DIY Cheat: Concrete Window Sill

Good news, peeps: we’re finishing off the last of our plastering today! We’ll be priming and painting the dining room later this week. We’re actually ahead of schedule right now because we found a shortcut for making our custom concrete window sills. (If you don’t remember those from upstairs, check em out here.)

In order to make concrete sills, you first have to make a mold. Then you mix up the concrete, pour it, thawp out the air bubbles and wait for it to dry. And finally, you clean them up a bit before installing them. We skipped most of those steps and went straight to the clean-and-install part with these babies:

Those are concrete walkway stones for yards and patios. We went to a local nursery and picked up 3 of them for $80. Each one measured 36″ x 24″ and they’re about 2″ thick.

These slabs are much more textured than ours because they were made to mimic stone:

We went for a super smooth, velvety finish in our DIY version. We’re OK with not having matchy-matchy sills throughout the house if it’s something interesting.

Another big difference between our DIY version and these pre-made slabs is the lack of rebar support. The pre-made slabs don’t have rebar in them, so they’re more fragile than then ones we made. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Since there’s no rebar, we can cut these suckers down to whatever size we want. We just have to be really careful while lifting and moving the slabs because they could easily break if we don’t distribute the weight properly.

We measured out our cuts and drew them on the slab using permanent marker. Then we cut it:

To make our cuts, we used a grinder and a circular saw, both loaded with diamond concrete blades. The slabs are 2″ thick, which means there’s no way we’ll be able to penetrate them with one cut. Instead, we first used the grinder to score the cut.

Then we went over the score line using the circular saw:

It helps keep the dust down if you hose the slab with water once in a while:

We ended up giving each cut 2 passes with the circular saw. The first cut was set so the blade cut one inch deep. the second cut was set so the blade cut two inches deep.

After each slab was cut down to size, we were left with 3 window sills that slid right in:

Each one sticks out a bit, just like the windows upstairs:

And we’re really digging the texture:

We sealed up the cracks between the drywall and the sill with painter’s silicone:

And that’s a wrap: we’re done with the window sills! We saved ourselves about 2 full weekends worth of work with our little shortcut. We also have enough left over to do the window sills for our kitchen, so our $80 spend was stretched to two rooms. Not bad, considering how much time it saved us.

We’ll be back later this week with updates on our dining room. We’re currently duking it out over paint colors, but we’ve narrowed it down to a couple of choices. Stay tuned!

Wrapping up some odds & ends.

Not gonna lie: this spending freeze is killing us. So far, we’ve had to make 4 trips to Lowe’s and Cole’s (our local chain). Our plan was to buy only what we absolutely needed to finish up outstanding projects — plumbing supplies for the hot water heater installation, for example. We stuck to our plan, even though it was really, really hard. After a few months of unchecked spending, our idea of what we absolutely needed got a little warped.

Part of our spending freeze plan is to wrap up the projects we’ve been putting off. (We posted a to-do list here.) That way we can move upstairs and start renovating downstairs. Our weekend was full of odds & ends projects, like putting up our DIY trim:

Bradley cut and installed the trim. Then he used painter’s caulk to seal up the crack between the wall and the molding. While he did that, I used wood putty to cover up the nail holes and seams:

Once the putty dried, we sanded it to a smooth finish and got them ready to paint. Then we moved on the radiators.

When we last left off with the radiators, we were in a bit of a bind. We wanted to replace our short, wide radiator with the tall, skinny one we swiped from our master bedroom. We needed to do a quick swaperoo of the fittings.

But — in typical home renovation style — we hit a snag. The fittings were on there so tightly that we couldn’t get them loose.

We even tried the heat-and-beat method, and it failed. On Sunday, we tried a different approach:

We set the skinny radiator down on its side. I stood on one end while Bradley used the pipe wrench on the other end.

At one point he was pushing down with all of his body weight with his legs dangling in the air. And then — finally! — the fitting came loose.

80+ years of grime makes for one serious glue! We did the same thing to get the fitting off of the short radiator. Then Bradley took the fitting from the short radiator and wrapped some Teflon tape around it.

