Getting Gorgeous: New Walls For Our Dining Room

Greetings from rainy, grey Brooklyn! We just got in from rainy, grey Pennsylvania last night. We spent our rainy, grey weekend finishing up the insulation and drywall in the dining room. It was actually a two-weekend project. We started last week by installing some temporary fixtures to the dining room doorways:

The dining room is smack dab in the center of the house. Here’s a floor plan:

Even though we leave the windows and door open while we’re working, dust manages to find its way everywhere. We found ourselves dusting pretty much every day, especially in the kitchen. Dust even managed to get upstairs in the hallway and guest bedroom. How? No clue. But it was getting to be a bit much to keep up with. We found these tarp zippers at our local hardware store for $10 a pop:

Basically, they’re a zipper with a heavy-duty adhesive on one side. We stapled some plastic over the doorway leading to the hall and to the kitchen. Then we taped the plastic to the wall and floors to completely seal up the openings. After that, we taped the zipper to the plastic, unzipped it, cut a slit from top to bottom, and we have a plastic doorway:

It looks a bit like a Dexter kill room, but it works like a charm to keep the dust out. We did this for two doorways: the one leading upstairs and the one to the kitchen. We didn’t bother with the door that leads to the living room because dust wasn’t really getting in there to begin with.

Once we finished dust-proofing the doorways, we settled down for a nap on our ginormous radiator:

Not hammy enough? Here ya go:

We dragged the radiator out of the way and saw what was going on behind it:

All together now: ewwwwww…. Luckily that’s not mold we’re looking at. It’s crusty old wallpaper.

It’s the 7th or 8th different wallpaper pattern we’ve found in this house. We’ve lost track at this point. Either way, there was a whole lot of fugliness going on back there. And here’s what we found underneath the radiator:

A giant pile of dust and animal fur. Again: ewwwwww. That picture pretty much sums up why we’ve decided to make radiator boxes. We’re designing them to fit in with the overall look of our house and building them ourselves, so they’ll be more fancy-schmancy than the frumpy radiator boxes we’ve found in catalogs.

Speaking of frumpy, check out what the radiator did to the floor underneath:

We have a little patching and sanding to do. But first, we’re building walls. We started by removing all of the trim:

We talked about it a little in our last dining room post, but we’ve decided not to save and reinstall the old wood trim. The room feels so much more open without it. Once the trim was out, we built our walls.

This wall was, by far, the hardest:

Each rafter was slightly different, so the drywall had to be precisely cut to fit against the ceiling:

It was a bit like Tetris.

We were so geeked to tear down this old doorbell:

We’re guessing it was added in the ’60s or ’70s, and we’ve always hated the way it looks. So we’re replacing it with this:

It’s a small bell. Kind of a tiny version of the giant school bells that we had in our elementary schools. We haven’t installed it yet, but it’s going to look much more subtle than the giant creme-colored box it’s replacing.

Another thing we were super geeked about:

Saying buh-bye to that hideous floral wall border. We’ve been living with that ugliness for over a year now and covering it up was a happy-dance-around-the-room kind of momentous occasion. We may also have shouted “See you in hell, wallpaper!”

Check out our new, ugly-free walls. So fresh and so clean-clean! And so tall-tall, too:

To give some reference to the height of this room, Bradley’s just a bit over 5’10″. The room has always had taller-than-average ceilings, but we added about a foot when we exposed the rafters. With fresh, untextured drywall and no trim, the entire room feels so much bigger.

Here’s Bradley screwing in the last bit of drywall:

And, finally, here’s how the room looks now:

We love how the clean walls make the raw elements in the room pop. The rafters look so much better jutting out of a textureless wall:

And the spot where the rafters meet the brick looks so much better:

It’s finally starting to look more urban loft and a lot less country tacky.

