"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!