Rubble Without A Pause

2008-12-29T20:17:00.001-05:00

My boy in the snow.

Progress

2008-12-27T00:56:00.002-05:00

Christmas in the Rubble House!

2008-12-27T00:44:00.002-05:00

Bathroom, Redux

2008-11-18T22:11:00.008-05:00

We redid the only bathroom in the house a couple of years ago: gutted (including ripping out an ugly dropped ceiling). We insulated, replaced all electrical wiring and heating, we sheetrocked, taped, etc. . We painted the walls and the ceiling. We replaced the sink and faucet, as well as the taps and showerhead in the bath. We tiled the floor and the bath surround, and really, it's been a very functional bathroom for us. We have only one complaint about it.

We don't like it.

The bathtub, which we couldn't remove at the time without ripping out the livingroom ceiling, is circa 1970s blue. The sink and vanity look cheap (they are) and the minerals in our water have made them look even more so. The cabinet we chose for additional storage also looks cheap (it is). The walls are too pink, even though the color we chose (Behr's Blushed Cotton) looked so subtle when we chose it. Must I go on?

Here's the plan, designed to salvage as much of the work we've already put in to keep expenses down:

we're keeping the tiling on the floor and in the bath, but
we're replacing the sink, vanity, and cabinetry,
installing a new countertop, and
we're repainting the walls.

Before pictures to follow tomorrow.

Blog Sales - the New American Way

2008-11-12T21:53:00.002-05:00

After months of blogger's block, I was finally reinspired to get back to tracking and publishing our progress in the little house by a lovely woman named Layla at The Lettered Cottage http://theletteredcottage.blogspot.com/

I think I was especially drawn to her blog since we were nowhere near the "beautiful" part of our progress when I first happened upon it, and I badly needed to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And as the months passed and we finally evolved from renovation to decoration, I appreciated The Lettered Cottage all the more. She's very talented, and has a really nice decorating blog going, filled with beautiful ideas.

Recently, Layla hosted a "blog sale" to help finance a pantry makeover (and get rid of some unused stuff, I'm sure). Everything she posted for sale was in good condition and was very reasonably priced, and I happily participated. I bought two Ikea wall lamps, three cotton curtain panels, and a cute beaded pillow.

In the photos I posted of our upstairs landing, you can see how I made use of that third green curtain panel. It made the perfect "door" to the closet Chris built to store extra clothing, linens, towels, etc. As the most finished part of this construction-zone-as-house, I am so proud of that little landing.

I am also really happy to have helped Layla recycle all the goods she was ready to part with, and give them new life in our home.

I'll be posting more photos of the other blog sale items soon.

Landing

2008-10-17T19:38:00.005-04:00

Prints by Chris

2008-09-28T22:30:00.018-04:00

These two beautiful photographs taken by my husband, Chris, now grace the picture ledge he built on the landing. Pictures of the finished project coming soon. You can see more in his etsy shop http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5408176

Beauty, or the Absence Thereof

2008-01-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

This might be the hardest part, living every day in a house without beauty. The morning is the easiest, when the tiny window in the tiny kitchen gets the rays of the sunrise, and no matter what's been left out the night before, it seems to glisten.

The Perils of POP

2007-12-21T20:38:00.000-05:00

In the world of DIY renovations, there are many downsides, but it’s the Pursuit of Perfection (POP) that can really trip you up. Symptoms of POP include dissatisfaction with anyone’s work but your own and an unwillingness to let anyone help. For the POP-afflicted, DIY takes on gargantuan proportions. My husband, Chris, suffers from POP.

While it’s true that no one can wield a screw gun quite as well as he can, and he’s probably right that no hired worker (at least around here) will care enough about the “wonky” walls and floors of our old house to get the sheetrock done right, I sometimes worry that he's making what he calls “a rod for his own back” (so British).

For the better part of a week, Chris has been sheetrocking our livingroom, a 12x22 foot space that makes up one-half of the first floor of our tiny house. As usual, he’s worked alone, assisted only by a rented lift (for the ceiling), and, occasionally by me, if he needs someone to hold a board while he measures, marks, and levels, over and over again. Unfortunately, all previous owners of this house were the Anti-Chris.

This is no straightforward job, he tells me. Each piece of sheetrock has to be modified to accommodate the above-mentioned wonky walls and slopey floors of this 70-year old cottage. And I’ve told him that, should this house ever be blown away by a hurricane, the only thing that will still be standing is the blocking he’s added to the studs, and the wood he’s put in to reframe the replacement windows he installed.

So far, we’ve got a ceiling and one complete wall. Another wall, partially done, boasts the most perfectly cut holes around each electrical box. This is no patchwork quilt sheetrock job. No, sir, this is craftsmanship, precision, fastidiousness, attention to detail. This is POP!

We are hoping to be done in time to get a Christmas tree, preferably before December 25th. I may have to call the paramedics.

A note about the first posted pics: The funky brown picture is the wasp nests that lurked behind nearly every wall. The pink stuff in the next photo is the insulation we put in that the previous tenants (the mice) stole to make themselves cozy.

Welcome to our home

2007-11-27T21:45:00.000-05:00

Hello to all DIYers, fellow bloggers, internet passersby, and innocent by-standers. Please forgive us for being late to the party. I'm afraid we've been a little busy.

For the past five years, my husband and I have lived with our little boy in a very tiny house in Upstate New York. The locals call us "9-12ers" -- that's rural shorthand for NYC residents who relocated shortly after 9/11/2001. In our case, we'd been scouting houses in the area for at least a year before that infamous date, but I'm sure seeing your hometown devastated, and reeling in the aftermath, played a role in our ultimate decision to move. (They also call us "cidiots," but that's another story.)

We'd looked at dozens of houses in our (low) price range, mostly decrepit. Some of them were truly atrocious: an old clubhouse, with a huge bar and a dance floor masquerading as kitchen and living room, that required you to leave the building and climb rickety stairs on the outside to access the bedrooms. Another house with the fuel oil tank in the kitchen, that made your head pound from the stench of petroleum, with the single bedroom only 4' tall, built under the eaves of the attic. And our favorite -- a house chockful of debris, a queen-sized bed in the kitchen surrounded by dog feces; bedroom doors sawn in half, like stable doors (so "Mister could see what his children were up to" - and that's a quote from the Mrs); hidden video surveillance equipment for bedroom spying, and a basement whose floors had deep, irreparable cracks from where they'd let their horses sleep inside. (They also had dead horses buried on the property.)

And so it was that when our son was just over a year old, we bought a tiny, nondescript "cottage" in a town that borders Woodstock, NY. The neighborhood was lovely, not too rural for cidiots like us. My sister lived nearby, we could walk to the supermarket (if we wanted to), and our neighbors were in plain sight.

The house looked innocent enough. It was actually charming, and I remember smiling when we drove up with the realtor. A little white clapboard house, screened front porch, nice garden, good neighborhood...

Cut to 2007. So many people told us to take before and after pictures. But we were young and carefree then and believed that it would all be over so quickly that we'd remember every detail. We're now on our 5th year of renovation, with budget, time constraints, family responsibilities, and other life realities playing major roles in the delay. The quaint cottage we bought has had so many secrets to share with us, and so many tricks up its aluminum-clad sleeves. Our personal favorite was the COMPLETE lack of insulation and the triple layers of sheetrock on every wall.

May I say that I have learned to love the pry bar, cherish the 5-ply black trash bag, and adore a fine, steady wheel barrow. I have salivated at the sight of a dumpster's arrival in my driveway; and I have cried when standing hip-deep in demotlion rubble. Many, many, times, in fact.

I promise, if anyone reads this and says they care, that I'm going to dig up what pictures I can find and post them here some day. But today, I have the ones we made a conscious effort to take, and I apologize that the very first photographs I share might make your hair curl (or your stomach turn). They are 1) post-demo but pre-clean-up of our livingroom; 2) what lurked behind the sheetrock; and 3) what else lurked behind the sheetrock.