Third Bedroom, We Barely Knew Ye (Thank God)

Before we totally rip the third bedroom and laundry room apart, I thought we should do a brief retrospective.  Let's take a quick look back at the way they were when we moved in, shall we?

View from kitchen door through laundry room, attic stairs extended, tool closet on the right, horrible filthy mismatched curtains on the big old window:

Laundry room and broken-down attic stairs in all their...glory?

Laundry room a quick coat of paint or four, new appliances, and a curtain over the weird closet-nook:

 

Blurry photo from the other direction:

Plans for this space:

1.  Move light fixture (i.e., bare bulb dangling from the ceiling) and replace with this.

2.  Build wall to frame out what will eventually become a half bath in the back of the space (the end of the room from whence the above photo was taken.

3.  Hang bathroom door.

4.  Convert tool closet so it opens from the bedroom rather than the laundry room; this will involve replacing the paneling on the back with paneling we remove from the 3rd bedroom.  Ditto the new wall we're building.

5.  Install engineered hardwood flooring in the laundry-room side.

6.  Use bathroom side as a storage closet until we have enough scratch for a half-bath.

7.  Demo cabinets above washer / dryer.

8.  Replace attic stairs and drywall the ceiling.

9.  Build new shelving for laundry supplies.

10.  Trim to match the rest of the house, paint.

11.  Replace the door (and hardware, naturally) between the kitchen and laundry rooms with a glass-paned French door.

Whew, that's a lot of stuff.  Anyone wanna take bets on how much of this we will ever get done?

Now onto the third bedroom:

What we're about to do:

1. Remove acoustical tile ceilings and furring strips, carpet, pressboard tile, paneling, and brick pad / mortar. 

2.  Get our electricians (an awesome husband-and-wife duo) out to cap off the junction box in the ceiling (the ceiling is too low for an overhead fixture), safely remove the old (unnecessary) baseboard heating and disconnect the wiring, move the outlets (which for some reason are located halfway up the walls) down to the baseboards where normal people put their electrical outlets, and replace the outlets with GFCIs.  We really like our electricians, so I don't feel weird about giving them all that money.  

3.  Drywall the walls and ceilings.

4.  Have the window replaced with one that opens, not only for comfort's sake, but because the we need an egress window in order to have a legal third bedroom.  Happening August 13 on our one-year homeowning anniversary!

5.  Trim windows, doors, and baseboards with moldings that match those in the rest of the house.

6.  Install floating engineered hardwood floors.

7.  Paint.

We're hoping to have a lot of the bedroom work done when my parents arrive in two weeks-- that way they can help us where we clearly need it most (the laundry space).  We'll update as we go, and I can't. freaking. wait. to show off some After photos.  Our first dumpster is arriving tomorrow morning, and the quest for flooring continues.  If you have any good karma to send our way, we'd appreciate it!

PS: You know you're busy when both you and your spouse forget your wedding anniversary until your mom calls to wish you a happy one.  Yep.  That just happened.

Santa Comes In August

I mean that literally-- Santa came to my house yesterday.  And he installed our new sliding screen doors in the dining room.  

No, really, he did.

Andy from Oregon Screen Crafts is a retired high-school shop teacher who makes awesome screen doors (and other screen things, of course).  He is also our local part-time Santa Claus, because we live in the kind of town where Santa also makes custom screen doors.  

Our quoted price was a very reasonable $337, including installation, for the pair of doors.  But one of the screens was slightly dinged in transit, so Andy offered to either a) make us a new door, or b) give us a $30 discount on the as-is door.  And when we inspected the screen and could baaaaaaaaaaaarely see the ding, we opted for the latter.  So really, Santa came and installed our screens and gave us a $30 discount.  I love Christmas!

 

In other news, the apple tree you see through my pretty new screens is out. of. control. 

3rd Bedroom Demolition Day One: Us, 1; Brick Floor, 0.

This happened yesterday:

Yes, I know that sandals from Anthropologie are not acceptable demolition footwear.  But at least I'm wearing both a dust mask AND safety glasses!

