A new house

Where to start, where to start...

So much has happened in the past couple of weeks, it's hard to sum up in a single entry. So I'll just cover a couple of the major bullet points and then maybe Tony can expand.

1. Paint
My nemesis. From the point of choosing a color, slapping it on, second coats, washing brushes. The whole process makes me both anxious and bored to tears. But after poring over countless swatches, choosing a number of test samples, buying 2 gallons of a paint color I ended up hating, and repeating the process all over again... I think we finally nailed it.

In the main living area we went with a basic taupe/tan/whatever you want to call it. And in the kitchen/dining we went with a blue-gray. Here's a decent picture of how the 2 colors play off eachother:



Check out those moldings, huh? Another recent dramatic update.

And please note the 2 chairs and TV tray that were temporarily acting as "couch" and "coffee table."

Also regarding paint, we had new ceilings, moldings, window trim, etc that all needed to be primed and painted. Luckily Nick and Paul own a sprayer, so after taping everything off, hanging sheets over the kitchen, and donning a dashing gas mask or two (I hid in the bedroom), the whole process probably took 1/4 of the time it would have with standard rollers and brushes. Those boys always come through for us.

And here's the biggest change that happened this weekend:

2. The floors
Because the upstairs floors are so dark and cozy, we wanted some contrast with the downstairs, so we were going with something light and airy. The original natural maple we picked out ended up coming back from the mill defective. So it was back to the drawing board. I had always loved the idea of bamboo, so when the maple didn't work out I floated the idea to Tony again. With Nick's approval, he went for it. It also helped that it was a heck of a lot more affordable. So we chose a light 3 3/4" bamboo for the downstairs living and dining areas, and we could not be happier. CHECK IT OUT!

Laying it down:


Halfway done:


Pretty much there:


I love how you can see the subtle striations of the bamboo.

And here we are set up with our new couch:





The bar will go back where the stools are sitting, and we're in the process of finding an area rug, among other furnishings. But I can't believe the difference in the matter of a single weekend.

Friday night we were on our dusty subfloors watching TV in a wooden chair with TV trays in front of us. Last night we were on our new floors sitting on a couch watching the Amazing Race with Janet and Nick.

Mama said there'd be days like this.

Before and After

I spent a little time w/ Google SketchUp and rendered these 3d drawings of the first floor layout. It's not to scale, but it's pretty close.

Before

After

Bigest differences:

• No wall separating the front room and living room.
• The wall on your left hand side when you walk in the house is now smaller, making the opening bigger
• The wall behind the bar (that used to have a mirror on it) was removed
  Kitchen island is gone
• A new wall blocking the back bedroom from the bar area

Other stuff that has been going on...

We're in the home stretch. Can you feel it? We're waiting on our first floor flooring to arrive. We order a 4 1/4 inch maple. It has a natural grain to it so it should be a good mix of light and dark pieces.

All of the crown molding is up, primed and painted with 2 coats of Ultra White. The walls and ceilings have both been primed. The ceilings have been painted white, and one set of walls has their first coat of paint. We've been dreading the painting stage, but it has been painless through this point. The boys have a paint sprayer that made it super easy. It took about an hour and fifteen minutes to prime all of the walls, trim, and celing with the sprayer. We're talking almost 800 sq feet of ceiling and who knows how much wall space. This would have been an all day job to do manually.

Once we figured out how to clean the machine and reset it, it took about 20 minutes to do each coat of Ultra White on the crown, window trim and doors. Just goes to show how valuable Nick+Paul are to have as friends.

We celebrated our success last night with a grill fest of BBQ chicken and sausages on a make shift plywood table!

One note: We had our first real casualty of the project. Nick+Paul had to take the french doors out of the bar while leveling the floor. The set it out on the deck and continued working. They heard a big crash and couldn't figure out what it was. Apparently the doors blew over and half of the glash was smashed! Nobody was hurt but as the supervisor of the job, I had to take it out of both of their paychecks. They understood and each drank one less beer that night.

Photo follow up

I apologize in advance for the poor quality of these photos. Santa did not bring me the $900 DSLR camera that I wanted because Santa was strapped due to some major renovations at the North Pole. It's okay, Santa, I understand. And my birthday is in 2 months. ;-) Not that you do birthdays..


Here is our freshly painted red door, white trim, and the new window treatment (taupe Roman shade):

(Note to self: Replace all switchplates and outlet covers with stainless ones. Yeek.)

Here is the front entry way console table and mirror.

(Yes, the peachy-pink tile is on our list... Our long, ever-growing List-with-a-capital-L.)

The bar-room holds the Christmas tree. Coincidence? Ask Tony how much I drank this holiday season. Nevermind, don't:



Dining room:


Front room:



The curtains in the bar and front room were recently purchased (Sarah) and put up (Tony). They make me feel all warm and cozy.

It may not look that different to those who have seen it before, but we put a lot of sweat and paint and detail work into the common areas so far. I'm happy and proud of us.

Although Santa didn't get me a super duper expensive camera, he did get me a ton of cute and practical accessories for the kitchen to go along with our new appliances. Once I get enough energy to unpack everything and pick up the clutter, I'll be sure to post more pics.

From both of us, I hope everyone had a great holiday!

So Grown Up

In the midst of 'Hurricane Upstairs' we've been working hard on miscellaneous list items downstairs.

We're almost done painting the trim a semi-gloss white, although the big challenge is figuring out how to paint the bay window that the cats love to sit on. We decided that we'll paint it when it's dark out, as the cats only seem to stare out the window during the day time. Let's hope that works, and we don't come home to find white paw prints all over our furniture and carpet. Although I do love a nice animal print...

As Tony mentioned briefly, we also bought ourselves all new kitchen appliances. I know, HUGE, right? Totally huge. Buying appliances sounds so adult too. We're such grown ups. We weren't exactly planning on taking the plunge this soon, especially with all this other work going on, not to mention the little economic FREAK OUT our country is facing... not sure if you've heard about it.

But one of Tony's many connections presented us with an opportunity we couldn't pass up. And we had to make a decision within a matter of days. Without naming names or going into too much detail (and no, they did not "fall off a truck"), we ended up paying just over $2k for these beauties, saving about $1300 including all rebates:

Stove:


Microwave (which will go above the stove, saving on precious counter space):


Dishwasher:


Fridge:


Okay, so the excitement doesn't quite translate to stock photos, but believe me... They are pretty. At least I hope so. They're to be delivered next Monday. EEE!! That's my excited sound.

Now that things are happening in the kitchen, that project may be pushed to #2 on the list up from #3. We were planning on tackling the downstairs bathroom after the current project is complete. But seeing those beautiful appliances up against the oak cabinets, laminate floor, and PINK countertops may just give us the nudge to move forward with some serious kitchen plans.

Fingers crossed we can get to it by 2010.

Nobody said it was easy

No one ever said it would be this hard. Don’t worry, that’s probably the last time Coldplay will be quoted in this blog.

In the midst of all the little Peach Orchard Projects lies a giant remodel of our upstairs bedrooms. As Sarah alluded to, what started out as laying wood floor in the two upstairs bedrooms has metamorphosed into a full on remodel.

The original plan called for us to change the layout of the bedrooms. No big deal. We (I) demolished the old closets, tore out the rugs, removed a non load bearing wall, and framed two new closets and a new wall.(thanks Nick and Paul). Our rooms were starting to take shape. We were off to a great start!

I hung the drywall on my own and decided to try tackling the joint compound job myself. After the first coat I had some serious doubts of my JC abilities. So I put an ad up on Craigslist and received 30+ responses in a few hours. Just goes to show how hard up some people are for work. Anyway, a couple sketchy dudes came over and banged out the job in two nights. I had them leave the closets unfinished as I could use them for practice. I also didn’t have them do the ceiling as it would have taken twice as long and cost twice as much. I figured I could match the texture, or at least get it close enough so nobody would notice. High hopes!

So, we now we have new walls, yay! Enter the painting. You can’t lay down the floor until everything is painted. Well, technically you can, but it’s silly. So prime and paint we did. There are some low ceilings making it real easy to paint in certain areas. Then there are some areas that are 12-14 ft which is still tough to reach with our step ladder. But I digress as we got it all done, it just takes time. Gotta give it tiiiime.

Ok, framing, walls, paint…we’re making progress!

Now it’s on to that icky baseboard heat. We debated on replacing all of the heating fixtures. The only problem would be we’d have to drywall a 6-8 patch along the base of most of the walls. Not a fun job. Not to mention, the cost of a 8ft run of the baseboard heat (minus the heating element) was $60 or so. We’d need at least 8 of them. No thanks. I guess that means we have to paint… We popped off all the hardware and spread it out to be sanded, primed and painted with metalic rated Rustoleom. Ok, enough with the painting. The baseboards came out nice. Sarah wants them to be glossy. So I have a feeling we’ll be painting them again when that time comes. Right now it’s on to bigger issues.

We got to a point in the project where we were very close to laying the floor down. We always knew there was a slight pitch to the floor. It was very hard to tell when there were rugs in the room. But, with the old hardword exposed you could put an office chair in one corner of the room and it would slowly make its way across the room. Instead of laying down our kickass new floor and have it not be level, I decided to do a little exploratory surgery on the floor.

I cut out a section to see what was going on with the subfloor and floor joists. It wasn’t good news. I could see it was framed with 2x6s. (Sarah dummie edit: They're supposed to be 2x8s.) They looked to run the length of the house, 24 ft. This was quite shocking to Nick and Paul. 2x6 over a 12 ft run would be asking a lot. 24ft would be catastrophic. We found out later that they were 12 footers that met on a beam above the kitchen. Not as bad a first believed. Then I opened up some more of the floor to find out the joists are 24 inches on center. Yikes! If they were 2x8s they should be 16 on center. 2x6s really should not have been used, but if they were, 12 on center might have been a good idea. Don’t get me wrong, it’s old wood and a 2x6 back then was a true 2x6. But we’re starting to find out why there was a bit of bounce in the floor. But it didn’t really explain the pitch.

Out came the rest of the old hardwood and subfloor to expose the beam in the kitchen. The beam was not level either. It was “sinking” towards the middle of the house. Things are starting to make more sense. But why the sag in the beam? The boys headed down to the first floor for some further investigation. Turns out the sag exists there as well. So we’re at the point now where we need to uncover why the sag exists. Is there a post in the basement that is sinking, or bowing? Is the foundation shifting? We could come up with a handful of reason as to what the issue may be. What we need to do is get a professional out to determine if something needs to be done.

A bit of good news is the sag on the first floor has been there as long as I can remember. I could put a tennis ball on the floor and it would slowly roll across. My hopes is the house has just settled and isn’t moving any further, or it won’t get any worse as long as we reinforce some things. My fear is that we have major foundation damages that will need to be repaired to the tune of big bucks. Keep your fingers crossed!

Irregardless (I know it’s not a word), we are moving on with our work, with a plan!

Complete floor demolition in bedrooms upstairs, cleaning up as we go.
Demo the ceiling in the kitchen, dining and bar room below the bedrooms
Add 2x8 16 on center to support the load of the floors upstairs
Level the floors to the landing at the top of the stairs so we don’t need to change the height of the last riser, “step” into each of the rooms.
Lay a new sub floor
Do the baseboard and trim
Lay the wood floor
Let Sarah decorate (Sarah edit: EEEE!!)

This has opened the door to two other projects that were in the pipeline, but way down the pipeline.

Redo the ceilings in the Dining Room and Bar.
Open the wall between the Bar and Living Room

Since we need to tear down the ceiling to add the new 2x8s, that redo of the ceilings will be happening around the same time.

Since we’re going to have the framing exposed in the Bar, it will be an opportune time to open up the wall into the Living Room. So we’re going to try to accomplish that as well.

We’ll be doing all the work upstairs through the month of December. I’m going to do my best to not put my foot through the ceiling as we’re hosting Christmas Eve. Once the holidays are over we’ll get to demo’ing the ceilings downstairs.

Tis the season to be in the middle of a giant remodel!

From the past to the present

While Tony hashes out the history of our house (he knows it much better than I do, having lived there off-and-on for 25+ years), I'll try to recap the present. Right now we're in a state of controlled disarray... which makes no sense, I realize. Let me explain.

We bought this house over the summer and rudely kicked our roommates the heck outta there. I keed.. our roommates were Tony's sister Jaclyn and our good friend Paul (who you'll hear much more about, as our good friend Paul is a certified contractor... Score!), who were kind enough search for their own domains, giving us newlyweds/property virgins the space we craved. While we lived in the downstairs bedroom with our elderly beagle, they were living in the 2 upstairs bedrooms. These bedrooms have ample square footage and high cielings, and we were dying to get our hands on them.

We'll get more into the details of what we've done up there so far, but in short we took care of all the demo (tearing up carpet, getting rid of impractical closets), framed out some new closets, put up sheetrock, and painted. Oh, how we painted.

The big dramatic change was going to be the wood floor... Of course I can't remember the name of the type of wood, but it's dark and the planks are wide (5 inches) and sort of rustic-looking. My dream flooring, basically.

We always knew there was a slight pitch to the existing floor. We chalked it up to a quirk of an old house. But as it got closer to the installation day, the boys got worried. When I say 'the boys,' I mean Tony, Paul, and Nick (brother-in-law, Paul's business partner, and also a licensed contractor. Choose your friends wisely, folks). Sparing you the gory details, there are issues... support beams too small, too far apart, possible foundation problems.. human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria! (Name that movie).

I don't know exactly what's going on because I'm a girl and my job is to find the perfect area rugs and window treatments to make the rooms pitttty! The guts of the house are for the boys to sort out, while I cover my ears and go "la la la!" Suffice to say, there's way more work to be done than was expected.

The reason that this disarray is controlled, is because it's mostly limited to the upstairs, which we already lived without utilizing for a number of years. The mess has not yet spilled out to our general living space, unless you include the boxes upon boxes of precious, beautiful wood flooring just BEGGING to be installed that are sitting in our dining room.

We'll get to you some day, floors. And that day I will do snow angels in your woody goodness.

Plenty of updates to follow.