Day Seventeen

We're pretty sure that the guys divided and conquered today because there was progress on multiple fronts.

The main level bathroom continues to move along. Today must have been Tile/Grout Day because the white grout went up on the walls, giving us a clean, unified look.

Continuing on the ceramic theme, the guys made huge strides in turning the laundry cellar into a bright, livable space (to the extent that anyone can be said to live in a laundry room). The floor now is a really neat Mexican/Spanish/Southwest tile that kicked up the red, chalky dust when cut.

Meanwhile back on the first floor...the widened archway into the studio has been framed with decorative wood that will match the entry into the kitchen and revive what had been there before the demolition.

Today's surprise (because there are always surprises) was learning that the studio, despite being the newest part of the house, has wallpaper under the painted walls. We have a little time before the guys turn to painting in earnest, but we'll have to decide whether to perpetuate the original sin of painting over the paper or if we want to pull it all down, scour the walls, and then paint. The latter is the "right" thing to do but also more time-consuming and labor-intensive. Too bad we can't make this interactive by asking people to vote.

Day Sixteen: We're firing on all cylinders now

The guys have been busy at it for a couple days and making progress on all sorts of fronts. With so many jobs to be done, this has turned into a blessing because it means not much time waiting for something to set or to dry. Here's the latest on all the projects underway.

The upstairs bathroom continues along. The grout is in the floor, so we're committed to this style now. It's a good thing we like it. One of the guys was particularly proud of his painstaking work carving the perfect shape for the soap dish out of one of the tiles. How he did that without cracking the tile we'll never know.

Lack of paint for the bathroom and vanity are holding up this job, so the guys have started demolition of the downstairs bathroom. They're leaving the toilet and sink down there (for obvious reasons) but have uncovered quite a bit.

First, here's what the bathrooms started as. Yes, that's the tub. Now we like nostalgia as much as the next person, but we're not quite into Smurf blue, Garfield orange, Big Bird yellow, or Kermit green.

And here's where things stand now:

• the waste pipe from the upstairs bath

• some water damage to wood behind the tub fixtures

• the wall that separates the bath from the furnace room

• the hole that used to house the exhaust fan

And we have the vanity all ready once this project gets further along.

Not satisfied with all this, the guys have moved onto a couple of smaller, but far messier and heavier jobs.

They tore up the linoleum floor in the laundry room and will be replacing it with a really neat tile we found at Home Depot. Trust us that the tile will far exceed the dingy cement floor that is pictured below. No one ever said a laundry room had to look like a dungeon cell.

This was the laundry room before the demolition:

Finally, the guys also began dismantling a nearly 30-year-old wood burning stove that was the primary heat source for both the previous owner and the one before him (a neighbor confirmed this and said the prior owner would stoke the stove before leaving for work in the morning, that seems like a fire hazard to us). With our new furnace there's no need for this creosote-spewing bad boy. Free to a new owner with a strong back or a half-dozen close friends.

Here's what it used to look like:

And here's what it and the access to the chimney look like now:

Day Twelve: Twas the night before....

With our contractors having two well-deserved days off, today was a day of consolidation and preparation for the coming weeks. If you like football analogies, today was 3 yards and a cloud of dust. If you're a fan of the theater, this was a matinee full of understudies. If you like science, this was like re-reading a dense chapter to see if you could understand more than the 10% you picked up on the first pass.


Between us we made some nice progress. Around the house were a series of small, odd jobs:

• Closing up several registers and returns in the basement. For some reason the in/out duct work in the basement have six total vents, which is way too many for a 10x15 room. A little sheet metal and aluminum tape and voila! we're down to one register and one return. 
• Cutting down more trees. These were small-ish evergreens that surrounded and obscured our deck. Given our concern that our tree-cutting could make us the black sheep of the neighborhood, we did this under the cover of dusk/dark. As Mr. T said after cutting down more than 100 trees back in the 80s, "I pity the fool!"
• Scouring the walls. The white, painted walls in the furnace and laundry rooms were in dire need of some bleaching to get rid of some mildew. A few buckets of clorox and water and a mop to apply them and now we're in the clear.

