Some progress today, with the first coat of paint in the family room, which is Chloe’s old bedroom. Although the reflected light makes the ceiling look as though it’s the same color as the walls, it’s actually much lighter and completely different. I’ve taken the next week and half off to work on the house, so look for more progress soon!
First coat of paint in family room
Yesterday I cut a couple of holes and fished some wire to get the room ready for our TV. The holes were a pain, because I didn’t have time to cut the holes before the drywall went on. This meant I had to cut through both the drywall and the underlying plaster, which is easy to do if you want dust everywhere and much more tedious if you don’t. My “least dust” method is to gradually score through each layer with a utility knife. After clearing the hole down to the wood lathe, I use a rotozip to slice out the lathe, which allows me to cut it without doing any damage to the remaining lathe and plaster.
The most challenging part of this project was just figuring out where to install the box behind the TV. This box, which is a split box to handle both high voltage and low voltage wiring, had to fit between the proverbial rock and hard place. The mounting bracket, the back of the TV and the stud locations all conspired against each other, so in the end I had to go with the best compromise and will have to just make it work in the end. I’ve run the 120V wire from the upper box down to the existing 120V outlet (on the right), and the orange low voltage box will eventually be fed coaxial and network cables from the crawlspace. Instead of running permanent low voltage wires up behind the TV, my plan is just to use the wall cavity as a chase for the wires. Technology changes so quickly that it’s difficult to imagine what kind of wires we may need down the road. Since I don’t want to touch this again, my solution is to just drop any wires I need through the upper hole and pull them out through one half of the bottom one. Nice and low tech.
High and low voltage boxes
Although these pictures are actually “in progress” pictures, they give a pretty good idea of what the drywall looks like now. We ended up getting a bid from a contractor we’ve used before for $800 vs. the ridiculous $2200 that the guy who did our upstairs wanted to charge us. $2200 to do one room and a hallway ceiling?? As you may remember from the last post on this room, we decided to cop out and have someone drywall over the heavily-cracked plaster in this room. We got a bid by a plasterer, who said it all had to come down and be replaced (for $3200!), so that was out of the question. And since we are really trying to accelerate progress on our house, we decided to spend the $800 and just get it done. If I were doing this myself, it’d take me longer to just acquire the drywall then it took these guys to get the whole project done. It’s such a great and unfamiliar feeling to see progress on a project when I come home from work! I really like how they installed the drywall. They got 4’6″ x 12′ sheets, so there is only a single horizontal seem on each wall, making for really smooth walls.
We don’t have good “before” pictures of these areas, but the hallway ceiling, in particular, was in horrible shape. There had been some exposed pipes run to the upstairs sink, and the corner where they had penetrated the ceiling was a big, gaping hole. A long-ago leak had turned much of the lathe and plaster black, and most of the ceiling was cracked. Going over the whole thing with a smooth sheet of drywall has made such a difference…
Drywalled family room
Hallway ceiling remade
As anyone who has ever remodeled a house knows, sometimes “easy” just means easier than the alternative. Easy also may mean that you are cutting corners or hiring someone else to do the work. In this case, we’re doing both!
We have long questioned how far we wanted to go on this back bedroom, which was formerly Chloe’s room and is now destined to become our family room. The plaster is cracked in quite a few places, although to some extent that’s been mitigated by the multiple layers of wallpaper. On our ambitious days, we’ve talked about stripping off the wallpaper and repairing the plaster. In our more lazy moments, we’ve contemplated doing nothing and just moving a couch our TV into the room. But, as we’ve gotten really tired of shuffling things around our house as projects move from one area to the next, we did commit to not “temporarily” start using this room, a phrase that for us usually equates to at least two years before we fix it up.
Our compromise in this case was to remove all the trim, so that we can have someone (not us!) come in and install 1/4″ drywall over all the walls. While the plaster purists out there will be appalled, we just don’t have the time or patience right now to strip off all the wallpaper and fix up the plaster. I spent about 3 hours removing all the trim today as the first phase of this project, and tomorrow I’m going to call to get a quote on the drywall work. The salvageable trim will go to Houck’s for stripping, and we will install new base trim. One of the previous renters had a dog that did an amazing amount of damage to the base trim, so it was shot. We will probably take the picture rail to the Rebuilding Center, because I’d rather go with crown, and there is no other picture rail in the entire house. Anyway, once get the walls “restored,” we’ll refinish our stripped trim and replace the trim that wasn’t salvageable. And between getting a quote and actually getting the drywall up, I am going to rough in some wiring for the TV. Our goal is to have this room finished by the time Stephanie starts teaching again in late September.
