Running late.

Happy belated Fourth of July, everyone! Hope it was a good one.

We’ve been M.I.A. because we’ve been in kind of a funk. The work we’re doing around the house right now is boring and tedious. For example, we spent 2 entire days mudding — that’s not even worth photographing after the first round. Not that I didn’t try. I snapped hundreds of photos of Bradley putting a second (and sometimes third) coat of plaster in the Smurf room and hallways. But when I reviewed the photos later, they put me in a coma. That’s how boring plastering is.

Here’s the most exciting sequence of the entire weekend: Bradley cracked open a fresh bucket-o-plaster and thought it seemed a bit dry, so he added a splash of water.

Then he gave it a whirl with his paint mixer drill attachment.

He blended until it was smooth and ready to smear on the walls.

Funny aside. Bradley’s first job in NYC was as a building maintenance guy for a very shi-shi-poo-poo restaurant in Chelsea. He pretty much did what he’s doing in our house right now: fixed things in a very, very old building. Anyway, the chefs used these same paint mixer drill attachments to mix giant batches of soup. Bradley thought it was hilarious to walk into the kitchen and see a chef mixing a vat of  lobster bisque with a drill.

Aside from plastering, we also put up the rest of the ceiling in the hallway:

More plastering to follow. (Insert huge groan-sigh here.)

While the plaster dried, we insulated the hallway. Our plan was to simply attach furring strips to the plaster wall, add 2 layers of styrofoam insulation and then throw drywall up right on top of that. Bradley started by drilling some pilot holes with his concrete drill:

Then he attached a furring strip along the bottom of the wall:

Once that was secure, he put up a vertical furring strip along the edge of the wall and made sure it was level:

And that’s when our entire plan fell apart. It turns out our 130-year-old walls aren’t exactly level anymore — they’re actually curved. To make a level wall, Bradley had to do some creative shimming. Here’s what the finished framing looked like:

The wall starts out straight, then starts curving. By the time it gets to the floor, it’s up to 2 inches off from where it started!

This explains the massive gaps where floor meets wall. Remember those?

The whole process shimming process, start to finish, took a few hours. Once the wall was framed, we put up a layer of styrofoam insulation in between the furring strips:

A second layer went right on top of the first:

We have a few more pieces of insulation to cut before it’s drywall time, but the wall is shaping up. It’s nice to not look up and see a crusty, textured ceiling:

What we learned on our long weekend:

• Plastering blows.
  It’s one of those jobs that you have to do so you can move on to the more exciting stuff like priming and painting. But that doesn’t make it suck any less.
• Deadlines are maddening.
  We’d originally planned a big Fourth of July BBQ weekend with four of our favorite New Yorkers. We thought we’d easily be done with the Smurf room and guest bedroom. And then we started changing things and tweaking things and finding brick walls that needed uncovering. We’re way, way behind schedule and it’s driving us nuts. So instead of fretting over it, we’re throwing out our schedule. It’ll get done when it gets done.

Stairs, stairs, stairs.

A couple of weekends ago, we removed all the carpet from the staircase and did a happy dance about how great our staircase looked.

Yeah. Our definition of looks great! might need a slight adjustment, but we were still thrilled to see the burgundy carpet in our garbage pile garage. The next project at hand: removing the 5000+ staples on the staircase. And, since this falls under the early morning cavewoman work category, I decided to get it over with on Saturday.

To make my job a little easier, Bradley found this weird little tool at Lowe’s and picked it up for me:

It’s a tool for pulling out small nails.

The prongs weren’t quite small enough to fit under the skinny staples we have under our carpet, so Bradley used a grinder to thin out the ends a bit.

It worked like a charm! Way easier than the old stapler / pliers / blood / sweat / tears routine. The only real hazards of this job:

Little tufts of discarded carpet padding would staple themselves to the soles of my sneakers. Very, very dangerous: if I wasn’t careful, this could have annoyed me to death.

Halfway through the staple-removal, I called Bradley over and we decided to do something about this weird platform at the top of the staircase:

It looks like something that was added on, and we’re not quite sure why. In order to go from the bathroom (down the hall on the right) to the master bedroom (on the left), you have to step down and right back up on the platform. It feels clunky and unnecessary.

And don’t even get us started on this:

Just don’t. We could go on for days, and we have way too much work to do ’round here. It has to go.

Bradley grabbed a hammer and a prybar and peeked under one of the steps:

As we’d suspected, there was solid floor underneath. The platform was a later (and confusing) addition. So we happily subtracted it:

We plan on putting up drywall over all of this lathe & plaster stuff in the hallway, so a little crumbling wall didn’t faze us. With the platform removed, we instantly felt like the staircase looked better:

The only thing that’s bugging us now is how the bottom step leading to the hallway ends so abruptly:

But there are a ton of solutions we’ve already started discussing. We could simply continue the step all the way to the end. We could install a big built-in bookshelf that’s the exact depth of the staircase. We could do floating shelves from floor to ceiling.

