Category Archives: House

Changes at the house

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A lot has happened since I last wrote on this blog. Like enough to fill up an entire novel. Which, maybe one day it will (one can only hope). But for now I just want to tell you about some of the changes going on here at the house in Burlington.

For those of you who are confused about why I’m back in Burlington – What happened to the farm in Virginia? – I direct you to a totally vague, not-helpful-at-explaining-anything-blog-post about leaving the farm. Funny, it has a parallel blog title to this one. Shows how creative I get with blog titles, eh?

But back to what I was saying. There have been some changes. And our house is all the better for it, at least in my opinion.

Let’s turn to the evidence. Project #1:

Which now looks like this:

Okay, sure, it’s not a big deal. The back door to the porch is now red when it used to be green. But it is a big deal when I realize it’s once again a way of making the house “ours” instead of “the last guy’s”. We have always disliked the green on all the doors and love the Barn Red color from our local solid waste management agency – made from local recycled paint! If you recall, we made the same change to the front door not long before leaving the house this winter. It’s amazing what a change a little paint can do to transform a space – or a doorway!

I got to learn that lesson – about the transformational qualities of paint – more than once as I did quite a few little painting projects while in Burlington over the past few weeks. Here’s another:

To this:

Don’t the stairs just look cleaner and newer? It’s basically the same color (blue or grey, depending on who you ask) but now it’s harder to notice all the imperfections, all the warped, worn, and aged edges. It’s nothing that will stop and “wow” you, but maybe that’s a good thing when it comes to stairs from your garage into your living room?

And then there’s the mailbox, which also got a new makeover. From this tired old fella:

To this younger, cleaner mailbox. Doesn’t it make you want to send us some mail?

By the way, see the shockingly gold (and ugly!) color of the door handle in the photo above? File that under the “one day I’ll be painted black too” category.

There have been other changes, bigger, more dramatic changes (in life as well as at the house), but those will have to wait until another blog post, when I have faster internet connection and more photos at my fingertips. For now I hope you forgive me for the quick updates as I jump back into the diy/renovation blogging world. Thanks for joining me on the journey!

 

15 Minutes of Fame / Being on TV

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Want to be on a reality TV show?  If you said no, I can relate. I didn’t either, at first. Then again I also understand if you said yes. I mean, everyone’s gotta have 15 minutes of fame, right?

Here’s our story.

When we bought our house in Vermont a year and a half ago we knew we had to do some renovating. The master bedroom/office/bathroom was especially troublesome to us, with nasty smelly carpeting in the office and bathroom, poor layout between rooms, and a dark bedroom awaiting some natural light.

Mark, ever the brainstormer, came up with an idea to change the floorplan by opening up the wall between the bedroom and office, put in 15-lite French doors to let in natural light, and put down oak flooring. Sounds great, in theory, but how would we make it happen? This renovation would be a bigger undertaking than either of us had ever done, and we really had no idea where to start.

Well, I did have one idea. Maybe we could get ourselves onto one of those HGTV shows where experts come in and do the renovation for you? I mean, anything’s possible, right? I checked out the Be On HGTV website and found that we were ineligible for most of the shows due to geographic location (many shows are filmed in CA or NYC. Nothing specific to Burlington, Vermont, sadly), or type of show (we weren’t property virgins or house hunters or the like). But we were eligible for one show on the DIY Network (a “sister network” of HGTV) called Renovation Realities. There was one problem, though. It wasn’t one of those tell-us-what-you-like-and-we’ll-do-it-for-you kinds of shows. No, this was a totally different kind of show. As their website says:

Renovation Realities is about the realities and drama of home renovation. We want to see the issues, the arguments and the real effects of taking on a project with a spouse, friend or neighbor. There is no host and no help: YOU are the star of this 30-minute show!

If you have a great home renovation project (which must include demolition) and want to share it with millions of people across the United States, you might be an excellent candidate. Your personality means everything on this show, so don’t worry if you’re not the greatest do-it-yourselfer.

We could practically guarantee we’d be eligible based on the above. Renovation project including demolition? Check. Issues, arguments, and drama while working on this project? Undoubtedly. But we would have to do the entire renovation ourselves? Millions of viewers? Scary stuff. Nonetheless, we were intrigued enough to want to apply and learn more.

Thank goodness they said you don’t need to be the best do-it-yourselfer, because we had little faith in our abilities in this regard. We would have to rely on our personalities, not our skills, to get them to like us. So we put together this application video.

(If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, jump ahead to minute 8:30 to see some funny outtakes.)

We thought the 10-minute video was cute and funny, while also being practical: answering all of their questions about ourselves and the renovation project. That’s a great combo if you ask me: cute, funny, and practical. In fact, I think that might be my new motto.

Sometime after sending in the application we were accepted for the show (!) and I posted this teaser telling you we would be on TV but not giving any more details. Truthfully, we had no idea what we were getting into and we were hesitant to share the news until we had a chance to go through the filming and get to see the show ourselves.

There’s a lot I could say about the week of filming – the nervousness before meeting the film crew, the wardrobe conundrums, the stress of living in a construction zone, the pressure to make progress every day. But looking back on it, the experience wasn’t as bad as either of us expected.

Here’s a few shots during filming:

In the end, five days of footage turned into a 20 minute show with a bit of repetition before/after commercial breaks. I’m guessing it’s only about 15 minutes of actual footage in the show. Turns out the phrase 15 minutes of fame is entirely accurate! Here’s the description of us on the show’s website, followed by a link to the entire show.

