Facelift

Miracles do happen! We have had the trim (and screens, and doors) that were sorely in need of boatloads of care, fixed and repainted! After only x-number of years of wifely nagging!

But doesn't it look lovely now?! And it's functional, too. All the windows have screens with only the tiny holes they're designed to have, and not gaping openings that made having them essentially superfluous.

guests in our guest room (above) can actually
open their windows now!

We have friends at a local architecture/remodeling firm to thank for the handsome color scheme. And the same wonderful crew of workers who (can it be?) 10 years ago redid most of the interior of the house proved just as skillful and diligent with the outside.

One of the biggest portions of this latest job was the garage, that not only needed to be painted to match our smart new color palette, but which also needed a bunch of rotten wood replaced...

Ditto with the utility room...

Of course, there are always complications that are unforeseen at the beginning of such a job, but which we think were eventually solved beautifully. Like, how do we paint the decorative metal work on the back porch doors? We decided on making them the "pop" color:

Longtime readers (not to mention visitors to our house) will know that we've had a lot of egregiously-deferred-maintenance issues on the exterior, and I tried to find some examples in old blog posts, but stopped looking with this one. Yes, we had squirrels living behind our fascia, and why not, when the wood was so rotten they didn't even have to wear down their little rodent teeth to get in? (You can compare the picture just below with the comical appearance of the (admittedly, effective) repair work done six—yes, six— years ago...yes, we had that red board up on our fascia for SIX YEARS.)

So, the little monsters (rodents of various kinds) will have a considerably more difficult time working their way into Henry and Kathy's house now! And we don't feel quite so embarrassed by the haunted house vibe that we've been giving off all these years.

A bright new day

Things have been pretty exciting in our kitchen lately.

For quite some time, our 30+-year-old oven/microwave unit has really been limping along....

Much as our Adorable Granddaughter enjoyed playing with its door, back in her youth...

...the microwave hadn't actually worked [other than sending out mysterious Interstellar-like messages occasionally through its numerical display] for a couple of years. And the oven's broiler element had been out for much longer; plus the insulation around the door was shot, and ditto for large areas of the interior coating, as you can see here. What you can't see is that the thermostat was also pretty wonky; you were never really sure what the temperature was inside.

pretty gross, eh?

I'd been bugging Henry for quite some time, as you might imagine, to get a new oven, but my pleas had fallen on deaf ears.

So imagine my surprise—and delight—a couple of weekends ago, when he announced he'd found a great deal (and a really great deal) for a used oven and microwave on craigslist. A house-flipper wanted new appliances and we were happy to take the old ones—but still so much newer than ours!

Of course, nothing involving home remodeling, even something as simple as replacing appliances with some of the same, is ever as easy as it seems. So I thought I'd chronicle our efforts for you.

First, naturally, the old needed to moved out of its cozy niche. A cumbersome, but not impossible, job for Henry and our handyman (part of the same crew that gloriously made over the rest of our downstairs seven years ago). Here's the old oven and microwave housing coming out...

...and onto a sturdy dolly...

...upon which it was wheeled out to the yard (where it still awaits a decision on responsible disposal).

There was some carpentry work needed (hence the necessity of the handyman and his crew). The old opening, although big enough for a happy retiree to find a seat, wasn't quite wide enough for the new unit...

As it turned out, electrical work was required, too, since the old microwave plugged into the back of the old oven. The new one has a separate cord, and we had no outlet for it; at least, that's what we thought. However, we discovered, behind a protective plate, that an old connection did exist.

Why was it there? Like many things about our house, the answer is lost in the mists of time.

We made another discovery, too, when everything old was gone. Underneath the oven was a nice little cubby, with what is possibly the original kitchen flooring—ironically, once vacuumed out, looking better than our current, very beat-up vinyl.

Not only do we not remember that the kitchen floor looked like that when we bought the house in 1980, but we can't for the life of us think why this space was just boarded up when we re-did the kitchen. An elderly master carpenter made our cabinets for us, and he was very cautious—perhaps he wanted to be sure the oven was properly braced, and didn't want his bracing interfered with. The old oven was really heavy, but the new one is considerably lighter and we feel that we are safe making this cubby actually available for storage. Perhaps for some of Granddaughter's toys?

So here's what the frame looked like when the carpentry and electrical work was done, ready for its new occupants, and with new occupants inside...

  

Didn't they do a nice job on the cubby?

It's been wonderful having a perfectly functioning microwave and oven the last several days. Our kitchen feels almost civilized and our cooking doesn't feel as jury-rigged and as much like camping out. I'm sure that re-heating leftovers in the microwave uses a lot less electricity than heating up the oven for that purpose. And the oven temperature is what it says it is! Halleluja!

Only one job remained: staining the new cubby and oven support to—hopefully—match the rest of the cabinets. We found a shade that looked like it might work, and yesterday I made the magic happen...

note the cute, cleaned-up, old flooring

...Voila!

We can't wait to have guests over for an oven-cooked dinner. And I'm particularly excited to show it off to the kids, who—with some justification—don't think we ever do anything to improve the old homestead. Now when our Exceptional Daughter-in-Law wants to bake cookies, she'll be able to do so in style!

An unblogged adventure: happy ending

Actually, the end isn't quite yet upon us, because of course there are a few little details that need fixing up. (When you live in an old house, are there ever no repairs that need to be made?) Not to mention the rehanging of most of our artwork and photos, which is proceeding very deliberately on our newly beautiful walls.

But for the most part our redecorating adventure is over, and not only am I glad of that, but also very glad that we had professionals do the work for us. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to stand on the scaffolding you see on the right, the apparatus needed to paint our stairway walls.

You can see on the left that they did a wonderful job, in spite of the precarious working conditions. (Note new, functioning doorbell under the vent—when it rings, I still wonder at first what it is, since we lived for so long without one.)

Here are some other glimpses of our not-quite-but-mostly-back-to-normal new rooms (technical note: blotches are a camera artifact—paint job is flawless).

newly re-finished floors in the living room waiting for the return of the furniture

living room with furniture and most of the knick-knacks returned from exile in the garage
(note un-pretty fireplace: a future project, along with Henry's home theatre)

dining room with unpacked and re-displayed glassware
(note re-hung pictures in the hall—one of the only spaces to have pictures back in place at present)

To the sincere delight of future guests, we're sure, the powder room (on the right) now has an appearance in keeping with its name. Although the drain fixtures of the sink need some adjustment, and we're still debating what to hang on the walls. Plus we need to find a sufficiently elegant-looking toilet paper hanger, towel hook and soap shelf. We have a funky antique mirror that we plan to use in there, but its placement is still a matter of some dispute. And because of this, we can't really select a light fixture yet. But it's quite an improvement over its previous life!

I really love the color of the walls, and have voted to have the front door of the house painted in this color. But, that is also still up for discussion.

Moving upstairs, our guest room doesn't look quite like this anymore, because it's full of guests and their stuff. But they like it, and we're looking to hang some art work in there tomorrow:
One of the most wonderful aspects of our "new" house is much less obvious than the painted walls, the shiny floors, and the functional plumbing. We have plugs! Everywhere! Here is a rundown of the before and after numbers of plugs in each room:

• master bedroom: 2 vs 6
• tv room: 3 vs 4
• study: 1 (!) vs 3
• guest room: 2 vs 4
• living room: 3 vs 8 (plus untold goodies hiding in the walls waiting for the home theatre fantasy to become a reality)
• dining room: 1 vs 3

Plus, new safe plugs in all bathrooms! Lights in two closets where none were before! I feel like we've been brought into the twentieth century—and within sight of the 21st.

Saving the best re-decorating story for last, below is my study, where the blogging magic often happens. The floral pictures are sentimental favorites, painted by my grandmother and dated 1944. (Another of her pictures, featuring the plane my father flew in World War II, got a new frame to celebrate the new wall it resides on in the study. You can see it here.)

The lovely photograph in the white frame (a rather blurry closeup of it is on the left) was a present from my sweet and very talented daughter-in-law. The palette in the peaceful scene looks like it was meant to go with my new wall color, don't you think?


The only other item of special note in the picture is the part of a "Peace Now" sticker you can see on my sewing machine at the right. It was placed there in another era, when the machine was new, referring to another war, but, sadly, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, n'est-ce pas? I can't quite bring myself to take it off, even though it's yellowing and torn. Maybe someday.

An unblogged adventure, part 2

The Secret Life of the Home

This is the title of an extra fascinating section of the totally fascinating London Science Museum*. But it could also serve as a sub-title for this collection of photos.

During the repair phase of our repainting project we were treated to some behind-the-scenes looks at our house's structure. Some of what was discovered was perplexing and made upgrading more difficult (like the zany original wiring that's now been made all modern and safe). But most of it was just really interesting.

Beginning with the wooden skeleton. The very experienced guys we had doing the work were impressed with the solidity of the basic construction. Our house's bones were put in place back in the day (mid-1930's) when 2 x 4 meant a board that was really 2 inches by 4 inches. Here's a look at some of these beauties, in the living room walls where they were awaiting new wiring to be strung amongst them.


Another "they don't build 'em like that any more" aspect of the house is the sub-flooring. The guys pointed out that not only are the sub-floor boards individually nice and thick, but they were installed diagonally over the floor joists for extra stability, which wasn't always done. You can see this technique here, where the flooring had to be removed in the powder room. (It had become warped from—guesses? anyone?—toilet overflows.)


Of course this extra solidity made it extra hard to put the new commode in there. The sub-flooring had to be cut away because new commodes have to be placed a different distance from the wall than old ones. One of the delightful details I would have been just as happy never knowing about. But I'm glad I didn't have to do this work!

Upstairs the walls are as solid as the floors. The studs in these rooms have shiplap boards nailed to them, over which, originally, wallpaper was then hung. On the right you can see what these walls looked like before being sheetrocked over in the guest room. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

The goofy folks we bought the house from in 1980 "fixed it up" by putting 8' paneling (the ceilings are 9' high!) on all the bedroom walls over the shiplap. We wished so many times that they'd just left the wallpaper and let us redo it the way we wanted. We really wished they'd left the popcorn texturing (complete with 1970's disco sparkles!) off the ceilings. But it's all gone now, finally! Except in the 2 undone bedrooms.

The guys worked fast taking off this paneling (which we had simply painted) and putting up the sheetrock, but I was able to catch my study, on the left, with its wallpaper still intact. What a lovely green! Not!

Although we didn't redo the bathrooms (saved for another day, and perhaps another lifetime!) we did have new GFI plugs put in. Doing that in our bathroom required the removal of our medicine cabinet, revealing another good example of very sturdy construction. Not to mention a collection of used razor blades (already cleared away when I took the picture on the right) that had been slipped down the convenient slot at the back of the chest. A little bit of americana right in our walls, from the days when flat razor blades were the only home shaving option.

Finally, below is perhaps the most amazing behind the scenes glimpse. I got to see how our windows work! Who knew!?

I only knew that most of the windows in our house didn't work—that is, they wouldn't stay up without props. Once, I even came close to seriously injuring fingers between the top and bottom sash of one of these antiques. But how are they supposed to work?

We got all the windows repaired in the repainted rooms, since in order to do this, the molding all around them has to come off. Best to do that before you paint, right? And when you take the molding off, this is what you see:


The weights suspended by these ropes (the breaking of which, by the way, causes all the problems with windows crashing down) are really heavy! They move up and down in these little channels, one pair on each side of the window. Who thought this system up? It just seems so quaint to me and I was very pleased to get to see the mechanism revealed.

Next up: "finished" product photos.

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*Read about my visit to this wonderful museum last fall right here. And you can see a bunch of photos I took there in this Flickr set.

An unblogged adventure, part 1

For the last 2 months, I've been unable to share with my reading public the most important features of my day-to-day life.

We have been redecorating (thoroughly!) a bit more than half of our house, but since I wanted the finished product to be a surprise to our globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law , I couldn't blog (or tweet) about it! I was about to go nuts!

Finally, they arrived Sunday and were suitably amazed and impressed with our efforts. Here they are, along with Austinite daughter, playing an insanely complicated BSG board game in our newly elegant and luxurious dining room—to what better use could it be put?!

So now I can share the saga with the world!

To give you an idea of where our starting point was, here is a picture of our "grand" entry hall before the project started. The cool LOTR poster was covering up a hole in the wall. Note peeling paint around the archway. Paint was peeling all over the downstairs. But this wall was especially bad because of damage caused by overflows from the bathroom just above it.

And here's the downstairs powder room, complete with non-functioning sink (the drain pipe had rotted away—note the "do not use" sign). Getting this vital space fully functional again was a major objective of the work.

Amazing things happened during this project. For example, on the left you can see Henry actually mopping the living room floor after he and his brother moved out the furniture. "Henry" and "mopping" were two words I never thought to have seen directly connected in my lifetime, at least outside of the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this photo the baseboards have already been removed to allow new wiring to be put in place.

He really got into things, especially in the living room, where his dreams of a home theatre system have yet to be completely realized. But the wiring is in the wall!

In the background of the photo on the right you can see that the damaged wall below the LOTR poster has been removed. Here are some better looks at it.

with poster still in place over the hole...so long, Aragorn!...

...and with hole made bigger for repairs. Sound insulation (to keep embarrassing tinkling sounds in the powder room from disturbing diners) has been added to the wall

Here's the work a bit further along, with the walls in the entry all patched and ready to be textured. You can imagine how yucky they must have looked before when I tell you how beautiful they appeared to us at this stage!

To give you an idea of how thoroughly our lives were disrupted, here are a series of photos showing how various rooms looked at various points in the process. The guys that did the work were very accommodating and—given what all they were doing—friendly and easy to have around. But I can't believe now when I look at these pictures, how we survived with (mostly) sanity and marriage intact.

living room full of building materials, painting supplies and other implements of destruction construction

guest room full of stuff from my study while study was being worked on (bed is still in garage)

my study full of stuff from guest room while guest room was being worked on

dining room full of supplies (the giant buffet eventually had to be moved to refinish floor but here is only covered for protection)

that's how you paint a ceiling! note cheerfully-colored scaffold. That's my piano, well-covered in front of the fireplace; it eventually also had to be moved out when we decided to do the floors

half of the garage made unusable for cars (although boats & bicycle stayed at home) while used for storing non-essential furniture

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As you might be able to tell from the photo at the top of the post, things are not yet completely back to [the new] normal. Nothing's been hung on the beautiful new walls, since I don't want to be as cavalier about such things as I used to be with the crummy walls. I need to give these decisions more thought. And some of the furniture has yet to be moved back from the garage.

But we can actually inhabit all of the rooms of the house, and sit down in the living room, which are simple pleasures I had no idea were so precious.

In my next post you'll see some of the secrets of 1930's domestic architecture that were exposed in the course of the project, and then I'll show you what the rooms look like now.