This tape keeps the pipes from leaking but lets the connection stay removable. We won’t have to tighten the pipe to the point that we can’t get it off again.

Next, we put the new fitting into the skinny radiator and tightened it:

And then we used 2 giant pipe wrenches to turn the pipe around:

The opening used to face the other way. We turned it around to face the closet instead — that way we can put the skinny radiator in the corner and get it away from the window.

How we did it: Bradley was in the closet with one wrench, and I was outside with the other wrench. I faced away from the closet, braced myself against the wider radiator and let the wrench rest on my calves. Basically, my job was to not fall down. I had to stand there with the pipe against my legs while Bradley pushed his wrench towards me.

It took some seeeerious work, but eventually we got the sucker turned 180 degrees:

Then we carried the skinny radiator over to the pipe and screwed it in:

We stepped back to admire the fruit of our sweaty labors:

…and that’s when we realized the radiator is still too close to the window. Booo! Hissss! We’ll need to unscrew the radiator, scoot it to the left a few inches and use a pipe to cover the gap. Good thing the skinny radiator doesn’t weigh much. The short, wide radiator has got to be 300-400 pounds. We’re not really sure how we’re going to get it out of the guest bedroom. Or where we’re going to put it once we get it out. Details schmeetails.

After the radiators, we installed a ceiling fan in the guest bedroom. This means we no longer have a ceiling light and I couldn’t get decent pictures. But we decided to go ahead and tackle one more thing off of our list:

We picked up two heavy-duty closet poles for $20 a pop from Lowe’s and installed them in the guest bedroom. Bradley hung from them to test out how much weight they can hold:

That’s pretty much our criteria for anything we hang up. We even made up a verb for it: “Can you Monkey Bars it?” If we can Monkey Bar something, it’s solid. If we can’t, we add wall anchors.

We’ve been living out of cardboard wardrobe boxes since May 1st. No joke. So immediately after we finished putting the poles up, we moved all of our clothes upstairs. Then we tore the wardrobe boxes to pieces with our bare hands while laughing maniacally. Not really. Bradley carried them out to the garage so we can use reuse them as spray painting surfaces.

There’s one more project we wrapped up over the weekend:

While Bradley put up trim in the office and hallway, I painted all of the trim in the guest bedroom. We’ll take the official after pictures once we get the wide radiator out and clean up the floors. So exciting!

Also exciting: it’s Turkey/Tofurkey Day! We were so busy working on the house this weekend that we totally forgot to pick up our bird. We’re currently debating between taking the lazy route (frozen pizza) or pulling together a last-minute-feast-for-two (roast chicken and some simple sides). So far, the lazy route is winning. We’re taking Thursday off and then going right back to work on Friday. We’ll be back soon with all the updates. Hope your Thanksgiving weekend is more festive and less productive than ours!

Hemming & Hawing

The good news: we’re ready to move into the guest bedroom! The bad news: it’s not going to happen until the weekend. Actually, that’s probably bad news only to us. It’s getting super cold now, and the dining room — currently our bedroom — is completely un-insulated. We’re up to 3 down comforters now. And hoodies. And sometimes socks.

We’re geeked about moving into the guest bedroom because it’s directly above the wood stove so it stays nice & toasty. Crawling into an icy cold bed every night is getting a little old. So we focused mostly on the guest bedroom the entire weekend.

I had a little time to tackle a quickie project in the office. Remember our ridiculously long curtains?

I needed to hem those puppies before they got dirty. (Jabba the Mutt loooooves nesting in any fabric she can get her hands on.)

The only problem is that we don’t have a sewing machine. And we can’t get one either since we’re on a spending freeze for the rest of the year. Even if we did buy a sewing machine, there would be a pretty big learning curve. Neither of us has sewed in years. And the last time we tried, it was kind of a disaster. (Where exactly does the bobbin go?)