The floor is totally solid (we did a jump test) and it was nice to see unpainted wood underneath. The plank flooring is actually not bad when you see it without chocolate brown paint and white splatters everywhere. We’re feeling a little less pouty about it these days.

We salvaged the planks from the platform and will use it to patch up the master bedroom floors when we get in there.

After the platform was out, I spent a few hours removing staples, and by the time I took the after pictures, the lighting was completely different:

The staircase looks like a totally different shade of brown at sunset.

With the staples and the tufts of padding gone, the staircase is starting to look less and less hideous. We still need to repair a few loose bars in the railing and secure some of the steps that have gotten wobbly over the years. After that, it’s time to sand and paint.

What we learned from this project:

• Having the right tool for the job makes things way easier.
  The last time I spent 5+ hours pulling carpet staples, my wrist ached for days. The $11 tool made a huge difference.
• Pulling staples is tedious, boring work.
  Our strategy? Throw on some Bob Marley, grab a beer and get to yankin’. We see lame jobs like this as an opportunity to turn our brains off and go on autopilot for a couple of hours. Sure, it’s not fun, but it’s not exactly work either.

New Windows and Other Small Projects

Remember those new windows sitting in our garage?

Last Sunday, we carried them upstairs and ripped open the plastic wrapping like two five-year-olds on Christmas.

You know you’re a real DIYer when the lumber yard doesn’t even bother with last names.

We’ve never installed windows like this before. Bradley’s installed commercial windows, but never vinyl windows that open and close and have a screen. Good thing they came with instructions!

The whole process was pretty easy. Here’s how it went:

Remove old single-pane windows. We took out the bottoms first, then the tops, and then the storm windows.

Everything we removed was stacked in a keep pile and a throw pile.

The single-pane windows were keepers. We’re thinking about repurposing them for something else — a hanging screen maybe?

We saved a bunch of pulleys from the windows. Not sure what we’ll use them for, but we love the way they look.

Storm windows and screen went into the toss pile. They’re ugly. We’re superficial. It was the only logical choice.

The header was first siliconed and then screwed into place.

Then the window slid right in.

Bradley leveled the window, then shimmed it.

And then he poked his head out to make sure everything was OK on the outside.

After that he screwed the windows to the frame.

Silicone went all around the outside and inside.

And viola! New window:

He did the same for the other two windows:

And that’s it! The Smurf room’s windows just got a major upgrade from crusty single-pane energy wasters to brand new low-e windows. Best part: we can actually see stuff now! The super old glass was really bubbly and wavy. The new glass gives us a great view of the mountains. And it’s easier to spy on the neighbors now.

Just kidding about the last part.

…no, I’m not.

Here’s some more stuff we accomplished last weekend that we never got around to blogging about:

We put door stops in the guest bedroom to keep our French doors from crashing into the walls. Super important now that we’re putting up big metal door handles that could put dents in our walls. We went with a really simple black-and-grey metal doorstop because the floors will be black — we’re hoping they won’t be noticeable.

The guest bedroom closet doors are fiiiiinally up:

The bottom isn’t perfectly level, but that’s just a matter of adjusting the hinges. We’ll get to it eventually. Right now we’re just super happy that both doors are up and able to open and close without making us cry.

We were going back and forth on whether we wanted to sheetrock the hallway ceiling:

After much hemming and hawing, we decided to go for it:

First sheet is up! The rest are going up this weekend.

And, finally, Bradley officially lost his mind:

I think he was just a little burned out.We got a lot of stuff crossed off our to-do list, but it meant long days and not a whole lot of rest. To recap, here’s what we did last weekend:

• Ripped up the stairway carpet.
• Exposed a brick wall.
• Insulated part of the hallway.
• Put up closet doors.
• Installed 3 new windows.
• Sheetrocked 2 trimless windows.
• Put up a bit of ceiling sheetrock.
• Installed door stops.
• Demolished the master bedroom / purple room divider.
• Sat in a bucket.

And then we drove to Brooklyn where we made a couple of door handles. Here’s hoping this weekend is just as productive. Stay tuned for updates on all our half-started projects.

What we learned from this project:

• Installing basic windows like ours is super easy. And Lowe’s charges $99 per window to do it. *CoughRIPOFFcough.*

A project we completely forgot about.

Or maybe we tried to purposely forget about it since it totally breaks our one-room-at-a-time rule.

Our dumpster was scheduled for pickup on Monday morning, so late on Sunday we wanted to fit as much junk in there as possible. The only problem was that we were out of bags of lathe and plaster to throw in there. And that’s when we had a brilliant idea: lets demo the master bedroom.

It’s our last major demo project upstairs, so we grabbed our sawzall and our hammers and smashed some plaster.

This is the wall that connects the master bedroom to the purple room. We drew an outline of the hole we wanted (hard to see because it’s in pencil), and then we started bashing away at it.

Bradley used the sawzall to cut the doorway.

Once we got to this stage, we decided that the entrance didn’t seem wide enough. It just didn’t feel right yet. So we expanded it and ended up with this:

Much better!

We left the studs up for now because we didn’t have time to properly frame the door. This isn’t a weight-bearing wall so it wasn’t totally necessary, but we like to err on the side of caution.

