Upstairs

One of my favorite blogs is ikeahacker. It’s both entertaining and inspiring.  Sure, a few of the hacks are “whack,” but that’s half the fun!

Not being handy myself (Julio is power tool god in this house – I tend to avoid motorized tools at all costs. I’m actually quite accident prone – to the point that even electric can openers freak me out. “That’s right doctor. I severed my finger trying to open a can of soup.” But I digress.)  Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Not being handy myself, I especially enjoy “hackeas”: simple IKEA hacks you can do in 30 minutes or less. They are right up my alley!

In a previous post, we discussed our own hackea involving IKEA’s Deka curtain rod. Today I plan to wow you with my startling transformation of the Skimra lampshade. OK – maybe not so startling, but pretty cute, I think!

The Skimra lampshade before:

and my post-hack Skimra lampshade:

And its twin:

in Chloe and Ginger’s playroom:

Crafty, eh?

This is the part where you simultaneously realize how good things are going to look, feel like you are making progress and become completely aware of how long it’s going to take to finish. It’s a 50/50 mix of elation and dread. Today I sanded Ginger’s closet doors and got the first coat of stain on them. The fir looks simply beautiful. I don’t think anything can touch old growth fir in terms of warmth. While new doors, such as the ones we put in the kitchen, look great, the vertical grain doesn’t look as varied or interesting as the flat-sawn to me. And if you don’t remember, we scored these old cabinet doors for $40 at the Rebuilding Center. There aren’t many places where you can find 5′ doors, especially for a great price. Of course the real “price” comes when your back is sore from spending hours and hours bent over while sanding and staining

A couple of days ago I sanded Ginger’s door down to get it ready for stain. Like all the upstairs doors, we had taken it to get dipped & stripped (probably over a year ago!), but unfortunately, the work never ends there. I hadn’t really looked at them too closely after getting them back from the strippers, but while sanding them, I noticed that the strippers had been a little to aggressive with their scrapers. One side of the door had really rough-sawn panels, and apparently the texture wasn’t willing to let go of the paint, forcing the strippers to scrape and gouge the panels to get the paint off. Because these gouges cut pretty deep, I decided to sand all of the panels smooth in order to remove the grooves. On the plus side, we now have nice, smooth panels on both sides of the door, but the negative was the hours I had to spend to sand just one door. Even with a power sander, it took forever to sand enough off to make the gouges less visible. They didn’t come out perfectly, but the great thing about old doors with beautiful grain is that the remaining blemishes actually add more character to the door. At least that’s what I tell myself, so that I can stop sanding. Comparing it to the way it looked when we bought the house, it was worth all the time and expense.

A year ago today marked my the end of my fifth week of “house arrest” (otherwise known as bed rest.)

Chloe, the older of our two daughters, was born prematurely and spent roughly six weeks in the hospital. So last May, when baby number two threatened to make an appearance two months ahead of schedule, I was advised to stay off my feet for SIX LONG WEEKS.

Being confined to bed rest in your third trimester is excruciating. Not in terms of physical discomfort (although there is a bit of that.) Rather, it’s the psychological distress that’s unbearable. Not only are you steeped in worry over your unborn child, but you’re locked in this perverse battle of wanting – or perhaps more accurately, NEEDING – to give in to the all-consuming “nesting instinct,” yet you know that your baby’s health depends on ignoring that desire/need. Ultimately, you end up glued to the couch for a month and a half, obsessing about everything that isn’t getting done. Click to continue »

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. Click to continue »

Just posting a few pics to show what’s changed lately. I was supposed to be going back to work today, but I asked for another day off to try to wrap up some of the loose ends. Pic 1 is Chloe posing in Ginger’s room.  Pic 2 is an example of the pain of some of the compound cuts required for trim in this sloped upstairs. If everything were perfectly square, it’d be easy, but there seems to always be just enough variation to make it tricky.  Although, they are definitely easier than the cuts in Chloe’s room, because those had to be notched out to accommodate other sections of the ceiling that sloped into them.  Sometimes it feels more like sculpting than sawing. Pic 3 is of the new shelves I finally constructed to fill the built-in bookcase in the playroom.

Ginger’s room is coming along nicely. The most difficult part, not surprisingly, was the closet doors. We always find that any of the “adapted” house parts that we get from salvage yards (in this case, the Rebuilding Center) end up taking the lion’s share of the labor time. The story here was that we needed doors just a bit shorter than 5′ for the closets, and new fir doors were quoted out in the neighborhood of $800…each! We got these, which are actually some sort of old cabinet doors for $30 or $40. Total cost after having the lead paint stripped off was maybe $150. The downside is that I had to fabricate jambs for them, since they had none. This is the type of project for which I have little patience, skill or interest. But the cost difference is pretty compelling, and of course, we always like to be able to reuse something old in our house whenever possible. Today also saw the new windows go in, so by tomorrow all the trim in the room and closets should be finished as well. Also, I got another coat of mud on the stairwell, but it doesn’t look different enough to warrant a new picture.

OK, so this has nothing to do with crops, but they do seem like they must have come from aliens. On sunny mornings, this is the sight that greets us. The reflections from the playroom windows upstairs create these three Xs on our neighbor’s house. Chloe likes to run upstairs to open and close the windows, which makes the patterns move around. The only thing that stumps is is why do the windows create these Xs? The windows are just plain squares of glass, so there must be some kind of complex polarizing effect going on here. Can anyone explain this to us?

Today kicked off Upstairs, pt. 107. Actually, we have no idea how many days have been “lost” up there, but that’s intentional. We honestly don’t want to know!

Much of yesterday and today was spent on home improvement store runs and clearing out Ginger’s room. I took this week off of work, and our goal is to have her room 100% done and the rest of the upstairs as close to that as possible. There are still little bits of trim work to do in all the rooms, and it’s amazing how many hours can be thrown into finishing a “done” space. My plan is to try to do all the sawing outside, to avoid kicking a bunch of dust into Chloe’s room, but today’s weather didn’t really cooperate with that idea. So, I opted to start the less fun task of starting to patch and mud the plaster walls on either side of the stairs. Our goal is to merge the 15 or so various textures on those two walls into a semi-cohesive look, even if it’s not perfect. And then we’ll paint the walls and rip the carpet off the stairs, so that they can be refinished. We’ve pretty much decided to hire someone else to do it, in line with our “save our sanity” plan that we committed to in our last post. Hopefully by paying for help on a few things we’ll squelch our desire to just move away from all these projects. Even today when dropping $400+ at lumber yards for “a few little things” to finish Ginger’s room, I was dreaming of how nice it’d be to be able to spend that money on something else…or even not spend it at all… So, without further ado, here’s the super-exciting kickoff picture…

Earlier this year, we blogged repeatedly about about our upstairs remodel. Post after post detailed our frantic race to get Chloe’s new bedroom and playroom habitable prior to her little sister’s birth. Then Baby Ginger arrived and we got so distracted that we never mentioned our upstairs again. Pretty inconsiderate of us, huh?

For those of you who have been curious about how it all turned out, below are a few photos of the new playroom. The space isn’t quite finished yet – we have still have some trim work to complete, doors to stain, shelves to install, pictures to hang, etc. But the space is far enough along that Chloe has been able to enjoy it for a couple of months now.

We were able to stay under budget on this project since we pretty much moved everything from Chloe’s old room into this room. The only new additions are the curtains and tablecloth (my first sewing project ever), the big pink beanbag chair (thanks Grandma!) and the new white bookshelf (thanks IKEA!)

We’ll post photos of Chloe’s new bedroom and bathroom soon.