Our latest DIY project: Margot Tenenbaum.

Hey folks! We’re going to start this post off by apologizing for being M.I.A. We’re long overdue for an update on the renovation, and we have so much to share. We’re living in an actual bedroom now! With an actual closet!! So what if our mattress is on the floor — it feels like we’re living in luxury after sleeping in the freezing dining room for the past 7 months.

The reason we’re so behind on our updates:

That’s Margot Tenenbaum. We named her after a character in one of our favorite Wes Anderson movies, The Royal Tenenbaums:

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Heavy eyeliner. Brown fur coat. They could be twins.

A few weekends ago, we decided to start volunteering at our local animal shelter. They’re pretty understaffed and they don’t get much funding. We thought we could help out by walking dogs a couple of hours a month. Before we headed over to fill out the paperwork, we made a pact that we would absolutely positively not be adopting any of the dogs. Nope. Wasn’t gonna happen. Just walking ‘em. No attachments.

And then she looked at me with those big brown peepers and I crumbled.

Bradley held his ground and refused to take her home. We’re renovating a house, we spend 2 days a week in Brooklyn, we do 3 hour drives. A new dog requires a lot of time. It’s a serious responsibility. Deep down, I knew he was right and we didn’t adopt her. He cracked a few days later.

7 days after we first met Margot, we took Jabba to the shelter and let them meet. The next thing you know, we’re riding home with one more dog than we arrived with.

We learned that she’s one or two years old and is a beagle mix. She was found as a stray in early October and brought to the shelter by Animal Control. Someone adopted her in November and then returned her a couple of weeks later because they weren’t ready for the commitment. She’s completely untrained and she’s not housebroken. And she shows signs of abuse and neglect.

She’s also incredibly smart. She learned “sit” and her name in the matter of hours. She’s making some serious headway on the whole potty training issue. And, even though she’s a little skittish and nervous, we think she’s starting to realize that we’re not going to take her back to the shelter. She’s starting to bond with us. Snuggling helps:

There’s been a lot of that:

Jabba’s doing her part to teach Margot the ins and outs of life in our family:

Put on a sweater? Check. Sit down? Check. Look cute? Check. Nice job, ladies.

Now that Margot’s been with us for a few days, we’ve got our schedules back to normal. Or as normal as they can be when we have to take turns tethering a dog to our belts. We’re finally getting into the groove of things, and we’ll be back to updating like normal starting tonight. Stay tuned, peeps. We’re back!

No More Flood Zone! Plus Some Odds & Ends Projects.

You know that feeling you get when you come back from vacation and sleep in your own bed? Multiply that by about a bajillion and that’s how we felt when the flood watch ended and we came home on Saturday afternoon. Even when we opened the basement door and found this:

Yes, it smelled as bad as it looked.

Our sump pump is easily 30 years old. It works, but every now and then it shuts itself off and you have to give it a swift kick to get things going. We added that to our list of ancient things we need to replace, and spent the rest of Saturday cleaning the entire first floor. On Sunday, we were back to renovating as usual.

Right now we’re trying to finish up some odds-and-ends projects upstairs so we can start painting walls and sanding floors. Here’s a shot of how our hallway looked before the Labor Day weekend:

And here’s how it looks today:

Yup! We’ve been painting doors and doorways! The bathroom door in the hallway isn’t totally finished. I just leaned it up against the doorway (accidentally upside-down) to show what it’ll look like once it’s in place. The hardware is still drying and we need to strip and paint the flip-side, but that won’t take long. The guest bedroom French doors are drying against a wall and need one more coat before they’re DONE-done:

The guest bedroom closet doors are dry and ready to be put back in place:

We never loved these cheap closet doors from Lowe’s. We got them because they were the least ugly of all the doors Lowe’s had to offer. And I practically had to wrestle and hog-tie Bradley in the closet door aisle before he agreed to buy them. They’ve been the bane of his existence ever since. Once the paint dried, though, he was all oohs and aahs. Up close, they don’t really look painted — they look stained:

While our doors and doorways dried, we fixed up a few things that were bugging us about the brick wall. Here’s our before shot again:

See all of those black cracks in our exposed brick wall? Those are spots where the mortar has chipped away. There’s also a big black rectangle at the top right hand corner of the wall where a couple of bricks were removed. We’re not really sure why, but based on lathe strip and old square nails that were used to patch the hole, it was done a long, long time ago. There are also some gaps on the floor where the wooden door frame used to be:

Bradley mixed up a batch of mortar and filled in the gaps:

He scooped mortar into the gap, patted it down flat, and then scraped his trowel across to get a smooth, even surface. Here’s how that spot looked when it dried:

And here’s how the filled gaps will look with our DIY moulding against them:

As for the brick wall, Bradley only wanted to patch the areas that will eventually be covered by a storage cabinet. This way we can experiment with what looks better, a meticulous brick-pointing job or a NYC-style patch job. We see the patch job a lot in old exposed brick walls in NYC. Basically, you take some mortar and smear it right across the brick face:

No need to be neat about it; a patch job is supposed to look industrial and old-school. When done properly, it can give a brick wall a lot of character. Since this spot is going to be covered with insulation and a cabinet, Bradley decided to leave a secret message in the wall. I didn’t even notice it until it was all dry:

30 years down the line, maybe some feisty whippersnappers will rip out our OMG-that-is-sooooo-dated custom cabinet and discover our graffiti. And they’ll get all huffy and puffy about it the way we do when we discover “SCOTT” written all over the house. It’s our way of paying it forward. Setting up challenges for future generations of DIYers. (Insert evil laughter here.)