Mark Weber and his girlfriend, Melissa, are setting out to renovate their master bedroom in order to make it more of a master suite. They start off determined to get their renovation done, but from an electrical scare to battling with drywall, the couple ends up struggling to finish in time.

Clicking anywhere on the image above should open the Renovation Realities episode in the same window. You’ll have to click the “back” button to get back here. You’ll also probably have to sit through a commercial or two – sorry!

A few things are worth pointing out:

  • The “electrical scare” that was made into a big deal on the show, was really not a concern at all because, ultimately, we didn’t need to tear out that section of the wall.
  • Yes, we did get to the point of a communication breakdown at the end of the week of filming (as was captured well in the show). We felt we had worked so hard that week yet had very little to show for it. We weren’t even done with the demolition. We were exhausted. We had a construction zone for a living space. It would be months before we had things back to normal. It’s really no surprise that we weren’t communicating well.
  • There are a few hilarious Mark lines in there. “You’re such a hippie” is one of my favorites. “Tuck me in” is another. See if you can catch him saying it when he’s in bed with the nightvision camera on one night.

We thought the show would make us look like total fools. We thought the slightly staged shots and voiceovers they asked us to do would sound corney or be a mockery, but really, it wasn’t that bad. As far as “reality tv” shows go, this one did a decent job of staying true to reality: It was a stressful experience. We weren’t really having a great time. We didn’t really know what we were doing. All of that comes across during the show.

What you don’t see during the show is the weeks of work we put into the renovation after the crew left, so that we could complete the project for our own sanity AND our pocketbook (there was a deadline for “after” photos in order for us to receive the second half of our compensation for being on the show). We are proud of the fact that we actually did 90% of the work ourselves, relying on friends to help us when we needed a hand. But I won’t bore you with all those details. You can read all about the renovation process in previous posts here, here, and here.

The “before” and “after” photos are included at the end of the show, and in previous blog posts, but I’ll throw a few in here as well. The transformation still amazes us when we look back at it.

We went from this:

To this:

From this:

To this:

You might wonder why I’m even writing about all this, since we finished the renovation in the fall and we’re now over 500 miles away in the other V state. Well, for one thing, I thought it was time to post something in the namesake of this blog, which has been severely lacking in the renovations department recently. I also figured enough time had passed that we were over any (vain) issues about how the show turned out, and we were legally allowed to share behind-the-scenes photos and link to the show on the DIY website.

So there you have it. We survived our 15 minutes of fame. Will we become big reality tv stars? Ummm if it hasn’t happened already it’s doubtful. The show has already been airing on the DIY Network since October. Plus, we aren’t quite as cute and funny in the stressful reality show as we are on the laid-back application video or in person!

Want to be on an HGTV/DIY Network show? Check out all the shows they are currently casting, here.

Bathroom Update: Day 486

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Wow, the days are just flying by. It’s now been 486 days since we first ripped out gross, nasty carpeting in our bathroom.

And as you know we’ve been renovating the master bath ever since.

About a week ago the bathroom looked like this from the same vantage point.

Astute observers may notice three things. 1) The ipe flooring is in! 2) The back wall is finally blue. 3) Umm, where’d the toilet go?

Well, to answer the last question first: we were toilet-less in that bathroom for a few days while we finished installing and sealing the flooring around it. Thankfully our roommates didn’t mind us using their bathroom for a few days. We couldn’t even shower in ours since – yet again – our shower doubled as a storage unit.

A few days later Mark and his friend installed the new (to us) low-flow toilet that we picked up at ReBuild. The new one is a huge improvement over our old toilet which had a bad habit of running all the time. (Insert corny running humor here.) Plus, it only cost us less than $50 as compared to $100+ for a brand new one. (I’ll post pics of the new toilet soon. Spoiler alert: it looks like a toilet.)

Back to your other observations. The back wall is finally blue!

If you recall, for a long time the back wall was a pinkish hue – or “sand dune” if you ask the paint company.

The sand dune really didn’t “go” with the blue paint (called “babbling brook”) in any way. Really, I should have known they wouldn’t go together based on the names alone. Since when do you find sand dunes next to a babbling brook? Here I was, thinking we would be all fancy and modern with an accent wall and instead I was committing a faux paux with my mixed up ecology!

Plus, not only did we not like the sand dune color, it was also was a matte finish, not semigloss like the blue, so it wasn’t quite appropriate to have in a moist bathroom environment. Speaking of not liking our color choices, we don’t particularly love the blue color, but at least it’s all consistent now.

Oh well, our modern design attempt failed and now we’ve got a bathroom that screams “it’s a boy”.

Sometimes the back wall sort of looks like an accent wall anyway, depending on how the light hits it. You’ll see what I mean in the the last photo below. It’s an optical illusion (brought on by the camera’s flash) because those two walls really are the same color!

But the big news of course is that we finished flooring installation! You’ve already heard about many of our flooring struggles along the way, but I wanted to mention some more of the fun things we had to do to complete this project. When I say “fun” really I mean “extremely tedious and frustrating.”  And when I say “we” really I mean “Mark”. If it were up to me I would have just continued the flooring as we had been doing. Line up the rows of wood, cut them to size, and nail down. Floors are squeaky? Eh, no one will notice. There are gaps in the wood? It’s okay, it will look aged. A little bit uneven? No worries, it’s just a bathroom.

