.
   On our way to Brooklyn, we pass by a huge outlet mall. We randomly stopped by to check out the J. Crew factory store, and ended up walking away with armfuls of bags. To this day, we’re not even sure how much money we spent. But we tell ourselves it’s worth it, because we look so much cuter in our new clothes.

Despite a few hiccups, we still managed to meet our savings goal and get back in control of our spending. We’re still being frugal these days and only spending money on things we need. So, all in all, our little experiment was a success.

How’d we do on our to-do list? We crossed off almost everything. Boo-ya!

• Guest bedroom / Office / Upstairs Hallway
  • Put up trim
  • Paint the trim
  • Hem and hang curtains
  • Re-veneer the bed  Build a new bed from scratch
  • Make legs for the desk
  • Install ceiling fan in guest BR
  • Install guest BR closet
  • Make custom shelves for the office closet
• Dining Room / Living Room / Stairs
  • Remove all the staples from the staircase (there were stragglers)
  • Remove carpet from the living room and entry hallway
  • Replace two dining room windows
  • Install ceiling fan in living room
  • Prime the walls outside the master BR and down the stairs
• Basement
  • Install hot water heater
  • Insulate rafters
  • Install shelving system
  • Demolish staircase
  • Mildew-bomb the stinky corner
• Master Bedroom
  • Move all the stuff from the attic to the garage
  • Reorganize tools, toolboxes and bins (currently a hot mess)
  • Move paints, paint supplies, hardware and electrical stuff for storage in basement
• Other Stuff
  • Demolish hideous trellis outside laundry room
  • Insulate the washer pipes
  • Polyurethane the white dresser
  • Thanksgiving weekend: load dumpster
  • Install dishwasher

The stuff we didn’t finish is getting moved to our Spring 2012 To-Do list. We’re still working on it and will throw it up here shortly. Also coming up: updates on that darned cabinet (it’s thisclose to being done!). Plus we’re gearing up to build some bedroom furniture. We’ll share our plans and step-by-step instructions for building a bed and some night stands. Stay tuned!

Moving into the Guest Bedroom

We know we’re totally late on the whole Thanksgiving weekends update, but better late than never. We decided to have a low key, low pressure Thanksgiving. That’s code for “We were too lazy to cook a turkey.” We roasted a chicken instead. And the rest of our meal was made from stuff we had lying around the house.

Squash, mashed potatoes, green beans and roast chicken. And ice cream for dessert. Not bad for a very-last-minute feast. We even roasted a dog-friendly version of our meal for Jabba:

I tried to grab a picture of it but by the time I ran back with my camera, she’d already scarfed it down. I caught Smokey mid-scarf:

Canned cat food of the filet minon variety. He horked it down in a matter of seconds. Side note: we can’t wait to rip up that fugly linoleum. We’ve tried everything — even bleach — and it still looks dirty.

We decided to take Thanksgiving day completely off. The rest of our four-day weekend was spent wrapping up the guest bedroom. We gave the French doors a coat of polyurethane, removed the plastic film from the windows, and installed the custom door handles. Then we gave the trim 2 coats of black paint to match the floors and doors. After that, it was just a matter of vacuuming, mopping and moving in.

Here’s how the doors looked before:

And after:

View from the hallway:

We love how much light the hallway gets through the guest bedroom windows. And we’re still smitten with our DIY door handles. We were worried that the black-on-black would look flat, but the pop of texture really helps add some dimension to the doors:

View from the inside looking out into the hallway:

The closet doors are back up:

And, for the first time since April, we have a fully functioning closet:

It feels so luxurious not having to live out of cardboard wardrobe boxes. But even more than that, we’re thrilled to have a closet with doors. Our apartment in Brooklyn didn’t have any closets at all, so we installed an open closet system in the bedroom. Everything was always on display, which made for some awkward times when we had company over. Overflowing hampers happen.

