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!

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.

Let There Be Light

You guys. YOU GUYS. I no longer have a desk lamp attached to my dining room ceiling. Now I have this baby instead:

 

For the moment I've reattached the giant ball on the bottom of it, but I'm not sure it's staying.  And as you can see, I need to paint the ceiling where the old fixture used to be.  And yes, that IS a garden hose and a spray bottle of moss killer in the corner of my dining room, thanks for noticin'!

View from kitchen:

Which I think is definitely an improvement over the view before the new chandelier:

As for the chandelier itself: do I love it? Meh. I don't know. But I think it will grow on me, and/or I'll do something to it that makes it look a little more special. I think part of the problem I'm having with it at present is that everything else in the dining room looks like shit. Let's talk about it.

PROBLEMS WITH THE DINING ROOM THAT WERE NOT SOLVED BY THE NEW CHANDELIER:

1. The chairs are still too light, and they're going to be that way until it gets warm enough to spraypaint them again. Also, I think I need to add a bit more reed-strapping to all the joints before I spray them again-- I'd like the joints to look a bit chunkier. I still really like the chairs, though. I wouldn't strictly MIND if two Chinese Chippendale armchairs appeared on craigslist tomorrow for around $50 or less each (I seem to be having a lot of luck with this approach, so I'm just putting it out there for the universe).

2. The walls are still bare. I can't seem to hang anything on them. Nothing looks right and it's making me crazy. I think I could solve this problem if I had room to put a skinny console table on the "long" wall, and then I could just pop a vase and a white ceramic animal onto it, center any number of big pieces of art over it, and call it a day-- but I really don't have enough space to do that. Poo.

3. I've never really liked the table-- it was very cheap (like, $125 with free shipping from amazon.com) and it happened to be the right size, and I'd gotten super tired of staring at a completely empty space so I bought it. I like the idea-- round but extendable with four legs instead of a pedestal-- but I really wanted something older and a little more Danish-looking. Add that to the list of Stuff I Want Craigslist To Provide For Me ASAP. Anyway, I don't know why I don't love it considering it ticks all the boxes on my checklist, but it's probably because I prefer old furniture to cheap amazon.com furniture. Think about it-- have you ever seen an amazon.com table in a House Beautiful feature? Nope, didn't think so.

4. I have no idea what to put on the table. Yes, an awesome vase with a gorgeous fresh flower arrangement would be perfect! Alas, I am too cheap to buy fresh flowers, and I'm also not a florist. I have no idea how to make flower arrangements.  Our nice neighbor dropped off the daffodils that are currently in my great-grandmother's silver pitcher, by the way.

5. Those $9 IKEA Vivan curtains would be awesome as sheers, but they're totally underwhelming on their own. Unfortunately I have like forty-seven crazy rugs and a kilim ottoman and a funk-ass brown couch and a beat-down yellow corduroy chair to contend with, and I don't know what kind of curtains could possibly complete the picture. Especially since I will someday get a new sofa, either ditch or reupholster the chair, and maybe swap out all these rugs for something slightly less insane.

6. Yeah, the dining room rug. Hatehatehatehatehate it in here. This looks like the home of a stodgy 80-year-old grandma. Ugh.

But really, I'm happy about the chandelier. I can't help but think we're going to have to do something to make it look a bit more contemporary, but for the moment I'm just glad it's not the weird spot-lighty thing. And I'm glad we hired an electrician, because as we'd feared, the wiring in this place is JACKED. UP. There were three transformers hidden inside that old fixture. Yes. Transformers. Not the Optimus Prime kind, which would have been cool, but the converting-volts-into-other-volts kind, which are decidedly uncool.

--------------------------------------------------

PART II. [Refill wine before proceeding]

You know what is genuinely awesome in a completely unqualified way? My new bathroom sconces:

Ooh, weird distorted view of my kelly-green sweater and blue plastic shower surround (ugh) in the backplate! 

And a wider view (crap iPhone photo):

 

Better pictures to come after I paint the wall where the old sconces were, and when there's some natural light-- obvious problem here is that I can't turn on the bathroom lights, because then I'd be taking a picture of the only light source in the room and you wouldn't see the sconces, only the light.  

Anyhow, remember these babies (please enjoy this seven-month-old photo of the bathroom in its completely unrenovated state, which is the only photo I could find in which the bathroom lights weren't turned on, rendering them impossible to see)?

Ugh, I can't BELIEVE the bathroom used to look like that.  

Those dudes not only hideous, but they also contained the only electrical outlets in the entire bathroom. Yes, that's right-- there was an outlet built into the base of each monstrously ugly "sconce" (scare quotes because these things were actually designed to hang horizontally OVER the mirror, not vertically on either side of it).

Our electrician (who we really liked and who charged us a VERY reasonable fee for rewiring our bathroom, adding a circuit to our breaker, fixing the dead switch in the guest room, and helping us hang and swag the chandelier) gave us a nice new GFCI outlet that is independent of the switch that controls the lights, so now we can plug in a nightlight and we won't have to turn on the lights when we get up to pee in the night. Yay! (TMI?)

I picked these sconces for a whole bunch of reasons, the first being that they have very narrow backplates so they'd fit on either side of the mirror without requiring that we move the junction boxes up or out. Most sconces have a 5" diameter backplate, and we needed one no wider than 4.5". These fit the bill.