We decided to go the no-sew route, which actually ended up being way easier and faster than firing up a sewing machine. I started by measuring each curtain to see how much I needed to lob off:

I used a tape measure and let the bottom touch the floor. The top touched the top of the curtain:

That gave the me the distance between the top of the curtain and the floor. In this case, it was 85″. Our floors are slightly uneven, so each curtain was a little different.

Next, I set up the ironing board in front of the window. I scootched it as close to the window as possible.

Each set of our IKEA curtains came with hemming tape, so we didn’t have to buy any. It’s pretty cheap at fabric stores, though.

This panel were 92″ long, and I wanted it to be 85″. So folded over 7″ and ironed it to get a crisp line.

After that I checked to make sure the fold was correct. I let the curtain fall to the ground and made sure the fold line hit the floor. Then I ironed the fold again — this time with the hemming tape stuffed inside. I simply unrolled the hemming tape and lined it up along the fold. Easy!

I gave the tape a few minutes to cool off (it peels up when it’s hot). Then I cut the excess fabric and tossed it. And that’s it.

Here’s how the curtains looked after I finished:

Sorry about the drastic change in lighting. It was dark by the time I finished! Anyway, the curtains grazed the floors just like West Elm image we used for inspiration:

Source

Here’s how all 3 look together:

Oof, it hurts to look at those floors.

We haven’t swept or mopped up there since we painted the floors. It’s been nearly a month. We’ve been stomping around up there in our work shoes, tracking plaster dust and grime all over. And they’re looking pretty grody.

Our dirty floors are actually the reason we didn’t move into the guest bedroom last night. We needed to sweep/vacuum and mop, and we were too exhausted. We’re in Brooklyn for the next couple of days, so we won’t get to it until Friday. Eep. Can’t wait!

We’ve had a busy weekend, and there are a ton of pictures we have to share. Stay tuned, peeps.

Window Talk

In our last post, we showed you our new firewood rack. We also inadvertently showed you another project we worked on this weekend: our new dining room windows.

The window above the stack of firewood looked like this last weekend:

A rogue chunk of plaster went flying through the single pane glass during our dining room demolition. We covered it up with a sheet of plywood and ignored it for over 6 weeks. You can see a bit of the top right hand corner:

We pretended we were pioneering a new look called shanty-chic. Our neighbors pretended not to notice.

While I stacked firewood in the basement, Bradley swapped out both windows by himself. It took him about an hour to do both. And that includes removing the old window weights and insulting the hollow crevices. (The process was exactly the same as when we changed the windows in the office upstairs. You can read about that here.)

Here’s how the windows look now:

The dining room was always one of the most cold spots in our house — more so when our window was busted and cold air came streaming in. After swapping out the window, we noticed a difference right away. The room stays warmer, even though the walls aren’t insulated. And it’s only going to get better from here.

We can officially scratch dining room windows off of our Just Say No(vember) to-do list. We got a head start on another project as well:

A few weekends ago, we picked up some curtains for the office and guest bedroom.

We snagged 3 sets of the Hedda Blad for $15 a pair. And 2 sets of Matilda for the guest bedroom for $24.99 a pop.

We picked up 5 Skuggig curtain rods for $20 a pop.

IKEA’s instruction sheets are a little cryptic, but we managed to figure them out. First things first: we measured out how high we wanted our curtain rods and marked the wall:

Next, we drilled our pilot holes:

We put wall anchors into each hole.

Wall anchors help distribute weight of whatever you hang on them, so we like using them for things like curtain rods.

Putting in wall anchors is super easy. You gently push the anchor into your pilot hole, then use a hammer to lightly tap it in. After that, you put your screw right into your anchor and you’re set. (If super-detailed instructions float your boat, check out this site.)

Next up, we hung our rods:

We decided to cut our rods because they were much wider than our curtains.

The curtain rods are aluminum so we could use a grinder to cut them. We marked our cuts with painter’s tape and lobbed off a bit from one end.

