ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Dine, Dine, My Darling

Posted by claire | November 17, 2009, 11:45 pm | Permalink

I can proudly say that we actually, fully, completely finished one room in our house.  More spaces have been painted and other projects have been tackled, but no other space in the house is as completely complete as our fantastic, wonderful, dining room.  Do I sound proud?  I am.  I was beginning to get the feeling that we would continually begin projects in every room and never fully complete one.  Thankfully, this accomplishment has lead to a new sense of accomplishment and a drive to get more more more done!

On Monday, Garth began describing some of the crazy processes that we went through to get to this point.  When we moved in, the room was peach-ish and rose colored.  We are attracted to bright colors and really feel like they help reflect light in what can be a very gray part of the country.  Our new, blue space feels clean, bright and slightly modern with a tough of baroque detailing to help push the ornate victorian-ness of our house.

Tackling just the walls in this space was a serious ordeal.  The drywalling took forever and Garth still shakes his head at some of the corners in the room.  Taping off the room before we could use an air sprayer on the textured wall paper took me nearly two full days of tedious work.  The ceiling had been painted peach, which meant Garth had to spend time stretching his arms to apply coat after coat of ceiling paint to the room.

Painting the matte blue on the upper portion of the walls felt like a breeze, but when I pulled off all the masking I had so carefully applied to the lower portion of the wall paint had leaked in and some other paint peeled off– this required two more days of tedious scraping and touching up to keep clean lines on the white molding between the textured wallpaper.

Next, there was the gloss pattern we applied over the matte blue paint.  This was time consuming and frustrating, but when the job was done I appreciated the subtle, larger pattern on the upper part of the wall paired with the smaller, textured damask pattern on the lower portion of the wall.

We then re-hung the old molding, and I spent two days repainting it and hand painting a white line around the room to even out the bottom edge (the molding is very old and has clearly been removed and replaced by more people than just me and Garth, leaving an uneven, jagged bottom edge).

When all of this was finally accomplished, we were able to move in some furniture.  In a previous post, I told you about the wonderful Danish Modern china cabinet that we scored at a local antique shop.  Once this was in the room, I could actually unpack our china and some of the ceramics that we have collected.  Not long after moving the cabinet into the space, we finished paying off our Craigslist table and chairs.  This set is also Danish Modern and included a slightly mismatched set of chairs– three of one style and three of another.  This was fine with us as we were able to score two more modern dining chairs at a garage sale (five dollars each!) that match closely enough to make the mismatching charming and intentional.  I love our new table, it can be collapsed to a complete circle or be expanded to accommodate twelve people by adding three leaves!  I like the versatility this offers for entertaining.

Hanging some art was my next step, and always my favorite part of pulling together a room.  Garth and I made it a goal when we got married to be sure to collect the work of artists that we like.  For each anniversary, we choose a new piece of art to add to our collection rather than giving each other individual gifts.  We have also each been trading art with friends for years so we have plenty of options when it is time to adorn the walls.

Let me give you a brief tour of the work we have in the dining room.

Because the portion of the room available for hanging art is so high and small, I choose groupings of smaller works for the walls.  These three pen drawings are by Kate Bingaman-Burt, a Portland based artist who draws something she buys every day.  Her drawing are charming and you can find her graphic design in the hand lettering in the Handmade Nation book as well as in the New York Times.  She has also has a new book coming out in March.

On this wall I arranged some of our softer, stitched pieces.  The splayed, dissected, crocheted frog was a Valentine’s Day gift from Garth the he found at this great Etsy site.

On the far left is a crocheted gun by Stephanie Syjuco, a brilliant San Fransisco artist who has so many projects and ideas it will make your head spin.  We were first attracted to her work when we found out about her counterfeit crochet project.

Next to the gun are some lovely machine-stitched tattoos by the incredible Theresa Honeywell. Theresa makes incredible work investigating macho gender rolls and “feminine” handicrafts.  Her crocheted motorcycle is a work of wonder.

Almost too small to see is a delicate piece by Diem Chau.  I love her carved crayons but absolutely fell in love with this tiny bowl covered in sheer silk with two embroidered hands.

This next grouping consists of a small collaged drawing by Stephanie Dotson, an amazing printmaker, installation artist, and graphic designer, a hand colored lithograph by Athens, GA artist Rizzie Gallego, and a fun foam polariod of and abominable snow man by Amanda Burk– printmaker and comedienne extraordinaire.

Above the china cabinet, I am reserving space for some drawings I am expecting from Erin Zona and her Black Box series (I guess with these missing the room is technically not finished).

The final piece that I want to point out is the incredible ceramic work by Jeffrey Kaller.  What seems to be a blooming object pulled from years beneath the sea is a magnificent sculpture.  This piece often baffles guests and the fact that it is made of clay always impresses.  We love Jeff’s work and were glad to see a piece much like ours gracing the cover of 500 Ceramic Sculptures.

After the art, the final touch in this room came together this weekend.  When we began work on the dining room there was a new-ish chandelier hanging in the room.  It was large and incorporated metal leaves and twisting tendrils of vine.  This was, in short, not to our taste.  As we were on the hunt for affordable and nice furniture we added new chandelier to the list.  We scoured antique and thrift stores and looked and looked for a variety of options on the internet.

