A Good Day's Work

I've gotta say, it's a FANTASTIC feeling when you work for about 6 hours and nearly (I'd say 90%) get a project done. The upstairs hallway had been carpeted with some beige carpet from our old gymnastics center, but after our previous renters had dripped something that stained the carpet to the point of no return - I'm inclined to think they carried something up the stairs that was leaking as there was little breadcrumbs all the way down the hallway.

Anyway, we rolled up the carpet and pad down to the original wood floor, but being so roughed up we decided to go ahead and put down wood laminate in the main hallway as we did in the N/S bathroom hallway. It's the same color as we did the dining room and kitchen areas downstairs, and as I said, almost got the whole thing done today (and had I had about 20more sqft of padding I would've been able to).

 

But as I said, it's a great feeling to actually get something completely done (well, almost)...

Kitchen Kitchen Kitchen

Okay, so I mentioned in the last post that one of the projects Dad and I recently did was the kitchen. The kitchen has always had issues, largely because when the house was built back in 1873, it didn't have a standard kitchen - given there was no indoor plumbing. And once the kitchen was built to accommodate indoor plumbing, it was really small. While it would be wonderful to tear down more walls and remodel the kitchen completely, we just don't have the time. However, what we do have are new'er' kitchen cabinets Dad bought online.

After finding some L-shaped cabinets someone was tearing out of their kitchen (kitchen remodeling must be the 'in' thing now), Dad thought there was a pretty good chance that they would work in our kitchen. After a debate on whether or not we really should redo the kitchen cabinets (I lost), Dad and I went to work on tearing out the old stuff and went to work on putting in the new stuff.

Once the old bottom cabinets were out, we decided to finish the flooring under the new cabinets since we had extra flooring. Once that was done, the work of bring in the new cabinets and leveling off the floor began.

The foundation work on the south side of the house has been a problem before, large in part to the addition of indoor plumbing. When the owners of the house first added on bathrooms, they were located where the breakfast nook is now, between the kitchen wing and the utility wing on the south side of the house. The problem was when they added them, they failed to pour any foundation beneath them, so the added weight pulled down the dining room and the kitchen. Growing up, I could literally put on my rollerblades and roll down north to south in the kitchen, it slanted that much.

Back in 07 when we tore out the bathrooms and added the breakfast nook - our attempt to help increase the kitchen size, we blocked up the foundation on the sound end of the house and got it about an inch within being completely level. That took care of most of the slant in the kitchen, however on the SE corner there was still a little slant, given there is only crawl space beneath that area and it's not really accessible to get leveling jacks in there. So instead, one cabinet by one cabinet we built up using 2x4s underneath, so when we positioned them on the east and south floors, the counter-tops would be level and would then 'trick' the eye and make the kitchen look, well, like it's supposed to look.

The L-shaped cabinets also helped add storage space to the kitchen, and while the additional space makes the kitchen appear smaller in size overall, the storage seems to balance everything out pretty well. While I still have sections of drywall to put up on the east wall and the marble tile counter-tops to install, overall, this is what the kitchen will now look like.

  

Last Bedroom - again

Okay, so it's been a while, but I've finally got good news on the last bedroom frontier - it's nearly done! And when I say nearly done, I mean that it's like 85-90% finished!

After a brief detour, given one weekend Dad decided that we needed to do something in the kitchen - and truthfully we've always known that the kitchen did need work, but were never sure just what to do in the kitchen - I finally managed to get back to working on the last bedroom upstairs, what used to be my Dad's old office.

If you recall my last post, where I talked about having to known down the closet wall in order to create a bigger closet, I finally finished the drywall and mudding that, in addition to hanging sheetrock on the ceiling and the north wall. Anymore, our $20 paint and texture gun works wonders and really is pretty easy to do, so Dad's more to the mind-set of 'if it's not an easy fix, let's just completely cover the (wall/ceiling/insert whatever have you) with sheetrock and spray it!'. So that's what we've been doing. It looks great on the ceilings, we don't even have to paint over it, and once it drys completely for a few days it's pretty easy to use a roller and paint if you need to even out the walls. So needless to say, the NE bedroom has a new ceiling, bigger closet, and newly textured north wall.

Apart from painting touch-ups on the trim and wall, in addition to putting up the shelves for the built-in bookshelf next to the closet and hanging up the remaining Closet-Maid closet stuff, the room is done. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do for carpet - the carpet that we had in there ended up ruined after paint and other stuff got dumped on it from our previous renters, but as far as I'm concerned that's a last minute fix.