The guest bedroom curtains are a gauzy white with a light vertical stripe pattern.We love how they let in plenty of sunlight but still give us lots of privacy. We decided not to hem the guest bedroom curtains because we liked how they grazed the floor. Curtain length is kinda tricky. Too short and they look silly, too long and they look comical. We asked ourselves WWWED — What Would West Elm Do?

Source: West Elm

Source: West Elm

Good enough! We let the curtains kiss the floors:

One one problem: our window has a radiator right in front of it.

Doh! Not so pretty. And we can’t just turn it around and shove it near the wall because it’s too wide. Luckily, we have an extra radiator in the purple room:

We tore down the wall between the purple room and the master bedroom, so we don’t really need another radiator in there. This one is taller and skinner than the guest bedroom radiator. We could — hypothetically — put it next to the window. That way the curtains wouldn’t be in the way. We dragged it into the guest bedroom to give it a shot:

We had to do a quick swap of the pipe fittings. Bradley headed them with a soldering torch:

He heated the fitting and then we tried to pry off the fitting with a wrench. It took longer than we expected.

…annnnnd the fitting still didn’t come off. So we left the radiators for another day and hung curtains in the office:

These puppies definitely need to be hemmed.

We used the same curtain rods in both the guest bedroom and the office, but they look totally different:

The office ceilings are so short (less than the standard 8′), so we tried hanging the rods from the ceiling. We loved the way they look similar but different.

We snuck in the next morning to see how the curtains look with sunlight streaming in:

Ooh la la!

Love that soft glow!

We also snagged this clock from IKEA:

We loved its simple, old-school-cool look. And when we saw this, it went straight into our cart:

We couldn’t help ourselves — we’re total suckers for pugs.

We’re off to catch up on Dexter and The Walking Dead rest up for this weekend’s projects. We’ll be back with updates soon!

One man’s blue is another man’s ewww.

I cackled at my own post title for far too long. I may also have snorted and spilled a little coffee on my own lap. Blogging: it’s a dangerous business.

We’ve been talking about painting for months now, and this weekend, it was finally, fiiiiiinally time to put some color on the walls. But first, we had to have a mild freakout about the colors we chose.

See, ever since we told people we were ready to paint, we started getting comments that made us uncomfortable. Like “Ooooh, can’t wait to see some crazy awesome colors!” Or worse: “You’re both designers, so I bet you’ll pick amazing colors!” Cue the clammy hands and schweddy foreheads.

Suddenly our colors seemed like lame and boring versions of the colors we really wanted. We cracked open each gallon and peered at the colors we had been so in love with, and barely recognized them. We felt jilted. Betrayed. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed Benjamin Moore. And then we made a fresh pot of coffee and got to painting.

Here’s the thing, peeps: color is a subjective thang. You may love the colors we’ve chosen or you may hate them. We’re not gonna get our collective panties in a bunch. What’s important is that they fit in our space and with the vision we have for our whole house. So, without further rambling, here’s the color we picked for the office:

That’s Benjamin Moore Shenandoah Taupe AC-36. We looked at approximately 40 billion paint chips before we agreed on it. We picked it because we loved the warm grey-brown tone and because we thought it would make the itty bitty office feel a bit bigger. Our biggest challenge with this room is its shorter-than-average ceilings. Average ceilings are 8′. The office has 7.5′ on the dot.

Here’s the fun part: we dug through our old posts and found the official before pictures. We’ll break down the before and after for each angle. Squee! We’ve been waiting to do this for 5 months now! Lets jump right in:

So. Much. Better. Here’s a view from the hallway looking in. You can catch a glimpse of the Smurf blue carpet we removed the day we picked up the keys to the house:

Standing in front of the brick wall looking at the other end of the room:

Here’s a better look at the recessed lighting. There are 3 that run down the center of the room:

View from the doorway looking in:

Standing in the corner from the last set of photos, looking towards the doorway:

And, finally, the closet. I couldn’t find great before pictures, but you get the general idea. It’s way back in the corner:

And it used to be covered in some really stubborn crusty grandmawallpaper that gave me nightmares and once made me cry:

And a view from inside the closet looking out:

…because we totally expect people to hang out inside our closets staring out into the room.