This was a pleasant surprise. The stairs into the kitchen and down to the basement are carpeted. We knew we wanted to replace it but didn't know what we'd find underneath. It was kinda like rubbing off that grey/silver stuff on a card to discover what you'd won! Turns out our 64-year-old house has nice, solid wood stairs and risers. They need some patching before we can paint them again, but that will be it. The only slow part was pulling out each of the dozens of staples with a pair of pliers.


Stairs with carpet:

Stairs with wood revealed:

Beyond the house was another big run to HD for a smattering of items that we'll need to finish the bathrooms and several other rooms. When you're on a first name basis with everyone in the plumbing and hardware sections, have you made it big or are you in need of some new hobbies?


Here's the latest on the bathroom. The bullnose trim is up. Grout will arrive on Monday. Then the hangup is waiting for the paint to arrive because the guys want to paint behind where the vanity and toilet will go. They're always thinking.

Day Ten

So much has happened since we pulled a Valley Girl and went shopping, shopping, shopping. The entryway to the studio has been reframed and widened. Now when we want to roll our baby grand around the house they'll be no stopping us!


Latest on the entry:

Much more impressive have been the improvements to the main floor bathroom. It's hardly recognizable from the grey-lavender-beige thing that it was. We've gone more retro with the white tile on the walls, white cast iron tub, and what will be wood trim and a wood cabinet. We're aiming for a farmhouse/mission motif on the main level and the bath will fit nicely into that. Look at me throwing around designing terms as if I know what I'm talking about. If you catch me saying "Bauhaus" then you'll know I've gone native.

With an eye always toward the next steps, we've ordered the cabinets for the kitchen and some paint to get us started. We're big fans of this place because of all the paints we've tried it really has no VOCs.

http://www.bioshieldpaint.com/

Our surprising and wonderful introduction to the neighborhood continued the other day. I was over at the house doing a few things and coordinating with the guys when I saw one of our neighbors come up the driveway with a gift wrapped in red cellophane. She and her family live kitty corner from us, she apologized for not stopping by earlier, and she presented me with a loaf of cranberry bread that she'd baked earlier that morning. Imagine, we've waved at each other a couple times in the past week but on our first meeting a neighbor is giving us a homemade present. I was dumbstruck. We've never lived in a place with such a strong sense of community as the one we've just bought into.

Day Seven

Our big activity was spending 3 hours at a tile store, and because we decided that several thousand square feet of options wasn't enough and spent 3 more hours at Home Depot. We hit all the big departments in HD:

-- lighting: new fixtures and bulbs for most of the house, switches to replace dimmers (who puts a ceiling fan on a dimmer?), enough switch plates for the whole house

-- bathrooms: new tub, 2 toilets and seats for them, shower hardware...for the record we selected the Kohler 5 foot cast iron tub, so all of those who had "iron" on your Bingo cards can give yourselves 2 points

-- flooring: tile for the laundry room

-- miscellaneous: fire extinguishers, a cornucopia of safety detectors

A small sampling of our purchases:

Not only was our tally the largest we've ever seen at HD, but the receipt was one of the longest imaginable. The saving grace of our contractors is that we could purchase items at HD that they could pick up later. Ten boxes of 16x16 tile is heavy, two toilets take up a lot of room, but nothing compares to the 300+ pound tub that wouldn't in a million years fit into or on top of our cars.

Tile for the main bathroom floor:

Today's excitement was having a plumber come by to look at a couple items. On first seeing our sump pump he exclaimed, "What the heck is this?" Needless to say, the jerry-rigged, Rube Goldberg contraption that allegedly was acting as a sump pump will be exiting the premises.

Day Five

Well yesterday was exciting. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and got deep into demolition mode. Our contractors took down the walls into the kitchen and studio. They're only half-way done and already we're enjoying the more open look and feel of the place. The kitchen is going to be much more inviting and we'll have much more space to get by a diving room table into the studio. 

Kitchen wall before:

Kitchen wall down:

Studio wall before:

Studio wall in progress:

They also began dismantling the upstairs bathroom. Who knew that an ugly bath would get uglier before it gets nicer.

Main bathroom before:

Main bathroom in progress:

Meanwhile I busied myself doing a variety of odd jobs--rewiring outlets, taking down a ton small things nailed or screwed to the doors, and beginning the destruction of some shelves in the laundry room. And I did it all with my trusty little red toolbox. Take that Black & Decker!