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.

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.

How (not) to remove wallpaper.

Remember our hideous closet that someone covered with granny shabby chic flowery wallpaper?

I marched into the closet early on Saturday morning, determined to deflower all 3 walls by lunchtime. Here were my weapons of choice:

L to R: scraper, spray bottle, fabric softener.

I saw some remodeling show on HGTV where the designer said that her favorite way of removing wallpaper is hosing it with a mixture of hot water and fabric softener, letting it soak for a few minutes, then peeling up the paper. Her wallpaper came off in big strips, easy peasy. She didn’t break out in hives or throw a crying fit like so many of my friends who shared their wallpaper horror stories. I was sold.

I went into the closet and doused all 3 walls with the fabric softener / hot water mixture. I went down to the kitchen to slam a cup of coffee and stomped back upstairs, ready to annihilate some wallpaper. That stuff was coming down in big strips.

Only that’s not how it worked out. Even though I had sprayed the walls really well and let them soak for 10 minutes, the edges of the wallpaper weren’t coming up. I ended up using my scraper to peel underneath:

Then I basically had to scrape up and down until little shreds of paper tore off and fell to the ground. I’m not sure what they used to glue that stuff to the walls — Gorilla glue? Super glue? Pixie magic?! — but it wasn’t coming off at all, let alone in the big strips I had hoped for.

I worked for a solid 15 minutes. I broke out into a sweat, I bit back tears, I threw every curse word I know at that wall and then invented new curse words so I could keep on going. But the wallpaper wasn’t coming off. At. All. No matter how hard I scraped or how much I sprayed the wall.

That’s the moment when Bradley came in and asked, “What are you doing? We’re demolishing those walls. You don’t need to take the wallpaper off.”

Uhhhhh…..oops.

What we learned from our attempt at deflowering our wall:

• HGTV lies.
• Communication is very, very important.
• Sometimes the best way to take down wallpaper is to tear down the entire wall.

DIY: Demolish It Yourself

One of our favorite parts about renovating is the demolition part. Call us destructive, but there is nothing more satisfying than smashing a sledgehammer through some perfectly good sheet rock.

Wait. I take that back. There is nothing more satisfying than smashing a foot through some perfectly good sheet rock. We’ve done it. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

But before we could get to the foot-of-fury part of the project, we had take care of one of our least favorite parts about renovating: planning. Booo! Hiss! Boring!! …but totally necessary. We started by setting a goal.

Here’s what we planned on doing over the last weekend:

1. Tear a big ol’ hole in the wall separating the guest bedroom from the hallway
2. Install French doors.
3. Seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole (yes, door hole is a real term)

After we developed our game plan, we gathered our supplies. We put together a list of all the supplies we’ll need: sheetrock, lumber, nails, screws, etc. Bradley did all the estimating of how much of everything we’d need. I mostly just smiled and nodded and pretending to know what furring strips are. (Note: it has nothing to do with foxes or minks. Or leg waxing.)

We padded our list pretty heavily with extras. For instance, we know we’ll be putting up a lot of new walls upstairs, so we went ahead and ordered enough sheetrock for the whole floor. Our local lumberyard charges a flat $15 for delivery, so we took full advantage of it.

Our delivery arrived bright and early on Saturday morning, and we tossed  all the extra supplies (gently) into the garage for storage until they’re needed.

Ohhhh, the luxury of space. The whole garage thing is new to us, and we are loving it!

We had already researched French doors to find a good deal. We knew we wanted 60″ wide x 80″ tall doors, and found that all the places we checked charged around $350. We ordered our door from Lowe’s and picked it up ourselves to save on delivery charges.

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Then finally — fiiiiiinally! — the big day arrived. We’d rested up. We’d stretched out. We’d made sure our tetanus shots were up-to-date. We’d said our goodbyes to the wall on the left:

Some disclaimer-y type stuff before we get into the meat & potatoes sledgehammers and sheetrock. This kind of work is usually better left to the pros. This guy:

…is a pro. He was born with a hammer in one hand and a level in the other. (Not really sure how his mother pulled that one off, but kudos to her.) He’s torn down walls and put up walls. He knows how to re-wire the lights, and he can plumb with the best of ‘em. He also knows how to throw a perfect put-down-the-camera-and-help-me glare:

In short, he knows what he’s doing. If you’ve never done anything like this before and want to try, get help from a professional. If you attempt to do this on your own, you will die. …just kidding. You might get hurt or destroy your house, though, so play it safe.

