remodelling – Counterspectacle

The office is painted!

Jess on February 12, 2011

In a mad rush during snowpocalypse, I finished sanding the office and getting it ready for paint. I even primed it and then applied the first coat of paint. The first coat of paint should have also been the only coat of paint as we were using top of the line Valspar, but alas, it went on terribly and left roller marks in different colors. So, I returned to our earlier plan of just pretending the room didn’t exist.

Today, I finally went out and got another can of paint from Lowe’s and begged them for advice. I think when I painted the first coat I rushed through it, possibly had a cheap roller, and ended up going back over areas when they didn’t really need that. Apparently, dark paint colors can be harder to work with so I guess you need to be more careful about it. Also, with this paint the difference between dry and wet is fairly distinct and things look unpainted or under-painted when they’re really just in the middle of drying. So this time I painted as recommended: in a w motion and in small sections making sure to always keep a wet edge.

It turned out much much much better.

And, while I painted, I thought about that weird character trait in me where I am super good at following directions if people can give me a reason for them. It’s like the time my brother had to have surgery to repair a spiral fracture in his ankle and told me that he had googled why he couldn’t eat before surgery and it wasn’t until he realized they tell you not to eat because you could choke on vomit during surgery and die that he decided to follow a doctor’s advice. Maybe it’s a family thing.

Finally finishing the office

Jess on January 31, 2011

Today was a Snow Day! I dawdled in bed until about 10:30 and then got up and spent the rest of the day tearing through the remainder of the work that needs to be done in the office. We already picked out paint for the room which was a lot of impetus to work. We’re going with Fine China Blue which is basically exactly the color of blue on Wedgewood china. Saturday, we bought that vintage drafting table and so now I’m in a rush to get it all set up. I am so excited about all of it.

Tonight I discovered the image above. Obviously we don’t have a second drafting table but we also don’t have quite this much space. I’m hoping I can arrange something like this though. I especially love the two work lights. I might have to do that.

Tedious or outright impossible? Wallpaper removal stage

Jess on October 10, 2010

We are at the point in re-modelling where it is time for the wallpaper to come down. In this whole process, there has never been much of a bad time for the wallpaper to come down, but after demo was finished, we have had a lot of different kinds of contractors in and out of the place and I was out of town for a weekend so I’m getting around to it starting last Monday and continuing yesterday. I had to take a break throughout the week because we were without water in the house for a few days last week after an incident involving the shower. Also, our shower now turns on by hose valve attached to the shower head. It’s a great look for an upstairs bathroom. Luckily, the room is a total afterthought to me. I haven’t even really thought about color schemes or fixtures or changes I want to make to it. It is just the room with the window that looks out at my favorite tree and it is basically a Johnny-on-the-Spot at our worksite. Really.

We happen to be very cursed with the kind of wallpaper that was applied directly to drywall. This means that it’s difficult to take down. I want to emphasize that it’s difficult but apparently not impossible. I’ve read a lot of places that it’s impossible and that you should consider painting over the paper. But our paper was somewhat poorly applied so it’s coming down in too many places and re-gluing it to the wall would likely take as long as removing it with worse results.

Yesterday, I started at this point and I now have all of the wallpaper above the border removed. Today, it is back at this room and then I may get going on an upstairs bedroom or too because I’m convinced that will be a little bit easier because there isn’t three or four layers of wallpaper to work with. And, I kind of sort of have the hang of it. Sort of.

An HVAC crash course I can now forget

Jess on September 28, 2010

Like wedding planning, re-modelling a house is one of the best-worst times of my life so far. This week, it’s a good week. We got word today that we will be able to run return vents to the upstairs (read: run central air upstairs) and stay within our budget.

We had been told that there was not space for the duct work required for return vents. Without the return vents, we’d have two options for the second story:

not very functional central air.
non-existent central air.

Because of the lack of return vents, we’d be likely have an upstairs that was 8 degrees warmer than the rest of the house year round. Likely, this inability to properly cool the upstairs because hot air has no escape would mean that our air conditioner would overwork itself while running too little to cool the house. Most of the stories I read online suggested that air conditioners run too hard trying to cool the upstairs and then cool the downstairs to the set thermostat temperature and stop. So the upstairs never gets cool and the air conditioner breaks

Our other option of no central air would have meant hotter summers than with the air conditioner and the stories on how cold we’d be in winter range from Mom and Dad’s horror stories of scraping frost off the window as children to the HVAC contractors’ opinions that the gravity vents would work fine and our heating/cooling woes would not be as big of a problem in winter.

Contractors had also told us that the only work around would require adding walls which means unplanned framing and drywalling of three new walls and a loss of floor space. Luckily, our current HVAC contractor can get large enough return vents upstairs to make the whole system work correctly. I guess it pays to work local with someone who has some experience trying to squeeze return vents into old houses.

Hooray, now I can forget everything I know about forced heating.

Remodelling Our First Home: Before Photos

Jess on September 19, 2010

You know, it’s called remodelling, but I really feel like we’re just modelling because we’ve never lived in it and it was difficult to comprehend how someone lived in it when we bought it. However, we have a vision for the place and we’re excited for work to start getting done. We hope that when we get to the end of our tiny budget, we can take pictures of the house as we envision it now, or, at least, with drywall.

It’s not completely clear from the photos, but the house consists of two floors. The main floor has the living room, master, dining room, bathroom, and kitchen. Plus, there is a room that used to be a porch that will (hopefully) become part master closet and part laundry room. On the second floor, there are three bedrooms and one bathroom. The bedrooms don’t actually have closets in them, the closets are the three pictured in the hallway.

I’ll likely be posting more about the remodeling because I need to remember the process, keep people updated, and vent.