First Things First: Let’s Build a New Room

A big part of deciding to move was the need for better home office space. Our new house has a finished basement, but Matt is apparently needy and wanted a window and actual natural light if he’s going to be working from home all day. Can you imagine?

In the House Tour I shared before I showed some awkward spaces upstairs that we planned on reworking and that was the first big project we decided to tackle. It’s a little hard to visualize from photos (especially since the hall closet was difficult to photograph, so here’s how the spaces were laid out when we moved in:

Not to scale

We discussed a few different options that included changing around the closet in the bedroom and adding a closet to the new room. These ideas led to complications involving vents and ceiling lights that we didn’t really want to deal with. Ultimately we followed Occam’s Razor theory and went with simplest solution:

Not to scale

To contain the mess a little bit, we started by building the new wall in the existing bedroom. We had to remove a strip of carpet and a strip of ceiling in order to add 2×4’s along the top and bottom. Because this is a pretty small project in the world of drywalling, we didn’t bother renting a drywall lift. Matt still decided to tackle a bunch of this while I was working in the office so he temporarily attached a brace to support the top piece of drywall while he screwed it into place.

Once the drywall was up, we demoed the wall between the closet and alcove.

After that was just patching, patching, and more patching. Walls needed new drywall, the ceiling needed new drywall + popcorn texture, the carpet needed to be filled in*… this was possibly the longest part of the whole process.

Most of the house is painted Sherwin Williams: Repose Gray and they had some left in the basement so we used that for now. Matt’s more or less in charge of this room and the bigger goal was having a functional space vs. and impeccably styled space. Heck, right now he still pretty much only has his desk in there (which fits perfectly in the alcove).

It may not be the most stunning visual makeover, but spatially it has been an awesome improvement to the house!

* My goal is to replace all the carpet sometime this year so we just patched in some leftover carpet from the basement. If a full carpet replacement wasn’t in our plans for the near future we would have come up with a better flooring solution.

In Which I Decide to Destroy My Closet

The closet in our master bedroom is a shockingly good size for a 100+ year old house…which pretty much means it’s on OK size for one person.

The current configuration is decidedly meh–a single rod and some small shelves on each end. I added another hanging rod for a nice tiered effect, but the height isn’t ideal and it’s wobbly.

There is a light in the closet, which is a nice feature…except the light is simply a bulb with a really gross-looking clip on shade.

Meanwhile I’m sitting around waiting for the wallpaper for the micro-bath,* so it seemed like a good time for a closet makeover.

I found a stock closet organizer that had everything I was looking for–double rods on one side (for shirts and pants), single rod on the other (for dresses and longer skirts), and usable shelving in the center.  Plus, the 16″ option was wide enough to slide my hamper into the shelf area with some minor adjustments.  All we had to do was rip out the existing rod, shelving, and baseboards (so the organizer would fit flush against the wall).  Sounds pretty simple, right?

Hahaha!

Last Wednesday night I decided to start on some demo. I knew some repair would be needed, so I was hoping to get the demo done and joint compound any dings in the wall during the week so I’d be able to throw on a coat of paint over the weekend and hopefully even get the organizer up and functioning.

Although it sounded like a good plan, this is what happened once I started to pry the baseboards off:

*twitch*

It turns out that part of the problem was that the corners where not actually mitered and the butt joints that were used were pushing the back section of baseboard into place. Unlike me, Matt figured this out and by the end of the evening he had almost finished removing the boards…which went much more smoothly when you weren’t fighting against the butt joints.

Matt could have made more progress, but I made him stop because I actually wanted Wesley to go to bed at his normal time.

Thursday saw the removal of the upper shelves:

I just love the smell of demo in the morning… only not because 1) this was all happening in the evenings after work and 2) it really just smells like dust and sweat.

And on Friday, she rested. With a glass of wine.

My plans of joint-compounding any “dings” were looking incredible optimistic. This was going to a full-on patch job on the back wall. So on Saturday, I squared off the holes in the plaster (and knocked off any remaining plaster where my patches needed to fit) and filled in the large damaged areas with drywall. Then I taped and finally joint compounded. Sunday brought on a couple more rounds of sanding and joint compounding. Because this was in a closet, I didn’t go full-on perfectionist in my patch job.  That being said, I was probably more neurotic than most people would be while working on a closet.

The upper part of the walls also got a layer of joint compound to fill in nail holes and dings, repair corners, and even up the paint build up that accumulated around the edges of the shelves.

I feel like I could make millions on this as a abstract painting–White on Dirty White.

We’ll see how this week goes and if I’m feeling ridiculously productive I may be able to get the walls painted some evening…more likely I won’t do much else until next weekend.

