Making Furniture From Found Materials

Some time ago, we found this old piece of barn wood:

And it made our hearts sing.

The aged grey tone. The weathered and worn grain. But most of all, the realization that this piece of wood is completely one of a kind. Nowhere on this planet is there another piece of wood that’s exactly like this one. Not even this other piece of barn wood we found to go with it:

Each piece is a unique thumbprint.

They’re so different, but close enough in look and feel that we were inspired to make a set of nightstands for our guest bedroom.

Here’s a rough mockup Bradley did on the back of a piece of MDF while working on another project:

The nightstand will be a basic white box, no back, sitting on four little legs, with one drawer set into it. The drawer will be made from the raw piece of barn wood. The rough sketch above shows a handle, but we’ve decided not to have hardware. Instead, we’ll make a little cutout in the face so you can pull out the drawer with a finger. That will help keep the focus on the gorgeous wood face with no distracting hardware.

The juxtaposition between clean white cabinet and raw, grungy drawer face will — there’s really no other way to say this — look mad hot. We love the way clean elements look when contrasted with raw elements. It’s a look we’re trying to carry throughout the house with our brick walls and rafters butted right up to our textureless walls and trimless windows. We think the nightstands will fit right in.

That’s our plan, man. What do you think? We’ll share the step-by-step instructions for DIYing a set of nightstands in a couple of weeks. We can’t wait. We’ve been stashing all of our bedside stuff in trays on the floor…for the past year.

It’s getting old fast.

Front Door Facelift

Let’s talk about our front door. We can see it from the dining room:

And, man, it’s not pretty. At least not from the outside:

Gross, right? That’s a screen door with a net to keep bugs out — it covers up the gorgeous solid wood doors that are on the inside. But that’s not the only problem we have with our front entrance.

Someone tried to stop drafts from creeping in through the 130-year-old doors with weatherstripping foam and felt. Only they did it wrong. The wood doors barely close — we have to push them in and quickly lock the doors before they pop back out.

And, in installing the storm door, the pretty wood details were covered up:

We also hate how the storm door has basically become a home for creepy-crawlies:

We found at least 5 spiders hanging out in the doorway. Blurgh! And did we mention the dust?

No? Well feast your eyes, friends:

It’s a good thing we have 3 entrances to the house, because if we invited people in through this doorway, nobody would ever visit. Ever. And we’d probably never leave either.

Despite all the hideousness, our front door has a lot of redeeming qualities. Here’s what one of the two doors looks like when taken off its hinges:

Bradley looks so tiny standing in front of it…and he’s 5’11″.

Yup. Their size alone makes these doors awesome. And check out this doorknob:

It came with a skeleton key, but we accidentally broke it while trying to jam the door closed, Incredible Hulk style. Whoops. For the record, it’s really, really hard to find a replacement for an ancient skeleton key. Good thing we’re updating the locks anyway.

But before we get to that, we decided to permanently remove the storm door.

We were so geeked to see thing thing go. Especially when we started seeing the woodwork that had been hidden before:

Ooh la la, so purdy! One side was completely in tact. The other side:

…not so much. We were so bummed when we saw this.

To fit the stupid storm door on, someone chipped away some of the original woodwork. Luckily, we think it’s salvageable. With some creative use of wood putty, we think we can reshape the missing areas.

Once the screen door was gone, we vacuumed up all the dust and cobwebs. Then we insulated the gap between the inside of the house and the outside of the house with Great Stuff.

That grey thing Bradley’s standing on? That’s a solid piece of stone. It needs a little cleanup work, but it’s in great shape otherwise. It’s going to be beautiful some day. Not today, though. We have priorities.

Here’s Bradley putting the cast iron plate back in place:

Don’t be fooled — he makes it look easy, but that sucker is SUPER heavy. While Bradley worked on adding insulation, I worked on removing insulation:

I used a paint scraper to remove all of the foam weather strips from around the doorway. They were keeping the doors from closing properly. With the strips removed, the doors open and close easily. We’ll go back in and install new weather strips that don’t interfere with the doors opening and closing.