Right now, we have 3 things in the room: a mattress, a rug and a chair. The mattress is on the floor, college student style:

We thought about gussying up the bed. Getting rid of the white duvet that we throw on the bed for extra warmth. Fluffing the pillows. Crisping up the linen. And then we realized, the mattress is on the frikkin’ floor. What’s the point of pretending we’re fancy? We like to keep it real:

We installed a ceiling fan a couple of weekends ago:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we need a couple in our house. The guest bedroom is directly above the dining room, which is where our wood-burning stove is located. Having ceiling fans in the dining room and the guest bedroom will help circulate heat throughout the house.

As far as looks go, fans usual fall somewhere between bland and revolting. Anything even remotely attractive is way, waaaay out of our price range. So we chose fans that are really simple and plain in hopes that they won’t be too noticeable:

The chair is another piece from Bradley’s company. We snagged 6 of these puppies back in June — two with arm rests and four without. They’ll eventually end up in the dining room.

If you look closely along the bottom edge of the trim behind the chair, you can see that we need some touchup work on the floor paint. Apparently we didn’t get close enough to the wall in this part of the room. We’ll fix that when we paint the floors downstairs.

We also have to do a little touchup on the French doors:

Keepin’ it real.

We picked up a radiator pipe that let us move our tall, skinny radiator a few inches further from the curtain:

We were planning on making boxes for all of the radiators in our house so that they’re not total eyesores. But this one is so close to the window that we might just paint it and leave it exposed.

If we do leave it exposed, we’ll need to touch up some paint on the floor:

The other radiator — the short, wide one we removed — was super heavy and dented the floor a bit. We’ll also need to fix the big, gaping hole that the pipe pokes up from. You can see right down into the dining room through it:

We’re going to find or make some sort of cap to conceal that. And, finally, we’ll need to get a handle for the radiator valve:

It had one but it was so rusted that it broke when we removed the radiator. At the time, we played it off like we had the strength of The Hulk. It’s all fun and games till you realize you can’t find a replacement that’s the right size.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more updates on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words about Margot. We’re completely smitten with this special dog, and we’re thrilled to have her join our family. Now if only we could get this potty-training business down…

Window Talk

In our last post, we showed you our new firewood rack. We also inadvertently showed you another project we worked on this weekend: our new dining room windows.

The window above the stack of firewood looked like this last weekend:

A rogue chunk of plaster went flying through the single pane glass during our dining room demolition. We covered it up with a sheet of plywood and ignored it for over 6 weeks. You can see a bit of the top right hand corner:

We pretended we were pioneering a new look called shanty-chic. Our neighbors pretended not to notice.

While I stacked firewood in the basement, Bradley swapped out both windows by himself. It took him about an hour to do both. And that includes removing the old window weights and insulting the hollow crevices. (The process was exactly the same as when we changed the windows in the office upstairs. You can read about that here.)

Here’s how the windows look now:

The dining room was always one of the most cold spots in our house — more so when our window was busted and cold air came streaming in. After swapping out the window, we noticed a difference right away. The room stays warmer, even though the walls aren’t insulated. And it’s only going to get better from here.

We can officially scratch dining room windows off of our Just Say No(vember) to-do list. We got a head start on another project as well:

A few weekends ago, we picked up some curtains for the office and guest bedroom.

We snagged 3 sets of the Hedda Blad for $15 a pair. And 2 sets of Matilda for the guest bedroom for $24.99 a pop.

We picked up 5 Skuggig curtain rods for $20 a pop.

IKEA’s instruction sheets are a little cryptic, but we managed to figure them out. First things first: we measured out how high we wanted our curtain rods and marked the wall:

Next, we drilled our pilot holes:

We put wall anchors into each hole.

Wall anchors help distribute weight of whatever you hang on them, so we like using them for things like curtain rods.

Putting in wall anchors is super easy. You gently push the anchor into your pilot hole, then use a hammer to lightly tap it in. After that, you put your screw right into your anchor and you’re set. (If super-detailed instructions float your boat, check out this site.)

Next up, we hung our rods:

We decided to cut our rods because they were much wider than our curtains.

