it's not a real renovation unless you go to the studs

The blog has been silent, but we have not been idle.
Life is getting in the way of home improvements, but we've managed to make some progress.

2 weekends ago we did a lot of small things around the house - hanging light fixtures, new curtain rods, new switchplates, etc. A lot of little things that make a big difference.

This weekend we decided to tackle the circa 1982 bathroom:

The cheap shower doors leaked, resulting in mold/mildew problems on the corners of the tub (see black junk under the sink in the last photo). We were hopeful that it would be relatively contained and only require a small amount of repair work...

That was a nice (fleeting) thought:

The backwall of the bathroom and the wall opposite the water spout were wallpapered before the shower surround was (poorly) put up. So the wallpaper had helped to wick the water/mildew up the walls a good 2-3 feet. The painted wall didn't fair much better, given that they used regular drywall in the bathroom.

The "up side" is that the poor construction made it really easy to keep the shower surround in tact when we removed it, which will help to keep costs down on this "small"/temporary renovation (we're planning a full remodel/expansion of the upstairs in a few years).

We stopped there for the weekend, leaving us a functional half-bath upstairs (with our bedroom).

Of course all of this work is just in time for my mom to come visit again while we do bathroom work. Poor mom - sometime she will get to visit when we don't all have to share one 5x7 bathroom.

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In non-house news, I landed a TA position last week. Hopefully this will help fund a few more small house projects during the semester.

renovation fuel

I guess J doesn't want me to run out of energy anytime soon.

We've settle on a date for our housewarming party as a self-imposed deadline to get a few things done: September 17th. Which, it occurs to me, is also one month from today.We were planning to spend this upcoming weekend tackling our circa 1982 upstairs bathroom - but the days are quickly filling up with (dog) rescue work and possibly entertaining some of J's new classmates. We need to get to the bathroom soon - the shower doors leak and as a result we have a lovelymold/mildew problem under the sink:



It looks much better than it is in reality. I generally try to shower and brush my teeth with my eyes closed and get the heck out of there as quickly as possible.

ch-ch-ch-changes

Today I officially gave notice at my job. I'll be there for another 4-6 weeks, depending upon how quickly my boss can get a replacement in (I'm the only employee - and I promised that I would give him a lot of lead time to hire someone new).
This (2 full-time grad students, 0 full-time jobs) wasn't the original plan, but if you don't take a few risks in your life - what are you doing?


As requested by Trissa, one dog who is far too busy romping in her yard to stop and pose for photos:

We are tired.

We had big, ambitious plans for the weekend. It wasn't clear that we were going to even come close to knocking everything off of our list, but, frankly, we kicked ass.

The office is no longer a dark hole of black and green paint:
Going...

Going...


Gone...



Just in the nick of time - my little sister is coming to visit us for two days starting tomorrow morning. Now we actually have a pleasant room for guests to sleep in.

The color is a silvery blue, instead of the gray-blue that I was initially aiming for. I knew I was running the risk of erring on this side because I was very concerned about not picking anything too dark (the room gets very little sunlight). The good news is that blue is my favorite color, so I'm happy with just about any shade.

We also had to completely dismantle one half of the L-shaped desk to get it into the room (it has been sitting in the living room waiting for us to paint). The upside is that the pieces are much lighter than the whole.

Putting the office together also freed up some room in the living room to actually put the furniture in place. If you squint hard, you can almost imagine this as a habitable room. Now J just needs to unpack his 23904823940283402 books and we will be well on our way to clearing the moving boxes out of this room.

Finally, we solved the bizarre backyard dog mystery.
Around 4 weeks ago the poo suddenly started refusing to walk on the grass in our backyard. She was fine on the back patio, fine in our front yard and fine wandering around anyone else's yard on walks. She simply would.not.under.any.circumstances voluntarily walk on the grass in our backyard. Even if her favorite person (me) stood 5' into the yard with a treat.
It was very bizarre. It all started one Saturday afternoon while we were out. There was a large thunderstorm while we were away and when we got back, she started up with this. I called the vet after exhausting all of my ideas and they suggested that maybe there had been a lightening strike in/near the backyard that had freaked her out. With their advice we tried to coax her back into the yard with treats and praise - still nothing. I spent an afternoon with the landscaping rake pulling all of the dead thatch out of the grass to see if that helped. No. We watered the grass repeatedly, thinking it was something in the rain. No. We thought maybe she didn't like the saw dust from the recycled timbers we'd used to build the raised garden bed - so we spread some top soil and new grass seed over the area where we'd been working. No.
Finally I thought that it might be the diseased apple tree in the middle of the yard. It was located in a position where the canopy reached right to the edge of the patio and covered the area of the yard that she was the freakiest about. The tree had to come down anyway because it is A. diseased B. non-fruiting C. smack dab in the middle of the yard D. growing into the overhead cable and phone lines.
This weekend it was only in the 70s and the best chance for outdoor manual labor in a long time. So we went for it - we took the tree down, picked up all the debris and raked the diseased leaves out of the grass. The dog now happily romps all over the back yard.

Before:

During:
After:

split personality

The right side of our house is neat and orderly, the left side of our house is a disaster area.
Last night I couldn't take it anymore so I cleaned all of the remodeling tools/supplies out of the dining room, family room and kitchen. Finally we have a living space that isn't under construction.

On the right side of the house we have the neat and orderly kitchen, dining room and living room (and the non-cluttered hallway upstairs). On the left side of the house we have the disaster areas known as our living room, office and upstairs bedroom. It seems fitting in a left brain/right brain way.

Some people have requested photos of the interior, which I have been holding off on until there were some clean rooms (we were so harried on moving day there was no time to take photos of the empty rooms). Without futher ado:

The kitchen:
This room isn't changing much in the first remodeling pass. We've already installed a new kitchen faucet. We have a new light fixture (yet to be installed) to replace the ceiling fan. We also plan to swap the fridge and the small sideboard to create more counter space near the stove and make it more accessible. This will require installing a new outlet for the fridge, which is why it hasn't happened yet. Eventually we will paint.
In the second pass of remodeling (2+ years from now) we will replace the fridge, the flooring and the countertops, add a dishwasher and replace the sideboard with upper and lower cabinets.

The dining room:
This just needs to have the new light installed. The red paint is from the previous owner (PO). While it's not my favorite shade of red and I hate that the ceiling is painted in the same red, it will stay this way for the forseeable future becasue it's really not all that objectionable. We have a new light fixture which needs to be installed - the current light fixture would be cool if it wasn't cheap plastic.

(note the classy cable wire which needs to be run up around the edge of the ceiling in the family room)

The family room:

The only thing we're doing in here on the first pass is replacing the sagging curtain rods and replacing the valances on the back windows with some matching ones that don't have scallops (which the PO left for us). All of the molding around the windows in this room is plastic. Several windows also don't fit correctly and are plugged with expanding foam. It's lovely. You may also be able to make out the crank for the security shutters on the back window. There is a matching crank behind the drapes for other large bank of windows. These are the only two sets of windows in the house that have security shutters - which makes me think??? Are you just trying to encourage the burglar to break a smaller, less expensive window? The corresponding metal boxes which house the security shutters on the exterior are also extremely attractive. Someday we will fix all of that.
It makes it sound like this room is hideous, but actually it's fantastic. The windows give us a great view of our yard and let in a lot of light. There's also a door to the back patio off to the right in the first photo. Add in my beloved sectional couch and it's my favorite room in the house.

On the other side of the house we have this (ironically, the living room):
And this - the office/sorry excuse for a guest room where we have made my wonderful parents who came to help us out sleep!:
I refuse to post a photo of our bedroom.

The office is the project for the weekend. J started patching the hole from replumbing the shower last night and tonight we're going to get everything prepped for painting. As you can see in the photo, there is one VERY dark green wall that I'm dreading. We also have to repaint the ceiling as it is currently the same color as the tan walls. If all goes according to our (overly ambitious) plan, we will have the office painted and "put together" by the end of the weekend.

We have another "big change" in the works, but I won't say anything more about that until it's official next week.

rested and refreshed

We've fallen silent on the blog for one of the best reasons ever: Vacation!
We got back from a whole week at a cabin on a lake in the middle of nowhere (seriously, the nearest town didn't even have one horse). No agenda for 7 straight days - sleep, swim, read, eat and play cards. Just what the doctor ordered.

Before we left we made some progress on the house.

One of those projects that you don't talk about it until it's over - the busted lock on the front door. We went about two weeks without a functioning deadbolt (just the handle lock). Obviously this was a priority task for before vacation. I wish I could say more about the process, as it was a process to replace the thing, but I have no idea what happened because J labored away on it while I took a nap one day after work.

We also pushed to "finish" the bathroom (I still need to re-paint the door and window trim, but since we don't shower in this bathroom, it is now fully functional for us).
Complete with beautiful new, hard-to-find 11" on center tub supplies:

The bathroom has about 12 different shades of white in it - the tub, toilet, sink, ceramic wall tiles, plastic wall tiles, shower curtain, floor tiles, caulk, grout, air vents and shades on the light are all different shades of white. J picked out the very bold color for the walls, which I think is fantastic and has the unexpected bonus of drawing the eye away from the aforementioned shades of white:

We also have a new gas stove. The house came with an old (but not ancient - read: cool) electric stove, complete with oven that never fully turned off. We were planning to buy one "soon" anyway, but J got a fantastic deal on a last-year-and-floor-model clearance Jenn Air, which is about 2x as nice as the stove we planned to buy and was only 25% more expensive. There was also the happy surprise of an existing gas line - saving us $$ on the gas company service call. (J will do water pipes, but not gas pipes):We do not normally decorate the stove with bamboo.

There have been other big changes in our household. We are officially 1/2 way to poor grad students. J's final day at his job was a week ago last Friday. He starts the MBA program tomorrow morning.

This, combined with the fact that we are sick of living with the two rooms of boxes, has moved the completion of the office to the top of the priority list. We have a busy week (getting my car ready to sell), so it will be our project for this weekend.