Quick Project

So I truely had a QUICK project to do last night! When we moved in, our front door had a really ugly curtain on it that came down almost immediately. It was stained yellowish, b/c the woman who lived here smoked, so I wanted it GONE! Unfortunately, no curtain and a big window on the front door meant no running down in the morning to grab something from the kitchen, without all of the kids in the neighborhood walking by, noticing that I didn't take the time to grab a robe!

So, the plan was to cut our house address out of contact paper using my Cricut (coolest thing EVER, btw!). I experimented with adding the word WELCOME above it, but Jeff said it looked too much like a business instead of a home if we did that. I also cut some little swirlly things to put in all of the corners. Finally, I taped off the beveled glass edges all around the door.

Next, I painted Window Etching Cream onto the glass. The label on this stuff scares the crap out of people! For instance, if you get it on your skin, it will continue to "burn away flesh for the 15 minute activation period". Hmmmm, perhaps I should be wearing gloves...

Completely coated, just waiting for the time to pass until I can wipe it off...

OK, so it's the back of the door, but you get the point! No more passers-by seeing into our front hallway :-)

A Shout-Out to Brad

It has been brought to my attention that a picture of my neighbor Brad hasn't been added to our blog yet. So, this is the official Shout-out to Brad Engelberg! Him and his wife Holly (and their 4 boys) live next to us, and we are SOOOO blessed to have a contractor living next door! Brad was the one who mudded the drywall on the dining room ceiling, he has helped us diagnose a mysterious bathroom leak early on a Saturday morning, and without his help, our new fridge would still be sitting in our garage! We're also very thankful to Holly, for lending him to us, often last minute, when we get stuck on something. It's so nice to have neighbors we like!! Thank you guys!

Making Room

Part of the kitchen project that needed to be done ASAP was that the new fridge needed to be brought in from the garage before it started freezing at night. We got an INCREDIBLE deal on it, and so bought it when we could in cash. It was a model that the original price was $1400. Lowes had it on sale for $1200. The open-box, display model was on clearance for $900. There was a dent in the side (which would be hidden by the wall), so the manager marked it down to $700. We had $590 in our remodel cash account, and I talked to the manager on duty about our desire to pay for our kitchen remodel in cash, and not incur any more debt than we already have (and are working hard to pay off!). I told him how much we had, and he said SOLD! So, the first thing we had to do was make room for it in the kitchen, so we could get it out of the garage before it froze :-)

This is the area we had to work with. The old fridge was shorter and smaller than the new one, so we knew that we were going to have to tear out cabinets to make a spot.

It would have been easier to tear out the cabinets with a chainsaw and sledgehammer, like they do on tv, but we had already determined that we were going to try to make the best use out of old cabinets, and use them in other places in the house- namely the playroom, basement, and future mudroom. Thus, everything had to be removed carefully! Unfortunately, like so many other things in this house, things were not done correctly! Cabinets are supposed to be screwed into the wall! Instead, they were nailed in with 3 inch nails, which had to be pried out, one at a time.

Then of course, because nothing can be too easy, the cabinet got stuck when we were taking them out! The back of the cabinets, and the shelves, had to be removed so that the cabinet could be taken out!


Meet our layers of flooring. Of course- why wouldn't there be layers in the kitchen too?! There is 70s rolled out vinyl, on top of 50's snakeskin looking floor tiles that we're PRETTY SURE contain asbestos, and below that is the original hardwood which we already refinished in the rest of the downstairs.

Now that the cabinets in the area are all torn out, note the doorway which we found behind there! Apparently, our downstairs half bath used to be the pantry- accessible from the kitchen. When the doorway into it from the front hallway was put in, this doorway was closed over. We wish we could figure out how to use it to create a coat closet (which was combined with the pantry to create the bathroom), but that may take some more finagling!

And, after much tugging and heavy lifting from Jeff and our neighbor Brad (thank you!!), the new digital fridge is in our kitchen, just in time for the freeze overnight tonight! Until we get the floor torn out next weekend, we're not going to put in any cabinets at this time. This also allows us to move the food from one fridge to the other too. But for now, it's nice to have 2 fridges, and I'm SUPER excited about the new one (it is all digital inside, and even has a drawer that flash thaws frozen meat). YAY for the new fridge!!

