Back In The Bathroom Again

So we've got big plans for the summer.  Our families will be coming to visit us, which means we'll have a few extra sets of hands and lots of free expertise for the projects we've been too scared to tackle by ourselves.  The first visit will be from Ray's parents and his awesome Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim from Michigan.

Now, in addition to being all-around cool people who we totally adore, Uncle Pat and Aunt Kim also happen to be bad-ass house-flipping machines.  They're a reno-minded family-- for example, two of their four kids have bought houses and DIY reno'ed them beautifully while still in their early 20's.  And I mean really renovated-- like, new floors, new kitchens, new bathrooms, basements, decks, plumbing, electrical, you name it.  And Pat and Kim have agreed to help us finish the bathroom while they're here, for which we are insanely, hair-tearingly grateful.

What's left to do in there?  A lot.

1.  Rip out the Blueberry Beast:

 

Yes, it's time to bid a not-so-fond farewell to the blue-plastic faux marble shower surround!  

To be honest I'm a little worried about this part, because-- as with everything else in this house-- the person(s) who installed it didn't do us any favors. It's sort of loose from the wall. And the corners of the plastic surround are rounded, while the corners of the walls are square.  Which means you can stick your finger down between the wall and the Blueberry Beast.  And if you'll recall, when we moved in there was this soffit-y thing:

(I'd already knocked a hole in it when I took this photo at 10pm one Wednesday night-- when, due to my dad's speakerphone encouragement, I decided to see what was in there).  See how the paint is all bubbly along the bottom of it?  That's because the soffit trapped water vapor over the tub after every shower, and the ceiling vent in the middle of the room was powerless to draw out the moisture.  So eventually it beaded up on the ceiling and ran down the walls behind the poorly-installed Blueberry Beast.  The soffit's gone now:

Please pardon the shower curtain hanging so low-- this photo was taken minutes after I finished painting my freshly skim-coated walls.

But we know there's going to be unholy mold behind that thing since water ran freely down behind the Beast for probably thirty years before we yanked out the soffit.  Like, call-the-mold-remediators-and-pay-them-$5000 mold.  Rebuild-the-wall-because-the-studs-are-rotten mold.  Tape-off-the-bathroom-from-the-rest-of-the-house-while-you-work-in-there mold.  Hairy, sticky, smelly, awful, deadly mold.

But, as our pal Franklin D. once told us, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.  And mold, but whatever.  Off comes the Blueberry Beast!  After we do whatever we have to do with the moldy walls back there, Pat and Kim will help us install backer-board, apply subway tile, and grout it.  Yay!

2.  Fix the subfloor.

[All the rest of this is dependent on how long it takes to deal with the Blueberry Beast, because we're not trying to make Ray's family spend their entire trip to the West Coast slaving away in our bathroom]

As we discovered when we tried to repair the leaking toilet a few months ago, there is actually no subfloor under it.  Yes, that's right-- the toilet is basically hovering on top of the sewer pipe, gingerly balanced on some Marmoleum that's just floating above our floor joists.  Which means that the asshole who installed the Marmoleum a few years ago (we know who you are, just sayin') KNEW there was no subfloor under the toilet and he just chose to go ahead and put the flooring down over a gaping void.  Special place in Hell, yada yada, yada.  Anyway, we're going to fix that, either with Ray's family or with mine (we'll get to our plans for their visit in a soon-to-come post).  That'll mean ripping up the fugly Marmoleum (not going to lie, I'm pretty excited about that part) and then we'll...

3. Tile the floor.

I think we're going with this:

Plain, pretty 2" white hex tiles from here (please note the hilarious caption under the photo on the site) with nice pale-gray grout.  2" hex tile is such a classic look, no?  And since we know this most likely won't be our "forever" home, we're trying to go with something that will please the maximum amount of buyers AND be pretty and cost-effective.  However, because I have champagne taste despite my hex-tile budget, I've been daydreaming about this:

I know I can't do it, even though I've found it for as little as $5.90/sq.ft.-- I need to keep this house as neutral as possible-- but I loooooove it and I can't promise it won't wind up as my kitchen backsplash.  It comes in a bunch of colors.  I need it.

And then we will just refinish the tub (right, like anything is that easy) and be DONE with the bathroom.  D.O.N.E.  Done-zo.  Yay!

A Million Little Projects

Long time, no post-- we haven't done much of substance around here lately.  We've arrived-- much sooner than I thought-- at the point where all the things that need to be done are a) infinitesimally tiny and more or less invisible to the naked eye, or b) absolutely massive and impossible to do by ourselves.  Even still, in the couple of weeks since I posted, I've...