And just now Stephanie asked me while cutting some vegetables in the kitchen whether “the final nail was in the coffin?” on the patio door idea. That was something we had tossed around for awhile…”wouldn’t it be nice if we replaced the back window with a door out the the patio?” This idea has long been stretched between our desire to streamline our projects and our bad habit of coming up with bright ideas. Keep posted to see which philosophy wins…
OK, the truth is that it’s been a slow 6 months, because it’s been about that long since Ginger was born. We haven’t had time to attempt even the simplest of projects, hence the post of a pug with a candy cane. Cute, yes, but what does that have to do with remodeling? Nothing, so that’s why I had to put a catchy title on this only marginally more interesting post. I just don’t want to look back months from now and realize that we haven’t had a real entry since November.
Well, a couple of weeks ago we were trying to get our temporary guest room ready for some guests. And by “guest room,” I mean let’s pull a mattress out the the basement and thrown it on the floor in Chloe’s old, empty room. But it is a big step up from the basement, to which our cat, Luna, claims full ownership.
Anyway, back to the room. For as long as we’ve lived here, the back bedroom has been the coldest room in the house. It’s not just a little bit cooler – it has always been at least 10 degrees more frigid in the winter and has the added bonus of being the only room in the house that gets a blast of late afternoon sun in the summer. Our neighbor’s house is taller and spares the rest of ours from the sun’s rays, but this poor room sticks out just far enough to get superheated. The problem, of course, is that the room has no insulation. This is something that we plan to remedy, but it’s standing in line with so many other projects that are competing for our time and money.
I shouldn’t admit this on the internet, where anyone can read and laugh at my lack of insight, but it never occurred to me before a few weeks ago that we could at least do something to improve the situation right away. A side note…I often let projects grow very large in my head, because I hate wasting effort, and I want everything done the “right” way. I would rather let something sit and sit as-is until I can get to it, since I don’t want to spend any time doing a temporary job that I’ll later have to redo. That had been my MO for this room for the last 3 years, so I never really sat back and wondered if anything could be done in the meantime. So that brings me to the topic of our window trim. I had removed all of it back in 2005, so that we could get it dipped and stripped. Two weeks later I picked up the trim, so if you’re paying attention, that means that it’s been sitting around for 34 months, patiently waiting to be lovingly refinished and reinstalled. Many, many times, we’ve commented “damn it’s cold in here,” and Stephanie has even asked “do you think it’d be warmer if we put the trim back up.” I always responded with a dozen reasons why it couldn’t be done now, since I wasn’t even sure if we should leave the walls or tear down the old plaster (it’s in bad shape, with lots of layers of paper over it), and we still haven’t decided if we’re just painting over the paint or stripping everything else down and going with stain. And again, the insulation issue…would we do it from the inside, the outside or just have some blown in? Too many decisions to make to actually commit to reinstalling the trim. So, fast forward to 3 weeks ago, and I’m staring at the empty cavities around the window, and I finally wonder what’s stopping me from spraying in some low-expansion foam. During all that time, I never gave it any thought, but once I did, I realized that spraying it right away would not interfere with anything down the road. Duh!
Four cans of foam later, the difference in room temperature was astounding. While it’s still colder than the other rooms due to its distance from the furnace, it’s temperature must have gone up at least 5 or 6 degrees. I know that to be true, because we don’t have to wear jackets and hats to walk into the room anymore. And, of course, the lack of draftiness makes it feel much more comfortable. So, $26 and 5 minutes of time saved us a whole bunch of natural gas. My belief is that because the foam stopped the draft issue in the room, it was just as or even more important than the wall insulation. We still look forward to getting that done, but in the meantime we’ve stopped a major source of heat loss in our house. I’m still kicking myself for the nights that we’d run a space heater just to make it tolerable for Chloe on the colder nights. And to think of all the countless hours spent painstakingly insulating every little nook and cranny of the upstairs, while every little gust of wind could blow its way through our exterior trim. Well, at least it’s done now…
9/6/2008 edit: this room is now on its way to being repurposed as our family/guest room.
Here is a picture of one of Chloe’s windows, after we replaced them with dual-pane windows. You can also see the initial attempt at stripping the casing with our speedheater. The futility of doing all of this led to me to find Houck’s Stripping Center, where I would end up taking all of the door and window trim. If you have a lot to do, dipping & stripping is the way to go!
Semi-stripped trim around new window
Hello…I am writing this from the future, September 2008 to be exact. Things today look much different than they did back in your time. Since these pictures were taken, this room was used for over two years for Chloe’s bedroom and since served as a “dumping ground” for everything we didn’t know what to do with, as well as a temporary sleeping area for Ginger for a few months. We are now reclaiming this room and converting it into our family/guest room. See the changes that we’ve made.
Back window of back bedroom
Side window of back bedroom