I’m so proud of the perfect lines dividing the ceiling and wall:

More details on that process in a few minutes. First, lets drool over our trimless windows and DIY concrete window sills:

We love how the taupe looks next to the raw brick:

But nothing made us happier than seeing the way taupe looks with a crisp white:

Ooh la la! We swooned when those went on. We know plain white switch covers aren’t a big deal, but feast your eyes on what used to light up our room:

I rest my case.

Now lets talk about how we roll. Our paint, that is:

We mentioned in an earlier post that we sprayed on our primer but rolled on our colors. That doesn’t mean it took us forever to roll. Not when we have the right tools for the job.

All of the tools above are made my Wooster except for the red thingy, which is made by Shur-Line. Check out the roller in the middle; that’s a standard-sized roller that everyone has and will give you an idea of how big the other items are. The ginormous roller on the left is what saved us a ton of time. It covers the walls twice as fast as a standard roller. No kidding. We used the mini roller for small spaces like the trimless windows.

The paint tray is also a huge time saver. It holds a gallon of paint, so we basically just dumped the entire bucket in all at once. It took a gallon and a quart to paint 2 coats in the office, so we only had to refill once. We covered the tray with some saran wrap in between coats — we painted a coat, broke for lunch, then came back and painted the second coat.

We also have a couple of roller extensions that let us paint the ceiling and the tall walls without having to drag a ladder all over the place:

We own 2 extensions, one of them by Wooster and the other by another company. The one in the picture above is not the Wooster — it’s the cheap one that works fine. I forgot to take a picture of the Wooster (teehee!) but that’s the one we recommend. It’s adjustable to different heights with a flip of a switch. Love it!

And, finally, there’s my new favorite painting tool: the Shur-Line Edge Painter.

Source

Basically, it’s a painting pad with 2 little wheels on the end. You dip the pad lightly in your paint, then put the pad on the surface you want to paint. You gently line up the wheels to the surface you want to follow (in our case, the ceiling). Then you drag with from one side to the other, leaving a clean line of paint behind you.

Taking a picture while simultaneously trying to paint a clean line was just not happening. Believe me, I tried. Here’s a picture I found that pretty much explains everything I just said, only way more clearly:

Source

We actually painted the office and the guest bedroom on the same day — 2 coats in each room, plus the clean up in between where we washed out our paint tray and rollers — so it really didn’t take us that long.

We used to get the cheapie paint tray sets from Lowe’s, but they don’t hold up well over time. We invested in these slightly pricier Wooster tools (the jumbo roller is $16 and each rolling pad is $8), and honestly, they’re worth it. They glide waaaaay smoother than our other rollers so they don’t leave too much texture on the walls. We actually ended up throwing out our cheapie rollers on Saturday because we were super impressed by the Wooster set. We have a lot of painting to do. Might as well use tools that don’t make us miserable, right?

What we’ve learned:

• Go with your gut.
  Our first instincts for each of the rooms we painted ended up being pretty spot on. We knew we were in the right ballpark when we found ourselves gravitating towards one color family (like deep greys and dark tans for the office). After that, it was just a matter of finding the one that matched our ceiling best.
• Don’t pick color palettes for each room. Pick color palettes for the whole house.
  We have 9 rooms and 3 hallways to paint in our house, and it would be super easy to get overexcited and paint each one a totally different color. We won’t, though, because we want our house to have a unified feel. This is why we painted the ceilings in the office, guest bedroom and hallway the same color (Olympic Horseradish) and then chose colors that coordinated with the ceiling colors as well as with each other. Each room will still have its own distinct palette, but it’ll all be part of the big picture. Young House Love has a great post about this that’s worth checking out.
• I just wrote 1365 words about painting one room.
  I’m not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed. Yiish.

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None of the brands we mentioned paid or perked us to write this post. We just like sharing the news when we find tools we love.

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!

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:

Source

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.