We still have a lot of work to do before we can wrap this room up, though. We’re currently planning out how to replace the entry door:

It’s an old, solid wood door that would look great if we sanded and painted it, but we’re not going to keep it. It’s about half an inch thick and has the thinnest piece of single-pane glass known to mankind. Seriously. We might as well have a Kleenex separating us from the elements. This thing is doing nothing to keep us warm in the winter. So we’re shopping around for new doors. It’s not as easy as it sounds — all of the doors in our house are so old that they’re not standard-sized. Boo! Hiss! We might have to make or order custom exterior doors for the dining room and kitchen.

We have a lot of updates for you guys this week. We’re running in high gear right now so we’ll be posting more frequently. Whee! In our next post, we’re going to talk about our plans for the dining room doors:

That’s coming up tomorrow. Stay tuned!

Our Tax Refund Dollars at Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We demolished the brick wall and exposed the ceiling rafters.

We sanded the floors.

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

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

We replaced the single-pane windows with new ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now you see it….now you don’t.

Next, we framed the wall for even more insulation.

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

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

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

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

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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?

Working hard or hardly working?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside the master bedroom:

And down the staircase:

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

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

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

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

Sorta. Some of them needed a little extra whacking.

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

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

Nothing a little plaster can’t fix:

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

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

More updates coming. Hint, they involve this stuff:

All together now: FIIIIINALLY!

We don’t need no stinkin’ doors.

We have big, big plans for our master bedroom. We want to take it from this hot mess:

To this sleek, sexy, sophisticated new floor plan:

Right now, the master bedroom isn’t a big priority. Once the guest bedroom is done, we’ll furnish it and move in. This will free up the living room (currently our bedroom) and the dining room (currently our living room), and we can shuffle things around a bit so we can get started on our next big project (the laundry room / bathroom downstairs).

Still, we’ve made some progress in the master bedroom. A few weekends ago, we demolished the wall that separated the small purple room and the master BR. Here’s how it looks right now:

This weekend, we scratched one more thing off our to-do list. We sealed up the doorway leading to the master bedroom so the only way in and out of the room now is through the purple room. Here’s how the hallway originally looked:

Bradley was directing traffic, I think. Or signaling a right turn. I forget which. Here’s how the same hallway looks with some fresh drywall lovingly slapped right over the door frame:

Ta-da! Doors? We don’t need no stinkin’ doors!

Sorry about the dark photos. Bradley’s doing some electrical work, and we basically shut down the power upstairs until he finished. More on that soon!

Here’s the inside of the master BR last week:

Now you see it. Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. But once we renovate the inside of the master bedroom suite, a little drywall will go right over the door frame. Nobody will ever know that it existed except us. And the internet.

I removed all of the trim and the door, Bradley framed it in with some 2×4′s, and the drywall went over the old doorway, making it seem as if it had never been there to begin with. So our purple room is officially part of the ginormous master BR now. And we’re already busy designing it out in our heads.

Right on cue, a Crate & Barrel catalog arrived in the mail and the theme: fresh Danish. Be still our collective beating heart. We love Danish design! We thumbed through it, soaking up ideas and inspiration. And then we saw this:

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That’s it. That’s the wall paint for the master bedroom. We both agreed on it without a fight. Usually there’s a little back-and-forth where I think a color is just right but Bradley thinks it’s too dark / too bright / too blah / too weird. This smokey grey with the white trim and accessories, though, was one we both instantly loved. Bring on the paint chips — let the matching begin!

Anyway, back on the outside, Bradley’s totally done with the drywall, right up to the ceiling.

Our plasterer was held up with another gig, so she won’t be plastering until next weekend. In the meantime, we got everything 100% ready for her visit. All of the windows are drywalled so they’ll have the trimless look we’re going for. And the raw edges of our drywall now have corner beads:

That way we’ll have crisp, clean lines that butt up against those raw, rough brick walls. It’ll look faboo. …if our plasterer ever shows up and gets the job done. Fingers crossed for Thursday!

Meet our grande olde livinge roome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next to the radiator is our closet:

Insert saddest face of all time here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In other news, our staircase now looks like this:

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

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

Other stuff going on with us:

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

Creeping down the staircase.

