Spring is Here....Time to Get Working

Spring is finally here! After getting a final dumping of 33" inches of snow, warmer temperatures have finally arrived, which means it is time to get working once again. As I looked at my last post, I was surprised to see that I have not posted since 2016! I am so sorry! While we did not do a whole lot of work on the house that is able to be shared, we did get quite a few projects done.

First, we installed our picket fence in the front yard.

Unfortunately, our yard is anything but level! We had to step down on the sides - one more than the other - to stay within the four foot high city requirements. This year I am planning on painting the fence white.

Our second big investment, and the reason why a lot was not done on the house last year, was a new steel roof on the garage. The old roof was pretty old and in poor condition when we bought the house in 2011. It finally reached the point where the insurance company put a rider on our policy excluding the garage which meant it was definitely time for an upgrade.

Now that you are caught up on what we accomplished last year, let's review the various projects in store for this year (and which I will be much better about sharing as we go along). This is the year that we are going to really start pushing on many of the projects.

This week, we finished the first of many - upgrading the washer and dryer set. My old set was, well, old. The washer had come with the house and was super-sized. While it worked, it had a few quirks about it. The dryer was a housewarming gift from my mother and had been refurbished. The first few years we used it we kept blowing the thermostat on it. We finally determined that we could dry our clothes so long as we set the temperature setting on medium instead of high. That worked great for a few years, but lately, we had to restart the dryer to get the entire load of clothes dry. So my husband decided it was time to spoil me a few weeks before my birthday.

What a difference! I usually spent most of Sunday doing all the laundry for the week when I am busy working at the local elementary school. I was able to do a week's worth of laundry in about four loads total. And each load only took about 40 minutes to wash (opposed to 50) and 45 minutes to dry (opposed to 60 minutes). And it plays the most charming music when it is done! Happy. Happy. Happy.

We have also started working on the downstairs bathroom. This is going to be a very time consuming project, to say the least. It is a fun one, though, with each  member of the family "helping" me while I glue every single piece down individually.

It took us about four hours to do this small section. We have been saving pennies for a while and were going to wait to start this project when we thought we had enough. I got tired of waiting. I mean, we just do not use cash anymore like we used to with the debit cards and credit cards, so we just did not seem to be saving pennies like we used to. I will have to go to the bank and start purchasing rolls of them to keep working. The bathroom floor has been taken down to the subfloor. We are then gluing each penny down using an extra durable and clear epoxy that works with metal. I have decided to glue each penny down, face up, meaning that we see nothing but heads.

This is a pun for my husband who is a veteran of the Navy....as in going to the head. Ha ha ha.

Each member of the family takes a turn handing me the pennies, tail side up, so that I can dab on a little bit of glue and stick the penny in its spot. The average tolerance level for "helping" has been two rows. We have had some debate about cleaning versus not cleaning, tarnished versus not tarnished, etc. However, since I suffer with my OCD, I decided that the best option was to be completely random and to use each and every penny regardless of condition, as is.

So, how many pennies are in this first section? We estimate approximately 1,404 or $14.04. So this project will take a while and we will be sure to keep you posted. As for the other projects, here is the list for this year:

• Trim the exterior windows and doors on the garage. (We finally bought a compound miter saw so we can start doing this type of stuff. Yeah!!!)
• Repair the wood floor between the office and kitchen.
• Sand, stain, and seal the living room wood floor.
• Install board and batten in living room.
• Install built-in bookcases in living room.
• Install baseboard in living room.
• Install crown molding in living room.
• Replace two living room windows.
• Install surround sound speaker system in living room.
• Install insulation in living room ceiling.
• Repair broken lathe and plaster in living room.
• Paint living room.
• Update light fixture in living room.
• CELEBRATE THAT ONE ROOM IN THE HOUSE WILL BE FINISHED!

We are also planning on finishing the new custom kitchen this year. We already purchased the new appliances: (2) 5-burner gas stoves, undercounter dishwasher, apron front farmhouse sink, and french door refrigerator. All the appliances but the refrigerator are in the dining room. Just saving up the funds for the custom kitchen cabinets, which we hope to do this spring/summer.

Stay tuned for more pictures and works-in-progress.

In Love with Oiled Bronze

I decided this spring that while we may not have the funds to tackle the larger ticket projects, I could start working on the smaller ones - the ones that don't require an excessive budget but do need either elbow grease or time. I have always been attracted to oiled bronze finishes, but never really noticed or acknowledged it until I started to tackle some of these projects. Isn't it funny how a key component of our style has always been there but just out of sight? For example, here are some pictures of items that I had already implemented in my home with an oiled bronze finish.

 

Like this sign that hangs on the front of our house. My husband is a Navy veteran and so I proudly display this as a reminder of his service to our country.

 

And years ago I had purchased this little bell. It reminded me of the farmhouse bell that was hung at my grandparent's farm. 

 

A few years ago when I purchased a small patio set, I purchased one with an oiled bronze finish and brown woven seats.