So here are the pictures of the finished product (mostly) in addition to what I started out with once I began tearing out the walls of the old closet.

Last Bedroom

Okay, I know it's been a while since I've updated - my fault. Will try to do better next time.

So what has been going on? Well, work on the last bathroom begun with the destruction of the too small closet. We had about a foot of dead space between the room's door (which you can see in the pictures) and the wall for the closet, so we decided to basically pull out the closet wall a foot to eat up the dead space and have a much roomier closet.

So here are pictures of the project so far. It's slightly on hold until I figure out how I want to run electricity for a light, given that it's now a bigger closet it really should have one. The other issue is that on the left side of the pictures, you'll notice the new wall doesn't go all the way across. This is because that corner of the room is an old fireplace chimney. Since I didn't want to have to try and drill or nail into the bricks (given their age they'd probably crumble or fall apart if I tried), I'm planning on putting in a built in bookshelf there.

Another room finally done!

Well, it's been a while since I've updated but let me say it was worth the wait - because another room is finally done! The Green Room, so aptly named because it has green carpet and partly green walls, has had its face lift completed! (though I should say over the years it's gone by several names, like the music room, the library, informally dad's office, and as of lately, my bedroom before I completely the master suite). It's been a few months since I posted about the green room but the lower walls have had their old lathe and plaster sheetrocked over, the small cracks from the foundation settling have been patched in the walls (or really, just on the south wall), the ceiling has been texturized and you'll never know where it's been completely replaced from ancient water damage (at least I think it may have been water damage - it's possible it could've been from the foundation settling).

Given that the original decor (when we lived here in the 90s) was a wallpapered top, green painted bottom, and wallpaper boarder acting as a chair-rail (below I have a small snippet of what it looked like), when it came to redoing the room, I felt it necessary to do something similar to the old look, given that I can't really change the green carpet and the old look made the green room one of my favorite rooms in the house. AND knowing that my wallpapering skills really aren't that great - well, let's just face it, it's messy - really messy - I decided simply to paint the room while giving it a similar feel, so I opted for a simple forest green color for the lower half of the wall while painting the upper half a light almond which was the closest color I could get to the old wallpaper my mom used twenty years ago. The wood work, which had been painted brown (who knows why given the wood matches the rest of the first floor wood work), was repainted so it matched the chair-rail I put up to act as the border.

And now I can finally say it's done, apart from some minor touch-ups on paint and the gas fireplace hookup which Dad will do on some trip down here. I do wish it was finished, cause it'd be so nice to sit by the fireplace while it snows outside - it's such a nice picture, isn't it?

<-- (Old wallpaper and border)

Another bedroom done

Just thought I'd update with some pics of a recent project I've finished - the SE bedroom. However, if I'm truthful there is one more thing that needs to be done - putting the ceiling fan and light back up, but I let the boss do that cause he took it down. :)

You may wonder why I picked gray for the wall color, cause honestly it wouldn't be my first color choice for a bedroom - but in an effort to keep the rooms somewhat connected via decor, the walls now match the bathroom walls, thus these two rooms plus the north bedroom which has the same gray accents as a wall border (which you can see on the door below) all match! The gray also comes from the slight gray/silver color in the second upstairs bathroom tile, which also includes a pink hue in the tile, so another reason for the north bedroom to be painted a light pink (also, the pink carpet also made that decision for me!)

I've also begun tile work in the shower in the hallway (second) bathroom, now that I've found more tile (and it was even on sale! Happy Days!). However, I did come across a slight issue. Once I put up the backerboard, which ended up resting on the shower basin's top edge, I discovered that there wasn't anything allowing the first row of tile to rest on while it dried because the tile now overhangs the basin. So I had to come up with a clever way to keep the tile from slipping while the mortar dried. Enter some 2x4s, wood laminate floor scraps, and kitchen Tupperware :) The only sad thing is that I can only do one wall at a time, but once all three sides have a bottom row, the rest of the job should go pretty quick!

More pictures :)

It's finished! The dining room floor, apart from trim and quarter-round being returned to their spots, is finished! I don't think I have to say anything more about it - the picture pretty much says it all.

I also thought I'd showcase some of the decoration I've done to the kitchen, since I've told some of you but have yet to post pictures, so here you go! I've always had a thing about sunflowers in the kitchen, so that's the decor I decided for in the kitchen. Because I couldn't find a sunflower stencil, I found a picture of one online, printed it off on file paper, cut out all the little sections (not that much fun), and began painting! Apart from some trim edging under the cabinets and around the doors (which need to be trimmed at the bottom to open), the counter-tops are the only project which still needs to be finished.