We love the way the lathe and plaster stained the wood:

We plan on salvaging it and maybe turning it into a set of stacked floating shelves.

We ended up removing the radiator when we expanded the entryway because it was in our way. We’re not sure we’ll be putting it back. The master bedroom has a big radiator and it should be enough to heat both rooms.

Here’s a view from the purple room looking into the master bedroom:

And from the master bedroom into the purple room:

We’re going to seal up the door in the master bedroom so the only way to get in and out will be through the purple room. And we’ve started our hunt for some cushy chairs to put in the purple room so we can turn it into a reading nook. More on what we plan to do here.

One last thing before I have to go spend my Saturday morning pulling staples out of the freshly de-carpeted floors:

We found another Scott original behind our attic door! Jealous??

Have a fabulous weekend. We’re off to gather more material for blog posts — and maybe eek a little closer to having one room finished in this house!

The DIY shuffle: 2 steps forward, 1 step back.

We’ve been so focused on getting the Smurf room and guest bedroom finished that we’ve completely neglected the hallway that connects them.

It’s all sheetrocked and ready to be mudded on the left side. But the right side needs some love. It’s plaster on brick (no lathe), so there’s no insulation there. While Bradley was busy sheetrocking the Smurf room, I decided to remove all of the window trim and the floor board to prep the hallway for insulation. I also had to remove the trim around the doorway leading that leads into this hall so we could sheetrock that wall.

It was a pretty simple task. Or so I thought.

Hoo boy. Where to begin?

I started with the floor board because it was easy (famous last words), and used a crow bar to pry the board from the wall. Unfortunately for me, I quickly learned that the wood was permanently glued to the plaster. I’m not sure if the wood was attached to the plaster while the plaster was still wet. Or maybe the lead paint that covered both the wall and the board had formed some kind of super bond. Or maybe it was pixie magic that held the two together. Either way, when I pried the floor board loose, 8 inches of the wall pried loose with it.

I think the technical term for this is “a hot mess.”

At least the window trim and sill came off OK:

Too bad I can’t say the same for the door frame I had to remove at the end of the hallway:

Half of the plaster surrounding the doorway fell off in big chucks as I removed the trim. It looks like a bomb went off in the hallway, even after the cleanup.

Our plan was simply to put up some furring strips, insulate with 2 sheets of 1″ foam, and then sheetrock right over everything. The wall was perfectly level, so it would have worked out really well. Now we have to shim the wall to make sure we’re putting our sheetrock up straight. And we have to build it out a little to compensate for the missing plaster. We also have to make sure to build out enough to cover the giant gap between the floor and the wall:

There’s as much as a 3 inch gap at some parts. Ugh. By our calculations, with the stud we’re going to attach to the floor, plus the furring strips, insulation and sheetrock, we’ll be able to completely cover it. No promises, though — we’ve learned our lesson!

What we learned with our little hallway incident:

• Lathe walls are a pain in the @*%.
• Our house, like many other super-old houses, has settled a little. We prefer to think of it as our house having a Gangsta Lean.
• If all the plaster in our house came off this easily, we’d probably expose a lot more brick.
• Don’t ever start a project by saying, “This is easy. We’ll finish it off in one day.” It only leads to broken hearts and shattered plaster.

Say goodbye to the Smurf room!

The Smurf room may be tiny in comparison to our other bedrooms, but we have big, big plans for it. And, like a lot of our plans lately, it involves demolition.

We woke up early on Saturday morning and removed all of the trim from the room. We labeled it “Smurf” so we could find and reuse it later.

The room is roughly 8.5 feet wide by 15.5 feet long, and the ceilings are just over 7.5 feet short tall. There are 3 windows in the room, and they’re all super old, single-pane suckers that need to be replaced.

Here’s how the room looks from all 4 corners, starting with me standing in the doorway and working clockwise:

From in front of the closet:

From the radiator corner:

And the last corner across from the doorway:

The flooring is newer (and in better shape) than the rest of the house, and the room gets a ton of sunlight. Plus we can see some big hills / small mountains off the distance.

It’s not a bad room. Just kinda tiny.

The short ceilings certainly don’t help.

Neither does the color scheme. It just makes the room look really squat. Still, we decided it would be great for an office. And with a pullout couch, it could easily double as a guest bedroom.

Bradley had another Saturday-morning project going on in the guest bedroom (more on that soon!), so he handed me the crowbar and sledgehammer and told me to go to town. I had some aggression to work out.

You see, earlier that morning, Bradley ran into our very sweet, very old and very pig-headed old-fashioned neighbor, who chastised him for “making” me move heavy furniture across our yard. Bradley told him that I wanted to move furniture because I haven’t been getting enough gym time lately and have been complaining about not getting a decent workout. Our neighbor replied, “They weren’t built for physical labor.” And by “they,” he didn’t mean sassy bloggers.

I made 2 demands when I found out: 1) that we go sign up for a gym membership immediately so I can get my guns ready for some sleeveless flaunting all up in our neighbor’s face, and 2) that I get to smash something. I also told him I was going to blog about our neighbor because he’s 100 years old and probably doesn’t read blogs. So, neighbor, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for stereotyping you.