But that’s just me. Mark wanted to do it right. Apparently doing diy home improvement projects brings out Mark’s perfectionist side. Who knew? Plus, he’s really been the brains behind the whole flooring operation and I’ve been mostly the assistant and flooring organizer. We are well suited for our respective roles.

Well organized piles of flooring

One task that Mark tackled along the way was replacing a bit of plywood subfloor near the shower that had been weak from years of use. He reinforced the supports underneath with additional wooden braces and cut a custom piece of new plywood to fit the space (in the photo below this new piece of plywood looks different because it actually has a rubber coating to make it water resistant).

Once we got the flooring to that section, he also decided to add shims to reinforce (and raise) the floor further as it was still a little uneven.

We figure there are a few ‘hot spots’ in the bathroom, like in front of the sink and toilet, and this one, where everyone will step when getting in and out of the shower. Even if nothing else is perfect in the bathroom, we’d like to at least get these spots right!

For uneven floors, we’ve been told there’s some kind of floor leveling product you can buy – I’m envisioning a thick goo that spreads itself out and acts like a glue. We opted for the less expensive route of using shims that we already own and they seem to have worked out great thus far (fingers crossed).

To encourage you to “ooh” and “ahh” a little more, here is another shot of the floor before the toilet was re-installed.

In this photo, the final row of flooring had yet to go in. Boy did those last few rows give us trouble! In fact, many rows were time-consuming stress-inducing and expletive-causing. Especially the last few. Because of the uneven floor issue, and our ongoing problem with mismatched flooring widths, and our interest in precision around the toilet, it took us over 3 hours to complete the final few rows of flooring.

Yes, you read that right. In what has become our motto during diy projects over the past year: Everything takes longer than expected.

But it doesn’t matter how long it took us. It’s finally done! And it’s beautiful! We love it. And it actually makes the baby-boy-blue walls more bearable.

Next steps. Here’s what remains to be done in the bathroom that will undoubtedly take us at least twice as long as we expect:

-Stain trim pieces including window and mirror trim
-Cut new trim pieces to size if we can’t find the old trim
-Attach trim
-Re-attach bathroom door
-Build thresholds
-Stain and install thresholds
-Build shelves for closet (remember the closet?)
-Finish mudding wall that was patched
-Prime and paint patched wall
-Reapply tung oil to entire floor

Will be back with more updates soon!

Bathroom Renovation: The Sink

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In the previous Bathroom Renovation saga I explained that we had encountered a few issues along the way. Issues 1, 2 and 3 were: inconsistency with tung oil application (a non-issue, really), gaps where the widths of the flooring don’t match up (a much bigger issue), and the bathroom closet (a new diy challenge).

(Don't) Mind The Gap(s)

I’ll explain how we resolve those issues once we figure it out ourselves, but for now it’s time for you to meet issues 4 through 101: the sink.

Our sink is a fairly basic (blah) pedestal sink. I mean, it’s okay. It’s served this bathroom well over the years and we’d be happy enough if we could just reuse it as part of our new master bath since we can’t afford our fantasy custom-built vanity. But no. This is a story of encountering problems at every turn. No matter how hard we tried to re-incorporate it into our new bathroom – and we tried very, very hard – the universe had other plans. Let’s re-live the sink journey of the past few weeks, shall we?


The first issue: the copper anchors that had once held the sink to the wall were now sticking out of the wall in an inconvenient location. We would re-use them to re-anchor the sink to the wall if we could, but with the new flooring underneath, the sink would be raised up too high to use them. In fact, these bolts would definitely be in the way.

So we borrowed a friend’s sawzall and cut them off in a jiffy.

Problem solved. That was easy! Hoping this was a sign the rest of the renovation would go smoothly, we kept going with the flooring in the sink area.

Having completed enough flooring past where the pedestal would sit (with only a few flooring-related bumps along the way), we switched our attention back to re-installing the sink. After all, it’d be nice to get the sink out of the bathtub.

Great, now we can't use the shower either! What part of this bathroom is functional?

We both agreed: if we’re going to reuse the pedestal, we have to at least upgrade the cheapo plastic faucet handles. In case you don’t remember what they looked like:

Really, we couldn’t have reused the faucet even if we wanted to (which, just in case it wasn’t clear, we definitely didn’t want to), because whoever installed this sink hacked together their own non-standard supply lines that we cannot easily duplicate.

Not your standard supply line

And thus began the hunt for a faucet… Oh, and say hello to the next problem.

In what has become the norm in this house, we learned that this sink is not your standard bathroom sink. In addition to the weird non-supply-lines, this sink had an 8″ wide faucet opening, with separate hot and cold faucet handles, instead of a more common 4″ or 6″ wide spread that are all attached. Now, this isn’t actually a bad thing; I think sinks with separate handles actually look classier and are probably more appropriate for a master bath. But that’s also why the faucets cost so much more. The cheapest faucet for our sink is about $90 at Lowe’s, and jumps up pretty quickly to well over $250 for really nice ones. Compare that to about $25 for a low-end faucet for a more common sink, and decent ones in the $60-90 range and you see why we were concerned about our wallets.

For example, some of the options we had included the following faucets from Lowe’s, all of which cost over $150.

Sure, they’re nice faucets, but nearly $200!? Are you kidding me?

Despite these outrageous prices we were still convinced the old sink with a new faucet would be the best route for us, so we bought the lowest-priced decent-looking faucet at Lowe’s and went home to install it. Which brings us to the next issue. (What is this, #47 or so by now?) We couldn’t get the old faucet handles entirely off the sink. As in, we either didn’t have the right tools or the right brain power to figure out how to take it apart. (I think it was a little of both.) We put out a few calls to people with more tools and brains than us and a few days later Mark’s friend came over to help us move forward on this project.