The decision finally came that a black crystal chandelier on eBay was the right match for our room.  It has an ornate flair with a slightly modern edge.  We placed our order and it came, half wired and completely disassembled, three weeks later.  This weekend we pulled it out of the box and spent the better part of the day wiring and rewiring the chandelier, flipping the breaker to find different combinations of lights working (or not).  There was a lot of cursing and long periods of time holding a heavy chandelier overhead while Garth wired it and attempted to anchor it to the ceiling.  Attaching the dangling crystals took me a few more hours, but it was finally finished.  A completed room!  Maybe soon we can even have people over for dinner?

[15 comments]

D.I.Y. Wallpaper For the Totally Insane

Posted by Garth | November 15, 2009, 11:25 pm | Permalink

I’m so excited.  Claire and I just put the final touches on our dining room, bringing the number of finished rooms in our house up to FOUR!  I’m going to let Claire do the full reveal of the room in the next post, but in the meantime, I’ll share our experiences with painting the room.

Last week, I told you about our first experiences with the wonderful world of drywall.  We ended up being happy with the result, and thankful that we didn’t have to drywall a bigger area.  The lower half of the room was originally decorated with beige textured wallpaper trimmed with white molding.  The upper part of the walls were covered in rose floral wallpaper.  This room needed a major makeover.

We decided on an electric blue color (Startling Blue from Ace Hardware) to compliment the crayon green that we had chosen for our living room.  Humboldt County is gray and foggy much of the year, so we decided to put as much bright color as possible into our first floor.  We liked the textured wallpaper, but the color had to go.  We didn’t want roller or brush marks on the texture, so we carefully masked off the trim and floor, then borrowed a friend’s airless paint spray gun.

If you haven’t used a spray gun before, we found out they make a HUGE mess.  It only took 1/2 hour to spray the room, but it took a whole day to do all of the masking.  Despite our care and attention to detail, paint spray still managed to find its way into a few nooks and crannies we missed with the tape.  Spraying would have been much easier if there was less trim.  In the end, the wainscoting looked great.  It was worth the effort.

We wanted to use a baroque-ish damask pattern for the rest of the wall above the white trim, so we scoured wallpaper websites and stores.  Damask wallpaper is totally hot right now, so you’d think it would be easy to find a pattern and color that fit with our color scheme.

You’d be wrong.

Most current damask wallpaper either comes in ultra-trendy chocolate and pink color schemes that will be out of style in a year or two (if they aren’t already).  Other damask wallpaper comes in a weird “pre-distressed” pattern that looks like the designer was trying to combine Versailles and a Mountain Dew ad.  Wallpaper can also be CRAZY EXPENSIVE!  Evidently, we have champagne taste, because everything that appealed to us was more than $100 per roll.

Plan B gave us much more creative control, and it was much cheaper, but it involved a ton of labor.

We happen to own our own vinyl plotter.  If you’re unfamiliar with them, they’re what professional sign companies use to cut letters and graphics out of vinyl for signs and banners.  What the sign companies don’t want you to know is that vinyl cutters have become very affordable.  We originally wanted to buy a small craft cutter like a Cricut, but we found a 25″ vinyl cutter for $300, which was much cheaper than the Cricut, but offered a larger cutting area.  Vinyl cutters are fairly easy to use.  Claire and I both use it for our art, and we wind up using it for signs every now and then.  It’s easy to use a program like Adobe Illustrator to design shapes, patterns or text that can be cut with the vinyl plotter.

I tried my hand at designing a pattern, but I wound up finding a vector pattern on a stock illustration website for $10 that we liked even better.

We bought a roll of cheap masking vinyl for $60 that would cover the entire room.  We used the vinyl cutter to cut the repeatable damask pattern up, and peeled away all of the areas that show up white on the illustration above.  That took a LONG time.

When you apply vinyl, you also need to use transfer paper, a paper that you stick on to the non-adhesive side of your vinyl to hold it together.  Then peel the adhesive backing from the vinyl and stick it to the wall.  You can find detailed instructions HERE.

Before we applied the vinyl, we primed the drywall and painted it our electric blue color with the flattest base we could find.  Then, we applied our vinyl.  You can see a photo of Claire above, aligning the sheets of vinyl and peeling off the transfer paper.

After we finished applying the white vinyl to the whole room (it took several days), we painted on three thin layers of acrylic varnish with a big sponge brush.  After the varnish dried, we carefully peeled up the vinyl, leaving a subtle gloss damask pattern on our flat blue wall.

It looks incredibly badass.

If you’re crazy enough to try this on your own, the possibilities are endless.  In exchange for your labor, you get complete creative control.  Think of this like your mother’s (or at least my mother’s) 80’s stencil project on steroids.  You can design your own wall treatments using any color combinations, or you could even use flocking powder to create your own flocked wall.

Of course you don’t need to use the vinyl as a mask…..you could put the vinyl directly on the wall instead.  You can buy nearly any color and finish, including glitter and glow in the dark.  You can buy an inexpensive vinyl cutter through U.S. Cutter HERE.

Update:  It looks like their store isn’t selling our inexpensive model…but they have it on their eBay store HERE.

Stay tuned for Claire’s reveal of our finished Danish Modern meets Baroque dining room.

[11 comments]

Room for Improvement

Posted by claire | November 10, 2009, 9:33 pm | Permalink

Getting our bedroom to a point where we could move our things in and start sleeping in the space seemed to take forever.  However, once the walls were painted we were able to haul our bed into the room and finally stop sleeping on the floor.  This was an immediate solution to the stress I was feeling our first few weeks in the house.  It took some time to start arranging things in the room, but initially just the color we chose for the walls was relaxing enough to create a refuge.