We mentioned in our last post that we’re hiring a professional plasterer to do our mudding for us. Turns out that’s way harder to do than we expected. 3 of the plasterers we found in the phone book didn’t pick up the phone when we called. Only one of them called us back and set up an appointment to give us an estimate….and then he never showed up for it. He also didn’t pick up his phone when we called him twice after he blew us off. Yup. Some people must haaaate making money.

We called our lumber yard — Bradley’s BFFs with the guys who work there now — and they recommended a plasterer who the local contractors love. We were feeling pretty burned by the last guy, so we weren’t expecting much, but when we called, she picked up her phone(!), sounded competent and professional(!), and is showing up early on Saturday morning to give us an estimate(!).

Since there’s not a whole lot we can do in the office and guest bedroom until the plaster is done, we decided to continue insulating down the stairs. And by “we”, I actually mean Bradley. He did this project mostly solo while I did other stuff we’ve been procrastinating on (ahem, laundry). I snuck in at regular intervals to take pictures.

Bradley started out by making sure the walls were level:

Bradley’s aunts in Texas will be happy to note that his underwear is not showing in that picture. Treasure it, ladies. I can’t promise you many more of those. The man’s pants have a mind of their own.

Surprisingly, the wall that runs along the staircase is almost perfectly level. This means we won’t have to go shim-crazy like we did in the hallway. Remember that fun project?

We remember. No matter how hard we try to forget, we can’t.

The ceiling is slightly off, but we’re not worried about it right now. That’ll be next week’s headache. Aaaahahahaha! Hahahaha!…haha….ha. Heh.

The next step was to put up furring strips, so we have something solid to attach our insulation and drywall to:

The silver square in the middle is a leftover piece of styrofoam insulation. Bradley used it as a template to space out his furring strips at an equal distance. After that, he attached some furring strips along the top and bottom of the wall:

In case you’re wondering how Bradley got way up there to put up furring strips, feast your eyes on this:

That, friends, is the Little Giant Select Step ladder. We picked it up at Home Depot, on sale for $134, down from $199. Whee! We’re writing up a (totally unofficial and completely not-compensated-for) review of that right now and it’ll be up later today. Or maybe tomorrow. Or, probably, 2 weeks from now. We’ve been pretty bad bloggers lately.

Next came the first layer of styrofoam insulation:

Bradley came up with a shortcut to quickly cut the angled pieces along the top and bottom:

He made a template using 2 leftover pieces of wood. He butted up one piece of wood against the vertical furring strip, and lined up the other piece of wood against the angled furring strip. Then he screwed the two pieces of wood together in 3 spots so they won’t move at all.

Then he just lined up the template’s straight edge with the styrofoam’s long edge and cut along the angle.

The cut pieces easily slid into place, and then Bradley nailed them directly to the plaster. He had a bunch of triangle pieces left over:

They fit perfectly into the taller parts of the wall, where the insulation didn’t quite reach all the way to the bottom:

He just had to cut them along the top and side to get the right width and height, and then nailed them directly into the wall.

After the first layer of styrofoam insulation came a second, slightly thicker layer of styrofoam insulation. Unfortunately we ran out halfway down the stairs, so this is what it looks like today:

Bradley switched gears and went back into the hallway to seal up the bat cave and finish putting up drywall on the doorway:

Bradley put a header above the door frame (easy) and then had to figure out how to make the doorway level both visually and technically (not easy). Our 130-year-old house has settled over the years, so our floors and our ceilings have a little bit of a lean to them. The hallway is one of those places where the lean is especially obvious.

Bradley ended up making the doorway un-level on purpose so that it looks visually level when you’re standing on the staircase. It made more sense than making a level staircase that looked totally wonky. He had to skim like a mad man to get the wall level on both sides.