 

*The sample I ordered FINALLY arrived yesterday.

Let the Demo Begin!

Now that Matt has moved into my study, we’re ready to start tackling the demo work on his study (well, he’s starting the demo, I’m still trying to tame all my crap in the other room).  The main reason we decided to work on this room next is because it is currently the grossest room in the house.  While we have plenty of rooms that still need a good ‘ole paint-and-style, this is the room that actually needs WORK.

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Whomp whomp.

Do you see that trim?  Matte-black, skinny trim in a 115+ year old house?  Are you kidding me?!  Half the reason I love old houses is for the big, chunky, amazing trim!  This makes me want to cry.

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And the ceiling… we had this same nasty acoustical tile treatment happening in our dining room.  I’m terrified of what we’re going to find underneath it… but it absolutely HAS to go.

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We’re also missing a closet door in here…. and it’s currently Matt’s closet.  We’re planning on getting a wardrobe for the master bedroom so he can keep is clothes in there, but I still want this closet to have an actual door.  Thank god it’s a standard size at least!

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What you can’t really tell from the pictures is that these walls we also all paneled at some point.  It’s actually fairly hard to tell in person too so I think the paneling may have gotten skim-coated too.  We’re a little on the fence about what to do about the paneling.  And by “we” I really mean me (Matt doesn’t want to deal with the walls at all).  It’s honestly pretty inoffensive in person so the tentative plan is to leave it alone unless it gets damaged as we rip the trim out.

This past week Matt already got started on the demo and took out all the ceiling tiles.

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Wow… that is nowhere near as bad as it could have been!  We’re a little concerned about some of the bigger cracks causing issues when we rip out the furring strips, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the moment!  Hopefully all it will need is some crack repair and a fresh skim coat…hopefully!

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We also found some more awesome electrical work!  And “awesome” I mean wtf?  It’s been a total crap-shoot if fixtures here have an electrical box and/or modern wiring or not and this one seems to be another not on both counts.  I want to get this light wired to a switch anyway and adding an electrical box isn’t a huge undertaking.  I am a little concerned that an electrician will want to redo the wiring as well.  It’s not a bad thing by any means, just a more expensive thing.

We spent Christmas in Wisconsin and then brought Matt’s mom and brother back with us.  If there’s one thing college boys are great for, it’s manual labor, so we put him to work with Matt.

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The furring strips were soon removed. And the ceiling stayed up!  I was a little concerned that the furring strips might be propping up some of the cracked areas, but so far so good!

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The offensive trim soon followed the ceiling into the garbage.

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The paneling took a bit of a beating in the process so Matt is finally coming around to just taking it all down and re-drywalling.  It may be a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the end.  I’m hoping the ceiling just needs a skim-coat.  I do NOT want to deal with the ceiling so I’m hoping for a budget-friendly project that can be hired out.

Most of the demo was done with pretty small pry-bars, about 1 foot long or so.  They’re better for getting into tight spots.  We’ve got a 3 footer too which is better if you need a lot of leverage.  As sissy as the tiny ones look though, they’re super useful to have around.

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Here’s to ending 2016 on a destructive note! If we had a fire pit we’d probably be ending it with a bonfire as well.  Hopefully we get it all put back together next year.

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Via Twitter, @HeatherGenua

Demo Day on the Shed

Goodbye sad little shed, we will not miss you. Especially since you were a beast to take down.

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It may not have looked like much, but this thing was surprisingly solid.  We started by detaching it from our fence so that wouldn’t get pulled down with it.  Then Matt went it and unscrewed everything he could and then took a crowbar to the roof.

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An hour later he had the roof off, but it was ungodly heavy.

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“Real men work in khakis.” –Matt  Also, this was just 2 weekends ago and we really did need jackets.  Yay for early May in Minnesota.  At least it wasn’t snowing….

Before we could do anything else we stripped off all the shingles–they weighed a ton!  Then we were able to wrestle the roof away from where it fell so Matt could work on breaking it down into manageable chunks.

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After lunch we tackled the walls.  Some of the plywood panels pried off relatively easier than others….

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After about 3 hours of work the whole thing was down.  The shed was really assembled in the most mind-boggling way–nails, screws, bolts, staples… they used every kind of fastener known to man.  Plus, every one of the 4×4’s supporting the corners was made up of multiple pieces sistered together.  3 were 2 separate pieces, and one was made up of 3 different pieces cobbled together.

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WTF?

It still doesn’t look like much, but I think it looks better.  It’s one of the sunnier parts of our backyard so may be a possible spot for our future vegetable garden.

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