Okay, I realize this story is getting a little long. Stand up and take a stretch break for a second… Ahh, that was nice.  Okay, ready for more?

After Mark and his friend (our hired help) spent about an hour taking apart the faucet – yes, it really did take that long – we discovered yet another issue! The old square faucet had left a square stain on the sink itself that would be visible with the smaller round faucet that we purchased. See the stain around the center hole?

As is often the case in situations like this, Mark’s response to the sink’s discoloration was a lot of expletives. My response was to laugh. Sometimes you just can’t fight against the universe! We were obviously not meant to reuse that sink.

By this time in the project, not having a sink in our bathroom was getting pretty old. Talk about a long and boring story: this was our reality for weeks on end! Brushing our teeth and washing our hands was relegated to the kitchen sink or our roommates’ bathroom. (Or, if you’re Mark, you simply stop brushing your teeth.) I refill water glasses at bedtime from the showerhead. Plus, our toilet is still leaky and the floor is only installed half-way. In the grand scheme of life problems, these aren’t really big issues. I know that. Certainly not worthy of complaint. But forgive me when I say there are times when I would like to get back to at least a standard middle class American bathroom. With a sink.

I know this post is already picture-heavy, but just for a laugh, here’s what our bathroom’s been looking like these days:

So this weekend’s task was to repeat the mantra everything happens for a reason and to get ourselves shopping for another sink, preferably with a faucet already attached. And what do you know? We found it. And installed it. With not a single additional issue.

Really?? Really!!

Here it is, our new (to us) pedestal sink that we found yesterday at ReBuild. Okay, I’ll give credit where credit is due. Mark found it. And he deserves a HUGE thank you. This sink is bigger than our old one, as in taller and wider, and with a deeper sink basin. It really commands a presence in the bathroom like all good master bath sinks should.

We’re thrilled with the new addition to our bathroom, and even more thrilled that it actually cost us less than the new faucet we bought (and can now return) from Lowe’s.

Here’s the breakdown of our sink budget:
Mark’s friend’s time to get the old sink faucet apart only to learn we can’t use it $20
New (to us) pedestal sink with faucet from ReBuild $65
Supply lines $10
Transportation costs for driving around trying to find sinks and faucets for the past month $5-10?
Being one step closer to a master bath we can be happy with? Priceless.

Why the heck didn’t we do this a long time ago?

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While the bathroom renovation project has lingered on in the background, we’ve found time recently to tackle a few other home projects, in addition to all the other things that keep us busy like work, bike riding, organizing all my winter clothes which included finding eight pairs of gloves and seven without a mate, voting in the unprecedented mayoral caucus, scheduling a big party and then getting sick at the last minute and postponing it, and kegging my brown ale that’s been in primary fermentation for a few months.

Some women collect shoes. I collect gloves.

Here’s just some of what we’ve accomplished on the home front recently. ALL of these projects fall into the category Why the heck didn’t we do this a long time ago?

1. Having the chimney cleaned so we can use the wood stove/fireplace as a heating source. But you already knew we did that. It’s not perfect, as in, the blower fan doesn’t work on the wood stove so we sometimes end up with more smoke than heat… Still working out the kinks I guess.

2. Rearranging our living room furniture. Now the living room is finally a separate defined room, with better furniture layout, surrounding the hearth.

3. Cleaning behind the stove and fridge (which, I actually have done before thankyouverymuch) AND plugging the mouse holes with steel wool (whytheheckdidn’twedothisalongtimeago?)

From this welcoming passageway:

To this “closed for business” sign:

One day we’ll also have to nail a piece of spare trim back there too, just to make sure the little critters don’t make their way through the other drywall sections. Oh, and in case you were wondering What’s with the mice? Don’t they have a cat? The answer is yes, we have a cat. I have witnessed Trixie: watch mice from afar, run away from mice, and play her own version of “catch and release” in which she lets go of the mouse that she’s already caught. The mice haven’t packed up and moved out yet because I think they like mocking Trixie.

4. Upgrading our living room window coverings from the semi-functional slatted-stick-through-which-the-neighbors-can-still-see-you kind to the kind that offer insulative value in addition to actually providing privacy. Great idea!

5. Installing a new kitchen faucet. Really, this is the one item on the list that we would not have done sooner unless you had paid us. We waited until our old faucet had sprung a leak, and even then we didn’t replace it for weeks (while we shopped around for a new faucet). Got this one on clearance and it works great so far.

6. Putting plastic on the windows and adding an insulative curtain over the office bay window. The plastic goes on the windows at different times each year. It’s always a toss up: Do I put up the plastic to save on heating needs and risk not being able to open the windows on a warm fall day or do I wait until I’m absolutely sure winter is here and we won’t be opening windows again for months? We’re somewhere in the middle this year. An important note on window plasticking: I don’t recommend plasticking over a bathroom or kitchen window. Always good to have additional ventilation in those humid spaces. Also, is plasticking a word?

7. Painting the trim in the kitchen white. This small change has made a BIG difference in the kitchen. It feels bigger, cleaner, and brighter. How does paint do that? I guess I bought the magic paint. Now, I’m not only beating myself up about not having painted the trim earlier but also Why the heck didn’t we paint the cabinets white, too? Put it on the “To Do One Day” list. Seriously, we have such a list.