1.  acquired a new dining room rug which is totally the wrong color but I might keep it anyway
2.  painted one dining room chair a darker gray to see if I like it (I don't)
3.  finished the RASTs with hardware I painted to match (photos of all this in a minute)
4.  repainted the master bedroom ceiling
5.  lost out on a midcentury Baker console table I really liked via an eBay auction
6.  worked some more on the bathroom ceiling
7.  re-patched the master bedroom walls where the spackle I'd used had shrunk
8.  killed / vacuumed up about 367,721,003 flies
9.  finished half the rat-proofing around the foundation (more on that in a bit), and
10. weeded the front yard.

Obviously most of that stuff is tiny and inconsequential-- like, I know I shouldn't really list "killing flies" as a home-improvement project.  But when your house has dead rats (hey, at least we know the poison's working, and this time we couldn't smell it/them) and there are literally tens of huge furry flesh flies on the lamp in your laundry room, killing them feels like both a job and an accomplishment.  And losing an eBay auction is also not a project, but it did take up quite a bit of my time.  The table was gorgeous, but I plan to console myself by... well, we'll get to that in another post.

First things first: the dining room rug.  I have no distance photos, and between all these projects the dining room is way too messy to bother photographing now (from my current vantage point on the sofa, I can see two bags of grass seed, a tube of wood filler, tin snips, my shop vac, a gallon of ceiling paint, my yardwork shoes, two screwdrivers, etc. etc. in the dining room), so this is the best I can do:

Yeah, we'll talk about the pizza-box-with-primed-hardware-on-it in a minute.  For now, the rug.  It's an indoor/outdoor, which I thought was a really good idea for the Pacific Northwest, but the real reason I bought it was its shape: a 6'7" square was exactly what I needed.  I didn't find too many options in the 7' square arena, and this one promised to be a very inexpensive (like, less than $100) gray and ivory quatrefoil-patterned godsend.  It is, in fact, the right size, and I really like it.  It's one of those Safavieh ones and it looks and feels like a nice flatwoven rug.  However, as you may be able to tell from the photo, it's not really gray.  It's more of a French blue.  And that is pretty much the ONLY color not found in my living-room rug.  Ugh.

I've decided to keep it while casually looking for another 7' square to replace it-- when I find something, this one will go outside to our covered patio, where it will someday be joined by two comfy armchairs and some kind of cocktail table.  

Anyway, the French blue leads us to our next conundrum: what to do with the dining room chairs?  As you can see in the above photo, the light gray I chose when I first bought them looks like primer, but the Home Depot didn't have any other appealing gray options.  So the last time I was in Salem I stopped by Lowe's (yes, the closest Lowe's is forty-five minutes away) to check out their spraypaint selection and I came home with something that promised to be a little darker.  After patiently waiting months for the weather to warm up, I finally took one chair outside and sprayed it on Friday.  Results:

You're right, it is not gray.  It is teal.  This is obviously a no-go. 

At the moment I'm thinking I sand the hell out of them, beef up their joints a bit, and go semi-gloss white.  I'm kind of feeling the Hollywood Regency thing these days, and if the question is WWJAD (What Would Jonathan Adler Do?) then the answer is always glossy white.  Thoughts?

Let's go back to that first photo for a minute:

Yes, you are absolutely looking at a pizza box with a bunch of hardware on it-- I needed something into which to screw the hardware for my RASTs while I painted it.  This pizza box happened to be handy, which is strange because we order pizza about once in NEVER out here.  

Tangent: the pizza in Oregon is absolute shit.  Shit, shit, shit.  Yes, I was a bit spoiled by New Haven (before you even say anything, Modern is the best apizza, and I miss it ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME, like sometimes I have dreams where I'm eating it), but even if I hadn't lived in the land of pizza perfection, I still wouldn't like the super doughy, yeasty, extra-sweet-saucy, limp-dishraggy disaster that passes for pizza in the Pacific Northwest. 

Anyway, we ordered pizza last week because we are stupidly optimistic people and we always think that just this one time the pizza's going to be okay.  Spoiler alert: it never is.  But anyway I had the pizza box so I screwed in my faux-bamboo hardware:

A short handle for the top and bottom drawers of each RAST and a long handle for the less-adorned middle drawers.  These came from coolknobsandpulls.com, which had the least-expensive faux-bamboo pulls, and since I planned to paint them it didn't matter that the 5in. ones were nickel and the 7in. ones were bronze.

I primed 'em with some metal-bonding spray primer:

Painted 'em with an artist's brush:

Drilled holes in my drawerfronts, and screwed 'em in:

  

Oof, horrible photo quality.  Let's try that again:

 

Even worse.  Well, I tried.  

Anyhow, I think the RASTS look pretty boss now.  No guarantees that I won't decide to do a little something with the awkward space under the bottom drawer, but that'll have to wait til I get a jigsaw.  And my birthday is coming up in just four short months (Dad)!

[Feint]

Check it:

Yeah, I couldn't live with the chartreuse.  So I decided to find a different color in the rug.  Here's a different shot for color-comparison purposes:  

 

See it there in the fourth band in from the outside?  