I have always like Tiffany Box Blue as a color for walls– it is bright, cheery, and it really makes white pop against it.  I began a crazy hunt to figure out how to get my hands on some Tiffany Box Blue paint.  This is a tough task, because Tiffany’s has the rights over that specific color.  This means that no one can sell a true Tiffany Box Blue– even the Pantone color (called Tiffany Blue) is unavailable, which seems nuts, but is true.  I spent some time in several different paint aisles searching the blues.  The nearest match I found was Benjamin Moore’s color Scuba Green.  Yes, it has green in the name, but it is as close to Tiffany Box Blue and I could get.  This color is luminescent on the walls and at just the right time in the late afternoon our entire room seems to glow.  We love it.

The room is not finished, but I am going to show you where we are in the process of pulling it together so far.

After we painted the walls, we decided that the brassy wall sconce fixtures in the room were a bit too, well, brassy.  Silver and white look so nice with our Scuba Green walls and we found two discounted, brushed silver sconces on sale at our local hardware store.  It was quick and easy to swap these out and the silver looks much better.

I found a $35 dresser on Craigslist that looks good now and can be switched out later if I find something I prefer.  In our never-ending garage sale quest we scored a lovely, antique round mirror for $10.  I pulled these things into the room first and went from there.

Because white looks so nice against the Scuba Green walls, I grabbed a painting from our collection that we love by Merrliee Challis.  It looked great on the wall near the window and I was attracted to way the touch of red in this painting stood out in contrast to the wall color.  Below the painting I hung this small collection of metal box frames I picked up in Mexico years ago.  I lined the inside of them with red velvet and stitched some little milagros charms inside.

With this small arrangement on the wall I had suddenly decided on a vague color scheme for the room– white and Scuba Green with touches of red.

At another garage sale we picked up a $5 shelf that I hauled home and painted white, it fit nicely in the corner beneath the painting, etc.

Because the small metal box frames worked so well beneath Merrilee’s painting I decided to hang my collection of Mexican tin mirrors on another wall.  The bright silver stands out on the walls and reflects natural light from the window, which really helps to brighten up the room.

Looking at Merrilee’s painting and all the vein-y lines reminded me that Garth and I had picked up a couple of faux coral wall hooks and matching drawer pulls at a flea market last year (in anticipation of the home we knew we would be decorating).  I dug these out of a box and liked their vein-y quality hanging close to the painting.  They seemed like a perfect decorative way to organize some of my jewelry.  I screwed the two hooks on either side of the round mirror and mounted the small drawer pulls on an oval piece of wood (you can pick these up at most craft stores– though mine came from the thrift store) that I painted white.  Once all these things were up on the wall, everything felt like it was made to go in the space.

At this point I turned my attention to the window treatments.  Initially the windows had very long, sheer curtains that ended in lace.  We enjoyed the light filtered through the sheer curtains but weren’t found of the way the length disguised the interesting shape of our window.  I pulled these down and shortened them.  I also used this pattern to create a draped window with red trim.

For now, this is what has been achieved in the bedroom. Now for the bigger problem, which is what I am still hoping to tackle in the room.

I am sure you have been wondering about the completely bizarre, round, beige carpeted bed that sits in our room.  The bed was part of Garth’s dowry when we were married.  He acquired it in college when he was a swinging independent record store owner in Lincoln, Nebraska.  It was a charming asset when we first met, and though all of his old friends seem to expect his wife to give it the old heave-ho, I like the bed.  It is quirky and weird and Elvis has one in Graceland.  Above the mirrored section is a stereo and eight track player.  Hidden in the hood there used to be a t.v. set with a tiny, tiny screen that Garth has since replaced with a small flat screen (at the moment none of this technology is hooked up because neither one of us can stay awake to watch television when lying down).

I love the bed, but can’t stand the bedside tables that came with it– one is conveniently covered in mirror (the height of [sniffffffffffff] function in the 70’s), the other is just a small cylinder covered in matching beige carpet.  We need to locate two night stands that have storage to hold our bedside books, alarm and radio.  I have yet to stumble upon the right nightstand solution.

The next problem is that the bed HAS GOT to be reupholstered.  I have always liked the bed and hated the upholstery.  I haven’t settled on the right fabric yet (nor have I actually finished an upholstery job).  Here is where you can all help me out– you’ve seen our room and decorations, is there a great source for upholstery fabric somewhere that I haven’t found?  Do you have good suggestions for the bed overhaul?  Fabric choices?  Upholstery advice?  This is going to be a big job, but I think I can handle it after I have found a good source for fabric.  I would also love to hear any helpful tips or be pointed to good upholstery internet resources.  Thanks in advance for your help and sweet dreams!

[14 comments]

My Name is (Drywall) Mud

Posted by Garth | November 8, 2009, 11:12 pm | Permalink

Oh drywall, that most underappreciated of the construction arts.  It’s messy and finicky, but it’s got a (relatively) short learning curve.  HOWEVER, there is a huge gap between the skills of a drywall master and that of a novice.  Putting up drywall has left a mark on everyone who has done it, and everybody likes to share their hard-won knowledge.

Restoring a house in the year 2009 is a fascinating process.  Twitter (find me @extremecraft), which had always been a fun, nonessential communication tool, became my construction oracle when it came time to put up some drywall.  I’d put up a tweet about the part of the process that I was starting, and a flood of advice on dust masks, application tools and zen drywall technique would come pouring in.