Here’s one shot out our kitchen windows after one of the coats of paint. Also, notice the cool ladder on the ceiling that we use as a potrack? It’s my grandfather’s ladder that used to live in my garage as a kid. My mom’s partner lovingly cut and refinished it as a housewarming present. Best housewarming present ever!

Scroll back up to #5. Note the color of the trim behind the faucet. Yep, that’s white now, too.

Want to know one of the other things on the To Do One Day list? See that exposed insulation around the dishwasher? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a wall there to enclose it instead?

8. Painting the front door.

Before – A boring green door:

During:

After – A door that pops, yet is also incorporated into our space much better:

Red. Barn red. Oh yeah. And guess how much we spent on paint? Zero dollars. Mark got a  free sample of an awesome local recycled paint. The sample will get us through two coats on the front door. The back and side doors might have to wait til we can scrounge up another sample can or two. (Unless we build a barn in the backyard we don’t really need an entire two gallons of barn red paint!)

So, that’s a little of what we’ve been up to. Anyone else having fun with plasticking their windows or painting things barn red?

Bathroom Renovation: Day 449

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Remember that day, weeks ago, when we tackled our bathroom renovation with renewed gusto and I nearly declared it would be done within a day or two? Well, it didn’t quite happen like that.

It all started off well. After optimistically gathering all our flooring tools, organizing a few bundles of wood by size, and rolling out the underlayment paper, we started in on the first row.

We even got all professional-like and made measurements to ensure we’d be square once the hallway portion of the bathroom opens up into the bigger area. We didn’t want to risk having this flooring look crooked when we walk through the office. So, for instance, if the office flooring is crooked, we’ll have to match it in the bathroom. (Am I foretelling? You’ll have to wait and find out!)

You may recall that we weren’t sure if we would have enough wood to complete our project. We’re always conscious of avoiding waste in our lives but now even more so; we make every flooring cut with the next row in mind. As in, when we cut a piece of wood to complete the left part of the row, the cut edge of the ‘wasted’ piece could be used to start the right part of the next (or a future) row. Smart, I know!

In the hallway section of the bathroom, which is just about 3′ wide, we realized we could use the full lengths of our wood – with not even an inch of waste – by putting them down in a certain pattern. Because ipe is such a dark wood and the pieces were lining up pretty well, I think it’s hard to even see the pattern. Can you see it below?

You may be saying, I don’t see the pattern (or if I do, it doesn’t look bad), but I do see some pieces that stick out like a sore thumb! There are two reasons for this: The ipe has a lot of color variation – which we like – but there’s another reason they look so different from each other. By the time we got as far as the photo above we had already run into issue #1: We were inconsistent with sealing the flooring with tung oil. Some pieces had been sealed with two or three coats, and had dried out for weeks. Some pieces had only been sealed with one coat and hadn’t dried long enough for another coat. In fact, they were still sticky and smelled like citrus (our tung oil is cut with citrus and thus our bathroom smells like an orange grove). Some pieces were entirely unfinished and we figure we’ll just seal them once we’re done. So, really, this isn’t such a big issue in the grand scheme of things. Just keep in mind when you see photos that the unfinished wood typically looks lighter and doesn’t have the sheen of the sealed wood.

We had also run into issue #2. Gaps. Lots of them. Turns out we weren’t the only ones being inconsistent. Surprise, surprise, the flooring pieces weren’t always the same widths! Sometimes one piece would be shorter or longer than its neighbor by as much as a sixteenth of an inch. A sixteenth of an inch may not sound like a lot, but believe me, it’s visible to the naked eye, and can mess up a straight line of flooring very quickly. We later developed a workaround for issue #2 (which simply involves measuring the flooring widths before putting them down – can you say duh?) but we hadn’t yet discovered that technique at the time.

Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s talk about issue #3, shall we? The bathroom closet. Take a lookey here, at our beautiful bathroom closet.

I’m being sarcastic in case you can’t tell. Doorless, trimless, open-faced plywood shelves. I sort-of painted it white a year ago in a half-assed sort of way, knowing that one day we’d get around to deciding how to pretty it up.  For the past year, the yellow color that I didn’t quite paint over at the bottom (and top) served to remind us of how gross our entire bathroom used to look.

Here’s another look at the closet, back when I thought using cabinet doors we picked up for free would be a good idea. Mark vetoed that idea pretty quickly.

Once we got our flooring down to where the closet began, it sparked a bigger conversation about the function and aesthetics of the closet. With any home renovations, our goal is always to keep in mind the words “value added”, since we know we’ll sell this house one day. So, even if the closet had trim and a door and it was fully painted, would these cheap plywood shelves ever look value added? The answer is no. I mean, can you even use the word value in the same sentence as plywood?  We briefly considered drywalling over the closet so as to not have to deal with it. But there wouldn’t be much fun in that, would there? So we decided to demolish the shelves and build something from scratch.

So, the closet quickly became Distracted Side Project Of The Day! Time to put the flooring on hold and do some demolition.

Out came the shelves. And the strips under the shelves.

The demo wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t made easy either due to this gross gluey substance used to hold the shelves in place.

With all the shelves out I could then mud the closet walls, (which I later sanded and re-painted entirely white).

We couldn’t make any more progress on the closet that day because we needed to let the mud dry. Also, we’ll need a trip to a hardware store as we need materials for building the new shelves. Oh, and we need a plan. I’ve determined that those are good to have, too. I’ll give you a hint and tell you that we have a fun idea that involves using leftover flooring for the shelving but I’m skeptical we’ll have enough leftover for that.