Here’s how all the shimming looked from underneath:

Luckily nobody will ever know what’s really going on under there, because the whole thing is now covered with a layer of drywall:

Bradley put some drywall up on the hallway ceiling while he was at it:

And even more drywall along the bottom of the staircase that leads up to our attic:

And that’s when we ran out of drywall. Bradley’s picking up more styrofoam insulation and drywall tonight. He has the day off from work tomorrow, and he’s spending it finishing off the hallway. His big challenge will be to drywall the hallway outside the master bedroom and purple room:

The door on the left leads into the purple room. The door on the right leads into the master bedroom — and we’re going to remove the door, put in some studs and cover the whole thing up with drywall as if it never existed.

Right now the master bedroom suite looks like this:

We’re not sure when exactly we’re going to gussy up in inside of this room, but after talking about it for nearly 3 hours on our last drive to Brooklyn, we finally have a game plan on the order of the rooms we’re renovating. From next up to last-in-line:

• Laundry room + downstairs bathroom
• Kitchen
• Dining room
• Master bedroom
• Living room

After that, we’ll move to the basement, garage, exterior of the house and the yard. But we’re not planning that far ahead. One room at a time. Unless we’re doing 2 rooms and a hallway. And some stairs. Just sayin’.

Stay tuned for our review of the Select Step ladder and some other random stuff that we couldn’t cram into one post. How’s that for an exciting outro?

Things get a little batty. (Wokka wokka!)

We were perusing through some of our pre-renovation pictures and came across this before shot of the upstairs hallway:

Hard to believe that was only 3 months ago! When we last left off a few weekends ago, we were busy insulating the hallway:

Here’s how it looks today:

Amazing what some new dry wall, French doors, a jackhammer and a dumpster can do, right?

Here’s what the hallway looks like from inside the guest bedroom:

We put up new drywall at the end of the hall, too. This is the space between the brick wall and the bathroom, right outside the office:

Even without the taping and mudding, everything feels so fresh and clean (so fresh and so clean, clean!). We set up one more trimless window. All it needs is plaster:

And we put up drywall on the office doorway:

We’ve been randomly signing “Scott” on the walls as an homage to the artwork we found in our laundry room, attic and garage:

Don’t worry, we plan on priming right over it so nobody except us will know it’s there. Here’s a view from the end of the hallway looking towards the stairs:

That end of the hallway was Bradley’s big project yesterday. He wanted to add a header in the doorway (we’re big fans of the play-it-way-too-safe method of construction, and this doorway didn’t have a header at all). We’re going for a trimless look for all of our doors upstairs, so we wanted to install and wood frame on the inside of the doorway. And, of course, both sides of the wall need some fresh drywall.

When we removed the trim from around the doorway, we found some neat wallpaper underneath:

Whoever lived here sure loved wallpaper — this is the 5th or 6th pattern we’ve found, and we’ve only been working in one wing of the house. Speaking of wing, check out who decided to visit us on Saturday night:

We were curled up on the couch in the living room — also currently our bedroom — watching TV when something came swooping into the room, inches above our heads. At first we thought it was a bird, but quickly realized it was a bat. He kept swooping down on our heads, so I did the only thing I could think of at the time: I curled up in a ball and started screaming bloody murder.

Bradley ran into the dining room and came back with the first thing he could find — a baseball bat. A bat for the bat. So then my screaming turned into words like, “DON’T HURT HIM!” and “CATCH AND RELEASE!”

Bradley went back into the dining room and came back with an umbrella. He used it to steer the bat into the living room, and that’s when our cat got in on the action. I slammed the living room door and then cracked it open a tiny bit so the dog and I could watch.

Bradley used the umbrella to steer the bat towards an open window and to keep the cat from lunging at our new furry friend. Eventually, the bat made it to the window and wedged himself between the glass and the screen. We gently closed the window, and suddenly the big, bad bat didn’t look so scary anymore. He was smaller than my fist, and with his wings folded in, he looked kind of like a gerbil with beady teeny tiny eyes. He was cuuuuute….but only because he wasn’t flapping in my face. I snapped a picture, and then we went back to watching TV.