Second, they're period-appropriate-- the ruffled, half-frosted glass shades are so 40's. Also, they're chrome, which is weirdly hard to find-- everything seems to be brushed nickel these days. Not in MY bathroom, uh-uh.

Third, they were dirt-cheap at $12 per. Yup.

Tristram Chand-y*

Today I dragged Ray to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store and, fifteen minutes later and $17.50 lighter, we left with this baby:

Yes, it's currently hanging in the unkempt covered courtyard outside our kitchen window, where it's awaiting a few thin coats of spraypaint, but its eventual home will be the dining room.  It's going to replace this freak-ass monstrosity:

So, as I've mentioned before, I've been having a lot of trouble deciding what to do about that thing, because the dining room is kind of a tricky space.  It's small, it's basically part of the living room, and it's really visible from every room in the house except the master bedroom and the third bedroom.  I've been looking for something fun and quirky, not too dressy but definitely dining-room-ish, and cheap.  And I kept not finding anything like that.

So I scrapped it all and bought the brass thing.  It was marked $35, but when we arrived at the register with it we found out it was half off.  Score.  I definitely feel okay about experimenting on an $18 light fixture, so let the games begin!

First I removed the giant ball that was at the bottom of it.  Maybe I'll put it back on, but at the moment it's looking like I probably won't.  Then I unscrewed the three curly twirly side pieces than ran vertically down the stem, because I'm not really a twirly-chandelier girl:

 

That's better, no?  Next we took off the shades (we'll probably use them or replace them or maybe cover them with fabric or stencil them or something):

It's lines are okay, and it's a good size for the small dining room-- it's kind of overscaled, but since it's pretty clean it looks like the right size for the table (we took turns holding it up to the ceiling so we could make sure we liked it).

Next I decided to do some experimenting.  I took the ceiling plate off and sprayed it navy blue, then I carried it inside (on a scrap of drywall like a DIY boss) so I could check out the navy color with the rest of the dining room stuff:

 

It's dark and matte, which I think I like.  But after it dried (in the meantime I painted the hallway ceiling, but more on that later) I taped off half of it and sprayed the other half with a glossy gray:

Please don't mind my crappy tape job-- I didn't want to stick the tape down too firmly since I'd just sprayed it a couple of hours before.

At this point we have some options, and I'd love your help with the decision-making (which it definitely not my strong suit).  Here's a photo for reference with a quick glossary so you'll understand what the hell I'm talking about as I explain the options:

 

See those little knobs about halfway down the arms of the chandelier?  We're going call them knobs.  There are also knob-things where each arm meets the stem (see 'em?) and where the candleholder-y things meet the arms.  Without further ado, your options are:

OPTION A: NAUTICAL NAVY

This would involve painting the whole thing matte navy except the aforementioned knobs, which we'd tape off so they would still be brass.  At the moment I'm leaning towards this, as there's a lot of brass in the rest of the house (the original doorknobs, etc), and I kind of like the idea of some exposed metal to give the whole thing a slightly less spraypainted-cheap-chandelier feel.  We would possibly also leave the candleholder portions brass-- so basically we'd be painting the stem and the arms navy.  This version would probably mean keeping the ivory shades or finding more drum-shaped ones in a plain ivory.  Maybe we'd paint a narrow navy or metallic-gold border around the top and bottom of each shade? 

OPTION B: SOLID NAVY

Matte navy all the way.  This would likely involve covering or replacing the shades with something more fun, though I have to be careful with "fun" patterns since I'm already working with two crazy rugs, a kilim ottoman, and ikat-striped chair pads.

OPTION C: DARK GRAY

Solid satin-finish dark gray.  I don't think I'd like the exposed brass knobs with the gray as much as I would with navy, so I think if I go gray it'll be all gray.  Problems with this plan: I'd like to spray the chairs dark gray, and I don't want to be all matchy-matchy chairs and chandelier.  Also, I'm a little worried that it might look like we bought a chandelier that was made of imitation metal or something-- the gray paint might look like faux pewter.  Or it might look totally awesome.  I have no idea, and I can't really tell based upon the half-gray ceiling medallion.  On the other hand, the thing cost $17.50 so if it looks irredeemably terrible I can just sell it for $15 on craigslist and pretty much recoup my entire investment.  Shades or no shades?  I don't know.

OPTION D: BRASS
This option involves not worrying so much about it and just hanging it up as-is.  I'll be honest-- I don't find this option terribly appealing.  But several people whose design opinions I trust (mostly my mom-- she's always right about this stuff) have suggested that I leave it brass because that's probably what was originally here.  A plain ol' brass chandelier is appropriate for a 40's house, doesn't feel too dressy or too casual, won't compete with the rest of the decor, etc etc etc. 

And now for something completely different!**  While I waited for the navy spraypaint on the chandelier's ceiling medallion to dry so I could spray half of it gray, I painted the filthy hallway ceiling with a product that I'd say is probably the second-greatest invention of the modern era (number one being the internet, naturally): ceiling paint that goes on pink and dries white.  That stuff is amazing.  It's not totally dry yet so there are still some disconcerting pink blotches in there, but it is already SO MUCH BETTER than the icky sticky yellowy mess that was up there before.  Slow and steady wins the race!

Please email or comment to weigh in on the chandelier situation.  Can't live with the weird office fixture for for much longer before I die of spontaneous interior-design-related combustion.

*Laurence Sterne joke!
**Monty Python joke!