We also didn’t make much more progress on the flooring that day because, well, we were both feeling pretty done with all the issues. Mark’s expression sums it up pretty nicely.

So, day 449 of the bathroom renovation was a wrap. Why am I calling it that? That was the number of days we had been in our house, and, if you recall, we started renovating the bathroom from pretty much Day 1 by removing the carpeting (and putting in a window not too long after).

In the next bathroom post I’ll bring you up to speed with days 455 and 464 of the bathroom renovation. Here’s a spoiler: it’s still not done. Hang in there with us!

PS – You may notice some changes going on around here on the blog. Subtle ones at first, like a new WordPress template and header image. One day soon there might be some bigger changes, too, like the name and even the focus of the blog. What? Is nothing sacred anymore? Stay tuned…

Bathroom Flooring: Ready, Set, Go!

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We woke up this morning with energy to tackle our last big home renovation project: the master bathroom.

I found myself getting caught up in the excitement of renovating, especially since we haven’t done any diy renovations since the completion of our master suite. But mostly I got caught up in a dream of what the bathroom will look like one day. In my dreams the bathroom looks clean and modern, it feels like a spa. My dream includes a big claw foot bathtub, surrounded by candles and soft music in the background. There’s also an eco-friendly dual-flush toilet in the dream, and plush organic towels awaiting me when I return from the bath.

Wait. Wrong dream. We don’t even have a bathtub, and the main eco-friendly feature we need right now is a toilet that doesn’t leak. Back to reality.

I had no false hopes that we would complete the project today; that would be ambitious even for us. You see, there’s still a lot left to do including: laying flooring, moving pvc piping to install a light centered above the mirror, installing a new toilet, painting or staining and installing trim, painting the fourth wall (‘accent wall’ gone amiss), patching some drywall, and re-sealing the floors.

Here’s what our bathroom looks like right now.

This is what it has looked like pretty much since we moved in and tore out the carpeting and added a window.

No joke. We have been living on sub-floor in this master bath for 1.25 years. YEARS. Okay, that’s technically only a year and a quarter and doesn’t warrant a plural. But still.

So, we worked for a few hours today and made some small progress. Let me guess, you’re probably expecting an “after” photo right about now. I mean, isn’t that how these posts are supposed to work? Maybe I’m not doing this blog thing right. Usually there’s a before and then there’s an after. Well sorry folks, all you’re getting is the “before”. Hopefully the “after” will happen in reality sometime this weekend, and then will be dutifully reported on this blog.

But here’s a little teaser on the flooring back when Mark was sealing it with tung oil.

Beautiful hardwood ipa -pronounced epay- which is apparently a wood flooring appropriate for bathrooms. (We’ll see how well it stands up to Mark-I-don’t-need-to-dry-my-feet-before-getting-out-of-the-shower-Weber.)

I was originally rooting for tile flooring. We even bought all the materials to install tile, (boy are there a lot of materials and expense that goes into it) but then returned them all after my poor footsies shivered all winter long last year. So maybe tile wouldn’t be the best choice in our cold house. Okay, I agreed on installing the ipa.  In part because it would instantly kick our bathroom style up a notch. This wood is typically at least $5/sq foot! But you know us. Why pay full price when we can get it for less? We found a former flooring salesman selling some on Craigslist for a great deal back when we first moved in, but here’s the kicker: we were only able to buy just about enough for the bathroom. We think. We hope. So we’re doing our best to avoid any wasted pieces and praying we have enough to finish.

Will we have enough flooring? What will we do if we’re only one foot short? Will Mark kill Melissa for insisting on putting flooring in the bathroom closet and wasting two square feet of it? You’ll just have to wait until next time to learn what happens next in our flooring saga!

Installing Insulation

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It’s going to be a good winter at our house. And by “winter” of course I mean the next six months because, really, winter lasts that long in Vermont.

To be sure, we recently tackled the following tasks: changed the air filter in the furnace so it would run more efficiently, installed a new thermostat that now works with our wall heater on the second floor, scheduled a chimney cleaning so we can use the wood stove as a heat source, chopped wood that has been drying for a year for said wood stove, and made a HUGE ADDITION to the insulation in our attic. All of which is to say we should be nice and cozy this winter.

What I’m really itching to tell you about is the insulation. Ba-dum Ching. Because really, who doesn’t get all warm and fuzzy talking about insulation?

Okay, enough with the puns. Back to serious business.

Installing insulation has been on the to do list since we moved in. We really should have done it before our first winter here – it undoubtedly would have saved on the heating bills – but I’ll be the first to admit it was a little daunting to think about at the time. Daunting because I really wanted to know that we would make the right decision about what type of insulation to install and how to install it, and at the time I was convinced we’d need a qualified expert to help us with the task. Daunting because we were talking about a potential health hazard: crawling around in what I pictured to be a mouse-poop-filled, dirty, scary attic playing with the existing fiberglass insulation. Well, okay, not quite playing with it but throwing it around a little.

For example, here’s the mess we were working with. No wonder I was daunted.

How did we know we needed more insulation up there, and just how much did we need? For one thing, last winter was cold. But again, this is Vermont so that wasn’t much of a shock.For the answer, bear with me for a little jargon for a minute.

Building codes in Vermont stipulate an insulative value of R60 in attics. We figure before we moved in there was maybe R38 at most. In some places there was one layer of insulation, with an R value of 19 (at best). In some places there were two layers bunched up together or compressed under plywood boards, (while it may seem counterintuitive, compressing reduces their effectiveness). In many places there was one layer or even nothing, like on the attic hatch itself. Um, what’s the R value of nothing?