We had to shim the cast iron plate to make it level:

By shimming it, we raised the metal plate a smidge…and the doors wouldn’t close at all. Not even a little. Our next order of business was to make the door fit properly.

We took the doors off their hinges, posed for the pictures we showed earlier, and then used a circular saw to shave 1/8th of an inch from the bottom of both doors:

And here’s the fun part: when Bradley started sawing, the wood released an unmistakeable smell that caught us totally by surprise. Walnut. These doors are solid walnut. We stopped the saw and had a mini freakout right there on the street.

To get an idea of why we were so geeked, check out the price tag on these solid walnut exterior doors. And those are standard sized doors. Ours are way bigger, way older, and — if we do say so ourselves — way cooler looking. Hence the dancing in the streets.

While we had our walnut beauties off their hinges, we did a few minor repairs on the locking mechanism.

We also lightly polished the brass locks using steel wool:

If you’re a longtime reader, you know we have a serious aversion to brass. Gold metals are not our jam. But this door is an exception. We think the locks and doorknob are badass in brass and we’re leaving them that way. Here’s what the doorknob looked like before we scrubbed it with steel wool:

It’s pretty grimy looking, with a dingy green color due to aging. And here’s how it looks after we polished the raised surfaces:

Two tone! All of the raised edges are shiny orangish brass, and everything recessed is still greenish-greyish old brass. For comparison’s sake, here’s how the doorknob looks next to an oil-rubbed bronze lock:

We’re in love.

Our last task for the day was to silicone the spot between the cast iron plate and the stone.

We used black silicone so it’s not visible, but it will still keep water and dirt from creeping under the cast iron plate and into our basement.

It feels like forever since we’ve done a before-and-after. Whee! Here we go. This is what our front door looked like before:

And this is what it looks like after:

BOOM. Magic happened.

We’re not done working on the front door. We have some big plans to make this entrance even better:

• We’re going to replace the old glass with new double-pane glass.
• We’re going to paint the outside of the door a bold color. We have it picked out already, but we probably won’t paint until spring.
• We’re going raw on the inside. We’ll sand the inside of the doors to reveal all that walnut prettiness.

We’re already loving the way the doorway is letting more light into our dark hallway. It’s only going to get better from here. We’ll be back with more updates from the home front. We’re going to start ripping apart our fugly kitchen this weekend. But before we do, we’ll share our before pictures. Warning: it’s gnarly looking. Stay tuned!

Freshly Tanned and Freshly Pressed

Hey peeps, I’m back from the girls’ surf trip to Barbados and it looks like we have a bunch of new readers. Thanks for all of the great feedback on our last post. I was a little shocked when my phone starting dinging  nonstop at the beach with new comments, and I’m sorry I didn’t take the time to respond to all of you. I was busy surfing

We hope you’ll stick around and follow our progress on our 130-year-old fixer-upper. We have lofty goals and a limited budget, which is a recipe for either fun or disaster. I forget which. We have a ton of projects coming up that we’re geeked to share with you:

• We’re making frames from scratch and matting our own art.
• We’re attempting to make our super creepy basement slightly less creepy.
• Bradley installed a new entry door in the dining room while I was gone and I have after pictures to share.
• We’re finally finishing off those tree stump side tables.
• We’re ripping out the last of the fugly burgundy carpet, rolling it up and setting it on fire. Just kidding about that last part. Maybe.
• We’re making bedside tables so our bedside stuff isn’t sitting on the bedside floor.
• And our most insane project to date: we’re going to DIY our own surfboards. Seriously.

Thanks again for all the feedback and we’ll be back to posting regularly in a couple of days. In the meantime, check out the projects tab to see what we’ve been up to for the past year.