The curtain rods are aluminum so we could use a grinder to cut them. We marked our cuts with painter’s tape and lobbed off a bit from one end.

The guest bedroom curtains are a gauzy white with a light vertical stripe pattern.We love how they let in plenty of sunlight but still give us lots of privacy. We decided not to hem the guest bedroom curtains because we liked how they grazed the floor. Curtain length is kinda tricky. Too short and they look silly, too long and they look comical. We asked ourselves WWWED — What Would West Elm Do?

Source: West Elm

Source: West Elm

Good enough! We let the curtains kiss the floors:

One one problem: our window has a radiator right in front of it.

Doh! Not so pretty. And we can’t just turn it around and shove it near the wall because it’s too wide. Luckily, we have an extra radiator in the purple room:

We tore down the wall between the purple room and the master bedroom, so we don’t really need another radiator in there. This one is taller and skinner than the guest bedroom radiator. We could — hypothetically — put it next to the window. That way the curtains wouldn’t be in the way. We dragged it into the guest bedroom to give it a shot:

We had to do a quick swap of the pipe fittings. Bradley headed them with a soldering torch:

He heated the fitting and then we tried to pry off the fitting with a wrench. It took longer than we expected.

…annnnnd the fitting still didn’t come off. So we left the radiators for another day and hung curtains in the office:

These puppies definitely need to be hemmed.

We used the same curtain rods in both the guest bedroom and the office, but they look totally different:

The office ceilings are so short (less than the standard 8′), so we tried hanging the rods from the ceiling. We loved the way they look similar but different.

We snuck in the next morning to see how the curtains look with sunlight streaming in:

Ooh la la!

Love that soft glow!

We also snagged this clock from IKEA:

We loved its simple, old-school-cool look. And when we saw this, it went straight into our cart:

We couldn’t help ourselves — we’re total suckers for pugs.

We’re off to catch up on Dexter and The Walking Dead rest up for this weekend’s projects. We’ll be back with updates soon!

Smash’em Bash’em Sunday

Guess what? We’ve been demolishing things! Whee! Enough with all the sanding and painting and fixing — we woke up Sunday morning wanting to destroy something. So we did.

We started by removing every bit of furniture from the dining room. Not an easy task because it was serving as both the living room and my office. And storage for IKEA goods we’d purchased for the guest bedroom. Annnnd we usually ate dinner on the couch, so it was still functioning as a living room at the same time.

After the room was empty, we took our official before shots:

That’s the doorway that leads to the kitchen. The hole in the wall is a recent addition.

We’re having an old-school wood-burning fireplace installed this weekend, and that hole is where it will connect to the chimney. Our chimney guy told us we’d be better off demolishing the room before the fireplace is put in. The thing is pretty massive and it’ll be hard to work around. Plus we don’t want to risk damaging the chimney or the fireplace.

Soak it all in, peeps. The burgundy carpet. The seafoam green crown molding. The ceiling tiles. That fan. It’s all got to go.

One of the walls features a window waaaaay over on one corner. Another window to balance it out would have been nice. But we’re working with what we’ve got.

There are 3 doors on another wall:

From L to R: the basement door, the door that leads to the front of the house (and upstairs), and the living room door.

And then there’s the window wall:

The door in the middle leads out to the porch and back yard. When we viewed the house before deciding to buy it, we didn’t see any of the crusty features of the house.

It’s like we had blinders on and could only see the cool features, like the 130-year-old solid wood doors, with their skeleton keys:

Still totally charmed by those! Not so charmed by stuff like this:

We’re not really sure what happened in this corner but the molding and the floral border doesn’t line up. At all. And, in case you didn’t notice, it’s hideous. That molding, by the way, is not original. It’s a later addition, and it’s painted the most atrocious shade of grandma green. At least it matches the floral border though, right? Right?? (We’ve been dreaming of ripping it out and smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer.)