So at best we had R38 in the places where there were two neat layers of the pink stuff. But along the back side of the house there was an entire ~2′ gap where there was no insulation at all. No wonder the office was freezing cold last year and our roommate had to use a space heater!

Anyone who knows about this stuff will tell you that houses have to “breathe”, sort of like what’s going on in the image below. But I think there was too much breathing going on up there. Our attic was hyperventilating.

The more we learned about insulation the more we realized it was a DIY project that we could tackle, but we had some decisions to make first.

Deciding on the type of insulation was not easy. There are so many options, each with their own set of environmental and health implications. I wanted to get some kind of recycled/eco/healthy/green stuff like cellulose. Or maybe insulation made from hemp or sheep’s wool. Or we could go really wild and hippie and get insulation from recycled blue jeans.

Which, for example looks like this:

Another choice to make was whether to use rolls (aka batts) of insulation or blown-in insulation, which can do a great job of filling every nook and cranny (why am I tempted to stop for a photo of English muffins?). While it is a bit involved to install blow-in insulation, I bet it’s fun to play weatherman, sending a snowstorm down on the unsuspecting attic floor like this guy.

I say involved because to install blown-in insulation, we’d have to rent a machine that sits outside (on our back deck, probably) with someone feeding insulation into it (me, probably), and run a tube up through the bathroom window into the attic hatch where someone directs where the insulation blows (Mark, probably). I can’t imagine how we would possibly communicate with each other while doing this process, and we couldn’t really plan when to do it in advance as it would be very weather dependent. Plus, we wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable as the guy in the picture above as you can’t stand up straight in our attic.

So, despite the fun insulation options like keeping warm with last year’s Levi’s or creating an avalanche of insulation with a big machine, we opted for just rolling out more fiberglass insulation on top of what we already had.

A few compelling reasons: 1) the best bang for the buck (R value per dollar)  2) easy-ish installation. No need to rent a piece of equipment, and not weather-dependent 3) readily available at Lowe’s 4) we had to deal with the existing fiberglass anyway so we knew we’d be wearing respirators and getting gross no matter what 5) even though it isn’t as eco-friendly a product as recycled blue jeans for instance, I think we get some eco points simply for installing more insulation period. Don’t the ends justify the means in this instance?

In our case it means we went for the standard (formaldehyde-free!) fiberglass insulation at Lowe’s for $10 a roll.  Each roll covers 25 feet with 15″ of R30 insulative value. It took two trips with Jenny-the-Truck to pick up everything we needed, and then we were on a roll (sorry, I’ll stop now).

For the past few weeks these rolls have been living in various locations around our house. I’m sure the roomies are happy we’ve finally decided to do this project and get them out of the living room.

Now there’s space in the living room for more important things. Like cat baths.

We didn’t get any great shots of the process of installing it. It’s unadvisable to bring a relatively expensive camera into a cramped attic with fiberglass dust floating everywhere. But here are a few photos that show some of the chaos of this process.

Here you can see the mess of existing insulation behind Mark, some of which was moved out of the way when contractors did projects like adding recessed lights to the bathroom. Also take note of the styrofoam soffit covers. Our goal was to fill in all insulation gaps up to, but not covering, the top of those covers. This would still allow the house to breathe. Oh and you see the pvc tubing (sink and toilet vents)? They’re a real pain to work around fyi.

Here’s a blurry me, holding up a piece of insulation that I’m about to shove in a crevice somewhere. Or maybe I was about to start a pillow fight with Mark? Tempting.

Once we were done rearranging and organizing the existing insulation, we rolled out the new batts on top, which added a beautiful 15″ blanket on top of everything.

Since we don’t have any great photos I stole one from someone else online. What you are about to see is not actually our attic, though it looks very much like what we were dealing with: Existing insulation between the joists with new rolls on top in the opposite direction. Only in our attic we weren’t smart enough to have a plank of wood to walk on top of. Instead we had to be sure to walk only on joists (or risk popping a leg out through the ceiling below).

Thankfully I have no injuries to report, but I may seriously need to burn the clothes I worked in. Any tips for getting fiberglass out work clothes?

I’m also happy to report that I already notice a temperature difference in the office. Come on, Vermont, bring on the winter. We’re ready!

Master Suite Revealed!

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Before.

For those of you who don’t know, this is what our bedroom used to look like.

The doorway opened into the office, which loops back around to the bathroom. The dresser “nook” was cute, if you like your dresser in a nook, and the slatted doors on the right were for the solo bedroom closet.

Below was what the other side of the bedroom used to look like. That’s the main door to the hallway. And the curtain hides a small window to the front of the house. That’s also the “before” shot of my cutie on the bed.

The office used to look like this. It had a huge closet that we never really used, another strange nook in the wall, and the door to the bathroom.

Here you see the door on the right, where we could walk between the bedroom and office if we wanted to. We could. But we never did. It was usually easier to walk through the bathroom to the office.

The Renovation. In rough chronological order.

First we removed some carpeting.

Then we made a hole in the wall.

Then we made the hole bigger. Take note of the ugly “before” fan.

Mark framed out the old doorway into a new closet.

We put down some oak flooring. We love the gnarly spots in it – and it was cheaper, too!

Installed drywall in the new closet and framed out the new doorway.

Installed the door with the help of a friend.

Mark made his dream come true of building a transom window. He built the boxes out of scrap flooring.