DIY Concrete Window Sills

As we mentioned last week, there’s a ton of mudding to do around here. Booo! Hiss! Most boring job ever! We decided to take a break and do something fun instead. Remember those trimless windows we started in the guest bedroom? Here’s what they look like with a coat of plaster:

That’s going to be the look for all of the windows on the second floor. Crisp, clean lines with no trim. They’ll each have a white cement sill that slides into the open space at the bottom where we didn’t put any drywall. Making those sills was our big project for the weekend.

We gathered our supplies in the garage. Here’s our mixing station:

The base of our mold:

The side walls of our mold:

Stuff for the inside of the mold:

We had to buy our white cement from Brooklyn because we couldn’t find it locally. It’s a bit pricier than the grey stuff. A 90 lb bag of white cement cost us $19, and the same amount of grey cement was only $9. We’re going for a softer look, though, so it’s totally worth it to us. We also couldn’t find a mold release spray in our area, so we used furniture wax. And the acrylic fortifier is an optional mix-in that helps make the concrete stronger by helping it bond together better.

One thing to remember when doing cement molds is that everything is upside down. The bottom of our mold is actually the top of our window sills. If we had wanted a heavily textured look for our sills, we would have used a heavily textured base bottom — a raw piece of wood maybe. To get the absolute smoothest texture possible, we would have used steel. We went with masonite because it’s much cheaper than steel and still gives us the smooth, velvety texture we want. And we used 2×2′s for the walls of our mold because we wanted a 1.5″ thick window sill.

Here’s a little hilarity for you: 2×2′s aren’t actually 2″ x 2″. They’re 1.5″ x 1.5″. And 2×4′s aren’t actually 2″ x 4″. They’re 1.5″ x 3.5″. My brain exploded when I found out.

The beauty of cement molding is that all of this stuff is totally customizable. Want a more textured top? Go with a more textured base. Want a super thick slab of cement? Build taller walls for your mold. Want black cement instead of grey or white? Go for it. What we’re showing is what worked for us.

The mold itself is really simple construction:

The particle board is on the bottom. The masonite is on top of the particle board. And the walls are on top of the masonite. Screws holds all 3 of the pieces together. Masonite is pretty flexible, so the particle board underneath is there to make the board rigid. This is really, really important — we don’t want a flimsy mold because we’ll be banging it around later.

It’s also really important to make sure the screws are long enough. The more sturdy the base, the better.

Bradley started by cutting the 2×2′s in half to make walls for our molds. We made 5 total molds: 3 sills for the Smurf room and 2 sills for the guest bedroom. And, since our masonite and particle board sheets were large enough, we put multiple molds on each base.

He made sure the wall edges were perfectly square before screwing them into the base:

Here’s what the Smurf room base looked like when Bradley finished. Each rectangle is one window sill mold, so this base has 3 molds on it:

Next, we used caulk to seal the gap between the wall and the masonite:

And once the caulk dried (about 10 minutes), we used a razor blade to scrape up any excess gunk.

After shaking out all the dust from the molds, we broke out the furniture wax:

We coated the masonite and the 4 walls so the concrete slab will easily slide out after drying. We made sure and waxed each corner really well because those are the spots that could potentially chip when we take the mold apart.

After that came the mixing:

We mixed together 50 lbs of cement with 50 lbs of sand. And that’s pretty much all we technically measured out. Bradley’s been experimenting with concrete at work and he likes to eyeball his mix, so our wet ingredients weren’t really measured.

He poured in about half a bottle of the acrylic fortifier and enough water to get the mixer moving, and then slowly added more water if he felt like the mix was too dry.

To check the mix, Bradley shoved his trowel in and mashed things around. When it got to the consistency of frozen yogurt, he started shoveling it into the molds:

Frozen yogurt or gelato. Or mousse. Or soft-serve. That’s the consistency we were going for. Nom nom nom.

