Second Closet

We are getting pretty good at closet building! This project took only a few hours over a weeks time to get fully installed and organized.

Before

After

After

After: organized and in use!
After: organized and in use!

First Closet

Because nesting has taken over my life, I convinced Eric that we needed to work on the closets in our house. If I cannot keep my house organized before the baby arrives, how will I ever manage after? I figured if we worked on custom walk in closets, there would be no excuse for the closets to ever look the way they do now. We have 3 closets and so far the one in the nursery is finished. Check out the before and afters!

Before
After
After

Plumbing nightmares

The complete remodel of the half bathroom has been a great challenge and learning experience. Needless to say I am not ready to quit my day job, but there is something satisfying about doing the work yourself. Many of our friends and family always seem to have complaints about how a contractor did a job differently from what they were asked to do. It is this very reason that we have decided to do many of our home improvement projects ourselves.

The biggest plumbing problem with the half bathroom prior to the remodel was the cast-iron radiator. This thing was old, rusty, smelly and unsightly. Removing it was a gift and a curse. Once it was removed we gained significant space in the room but then we were left to install a new heating element. Since the whole house has baseboard heat with force-hot-water, we decided to replace the big heavy radiator with a small 2 foot section of baseboard heating element with the small aluminum plates. This heating element takes up little space and can provide a good heat source for a small area.

After we installed all of the bead board, trim and baseboard; the toilet (which took 2 tries to get right) and the sink(which took a day to figure out. Pedestal sinks are trickier than you think) it was time to tackle the heat. There is one thing that I had wished I had not done for the heating. When we installed the floor I decided to drill holes for the heating pipes, where they originally were, prior to polyurethaning the floor. The theory was that we would work around the heating element, but when it came time to put the heating system together it became clear that the original setup was poorly executed and difficult to work with.

It took me a good day to figure out how I would get the pipes installed without burning the house down. The main problem is that the heating pipe actually comes out of a small whole in the wall which is not big enough work in and definitely not safe enough to sweat (solder) copper connections. Because of this space constraint I was forced to put together as much of the heating pipes so that I would only have to solder a few connections in the basement and avoid the dangerous hole in the wall. Because of my work schedule I had to do this work over the span of a few days and each night I would have anxiety dreams about plumbing. If you have every seen the screen saver that has the pipes running in all different directions and multiplying at an alarming rate, image dreaming that with a real project which you have to wake up to and deal with.

After much preparation I had decided to go ahead and put together the heating system once and for all. I started working at about 6pm and finished at about 12:30am. After sweating many connections, running out of solder, making a trip to Lowes just minutes before they closed to get more solder, and finishing the remaining connections, the heating system was finally ready to be tested. In my excitement I turned up the thermostat and waited for heat to come, but it never did. At 1:30am I gave up and went to bed. I still had the plumbing nightmare that night which was unsettling because I had just worked so hard to get the job done.

In the morning I gave the heating system another test and within minutes I heard the unmistakable hiss of water leaking out of a faulty connection. To my dismay it was in the one spot that I could not fix easily. It was a disappointing moment and for the first time I felt like I could have paid someone to deal with the problem and be done with it, but I knew that I could fix it myself. To fix the problem I had to take apart about 50% of the work I had done the night before and go out and buy some special copper fittings that do not require solder. These fittings push together and hold tight. I decided to go with this system because I could not image re-sweating connections only to have another leak.

The new system finally works without any leaks, yet I am still haunted by plumbing nightmares...I think it will be some time before we tackle another plumbing project!

About the duct tape...

My friend Brittney has questioned the duct tape on the toilet in my "before pictures" twice and though the reason its there is not super interesting, I decided she was owed an explanation ;)

So, when we bought our house it had been on the market for a LOOOOONG time. It was also a foreclosure. Because it costs so much to heat a house in the winter in MA, not to mention the risk of burst pipes, owners who do not occupy the house often "winterize" it which means they drain all the pipes of water so they cannot freeze. This was the case with our house because it was bank owned and had been vacant for so long.