The Doors

Mmkay, let’s talk about these two doors in our dining room:

Here’s what they looked like, without the plastic wrap, right after we demolished the room:

We’ve already covered up the door on the far left — it used to open up to a very rickety, get-ready-for-a-broken-neck staircase that led down to the basement. We don’t miss it. Now we have to decide what to do with the other two doors. We’ve been hemming and hawing over whether to keep them.

On the one hand, the doors are really cool because they’re MASSIVE. It’s hard to capture their scale in pictures. When we stand in front of them and reach up with both hands, we can’t touch the top of the door. We can’t do it even if we stand on our toes. They were built for giants. Or supermodels. Or Amazons. Whatever, they’re frikkin’ huge. They just don’t make doors like that anymore.

On the other hand, though, the doors are kind of a drag. With the doors open, the living room flows into the dining room which flows into the kitchen. Everything feels so spacious and airy and sunny. With the doors closed, everything feels choppy and cut off. The rooms feel smaller.

On the OTHER other hand, we love having doors because it lets us direct airflow when we use the fireplace to heat up our house in the winter. We’re two people living in a 2,050 square foot house — not every single room needs to be toasty all the time. We like being able to close the living room doors so heat goes up the hallway and to the bedrooms instead. When the living room becomes an actual living room (and not our storage-slash-junk closet), we’ll appreciate being able to direct heat there by closing off the hallway door.

So here’s the compromise we’ve come up with: a sliding door. We’ll be able to slide it down to close off one door or the other if we want. Or we can just push it out of the way and enjoy our big, open spaces.

We’ve been ogling a lot of sliding doors on Pinterest lately. Here are some of the doors that have caught our eye:

Pinterest

That room looks like somewhere we would live. Except for the white couch. We can have white couches because we wear really dark denim that rubs off. But those floors, those walls, and even that cowhide rug scream our names. The barn door is icing on the cake.

And then there’s this beauty:

Pinterest

We’re such suckers for brick walls and black floors. But that door is amazing on its own. We love how it lets in light but still offers privacy if needed.

Check out the hardware on this simple wood door:

Pinterest

We swoon. We fan our faces and have a fainting spell. It’s like the perfect blend of barn-meets-loft. We considered doing a really traditional looking barn door like this:

Pinterest

But we’d do it with a serious pop of color like this:

Pinterest

Or this next color, which we’re completely smitten with at the moment:

Pinterest

Those doors win on so many levels. We love the inset handles and the bold black hardware. We could rock that look in our house. Or we could take it in completely the opposite direction and inject a big dose of industrial chic in our dining room:

Pinterest

Don’t get us started on those floors. They’re ridiculous. We’d make out with them if we could. And we’re ready to adopt that giant fire door and make it part of our family. The only problem we can see is that it wouldn’t let light into our sorta-dark-half-the-time dining room. Which is why we keep going back to this glass paneled look:

Source (with step-by-step DIY instructions!)

So there we go. We have a plan of what we’re going to do with our dining room doorways, but we just need to pick out what kind of doors we want. We’ll probably twiddle our thumbs and hem and haw about it until the weekend we need to install something. Then we’ll make a last-minute decision that will be exactly what we should have done the entire time. That’s how we roll, people.

What do you think of the sliding doors? Any favorites?

Our Tax Refund Dollars at Work

A few weeks ago, we received our tax refund. And it was the Biggest. One. Ever. Apparently when your employer forgets to change your tax info from NYC resident to way-out-in-Pennsylvania resident, that’s what happens. We hemmed and hawed for a while about what we could spend it on. We briefly considered cashing it out in pennies and making a Scrooge McDuck vault in the basement, but that didn’t work out so well when Peter Griffin tried it.