We bought glass with a subtle swirl design from a local glass business. It’s a small touch that I think was well worth the $30 investment.

I wrote a note to the future owners of the house and put it in the wall before we put the drywall up.

We moved around a few outlets, and mudded and sanded lots of walls and ceilings.

Found beautiful pendant lights at ReBuild. Normally $130 each (according to Amazon.com), we scored two for $20.

There was a lot of painting to do.

Lots of baseboard trim to prime, paint, cut, and install.

Electrical things to figure out.

Which Mark did like a pro.

Through it all…

We slept in a construction zone.

We navigated messes elsewhere in the house.

We worked through many moments of confusion.

And made many decisions- large and small.

And now…

We’ve got an amazing new room we are so proud to call our own.

And we’re even prouder to know we created it (almost entirely) ourselves.

It’s a welcome addition to have more closet space in the bedroom.

(Forgive me for being a little tired when this photo was taken.)

I still think our room looks like it’s from a magazine on luxury homes. Do we really get to live here?

Did I mention Mark also envisioned, and created, built-in bookshelves also made from scrap flooring?

Even my desk got a slight upgrade with some newly painted legs.

This is us “after”. Back to normal. I can’t tell you how good it feels.




Yes, We’re Still Renovating

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If you ask Mark, we’ve opened up a resort here at the house. Our new master suite feels like a room you’d get at a vacation getaway, a bed & breakfast, a place you’d pay money to stay at. Of course, then I remember how much this renovation cost us and realize oh yeah, we are paying money to stay here.

We’re still not done with this renovation. Close, but not quite. While technically I can show “after” photos – as in after we began the renovation months ago – I cannot show you “done” photos. Hopefully, that will come in about 24-48 hours.

For now it feels important to detail some of the recent lessons I’ve learned:

  • Renovations age you. Mark offhandedly remarked the other day “I bet doing home improvement ages you about ten times faster than normal.” Up and down the ladder a million times a day. Bending over to nail the flooring or move the baseboard trim, or dip the paintbrush into the bucket… You start and end the day with aches and pains.
  • Home renovations are an emotional experience. I’ve recently been on the verge of tears every time we accomplish something big. We finished installing the flooring! Mark built the transom window! I finished painting the bedroom! Happy tears? Yes. But I’ve also been led to cry by the sheer frustration and stress of this experience. Why stress? Partly because there’s a real time constraint on us (relating to the TV show) and partly because, well, it’s a stressful experience. We took the bedroom and office, rooms where I could conceivably spend the entire day (because I love sleep and I mostly work from home), and turned them into an uninhabitable  construction zone for about 5 weeks. My work desk is now our dining room table, which, also doubles (quadruples?) as our occasional workstation when we’re building something, or as a place to leave spare tools so we can find them later. Other stress factors: We can’t find anything, least of all one of the dozen or so tape measurers we own when we need one. We’re tracking sawdust, drywall dust, stray nails, and tools throughout the house everytime we move. Mark and I haven’t had time for a social life, R&R, or hardly even time to spend in the garden taking care of necessities like tying up the tomato plants, weeding, and watering. We’re not even sleeping in our bedroom anymore. Once known as a retreat from the heat, a cushion on the basement floor is now our semi-permanent bed until the renovation is complete. Our lives have been consumed by this renovation. And when I say consumed, I mean it. We’re being consumers in ways that we hate: Shopping at big box home improvement stores every other day. Eating take-out because it’s less time and effort than making our own meals. This life is not sustainable, and thankfully, after just a few more days of this, we can return to some normalcy.
  • Buying sample cans of paint is worth the investment. Typically we pick up a paint card at Lowe’s, bring it home to look at it in different lighting, and choose one that looks okay. Isn’t this the way you’re supposed to do it? But we always end up hating the color once we bring home a gallon of it and start applying it to the walls. This time, we invested $3 each in 8 – yes, eight! – sample paint cans and took several days of looking at the paint applied to three different walls in the suite to make our decision. I must say, the color we ended up selecting through this process is fabulous. Not fabulous in the sense that New York is now the sixth state in the nation to allow gay marriage kind of fabulous. More like a subtle, organic kind of fabulous. Beautiful, Graceful. Wonderful.
  • It’s okay to specialize. Mark and I both tend to enjoy being generalists. We pretty much share all duties equally without the separation and power plays that can happen when one person takes over (or is relegated to) a certain task or chore. We enjoy being able to do a little bit of everything, and being able to learn how to do it if we don’t already know. In fact, my entire freelance career these days is built upon the fact that I’m a Jill of all trades. But I’ve learned that it’s okay if you’re slightly better at doing a task, to just stick with it until it’s done. Or to find a project that your partner is more excited about and let them have at it. At this point in the renovation, we don’t need to learn from each other how to do every aspect of the project or think through the details of each step together – though sometimes this is immensely helpful. We just need to get it done. Tonight for example, I took on a project I’m fairly skilled at: cutting in the corners of the room with my favorite paintbrush, while Mark worked on installing the ceiling fan.  After a short period of time enjoying his favorite pastime – cursing at inanimate objects – he made progress with the ceiling fan, ultimately installing it without any help at all. Personally I think we have a budding electrician in our midst.

I make a promise to you blog readers: I will include more photos and less words in the next post. I also make a promise to me: More sleep, bike riding, and garden time in my near future, and less inhaling paint fumes and shopping at hardware stores. One thing I can’t promise, though: I can’t promise I’ll stop crying tears of joy once this renovation is over.