Anyway, on to the smashing and bashing. When I removed the trim, I found a couple of surprises in the wall:

A valentine (awwww!) and a hunk of bee hive (ewwww!). Luckily there seemed to be no sign of bees, so I kept smashing walls until I was too tired to lift the sledgehammer:

That’s when Bradley dropped by and took over. We had to move a radiator to get to the wall behind it. Here he is demonstrating how not to pick up something that weighs a bajillion pounds:

I asked him to pose for a radiator-lifting picture and that’s what I got. Come on, Bradley, rules are in place for a reason. Lift with your legs, not with your back. Don’t lock your knees. Look both ways before crossing the street. I before E, except after C. No white after Labor Day. Rules rule!

We haven’t decided what to do about the closet door at this point. In fact, we’re not even really sure whether we want the closet to be a closet. Our bathroom is right next to the closet — you can see the plumbing for our bathtub through the hideous hole the wall. We’re not renovating the bathroom for a while, but we could use the closet space to expand into it. We could kill 2 birds with 1 stone: remove an awkwardly shaped closet and add a considerable amount of space to the tiny bathroom.

If we do decide to keep it as storage for the office, we can always install some shelves. We also talked about designing and making our own sliding door for it. We already plan to make a sliding door for the main entrance to the room, so we could make a second one to match and hang that for the closet door. There will be a long desk that goes between the closet doorway and the main doorway. The desk will be designed to accommodate the sliding door (or doors) behind it.

Told you. Big, big plans for this little room. For now, we know we have to insulate the two outward-facing walls in the closet regardless, so we have time to plan out our next move.

When we ripped out the plaster and lathe around the window frames, we found weights hanging on the inside:

There was one weight on each side of each window, so 6 weights altogether.

Plus several other weights at the bottom. The ropes must have ripped off or the windows must have been replaced.

They’re rusted and covered in dust right now, but we think they’re really neat looking. We’re saving them to reuse somewhere — maybe in a sculpture.

A very heavy sculpture. Each weight is 6 pounds. We have 11 weights so far and we’ll find at least 10 more weights in the house from the other old windows.

We made a rule recently that limits the amount of hours we work on the house on weekends. We start right after breakfast — around 9:30 — and work until 6PM. At 6:00 on the dot, it’s pencils jackhammers down. Our self-imposed cutoff is so that we take time to relax a little on weekends. Both of us have full-time jobs and work at least 10 or 11 hours a day. When it comes to working on the house, we have a tendency to go go go until bedtime.

Between our long work hours, our 2 days a week spent in Brooklyn, and all of our renovating, we could easily burn ourselves out. We’ve got a long way to go, baby! We don’t have time to burn out! So we set up a strict deadline, and after 6PM, it’s all hot showers, BBQ grills, beers and Netflix. This way we can keep up the energy and excitement we need to keep on renovating.

At the 5:30 on Saturday, we had demolished the entire Smurf room, but we hadn’t gotten into the closet yet. And we had 14 contractor garbage bags full of plaster and lathe from the 2 walls we ripped down. Each 32-gallon bag weighed over 100 pounds:

Everywhere we turned there was a giant bag full of old walls staring us in the face:

I was so beat from an entire day of swinging a sledgehammer that I wanted to leave the bags overnight. I’m not sure how Bradley mustered up the energy, but while I took care of sweeping up the room, he carried every single one of those bags down stairs and out to the garage.

Mah hero! Mah poor, passed-out hero!

The next morning, we woke up and went back in for more demolition. The plaster and lathe were all gone, leaving behind only some studs and boards that separated us from the exterior brick.

It’s hard to imagine how people lived in this house without any insulation. I can understand it 130 years ago, but people were living here last year. They must have frozen their butts off every winter!

I spent my Sunday morning doing a pretty brainless task (the best kind of task to take on until the coffee kicks in!). I demolished the walls in the closet, creating 4 more bags of debris that had to be hauled downstairs. Meanwhile Bradley demolished another wall in the Smurf room:

That’s right: we exposed some more brick! We can’t help ourselves. It’s a culmination of all those years of living in apartments that had brick walls, but landlords who refused to set them free. Or maybe we just really, really love carrying 100-pound bags of plaster down stairs.

This is the flip side of the same brick wall we exposed in the hallway. It turns out there are actually 2 layers of brick. The brick on this side is in way better shape. We won’t have to do any re-pointing at all on this side! This is excellent news because we plan on exposing this same wall in the kitchen. This means less work for us! Squee!!

We were also pretty happy to see that the plaster is much, much thinner on the Smurf room side so it didn’t take a ton of work to get the brick exposed. Bradley used only a jackhammer for the entire wall — no hammer & chisel!

While Bradley jackhammered, I grabbed a regular hammer and moved on to brainless task #2. Every single stud in the room had about 30 nails in it:

That’s how the lathe strips (the wood strips from earlier photos) were attached to the studs. Lathe gets nailed to stud. Plaster gets smeared on lathe. Viola! Walls!