So we scratched that plan and allocated our funds to 3 things:
1.    The dining room do-over
2.    New kitchen cabinets
3.    Plane tickets for next year’s vacation

Let’s back up for one sec with an update on what’s happening with the upstairs renovation. We’re soooo close to being done with the actual renovation and almost ready to move on to the styling phase (a.k.a. the fun stuff). We still have to seal up both sides of the brick wall in the hallway and paint the trim in the office closet. After that, we’ll build some furniture and bring in the accessories to get those rooms totally finished.

It’s going to take only one weekend to paint-and-seal upstairs, but when we woke up on Saturday, we weren’t feelin’ it. Luckily, Bradley had already ordered everything we’ll need to insulate and drywall the dining room as soon as our tax refund showed up. So we moved all the furniture out of the room and got to work.

Here’s a refresher on what the dining room looked like when we moved into the house:

All together now: ewwwwwwww. The only thing that’s staying is the huge radiator, but we’re going to cover up its ugliness by making a radiator box. Sort of like putting a bag over its head.

Anyway, we’ve already done most of the dirty work in the dining room over the past few months.

We demolished the brick wall and exposed the ceiling rafters.

We sanded the floors.

We got an old-school wood stove so we don’t have to rely on oil for our heating needs.

We installed a (much less hideous) ceiling fan and track lighting.

We replaced the single-pane windows with new ones.

We’re going to beat the ugly out of this room.

With the demolition part of the job pretty much done, we’re going to jump right in with building things. On Saturday, we started building a wall.

We started by making sure there was no power running through the outlets, and then ripped off all the trim.

We had to make a decision on whether or not to keep the woodwork in this room. The cool thing about it is that it’s original to the house. But that’s about all it has going for it. We think that the thick-and-clunky trim weighs the room down. It makes the big windows appear smaller and the 11.5′ ceilings appear shorter. And, most importantly, this look is just not “us.” So we decided to get rid of the trim and go with the same look we started upstairs — trimless windows with concrete sills.

Once the trim was down, we started insulating. This room is completely un-insulated, so we’re basically hemorrhaging heat all winter.

We screwed foam insulation directly onto the plaster to add an R-value of 5. At the bottom of the wall, we noticed that the trim had damaged some of the bricks. Bradley mixed up a batch of cement and patched those spots.

He recently made a door for a fancy apartment in SoHo. When he went to install it, he noticed there was a big collection of old bricks that the apartment owner had removed during her renovation.

They were in great shape and each one was stamped with EMPIRE on one side, so we assume they were made in the Empire City a long time ago. The owner was getting rid of them, so Bradley gladly took them. This way we can have some old NYC brick in our home.

With the foam insulation complete, we taped the seams and sealed the gaps with Great Stuff.

Then we took off the basement door and framed it. That way we can cover it up and it’ll be like the door never existed.

We’ve always hated the way this corner looks. The doors aren’t the same height, which looks odd. Plus, there’s outdoor access to the basement, so this door is redundant.

Now you see it….now you don’t.

Next, we framed the wall for even more insulation.

Fiberglass insulation is my jam. I realize it makes me sound completely insane, but I love insulating. There’s something really satisfying about the click…click….click of the staple gun. And, as long as I wear long sleeve shirts, I don’t get the dreaded itchies that everyone complains about.

Bradley had to do a little electrical work for this wall, so I happily took over the insulation duties. Here’s what it looked like by the time I finished:

The fiberglass insulation has an R-value of 19. Combined with the foam insulation, we’ve brought the R-value of our wall up to R24. From R0. We’re going to be nice and toasty next winter.

You can see Bradley’s electrical addition poking through the insulation. He wired the wall we can install two swing-arm sconces. We saw this baby in the Restoration Hardware catalog and fell in love:

Source

We love the old-school look and the ability to swing the lamp where ever it’s needed. We don’t love the price tag, because this is a really simple DIY project. And our version will hide the cord behind the wall for a much sleeker look. That’s still a few weeks down the road. Right now, we’re building walls.

Fast forward to a few hours later:

And that’s what our dining room looks like today. We’ve got more framing, insulating and drywalling to do, but we think it’s already looking so much better in here.