Our bat eventually figured out that the screen was open at the bottom, so he flew off. We’re pretty sure he’s back in our attic now, pooping on all of our moving boxes that we haven’t unpacked yet.

When we took the trim off of the hallway entrance, we noticed there was no header above the doorway. What we didn’t notice is that we had basically opened a giant hole into the attic:

The bat must have shimmied down between the walls and come down to explore. Pretty sure he won’t be doing that again — my high-pitched screeching might have permanently damaged his sonar — but just to be on the safe side, Bradley’s working on sealing it up today.

What we learned this weekend:

• We still really hate plastering.
  We actually enjoy putting up insulation and drywall, but plastering is the bane of our existence. We hate it so much that we’re dragging our feet and causing a big delay in finishing up the hallway, guest bedroom and office. We decided to hire out the plastering so we can get on with things. Someone is coming in to give us an estimate today, and if the price is right, he’s hired!
• General rule of life: if all else fails, curl up into a ball and scream till you lose your voice.

Trimless Windows

We mentioned in an earlier post that we plan on having trimless windows in a lot of our rooms. The trim in the living room and dining room are original to the house, and we plan on keeping those. The rest of the house, however, has a much less fancy trim that we don’t like. Here’s a before picture from the guest bedroom during our first official day of renovating:

They’re pretty much just cheap pine boards slapped together and painted white. They’re not hideous — they’re just blah. So while I was busy de-plastering a wall, Bradley tackled the guest bedroom windows:

We had already removed the trim a few weekends ago when we were tired of looking at it.

Bradley removed the wood frame surrounding the windows. Our goal is to make the window framing flush with the rest of the wall around it and the frame we had was beveled, so we couldn’t just drywall over it.

Bradley used a small piece of drywall as his guide on how deep to set the new frame, and then he nailed in some new wood.

Once the wood was set up on all four sides of the window, Bradley screwed pieces of drywall to the frame. He covered the inside of the window:

And then he covered over the frame itself so you can’t see any wood:

Once he had drywall up on the top and sides, he made sure everything was level. Then he screwed vinyl corner beads to the edges:

This will give us a really straight, clean edge once we plaster over it this weekend.

Even though it’s not totally done yet, we though it would be fun to do a before / in progress comparison. Check it out:

You might have noticed that Bradley didn’t drywall the bottom of the window:

That’s because we’re making concrete ledges that will sit across the bottom. The piece of wood is a guide that shows how thick the ledge will be. We’re still debating whether we want to splurge on white concrete or go with a standard grey. We can’t buy the white stuff locally, so we’ll have to wait until we’re back in Brooklyn to stock up on that. Either way, we’ll do a concrete tutorial soon!

What we learned from this project:

• We’re incredibly picky.
  There’s a reason we moved into a fixer-upper and it’s not just because we love smashing plaster walls. We looked at a few move-in ready houses and they just didn’t seem very us. So glad we decided to go with a house we can tear up and rebuild to be perfect for us!

Mudder’s Day.

Happy weekend! It’s been the kind of week where we started wishing for the weekend on Tuesday. We’ve both been crazy busy with work, but not so busy that we didn’t sneak in a little work on the house.

The Smurf room is completely insulated and drywalled, which means it’s time for taping and mudding. We grabbed our supersized bucket of joint compound and got down to business.

I learned something new: sheetrock is a brand. So it should be capitalized. I also learned that Sheetrock and drywall shouldn’t really be used interchangeably. And that “sheetrocking” is not a verb. In short, I learned that I have no idea what I’m talking about 72.3% of the time. Lets pretend that the last 3 weeks worth of posts never happened, OK? Thank you.

This was my first time mudding, so Bradley showed me the ropes before putting me to work.

He started by scooping some joint compound into his bucket. Not so much that it’s too heavy to carry around. And not so little that he has to go back for a refill every 10 minutes. Not too much, not too little: he Goldilocksed it.