Bradley’s job was way more exciting than mine.

I kept offering to take over, but he really wanted to do this wall on his own. I think he secretly really wanted to expose the hallway brick, but he was too busy working on other projects and missed out on all that fun.

So I let him have his glory.

We finished at 6PM, and didn’t have any time left to clean up the rubble. Not that it mattered anyway. We were so beat from 2 days of demolition (sore shoulders, sore back, sore hands, sore arms, sore everything), that we couldn’t have cleaned up even if we wanted to. All we wanted to do is shower and go out for dinner before hitting the hay, so we didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before taking our in-progress pictures:

Isn’t it lovely?

Hazy, yes. But still very lovely.

We haven’t decided yet whether we will leave the brick raw or white-wash. I love the look of white washed brick. It looks so earthy, and much softer than red brick:

Source

The color palette for this room will be white, yellow and greys, so I think a white-washed wall will work better. Bradley’s not totally sold on it. We’ll probably rock-paper-scissors over it, but in the end, I’ll be spending much more time in this room than he will. So Leena crushes rock, paper, AND scissors. Just sayin’.

The rest of the walls are totally naked and ready for new windows, insulation and sheetrock.

No more wallpaper in the closet!

After taking these pictures, we used a sheet of plastic to completely seal up the doorway. There’s no door anymore, so this will help keep the dust confined until it settles. Next time, we’ll just vacuum it up and move along.

Still left to do in this room:

• Seal up cracks with spray foam insulation
• Insulate all of the naked walls
• Sheetrock (plus tape & mud)
• Replace windows
• Paint
• Sand floors
• Paint floors
• Replace trim
• Make and install a sliding door (or two?)
• Cry sweet tears of relief

It looks like a long list, but we’re getting there. Demolition always seems to take way longer than putting things back together, so we’re optimistic that this room will be done by the time our first set of visitors come out to see us (July 4th weekend…eep!).

What we learned in this project:

• Plaster is really, really heavy.
• Chuck Taylors: cute, comfortable, not meant for construction work. (Plaster is really, really heavy.)
• It takes approximately 4 weekends for us to create enough construction garbage to fill one standard dumpster.

Meet our master bedroom.

No matter how hard we try to wish it, our master bedroom just won’t go away. And it isn’t fixing itself either. The only thing left to do is acknowledge its presence and officially document the before pictures. Take a deep breath, people: we begrudgingly invite you into our master bedroom.

Before we got down to the working part, Bradley spent a few hours spying on our neighbors:

Just kidding. Bradley’s measuring a couple of window that need to be replaced. He’s hiding behind a window roller because it doesn’t technically roll anymore. We have to manually roll it up every time we want a little light in the room.

Most of the other window rollers in the house were ripped down during one particularly hilarious hissy fit. It was very Joan Crawford moment, except instead of NO MORE WIRE HANGERS!! it was more like WHAT KINDA ROLLER DOESN’T ROLL?! So far, only 2 rollers on the entire second floor have survived our wrath. They’re both in the room we frequent the least. Ahem.

Anyway, the window panes are so old that they have a wavy look to them, and they make everything look a little blurry.

Check out the Freestyle Painting around the glass. Maybe there was a masking tape shortage when they last renovated the house. Yeah, that must be it. The Blue Tape Shortage of Aught-Nine.

Single-pane glass has an Energy Star rating of Your-Heating-Bill-Will-Bankrupt-You, so we want to get these swapped out pronto. Ahhh, the joys of buying a 130-year-old house. No insulation, crusty windows, energy-sucking boiler. Our goal is to fix all of those problems before Old Man Winter shows up and drains our wallets. We’re starting with the 3 Smurf Room windows and 2 master bedroom windows. These are the 2 master bedroom windows that need help:

The thing in the middle that juts out a little is a chimney. And on the other wall is the radiator:

You can get a better idea of the ceiling height there. Bradley’s 5’10″ if that helps scale it. The ceilings are 112 inches tall, which is about 9.333333 feet. The height really helps open up the room and make it feel even bigger.

On the flip-side of the chimney wall is the entrance to the room. You’ll see some more Freestyle Painting around the door frame:

Please ignore the pile of insulation. That’s the stuff we pulled out of the guest bedroom / hallway wall. We were too tired to carry it up to the attic, so we piled it up in front of the master bedroom until we could barely see the door. It’s all part of our delusion master plan.

We’ve already shared our faux marble turquoise light switch covers:

Those are perfectly complemented by our faux marble pinkish-red plug-in covers:

What color would you call that? Off-red? Rose? Mauve? Also, how exactly do you pronounce mauve? Moev? Or mawv? We say mawv, but it sounds a little too New Yorker to be right. Like kaw-fee (coffee) or bee-a (beer). My absolute favorite New Yorkism ever: brawr (bra).

However you pronounce it, that mauve monstrosity is not going to last much longer in our house. There was some talk of gathering up all of the colorful faceplates and repeatedly running over them with our car, but it didn’t seem like a productive use of our time. It also didn’t seem very sane, so we’re playing it safe and just tossing them in the trash. We’re laughing maniacally as we throw them away, though, so sanity is a moot point.