We started our demo day by making sure we weren’t about to demolish a load-bearing wall. That would be bad. Ceiling-crashing-down-on-your-face-while-you-sleep bad. Once we figured out our wall was a-OK to demolish, we turned off all the electricity so we wouldn’t end up Benjamin Franklining ourselves. Little Pennsylvania humor for ya there. Wokka wokka!

Bradley removed all the baseboards with a big ol’ crowbar. We plan on reusing as much of the original lumber as possible, so we stashed it away for later. After that, he used a box cutter to score the edges of the wall we wanted to remove:

At this point, we put on our respirators to protect our lungs from any potential lead paint dust.

Yes, ladies, my ventilator is hot pink. Safety first, fashion second.

Once our noses were secure, out came the sledgehammer and we bashed the wall down….carefully. We wanted to keep the other side of the wall — the inside of the bedroom — in tact, so we only removed one side of the wall. The sheetrock removal process was a lot like Operation Ivy: grab, yank, toss, repeat.

We were a little surprised to find random bits of insulation stuffed into the walls. Whoever put up the wall must have had leftovers and decided to throw in them. Either way, they’re not doing any good in this interior wall. We removed the insulation stashed it away for later use as well.

We found some fun stuff within the wall. Like this bit of floral wallpaper:

This floral border on top of the floral wallpaper. Someone sure loved flowers on her wall:

The biggest surprise was the Gold Bond brand drywall:

And here I thought Gold Bond only made foot powder. Crazy!

Eventually the entire wall was naked, the wood was exposed and all the old sheetrock was put away in four huge contractor trash bags:

Next, we needed to cut the hole to set our French doors into. Bradley drew out the dimensions for the door on the other side of our bare wall, making sure they were level and perfect.

And, because, we’re total nerds who can’t ever walk away from a Beetlejuice reference, we drew knobs on the door and knocked 3 times.

Nobody answered (sad face). So we pulled out the Sawzall and started cutting:

I’d never used a Sawzall before, so Bradley let me have a turn. It was love at first whirr. I was totally the girl who took shop class in middle school and metal smithing in high school and college, I became pretty scared of loud power tools. I had an accident in a metal class and sliced into my left thumb and forefinger. All the way to the bone. I had to get 22 stitches and — ew ew ewwww! — I felt every single one of them because the local anesthetic didn’t quite kick in. So after that traumatic experience, I’ve been a little hesitant to jump back into using things that could chop my fingers off.

After using the Sawzall, though, I’m ready. I’m back in love with power tools, and I can’t wait to try them all. Good thing we have a lot of work to do around the house!

Anyway, we Sawzall’d right through all the wood on the bare side of the wall, but used a handsaw to finish off the parts closest to the floors so we didn’t accidentally cut through them:

The wall popped right out and we removed it to reveal our new door hole:

Door hole! We knew right away that our hunch about putting in a French door was spot on. There was so much light coming in from the bedroom windows and from the windows in the hall. We could open up all the windows and let a breeze through. Everything felt so much more open and big and airy. We had time for a quick high-five and then got back to work moving some outlets around:

We also had to cut and install a header to sit above the door. Basically, a header takes the weight of the wall off the door:

See? I told you he knows what he’s doing. Once we had the header and frame in, we made sure everything was level. And, easy peasy, we slid the door right in:

OK, not really. When we went to slide the door in, we found out that it doesn’t really fit. No matter what we tried, the door seemed too big for the door hole. We had a minor panic attack. I didn’t get any pictures of it because we were too busy running around trying to figure out what happened.

We quickly figured out what we did wrong: we were being way too precise. Our measurements and cuts were so exact that the door wouldn’t slide in. D’oh! Our jobs are kind of all about making things look perfect. Bradley’s a furniture designer and I’m an art director. With our work, when something is off by 1/16th of an inch, it looks wrong. You have to get things exact or else they look weird or ugly or off. So we measured and cut our door hole to perfectly fit our door. Turns out walls don’t really work that way. Type A / perfectionist FAIL.

We had to go back and widen some of our cuts and make a few adjustments. There were door shims involved:

After another 30 minutes of tweaking, the door finally slid in and looked fabulous.

Toot freaking toot. That’s the sound of us tooting our own horn. Above is a shot from the stair looking down the hall. And below is a shot at the end of the hallway looking down towards the stairs.

And here’s a shot of the doors open, so you can get a looksie at that the header I was talking about earlier.

Before the day was over, we had one more task. We had to seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. We still have to tape and plaster and sand and paint, but we won’t get that that till next time.