The plumbers put these bright orange stickers all over the house warning that it has been winterized and they duct tape the toilets. I believe this is done primarily to make sure that any squatters looking to live in the house temporarily know the water isn't working. I am not sure if duct tape would seriously stop me from using a toilet if I were a squatter but who knows!

So, Brittney, now you are in the know about the duct tape :)

Also, thanks for your compliments on the house - you are always so very sweet!

Picture Post

I thought instead of actually describing the step by step of our remodel, I would let the pictures do the talking!

And stay tuned for Eric's very first post...it's currently a draft waiting for publication :)

Before Picture

Before Picture

Eric ripping it all out!
Remember "Sub Floor Secrets"?

Installing some new sub floors

Me installing the new floor!

Ok...Eric helped a little when my belly got in the way :)

It's electric!

The bead board installed
Even Tiger wanted to help :)

After picture!
After picture!
After picture!
After picture!
After picture!

INTERESTING DISCOVERY!

While tearing out the back side of the half bath wall to remove the stinky insulation, we made an interesting discovery:



OUR HOUSE USED TO BE PAINTED PINK!!! The wall we opened up is where our house originally ended and where a very poorly executed side addition begins. I guess now I understand why subsequent owners covered the house in not 1 but 2 layers of tan vinyl siding!

A Mystery Smell No Longer!

The whole point of the half bathroom remodel was to rid that room of a terrible urine stench that we could not eradicate through less drastic means. We had tried EVERYTHING we could think of and yet the smell remained, so in our minds, the only fix was to rip out all the floors, radiator and the lower portion of the walls, paint the walls and floor joists with BIN and hope for the best.

Well after doing all this and installing the new hardwood floors we felt confident the project was a success. Not only would we have a beautiful new bathroom, but we would have accomplished our primary goal of eliminating the smell for good.

It didn't take long before we realized that though the smell was almost undetectable, it was still there. While sitting up close to the wall while installing the bead board, I caught a whiff and knew we had a problem. Eric and I couldn't imagine what else we could even do to fix it after removing the floors, sub floors, parts of the walls AND sealing the entire room. What could the source of the smell be? Where was it coming from?

I sniffed the whole room and finally found a place where the smell was the strongest. It was right by a hole in the wall that was left for the plumbing. At first I was sure it was the pipes that smelled, but Eric noticed that there was old fiberglass insulation surrounding that area in the wall. When removed we realized that IT WAS THE INSULATION THAT SMELLED! There had been some in between layers in the sub floor and it was in behind the walls on one side of the bathroom - the side that smelled.

We really couldn't believe that the insulation had been causing the problem all along. Since when does insulation smell like urine? We googled it and interestingly enough, this problem is more common than one might think! Here is just one of the many examples that we came across:
http://www.ytmag.com/cgi-bin/viewit.cgi?bd=toolt&th=216180

After ripping it all out the smell is finally gone! But I am still in disbelief over the cause.

"Screwed"

Our bathroom remodel was going great, until yesterday Eric had the bright idea to screw a screw ( a very LONG screw I might add) into the wall to hold a piece of beadboard in place. I told him I thought it was a bad idea - but you know boys with their toys; he was itching to use his drill ;)

Long story short: he screwed right into a pipe which immediately started spraying water everywhere! Luckily we were able to turn the water off for that pipe before any damage was done, but now our washer is out of commission and we are in desperate need of clean laundry!

I have a handy husband so it will get fixed - but what a set back...

Sub Floor Secrets?

The Half Bath Project Begins!

So Eric and I have this little joke that started when we first bought the house. We were tearing off so much wallpaper and finding so many interesting things underneath that we would say in a sing songy voice when we found something of interest " walll paaapper seeecrets" to alert each other of the finding( yup - we are dorks - just accept it). We found wall paper covering anything from holes in the wall to more wall paper to just plain bizarre stuff( like a ruler?).