One of the biggest challenges we’re having right now is figuring out where we’ll put a king-sized bed in this room. All of the walls have something going on:

The fourth wall has a door smack in the middle. After years of living with a queen-sized bed and no bedside tables, we’re being pretty bratty about our master bedroom setup. We want a king-sized bed, 2 bedside tables with drawers, and lamps. The only wall that might work is the wall with the closet, but we’re not sure the bedroom door will fully open with a bed there.

After taking window measurements, we found ourselves staring at the walls, wondering how on earth we would make this a functional bedroom. And that’s when we had a brilliant revelation. We took a couple of measurements and confirmed it: the wall had a hollow space behind it!

We could remove the entire wall, move the closet somewhere else, and have a nice set-in section that would give us plenty of room! Bradley couldn’t wait to have a look at how much hollow space was behind the wall. He ran out of the room and came back with the sledgehammer:

Doesn’t he look so ecstatic? He made the same face when we ate at a Sonic for the first time ever:

Burgers and sledgehammers: it doesn’t take much to keep the boy happy.

Bradley used the sledgehammer to smack a hole in the wall, but the hammer just kept bouncing back. It wouldn’t crack through. Um…turns out he was hitting a stud. Oops! So he knocked another hole next to it:

There was lathe behind the wall, just like we were expecting.

We pulled the wood strips out, reached in to see how much room we had, annnnnnd…

….saw the back the guest bedroom closet. Oh. Crap. The wall was hollow, alright, but there are only about 4 inches to work with. Somehow we got our measurements wrong by a couple of feet.

We blamed it on the fact we had been doing manual labor all day before we got to this project. Our brains weren’t working at full capacity. Maybe we were holding the tape measure upside-down. We needed a nap. The dog ate our homework. No matter what excuse we came up with, we knew it all came down to this: we screwed up.

After a few choice profanities, we grew silent and just stared at the back of the guest bedroom closet through what used to be a perfectly good wall. Then we walked out of the master bedroom, closed the door behind us and stacked our insulation in front of it.

Mistakes: we all make ‘em. But it takes a special type of person to walk away and pretend like it never happened.

To help cleanse ourselves of the residual guilt, we decided to do something uber-productive and totally necessary. Like go up to the attic and look around at stuff. We’ll do whatever it takes to forget.

The attic door, in case you forgot, is in the Purple Room:

Purple walls. Purple trim. Purple door. Purple floors. Prince called. He wants his palette back. Or he wants to move in and pay rent. I forget.

The Purple Room is another one of those close-the-door-and-let-it-get-sucked-into-a-vortex rooms, but it does have one huge redeeming quality:

Brick! We’re such suckers for exposed brick. It’s going to take all of our will power to not go completely overboard and expose every inch of brick in this house. We sometimes struggle with taking things too far — why do it when you can overdo it?? — but admitting we have a problem is the first step. Still, when we need a hit of brick, we go peek at the attic wall. It fills a need and keeps us from going jackhammer-crazy all over the place.

For all of you who have wished us luck in finding some antique artifacts in our attic:

We found some shutters! They’re easily as old as the house itself and are covered in inches of grime. There are 4 windows on the front of the house and we found 3 shutters that look like a perfect fit. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll find a fourth lying around!

We’re honestly not sure these shutters are even salvageable because they’re so covered in nastiness, but we’d be willing to give them a power wash if we find the missing one.

Those shutters, by the way, are the only thing we found in the attic. A few weeks ago, a sweet elderly couple dropped by the house to chit-chat, and they told us they were hired to clean up the house after the foreclosure. Apparently there was a lot of “junk” in the attic and garage, and they got rid of everything. We were a little sad, but also a little relieved because it means less work for us.

Sorry to disappoint, but unless we find something really cool hidden in a wall somewhere, our biggest finds have been a block of wood, a tin of flux, a roll of wire, a DVD and a half-empty can of beer. And that busted chimney that someone sealed up and hid under the guest bedroom floor.

What we learned from our venture into the forbidden zone:

• Measure twice, bust through wall once.
• The master bedroom may end up being the guest bedroom, and the guest bedroom may end up being the master bedroom.
• None of our friends are going to visit us after they see that last bullet point.

The bad and the ugly.

We’ve talked a lot about how much we love our new (old) house, and how amazing it’s going to be when we’re done with it. What we haven’t really brought up is all the stuff we hate about it. This is mostly because we don’t really like dwelling on the negative — we like to demolish it and replace it with something better. Also, we like our Kool-Aid mixed with equal part denial and disbelief.

