The Green Monster

I'm not even sure where to begin with this post.  It's just so . . . gross.  Here goes.

When Cory and I bought this house we didn't plan to do anything to the current master bathroom / closet other than paint it and freshen it up a bit.  I knew our kids would NOT be using the time capsule of a shower because it was just . . . gross.  But it wasn't in our budget to gut the space so it was deemed a "down the road" project.

Fast-forward to today and this is what the space looks like.

The Green Monster is gone!

My clever little sister suggested that we split the bathroom / closet space in half to make better use of the space and give Dixon a bigger bedroom.  So Dixon's bedroom will be to the right of the doorway all the way to the back wall where the mirror hangs.  We will build a wall at the doorway which will allow Tessa to access the bathroom area which will be reorganized and modernized.  In the space to left we will have a laundry area for the upstairs bedrooms.  Confusing, I know.  If you look closely you can see the shower head and controls between the studs.  That is where the shower used to reside.

But let's talk about that shower for a moment.

That thing was a beast.  I'm almost certain that it could have served as a bomb shelter if needed.

And it was so attractive.  In an ugly sort of way.  Don't even get me started on the stains, mold, and soap scum.

Anyway, my job was to take off the tiles.  I was hoping that they would pop off easily like the tiles in the downstairs powder room.

No such luck.

I used a hammer and screwdriver and chipped away at those tiles.  But like everything in this house, they were set in thick concrete and didn't want to budge.  I was able to get most of one wall off bit by bit but it took for.ev.er. and I was not a happy camper.  It was time to bring in the big guns.

I called my burly man and he came over with a sledgehammer.

Cory took a different approach to removing the tile.  He first knocked down the plaster wall on the outside of the shower and then slammed the concrete and tile from behind.  Hard, sweaty, dirty work that was awesomely effective.

However, that was just one of the shower walls and there were several more that couldn't be knocked down so easily.  The tile was everywhere: walls, shower seat, floor, and even the ceiling.  It took a few days to get it all out of there and I think Cory gained 5 pounds of muscle in the process.  One evening we were watching an episode of Property Brothers on HGTV and Jonathan Scott was removing a similar shower.  He said, "Imagine breaking up and removing a sidewalk . . . that is on your wall."  Yep, that's about right.  Our sidewalk ran up four walls and the ceiling.  Cory deserves his own HGTV show.

So one project always tends to lead to another and that was the case in this bathroom.  We decided would need to remove the linoleum flooring because there would be a height difference between the current bedroom area / laundry area and the bathroom area.  Cory can't stand that.  And of course under the linoleum is more of the dreaded tile.

UGH.

I'm fairly certain that removing heavy flooring (once again set in concrete with metal mesh) is the most laborious and difficult task on the face of the planet.  Cory got it started and made good progress, but he was beginning to resent the house and dreaded going there because of how much work it was for him.

Thankfully we have an amazing church family.  AMAZING.  We put out word that we needed help one Saturday and we had a slew of awesome people show up to help us work.

These guys were able to remove almost all of the remaining floor and rubble.  Thanks, guys!!!!

So now the space is nearly empty.  The built in closet drawers and shelves are gone.  The two vanities are gone.  The Green Monster is gone.  The floor is gone.  The only thing that remains is the tub, and it will see a makeover as well.  It literally took weeks to get to this point, but I'm excited about how the room is transforming and about how much better it will function for our family.

And I'm SO very thankful that we tackled that mess during the renovation instead of waiting a couple of years.  I can only imagine the dust and rubble that would have permeated the house had we done this after moving in.  Yikes.

So long, Green Monster.  Enjoy your new life in the landfill.

Hey There, Studs

Our work downstairs was no where near complete, but at some point Cory and I decided to head upstairs and begin opening up the space.  If you recall, there were five bedrooms upstairs when we bought the house.  Our plan is to make two of those bedrooms larger, change the shape of a third, and leave the remaining space open as a hallway and kids' study.  The fourth bedroom for Sasha will be added over the garage during construction and our master will be built as an addition downstairs.  So here is a look at what the upstairs looked like before:

Four bedrooms are off of this hall and one bedroom, the "master", is behind the camera.

The first thing we did was remove the wall between the two front rooms.  This area will become the hallway / kids' study.

We quickly got a glimpse of how the space will look when it is one big space.

Demo is sexy work, man.

It took a couple days to get to this point.  The dividing wall is gone as is most of the flooring and some smaller walls that needed to be removed.  It's amazing how bright and airy the space feels now!

Our plan is to have two large desks that will each seat two children along the walls between the dormers.  I think it's going to be awesome.  If I were a kid, I'd definitely want to do my homework in a space like this.  Well, in a cleaned up and finished space like this, that is.