Now that we have started tearing up floors, we have discovered the house is full of "sub floor secrets" as well. The mere fact that in our half bath remodel we have had to tear up 4 layers of sub floor so far is indication enough that there are secrets to be found.

Besides the oh so fun beaver board that I mentioned in my previous posts, we have also come across 2 different of layers of linoleum, we can only guess date back to the 1950's. What else did we find from the 1950's? Newspaper used to level and dare I imagine - insulate? It was actually a pretty neat find. Its a Newspaper from our area that is long gone and one of the largest pieces we found had an article about Walt Disney. Its just a little glimpse into the history of our house and community which was an unexpected treat.


The project is moving along at about the pace we expected. It took Eric 3 days to remove the old floor and to put in the new. We are finally ready to start the beautification process - which is where I come in :)

Eric worked the reciprocating saw a little to hard...

Tomorrow I will be laying the hardwood floor, hanging beadboard and moulding and finally painting! I have felt so left out of this process. Usually I am in there with a crow bar ripping out the floors along side Eric but pregnancy puts such limitations on what I can do! Not only was the work dangerous ( Eric nearly fell through to the basement a few times but luckily was able to steady himself) but I can't even bend over to tie my shoes let alone rip up boards! I am, however, still excited that I can still at least contribute to the process...stay tuned :)

My baby ticker...

is totally rushing it! I too would love to have a week of time pass in a matter of a few hours, but I know that I started off this morning at 28 weeks and 2 days and now I am suddenly 29 weeks along?

Maybe the ticker is trying to tell me something...

Rookie Mistakes

Lately ever project we do goes very smoothly, but our most recent project reminded me that this was not always the case - there was a project where Eric and I screwed up big time. I got to thinking about this because we are working on updating our half bath downstairs. Currently this bathroom reeks of some sort of animal urine and we decided that since we are on a "bathroom update kick", we might as well tackle this one next. So, let me not get off topic, you can read more about the bathroom renovation in some upcoming posts, but for now let me tell you about the project we screwed up. You will see how the bathroom project ties in later...

Back when we first bought the house, the kitchen was our first major project. We had this notion that we would find beautiful hardwood under some old linoleum because we had that kind of luck in every other room when we ripped up carpet. This was rookie mistake #1; we assumed the best when in home renovation you should ALWAYS assume the worst and then be pleasantly surprised by anything better.

This mistake resulted in a weekend of me crying as I ripped up sheet after sheet of old linoleum finding only really nasty sub floor beneath.

Which leads me to rookie mistake #2; that sub floor was totally awful and should have been replaced. Half of it was "beaver board," a material I can only describe as compressed sawdust that rots if someone even breaths near it. After a grueling weekend of pulling up linoleum, Eric and I just couldn't see ourselves then also pulling up old sub floor. We needed a kitchen and still had hardwood to lay, not to mention removing the sub floor would have meant we would need to remove our cabinets that had been installed on top of the sub floor which were also full of all our dishes, pots and pans and food. We knew we were in over our heads, but we should have stepped back and recognized that doing the job right would have been better than doing the job quickly.

This mistake resulted in a bunch of issues. The first is that after laying the hardwood floors, we realized the kitchen was a good 2 inches higher than the rest of the house. We now have to make our own custom thresholds for the 2 entrances which hopefully will fix the "tripping trap" we created.

We also realize that the likelihood that we will one day have to rip up the floor because of a rotting sub floor is great. This is where the half bath renovation comes in. We are currently ripping up all the sub floor in the bathroom in order to remove anything that could be causing it to smell. In this process we found that the bathroom( which is off of the kitchen) is also 2 inches higher than the house because it has 4 layers of sub floor, 2 of which are completely rotten. Try and guess what those sub floors are made out of - yep that's right - BEAVER BOARD! Its a total mess and we realize that its only a matter of time before our kitchen sub floor rots to the point of needing to be replaced. On the scale of serious rookie mistakes, this was probably our biggest - "haste makes waste."