Let's tear some stuff down!

We knew the first time that we came through the house, that the kitchen we going to be one of the first things that we would redo! It was circa 1970s and in desperate need up some updating! I will say now, that our budget for the entire room is $4000. A year-end bonus will allow us to pay for the room in cash, if we can keep it under that amount. For those of you who have built, or remodeled a kitchen, I'm sure that you know that the average price for a LOW RANGE kitchen is $25,000. Thus, this will provide a huge challange to my deal- seeking abilities :-)

We had a few people comment on the beams running across the ceiling. Please note, for those of you who haven't seen them, that they are made out of FOAM. You will note in the picture, Meg easily sticking a fork into them...

We promised her when we moved in, that when it came time to tear out the beams, that she would be allowed to pull them down. Well, it was about that time... :-)

After we took out the frosted ceiling tiles, there were, once again, many LAYERS underneath. Besides the frosted ceiling panels and foam beams, there were shop lights, then fiberboard ceiling panels, then the original plaster, then the lathe, and finally the floor joists of the second floor, as well as the plumbing running to the upstairs bathroom (convenient for running that second bathroom up to the secret room!)

The Secret Room

We've had many requests to put up a post about the secret room :-). A brief recap of the story of how we discovered it: We removed some of the ceiling tiles in the kitchen the month after we moved into the house, to see if the same 10 foot ceilings were in the kitchen that were in the rest of the house. While looking up, I noticed a window that I originally thought was Teddy's room. Then, I realized that the curtains were different! We went outside around the house, and verified that there was indeed a window on the west side of the house that we had never noticed. Our neighbor brought over his ladder and climbed up to look into the window (mainly to make sure there were no dead bodies, or anything creepy in there!), and verified that there was a full room in there! So, Jeff took the sawsall and cut into the wall in Teddy's closet. Sure enough, there was the "secret room" . Completely walled over, but still complete with trim, curtains on the windows, and even an old wooden bed frame!



There was also a fair amount of construction debris in there, including a door frame, and lots of other stuff. There was also a capped off radiator pipe in there as well- showing that heating used to run up into the room.

The back part of the room was seperated by a half wall, and in the corner there were hooks on the walls, and even some old windows.

The plan is now to take down the half wall, make a real entry into the room from the bedroom (instead of climbing through the hole Jeff cut in the closet!). Then, we will switch rooms with the boys and make that the master bedroom instead :-). While we have the ceiling torn out in the kitchen, we will have a plumber run plumbing up into the secret room, and it will become a master bath (something we had given up on having when we bought this house!). Instead now, we'll have a 10x10 bathroom (and hopefully even enough room for a whirlpool tub :-)!

Tah - Dah!!

Let's try to do this in true HGTV fashion...
Before- this formal dining room, once stately, had been hidden under layers and years of cosmetic "improvements". 2 layers of paneling, and 8 layers of wallpaper, large draping curtains which hid the original woodwork, and drop ceilings which lowered the 10 foot ceiling height down to 8 feet...



A hidden pocket door was kept shut for decades, pinned behind the wall by layers of carpeting and flooring. All of which hid the original hardwood floors from when the house was first built...

After: The plaster walls were patched and restored, and painted with a granite textured paint in a dark brick color. An updated, but historic looking iron light fixture replaced the 70s fixture. Crown molding was added around the top of the room to draw the eye upwards and accentuate the high ceilings. The wooden floors were sanded and refinished to their original glory, and the 10 inch baseboard and quarter-round was added around the room, as it would have been when first assembled from the Sears kit.

Though artwork and wall sconces still need to be added, it is still a far cry from the wallpapered, carpeted, crop ceilinged room we found when we moved in!

The Girl's Room

One of the projects which we weren't planning on doing for awhile was the girl's bedroom upstairs. It had wallpaper on the walls which was only peeling in a few places, so that was going to be something that we did down the line. However, one afternoon a certain 3 yr old throwing a temper tantrum changed all of that, when she was having a time out on her bed and discovered the joy of peeling wallpaper off the walls...