Then there’s the ceiling:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we do plan on having 3 ceilings fans in the house (in the dining room, guest bedroom and master bedroom). We’ll need them to help circulate heat from the fireplace and to keep us cool in the summer. We decided to not have air conditioners in the house. Even when it’s 90 degrees outside, our house stays pretty cool in the summer. We do have a window unit, but it sat in the garage all summer and we didn’t miss it. Added bonus: our electricity bill averages $35 a month now! Squee! But I digress…

We’re having ceiling fans, but not that ceiling fan. It’s outta here. The ceiling tile is also gone-zo.

We have some patching up to do in some spots, like the place where the radiator pipe meets the ceiling:

You can see right up into the guest bedroom through that hole.

We plan on stripping the paint off of the radiator and leaving it bare. But radiators aren’t exactly pretty to look at, so we’re making covers for all of the units in the house. That way they won’t collect dust and we don’t have to maintain a paint job. Low maintenance living!

We have a few wall warts to rip out — ugly, unnecessary wall fixtures like phone jacks for land lines. We haven’t had a landline in 7 years and we’ve survived.

And we have 2 original windows that need to be replaced. It’s starting to get cold outside, so our single-panes look like this most of the time:

The room isn’t insulated at all and has 2 walls that face outside, so we have our work cut out for us. But first, we have to demo.

We sealed off the doors that lead to the living room (currently our bedroom), the stairs and the kitchen with thick plastic sheeting:

Then we gently pried off the original molding. We want to preserve the original stuff just in case we can use it in other parts of the house.

Behind the molding, we found a big gap between the floor and the wall. Stuffed inside was some old-school insulation:

Newspaper! We carefully unfolded the delicate pieces of paper and looked for a date:

December 12, 1932 — the newspaper is nearly 80 years old.

We were pretty geeked. This confirmed what we’d suspected for a while — the “new” part of the house was added on in the 1930s. That includes the kitchen, both bathrooms, laundry room and office. The original house was already 50 years old at the time. Crazy!

Once the molding was off, it was time to get serious. Our plan for the day:

• Expose the big brick wall
• Tear down the ceiling to expose the rafters
• Remove all the carpet from the room

Did we mention we had less than 8 hours to get all of it done? Annnnnnd we were off:

This is the same brick wall that we exposed upstairs in the hallway and office, so we knew the brick would be in good condition. It came off pretty easily:

We didn’t bother covering up the carpet because we knew we’d just roll it up and throw it away at the end of the day. It made things so much easier.

The only downside to the jackhammer is that it’s insanely loud. We waited till 11:30am to get started so our neighbors wouldn’t hate us. I was also worried about how Jabba the Mutt would react to the noise since she was hanging out in the next room. This is what I found when I went to check in on her:

She was curled up on the couch, napping right through the jackhammering. What a trooper.

After de-plastering the wall, Bradley showed me how to take down the ceiling tiles (just yank on ‘em on a little):

That hole wasn’t always there. Bradley punched it out to see what was behind the tiles. No shocker there: it’s lathe and plaster. I took over tile removal while Bradley “fixed” the doorway:

Just like the doorway upstairs, we wanted to get rid of the wood frame and have exposed brick sides:

And, just like upstairs, we have a neato header sitting above the door.

Those scars are chop marks from an axe. And the wood is so old that it’s turned grey — we love how a little bit of natural wood color peeks out from the scars. It adds a lovely bit of texture and dimension to the room.

We salvaged the original trim and the planks from the doorway just in case we want to use them later.

We already have big plans for the planks — they’re going to be reborn as nightstands for the guest bedroom! We’ll post the step-by-step on that when we get to it. But, rest assured, that pile of wood will eventually look mega-fabulous.

After all the tiles were out, it was time to pry the furring strips out:

The furring strips were nailed to the original lathe & plaster ceiling and the tiles were stapled right on top. After that, things got a little dusty:

We’ve demo’d our fair share of lathe and plaster walls, but never a ceiling. This was, by far, the dustiest job we’ve done in the house so far.