The next task was removing the large hallway wall.  Cory and I didn't plan to take down this wall because it will become the new back wall of two bedrooms, but the location of the bedroom doors needs to be changed and we need an access into the study area so it just made sense to take it down and start from scratch.

Let me just say, plaster is heavy, messy, dusty, ridiculous stuff.  Yes, you can do cool curves with it and it's very sturdy.  But oh. my. stars.  If I never have to remove plaster again in my life it will be too soon.

Goodbye, plaster wall!  Thankfully, we had a lot of help one Saturday which made the cleanup of all the mess go LOTS faster than Cory and I could have managed on our own.

That help was super important because we had to take the other hallway wall down, too.  You can now see that the back bedrooms picked up quite a bit of space from the hallway - hooray!

The only hiccup we've run into with these two bedrooms is that Tessa will not have a very spacious closet.  The corner where her closet sits has to be cut at an angle in order to have enough room to maneuver at the top of the stairs.  So it will only be a few feet wide.  We thought she was going to have more closet space on the opposing wall, but there just isn't enough room due to the placement of the windows.  I'm kind of bummed because one can never have too much closet space (especially a girl), but we'll make do.

Overall, I'm really happy with how the upstairs is transforming.  There is still much to be done up here, including removing a bit more plaster and getting clean edges along the ceilings.  We've been doing demo for so long and are absolutely exhausted.  It doesn't sound like a big deal to take down some walls and tear out floors, but it is a HUGE amount of work.  So hopefully we'll see some construction start soon!

One Question

As Cory and I progress through demolition of our house there is one question that we find ourselves asking over and over again:

Why did they DO that?

Don't get me wrong.  This house was really well-built and is sturdier than 99% of the homes built today.  The bones are fantastic.  But over the years previous owners have done things that simply leave us scratching our heads.  They also leave us with tons of work to do to get the house ready for renovation.

Exhibit A: The foyer.

Take a moment to soak in that lovely slate floor.  

Now come back with me to the dining room which is to the right of the foyer.

After I pulled off the wallpaper we decided to start removing the wood floors.  This is what the floor of the dining room looked like once the throw rug was removed:

No, folks, that isn't just a ring of dirt around the room.  The wood floor is actually stained that darker color all around the room so that you can see exactly where the rug once was.  I'm guessing this is a result of many years of dirt from wear and tear combined with dust and dirt being blown onto the floor by the radiators.  It's charming.  Or something.

We planned to replace these floors before seeing the condition they were in so this stain made it even less sad for us to start ripping them out of the house.  Cory got the job started along the front wall and between the two of us we removed the floor fairly quickly.  The boards were nailed down so it wasn't super easy, but it wasn't terribly difficult either.

We did have lots of nails to pull out of the subfloor, though.

Okay, back to the foyer and that awesome slate.

So guess what we discovered as we removed all that wood flooring?

Look closely.  Can you guess?

The wood floors run UNDERNEATH the slate!!!!  Seriously, WHY DID THEY DO THAT???

We were dreading removing the slate already because we knew it was set in concrete.  But we didn't imagine that the slate would have been plopped on top of wood.  It now makes sense why there wasn't a proper threshold at the front door: the floor was too high.

So Cory began attacking the floor.  It took days - DAYS - to remove this slate.  It ran all the way to the back of the foyer where the large family room begins, so there was a lot of it to remove.  The first day Cory just chipped at it a bit to see exactly what he was getting into.

And our suspicions were confirmed.  Slate on top of concrete on top of wire mesh on top of wood floors.  There was no less than two inches of material to remove and none of it would be easy.

Dixon was a great helper.  He loaded up buckets of concrete and tiles as Cory broke it up so it could be tossed into the dumpster.

But this job was really big and thankfully my parents came to help us for a day.  It was backbreaking work but they managed to free the foyer of all that unnecessary flooring.

Please folks.  If you want to change your flooring, take the extra time and effort to do it properly. Remove the old before installing the new.  

Spare future owners of your home the crazy amount of work it takes to do things the right way.

No one wants to do this kind of work.

It will all be worth it in the end though.  It will ALL be worth it.

The Powder Room

One of the rooms in our home that really embraced a retro feel is our downstairs powder room.  You may recall that it had lovely pink tiles and a matching pink sink as well as a very 70's inspired fabric for drapes and cabinet inserts.

The size of the powder room is great.  It is definitely bigger than our current home's powder room.  Initially we were just going to update it with new flooring and a new vanity.

Then we went to an antique mall and found the most awesome piece of furniture that we are going to convert into a vanity for this room.  I'm not going to show you the piece just yet.  I've got to keep some surprises up my sleeve for a little while.