 

I didn't even think about my pot rack until I was taking photographs of the finished projects with oiled bronze components! My lovely pot rack that we installed a couple of years ago to hold my stainless steel pots and pans and my ever-growing collection of cast iron cookware.

Earlier this spring I decided that I needed to do something with all of the exterior doors. They are all unfinished, steel doors. In an ugly gray finish. Two years ago we decided on the colors for the house - of which one of the accent colors was a charcoal. I was wandering in Wal-Mart's spray paint aisle looking at paint options for the doors when I saw the metallic collection - with an oiled bronze color. I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a "before" picture, but here is another door from the house in the same gray steel finish. 

 

Not the best looking door. And all the wear and tear and fingerprints on it appear to be dirty brown and yucky color. This made the oiled bronze a good color choice since it can hide a lot of the wear and tear that our household puts on doors. The first door I painted was the front door. And I love...love...love how it turned out! 

 

One door down and four more to go. I actually bought the cans of spray paint needed to paint the rest of the exterior doors, but they got used on a surprise Mother's Day present - a front porch swing! I have wanted a porch swing ever since we bought this house...in 2011. Yes, projects take us a very long time to complete. We are not the Turtle Construction Company like the Duggars; we are the Slow-as-Snails Renovation Company! My goal is to have all the projects done before the house is paid in full or all the kids move out!

 

I was more than happy to use all my cans of paint for the doors fixing up this swing. I really enjoy sitting out there on a nice, warm day enjoying cuddling with my quilt while reading a good book. There is nothing that compares to it.

In addition to painting the exterior doors, I decided to paint the interior doors as well. We plan on replacing the cheaper, hollow core doors with solid wood ones at some point. However, I have to live with these doors for right now. It took me some time - and cleaning - to realize that these doors were purchased pre-primed and then never painted by the home owner that installed them. I would try to clean them and the finish would turn a disgusting shade of gray. As usual, I forgot to take a before picture, but there are a lot of these doors in the house - all identical in style and type.

 

This picture does not do justice to how incredibly disgusting this door really is. Just trust me. It is nasty. Well, Wal-Mart was selling on clearance Almond Enamel paint. This was a nice, high gloss and easily washable paint that I thought would work perfectly for the doors. Cleaning them has been really easy. I tackled the dirtiest and nastiest door on the first floor - the bathroom door. This door gets a lot of handling, especially when we are working in the garden. Lots of dirty fingerprints cover just about every available surface of this room. I chose the almond color because I felt that it was a nice, warm color compared to the dirty gray. Plus, with the kids, a bright stark white just would not work. And I did not want dark colored doors as I want  our rooms to be as large, bright and airy as possible. 

 

I also chose the almond color because I thought it showcased the oiled bronze handsets beautifully. A true complement of finishes. Doesn't that look so nice?

 

This past week we had two unplanned projects land in our lap - a broken toilet and a leaking kitchen faucet. The plastic handle on the toilet snapped. I temporarily fixed it by tying a string to the chain that controls the flapper thing. We have really hard water so the guts of the toilet were in pretty bad shape after about 7 years of use. A week of flushing the toilet with the string seemed to have skewed the flapper position as well. My husband decided that we would upgrade and replace the inserts. Since we had to buy a new handle anyway, I chose one with a - you guessed it - oiled bronze finish. 

 

Doesn't that look nice? It is such an upgrade from the original cheap plastic handle. Plus, this is the toilet that has had the seat replaced - not just once; not twice; but three times! I don't think the problem is us. I think it is the quality of the plastic thingamajiggy that secures the seat to the toilet. We keep breaking those silly plastic things!

We discovered that the kitchen sink was leaking really bad. Some of the plastic gaskets had broken and the caulk was missing from around three-fourths of the sink. We had replaced the faucet about three years ago for the same reason. Instead of choosing a good, quality faucet, we went with the cheapest option we could find. It was more of an emergency and necessity. However, this time, I was blessed that my husband agreed we should invest in one of better quality. We were double blessed that Menards was having a nice sale on kitchen faucets! We were able to pick up our new faucet at quite a steep discount!

 

The faucet itself is higher up than the one that we replaced. This will make filling the watering cans, canning pots, and other pots and pans much, much easier. I also took the time to remove what was left of the old, moldy and disintegrating caulk with some nice, new caulk. No more leaks and a nice finish to the faucet. 

Now that we have recognized that I really like the oiled bronze finish, we are going to slowly integrate it into the house as we update, repair, and replace different things. So what types of finishes do you like or have you found that you use in your house on a regular basis?

An Interesting Spring

It has been an interesting spring this year, that is for sure. Over the winter, we worked on relatively few projects around the house. The winter seemed longer than usual this year - almost never ending. We began work in the downstairs bathroom by raising the ceiling back to its original height, and creating a buildout to hide the plumbing pipes for upstairs. We also replaced the sink and cabinet with a beautiful porcelain pedestal sink that we picked up for $15 at our citywide rummage sale - in 2013. And we finally decided on a few more of the finishing touches - like the walls and floor.