Our wallpaper saga is well-known to readers of this blog.  When we started tearing down the wallpaper in the house, we found out why there was so damn much of it.  There was nothing underneath the drywall but redwood planks.  Victorian houses in our area were frequently constructed with big ol’ redwood beams that were then finished (inside and out) by the application of thick redwood planks.  The photo at the beginning of this post was taken from our wallpaper peeling party, and you can see the beautiful, exposed old-growth redwood in our dining room.  Every person we showed the wall to cooed about how beautiful the wood was, and told us that we should keep it the way it is.

That would be great…except that we don’t want to live in a cabin.  We’re considering leaving some “rustic” touches in our guest bedroom…but we’ll tell you more about that later.

Back to the drywall.  Both Claire and I have done our share of drywall sanding, but we’ve never masterminded a drywall project from start to finish.  We were starting with one huge advantage, though, which was the fact that we would be putting the sheet rock over a plank wall instead of a normal frame wall.  That meant the wall would be fairly forgiving, and that we could piece the drywall into any weird spots and use drywall mud to finish and smooth things out.

Rather than tackle everything by ourselves, we decided to reach into our (rapidly shrinking) piggy bank and pull out a bit of money to hire a handyman to help us with the dining room.  We found an experienced handyman with affordable rates from a Craigslist ad.  He touted his attention to detail and years of experience, so we invited him over to take a look.  He seemed confident that we could knock out the project in the course of a couple of evenings.

When we hopped in the handyman’s pickup truck to get the drywall and supplies, it became apparent that he had overstated his drywall experience.  I think he’d worked on plenty of drywall projects, but hadn’t really engineered any from start to finish.  Still, he was nice, had more experience than us, and would be a big help on this relatively small project.

I took down the 100-year old wooden molding.  This stuff is a work of art, so I was really careful not to splinter or break it.  As I started to scratch some of the white paint off, I saw that it had originally been painted a beautiful terra-cotta color with very subtle buffed gold accents.  Still, we had already planned the room’s color scheme, so we decided to leave the trim white.  We’ll be revealing more about our plans for the room VERY soon.

As anybody who’s done it knows, drywall is a huge mess.  Wear a mask.  The dust will get into places that will leave you scratching your (drywall dust-flecked) head.  As advertised, the drywall went up very quickly.  Our handyman was a little less deft with his application of the drywall mud.  I watched him apply a SUPER THICK layer of mud to the corners before he applied the drywall tape.  It only makes sense that you want a corner to be square, rather than a weird angle.  When I explained this to him, he seemed to get it and scraped some of the mud from the corners.  He was better at applying the mud to the seams and feathering the edges, but applying the mud still took more than double the time that putting the drywall up took.  The corners still wound up looking a little clumsy and thick.

Here is our hard-won drywall advice.  This is going to sound very un-D.I.Y. of me, but If you’re a novice and can afford it, HIRE A DRYWALL PRO!  If we had been less stingy, we would have paid less money to a professional, because they can do it in much less time, and with much better results.  We feel like we learned a lot from the process, and we feel like we could fumble our way through some more basic drywall projects with pretty good results, but we’re at least going to hire a professional to do the finishing work with the drywall mud for us when we do our kitchen.  We also need somebody to skim-coat the damaged places on our walls where we got overzealous with our wallpaper removal.

I’m looking forward to watching a pro fix up the corners and feather the seams with craftsmanship and precision.  I’ll be taking notes (and kicking myself for not hiring somebody sooner).

[4 comments]

Coming Out of the Closet

Posted by claire | November 4, 2009, 9:04 am | Permalink

After painting our two front rooms green and, unfortunately, before we learned the magic of a wall paper steamer, we knew we had to attack our bedroom area of the house.  When we first moved our ever shifting piles of stuff into the house, Garth and I were sleeping on an air mattress on the floor of one of the small bedrooms.  Clothes and hardware store receipts were tossed around that little room which was also piled full of my sewing supplies.  It was crowded, very much like squatting in an abandoned house full of useless crap, and not a relaxing way to end each day in our new home.

Our bedroom, however, was a bit of struggle.

At our wallpaper removing party the children gleefully tore the paper from the walls in our bedroom.  They could pull what appeared to be entire sheets of the stuff from the wall with a graceful rip.  On closer inspection, what had been removed was only the top layer of wallpaper.  The adhesive and a fuzzy, papery top layer clung to the wall for dear life.  Not unlike the front hallway, there were areas that we were able to wet and peel off with ease and there were other areas that no amount of scraping and wetting could shake loose.  The entire process would not have taken so long if we had discovered the glorious wall paper steamer before we finished the bedroom, or if I had not insisted that we also remove all wallpaper from the closet while we were at it.  I mean really, if we are tearing down paper and nothing is in the closet, we might as well, right?

Scraping the paper in the closet took at least three additional days, and while this was not pleasant for our sleeping arrangements, when the bedroom was finished the closet was my favorite room of the house for a couple of weeks.

Once all the paper that we could scrape and scrub off  was gone I took our garage-sale-new palm sander to the walls to remove the additional glue and fuzz that just wasn’t budging.  This seemed to do the trick.  After a week of scraping and three hours of sanding, the walls were ready to be primed!

We rushed to the paint store and, as we had learned in our green room, asked to have our primer tinted towards our wall color.  The bedroom is blissfully smaller than the first two rooms we painted and has no molding circling the room a foot below the ceiling.  This made the paint job move swiftly, as did using the proper primer.  Soon, we were staring at our light, airy, and bright new bedroom!  I have alluded to the fact that we will be using bright color throughout our house, and as you can see the bedroom is no exception.  We choose a close approximation to Tiffany Box Blue and love the glowing results.