Anyway, because of the shape of this powder room our newly acquired treasure won't fit into the space.

The main wall in the powder room backs up to the larger family room, and on the other side of this wall, in the part of the powder room to the left of the sink, is this:

Please excuse the really poor quality photo.  Once again, it was taken in the evening with only the light of one can light in the ceiling.  Anyway, these shelves take up space in the powder room.  So Cory and I had to decide if we wanted to leave the shelves in place and simply install a small vanity in the powder room or if we wanted to sacrifice the shelves for the really super cool amazing one-of-a-kind antique piece we both really really really love.

I think you can guess what we decided to do.

I started by removing the pink tiles.  Luckily, the wall tiles popped right off with just a tap.  But wall tile removal was as far as I got in this room.  I soon discovered that the tiles on the counters and the lovely pink sink were set in concrete and there was no way little me was getting them to budge. So from this point on my strong, handsome, burly man husband stepped in and did his thing.

Cory powered through the concrete counters and was even managed to remove the sink without breaking it.  He's da man.

Here you can see that the shelves are gone and so is part of the floor.  When Cory took out the shelves and the crown molding in the family room he discovered that another family had been occupying this home for some time.  A family of squirrels had clearly made themselves comfy as evidenced by the walnuts that tumbled out of the walls.  Cory even found a plastic Easter egg that a squirrel brought inside after the humans finished a hunt one year.  Silly squirrels.

So Cory had a lot of work to do in this little room.  It was a bit more than he bargained for when we started tearing things out of the space.  As he began to remove the linoleum flooring he found that it was layered on top of a mosaic tile.  Lovely.

It wasn't just any mosaic tile either. It was pink and blue mosaic tile to match the rest of the powder room.  Of course it was!

This meant that Cory pounded and chipped his way through layers of linoleum, tile, concrete, and steel mesh in order to get down to the subfloor.  I don't think I need to tell you how much work this was.

Slowly but surely he made his way around the room and cleared everything from the space.

It's not easy to see from this photo, but we also learned that the pipes were extremely old and fragile (and one even cracked when Cory touched it) and that the toilet was not properly sealed.  The concrete was soaked from water leaking for who knows how long.  And the subfloor is so damaged that it needs to be replaced.

So even though demolishing this room was a ton of work, we are very glad we did it.  Thank God we exposed a problem that would have gotten much worse had we done nothing.  It's moments like this one that make me thankful that we are tackling this project all at once even though we could have kept the powder room intact and just "lived with" the time warp that it was.

Lessons learned from this room: Don't put layers of flooring over top layers of flooring, and perhaps more importantly, check your toilet seals!

Wallpaper Woes

I don't know that there are many tasks as awful as removing wallpaper.  Am I right?  Either the top layer comes off and the glue layer is left stuck on the wall or none of the paper wants to budge at all.  In the past I've used different tools that were supposed to make this chore easier: scorers, glue-releasing gel sprays, steamers, and so on.  None of them really work all that well in my experience.

So when we bought this house I was happy that there was only wallpaper in a few rooms.

But let's not underestimate the reality of the wallpaper issue in the house.  It was there.  And it had to come down.  And that was my job.

So shortly after we gutted the butler's pantry I decided to work on the walls of the family room.  They looked like this at the time:

It's hard to tell from this awful photo in poor light, but there was a layer of cream wallpaper on the top section of the walls, fake paneling on the bottom part, and chair rail where they met.

I started to pull down the wallpaper without any tools at my disposal.  Yep, just my bare hands.  And honestly, the top layer came off without too much trouble in some places, and didn't want to budge in others.  The glue layer wasn't coming off at all.  But I persevered and spent a few hours picking at little pieces of it until it was time to call it a night.

You can see how much I accomplished during this time.  Not a whole heck of a lot.

So the next day I got smart and went to Lowe's.  I found this wallpaper scraper tool thingy (that is it's official name), grabbed a spray bottle of water from our current house, and went back to the house armed and ready to fight the paper.

 Okay, it's really called a Piranha, and let me tell you, it's a great name for this little fella.  That little straight edge gets underneath the paper and glue and scrapes it right off the wall.  This tool saved me countless hours and fingernails.

I quickly found my rhythm.  Peel off the paper layer, spray the heck out of the glue layer with water, and then scrape it off with the Piranha.

Cory removed the chair rail and paneling to expose a lovely ridge all around the walls.

After several evenings of spraying and scraping, the family room is now free of wallpaper.  Hooray!

I then moved on to the room that I was dreading: the dining room.  Remember that Williamsburg mural paper that was decorating the walls?