Some of this crap, though, is too good not to share. So, without further ado, here’s a tour of some of the less desirable parts of our home. Lets start with a tour of the various light switch covers in the house. There’s this charming I’m-a-creepy-cat-lady number:

And this homage to Pennsylvania Dutch that would be cute in a Grandma’s house, but not so much in the house of two not-quite-30-year-olds:

And then there’s our favorite. The turquoise faux-marble plastic covers that show up in several different rooms. Here’s one in the hallway:

And another one in the master bedroom:

That bile green paint on the walls? Whoever did that didn’t use painters’ tape. They just free-handed it around the door frame, dribbled a bunch on the floors, and then left it. While we’re in the master bedroom, check this out:

Someone had a mild obsession with floral wall borders. There are more floral borders in the kitchen and dining room. We even found some behind the walls. Also check out the popcorn ceiling — that cottage cheese textured monstrosity that was so popular in the ’70s and ’80s. Those are in several rooms, including the office and the kitchen. Some rooms also have popcorn textured walls. Feel free to ugh and ew. We did.

Also in the master bedroom, we found this lovely grey rug left here by the previous owners:

Yes. That is a slit to accommodate the radiator. No, they didn’t even try to hide it. And yes, the floors are painted barnyard red. This is why the master bedroom is not the first bedroom we’re working on. We like to close the door and pretend it doesn’t exist. We haven’t even hauled the rug out to our garbage pile garage yet. Someday we’ll confront it. Till then — master bedroom? What master bedroom?

Since we’re looking at floors already, take a gander at what we’ve been whining about:

We can look past the chocolate-poo-poo-brown color. What we can’t get over is how someone didn’t throw down a drop cloth or a plastic tarp before plastering and painting the rooms. They just smeared white paint all over. Side note: a man asked me today if I played soccer. He said he asked because of my bowlegged legs. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or both.

Anyway, it seems like freestyle painting is a theme throughout our house. Here’s one spot on the floor where someone spray painted a radiator and didn’t bother with a tarp:

I suppose it doesn’t matter much since all of our floors will be getting the up-close-and-personal treatment with a belt sander. Check out our splintering and peeling pine:

No flip flops in this hizzy. Not for a while. And I don’t think we’ll be going barefoot till at least 2015. We might even have to sleep in our shoes for a while. That’s how splintered our floors are.

There are also some pretty serious gaps between the floorboards and the baseboards. If I were a mouse, I’d be so happy about this:

We’ll figure out some way to either fix the floor gaps, or at least stuff a wad of steel wool and disguise them. Or just put chairs all over the place so we can scream bloody murder and jump up on a chair, cartoon style, at the sight of a mouse.

We’ve already shared the Smurf room on here a few times, but we haven’t shown a view of the floor like this:

Take a good look. That’s not a shadow you’re seeing. Someone painted the floors around a rug. Instead of rolling up the rug and moving it out of the room. They just painted right around it. Yep.

Remember the weird missing chunk of floor in the guest bedroom? We had to peek inside.

In our defense, we get bored easily. We can’t help ourselves. We were hoping for some sort of Depression-era buried treasure. A coffee can full of money. A secret stash of jewelry. Love notes from a WWII sailor. Something. Anything.

Instead we found that crusty old pipe. Lamest buried treasure ever. But, because we’re inquisitive little turds, we couldn’t leave it at that. We used some pliers to pry open the pipe.

Still no buried treasure. All we found was a wood cork stuffed inside. We think it’s a sealed up old chimney. And that’s 15 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back.

When we peeked inside one closet, we saw a giant mother’s day card hanging on the wall. After careful examination, however, we realized that it was a piece of cardboard taped to the wall, with a giant mother’s day card taped in front of it to disguise a giant hole in our wall:

Same thing in the Smurf room, except this time, they used a piece of scrap metal and nailed it into the wall:

Say hello to our plumbing! I think the thing that bugged us most about this one is that they didn’t even use a saw or box cutter to make a real access panel. They just punched in the wall with a hammer. That’s quality craftsmanship right there, folks. Brought to you by the same people who’ve never heard of a tarp!

The Smurf room is chock full of surprises. Like this hook-and-key lock:

…which wouldn’t be that weird except it happens to be on the outside of the room. Creepy much?

Some of the things that drive us nuts aren’t even the big in-your-face things like holes in walls or crusty ceilings. Little things like upside-down outlets in the guest bedroom get under our skin like nobody’s business:

We like to think our guests will be sooooo busy being charmed by our cute house and our cute faces that they won’t notice something as trivial as upside-down outlets, but we’re not taking any chances. After a few days of attempting to ignore the outlets while tackling some bigger issues in the room, we just couldn’t take it anymore. We grabbed some screw drivers and fixed the outlets in a matter of minutes. We’ll sleep better at night knowing that our outlets are right-side-up:

A lot of people have been asking about a full house tour. One of the reasons we don’t have it yet is because most of our light fixtures currently look like this:

Our point-and-shoot isn’t fancy enough to take decent pictures in dark rooms, and our new camera didn’t arrive in time to photograph the whole house. So we’re in house tour limbo until the next time we drop by with another batch of moving boxes (maybe this weekend!).

Still, we feel like we have to share a picture of the one cool lighting fixture in the whole house:

It’s a massive blackened gold fixture in the middle of our ginormous living room. The room is so big that all of our worldly possessions can fit in it. With the two of us and our dog and our cat. And 3 of our closest friends. And a car. OK, not really, but it’s big. Here’s a better look at the light fixture:

What’s not to love, right?