Before we could begin to shift ourselves into the room we needed to finish the closet.  The former owners had installed mis-matched white wire shelving of various sizes.  We removed all of this before removing the wallpaper, and patched the screw holes in the walls.  The shelves were functional, but we needed rods to hang our clothing on.  Here was the problem: the closet has plenty of space for both of our clothes but the super-slanty back ceiling makes it very difficult to hang a bar in the closet.  This is certainly why there were so many levels of shelves installed.  We scratched our heads and then ran to the hardware store and looked at galvanized plumbing pipes.  This wound up being the perfect solution for us.  We bought two long bars, four 10 inch connectors and a four corner connectors to create our perfect, sturdy, closet bars.  To hang them straight took plenty of measuring and the use of a level, but once installed they now hold bunches of clothing and are not budging.  We reconfigured the remaining wire shelving and now have an extremely organized and functional closet.

Why was this my favorite space for a few weeks?  It was the only area of the house that was under control and at the time it felt as though it might be the only area we ever finished.  Thankfully, as we have moved on to make bigger and bolder changes, the closet is no longer my favorite room.

Next week, I’ll show you more of the bedroom, some of the smaller projects I have tackled in that space, and ask for advice about some larger projects that still need to be started!

[3 comments]

A Steamy Proposition

Posted by claire | November 4, 2009, 8:51 am | Permalink

As I have mentioned several times before, since we took possession of our house my mania for home improvement has been directed at our walls.  All I can tell you is, if you ever decided to buy a house that is covered in wallpaper that you intend to remove, try EVERYTHING.  Our efforts removing the border around the room in our living room and parlor areas worked like a charm.  We sprayed some diluted fabric softener and it came down in long satisfying stretches.  What a delight!

In the kitchen, under the top layer of paper seems to require a chisel.  We have long since abandoned this peeling job as we have decided it will be best to simply drywall over the one hundred years of wallpaper firmly stuck to the redwood plank walls beneath.  The kitchen (temporarily, I keep telling myself) sits with half peeled fruit wallpaper and the exposed history of decorative papers beneath.  In several spots there are large swatches of redwood plank peeking through the entire mess.  Yes, sigh, the walls are still like this today.

In the front hallway, we sprayed our magic fabric softener.  Nothing.  We perforated the surface with a special tool and sprayed a store bought remover on the wall.  This was semi-effective in some places and completely useless in other spots– it was as if the wall paper had been applied in some areas with wallpaper paste and in others with superglue.  The walls under the paper have been drywalled, but were not primed before the paper went up so occasionally as we found a nice piece of wallpaper that seemed to be peeling up satisfactorily (in more than shredded inch-long bits) the paper would suddenly pull up the top layer of drywall.

Dammit.

This hallway caused plenty of cursing from the (otherwise) mild-mannered Garth.  He still walks through the hall, looks at some rough spots, and mutters angrily under his breath.  The hallway sat for weeks as I shamefully walked in and out the front door.  This challenge seemed impossible.  I started to spend two hours each day spraying and scraping, figuring that doing this a bit at a time might make it less painful.  I wasn’t getting very far.  People had mentioned renting a wallpaper steamer to us several times, but because Garth had tried to use one of our friend’s clothing steamers in the front hallway to no avail he scoffed at the idea.

Note to anyone pulling down wallpaper– a clothing steamer and a wallpaper steamer: NOT THE SAME THING.  I did a bit of research online and brought this argument to light one Friday.  That particular weekend we were suppose to be adding the finishing touches to the dining room (yes, we will be showing this very soon).  As I stood on a ladder painting the dining room, Garth proudly returned from a trip to the recycling center with a rented wallpaper steamer.  This was not what I was hoping to work on that day, but Garth set to work in the front hallway.  Although the steamer drips boiling hot water and it can be awkward to hold it on one area of the wall as you scrape at the area you just steamed, the entire front hallway, as well as the famous bookcase wallpaper, were removed in a matter of hours.

I had been averaging a square foot every two hours or so prior to this.  Thank you wallpaper steamer.  If you find that other methods are taking too much effort don’t hesitate to drop $30 or $40 for a twenty four hour rental of one of these babies.  If we had rented a steamer earlier, we might have saved tons of time.

[1 comment]

Cool For Cats!

Posted by Garth | November 1, 2009, 9:28 pm | Permalink

One of the great parts of doing this blog for Readymade has been connecting with our fellow home renovators and redecorators.  I was happy to get a comment and follow a link from Reeve and Nick, a young couple who just bought an old 1874 house in Portland, Maine.  Their blog, 2 Cats in the Yard, is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe to show us what it would have been like if we had bought one of the more down-at-heels, unloved houses in our neighborhood.  Their love for their house and pride in being as ecologically sound as their budget can possibly allow is apparent in every post.

Like Claire and me, they agonize over each original feature of the house.  Their kitchen was dominated by a tiny, creaky staircase that took up a lot of space.  Ultimately, Reeve and Nick decided that the stairs had to go, and their choice freed up a bunch of space and gave them more light in their kitchen.  They also had to do a ton of demolition, tearing out rotten walls, building temporary walls to support the load-bearing walls and tearing out old cat piss-covered linoleum to make way for their Craigslist-purchased locally milled pine flooring.

