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!

Post-Demo Dining Room

Know what our favorite part of demolition is? The part where we get to show you guys this:

Ta-da! Our brick wall! And our rafters:

It’s pasty looking because we still have some dust that’s hanging on for dear life. We’re talking stage 5 clingers. We had the same problem upstairs, but it was easily fixed: we simultaneously brushed and vacuumed the wall using our shop vac’s brush attachment.

We also have to vacubrush the rafters and tidy up the wiring. Not that we don’t love 100-year-old cobwebs or anything, but creepy really isn’t the look we’re going for.

Still, we think it already looks a bajillion times better than before.

Here’s a better shot of the header. It’s a big hand-hued beam with axe marks still visible:

Some of the brick around the chimney hole isn’t looking so hot:

Our chimney guy’s going to repair that when he installs the chimney liner. We didn’t know until he dropped by to clean our chimney, but he already added brick pointing into his (super reasonably priced) estimate.

We have some floor repair to do, too:

That hole is where an outlet used to be. Right now it’s a straight drop into the basement.

One thing we’re really not looking forward to:

Each of those fuzzy tufts is a staple. Every time we had a staple-plucking day, we end up with a case of the claw hands. Better get the Advil ready — we have approximately 7.2 trillion staples to pull in this room alone.

Check out our fancy new window:

Pretty sure our neighbors hate us and rue the day we moved in, our unwieldy jackhammer in tow.

The rest of the room still looks like it was beaten with an ugly stick, but we’ll get to it soon enough. We’re not demolishing the remaining walls — just building out new walls right onto them, the way we did in the hallway upstairs. So this is rock bottom and it’s only going to get better from here. Unless it gets worse. It’s a DIY home renovation, peeps; everything is 2 steps forward, 1 step back. We roll with it.

We can’t walk into the room without making googly eyes at our brick-and-rafter combo. And if it makes us this giddy in its unpolished state, imagine how we’ll be when we get the room cleaned up, insulated and painted. Every day will be a staring contest with the wall from 8am to 10pm and then we’ll go to bed. We may never get anything accomplished ever again.

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!

Have you hugged a brick wall today?

We admit it: we have an unhealthy obsession with brick walls. It’s a problem. It seems like every other post we write up has something to do with exposing brick — sometimes accidentally. This weekend was no exception. We had a happy accident with our brick wall that made us fall even more in love with it.

The whole thing started when I removed all of the window and door trim in the hallway. There’s nothing really wrong with the the way the previous owners put up window and door trim — it just seems a little big and clunky to us. We plan on redoing it all.

While prying the trim on the flipside of our brick wall, I realized the solid planks of wood framing the door weren’t solid at all. Basically, we were expecting the back to look more like the front:

The wood sticks out about 1/4″ past the brick and is grey and aged. On the flip side, it looked like this:

The wood doesn’t reach all the way to the back. They faked the look by using trim covered with plaster. Doh!

After a few choice profanities and whole lot of hemming and hawing, we decided to remove the wood frame. This meant we would have to replace our old wood doorway with new wood to make it jut out 1/4″ on both sides and get that super modern look we were going for. We weren’t exactly happy about having to cut out the beautiful grey wood — we thought it had a lot of character — but Bradley cheered up when he realized this was a really good excuse to pull out his Sawzall:

Look at that concentration.

Sawzalls. Are. Intense. Proper sawing technique requires both furrowing of brow and flaring of nostrils. Clenching of jaw is optional, but highly recommended.

Bradley sawed through one side, then switched to the other:

Then he broke the top in half using a crowbar:

And removed the wood on the side, which revealed the butt end of the brick wall we’ve exposed:

Not gonna lie: the entire time, I was cowering in the bathroom and asking Bradley for reassurance that the ceiling wasn’t going to fall down on our heads. He explained that the header — that big block of wood above the door frame — is supporting the weight of the wall. The door frame was in there loosely. It wasn’t even nailed to anything. So it wasn’t supporting any weight at all. It was mostly there because doorways are supposed to have frames. In other words: just ‘cuz.

I felt safe enough to come out of the bathroom:

And immediately regretted it. Nothing like 130-year-old dust to wake up those sinuses! Once we had the wood out and let the dust settle, Bradley checked to make sure the wall was level:

Both sides were perfectly level. Bradley rejoiced:

Then he went around the corner and said, “Oooh, now we have to expose this other side.”

I caught him mid-ooooh. And he’s right:

On the left, you can see Bradley scraping our freshly exposed brick to get the dust and plaster off. On the right you can see the brick wall in the Smurf room. And that white crap in the center? That’s the little bit of plaster that’s separating the two from being one long, continuous piece of interior design eye candy.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have the jackhammer with us (it’s at Bradley’s workshop), so we won’t expose the rest of the brick until next weekend.