Bradley tore down the ceiling while I bagged debris. We learned a lot from our last big demo upstairs, so this time around, things were surprisingly fast. Everything seemed pretty under control, and then this happened:

A rogue lathe strip fell from the ceiling and crashed right through our single-pane window. The funny thing is that this was moments after I told Bradley not to break a window.

Me: “I’m gonna go outside and eat a sandwich. Don’t break any windows.”
Bradley: “Yes, honey, duuuuuh, of coooourse I won’t break any windows.”

Moments later, glass smashed inches from my turkey breast on whole wheat:

Mistakes: we make ‘em, too. The only difference is that we taunt each other mercilessly about them for at least a week afterwards.

We finished up everything — carpet removal and all — at 9pm on Sunday night. We were too exhausted to take after pictures. Plus it was too dark and dusty anyway. So we decided to wait a few days and let the dust settle before we did that. Those pictures are coming up later today. Get excited peeps. We are!

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What we learned:

We actually learned what not to do from our demo upstairs. So this time we had it down to a science. Here’s how we streamlined the demo and cleanup process and got it all done in one day:

• Leave the carpet till last. We took out the carpet before we demolished upstairs. If we had left it in, we could have just rolled up the dust with the carpet and tossed it all out at once.
• Bag the plaster, not the lathe strips. The wood has nails in it and they poke through the bags.
• Sort the lathe strips into 2 sizes: long and short. Bind the piles together using twine. Stack the bundles together like firewood.
• Use shovels, not dustpans, to gather up the smaller debris and dump it into bags.
• Cut the carpet into strips and then roll it up instead of rolling it all up in one piece. Bind each roll with twine. Waaay easier to carry.
• Cut the carpet from the bottom instead of the top. Your knife won’t snag.

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.

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.

The DIY shuffle: 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

We’ve been so focused on getting the Smurf room and guest bedroom finished that we’ve completely neglected the hallway that connects them.

It’s all sheetrocked and ready to be mudded on the left side. But the right side needs some love. It’s plaster on brick (no lathe), so there’s no insulation there. While Bradley was busy sheetrocking the Smurf room, I decided to remove all of the window trim and the floor board to prep the hallway for insulation. I also had to remove the trim around the doorway leading that leads into this hall so we could sheetrock that wall.

It was a pretty simple task. Or so I thought.

Hoo boy. Where to begin?

I started with the floor board because it was easy (famous last words), and used a crow bar to pry the board from the wall. Unfortunately for me, I quickly learned that the wood was permanently glued to the plaster. I’m not sure if the wood was attached to the plaster while the plaster was still wet. Or maybe the lead paint that covered both the wall and the board had formed some kind of super bond. Or maybe it was pixie magic that held the two together. Either way, when I pried the floor board loose, 8 inches of the wall pried loose with it.

I think the technical term for this is “a hot mess.”

At least the window trim and sill came off OK:

Too bad I can’t say the same for the door frame I had to remove at the end of the hallway:

Half of the plaster surrounding the doorway fell off in big chucks as I removed the trim. It looks like a bomb went off in the hallway, even after the cleanup.

Our plan was simply to put up some furring strips, insulate with 2 sheets of 1″ foam, and then sheetrock right over everything. The wall was perfectly level, so it would have worked out really well. Now we have to shim the wall to make sure we’re putting our sheetrock up straight. And we have to build it out a little to compensate for the missing plaster. We also have to make sure to build out enough to cover the giant gap between the floor and the wall:

There’s as much as a 3 inch gap at some parts. Ugh. By our calculations, with the stud we’re going to attach to the floor, plus the furring strips, insulation and sheetrock, we’ll be able to completely cover it. No promises, though — we’ve learned our lesson!

What we learned with our little hallway incident:

• Lathe walls are a pain in the @*%.
• Our house, like many other super-old houses, has settled a little. We prefer to think of it as our house having a Gangsta Lean.
• If all the plaster in our house came off this easily, we’d probably expose a lot more brick.
• Don’t ever start a project by saying, “This is easy. We’ll finish it off in one day.” It only leads to broken hearts and shattered plaster.