Anyway, after Ray and I took turns busting up the bricks and mortar while the other carted the refuse outside to the site of our soon-to-arrive dumpster, this is what we're working with (blurry photos taken with dusty iPhone as always):

This is my oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-how-easy-that-was demolition selfie:

I know you can't tell but I'm grinning insanely underneath that dust mask.

Mission: Looking Entirely Possible

So we got our asbestos results via email today, and I couldn't believe my eyes when we were given the all-clear to rip those ceiling tiles out with abandon.  I blinked, like, thirty-seven times in disbelief.  I may or may not have gotten a little teary.  This is pretty much the first bone our house has thrown us, and I'd like to think of it as our place's  First-Anniversary-Thanks-For-Renovatin'-Me gift to us.  

As we were sitting here on the sofa after dinner, reveling in the good no-asbestos news, we started to wonder what we were going to find inside the ceiling.  I'd watched this video and I was pretty terrified that the same fate was about to befall us.  So we decided we'd just do a little exploratory demo, just to see what we were up against.  Demolition masks and safety goggles firmly in place, we picked a random tile and yanked it down.  There was a brief rain of fossilized rat shit, and then... nothing.  Encouraged, we pulled down a few more tiles.  This is what we saw:

Yup!  The insulation is contained in weird cardboard baggie-things and appears to be in good shape!  Now, I know it's full of sixty-odd years or rodent refuse, and I also know that isn't good, but hey-- it's not going to fall down on us and leave as standing in a waist-deep mixture of dusty blown-in insulation and rat turds, so I'm counting this as a huge positive.  See the furring strips that are running vertically in this photo?  We'll be able to pull them down and gain nearly an inch of ceiling height, and the attic joists appear to be in really good shape so we should be able to screw the drywall right into them.  Like a boss.

After that success, I decided to grab ye olde hammer and chisel and see if I could possibly pry up the big brick pad where the bright red chimenea once sat.

Aside: I took a quick antiquing trip to Portland with my girls M, K, and L a couple of months ago, and we were admiring all the midcentury fabulousness in Sorel's, and that's where I saw the EXACT RED CHIMENEA (I mean literally, I think it was the actual same chimenea) we ripped out of our house... selling for $700.  Damn.  That would've paid for a lot of drywall.  I wish I'd known that stylish Sorel's-type people liked red chimeneas.  Oh well.

Anyway, I'd been nervous about this part because it kind of looked like were were going to have to rent a jackhammer to pry up all the mortar.  Silly me-- a hammer and chisel should take care of this, mortar and all, in no time flat.  Here's what I was able to pry up in two minutes:

Sorry, it's kind of dark in there as the only light comes from overhead.  

The pressboard tile (you're seeing it in the bottom left corner of the photo above) is no longer glued down, so that shouldn't be much of a challenge; the carpet you see on the bottom right is attached directly to the pressboard, so we should be able to make short work of it. 

Then, since we're completely insane, we decided to pry out just one piece of the wood paneling.  That put up a bit more of a fight since we didn't want to remove the "baseboards" (which are actually just stained-to-match 2x4's), but we were able to pry it far enough away from the wall to see that nothing terrifying is happening in there.  Nothing is happening in there at all.  There's some insulation in the top half (?) of the wall, but I was expecting mountains of rat shit / dead animal carcasses / live animals / chewed wiring / Pennywise the Clown / the little girl from The Ring / a black hole.  So I'm going to count that as another win.

So, new plan: Ray and I are going to handle the demo and then use my parents' expertise to get the place put back together again.  Maybe they can help us out in the laundry room, where there are some weird-looking structural things going on.  SO MANY IDEAS.   

 

VICTORY!

Let the demolition begin!

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

THINGS WE ARE PRESENTLY AWAITING:

1. Results

I finally sent off samples of the ceiling tile from my third bedroom and laundry room to an independent lab for asbestos testing, since we're planning on gutting the third bedroom when my parents arrive for their Second Annual Help Our Daughter With Her Crazy House trip in the third week of August.  My stomach is in knots.  If we have asbestos, we're screwed.  If we don't, we're going to rip the entire room apart and coax it from the ashes, phoenix-style, reborn as something beautiful.

Wait time to results: Five-ish business days.
Wait time to beautiful, useable, insulated third bedroom: Too damn long.

2.  Flooring

I''m now on my second try for engineered hardwood for the third-bedroom floor.  The first try was waaaaay too orange.  It looked like George Hamilton.  The next attempt, Bruce engineered hardwood in Wheat Oak, should be arriving shortly for inspection:

Fingers crossed for us-- if this one's not a close-ish match to our sixty-some-odd-year-old original flooring, we're back to the drawing board, and the drawing board is a really expensive place to be.  This stuff is $2.39/sq.ft., and if it doesn't work we're going to have to try the $4/sq.ft. option.  Please, no-- not that.  Anything but that. 

Wait time for flooring: I'm guessing 7-10 days.

3.  Windows

The huge picture windows in the living room and third bedroom can't be opened at present, so a sunny summer day turns our home into an oven.  After two weeks of roasting at 375°, turning occasionally, we called around and got some quotes.  The first guy came in at $4000 for both windows.  Right, dude.  The second guy was a significant improvement at $2K.  We're going with the third company at around $1500 after rebates from the Energy Trust of Oregon.  We'll be meeting our new windows on or around August 13.

Wait time for windows: Two weeks, give or take a day.

4.  Doors

In order for our new windows to make sense, we need to get screens for our sliding glass doors.  Cross-ventilation is a go.  Fortunately, our new window company hooked us up with an awesome retired shop teacher who makes beautiful sliding screen doors.  We're getting ours for $337 (that would be $500 cheaper than custom retractable screens, woot) soon.

Wait time for doors: Two-ish weeks.

5.  Sofa

I'm told my new beauty will arrive in mid-August.  I feel so guilty about buying the damned thing at this point that I'm having a tough time even being excited about it.  

Wait time for sofa: Two weeks?  Seriously?  There's a pattern here.

6.  Celebration

On August 13th, we'll be celebrating our one-year anniversary as official homeowners. So I guess it's fitting that so many exciting things are happening I've bought so much stuff that's due to arrive in mid-August.  I'm going to convince myself that all the money I'm wildly throwing at like a million things is okay because it's for our anniversary.  Right?  That's okay, right?  Debtor's prison isn't even a thing anymore.  I mean, this is totally fine.  I'm not panicking at all, so don't worry about me.

Refresh

My dining room chairs, purchased from Craigslist for $20 apiece last fall, have been many colors.  They were red when I bought them, and then I tested two different shades of gray before realizing that I needed to stop trying to make gray chairs happen.  Gray chairs are not going to happen, Gretchen!

So yesterday I picked up a few cans of Rustoleum in Heritage White.  After a quick sanding, my first chair got what I hoped would be a nice, flaw-hiding coat.  Except white spraypaint doesn't hide flaws:

 

Pardon the dizzying bird's-eye angle.

See all the splits in the wood there on the top rail?  Se how the reed-strapping is starting to unravel in spots?  I don't know how old these are or who manufactured them, but these babies are showing some mileage.  

I thought I'd do a little experiment, and before I sprayed the second chair, I sanded it thoroughly and used half a tube of wood filler on it.  I filled the unpaintable gaps around the rattan joints and forced putty into the splits and dings (the chairs are made of really soft wood).  It took, all told, a couple of hours.  I was kind of hoping it wouldn't make much of a difference so I wouldn't have to do it three more times.

Of course, it made a huge, visible-to-the-naked-eye difference.  The refurbished chair is (obviously) on the right:

Back detail, un-refurbished:

Back detail, refurbished:

Better.  Now please excuse me while I go buy more wood filler.

PS: Found a gorgeous cotton blanket in TJ Maxx that perfectly matches my nightstands.  I bought it:

I love you, TJ Maxx-- two x's and all.