We also worked a little bit in the living room and dining room area. We are continuing to slowly remove the old varnish from the original wood floors and we finally removed the supporting pillars. The pillars were made of treated outdoor lumber - not something we really wanted in the house due to the chemical processes used. Now, my wonderful husband likes to measure the distance between the floor and the support in the ceiling to make sure nothing has moved.

And, of course, we put in our garden. This is our third year doing the Back to Eden garden method. This year, we were also able to start some of our seeds in the house - and managed to not kill them before getting them into the garden! That was a first for us. Since last year's garden resulted in some unintended produce - like green and gold gourds - this year we did something a little different with our layout. And, we added some new-to-us produce: potatoes, acorn squash, turnips, rutabagas, and cantaloupe. Plus a whole variety of beans that we had never heard about before.

We have plenty of wood chips from the deliveries that we received last year and actually have some extra stored around the garden. This year, I have been spending more time working around the plants and, unfortunately, weeding. This was due to a decision, regrettably, that we made last year. We wanted to try and save our own seeds and thought we would try with dill. And so we let it go to seed. Big mistake. I should have sealed the seeding plants in bags or something because they spread their seeds throughout the entire garden. And so, I have little dill, and for some reason parsley, sprouting everywhere. Fortunately, the "weeds" are coming out of the ground fairly nicely and once pulled, I have been putting down additional wood chips in an effort to prevent any reappearances.

Little Peter Rabbit had also discovered our garden this year. Unbeknownst to us, a momma rabbit had her babies in our garden and was keeping them in some tires we had set aside for our potatoes. We noticed momma rabbit getting into the garden and so we added additional fencing around the gate and did some other minor repairs, which successfully locked momma out - and away from her babies. Once we realized that we had baby bunnies in the tires, a couple of days later, we felt really bad. Of the four, one had already died. We moved the surviving three to a corner of the yard where there was plenty of old wood and some shade and security. Unfortunately, it was too little too late and over the course of a few days, we had to dispose the rest of the bunnies. It was so sad.

And yet, we continued on and our garden was thriving. The beans were doing especially well and then, one day, an entire four foot section was gone! The culprit - Peter Rabbit. We finally caught him in the garden and my husband began to chase him. To our surprise, he jumped through the fence - literally. What?! Upon closer inspection, we noticed that the fence we put up the first year, made of plastic, had been chewed through in several placed, providing an open air restaurant for Peter Rabbit! Not good. We reinforced the fence with chicken wire. And since then, have not seen Peter Rabbit in the garden.

We thought that we might not have any radishes this year. For some reason, our plants seemed to grow almost too fast, in same cases already getting ready to go to seed. We thought it might be because of too much water combined with a succession of hot, sunny days. I finally decided that I would just have to thin out the radishes, pulling those that were going to seed as well as those that were starting to overtake the row of tomatoes in the next row. To my surprise, I ended up pulling several very nice sized radishes! Enough to fill a quart jar for my wonderful husband to enjoy!

All in all, a very interesting spring!

Bathrooms and Hallways

Once we removed the ceilings from the large combined space of the living room, dining room and kitchen, we noticed that the bathroom ceiling seemed really low by comparison. It was kind of surprising, since we have been living in the this house for more than a year, that no one ever noticed the discrepancy in ceiling heights.

Opening up the ceiling gave us more than an extra 18 inches in height - it also allowed us to see the piping for the upstairs bathroom. We saw a really large open corridor all the way to the ceiling upstairs. We weren't sure what it was at first. However, removing the two cupboard added to the upper bathroom gave us access to the upstairs pipes and enabled us to see the space more fully. We found more than 10 square feet of space that was not being used effectively in the upper bathroom. We could see the original studs and the lines for the lathe and plaster, so we know the old bathroom was at least 10 square feet larger. Of course, the upstairs contains more work - but that is for another day (or more likely, another year).

Once we removed the ceiling from the downstairs bathroom, we began to review the wall lines around the chimney between the dining room and kitchen.

The chimney is actually the square block area behind the light switch plate that you see on the left in the picture above.

First, Daddy and DJ broke out an exploratory section, just to see exactly what we were working with. We weren't sure if this funny angle was original to the house or not. During discussions with previous residents, they never really seemed to know what I was referring to; now we know why. This part of the house was significantly modified. We are not sure why, but we guess it was to make the kitchen about 3 feet wider. Since historical accuracy is more important to us, we are attempting to put it back to the way it originally was. Down came the walls!

So, you might be wondering how we determine if something was original or added later? In this case, it was actually quite easy. They had filled the space with their garbage - new drywall scraps, McDonald's containers, etc. We were like, "really"? It just seemed so wrong to us that this what the flippers used the space for. All of that had to be cleaned out first.

With DJ's strong muscles, it didn't take too long for the "men" to get the wall down. Once the drywall was broken off, it was time to remove the screws. Good thing he has his own power drill to make short work of those screws, too!

He is so "helpful"! Once everything was torn down, we saw that we made the right decision. We could see the original base moulding and chair rails still attached to the chimney. We also found some wonderful colors in the plaster. There is still a lot of work to do, but we have definitely made some progress today. Thank you DJ for all your hard work!