The most noticeable difference is how tall the ceilings feel without the hideous wallpaper border along the top. We’re not really sure how that trend became so popular 20 years ago, but all it does is make the room feel smaller. Good riddance.

We’re still in the wishlist stages of planning out our dining room. Here’s what we’re thinking:

• We’re already considering a warm blue-grey for the walls.
• We’ll build a wall-to-wall built-in bench with storage compartments under the seat. This would make some seating for…
• The dining room table we’ll build from some reclaimed spalted maple we recently acquired. (The guy told us we could have it for free if we removed it from his property, and we gladly did.)
• That basement door we covered up? We realized that’s a ton of wasted space under the staircase. We’re going to turn that into a coat closet. More on that when we renovate the hallway.
• We’ve decided to leave the brick wall raw, but we need to clean and seal it. That sucker sheds more than both of our dogs combined.

That’s what we’ve been up to, peeps. We’ll be back soon with updates. What’s going on with you? Any DIY projects in the works? Are you putting your tax refund to good use?

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!

Fun Finds.

There’s a small, local shop in our town that sells everything. Literally everything. From candy to light bulbs to fabric — they’ve got it. A few days ago, we wandered in to check out their fabric selection (planning out a new project!), and found these:

We think they’re stocking hooks for mantles, but we’re not sure. We picked up both for $5 and we have big, big plans for one of them. Here’s what we’re thinking: remove the hook, paint it black, and turn it into an amazing finial to top off our staircase baluster:

I can’t believe the only picture I could find of our baluster was this hideous shot before we removed the carpet. Yiish. There might have been a finial on the staircase at some point, but currently, this is what it looks like:

We plan on painting the staircase black to match the floors. And we think our new DIY finial would fit right in. We admit it: we’re a little bit goth on the inside. Just a little. We embrace our inner Lydia Deetz:

We’re not sure what we’ll do with the second one, but we’ll figure it out.

Check out what else Bradley found:

Two stumps. And they’re the perfect size to make side tables for our couch! We love the way this one is shaped:

We need to dry them and strip the bark off the sides. Then we’ll sand them smooth and finish them off with a lacquer. It could take a while — just the drying is going to take about a month. To speed things up, we’re going to haul them inside and put them next to the fireplace.

By the time we’re finished, we’ll have something that looks like this:

Source

Except ours will be free. Whooooo!

We’re smack-dab in the middle of a big project right now. We’ll be back tomorrow with some updates. Stay tuned!

Just Say No(vember)

We love our new wood-burning stove and all, but it completely derailed our progress in the guest bedroom and office. We were getting thisclose to wrapping up the two rooms and moving upstairs. And then the stove happened. We demolished the dining room, yanked out carpet, sanded floors, and broke a window.

Then we freaked out about how much heat we were losing through the window, which made us freak out about how much heat we were losing through the attic. So we insulated the attic. Then we ordered insulation for the basement. Plus enough firewood to last us through the winter. And, while we were at it, we ordered new windows for the dining room. Our house feels enough like a shanty without the boarded-up windows.

Here’s the thing, though: all of this stuff costs money. A lot of money. We were visiting the hardware stores at least twice a weekend to pick up one thing or another. And each trip resulted in a tab of $500+. The fireplace was a $2300 purchase. $1600 for the chimney liner. $240 for firewood. $900 for a water heater. $400 for windows. $500 insulation. $200 lumber. It adds up fast. We were easily dropping $1000 to $2000 per weekend. Yipes!

We’re paying for our renovation in cash, so a couple of months of frivolous spending left our bank account a little lower than usual. We like to keep our account balance above a certain amount, and lately we’ve been hovering a few hundred bucks under our comfort zone. Whenever we drop below our buffer, we panic. There was a lot of nail-biting and hand-wringing and Advil going on. So we decided it’s time to give our debit card a break.