I was terrified that this stuff was going to take for.ev.er. to take down.  All those little leaves and details would have to be peeled or scraped off and there was just so much of it.  So in order to delay the pain I did what any good mom would do.  I called the kids into the room, made sure they had pencils, and told them to draw our family - and whatever else they wanted - on the paper.

They happily obliged.  Even Tessa got in on the action.

Some of the artwork was funny:

That reads, "Hi babe."  A little colonial humor.

Other drawings made me question the mental health of my children.

And there may or may not have been some piles of animal droppings added to the fields of cattle.  And I, the mature mother of four that I am, may or may not have contributed to those drawings.

You've got to find ways to have fun during situations like home demo, you know?

So after we all entertained ourselves with wall art for a while I shooed the kids back down to the basement so I could tackle the wallpaper removal.  I grabbed my trusty tools, took a deep breath, and mentally prepared myself for the battle at hand.

Surprisingly, within a few minutes, yes, MINUTES, all of the wallpaper was gone!  The project I thought was going to take days was the easiest one in the whole house.

It turns out that the mural was placed on top of a linen-like wallpaper.  And that paper just peeled off in huge strips taking the glue layer with it.  

If only all wallpaper came down so easily!  Dixon even popped back into the room, grabbed a piece, and pulled it right off.

Notice he is holding the Piranha, which was totally not needed here at all.

I actually took great satisfaction in pulling off this paper.  It made an awesome ripping sound and reminded me of peeling off big pieces of sunburned skin from someone's back. (Yes, I enjoy peeling sunburns.)

Anyway, the dining room has said goodbye to the 1800s and is ready to move into the 21st century.

The last room that had wallpaper was the laundry room.

It had this lovely beach themed border around the top.  What?  Don't YOU feel like you're at the beach when you're doing laundry?

Yeah, me neither.

It wasn't easy getting this paper off the wall only because I could hardly reach it.  I stood on a stepstool, a toolbox, and even hauled my bum onto the counter top to get the paper over the cabinets.  It wasn't easy.  It definitely wasn't fun.  And I discovered that the blue paint peeled off the wall as well, which meant I had to pull all of that down, too.

As of right now, all but one corner of the beachy border is gone and there is still some paint that needs to come down.  But I got burned out and had to move on to something else.  

Remind me to never put wallpaper in this house.  Ever.

Unless it's a really cool geometric pattern that is trending on pinterest and will be out of style two years from now.  Cause that stuff is really awesome.

It's DEMO Time!

Nothing ever happens quickly when it comes to building / remodeling a home.  Cory and I HOPED we would be under construction by now, but the reality is that we are just getting ready to start.  We closed on our house on November 22 and nearly four months later we still haven't built a single thing.

Why is it taking so long?  Bank processes.  Ugh. Who would have known it was so darn difficult to cut through all the red tape?  We had to wait until the house was appraised again.  This time, we needed to have it appraised as though all the work was done.  Long story short, this process took for.ev.er.

Anyway, after the appraisal was complete we started tearing the house apart.  Cory and I are doing all the demolition ourselves in order to save money.  We knew it would be a big, difficult, and time-consuming job and we were so right.  We've spent every free evening and weekend we've had for the past couple of months knocking down walls, removing wallpaper, tearing out floors, and so on.

The first area we tackled was the butler's pantry.  If you recall, this is the area that connects the smaller family room to the larger family room.  

Day One of Demo: Cheers to destroying our house!

I didn't really hammer those cabinets, but I did get some frustration out knocking down shelves and other junk.

Our kids got in on the action when they got tired of playing in the basement.  Sasha was good at taking off the cabinet doors and hardware.  As the doors and drawers were removed we found some random bags and even some birthday gift bags and tissue paper hiding behind them in the cracks.  I'm sure lots and lots of birthdays have been celebrated in this house!

Cory had the pleasure of doing the hard work, including knocking down beams.  But I think the most labor-intensive part of this project was removing the small closet beside the cabinetry.  The house was built in 1959 and all the walls are plaster.  Plaster is heavy, dirty, and super hard to remove.  It took a few days and lots of grunting and sweating before Cory got that area clear.

Here is a view of the now clear butler's pantry area from the family room.  (Sorry about the iPhone quality photos.) The fridge was moved to the side and is blocking part of the wall but you can get an idea of how much space we gained by removing all the old cabinets and the closet.

And here is the space from opposite end of the hallway.  The dining room is on the other side of the now exposed wall.  Cory would love to open up the wall for a more open layout, but I think it is staying as is for now.  My imagination is running wild with decorating options, though!

 Removing the butler's pantry was like a gateway demo drug for us.  Once we saw how the space opened up and felt how good it was to get rid of old crap we wanted to do more.  And more we did!  But that's for another post on another day.