Right now, they’re months past their original move-in date, the contractor that’s helping out doubled their estimate, and a broken and clogged sewer pipe is going to literally flush $5,000 down the toilet.  Reeve has been slinking into Best Buy every few weeks to push the delivery dates for their new appliances back.  By the time you read this, though, they’ll be finished moving their stuff into the new house.  The heavy demolition and construction seems to be over, and they can get down to the fun of making their house into a home.

Did I mention that they’re doing all of this with a toddler in tow?  Our admiration goes out to them.  I can’t wait to keep up with their progress.  As always, if you’ve got stories (or better yet, WARNINGS) to share, leave us a comment or drop me an email.

LINK

[2 comments]

Thrill of the Chaise

Posted by claire | October 28, 2009, 12:04 am | Permalink

In my last post, I talked to you about my crazed and frantic attitude toward accomplishing our goals and getting to just live in our new house without feeling like a complete slave to the situation.  For me, at the moment, my goals are focused on the walls throughout the house.  There are many other things we intend to change eventually (light fixtures, flooring, cabinets. . .), but for now I just want to paint each room a color that I can live with.  With that goal accomplished, I can hang art on the walls, finish unpacking some of our more delicate possessions, and fill rooms with fantastic furniture (some that we already posses and some that we have yet to stumble upon) while we wait to get our hands on the magic pot of money that will help fix the light fixtures, flooring, and cabinets.  Today, I’m going to focus on furniture.

In Garth’s last post, he turned you on to some of the approaches we are taking to surviving and accomplishing the renovation of our house.  Though we are focusing on the walls at the moment (and, oh, how much trouble the walls are by themselves), we have been spending our Saturdays popping from garage sale to garage sale in an effort to acquire some things we need to fix the house as well as some things we need to furnish the house at prices that our small wallets can handle.  Beyond simply garage sale shopping, we have also been hitting up local thrift stores, antique stores, flea markets, and following Craigslist as if it our lives depended on it.  By being fairly diligent, we have amassed a grand collection of useful tools that we could never afford at full price and we have stumbled upon some great furniture finds that either require some work on our part or none at all.

Garth and I came to this house with a variety of interesting furniture.  Some things will work in the space wonderfully and others need to be replaced– errr upgraded– to suit our new, more adult surroundings.  The living room, especially because it is already painted, has been a source of furnishing concern for me since we pulled the last bit of masking tape from the trim.  We already knew we would be ditching our Ikea t.v./bookcase in the move and our couches, though very interesting, were simply not comfortable enough to try and incorporate into the new decor.  I did my minimally twice daily check of Craigslist furniture listings and wandered through various sales and used item stores in search of suitable furnishing.  Beyond this I am constantly trolling through design and decorating blogs for inspiration (Design Sponge and Apartment Therapy are among my favorites).  Because I have the crazy idea that I can learn and do just about any task that I need to, I was not fearful about buying furniture that needed some refining.  I haven’t gotten to an upholstery project yet, but I did find an upholstery tool kit at the thrift store!

Here are a few items we have acquired for very reasonable prices that need some help:

1.  We found this hutch at the thrift store for $15.  Immediately we were attracted to the nice, clean lines and the subtle curve of the bottom drawered part.  Our intention?  To remove the single glass door, change the door pulls, and paint the entire piece a solid color that will pop in our green room.  It will no longer be for displaying dishes, it will hold our t.v and related multi-media materials.

2.  This crazy hallstand was for sale at a garage sale of antiques.  I had to fight a lady for it and ended up getting it (and free delivery!) for around $100.  It needs to be stripped of all the green paint (this is half done in the photo), refinished, the mirror it came with needs to be cut down, and we want to adjust the size of the seat/storage bin (it doesn’t quite fit where want it– one danger of having to buy things on the spot).

3.  We have tons of books.  Tons.  Whenever we can find good, wooden shelves we get excited.  I have three different shelves of varying sizes that have needed to be stripped, sanded and repainted.  Unfortunately I don’t have before photos of them because I am a maniac and painted them as soon as they made it to the backyard.

4.  A white, slightly formal, cough from Craigslist.  For $75 this couch is great, but it will be one of my reupholstery projects.

5.  This $5 garage sale chair will also get an upholstery makeover.

We have also found a few items that required no work on our part, these feel like especially grown up purchases and anytime we walk into a room and see them we congratulate each other on our good taste and bargain hunting.

The first of these is a gorgeous Danish Modern display shelf/china cabinet that we picked up at a local antique store for $300.  This is one of our more pricey items, but it would cost waaay more than that brand new (even Ikea shelves can cost more than that).

The second thing is a fantastic couch.  When we moved in we brought with us my set of blue fur furniture that I picked up for a song at a thrift store in Kansas City six years ago.  They are fun, but it was time for a change.

In my design website hunts I came across this couch from Anthropologie that I thought would look fantastic in our green room.

The $5,998 price tag (plus $300 shipping) made that particular couch completely out of the question.  However, the idea was in my brain and a month later we stumbled upon this couch at a local antique store.

The owner let us make two payments to cover the $900 sale price and suddenly we had a very grown-up couch (crammed in a room with the white couch and the blue fur set).

We posted our groovey fur furniture on Craigslist and in a couple of days a lovely couple bought them and took them away.  We applied that money towards our couch purchase and felt especially thrifty.

Recently we also managed to secure an beautiful Danish Modern dining room table and chairs from Craigslist.  This was our most expensive purchase to date at slightly over $1,000.  The owner has let us pay him off slowly, which is extremely generous.  We are hoping to move the set in this weekend as we just got our First Time Homeowner’s check.  Unfortunately we won’t have an image of this gem until it is in our possession, but believe me, you will be seeing it soon.

So, these are our furnishing triumphs up to this point.  We certainly can’t afford (nor do we want to) run out to Pottery Barn or Pier One and try to furnish our place in one quick swoop.  I am content to let this portion of our home be a slowly evolving process, I enjoy the hunt and the reward when something is just right.

The walls, however, are a different story.

[9 comments]

The Money Pit

Posted by Garth | October 25, 2009, 9:43 pm | Permalink

We had a lot of fun bringing you the Martha Stewart clip last week, so we thought you might enjoy upping the ante this week with the “money shot” from that old Tom Hanks/Shelley Long movie “The Money Pit“.  I don’t know why, but this movie endlessly fascinated me when I was a kid.  I must have watched it a dozen times.  When I was in 6th Grade, my parents decided to build their own “acreage” about a half mile down the road from the 1920’s Nebraska farmhouse I grew up in.  That old house had a mysterious, half-finished basement with all sorts of pipes and dirt-filled crawlspaces.

The process of building the new house demystified a lot of the construction process for me.  Even at age twelve, I followed the process with interest, though I already knew that I was challenged in the handiness department.  I got to see the house being built from the foundation up.  It took ages to find water and drill a well.  Even in the early 80’s, my parents were ahead of the energy-saving curve, so they put in a geothermal heating/cooling loop that helped cool the house in the summer and warm it up in the winter.  I put in plenty of time sanding drywall and helping with the 80’s textured ceilings (some with bonus glitter!).

I think that living in that shiny, new house contributed to my love for The Money Pit.  The new house was awesome, but I think a part of me missed the mystery of the old farm house.  When Claire and I started looking for an old house of our own, The Money Pit was burned into my brain.  I knew the pitfalls that could come from faulty wiring, as well as the dangers of bathtubs falling through the floor and front stairways collapsing.

My memories of The Money Pit all centered around the physical comedy of the house destruction, but as an adult, the movie is a cautionary tale about the effects that home renovation can have on a relationship.  In the movie, Tom Hanks and Shelley Long become broke, exhausted and jealous….all things I want to avoid during our home renovation.

Our beloved Aunt Joan in Missouri just sent us an article she clipped from an old issue of Better Homes and Gardens entitled “How to Survive a Remodeling”.  In the article, author Teri Cettina profiles an average couple who were renovating an 1853 brownstone in Albany, New York.  The couple were battling a mouse infestation, budget and scheduling woes, and a bunch of unexpected problems with the electrical system.  In addition to all of this, they were expecting twins shortly after the completion of the remodeling.

Unfortunately for us, most of the advice in the article is geared toward people who are a little more well-heeled than we are.  The article gives advice like “take off for a vacation to Mexico while the contractors do their job” and “protect your privacy by walling off the section of your house that the remodelers are working on”.  All of this is fine…but we’re doing pretty much everything ourselves, so that portion of the advice doesn’t really apply.  Believe me, I’d love to be on a plane to Mexico right about now while magic elves take up the yoke of wallpaper removal.

I have whipped up a few tips that can help save your relationship while remodeling your house (if trips to Mexico and teams of contractors aren’t an option).

1. Realize Your Strengths and Weaknesses

We’ve got a lot of things going in our favor.  Fortunately, we have very similar taste, and I also realize that my taste isn’t as good as hers, so I tend to let wacky ideas like do-it-yourself flocked wallpaper fall by the wayside.  I like to think that our skills compliment one another.  Claire is smart, inventive, handy and organized…and she has impeccable taste.  As for me….I’m tall, so I can peel wallpaper from hard-to-reach places.

2. Avoid Budget Woes by Suckling at the Government Teat

We’re both good at working within a budget, even though it’s shocking how much money we’ve pumped into our local hardware store.  Our eternal thanks also go out to the Obama administration for their first time homeowner tax credit.  This extra pad of money is helping us to be  a little more flexible in our decorating and remodeling plans.  The twenty year old hot water heater can be replaced with a tankless model.  We’ve also been able to buy some high-efficiency appliances.  Most of all, it’s nice that we don’t have to worry as much about money.  Much has been made about the supposed economic effects of the stimulus, but I don’t want to discount the number of relationships that are being saved!

3. Make Going to Garage Sales Your Second (or Third) Job

This also falls into the money saving category.  Don’t underestimate the number of things you’re going to need to buy as a new homeowner.  Nobody thinks about things like lawnmowers, hedge clippers and chop saws while they’re looking for their dream home, but it would behoove you to start amassing your war chest of tools before you sign on the dotted line.  Who knew that ladders that are tall enough to reach the roof of a Victorian house are so expensive that you’ll need to take out a second mortgage?  We live in an area that is rich with garage sales, so we managed to pick up the staples for a song.  That $1 box of random screws, washers and hardware has already saved me from last-minute trips to the hardware store multiple times… and has saved me a pile of money.  We’ve also picked up awesome antiques like a hall stand and shelves made out of actual wood.  We’re both sad that with winter approaching, the torrent of summer garage sales has turned into a trickle.  On the positive side, in addition to saving money, we’re both out of the house and away from the remodeling mess on Saturday mornings.