Well, for starters, the “blackened gold” color we thought we saw is actually gold spray paint. And, once again, someone didn’t bother with stuff like painters’ tape, so there’s gold spray paint all over the place. You can also see the gold and white Awesome ’80s texture that someone sponge-painted onto the ceiling. Luckily it doesn’t look so cheesy with all the lights off, so maybe we’ll just take down the light and leave crusty old wires hanging out of the ceiling. Then it would match the lights in the rest of the house.

And, last but not least, there’s this rusted handle in the middle of the hall upstairs. We think it might have been placed there to help an elderly person get up the last 4 stairs. We haven’t removed it yet, mostly because we’re scared we’ll get tetanus just by touching it:

Hope you enjoyed the not-so-charming features of our old house. We’re still in the process of moving in and haven’t completely left our Brooklyn apartment yet. We’re hoping to have all of our stuff outta here Saturday morning. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Here’s what’s coming up next:

• We sheet rocked the French door hallway — still need to share all the dusty details!
• We have half of our brick wall exposed. We’ll finish that up and show you some dramatic before & afters.
• We discovered that the Smurf room has zero insulation. Yipes! We’ll show you how we’re insulating them.
• We’re tearing down another wall in the guest bedroom to put in a big, industrial closet.
• We have to remove some of the most stubborn wallpaper in the world, and we’re doing it without shelling out the dough for renting a steamer.

And that’s all in one wing of the house. Yiish. Stay tuned!

Our 130-year-old house has history. Who’d a thunk it?

Our house was built in 1881, which makes it exactly 100 years older than me and 101 years older than Bradley. Right after closing, we met a really nice man who came over to turn our water on. He told us that Old Mrs. Thompson owned the house and that the entire area flooded in the early ’70s. That’s all the history we knew about the house. (We also found out that they levied the creek after the big flood, so we’re totally out of the flood zone. Phew!)

Up until yesterday, that’s all we knew about the history of our house.

We dropped by after work yesterday to drop off some boxes & furniture, and to check the mail. We still haven’t officially moved in yet — that won’t happen until we finish the 2 rooms we’re renovating. Anyway, our neighbor Skip saw us lugging boxes into the house and he dropped by to introduce himself. Skip and his wife have lived next door for 30ish years. They moved into what they thought was a starter home, and never left. So cute!

We were so excited to meet him. Not just because we’ll be living next door to him for an indefinite amount of time, but because we had a ton of questions about the house itself. Ever since we got the keys, we’ve been wondering who lived in our house before us. Were they happy there? And, more importantly, whhhhhhy would they paint the walls the exact same blue as the carpet? Or use roof shingles to cover an indoor wall. Or cut a giant hole in a wall and — instead of covering it with an access panel door like a sane person — tape it shut using a piece of cardboard and a giant Mother’s Day card. Yeah. Really. Photographic evidence coming soon.

When Skip dropped by to chit-chat, we finally got a chance to talk to someone who might know. We’re nosy people. We can’t help ourselves.

Skip told us that an old lady owned the house (Old Mrs. Thompson!), and she was a lifer. She purchased the house as a foreclosure during the Great Depression, and lived there until she died. She was 104 years old. The house was already “old” by the time she moved in — it had been around for 50 years!

The nerds in us couldn’t help but marvel at the similarities. We purchased the old house during the Great Recession, also as a foreclosure. Who knows — maybe we’ll live here until we’re 104!

Skip said that Old Mrs. Thompson took great care of the house, and maintained it beautifully. The exterior always looked immaculate. Skip and the water guy never mentioned an Old Mr. Thompson or Little Baby Thompsons pitter-pattering around the yard, so it sounds like she lived there by herself.

After Old Mrs. Thompson died, some allegedly nuttier people moved in and they didn’t take very good care of the house. They put up the half-painted privacy fence. I’m guessing they’re also responsible for shingled wall, the Mother’s Day card access panel door, and the all-blue Smurf room that we’re currently re-doing. And then there’s the all-purple room:

Yup. Purple walls, purple trim, purple doors. And the pièce de résistance: purple floors. At least they held themselves back a little and made the floors a very light lilac. I think our eyeballs would have exploded if the floors matched the dark purple trim. We’ll share all the charming features of the purple room (permanently glued butterfly stickers on the walls!) once we take our hammers to it. For now, we’ve closed the door and are in full denial of what lies behind it.

Anyway, we didn’t learn much about the latest owners of our house, but they weren’t around for very long. Skip didn’t seem very sad to see them go.

What we learned about our house just made us love it more. When we found out that a little old lady lived there and loved the house and took a lot of pride in keeping it beautiful, we got even more excited about restoring the house to its previous level of fabulousness. It’ll be like the purple room never happened.

The fun starts this weekend with our first how-to feature. We’re going to tear down a wall and install French doors and share all the details of how we did it. Whee! Stay tuned.

Surprise find: top secret trap door!

Anyone remember the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice?

Source

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:

Source

And this is the Winter River Bridge from Beetlejuice:

Source

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: