Long Time, No Blog

Hi all, please pardon the recent lack of posts.  This is due to a combination of factors: 1) DIY fatigue (which is also affecting my fellow DIY-er (and BFF) CWM, must be something in the water), 2) full-time jobs that aren't over when we leave work for the day, 3) money (we have none), and 4) a million other things.

But for the record, here a terrible photo of what we're up to in the third bedroom these days:

Please don't mind that I didn't bother to clean up for you.  Anyway, curtains have been hung and our IKEA "built-ins" have been purchased, assembled, and... promptly forgotten.  A few more shots below.

I call this one "IKEA Bestas With Ironing Board and Stray Soccer Goalie Glove;" it's one of my finest compositions, no?

In the next shot you can see a bit of how this is all going to come together in the end-- one of the gaps beetween the small bookcase (center) and the long bookcases (on either side) has been bridged with 1.5" trim.  We had some lying around, and I thought I'd experiment with it; I think the spacing is nice and we'll probably go with it:

See?  The experiment-trim-piece isn't tall enough, as you can see in the next shot:

Another angle:

Now we just have to figure out the best way to make them look built-in; I think it's going to involve cutting a notch from the back of the left-hand bookcase to accommodate the water pipe (you can see it in the corrner in the following photo):

... so that we can set the bookcases back against the wall.  There will be about 3" of trim on either side of the outside bookcases, which is good since they will have doors:

... across the bottoms and 3" trim will give the doors plenty of clearance to open.  Two of the doors will conceal pull-out frames for our hanging files and the rest will cover up out out-of-season clothes, etc.  There will be about 10" of open shelving for paperbacks and objéts above the drawers.

I'm really proud of how far we've come, but we just have SO MUCH left to do that I'm having a tough time getting motivated to start.  I can't believe I'm admitting this, but I think I'm going to hire someone to mud the drywall in the laundry room.  I just can't face the idea of doing it myself. 

Windows Trimmed

Too tired to think of a sexy post title.  Here are some photos of the windows post-trim and two coats of glossy white paint:

 

Funny how different the wall color looks in two photos taken of two different walls at the same time!

The door's all trimmed too.  No photos.  Bad blogger.  Sleeeeeep.

Feet on the Floor

So, we just did this:

Yes!  Flooring happened.  And it is so pretty, thanks for noticing.  Here are a few more shots:

 

Sorry all these photos are taken from weird angles, but we can't walk on our floor until tomorrow night (the glue needs 24 hours to cure before use).

And really, this took us four hours to do-- it couldn't have been easier.  If you're thinking about putting prefinished engineered hardwood anywhere in your house, you can absolutely do it yourself no matter how little experience you have.  Simple process: lay out a row, making sure the joints are attractively staggered and there's nice variation in your pieces; measure the last piece and cut it to fit with your handy circular saw; put a quick bead of glue around the bottom edge of each board's groove; tap each into place with tapping block; repeat to make next row.  Voila!

As I've mentioned before, this beauty is Bruce 3" Engineered Hickory in Wheat.  It cost $3.49/sq.ft. from Home Depot's website (which is the only place I could find it-- lots of places sell Bruce Oak in Wheat, but the color is really different-- super red-- and though it's much cheaper at $2.79/sq.ft., it's just not nearly as pretty).  I was thinking I'd also put it in the laundry room and they tell you to account for 10% waste, so I ordered 9 boxes; we used 4.5.  Since you can use the offcut from one row's end piece as the start to the next row, our total waste was nowhere near 10% (which would have been 14sq.ft); I'd say we were closer for 2 square feet of waste (all tiny offcuts).  I'm undecided about putting it in the laundry room; my biggest concern is that the washer might leak at some point and totally ruin my floors.  Does anyone have experience with one of those rubber pan-things that goes under a washing machine?

 

Anyway, we chose our pieces to match the color and length variation in the flooring in the rest of the house, so we tried to find and use as many pieces as possible with burns from the sawmill, knots, and other irregularities.  And I love it.  I absolutely can't wait to get in there and trim the big window.  Then we just need to buy, install, and build-in the IKEA Bestas to hide the wack-ness under the big window.  And deal with the baseboard situation.  And so the renovation continues.

Just because I can't resist:

Now:

All the Trimmings

A sunny day in Oregon means a few more progress photos!  Not for the first time and certainly not for the last, your before shot of this angle:

And this morning:

You're seeing a few things in this photo.  First, drywall!  Yay for drywall.  I hate drywall mud with a fiery passion, but damn if I don't love the results.  Also, you're admiring my beautiful new window.  It opens!  And it's a legal egress window!  And it's pretty.  Win-win-win.  

You're also seeing a test-run of our new flooring.  Isn't it stunning?  It wasn't the cheapest option (though at $3.49/sq.ft., it's quite a bit cheaper than lots of other engineered hardwood), but it really closely matches the flooring in the rest of the house.  Our end goal has always been to make this room feel like it belongs in our home, and I think this flooring (despite costing $1 more per square foot than I'd originally hoped to spend) really goes a long way.

You're probably also wondering what the hell is happening at the bottoms of the walls, though.  Good question.  Those are the cinder-block footings for our walls (oh, the joys of what you find when you rip out old paneling).  You can also see the water pipe (which we'll be disguising with some built-in storage) in the center of the photo.  Here's a closer look:

But hey, you're also seeing our now-covered outlets!  And how's this for ya:

That's right!  I trimmed out the small window, and I think it looks about a thousand times better than it did here:

Or even two days ago:

Next up: trimming the big window and laying the floor.   Fingers crossed we can get most of that done this weekend.  Slow and steady wins the race.

State Of The Bedroom Address

Well, it's been a solid two months since we started demo on the third bedroom project and nearly a month since my last post.  We've been very busy at work (I won't bore you with the details) and we're also experiencing the appallingly early beginning of the rainy season.  Our old sofa is now sitting squarely on the third bedroom's still-unfinished floor along with a chair I scored when my friend M moved cross-country (more on both of those later).  All of these things sort of combined to mean I have absolutely zero acceptable photos of the now-painted walls and ceiling in the bedroom.  Either we're too busy or it's too dark out or I'm too embarrassed by our lack of progress to photograph it.  But today I'm sucking it up, so get ready for the first (crappy) photos of the paint job.  And I have to say, I'm very proud of my drywall.  To badly paraphrase classic horror villain Jame Gumb, I'd hire me.  

First, let's go back to the beginning of this project just to remind ourselves of how it used to feel in this room.  I present this photo without comment:

Now, if you'll pardon the dark photos, a bit of before and after...

Northwest corner then:

Northwest corner now:

 
North wall then:

 North wall now:

 Ceiling then:

 Ceiling now:

 So in case you're wondering, yes, I totally painted it almost-white.  It's actually the same color as the living room (Behr's Irish Mist), and once we get some nice glossy white trim going on in there, it should look a bit more like the pale gray it actually is; here's an old shot of the wall color / trim color contrast in the entryway.  Hi y'all!

The only reason the ceiling color and wall color appear so identical in the above photos of the bedroom is that it's dark in there right now.  The Pacific Northwest is tough for interior photography, and/or I have no idea how to artificially light a space before photographing it. 

So what's left to do?  A lot.  

First, flooring.  We're hoping to tackle that soon, but we need to get the old sofa out of there.  I've found a buyer who wants to come get it next weekend.  

[So, yeah, side note: after a couple of days of sitting on the new couch, we noticed that the giant gap in the cushions magically closed up-- the manufacturer assured me it would happen, and it did-- and the down has relaxed quite a bit, which makes the thing really comfortable.  Photos next time I clean the living room, I promise.] 

Anyway, the flooring I found was both budget-friendly-ish and a really close match to the hardwood in the rest of the house; like, it's close enough that I'd put it in the kitchen right next to the original flooring.  We've got the underlayment and we're ready to get started as soon as possible, but when you live in a 1350 square-foot house, there just aren't a ton of places for your old sofa to hang out.

After flooring, trim.  And that's going to be quite the project.  To make a long story short (too late), there are some big molding challenges in here, and we're going to have to get creative.  One of the many things we need to address is the pipe that feeds our outside spigot-- it sticks up through the floor and exits the house under the big window.  I'm currently leaning towards using this IKEA Besta unit to cover up the problem; I'd need two of those and one of the matching half-width ones to span the wall under the window.  They're available with pretty Shaker-style drawers; so they'd make GREAT storage if we chose to go that route; we could also go drawer-less and use the shelf space since, as two academics sharing 1350 square feet, we are under constant threat of being buried beneath a pile of books.  We'll add trim to make them look built in (there'd be a three-inch space on either side we'd have to cover with trim, no big deal) and I think they'll look nice and intentional rather than DIYed-because-of-the-spigot.

That's all for now-- tonight we're off to hear an author talk about his memoir, "Another Bullshit Night in Suck City."  Living four blocks from a major university definitely has its perks.

Win Some, Lose Some: Completely Random Edition

Today's big win was round two of leveling the floor in the third bedroom.  Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Exhibit A:

Yes, that is a 4' level sitting on my floor.  Perfection.  After dinner last night I caulked up all the seams that were ruining the job, and then we popped over to Home Depot for yet another bag of concrete.  We mixed and poured the last two bags before bed.  Success!

And now for the first bad news of the day: my sofa arrived this morning.  At 8:30am.  Not between 3pm-7pm yesterday as promised.  And it's a nice sofa, except for one big fat freaking problem.  Wanna see?

HAHHAHAHAHAHAHH!  It's hilarious, right?  Or I've become slightly unhinged, I'm not sure which.  But either way, look what happens when someone sits on one of those freakishly tiny cushions:

Yeah, so.  Also, it is SO uncomfortable right now.  I feel like I'm sitting in a church pew, which is not a place I enjoy being.  I know the down-wrapped cushions will deflate over time, but as it stands, the seat is way too narrow and this thing is unspeakably, horribly fluffy.  Really, it looks kind of nice with the throw pillows on it-- the scale is great since it's a whole foot longer and about 4" taller than my previous sofa-- but I obviously cannot keep this thing.    

Tomorrow we initiate the return-- this company claims you'll get a full refund (less a 10% "restocking" fee) including free return shipping, so we'll see.  Good thing I haven't sold my old sofa on Craigslist yet-- I mean, I posted it yesterday and I've already had multiple offers because have you SEEN the other sofas available on Craigslist?  Damn, they're ugly. 

Lesson learned: just because buying furniture over the internet worked really well for your mom does not mean it will work well for you, and you're going to be crushed when you spend $1200 and wait three months to receive your sofa only to discover that it is just not going to work.

Anyway, this was probably some kind of sign or some shit, because we really don't have the money to buy a sofa right now.  When I die, just pry my old bones off the old brown sofa to which they will surely have fused.

Returning the sofa means I won't have to feel so bad about spending nearly $900 on flooring for the third bedroom and laundry room, at least.  AND our only car is officially dead at a shop across town right now AND we'll have to pay to get it fixed in order to trade it in so we can buy a new car, AND we spent about $250 leveling the floor AND we have tons of huge bills to pay following all of this summer's medical emergencies.  

So I guess what I'm getting at is that if you're reading this and you are a fabulously wealthy philanthropist and you just don't know what to do with all that money you have just lying around, please consider a small donation (about, say, $10K) to two poor professors who are just trying to get by.  Sigh.

On The Level

Though I still need to do another (final, I pray) coat of mud on all the drywall in the third bedroom, we decided to turn our attention elsewhere this weekend-- specifically downward, to the floor.  You see, the concrete slab upon which the bedroom is sitting is not exactly level.  It's not even kind of level, and that's going to be a problem for the engineered hardwood install we're planning to do in a couple of weeks.  

It's high on the north side of the room (nearest the door) and about 1.5" lower in the center of the south (window) wall.  The corners of the window wall are only about 3/4" lower than the high side.  So... that's a mess.  After doing some research on the best ways to address the issue, we invested in six (!!!) bags of self-leveling concrete at $30 (!!!!) per bag.  I read the reviews online and was pretty intimidated by the project, and it turned out to be every bit as challenging as I expected.  

When we pulled up the carpet and the pressboard tile beneath it, big chunks of the previous owner's attempt to level the floor came up too.  They'd just poured concrete on top of the un-level slab, but it wasn't really attached to the slab, just sort of floating on top.  So we knew we'd have to start over before putting in our flooring.

We started by chipping up the few shreds of old concrete that were actually bonded to the slab.  Then we primed the floor with the recommended product and waited for it to cure.  We rented a corded drill (pro tip: cordless drills aren't powerful enough to handle mixing concrete) and a mixing paddle for $18 and readied our supplies: 6.5 quarts of water per bag, pre-measured so it would be easy to mix the next bag while spreading the previous one. 

Then we started pouring.  And after we poured five of our six bags, we realized we needed to stop and correct course.  See, there are several places where the concrete slab and the concrete footings for the walls don't really meet.  I thought those were just little divots that would quickly fill in with wet concrete.  But they aren't.  They're actual holes.  Lots of the very expensive concrete just flowed right out of them.  And the more I tried to fix it, the bigger mess I made.  So here's what we're working with right now:

We've made a lot of progress towards making the floor level, and those ripples you see on the wall in the back are actually just splash marks-- it's not as bad as this photo makes it look.  But in one hour I'll be able to head into the bedroom (it needs four hours to cure before you walk on it) to caulk up the gaps on the far side of the room (there's one in each corner under the window) so we can pour the last bag tomorrow and hopefully be done with this step.

In other exciting news, my new sofa is supposed to arrive within the next hour and a half.  I'm skeptical.  I mean, it was technically supposed to arrive by the middle of August.  We'll see.

Hotel Door: 1; Me: 0

Pardon the recent lack of posts-- between the sloooooow process that is inexpertly mudding drywall and the awesome trip we took over the weekend, there's not much progress to speak of in the bedroom and laundry room.  I was all excited to get back home to finish up my mudding, but I unfortunately had a bit of a run-in with a hotel door in Lexington, Massachusetts, and now I'm stuck sitting with my foot up while my seven stitches heal.

We spent the weekend with some of our favorite people in two of our favorite places-- the Boston area and our former home of New Haven, Connecticut.  Two of our dear friends were married at the beautiful DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA and we were so excited to go.  I mean, SO excited.  Like, so excited that I absolutely knew something bad was going to happen.  You know when something is just too good to be true?  We were not only going to attend the gorgeous, intimate, personal wedding of two people we adore; but also spend time with some of our very favorite pals (also wedding guests and the owners of the best poodle ever) who just bought a house in my dream neighborhood in New-Haven-adjacent Hamden, CT.  We also planned to pop into NYC before our return flight from JFK; we were hoping to stroll around Central Park (where we got engaged) and see our niece and nephew (and their parents, of course!) in Harlem.

The first snafu occurred when we arrived at the airport in Portland on Friday and couldn't get the key out of our car's ignition.  We finally worried it enough to yank it out, but the ignition was stuck in the battery-on position, so we knew the battery would be dead by the time we got back.  And since the battery was on, the doors wouldn't lock.  But we were out of time to mess with it, so we sprinted for the shuttle and boarded our flight.  One hurdle jumped (or at least delayed).

But later that night, I was trying to pull open a stuck door at the hotel, and it finally opened with epic force and essentially cut off the tip of my toe.  A few hours later, I had stitches and antibiotics and strict instructions not to walk much.  Boo.

We did squeeze in a bit of New England tourism anyway, checking out the Buckman Tavern in Lexington (site of the first skirmish of the Revolutionary War) on Saturday and Walden Pond on Sunday, and of course on Saturday evening I ignored my doctor's instructions and did a bit of cautious dancing at the wedding.  Sue me.

Sunday afternoon we returned with our pals to their beautiful new house in Connecticut, where we spent the next two days reliving the early days of our relationship and eating everything in sight.  Maybe I walked a little bit more than I should have and I definitely ate more than any doctor would recommend, but I've been looking forward to a New Haven visit pretty much since the day we moved out of our apartment there.  I wasn't about to sit on the sofa and miss out, you know?  Though sitting on the sofa with this guy is very tempting:

He had to have a drastic haircut after an encounter with a skunk a few weeks ago, but he is still every inch the charmer.

Yesterday we realized we just shouldn't try to squeeze in a trip into the city-- between time constraints and the fact that, due to my constant walking, my stitched wound was still bleeding quite a bit-- so we made our way to JFK (why, why, why aren't there ever any good flights out of LaGuardia?  It's, like, a million times more convenient) and arrived in Portland at midnight.  After collecting our bags and getting our car jumped, we started the one-and-a-half-hour drive home.

And now I'm resting on the sofa, willfully ignoring the school work, housework, and drywall work that need to be done.  Renovator, heal thyself.

More later on a pair of very exciting and adorable new additions that came home with us!

[The Laundry Room] Wasn't Built In A Day

Let's take a quick look back at the late, not-so-great laundry room of yore:

Above is what it looked like from the third bedroom when we toured the house for the first time.  Dark, scary, and dirty with paneled walls and acoustical tile ceilings.  Let's see if I can dig up a few more photos:

Above: From the kitchen door after the washer and dryer were removed (the former tenant took them when he left).  That's the attic pull-down in the foreground and two weird closet-y things on the background, and that brick is the back of our chimney.

Above: again with the tenant's stuff during our home inspection.  This one was taken from the door leading outside to our breezeway.

I took the above shot after we got our new washer and dryer after a generous assist from my sister and brother-in-law-- without whom we would definitely not have been able to afford pretty white front-loaders-- and after I painted all the paneling white.  I think this was... late September of 2012?

 

 Again with the white paint job, this time the photo was taken from the kitchen door.

I'm not sure if you can tell in any of these photos, but the laundry room ceiling was beginning to sag.  The weight of the pull-down stairs was a bit much for it.  So we needed to shore it up a bit before we could proceed with any renovations, and we also wanted to frame in a space for the half bath we'd eventually like to put in.  The solution was to put a wall up immediately behind the pull-down stairs, thus turning all the space behind it into a potential half-bath (for now it's just a killer closet).  

In order to make room for the bath, we also needed to stack the washer-dryer, which meant removing the "cabinets" that were over them before.  The cabinets were, like all the others in this house, really just open-backed boxes with shelves sitting on ledger boards, and they were covered with old funky peeling shelf-paper.  And some rat poop on the top shelf (I'm guessing it fell down from between the attic floorboard--the acoustical tiles didn't extend into the cabinet, so the top shelf was pretty much open to the attic).  Suffice it to say I wasn't sad to see them go-- you generally don't want something that's been pooped on by rodents that close to your clean clothes.

We needed to move the junction box for the ceiling fixture from the low end of the ceiling (over the washer and dryer) to the high part so the washer and dryer would have enough clearance to stack, and our electrician took care of that for us when he was here addressing the situation in the third bedroom. 

Finally, the laundry machines have to sit about eight inches away from the wall because of the very enormous hookup for the dryer vent, and so the first thing you saw upon entering the laundry room from the kitchen was a whole mess of crap behind the dryer.  Some genius screwed a sheet of plywood against the wall (ostensibly to cover up some wires) and we really didn't have the know-how to address the situation.  Here's a dark photo to explain what I mean:

So in order to hide all of that and also make the laundry room look more like a hallway and less like a laundry room, we built a shallow wall.  We also needed to construct a soffit over the washer and dryer to accommodate some wiring at the ceiling.

While I still have a lot of taping and mudding to do in here, and we still need to hang the new ceiling fixture and put in flooring, and I still have to paint the shiplap behind the laundry machines, I'm just too happy about all the changes to wait til it's done.  I have to show you now.  Here's the view from the third bedroom as of this afternoon (again, please pardon the dark photos-- there are no lights in here yet!):

The future bathroom is behind that curtain-- it'll obviously have a door when it's ready to be a bathroom.

Cabinets are going to be installed to the right of the laundry machines so we'll have lots of storage.

From the kitchen door:

 From the third bedroom proper, through to the kitchen:

It's getting the same hickory engineered flooring as the bedroom.  

tl, dr: same view, July 2012 to September 2013:

,dWGFCKQ;OSDHjabsmvhvamdhkquhKjagdjyBAB.  That's me being excited!

Can't Stop The 'Rock

Sheetrock, that is.  We can't stop it.  Because if we do we will never finish it.

While my parents were here, we accomplished a massive amount of work.  Unfortunately, that means we have a lot of finishing to do.  First, we-- wait, let's back up for a minute and check out some befores and durings.

Here's a pretty good "before."  And by pretty good, I mean it shows how truly hideous the bedroom used to be.  Dark paneling, stained and sagging acoustical tile ceilings with a huge red thing hanging down (the red thing was the ceiling cap for the chimenea that used to be in this corner), awful dirty / ugly / smelly carpet, a brick corner, some pressboard tile (you can see it peeking out from beneath the carpet under the door), etc:

Here's the same view as of this morning.  Sorry I forgot to close the door, but I think you get the idea:

Here's another vista that really captures the frankly depressing quality the bedroom had before:

And same view this morning:

Something else very exciting happened in our house a couple of weeks ago and I completely spaced on posting about it, so here's a before of the weird (broken, funky, badly painted) fixed window we used to have:

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... a huge and beautiful legal egress window!

That one's in the living room (why don't I have any pictures of the bedroom one?) but it's identical to the one in the bedroom in every way.  Pretty.

Anyhow, along the way we ran into more than a few snags-- I'd say the sheetrock job in here was / is just about as complicated as sheetrocking can get.  Ray and Dad did all the work-- they had to cut around SIX outlets, a light switch, a cable, and two ceiling vents.  Add that to the fact that nothing in here is square (love my old house!) and that all the joists and studs had to be brought to the same level plane so the drywall could be attached, and you have a loooooooot of work to do.  So here's what we did:

1.  Demo.  See previous posts.  It was really gross.

 

2.  Electrical.  We had some outlets converted and some code violations addressed professionally.  Now we're safe and modern and up to code. 

3.  Insulation.  Fresh, clean insulation with no poop or rat holes in it!  Luxury, right?

Here's Dad standing in front of the newly insulated wall right after the first two sheets of drywall went up on the ceiling:

3.  Structure.  Adjusting levels / adding some support posts / getting ready for drywall install.

4.  Drywallin'.  It took days, but it was worth the time.  Good install means easy taping and mudding!  Sort of.

5.  Finishin'.  I'm presently on my second coat of mud all over the room (except the corners and the ceiling).  I'm nervous about the corners-- corners are tricky-- and I'm just dreading the ceiling because sanding drywall over your head is just plain awful.

So here's what we still have to do:

1.  Finish-coat of mud on the seams and screw-divots.
2.  Tape and mud ceiling and corners.
3.  Waterproof the concrete footings and address some complicated moulding issues (post coming soon!) and trim the door and windows and install baseboards. 
4.  Level the concrete subfloor, losing our self-leveling-concrete virginity in the process.
5.  Install underlayment and engineered hardwood flooring (Bruce Wheat Hickory from Home Depot is the winner, more on that to come). 
6.  Paint the room.
7.  Furnish it.
8.  Enjoy it.






Now if you'll excuse me, I need to call the company that's shipping my new sofa and arrange a delivery date.  So much excitement!