And yes, I did attach the fretwork this weekend!  Thanks for noticing.  I really like it.  Here's what it looked like sans fretwork:

So much better with the fretwork, no?  Here's a little breakdown of the my RASTS went from here:

Through here:

 

To here:

My fretwork came from myoverlays.com (highly recommend, by the way) in the mail on Monday, so I painted it chartreuse.  I was still planning on going ahead with the whole chartreuse thing, but over the course of the week it became clear to me that it was the wrong direction.   I mean, I want to be a chartreuse kind of person, but I guess I'm just not.  So I picked out the new color (this one's Black Pepper by Benjamin Moore).  I filled the pre-drilled hardware holes on the drawer fronts with wood filler, sanded them down, and painted everything.  I waited for all the components to dry thoroughly, and this afternoon I attached the fretwork with some gel superglue (SO MUCH BETTER than the regular runny kind, seriously).

On Friday I popped by T.J. Maxx because you just never know, right?  And I picked up two down-filled zippered ikat pillows for $16 each-- I figured I couldn't make 'em too much cheaper than that, so it seemed like a good deal.  Then today while I was in my office on campus this morning (yes, I was totally working in my office on a Sunday morning) I grabbed a pair of lamps I've been keeping in there-- I think matching nightstands necessitate matching lamps, and I only have one useable outlet in my office so I had no need of a matching pair there.  I bought these at Target last year, and I really like them.  I used some of our excess hardcover books (we have a lot of those floating around) to make the lamps a bit taller.

As for the RASTS, I'm done save for the hardware.  In keeping with the Hollywood Regency theme I was going for, I've ordered some faux-bamboo drawer handles which I'll paint to match the dresser.  Lots of texture for the win!

Let's go back to August 2012 for a minute:

Oof.  Now May 2013:

Much better, non?

Nowhere-Near-The-Curb Appeal

This weekend our full-on assault on the unruly backyard continued.  We bought a weed-whacker with a brush-cutter attachment and Ray attacked some of the crazy overgrowth at the back of our property.  I'm not really one for yard work (I have an irrational, if not entirely unfounded, fear of bees), so my contribution to our backyard beautification project was to paint the exterior doors on the back of our house.

When we first toured the house, I remember thinking that the back of it was completely hideous, and I've been meaning to dress it up for some time.  The French doors in the dining room were pale primer-gray inside and out-- they're security doors, and since they were close enough to white (I guess), nobody ever bothered to paint them.  I painted the insides with our trim paint about a week after we closed, and then I completely spaced on the outsides until this weekend.  There was also an unpainted primer-gray security door on our little shed under the covered patio, and I attacked it first.

Here's a before of the shed door:

Since you can't really tell how filthy it was in that photo, I'll pride a close-up of the doorknob:

Gross.  So anyway, this weekend it got a coat of primer and two coats of our front-door color (a dark, purpley brown-- I would've loved to go full-on plum, which I think would look awesome with our olive-green house, but I wasn't brave enough when I bought the door paint way back in August.  Maybe someday).  I somehow managed to forget to take an after photo, but you'll get a wide shot shortly.  You'll just have to wait.  Are you holding your breath?

Anyway, here's a shot of the French doors pre-paint job:

And post-paint:

Do we need to clean up our yardwork shoes?  And that old paper bag full of fireplace ashes?  Absolutely.  And the awful plastic light fixtures (you can see the left-hand one at the top left of the photo) need to be replaced with something that isn't patently hideous.  Still, I'll call this an improvement.

Wide shot:

See those weird ladder-y things on the left of the doors?  They were attached to the wall in the linen closet before I made it over.  Not sure what do do with them, but I do know I need to get them off the porch.  And the foam cooler and navy bin covered with painter's tape need to move to the shed-- they're full of grilling supplies.  But we're making progress.

Plans for the back porch obviously include the aforementioned cleanups and new light fixtures, and I'd like to get two big topiaries for either side of the door.  Eventually we'll get a weatherproof table and chairs.  I'm not sure what else to do with the deck, as it's a pretty awkward space, but I'll be on the lookout for ideas.

Here's a shot of the most of the back of the house, including the covered patio:

See?  It's just not cute.  Painting the doors made it look much more finished, but as you can see, we need to do some serious landscaping around the porch and along the foundation.  Some bushes, maybe?  Azaleas?  Perhaps a huge rhododendron between the kitchen windows?  And please try not to mind the cardboard on the patio-- I always use a big piece of old cardboard (I think that one's a RAST box) as the command center while painting, and I'd just finished all the doors.  The cardboard is awesome because it stops drips, gives you a worry-free place to set your paint cans / lids / church keys / brushes / rollers / roller trays / paint-y paper towels / paint stirrer, and allows for nice quick cleanup.  If you remember to clean it up, that is.

Speaking of landscaping, here's a quick shot of a poodle in his natural habitat: freshly bushwhacked weeds at the back of our property.

Yeah, we have a lot of work left to do.  But we've done a lot, and we're making progress one marathon weed-whacker session at a time.