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…

A few months back, Julio wrote that our daughters’ playroom was finished. Truthfully, it wasn’t quite finished - in fact, it still isn’t quite finished - but it’s usable, and that’s almost as good as finished, right?

Since that initial posting, we’ve let our older daughter Chloe have free reign of the playroom. The end result? TOTAL CHAOS! Toys, crayons, drawings, princess paraphernalia and Candy Land game pieces have littered nearly every surface. We’ve often found ourselves wondering why we spent so many months building a playroom when, clearly, Chloe would have been just as happy if we’d rented a dumpster, poured her belongings inside, and plunked her in with them. Continue Reading »

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…

Have you heard about the Home Depot $25,000 Holiday Gift Card Contest?

Do-it-yourselfers are currently posting videos on You Tube showcasing home improvement projects in dire need of attention. On December 17, a winning entry will be chosen, and Home Depot will award some lucky homeowner with a $25,000 Home Depot Gift Card.

What can we say? We couldn’t resist! So, if you haven’t already submitted an entry of your own, we’d love it if you would click on the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Mr6WrO-ADA

View count accounts for 20 percent of the points awarded to each submission, so we really need to get as many people as we can to watch our little video as soon as possible because the contest ends this weekend. If you’re a horror movie fan, you may even get a chuckle from our submission. We can pretty much guarantee that our entry is one of a kind.

Thanks in advance for watching!

We finally finished up the paint in the foyer.  Sometimes the easiest projects take the longest!

By the time we we purchased our bungalow in 2004, it had been abused as a rental house for well over a decade. As you might expect, none of the original lighting remained (with the exception of the brass fitters in the living and dining room box beams.) Sadly, everything else was long gone, but don’t feel too sorry for us - we definitely had fun choosing new lighting!

We selected copper-foiled Tiffany-style stained glass shades from Rejuvenation for our living room sconces, box beam fixtures and dining room chandelier.

In our kitchen, we used five Arts and Crafts style pendant fixtures from Progress Lighting. (To tie the fixtures together with the rest of the room, we installed matching carmel-swirled glass panels in the cabinets flanking our refrigerator.)

For our ground floor bathroom, we chose sconces and overhead lighting from Schoolhouse Electric

In our front entry hall, we used another stained glass fixture from Rejuvenation which incorporated all of our paint colors from the entry hall, living room and dining room, which really helps tie the ground floor together.

We got the floors refinished just before moving in. This is one of about three things that we did hire out. Floor refinishing is an art, and it’s not one that you want to practice on 1,000 square feet of your own wood floors.

The floors in this house are continuous through the entire downstairs, even into the closets. That means that you have to do all of it at once to keep it looking right, as there are no transitions between rooms.

We opted to have them refinished without a stain, because we thought that the lighter color would help offset the dark woodwork. In the end, we feel that we made the right choice.

It will be a full 21 months before these edges are touched up.  Writing a blog after the fact gives you a different perspective on each of your projects.  Sometimes you’re surprised by how quickly something seemed to move along (even if it felt slow at the time), and other times the low priority projects seem to live on forever.

We removed the chimney to create space for a bigger pantry closet and a chase for heat ducts to the upstairs.  This was possible to do, because our new furnace and tankless water heater duct directly out the side of the house, making the chimney obsolete.  Our friend James pitched in once again to help take us take it down.  He worked like crazy with the cold chisel and sledgehammer, while Julio carted the bricks out to the backyard.  They were able to get the whole thing down in only 2 hours.  The old mortar helped a lot, as there wasn’t much holding the bricks together.

Before shots of our foyer.  Another room with unstained woodwork (!)  Nothing too bad in here, but we have hopes one day of recreating the bench that was in front of the paneled wall on the left side of the picture.  Somebody removed it years ago.