Here’s how the big patch by the ceiling looks after drying:

Here’s our “in progress” pic again that shows how the dried mortar looks from a distance:

And, just for funzies, here’s what the hallway looked like waaaaay back in late April when we picked up the keys to our house:

Technically, that’s the cleaned up before picture. When we got the house, the hallway was covered in hideous burgundy carpet. We waited about 30 minutes after our closing before we started ripping up carpet, and in all the excitement, we forgot to take a true before picture. (Read all about it in our very first post.) Here’s the earliest documented before picture of the hallway, taken when I was halfway done ripping out carpet tacks:

Ahh, memories.

We have a lot more updates to share from our very busy Labor Day weekend. And unless some other insane force of nature disrupts our progress (Tornado? Tsunami? Locusts?), we’ll be firing up our spray painter this weekend. Can’t. Wait. Stay tuned!

Blogging From the Flood Zone and Restoring Our Old Bathroom Door

Holy moly, we just breathed a sigh of relief so loud they probably heard us back in Brooklyn. Our neighbor-friend Jhane (the same one who warned us about the flood) sent us a text while she was walking by our house. Walking. Not swimming. She let us know that our house is still standing and our street is totally dry. Whee! (Thanks again, Jhane!)

We’re still blogging from just outside the flood zone. We’re kinda trapped here because all of the roads around us are closed. Just half a mile away, there are houses covered almost up to their roofs in mucky river water. It’s really scary and sad, and we feel horrible for everyone who lost their homes. We’re really anxious to get back to ours. But in the meantime, we’re going to share another project we started before we had to evacuate.

We’re so close to wrapping up the guest bedroom wing, but there are a ton of loose ends to tie up. Take, for instance, the white door at the end of the hallway:

That’s the door to our bathroom. From far away, it looks great — a standard bright white interior door. And then you get up close and see this:

Jagged edges. Peeling paint. Stains. Pencil marks from where some kid drew on the door and nobody bothered erasing ‘em. They painted over the hardware a few times and it looks pretty crusty.

Still, the old skeleton key lock works and we’re in love with those porcelain knobs. We saw those same knobs at a local antique store going for $30 a pop. We also saw replicas of this exact set going for $70 in a restoration catalog. We’re pretty sure we can restore these puppies for $0 using stuff we have in our garage.

We started by taking the door off its hinges and taking off all the parts we want to save. Everything went into a big glass jar, including all of the screws:

The porcelain knobs went into their own container:

We filled both containers with enough paint thinner to completely cover all the parts:

We did this part outside because paint thinner fumes are no joke. We left everything soaking outside overnight, and came back to scrape them the next day.

The little black toothbrush thingy in front of the paint thinner is a steel wire brush. Bradley was at work so I decided to take care of this easy peasy job on my own. Carpe diem. Girl power. All that stuff.

I drained the paint thinner into another glass jar, pulled out the different hinges one-by-one, and gave them a good scrubbing in the kitchen sink. I brushed the metal in a circular motion and paint starting sloughing off. Perfect. That’s what I was going for. One entire layer of paint came off easily. The second layer, though, wasn’t budging.

I wiped the sweat from my brow. Girl power. I brushed harder and nothing happened. I kicked it up a notch to scrub mode. Still nothing. I scoured, and still nothing. I cursed, I threatened, I spat. Girl! Power! I scrubbed some more, sweat dripping, fingers aching… and then I got a text from Bradley telling me not to use the small wire brush because he had a better idea. He was going to use the grinder with a wire brush attachment and have all the paint off in about 2 minutes. *Single tear.* Everything went back in the paint thinner jar for some more soaking.

And that’s exactly where we left them when we evacuated on Thursday. We’re guessing that after a solid week of soaking in paint thinner, we won’t have to do much scraping to get the gunk off.

While the hardware soaked, we got to work on the door. Up close you can see how gunky the paint is:

It’s not all bad, however. There are some spots where cracks and lines give the door character:

Our challenge is to get rid of all the crusty, gunky bits while keeping the interesting areas in tact. We don’t want to restore this door and have it look like a brand new door from Lowe’s — we want it to look aged and interesting.

We’re pretty sure there’s lead paint in these old doors, so we vented out the room with a window fan and I put on my hot pink ventilator mask (safety first, fashion second!). I spent about 30 minutes sanding this door, and it wasn’t going the way I’d planned.

The sander was scuffing the surface, but the paint wasn’t coming off. Scuffing wasn’t going to do the trick with these doors. The old paint had bubbled up over the years. It needed to be completely stripped off. I needed paint stripper.

Meanwhile Bradley ran out of the caulk he’s using in to seal off the cement window sills so we made a run to the hardware store. We cackled the entire time about getting some caulk and a stripper. Hehe. It still makes me snort. We’re basically 13-year-olds on the inside.