This is what it looked like beforehand- classic grandma wallpaper...


Teddy and Anna trying to be helpful and peeling off the wallpaper in little pieces...


Under the wallpaper, there was yellow textured paint on top of the plaster. For future reference, if you are EVER going to put anything on top of plaster- whether it is paint, wallpaper, etc, please remember the following: Plaster is a very dry surface, and also very porous. This means that it will SUCK the moisture out of whatever you put on it (this will lead to cracking, among other things!). You MUST, MUST, MUST first put a BONDING AGENT on the plaster. This is about the consistency of milk and is applied with a roller, and it does 2 jobs. First, it seals off the plaster so that the moisture won't get sucked out of whatever you're applying. And second, it allows whatever you're applying to BOND to the plaster. Obviously, whoever applied the textured paint to the plaster did not know about this. As a result, as I peeled off the wallpaper, huge chunks of the paint would come off too. This resulted in me having to apply drywall mud to even the surface to a LARGE portion of each wall. From there, I had to paint a textured paint on top of the mud to match the textured paint that had stayed behind...

And finally.... COLOR! I had my friend Amy help me pick an accent color for one wall, and a more natural pink for the other 3, that coordinated with the girls' bedspreads. I'm so excited about how it turned out!!!

Molding

The last step to be done on this wall was the crown molding. Though we have invested in many tools thus far, one thing that we haven't purchased is a compound miter saw. SOOO, I had to cut the miters by hand with a coping saw. Let's just say it took a few tried to get a joint that butted correctly!

Jeff installing the corner molding blocks. We thought it would add a more formal look (and reduce the number of miters!) to use these.

YAY! Molding on one wall is up! You can see the corner block, and then the crown molding that runs across from there.

DONE! Not the whole room mind you (I still need to cut a few more baseboards and crown molding strips), but ONE WHOLE WALL of this room is completely done! HORRAY! (pardon the white orbs in the picture, I need to clean my camera lense). What do you think of the room?

Trim!

The next step was to make the baseboards. Of course, since nothing in this house is standard, we had to go out and buy 1x10 lumbar to make the baseboards out of. I cut it with the circular saw, and then had to use the orbit sander to bull-nose (round) the outer edge to match existing trim in the house.



A dry fit of the trim. I actually cut it right on the first try! (that never happens!)

OK, so I'm skipping a few steps, but here is the trim and corner-round, installed. The coloring looks a little off in this picture- you'll have to come visit to get the true effect of the wall!

A Lesson on Windows

So here's another history lesson about old houses, for those of you who have been wondering :-).

You may have been in an old house before and noticed the ropes attached to either side of the lower window. These sash cords are actually how the window stays open.

Within the casing of the window, there are lead counter-weights recessed into the walls. One weight weighs half as much as the entire lower window (so about 40 pounds in this case). The sash cord runs up behind in casing, and out through the pulley at the top. It then attaches to either side of the window. When you open the window, the weights move down, counter balancing the window so that it stays open where you put it.

Unfortunately, if the cords snap (which they do over time) and you try to open the window, 80 pounds of window will come slamming down on you! So, I need to restring the windows with new sash chain (stronger than the rope, and looks cooler!). Ironically, no place near us sells it! The only place I can find restoration pieces for the windows is... in New Hampshire! So, next trip out to see my parents, I will be heading to the store to pick up the pieces to fix the windows in the house that currently slam shut!

Trim

Originally, we were just going to leave the trim around the doors and windows "as is". However, the more I looked at it, the more I realized that I would be really annoyed putting all of this work into a room, and then leaving the scratched up, dinged up trim the way that it was....

So... out came my good friend, the orbit sander! Here is a pic of the two side pieces of trim nicely sanded down and ready to be stained (I did sand down the top too).

Ta-Dah! SOOO much nicer looking than it was before. The other nice thing about redoing the trim was that I stained it with the stain we're using for the molding, baseboards, and corner round, so now everything will match!