This entire project took roughly 6 hours or so. We had a few other projects going on at the same time, plus we had to take a time out to accept our delivery and run to Lowe’s and Home Depot. We’re pretty geeked about our new door and how it totally opens up the cramped hall.

Stuff we learned from this project:

• Handcrafted tables and well-designed brochures can never be “too perfect.” Door holes on the other hand…
• Power tools are not toys, but they sure feel like it.
• You can’t put on a respirator without making some kind of Darth Vader joke. We dare you to try.

Surprise find: top secret trap door!

Anyone remember the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice?

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It’s one of our absolute favorite movies in the world. We’ve watched it at least 20 times together, and probably twice as many times on our own. We can’t go to the grocery store to pick up a carton of orange juice without reciting “Orange beetle…beetle breakfast….beetle….juice? Your name is Beetlejuice?” We don’t have cable, ya’ll. We have to make our own entertainment.

Anyway, we’ve had a lot of Beetlejuice moments ever since we decided to buy a house. For starters, we’re a couple of New Yorkers moving to a small town far, far away, but close enough to go back whenever we feel like it.

Our house has skeleton keys, just like the Deets’ house:

We also passed by this adorable covered bridge near our town that totally reminded us of the Winter River Bridge from Beetlejuice:

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And this is the Winter River Bridge from Beetlejuice:

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They could be twins, I tell ya!

We’ve also been having a lot of Otho moments. Otho, in case you haven’t seen the movie recently, is Mrs. Deets’ diva interior decorator friend. There’s one closet in particular that pulled out the Otho in us. We opened the door, sighed, and I couldn’t help but bust out this classic line:

“UGH. Deliver me from L.L. Bean.” We love Otho. He’s 2 snaps and a headwave. Here’s the horrible closet that brought out our inner prima donna:

OK fine, there weren’t any headless ghosts in the closet. It was more of a reaction to the wallpaper. And the super narrow shape. And check out the weird angled corner that’s going to make shelving a huge pain in the butt. Luckily this is the office closet, so it’s not like we need to hang clothes in there. Instead, we plan on making custom shelving for all the office stuff we don’t want want to see all the time: printer/scanner, paper shredder, garbage and recycling. We loved the old hooks that were in there — they’re acorns! — and I unscrewed all of those so we can get the paint off and reuse them elsewhere in the house.

While I was busy pulling carpet tacks, Bradley was putzing around in the office closet and discovered a loose section of flooring. He jammed his screwdriver under it and found a trap door! Here he is climbing in:

I know what you’re thinking: Skinny McGee should really eat a sandwich. After I watched him crawl into that tiny hole, I started wondering what else he could fit through. A doggie door? Maybe. After that I started thinking about sandwiches. That’s pretty much how my brain works. Though A. Thought B. Food. Mmmm….fooooood.

We’re not really sure why there were broken lightbulbs on the floor. There’s no outlet in the closet. Yup. One more thing we’ll be rigging up!

We weren’t planning on climbing down any funky crawlspaces, so we didn’t bring a flashlight with us. Bradley used the flashlight app on his Droid to take a peek, and then took some pictures using his phone’s flash. I have Droid envy. My iPhone camera doesn’t have a flash. His pictures turned out a little blurry, but you can make out some stuff:

Brick wall! Pipes! Planks! Tubes! That purple thing in the middle is a can of beer someone abandoned long ago. Beer!

You can see the floor of the Smurf room up top, and it’s held up by some huge, old beams. Down below is the ceiling to the kitchen. We were straight up giddy when we saw how much space is between the kitchen ceiling and the floor above. Why? Because this means we can take our sledge hammers to the kitchen ceiling and expose all that beautiful, beamy, floory goodness going on up there! This is going to add at least 3 feet to the height of our kitchen!

We’ve been talking about exposing the beams above the kitchen ever since we first saw the house, but we weren’t sure what was going on behind the tacky drop ceiling we currently have. We were scared we might find asbestos-covered pipes, or worse: mice. Instead, we found a brick wall, some beams and a can of beer. That’s what I call winning! We can also expose the brick wall if we want….and we do want. I have no idea how to expose brick, but Bradley tells me it involves jackhammers. Squee! The kitchen is #3 on our list of renovations. #1 and #2 are the guest bedroom and the office. We’re dying to get in that kitchen and start making it what we want. We love to cook. And eat. See — I’m back to food again.

I’ll leave you with another clip from Beetlejuice that pretty much sums up how we’re feeling right now: