The Remodeled Blog

A Painted Room

The bathroom has paint! It is actually looking like a real room. We have walls and a ceiling and PAINT! Though you can’t really tell the color, it is a light almost french blue. Very pretty. Those of you who have seen it in person can attest to the pleasantness of the color. So these are pretty boring pics, but it just shows how now we have paint on the walls and ceiling. Oh yeah, and the most amazing tephlon paint pan. I know this really isnt exciting to most people but it is so cool. When your paint drys you can peel it out like a big sheet. It is like when you have a sun burn and get that big piece of skin to peel off…gross yes but also amazingly satisfying. The paint peel has much the same effect. Ok…so here are my really boring photos.

See, how cool is that!

Like I said, not the most exciting pics, but we are making progress on the bathroom. I know we are remodeling like sloths…but they still move just very very slowly. =)

Wait, is it my birthday?

No it isn’t my birthday. It isn’t even close to my birthday anymore. But it feels like it is because when I came back from my trip I discovered that Dave had done a bunch of work on the bathroom! WE HAVE A CEILING!!!! and it is vaulted…ooo, fancy. We have an installed light, that vents. We have drywall! Every wall in the bathroom officially is covered by drywall or tile! I can no longer see the insides of my walls! If you have never experienced the upheaval of remodeling than it will be hard for you to truly empathize with the excitement of NOT seeing the inside of your walls. It is like bliss on tap…and those work too!

So now I am being a busy busy little worker bee and am mudding and sanding the drywall. It is hot. You sweat a lot. It is dusty. Did I mention that you sweat a lot. So you basically get covered in a drywall cake. Trust me when I tell you that it is not as sexy as it sounds. But I have mudded all the walls and done my first round of sanding. Tomorrow I should be able to finish off the sanding and then maybe even move on to a coat of paint!

Here are the pics of our beautiful work:

You will, of course, note the vaulted ceiling…and my wonderful mudding work.

Here I am, in my dusty glory.

Look, no more exposed wires.

Not the greatest picture, but you can see the light and the beautiful (and soon to be white) bead board ceiling.

The first step is the hardest

Finally we are moving forward with work on the house. Between visitors, visiting, school, work, being exhausted and general laziness we have done some work on the house! I finally got a ladder, ok I got it a while ago, but I finally got a ladder that will allow me to paint the window above the bulk head. The glass is now re-glazed, storm window removed, and base coat of paint applied. Tonight I am going to put the top coat of paint on the window and all the windows will be completely, 100% done. On to the second floor!…eek.

Dave dove right into, ok more like he has edged his big toe in the water of bathroom work before jumping in. But now he is in! and the result…all the electrical work is done. If we had tile on the floors they could be warm on the tootsies. If the beautiful venting light were installed, it would look amazing and functional. Currently it is beautiful and functional sitting on top of the bath tub. =)

So we are officially moving forward with the bathroom and the house paining! Yippee!!!

From top to bottom: thermostat for the floor, light switch and junction box

This is our light/fan…though obviously not mounted. One step at a time here people, really!

It even works! ooooo…pretty!

I know this doesn’t look like a big step forward..but really, it was a lot of work.  Running wires and doing wiring takes a lot longer than you might think. Then you are wonderfully left with the anticlimactic feeling of not doing much. Well, except for those darn lights working.

Remodeling Yoga

Lou asked me a pertinent and interesting question, why did I post before pics of my door but not the after pics. Well that is because it looks the same as it did in the before. Now I am sure you are wondering why this is. Well, when you are remodeling an old house there is no such thing as a simple project. As soon as you drop a hammer into one wall you find out that you have to remodel four other rooms. The hallway project actually started out with the bathroom remodel. The wall next to the stairs use to look like this. So there are actually before before pictures. When we moved in we had to wall up that doorway so when you walked into the house you weren’t looking at our toilet. Then that necessitated a remodel of the entryway (of course the bad paint and bad wallpaper also cried out for such work), but this just shows how if you touch one room in an old house you inevitably touch another.

So why does the doorway look the same, well, our house is mainly [tag]knob and tube[/tag] wiring. For those of you who don’t know what that is, that is really old wiring that often likes to spontaneously set your house on fire because there is no ground. So among all of our other projects there is the constant background project of replacing all our [tag]wiring[/tag]. This wall has a light switch that needs such work. That light switch is connected to the light for the [tag]foyer[/tag], which also needs such modernizing. Because I did not want to have to replaster, repaint and replace the trim…again…I decided to leave that wall as it stood and finish that part when the wiring is done (which will hopefully be soon).

So to just finish that wall, we need to rewire the light switch, rewire the light in the foyer and on the porch, which these are connected to the rewiring taking place in the upstairs bathroom which has to be separated from the wiring in the attic. Then there is also the big question, do i finish that wall before we replace the front door? or should I wait until after…hmmm. I am thinking before and I can just repaint when needed.

This is part of what makes living and working on an old house so interesting. Nothing is simple. The only thing that is straight forward is that you have to be flexible. So I practice my [tag]yoga[/tag] with a hammer in one hand and a nail gun in the other and I try for downward facing dog while ripping apart plaster. Ah, the joys of an old house.

Wearing Red Lipstick

A new entryway is like wearing red [tag]lipstick[/tag]. I say this because your entryway is the first thing people see when they come into your house, much like your lips are the first thing people see when they look at your face. If they don’t have red lipstick, people often won’t notice, no matter how fabulous they are. If you do have red lips, they absolutely notice and usually say wow. Well, now our entry way is like our house is wearing red lipstick. It was this ugly pinkish taupe painted [tag]foyer[/tag] with strange rose [tag]wallpaper[/tag] trimming the crown molding and the trim going up the stairwell. There were cracks in the [tag]plaster[/tag] the horrible cheap white painted crown molding, which doesn’t even deserve the title [tag]crown molding[/tag].

So for a while I had been waiting and waiting and waiting to do some work on the house. It is, or can be, a stress relief for me. Plus I get to feel like we are making progress on all our projects and the dream of living in a house not under construction comes a little closer. But the main projects, like the bathroom, are not ready for me to work on. I have found this to be enormously frustrating. Sitting around waiting for other people to get motivated to do work so you can do work. It just drives me nuts! So in my irritation, I realized that the entry way needed to be redone. We have always spoken of it, but it has been one of those projects that just fall to the wayside. The only time we ever thought about it was when we were giving someone the “grand” tour and we would mention, “oh, someday we are going to redo the entry.” Well someday finally came. As I was stewing in irritation and feeling entirely impotent in house remodeling, I remembered the hallway and I tore into it like a dervish.

So roughly a weekend worth or work, and details spreading over the next week, which was mainly waiting for stain to set, I redid the entry and it looks beautiful! It makes such a difference. Now if we can just get some natural light so people can see what I have done, we will be all set….but that is another project.

But much like any project working on an old house, nothing is as simple as it looks. All the wallpaper had to be taken off with a razor blade. We had to shave plaster away from the wall to mount the trim, so what Dave thought would take 15 minutes took over an hour. But overall, it was a pretty simple job…and highly satisfying.

Working on your house gives you a bigger sense of accomplishment than just completion. There is a part of yourself that goes into everything you do. You get to see this beautiful old house turn into a truly beautiful old house. The house has good cheek bones, as my mom would say, and now you are starting to be able to see what we saw when we closed our eyes. The beauty is hiding underneath dull wood, bad paint, and a hundred years of wallpaper, but it is there. Not only do I love this house, I am proud of it. I am proud because I know that what I have done may help this house live for another hundred years.