Our final rookie mistake is that we listened to advice from someone at a paint shop about how to match our new hardwood floors to the existing ones. The guy took a piece of wood, slapped on some stain and polyurethane and told us it was a "perfect match." Well, after staining and then sealing our newly laid hardwood floors, we discovered that they couldn't be further from a "perfect match." Every time I look at our kitchen floor I ask myself how we could have been so stupid. Eric and I usually have a great "checks and balances" system for our projects. He and I often have the opposite opinion on how a task should be completed, so we end up having to debate and discuss our projects at length before coming to a decision about how to execute. Why we both unquestioningly followed bad advice is a great mystery.

The kitchen project has become our great do it yourself learning experience. We screwed up at almost every junction in this project and we both know it. Things have been going so great since then and I almost forgot about the kitchen disaster. This bathroom project has reopened those old wounds. We again were faced with needing to replace the floor and again were disturbed at what we found under the linoleum, but this time we decided to do the job right, so when that bathroom is complete there will be no question of its value.

UPGRADE!

So I am ready to admit it - Eric and I are perfectionists and we just couldn't leave the old vanity after the bathroom overhaul. So we looked around for something that was cheap and attractive that would get the job done. Luckily we found one at Lowes and within a few days the project was underway!

The very before picture of old vanity

There are ALWAYS interesting elements of any job we do in this house. There seem to be little "secrets" hidden everywhere just waiting to be found and this was no exception. Below is a picture of what we found when we removed the old vanity. Guess we have an explanation for why things were smelling a little funny - a half rotten book used to level the old vanity would cause that!

So after a few hours of figuring out the plumbing, caulking the sink in place and installing the new hardware, this is what we ended up with!

Looking back 6 months ago, we would certainly have hired someone to do this job. It's beyond rewarding for us to be able to improve our home and to be able to do it for $100 and an afternoon - UPGRADE!

Baby Steps...

Work has been REALLY slow on our house lately. Since I got preggo, there have been very few projects that I can really participate in and without me, Eric gets side tracked and nothing ever gets done! Well, not this past weekend! We decided we had had enough of our disgusting upstairs bathroom( note: downstairs bathroom is also gross) and that something had to be done!

So before I even get started on what we did, let me tell you, this is no fantasy bathroom. We updated it so we could live with it while we create an entirely new bathroom for the house which will be more luxurious. Eventually we will do a complete remodel of the existing bathroom, but with a baby on the way and other priority projects - who knows when that will actually get done!

This all started Friday night when I announced to Eric that I thought something had died in the bathroom. It smelled really really bad and once we both evaluated it, we knew this was something that could not be ignored. Now, you know how they say "a picture is worth a thousand words" ? Well this is more of a "you have to see it to believe it" situation. The picture just doesn't do it justice...
We knew already that the smell that got this project started was probably a result of the bathroom fan which, although was originally put there to keep the bathroom smelling fresh, had been improperly installed and truly needed to be replaced. Upon removal, we saw it wasn't even hooked up to a vent and the mold growing in it made me wonder if it had been safe to use that bathroom for the past couple months!

After removing the fan we( as in Eric - he he!) painted the bathroom with mold/mildew resistant paint and patched some holes( yes i said holes) in the ceiling, which again were the result of the former owner's improper drywall installation. Then we installed a new fan and replaced and fixed all of our electrical outlets, light switches and installed a new light. While Eric was doing stuff my preggo body couldn't do, I worked on getting some new hardware, accessories and a shower curtain for the bathroom. I also built us a new radiator cover, and though it only cost me about $10 and some time to make, its a million times more attractive than what was there! We both had to do a lot of tedious little things to bring the project to completion.

So after a few days of work, the bathroom is finally in presentable shape. It no longer smells, its not appalling to look at and though its not our dream bathroom, it's baby steps in the right direction!

the house part 2: the work begins

We worked for 3 months, every day after work and every weekend to get the house in to its current condition. Because this is our first house, we discovered how little we knew about the time, energy and money it took to renovate a house. We also couldn't have anticipated the troubles of owning an old house during a cold, new england winter. We had a pipe burst within the first couple of weeks and the biggest issue with that was, in a small rural town, it is very hard to find a plumber! They only see regular customers, and since we were new to town, we didn't "qualify" for service. Our neighbors were kind enough to call their loyal plumber for us, but unfortunately the side stairwell was badly damaged by the water - we are currently pretending that area of the house no longer exists until we can figure out what to do with it!

We went a month without a kitchen because that was the one room i really needed to have done - unfortunately it was also the room that needed the most work. We thought we would be lucky and that after ripping up 2 layers of old and rotten linoleum we would uncover the beautiful hardwood floors we found under the carpet throughout the house. BOY WERE WE WRONG! There were rotten boards, plywood, beaver board( its almost more like cork/cardboard than actual board). We decided the best thing we could do in this bad situation is buy and lay new hardwood floors ourselves. It was actually ALOT easier than i thought it would be! We also needed to replace all the appliances - none of them worked. Check out the results:


We did A LOT of painting! That is what we have done the most of - here are the befores and afters of rooms we have completed! First the entryway( both colors are mores subtle minus camera flash):


The new living room:

The dining room:



Our bedroom:


Our work has slowed - significantly - because when i found out i was pregnant with our first child in the beginning of April 2008, i decided it would be best if i take a break from climbing ladders and other equally risky activities. Also, Eric hurt his shoulder playing basketball( i'll save my rant about this for another post) so he recently had surgery and will be generally out of commission for the next couple of months. We still have work ahead of us, but we have made huge accomplishments for only a few months time AND we had the house appraised on Friday and the appraisal is coming back AT LEAST $100,000 more than what we paid for the house. We are satisfied with that for the time being!

about the house part 1

So, before i even get to who Eric and I am, i have to share what has consumed our lives since October 2007. We decided it was time to try to buy our first house shortly after getting married last summer and in October we finally found the "perfect" house for us. Let me tell you though, this house was so imperfect, it had been on the market for nearly a year after having been foreclosed upon when we found it. We were looking for something first, that we could afford, but perhaps more importantly we were looking for a house that had something special about it and had just been too neglected for the average home buyer to see its potential.


During our first "walk-thru" of the house, it was obvious that it had not been lived in for a LONG time. Everything was filthy, animals had inhabited it and there were so many things that needed repair. The bathrooms were disgusting - it took me 8 hours of straight cleaning to get just one of the 3 bathrooms just to look clean, another 5 for Eric and i to feel comfortable using it. We didn't even attempt to clean the toilets, we replaced ALL OF THEM. I haven't even mentioned the fact that the house was HIDEOUS; walls covered with awful wall paper wall to wall carpeting (again hideous) that was covering fabulous original hardwood floors.

( a good example of the work ahead of us)

Our Realtor thought we were nuts to be interested in this house, but we saw its potential. It is an 1880, very large Victorian ( with perhaps some Colonial Revival influence) with some nice original elements, in a very good neighborhood on a quiet street. We just knew we could give it the face lift it needed and turn it into a place that we would be happy living for the rest of our lives.

( look at the BEAUTIFUL original hardwood floors)

After months of dealing with problems with scummy mortgage brokers which resulted in starting over with a different mortgage broker, then dealing with trying to get people at banks to focus on doing their job during the Christmas season - WE FINALLY BOUGHT OUR FIRST HOUSE! We started our move on dec. 28th 2007, only days before needing to be moved out of our apartment. We finished moving at 10 am new years day having not slept at all, after moving all day and night of new years eve. So, let me finish by sharing some more pictures of "before." ( I'll put before and after side by side in next post!)