Back at the casa, Bradley showed me how to strip (har har!):

The trick is to put your index finger on top of the blade and use that to apply downward pressure so the blade slides under the paint. Easy peasy. Here’s what the door looked like after scraping off all the loose gunk and giving it a sandjob (once it starts, it’s hard to stop):

The white paint was latex and it came off easily. The yellowish paint underneath? That’s lead paint. Eeps! Bradley was pretty impressed by how hard the layer of paint is (“Say what you will about lead paint, that s**t is durable.“), and we decided to leave it alone. Why bother creating lead dust if we don’t have to?

We were worried that the cracks would disappear if we removed too much old paint, but they were fine. Next step:

Yup, floor & patio paint. For our bathroom door. We spent at least an hour chatting it up with the paint guy at our local hardware store and this is what he recommended for our floors, baseboards, door frames and doors. Each gallon cost a whopping $50, but we splurged on it, but from what we’ve seen so far, it’s worth the extra dough.

We decided to skip the primer because the door was stripped down and scuffed up enough and this black paint gives some serious coverage. Here’s how it looked after one coat:

Still pretty crusty, right? We wanted to get a smooth, even paint application so we decided to do several paper-thin coats. It’s a little more work, but it always results in a very slick paint job. We scuffed the paint lightly with some 120 grit sandpaper:

And gave it a second coat:

This part was really hard to photograph because it was dark outside. I was planning on photographing it in the morning, but then this whole flood thing happened. Still, you get the general idea. What once was clumpy and goopy is now lookin’ pretty lovely. Check out the lovely cracking at the bottom that showed up when the paint dried:

We think it might need a third coat, but won’t be able to tell until we get back to the house. We also have to flip the door over, strip it and paint it white. So the door will be black on the outside but white on the inside. A black door seemed a little too overwhelming for a teeny-tiny bathroom. We’ll wrap that sucker up next weekend and get some better pictures up here.

What we learned from this project:

• Lead paint kinda rocks…if you overlook that whole lead poisoning thing. Stuff was made to last a long, long time.
• Strip first, then sand, and your old door will end up smoother than a baby’s butt. Only with more cracks and wrinkles.

Blogging From The Flood Zone and How “A Cat Peed On My Drywall” Saved Our Basement

Hey, peeps! We’re not sure if we’ve ever mentioned it on the blog, but we live 6 short blocks away from the Susquehanna River. You know. The one that’s on the news right now for severe and record-breaking flash floods. Eeps!! In our area, the big emergency is that a part of that dike (aka the running trail Bradley and I love) has washed away. It’s not a good situation.

Before anyone panics (ahem, Bradley’s mom), we should go ahead and mention that we’re safe and sound in a very elevated area about 20 miles away from our house. We’re OK, really!

We were both at work in New York City, totally clueless about what was going on, when I received a text message from a new friend who lives a few blocks away (thank you, Jhane!). She let us know that our area was being evacuated and that roads would be shutting down soon. I called Bradley right away and we basically went into panic mode.

The smart thing to do would have been to say in NYC, but our cat was home alone. We knew we couldn’t live with ourselves if something happened to that cranky old turd, and we could have been stuck in NYC for up to a week due to road closures. So instead of doing the smart thing, we did what we thought was the right thing: we both left work early, jumped in the car and rushed home to rescue our feline friend. (Big thank you to our understanding bosses!)

When we got home, we noticed right away that there was a funky odor in the air. We ran to the basement to check out the situation below ground level and found this:

Sorry about the bad photo. We only had time for iPhonetography. That’s standing water in our basement. I guessed it was about 3 inches, but it went over Bradley’s ankles when he stood in it, so it was really more like 6 inches. We could hear it pouring in through the walls — literally the sound of a running faucet turned on high — and we flipped out.

We knew there was a sump pump in our basement (you can see it sticking up though the water on the top left hand side of the photo above), but we weren’t sure if it actually worked. It’s in a totally random location and there are no plug-ins anywhere near it. It’s been off ever since we got the house. Bradley ran an extension cord down to the basement, plugged in the pump and — yay! — it hummed and turned on. He ran the drain pipe outside, but it was pretty short. Still, it was pumping water out and that was better than nothing.

While the pump did it’s thang, we rushed upstairs to move everything from the first floor of the house up to the second floor. We’ve been complaining about being forced to live out of boxes, but they came in pretty handy last night. We just schlepped everything up to the guest bedroom — even the couch. The heavier stuff (like our brand new media cabinet and our bed) stayed downstairs, but we elevated them. We have a twin-sized daybed that was sitting in our dining room, and once we carried the mattress upstairs, we had a platform that we could stack a bunch of things on.

While we were carrying things upstairs, we couldn’t help but peek in the neighboring houses, and a lot of people were just hanging out and watching TV. We starting questioning whether we were overreacting. But, whatevs, this is our first flood. We took the paranoid first-time-homeowner route, and we don’t regret it.

After everything was off the floor, we went back downstairs to deal with the water pouring in through the walls. Once we took a look around, we could see that water was dripping in through several spots, but the faucet noise was coming from one dime-sized hole in the wall.