4. Finish the Bedroom First

No, I’m not going to get steamy with this one… it just makes common sense.  We’ll be sharing our own bedroom renovations soon.  If you finish decorating the bedroom first, at least you’ll have a refuge at the end of the day where you can shut your door and block out all of the messes in the rest of the house.  The first few weeks in our house were the toughest, because we were camping on an air mattress in a spare bedroom.  Once our room was finished, remodeling got much more rewarding, and it was easier to put the rest of the house in perspective… Which leads me to my final tip.

5. Keep Things in Perspective

I actually ripped this one off of the Better Homes and Gardens article.  At the end of the day, it’s great to remember that getting to finally customize your dream home is a huge privilege.  We’ve been waiting for this our whole lives, so years of pent-up design frustration and living with sterile, white walls and slumlord carpet naturally make us want to finish everything at once.  Even though I feel like there isn’t enough time in the day to finish all of the things I need to do, I’ve felt a sense of pride in accomplishing things with my own two hands that I haven’t felt in a long time.

Spoiler alert!  You’ll never guess this, but Tom Hanks and Shelley Long manage to work everything out at the end of The Money Pit–it’s a Hollywood movie, after all.  Follow a few of these tips, and you can keep your relationship during your remodel more like a Hepburn-Tracy screwball comedy and less like an Ingmar Bergman psychodrama.

I’m anxious to hear what hard-won tips Readymade readers have to offer.  I’ll be happy to do a follow-up post on this one.

[3 comments]

Martha, Martha, Martha

Posted by claire | October 20, 2009, 10:25 pm | Permalink

What I am about to share with you takes some courage on two fronts.  This first is to admit to you that last week while grading mid-terms in front of the TV, Garth and I decided to watch one of the two Lifetime Martha Stewart Bio-pics (Martha Inc: The Martha Stewart Story) that we had TIVOed.  Yes we TIVOed them, and yes, we watched one.  What is more upsetting than this is that I couldn’t help but COMPLETELY SEE MYSELF in this clip about re-doing her house.

The first month in our house for both of us was a flurry of motion.  Like Martha, I snapped awake ready to tackle the next task.  I could only think that one hour spent scraping paper from a wall in this corner would put me one hour closer to painting the walls and eventually relaxing in said space.  I’ve heard that women often don’t remember the full experience of childbirth and as I look back at the progress we have made it is hard to remember how we have come as far as we have.  Hours and days have disappeared.  I still don’t always know what day it is.

Over drinks, a friend said to me, “You can’t take everything on at once, it really does take years to change a house.”

Oookay, I thought.  It might take years if you don’t have drive and a crazed work ethic.  Years.  Ha.

During our wallpaper removal party, I overheard a friend’s boyfriend say to Garth, “There is so much work to do, I can’t wait to see you slowly change this place.  It is gonna take forever.”

Garth scoffed at him, “Have you met my wife?  The bulk of this will be done by Christmas.”

The former owner stopped by to pick up some mail that had failed to be forwarded.  She said she was glad we stayed in touch.  I told her we would love to have them over after we had the place in working order.  I was thinking January, perhaps?

She laughed and waved, “See you in five years!”

I shook my head and smiled– five years?  Ha.

The first area that we really attacked in the house is the living room and parlor.  The walls were sponge painted beige on darker beige with a wallpaper border circling both rooms just above the molding.  This seemed a logical place to start because there was little wallpaper to remove, and the walls could simply be primed and painted.

Naturally, before we even had keys to the house, I had selected colors for every room.  This room would be green.  If bright colors make you queasy now would be a good time to stop reading our blog.  The rooms in this house are moving from neutral and patterned to bright and solid ASAP, and it all starts in the living room and parlor.

Our very first night in the house we climbed ladders and sprayed fabric softener at the borders.  We had it all down in a couple of hours and I began to tape off the room.  I figured in one day we could have this room looking like new.

Not so fast.

These two rooms are fairly large, and my room painting skills were sorely out of practice.  I primed the walls and didn’t manage to fully finish this task before our wall paper removing party began.  The following day with Garth and I both painting the coverage wasn’t great, and it seemed like the walls would need ten coats at the rate we were moving.

Garth ran back to Sherwin Williams to grab more gallons of Direct Green and reported our problem to the paint man.  We used the wrong primer.  Feh.

I knew this and somehow let it slip my mind.  If you are using darker colors (reds, blues, greens– not pastels) it is good to prime the walls with gray.  You will need less coats of paint and the overall color will be more brilliant.  What is even better is to ask the paint person (they will do this most anywhere that they sell paint) to tint your primer towards your final color.  We have done this in other rooms and I wish we had done it in the living room.

Of course, I had used straight white primer.  This ended up costing us a lot more than we had intended and took precious work time away from other tasks that could have been accomplished during our week of work before we moved in.

Below is the color on the wall (I am not showing the entire space yet because we aren’t nearly finished with it).

Before the wallpaper party revealed the walls beneath the paper, my intentions were to paint the living room, dining room and kitchen before we moved in.  I shifted my focus to painting the living room, bedroom and studio before our move-in date.

I was still painting green around the trim four days later.  FOUR DAYS!!  I realized that maybe I wasn’t going to get the bedroom painted before we moved in (but I’ll be damned if I wasn’t up until all hours scraping at the glue the wallpaper left on the walls).

At this point you must be thinking, “This is where Claire comes to her senses and realizes that it just might take five years to pull the house together.”

Hmph.

I can make this into my vision of a house.  I can make it happen relatively quickly.  The bulk of it will be pulled together by Christmas.

It has to.  The In-laws are coming.

[11 comments]