We’re declaring November & December our no-spending months. We’re not going to buy building materials, tools, appliances or any other big purchases until the end of December. This doesn’t mean we’re going to stop working. We have a huuuuge to-do list of things we’ve been putting off. We have supplies on hand to finish most jobs. Rest assured, we’ll be crazy-busy for the next two months.

We’re making two exceptions to our spending freeze. 1) If we run out of basics like nails, screws or Great Stuff, we’ll still buy those. But we’re not going to spend more than $50 on a trip to the hardware store. 2) If an emergency comes up, we’ll be flexible. We’re talking pipes-froze-and-burst type emergencies. Not OMG-SALE-AT-LOWE’S emergencies.

Not gonna lie: this will be tough. We have so many projects we want to do — building new (insulated!) walls in the dining room, for example. But we also have a bajillion small projects we need to wrap up before we can move on.

Here’s what we have planned for the rest of the year:

• Guest bedroom / Office / Upstairs Hallway
  • Put up trim
  • Paint the trim
  • Hem and hang curtains
  • Re-veneer the bed
  • 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
  • Book a dumpster for Thanksgiving weekend and empty out the garage (it’s completely full of trash from the dining room demo)

We definitely have our work cut out for us, but we think we’re up to the task. It’s going to be hard to totally stop spending after a few months of kid-in-a-candy-shop behavior, but we have plenty of supplies to get these jobs done. By the time January rolls around, we’ll be back in our comfort zone. Added bonus: all the odds & ends jobs we’ve been putting off will be scratched off our list!

We’ll keep you posted on how we’re coping with the spending freeze. So far, we’re avoiding Lowe’s like the plague. They’ve already starting the holiday sales and specials. It seems like everything we’ve been eyeballing for months is magically on sale the minute we put our debit card away. Boo! Hiss!

How about you other renovators out there? Made any big purchases lately? Ever put yourself on a spending freeze?

Dining room plans.

We weren’t planning on remodeling the dining room next. For months now, we’ve been daydreaming about attacking the laundry room. Literally attacking it. With sledgehammers. That room is a wart on the rest of our house, and we always assumed we’d start ripping it apart as soon as we moved upstairs into the guest bedroom and office.

Then the temperatures started dropping and we freaked out. We really don’t want to be reliant on an oil burner all winter — it would cost a fortune and isn’t exactly eco-friendly. So we decided to put in a wood-burning stove in the dining room. And, just like that, our laundry room went on the back-burner and we started making plans for our other wart. (We have a multi-wart situation going on ’round these parts.)

Here’s what our dining room looks like in 2D-birds-eye land:

No renovation would be complete without a few challenges:

• We have to work around a wood-burning stove.
  See the grey box in our floorplan? That’s a steel plate that has to sit under our wood-burning stove just in case sparks fly out. We can’t have furniture too close to the stove for the same reason.
• We have to insulate 2 walls.
  The top and bottom walls in the above floorplan face outside and need to be insulated. This means we’ll lose over one foot of width. The room is currently 16′x16′, so it’s not that huge a deal, but it’s still a bummer.
• The dining room is the central hub of our house.
  We have to walk through it to get to different sections of the house. The kitchen, laundry room and half-bath are on one side of the dining room. The living room, front door and stairs leading up to the bedrooms and office are on the other side. High-traffic to the max.
• It’s our way in and out of the house.
  There’s no street parking in front of our house (really old, narrow street made for horses, not cars). We have a 2-car garage and a small driveway, but they’re located behind the house. So the dining room entrance is the closest and most convenient way in and out of the house, and that’s what we use. Our front door (put up in 1881) is basically just eye candy. I think we’ve used it, maybe, 3 times in the past 5 months.
• There are so. many. doors.
  There are 5 doors / doorways in this room alone, and we have to leave enough room to work around those.