We had a quick brainstorm of all the things we could possibly shove in the hole to at least slow the water down. Cork from a wine bottle? Didn’t have one. A rag? Wouldn’t do much. Silicone? Not with the amount of water that was pouring in. And then, Bradley had it: “Rope!!” Uhhh, rope? “Didn’t you tell me that’s what shipbuilders use?” Oh. Em. Gee. YES. It is. Sorta.

A couple of weeks ago, I got all caught up with reading A Cat Peed On My Drywall, a renovation blog based in Nova Scotia. They mentioned an old shipbuilding technique for filling in gaps between wood planks — you just take a length of rope and shove it into the cracks. They were using it for insulating their cold wood floors, but I shared the post with Bradley because their floors ended up looking super cool.

Maybe it’s because I told Bradley it was a shipbuilding technique (he’s way into anything that involves building anything), but the whole stuff-rope-in-it thing stuck in his head. Standing there up to our ankles in mucky water, listening to the Niagara Falls version of basement leaks, it sounded like a really good idea. The rope would get wet and expand, which would at least slow the flow of water. It sounded logical in a crazy kinda way.

Bradley grabbed some rope, a hammer, and a fat nail. He used the hammer and nail to bang the rope into the hole. It took about 15 minutes and a lot more rope than we originally thought, but eventually, the water stopped. We were so geeked! Once it stopped, Bradley quickly applied a bunch of caulk around the area. We’re not sure if it’ll hold until the worst of the flood is over, but the rope is in there so tight that it’s not coming out for a while. And it’s better than nothing, right? (Thanks for giving us the idea ACPOMD! Love your blog, and a belated congrats on your pregnancy!)

Once the leak situation was under control, we went out to the garage and moved all of our building supplies and tools up to the garage attic. Everything that was too big to squeeze through the attic entry was raised up on cinder blocks.

The entire ordeal — getting everything moved upstairs, pumping the basement, sealing the leak, packing food and clothes for the evacuation — took about 5 hours. We decided not to wait until the morning to evacuate and left at 1am, exhausted, but feeling pretty good about all the prep work we did.

Even though the building we’re staying in is way above flood levels, they’re still expecting power outages in the area and the roads are shutting down. We woke up this morning and ran to pick up some rain boots for Bradley:

He was wading around in the nasty basement water in flip flops, and he was shivering from the cold the entire time. We figured we might as well get ‘em now, just in case.

Next stop was the grocery store where we stocked up on enough food to get us through a couple of days. We saw a lot of people stocking up on frozen foods, refrigerated goods and fresh meat. Super weird. We’re definitely not experts in emergency preparedness, but we thought we should get things that are shelf stable, just in case the power goes out. We grabbed some bread, crackers, peanut butter, canned beans, canned soup, brown rice and some fruits & veggies that don’t need refrigeration. We also grabbed one small package of chicken breast. If the power goes out, it won’t be a huge loss. We have access to a gas grill, so we’re all set. We also stocked up on bottled water and we have candles, lighters and flashlights ready to go.

After that, we hit up a cheap diner for a little pre-flood calorie-bomb action. Nothing says comfort food like breakfast for lunch:

L to R: pancakes, coffee, bacon, scrambled eggs. There was also some toast, but it hadn’t arrived yet. Best $11 we’ve spent in a long time…even though neither of us could actually finish that grotesque amount of food.

Now we’re both lounging around, waiting for the flooding to hurry up and happen.  And hurry up and end, hopefully. It’s the waiting around that’s driving us bananas. We’re not sure how long the evacuation will last, but we’re pretty sure we won’t be doing any renovating this weekend. We still have a ton of Labor Day weekend projects to share, though, so stay tuned for those. And if you’re in the flood area, stay safe and stay dry!

Goodwill Hunting

We’ve got a little celebrating going on right now at the Bye Bye Brooklyn casa.

The Futurama birthday song is my favorite birthday tune of all time. Bradley’s been singing it to me all weekend for my big three-oh. I’m still getting used to the idea that I’m no longer a twenty-something. It’s not so bad — just different.

To ring in the big day, we decided to take a break from the renovating and go shopping instead. Our area has a lot of antique and thrift shops, and I’ve been begging Bradley to go there with me for a solid month now. On Saturday, he took me to 5 shops, one after the other, and we ended up finding a lot of things we didn’t know we needed.

Our first stop was The Rising Sun, which is located in a beautiful historic building.

Look closely on the counter and you can see my Contigo coffee mug that I raved about in another post. That thing goes everywhere with me. I’ve told Bradley I would like to be cremated and have my ashes placed in it someday. Not kidding.

The owner is a really sweet guy who grew up in our area. He gave us a lot of info on where to go and what to check out. We have a lot in common. All 3 of us wanted to be astronauts or anthropologists when we were kids. And we have a love for bones:

That’s an ice age era sloth bone. Too expensive for us, though, so we settled for just drooling over it momentarily.

Bradley fell in love with a pair of old driving goggles.

Meanwhile, I looked through 2 floors of stuff to find something that felt like a good fit for the office. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but I wanted some yellow accessories for the office.