I like to take words that aren’t verbs and turn them into verbs. Don’t judge me.

Next, he scooped a little mud onto his blade:

And he smeared it across the holes where we screwed the drywall to the studs:

At this stage, he was pretty generous with the mud and spread it several inches around the screwhole. Teehee, screwhole! I was trying to avoid saying it. I really was. But it’s so much easier to say than “the holes where we screwed the drywall to the studs.” Screwhole. Sorry, family.

Once all of the screwholes along the stud were covered, Bradley set his blade at an angle at the top of the wall:

And then dragged it all the way down to the floor to scrape up all of the excess mud:

The result:

All of our screwholes are filled with mud. …eww.

After Bradley gave me the Mudding 101, I took over the easy jobs — screwholes and small seams that didn’t require as much taping finesse. Bradley handled the harder seams, like the old doorhole we sealed up.

It used to look like this:

Then, for a while, it sat around looking like this:

We were pretty excited about taping, mudding and forgetting that this awkward doorway ever existed. I wanted to make a video of the whole thing. Maybe throw together a quick tutorial on how to tape and mud the crooked seams and big gaps. Unfortunately, when it came time to do the video, Bradley totally shot me down. Mr. Bashful said he felt too self-conscious to do a tutorial video, and that we should just stick to photos.

So I took photos instead of shooting a video. Then I pieced the photos together to make a bootleg video animated gif of Bradley patching up the doorhole:

See? Motion is way more fun. I’ll convince him to do a video some day.

Here’s how the guest bedroom doorhole looks with one coat of mud:

We’ll need 2 more coats on that before it feels smooth and ready to paint, but we’re getting there!

We finished mudding all of the screwholes and the less complicated seams in the Smurf room:

We still have to give our screwholes a second coat and tape all of the big seams, but at least we’re making progress.

No more blue walls! And — squee! — no more granny wallpaper in the Smurf room closet:

It’s funny to call this the Smurf room now that it’s halfway through a facelift. It feels like a completely different room. Less of a kid’s room and more of an office. And that stunning brick wall definitely turned the whole look around:

We mentioned in an earlier post that we chose a paint color for the Smurf room:

It’s a very soft white — horseradish, to be exact. Our color scheme for the office is a mix of whites and soft greys with yellow accents. I also have my heart set on a white bookshelf with the back painted a bright yellow:

Source

That’s been the plan ever since we got our hands on the house keys: whites, greys, yellows.

After we exposed the brick, though, we weren’t sure how our color scheme was going to work in the room. The red brick seemed so bold. We were worried that it would compete with the bright yellows we wanted. It could end up looking really chaotic.

We considered whitewashing the brick to soften the look. But the more we stared at it, the more we loved the raw red brick. We then considered changing the color scheme for the room. That also ended up being a no-go. We’d been daydreaming about a white-and-yellow room for so long that we were completely lost when trying to come up with new colors.

Finally, after going back and forth for days, we decided to give yellow-and-brick a shot. Maybe they wouldn’t look so bad together. We went to Lowe’s and picked up a bunch of yellow paint swatches. We stuck them to the brick to see the colors side-by-side:

We love it! Turns out our red brick looks just fine with most shades of yellow. The brighter, the better. So we wasted a solid 2 weeks fretting over something that ended up not mattering one bit. In the end, we’re saving a lot of time by not whitewashing the brick, and we still get to keep the color scheme we’ve been loving in our head. Win-win!

What we learned from this project:

• We finally understand why so many people have textured walls — it’s to cover their crappy taping!
• Mudding a ceiling? Get ready for sore shoulders.
• We found that holding our blade at about a 45° angle worked really well for scraping mud. If we held it at too much of an angle, we got streaks.
• Mud dries fast, so you have to work fast. If you need a break, cover up your mud with saran wrap to keep it wet.
• Messed up your mud-job? It’s not the end of the world. You can always sand the excess and apply a new coat or two to get a smooth wall.

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.