Once it was full, we slid a piece of pipe under the mold and made a see-saw:

The is the part where the mold gets banged around a lot and could potentially fall apart if it’s flimsy. The basic idea is to whack the mold against the floor repeatedly so the air bubbles rise to the top. Little pockets of air in your cement mix could weaken your concrete slab. They could also make the top of your sill or counter look like crap, so whack the mold like you mean business.

The easiest way is to position the metal pipe in the center of the mold and stomp on one end of the mold with one foot.

The entire thing see-saws back and forth and smacks itself against the ground. It’s incredibly loud, and we’re pretty sure all of our neighbors hate us now, but it works like a charm. We did about 10 minutes of whacking per mold base.

While I did that, Bradley cut some wire and got the rebar ready:

The rebar is to strengthen the cement even more. We tied a length of wire to each end of the rebar, and gently set it into the cement:

We then twisted the wire around scrap pieces of wood that were long enough to sit across the walls of each mold. This way the rebar is sort of floating inside the cement instead of sinking to the bottom.

Here’s what it looked like when we finished setting the rebar:

Then we plopped more cement into the mold and covered up the rebar:

With a little more banging and whacking, the cement settled and filled in the spots under the scrap wood. We gave it an hour to firm up a little and then went back to remove the scrap wood.

Bradley snipped the wires:

Then he carefully lifted the scrap wood up, leaving behind the wire and the rebar floating in our cement mix:

He gently smoothed over the cement, being really careful not to tough the wires:

That whole taking-the-scrap-wood-off step is completely unnecessary. What we’re looking at in the above photo is actually the bottom of the sill, so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like. Bradley just felt like experimenting to see if he could get the bottom to be a little more even. Just in case he needs a more smooth bottom for another project.

We let the molds dry overnight, and came back the next day to crack ‘em open. We started by unscrewing all of the screws:

And then gently tapping the walls to loosen the molds. Emphasis on gently — the concrete isn’t 100% dry and tapping too hard could cause chips or cracks.

One by one, the molds released and out came our concrete window sills.

We gently moved them to the corner of our garage to let them continue drying.

The color ended up a lovely bone-white (lighter than they look in the photos) and the texture is super smooth and velvety. Exactly what we were going for.

One of the molds had a little bubble issue on the side:

Luckily it was on the side of the sill and not on the top — we can face the dimpled side to the wall so nobody will ever see it.

After we finished oohing and aahing over our new sills, Bradley grabbed a bucket of water and doused the concrete slabs:

This is totally counter intuitive — or at least it was to me — but you don’t really want your slabs to dry quickly. The longer cement takes to cure, the stronger the bond. So a hot, humid day is actually ideal for drying concrete because it slows down the dry time.

A few hours later we grabbed a couple of sills to see how they fit. Bradley slid one into place in the guest bedroom:

Perfect fit!

The sill is actually not done. We still need to sand them so the edges are smooth, and then polish them so they have a slight sheen. We also have to finish plastering the windows all the way to the edges of the sills so there are no gaps. We’re already loving the way they look, though.

What we learned from this project:

• The wet mix will look way darker than the final product.
  We had a slight meltdown when our wet cement mix looked more khaki than bone, but it dried several shades lighter. Whew!
• Mix smaller batches.
  We mixed a huge batch of cement — 100lbs of dry ingredients plus 5 gallons of water — and broke our paint mixer attachment. We ended up having to hand mix with trowels. Oops. Next time, we’re getting a more heavy-duty mixer attachment and we’re only mixing 2 or 3 sills per batch.
• Use bathroom + kitchen silicone and not painter’s silicone.
  We used painter’s silicone because it’s what we had on hand, and we think it may have dissolved a little in the wet cement mix. We think it’s the reason our edges weren’t as crisp as we had hoped for. Bath + kitchen silicone will hold up to water better, and we’ll try that out next time.
• Concrete is cheap.
  Even though we splurged on the fancy white concrete and the totally optional acrylic fortifier, we still only used about $18 worth of supplies to make these 5 window sills. We’re not sure what trim costs these days, but we’re willing to bet we’ve spent less on our trimless windows with custom sills than we would have on standard window sills with trim.

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.*