I loved that old circus poster — I could totally imagine it leaning against the exposed brick wall — but, sadly, it was way out of my boo-zhay. And then I spotted these:

Earlier that day, Bradley had suggested getting a coffee maker for the office. I thought he was joking, but he insisted. He knows when I get in the zone, I hate being interrupted and I especially hate running out of coffee. So he thought it would be a good idea to set up a little coffee maker or French press. That way I can keep the creative juices flowing and not have to wander too far if I need a refill.

When I saw the four yellow cups, I was sold on the idea. I nabbed all 4 for $10. They already make our house feel bright and cheerful:

Now all I need is a yellow French Press to match:

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Our next stop was a big red barn that we pass on our way home from Brooklyn:

It was too dark inside for me to get any decent photos, but they have some on their website if you’re interested. We loved the setup of the place — 3 floors of antiques, all very neatly organized and staged — but we didn’t find anything that felt like a good fit for our home. It’s definitely one of the least cluttered antique shops I’ve ever been in, though, and well worth checking out.

After that, we headed over to a Goodwill, which was a total bust, except for these 2 finds:

L: Ringo Starr’s Goodnight Vienna, R: Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.

A full moon. A flying saucer. A giant robo space man. Ringo Starr in a silver lamé  space suit. Are you jealous yet? This may well be the best 50 cents we’ve spent in a long, long time.

We plan on framing these puppies and hanging them up somewhere in our house.

Next up: Timeworn Treasures, where it was also too dark to grab decent photos. When we walked in, I wasn’t sure I would find anything I liked. The whole store smelled like potpourri, which is a huge turnoff for both of us. “It smells like a grandma’s bathroom,” is Bradley’s exact quote. Still, we forced ourselves to go in and ended up walking out with the most incredible find of the day:

Bradley found this chair hidden away in a corner of the store.

It’s solid wood, with cast iron fittings that adjust the height and angle of the seat. There a little spray paint action going on on the back:

It’s rusted and scuffed and stained.

But it was love at first sight seat. Not only is this chair super cool in a steampunk kinda way, but it’s extremely comfortable to sit on. So we negotiated the price down to $64 and nabbed it for our office.

I also nabbed these B & L blocks for $4 a piece:

A $14 greenish-yellow lantern for a bookshelf:

And 3 fist-sized shells for $3 a pop:

Our final stop was Fleming Antiques & Lamps:

One of our lamps broke during the move and Bradley needed to pick up a replacement part. These ladies know their stuff — they had us in and out with the right piece in a matter of minutes.

But not before I picked up what I really came in for:

I fell in love with these vintage bookends , but initially passed on them because the $45 price tag was non-negotiable. I thought $45 was kinda ridiculous for something so small, but I’ve been talking about them nonstop for weeks now. I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t snag them, so Bradley got them for me for my birthday. (He also got me a sweet canvas carpenter’s apron from Lowe’s. Thanks Bradley!!)

Even though I loved the way they looked, the owls seemed way too dark to me. I kept wondering how they would look if I painted them a lighter color. They could look super cute and retro. Or I could totally ruin them and screw up something I already thought looked great. After a lot of hemming, hawing and begging Bradley to make the decision for me (he didn’t, the turd), I grabbed a paint brush and went for it.

We had a gallon of creamy white paint we purchased for the office walls.

The exact color is Olympic C151-1 Horseradish, and it’s a low-VOC mix so there wasn’t much of an odor. Which meant this lady could hang out with me on the porch while I painted:

Is there anything in the world lazier than a pug? I’ll go ahead and answer it for you: no. There isn’t. The end.

In case you’re wondering why we named her Jabba the Mutt, I’d like to present you with Exhibit A:

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I rest my case.

I was super nervous the entire time I painted. My hands actually shook a little when I started, and I was biting my nails in between coats. It took a solid 3 coats to cover up the deep brown wood, but the final product was exactly what I imagined.

The lighter color really makes the details in their feathers pop. And they look less weathered and old and more retro and whimsical.

It’s amazing what a huge different a little paint can make.

My new bookends will look fantastic in our office. We’re not sure right now whether we’ll use them as actual bookends or just put one in the office and the other in a different part of the house (guest bedroom, maybe?). They’re too cute to hide sideways. But we’ll figure that out once we get to the decorating stage of the office. For now, we’re OK with all of our new finds living in boxes in our dining room. They’ll have their moment soon.

As for me, I’m planning on having a moment of my own: I’m spending the rest of my birthday hanging out on the porch with the pup and dreaming about drywall and paint chips and finishing off the 2 rooms we’re working on. Back soon with more renovation adventures!

The Smurf has new clothes.

When we last left the Smurf room, it was looking a little naked:

With the lathe and plaster gone, all that separated us from the outside world was one layer each of wood and brick. Terrifying. We were pretty lucky — the wood in our 130-year old house is really well-preserved. We don’t have to replace the wood, but we do have a little crack situation:

We went upstairs early on Sunday morning to start insulating the Smurf room and found a bunch of gaps around our window sills. We could see the sunlight pouring in through the cracks. Yipes.

It’s hard for us to imagine that people have lived in this house for 130 years without proper insulation. Or maybe we’re just wusses. We couldn’t live like that. Our area of Pennsylvania gets cold in the winter. Not the-barren-arctic-tundra-of-Minnesota level of cold that Bradley grew up with, but still colder than New York City. So once the walls were stripped bare, we wanted to make sure they were properly sealed up once and for all.

We stocked up on fiberglass insulation and foam insulation. The foam insulation comes in a few different kinds — we picked up a couple of cans each of window & door foam and gap & crack foam. Then we got to work sealing up all the cracks around our windows:

Is it weird that I craved a Starbucks latte with whipped cream the entire time we sprayed insulation?

Not that I have the luxury of a Starbucks on every street corner anymore. The nearest one is 9.8 miles away. The second nearest? 16.3 miles. Good news for both my wallet and my thighs. Bad news for the Dunkin Donuts a few blocks away, where I will make demands the likes of which they have never experienced.

Some sweet, small-town kid is going to the suffer the wrath of an early morning Starbucks-deprived part-time New Yorker. My Manhattan glare and a “WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN’T MAKE ME AN EXTRA FOAMY GRANDE SKINNY VANILLA LATTE WITH 2 PUMPS OF SUGAR-FREE VANILLA??” Or, more likely, he will try not to laugh in my face as I beg him for a shot of whipped cream on my plain old coffee with skim milk, no sugar.

Jabba came running at the sound of the spray foam, probably also thinking it was something food-related:

We’re simpatico like that, always thinking with our tummies. She stood in the middle of the room and cocked her head side to side with every spray. Then she found a sunny patch and fell asleep for 6 hours. That dog leads a rough life, I tell ya.

After we sealed up all the spots around our windows, we foamed the big gaps in between the wood slats. Some of these gaps were so big, we could stick our fingers through and touch the brick on the other side.

The foam went from being soft and tacky to dry and hard in about 15 minutes. After that, we brought out the fiberglass. We decided to go with a formaldehyde-free brand:

In all honesty, we don’t know if the formaldehyde-containing insulation is really, truly bad for our health. The white stuff claims to be better for the house’s air quality, but I work in advertising and I know a thing or two about jazzing up a statistic. I’m equal parts skeptical and cynical. At any rate, the formaldehyde-free stuff wasn’t any pricier than the regular stuff, so we decided to get it. We plan on living here for a while, so we figured we might as well go with the stuff that doesn’t have any cancer-causing ingredients. Better safe than sorry.

Bradley put up the first strip of insulation to show me how it’s done. First he placed the insulation between the studs and made sure it was tightly butted up against the ceiling:

Then he unfolded the sides so the paper sat on top of the studs:

That’s my thumb, not Bradley’s. I wasn’t joking about giving up manicures until this house renovation stuff is over. I’d rather have dirt under my fingernails and a few hangnails than deal with chipped polish. I’m an all-or-nothing kinda girl. Besides, I Googled the nearest place to get a mani/pedi, and lets just say it would be easier to get an extra foamy grande skinny vanilla latte with 2 shots of sugar-free vanilla.

Next, Bradley started at the top and stapled the paper to the stud, making sure to pull it tightly to avoid wrinkles and gaps:

Once he got to the bottom, Bradley lined a spare piece of wood across the insulation and flattened it out. Then he used a knife to cut through the paper and insulation:

And he stapled across the bottom:

The final product was a wall segment with an R-value of 13:

Our area recommends an R-value between 13 to 15, so this is enough for the walls. We have a tendency to go overboard, though — why do it when you can overdo it? — so we came up with a way to sneak in a little extra R-value. We’ll get to that in a minute.

In the meantime, we re-used the R-13 fiberglass insulation we found in the house:

Reduce, reuse, re-insulate:

While I took over insulating with the new rolls, Bradley went to work sealing up the tighter spots where the full strip of batting wouldn’t fit. He removed the reclaimed insulation from its paper backing, and stuffed it in the smaller spots.

He covered the loose insulation with vapor barrier, and taped the plastic to the surrounding paper:

My insulating skills were pretty fantastic as well:

The paper is pulled tight and sits flush against the floors. Each strip of batting was gently tucked into place and all gaps filled with spare insulation or foam. And you better believe all of my staples were perfectly aligned in a row, 2 inches apart, OCD style. It’s nice to know that if I ever get sick of the art direction scene, I can go be a master insulator instead. If there is such a thing as a master insulator. Insulation Director. Chief Insulator. …I’d better just stick to advertising till I figure out a better title.

Now, back to that R-value business. We could have gone with insulation with a higher R-value, but we didn’t for 2 reasons.

1. We’re cheap. We weren’t ready to shell out the dough for a costly spray insulation.
2. We didn’t want to lose any more space in this room.

Yes, spray insulation is the best thing since sliced bread and it saves a ton of money over time. But it’s also very pricey. We have a pay-for-our-renovations-in-cash policy, and spending that kind of moolah right now just isn’t going to work for us. Not when we have a bajillion other things to renovate.

We could have just gotten thicker fiberglass insulation, but then it would be thicker than our studs. This means we would have had to build out our walls to be 6″ thick. The Smurf room is already teeny-weeny, and we didn’t want it to shrink any further. Plus we were feeling a little lazy. Framing walls is a lot of work.

The solution we came up with is to use a styrofoam insulation on top of our fiberglass insulation:

At a mere 1″ thick, these aluminum-faced sheets of insulation pack a serious punch. Each sheet adds an R-value of 6, so together with the fiberglass batting, we get an R-value of 19. Above and beyond the 13-15 that’s recommended for our area.

Added bonus: the aluminum-faced insulation is super easy to work with! We loved how lightweight it is. It was easy to carry from the garage, through the house and up the stairs to the cutting workstation in the guest bedroom.

We used a boxcutter and a makeshift ruler to score the full sheet. Then we snapped the sheet along the cut and sliced through the other side:

We also use a sheetrock saw to easily cut outlet holes:

Once the sheet was cut to the right size, we popped it in place right on top of the fiberglass insulation:

Bradley used his foot to gently nudge the sheet into place. Then I used grip-cap nails to nail the sheet to the stud:

Regular nails have the potential of damaging the foam. Grip-caps have a plastic ring around them that keeps the nail from going right through the foam:

The cap sits almost flush with the foam, but doesn’t rip the aluminum around it.

We did have a couple of incidents where the hammer missed the nail and ripped a hole in the aluminum. And by we I actually mean me. And by missed the nail I actually mean completely missed it by at least 2 inches because I was too busy freaking out about a wasp trying to get in through a window. Whoopsie doodle. Butterfingers.

That problem giant hole was easily fixable. We used a metallic tape to bandage up our boo-boos:

Right around this point, my photography got a little dodgy. Shiny metal is hard to photograph, y’all. And I’m still teaching my camera who’s boss. Go with the flow here.

Once we reached a corner, we used the metallic tape to seal the crack:

With Bradley cutting and setting sheets and me nailing and taping them, we had the entire room covered in metallic insulation. We were on fire.

And then we were on fire. As in melting. It was a 90-degree day and we had all of the windows open in the Smurf room, so we weren’t exactly freezing up there to begin with. But with the added metallic insulation, the sun reflected off of every surface in the room and we had ourselves a nice little sweatbox. It must have been over 100 degrees in the room. We were drenched in sweat and dehydrated by the time we were done.

Even after the sun went down, the room stayed warm. We noticed that if we stood really close to the insulation, we could feel our own body heat bounce back. In a nutshell, we discovered that the metallic insulation works really, really well. Too well. We were overheating, and couldn’t wait to get the sheetrock up on the walls.

The next day, we turned our attention to this:

That, I’m sorry to say, is the Smurf room ceiling. It’s textured. And hideous. The ceiling is so low (under 8 feet) that you can see every crusty detail. Since I work from home and the Smurf room will be my office, we knew we had to either demolish the ceiling or cover it up. Otherwise I’ll never get any work done. I’ll just sit in the office and stare at the ceiling all day, wishing I could sledgehammer it to smithereens.

It was a now-or-never moment because we had to sheetrock the ceiling before we could sheetrock the walls. The walls will help take some of the weight off of the ceiling sheetrock — that’s why the ceiling comes first.

So we went for it:

Getting the sheetrock up was pretty easy. Bradley grabbed one side and I grabbed the other. We lifted the sheetrock up over us and balanced it on our heads while I grabbed my homemade T-bar:

Then Bradley stepped up on an upside-down bucket and we both pushed the sheetrock up to the ceiling. I used the T-bar to hold my side of the ceiling up while Bradley put screws through the sheetrock right up through the plaster and lathe ceiling. He did his side first and then my side. I got a little break for my arms and shoulders while he finished putting up screws. Then we did it all over again with a new piece of sheetrock.

Putting up a ceiling isn’t a particularly hard job, but we wouldn’t recommend doing it alone. Or if you’re not strong enough to hold weight up over your head for 5+ minutes at a time. We would also recommend using a T-bar that is as tall as your ceilings. Ours was only about 4 feet tall, so I basically had to hold it up using arm and shoulder strength. All of my gym-time was totally put to work that day. It’s obviously not impossible to do, but we still wouldn’t recommend it for big rooms — better to have a T-bar that goes all way way from the ceiling to the floor.

My favorite part of the new ceiling process was covering up this gross looking hole where a light will someday hang:

Ta-da! It instantly felt cleaner. Or at least less grody.

One thing worth mentioning is that we staggered our sheetrock. So one sheet would butt up against the right wall, and the next sheet would butt up against the left wall.

This is in case the ceiling ever sags or a seam ever pops. It won’t rip the sheetrock all the way across the length of the room — it’ll just rip until the seam ends. This makes life way easier in case we ever have to repair our ceiling.

Once we had the big sheets up, we went back and added in smaller pieces of sheetrock to the gaps along the left and right walls:

When we were finished, the ceilings looked like this:

We were super proud of our tight seams. They’ll be easy to tape and mud over, and we love it when things are easy. We also love how clean the ceiling-meets-brick area looks now:

We don’t even need a corner bead to clean up the edge because the cut is so perfectly straight.

The whole room feels so fresh and clean without the 4 Smurf-blue walls. It feels bigger, sunnier, more modern.

And definitely less Smurf-y.

We still have to sheetrock the closet and the one remaining blue wall. We also need to replace all 3 windows in the Smurf room with new double-pane low-E windows. After that, it’s just a matter of taping, mudding and getting the walls and ceiling ready to paint. We’re pretty geeked about that last part. Why? Because we’re going to spray paint our walls with our new Graco spray gun!

Get excited, peeps. We are!

What we learned from our insulation adventure:

• Those leathery old ladies who tan with reflectors are onto something. Bradley and I got a little color while insulating the Smurf room!
• We found that the formaldehyde-free fiberglass insulation didn’t make our skin super itchy like the pink stuff did. Either way, it’s probably a good idea to wear long sleeves while handling the batting.
• It took 4 full cans of spray foam insulation for us to seal up an 8.5′x15′ room. And that’s the smallest one in our house. Better buy stock in Great Stuff pronto — we have a lot of insulating to do.

The outside of our house.

Our new camera finally arrived, and we didn’t waste any time putting it to use. We have a lot of pictures of the guest bedroom and hallway to share, but we’re still working on those posts. We didn’t get into Brooklyn until super late last night, and it’s been work-work-work ever since. Also, it turns out that writing about putting up sheetrock is as boring as actually putting up sheetrock. Yiish. Give us a couple of hours to work that one up.

In the meantime, we’d like to share with you the reasons we moved from Brooklyn to the middle-of-nowhere. A lot of our friends think we’re insane for moving to a small town, and double-insane for buying a fixer-upper. They they don’t understand why we would keep our NYC jobs and drive back 3 hours to sleep in a friend’s closet just to show up at the office 2 days a week.

We think this makes it all worthwhile:

We start seeing those rolling hills about an hour into our drive, and both of us get super excited.

By the time we get up into the hills, we’re in a completely different state of mind. We’ll roll down the window and breathe in the fresh air, and marvel in the greenness of everything. Everything is so lush.

Everything is so quaint and quiet.

Sorry. It’s quaint and quiet and cute. Did we mention there’s a trolley? Even the word itself is cute. Trolley — instant cuteness.

But the most important reason we moved out here is this:

The minute we saw her, we knew she was The One.

Sure, she needs a coat of paint, and we’re not crazy about the white screen door, but we still thought she was stately and classic. She had presence.

Even now that she’s all naked without her ivy.

Once we stepped inside and saw the original details, we were smitten. Check out the front door from the inside:

Ignore the pup. That 90lb attention-seeker isn’t ours. We were dog-sitting for a friend, and Paulie wouldn’t get out of my door shot no matter how nicely I asked. He’s pretty geeked about his 5 minutes of internet fame.

To give a frame of reference, those doors are so tall and neither of us can reach the latch up top to lock the door. I’m 5’5″ and Bradley’s 5’10″ (and Paulie’s a bit over 4′). We need a chair to get way up there:

It was love at first sight. And that, overly-judgmental friends, is why we became part-time New Yorkers and full-time small townie homeowners. For those of you who requested a peek at the outside of our house, we hope you enjoyed the pics. Coming up next: that brick wall we were exposing is done-zo and we have the before-and-afters to prove it!

Bye Bye, Brooklyn!

It’s official. We’ve leaving Brooklyn. And we’re not leaving it for Queens.

We love New York. We loathe New York. We think that makes us typical New Yorkers. For years, we took the good and overlooked the bad. We paid an absurd amount of rent to live in teeny-tiny apartments with absentee landlords. We ignored creepers on the subway. We attempted to sleep through police sirens and fighting couples and crying babies and car stereos. We were in a cycle of moving to a neighborhood, watching it become filled with annoying hipsters, and then moving to get away from them. Or we’d get really stressed out by our jobs and our lives, and we’d fly out to the Caribbean to unwind (only a 3 hour flight from NYC!). It was all worth it, because we love New York. And then one day, we were kinda over it.

It became harder and harder to justify the amount of rent we paid for an apartment that was literally falling apart around us. The creepers were suddenly everywhere and more annoying than ever. Our neighbors brought home a screaming newborn. Our ‘hood suddenly became the next hot thing, and all the annoying hipsters we had just moved away from were all over the place. We thought about going to the Caribbean again, but it seemed like a really temporary fix.

That’s when we decided to move. Bradley was already spending a few days a week in Pennsylvania for work, so we started looking for houses in the area. Luckily for us, we happened upon a fantastic realtor — Daniel Young at Century 21 Killian— and he nailed it. He had us at “It was built in 1881.”

We love the look of old brick houses with their tall ceilings and wood floors. A back yard was non-negotiable. We didn’t want a cookie cutter house in the ‘burbs. We’d rather have something with character, even if it means doing some serious remodeling work. So, most importantly, we wanted a killer deal.  The less the house cost, the more we could put into remodeling it.

Fast forward to a couple of months later, and we are the proud owners of a 130-year old fixer upper. She’s all brick, with tall ceilings and hardwood floors lurking underneath some really hideous carpet. There’s a small backyard, which is perfect for our small dog. She needs some serious work, but we’re up for the challenge. I’m predicting a lot of trips to Lowe’s in our future!