For now, we’re giddy about the way our frameless raw brick doorway looks:

We were planning on replacing the door frame, but we like the way this looks better, so we’re going to leave it. Frames? We don’t need no stinkin’ frames!

What we learned from our happy accident:

• Roll with the punches. Being flexible about our end result is one way to avoid being constantly heartbroken about things not going the way we plan.
• Different is good. We were a little freaked out at the idea of having a frameless doorway — it just seems so different — but the more we looked at it, the more we liked it.
• We’ve come a long way, baby. Sometimes we get down on ourselves about not working fast enough or not getting enough done on a Saturday. Then we look at our before pictures and realize how much we’ve accomplished in a month. Check out what this hallway used to look like:

Feeling exposed.

Hey & welcome, new readers! We were so geeked to be Freshly Pressed — we did a happy dance and everything — and excited to have someone following our whole house renovation. Someone who isn’t related to us and thereby forced to read our DIY dorkiness, that is. We’re just getting started, so you joined us at the perfect time!

When we left off, we’d just finished installing our French doors. After that, we cleaned up the walls and got them ready to have new sheet rock attached.  That’s when we came across something that made us hyperventilate in our ventilator masks:

A brick wall tucked behind some wood and drywall! Technically we knew this was there from the day Bradley crawled around the space between the kitchen ceiling and the office floor. You can see it waaaaay back there in the picture he took using his Droid.

We planned on exposing this brick wall in the kitchen, but we didn’t really consider exposing it upstairs. Not until we saw it behind the wall, just begging to be let out. How cool would it be to walk up the stairs and see an exposed brick wall at the end of the hallway?

It didn’t take much to talk ourselves into it. We grabbed a crowbar and hammer and removed the molding around the door. Then we started chipping away the plaster in the hallway.

One of us would chisel while the other picked up the falling chunks of plaster and tossed them in a garbage bag. Then we’d trade positions to give the chiseler’s arms a break.

Bradley showed me a tuft of horsehair he found in the plaster:

Ignore the filthy hands. De-plastering’s a dirty job.

He told me they used horse hair to keep the plaster clumped together back in the day. Sure enough, when I looked through the plaster, there was horsehair everywhere. I asked him how he knows this stuff. He said, “I read up on it.” Keep in mind that this is coming from the same guy whose idea of a good beach read is this:

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We had to be careful to chisel only the plaster and not remove the mortar from between the bricks. For the most part, it came off easily in big chunks. Then we’d use the back of the hammer to loosen the more stubborn bits of plaster and use our (workgloved) hands to brush off the brick.

We were loving the raw look of the brick. It’ll totally modernize the space, but also give it a hint of old-school cool.

The raw, unfinished texture of brick isn’t really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of modern interiors.
A lot of people associate modern design with super slick, new walls with no texture or color. But we love it when a modern space has rough edges.

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The perfect balance of old and industrial mixed with sleek and shiny:

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And we love how old red brick looks with wood furniture:

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We were so excited to find that the brick-meets-wood look was already built into the house. When we exposed the area above the door frame, we found that the header was an old wood beam:

That thick block of wood supports the weight of the brick wall above the door frame. You can also see a bit of the original door frame underneath the beam. It’s turned grey with age, but it’s solid wood and it’s as old as the house is.

It needs a little cleaning, but the wood is beautifully preserved.

Sadly, we ran out of daylight before we finished exposing the entire wall. We wanted to finish the sheet rock in the hall before the day was over, so we switched projects halfway through.

We haven’t taped, plastered and painted our wall yet, but we already love the way the new wall butts up against the old brick wall.

We’ll be fully moved into the house in 9 days(!), and we’ll tackle the rest of the wall then. We have to expose the rest of the brick, move the smoke detector, clean the brick with a wire brush, wash the wall to get all the debris off, and get the door frame ready for painting.

When we’re done with that, we’ll have our very first before-and-after pictures for the blog! Get excited — we are!!

What we learned from our brick exposing project:

• Bradley would be the master of Trivial Pursuit’s Construction Edition.
• No jackhammer necessary — just a hammer & a small pry bar were enough to remove the plaster wall.
• Plaster dust blows. Literally. It blows everywhere. We forgot to hang up some plastic sheeting to keep the dust contained and now the second floor is covered in white dust. Oops!
• When exposing brick, wear a ventilator, long sleeves and a hat or hoodie. 3 shampoos later, I still feel like I have plaster in my hair.