We were pretty stumped about what to do, so we made a wishlist of all the things we wanted in the room:

• Exposed rafters and brick (got a head start on that one!)
• A window seat
• A place to sit around the fire
• A place for our 4-legged friends to nap by the fire (Jabba’s a fireplace fanatic)
• Somewhere to sit down and take off our shoes when we enter the house
• Somewhere to stash things we like to grab as we’re leaving (keys, gloves, hats, scarves, umbrellas, etc)
• A dining table big enough for 6
• Firewood storage area so we’re not constantly running down to the basement

Yup. Kind of a tall order; when we wish, we wish big. We didn’t know if we could fit everything into one 16′x16′ 15′x16′ room. We talked over a lot of options; having a 4-seater dining table, having a round dining table, even having no dining table. And then, out of the blue, we came up with this:

• Get rid of the basement door.
  There’s another entrance to the basement through the porch. If we get rid of the one in the dining room, we have enough space to….
• Build a wall-to-wall bench with storage cubbies underneath.
  That way we get a biiiiig window seat by the fire. And we can stash firewood in the cubbies right under our seating. Plus we can use one of the cubbies to house a bed for Jabba. How perfect is that?? Added bonus: we know an upholstery guy who can whip up one long bench cushion in whatever fabric we supply. And a matching cushion for our furry friends.
• Find or build a rectangle dining room table.
  We want something that can seat 4 people in chairs and 2 people on the bench. It has to fit the space in a way that boxes in the whole fireplace / dining table area, so we may have to build this one ourselves. Fun!
• Build an mini-mudroom setup by the entrance.
  We’ll build another bench setup by the door with storage cubbies underneath for all our grab-and-go stuff. There will also be a boot tray to keep mud off our floors. And we’re still working on a coat storage solution. (Our coat racks always end up being total eyesores because we overload them.)

We’re still working out the design of the bench, but we’re starting pinning things that catch our eye. We’re thinking something simple like this:

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But waaaay longer and with a cushier seat. We’re talking sofa-like cushiness. We also dig the more minimalist look:

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As soon as we’re done upstairs, we’ll start shopping for fabric and get this sucker going. And, of course, we’ll share the step-by-step with you guys. Stay tuned for more updates from our casa.

To paint or not to paint? Our rafters, that is.

Before we demolished the dining room, we came up with a game plan of what we wanted the room to look like. We’re total Type A planners, so nothing happens without a set goal in mind. It helps that we drive to Brooklyn and back once a week, and each drive gives us 3.5 hours to chit-chat about what we want to work on.

When we started talking about the dining room, we agreed on 4 things right away:

1. The brick wall between the kitchen and the dining room was just begging to be exposed on both sides.
2. Nothing goes with exposed brick better than exposed rafters.
3. If there’s going to be an old-school fireplace, there might as well be a leather couch.
4. If there’s a fireplace and a couch, then a sheepskin throw would really help pull the rustic-urban look together.

So with all of that in mind, we started scoping out inspiration and pinning them to our Pinterest boards. Here are some images that caught our collective eye:

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Love the mix of woods with the brick in that dining room. And how tall do those ceilings look with the rafters exposed? Sign us up! We’re not sure that we want to leave our rafters raw, though. We love how the raw wood looks, but white rafters feel so much more polished:

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We swooned over so many things in that picture: the peacock blue cabinet, the cowhide rug, the picnic table style dining area. Oh, and it’s on a beach. That helps. But for now, lets focus on those rafters. Here’s the same room from a different angle:

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White rafters look so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean. On the other hand, we’ve seen plenty of spaces that have raw rafters and still look squeaky:

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We love how raw wood rafters helps warm up a space. On the other-other hand, a great wood table would do the same thing with white rafters:

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We’ve lost count of how many other hands we have, and we still haven’t reached a verdict. What do you think? Do you prefer the more urban raw textured wood look? Or the clean white beachy feel? After seeing pictures of our nowhere-near-finished space, do you think we can pull either look off?

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P.S. You can check out all of our Pinterest boards right here.