Good things come to those who WORK!

It's been a while, and the blog has suffered. With finishing up little projects around the house, plus working at our actual jobs, it's hard to make time to blog. If you've not been over to see the house in person, here are some before/after shots.

Here we've got what was once the laundry area, and is now a modular working cook top area. The previous owners had their washer/dryer and some white melamine caninets hung up here, on that LOVELY "wood" paneling. Also look at the window and see the bars over the glass? Fantastic. We chceked codes and found that if we wanted to install our gas range there, we'd need to wall in the window. I was pretty sad about this at first, losing light, but we installed a Solar Tube which really lights up the kitchen (I've blogged about it in the past). I created this gas range work station from 2 kitchen carts from Ikea, which I found to match the existing kitchen island we already owned from Ikea. We added casters to it, and I think I may add a towel bar and some utensil hooks one of these days. Anyway, I found the mini-version of the island and bought 2 of them, and set to the sides of the gas range. The reasoning behind this was due to our having 2 competing cabinetry styles already, plus the island in another style, so I worked my magic and made them all work rather than compete. And that area with the range and 2 butcher block surfaces is really convenient, especially with all the oil/vinegar hanging baskets, pot racks, etc. Love it. Check out the custom made Spice Rack, made to match the cabinets, of course.
Here I've got another shot of the kitchen (below) and the Dining Room. In the DR, there was not a lot I could do as far as changing the layout, and I love the built-in china cabinet, they just don't do that in new houses any more. Of course the paneling had to go, I repainted everything and hung a collage of original artowrk I collected on a trip through Europe. I went with Dunn Edwards Navy Teal on the walls, and Waverly Damask print curtains. The table was Warren's parents in the 60's, an artist up in Topanga Canyon made these neat furniture pieces from old barnwood. I bought those chairs at the Salvation Army about 4 years ago and they've been re-painted and upholstered a few times since I've owned them. In addition to having to pretty much re-glue and stabilize each one too.

The kitchen shot is from the gas range area, where there now is our refrigerator and a shot of the refinish job I did on the cabinetry. The 2 cabinet styles were completely different, and instead of trying to make them match, I decided to make them completely different, yet complimentary to eachother. The upppers are original to the house (1945), the lowers are cheap stuff from Home Depot. You can see in the before photo that they were painted, or stained, and had cheap tile installed, OVER the ugly printed paneling. I think we made an improvement. I wallpapered Damask print in the insets of the uppers, painted everything else Swiss Coffee, we selected Verde Butterfly granite, which is basically black but has a slight twinkle of green, which goes well with the pea soup color green I did, Dunn Edwards Crocodile Tears. Next to that there is a shot of the island with Vintage poster that I had framed (Aaron Bros 1 cent sale! Usually in January and July every year, worth the wait if you have a lot to frame).

Here we've got a shot of what was once the Most Depressing Living Room in the World, now we have Warren's must-have projection screen instead of a TV, hidden by these graphic art screens that I found online and hung up on the wall with hinges. They're reversible, so when we open them up while using the projection screen, you still see something instead of a plain back. And when closed they're quite a statement. Much better of a statement than what was being made before. Disgusting mauve, smoke-stained walls, hideous Oak shelving and entertainment cabinet, a nappy plaid sofa, and a hospital bed. Vision, I have. Sanity, barely intact. But hanging on by a thread. It's over, but whew! What a project!


And last but not least, the outside. We took down the termite damaged fence to open up the property and make it look less like a compound. What a difference right there! The house was painted Dunn Edwards Rocky Ridge (actually I had it mixed at Home Depot with Behr paint because they were having a huge sale that even my account pricing at Dunn Ed couldn't touch...never agian. Worst paint ever. Dunn Ed's paint is so superior it's not even funny. ) We got new retro-fit windows, and added black shutters. Actually those were in the clearance bin at Home Depot, a return, they were gray and about 2 inches too tall. We chopped them and painted them, saving a ton of cash. We got them for next to nothing because they were a custom order that went wrong. Good things come to those who dig through clearance bins! And you can't see it in this photo, but we have a red front door, it's Dunn Edwards Pomegranete. A fun, cheery red, not too dark, not too orange, not too fire-engine. And the rocks on the front of the house, mostly obscured by the previous owners overgrown hedges, were faux painted by me with a combination of exterior stain and paint. If I have to have rocks on the front of my house, I think I can live with these.

Kittens and Kitchens and Paint, Oh My!!!

Here we are with the house starting to really look like just that...a HOUSE not a compound. We have been painting the exteriors, which is zero fun in the summer. As a professional painter, I thought to my self (and out loud) "Oh, painting the house will be a piece of cake! I paint for a living!" I actually looed at one wall of the back house and told Warren I could paint it start-to-finish in 15-20 minutes. Oh, exterior painting, damn you. So not the same as interior painting. Not only is it super hot outside, and the paint gets all gummy and disgusting, the exteriors of the houses were all sprayed with Spray-Tex by Sears many years ago, and that stuff sucks up paint like I suck up wine with my mom or girlfriends. Like a lot is what I mean. So that's extending the process. But it's getting done. I'd say we're about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way done painting the exteriors. The insides of the eaves are the most time consuming part. A lot of trim and cutting in. Ugh.

On to the kitchen: We have the granite countertops installed on our custom cabinets (yours truly did her magic to make a funky eclectic look out of 2 mis-matched styles of cabinetry (Again, I am obsessed with the Damask wallpaper inserts). Our plumber, Peter can be seen here hooking up the cast-iron sink. This was a fun job for him, because his past work at our house involved digging ditches for gas and water lines, fixing leaks galore, repairing "tweaker plumbing" which is a line that runs maybe 12" but has 5-6 different materials in use. He's probably quite happy to see us at the end of the road soon! If you need a plumber let me know, I highly recommend Peter!

And Kittens: We found a litter of 3 kittens behind the garage last week. We have 2 kittens already, and if you didn't know, they're not the original 2. Our little orange kitty DJ from the pics in earlier blogs was vehicular cat-slaughtered (hit by a car) in front of our house a month and a half ago, and we adopted another kitty to keep Sonja company. Well, we found this litter, and a home for one on the first day, and have a taker for one more when our old neighbor gets back into town, and may end up with one of them. They're more than adorable, and when the house is done we have room for them, and are going to eventually put in an electronic fence so there are no more accidents. But yeah, we're those people that are remodeling our house down to the studs, dealing with 4 kittens. At least they're adorable and lift our spirits, because this is grueling work.

Wait for it....

I know, I know, it's been a while! No time to blog when I have work to do on the house! This one is for YOU Jaime Allen...we may even be related, and you always have an invitation here at Allentown.

A very short catch up for you all:

We had the Bobcat guy take away all the concrete that Warren and Kyle broke up:



We FINALLY drywalled the kitchen, plus primer and paint:



We re-hung the cabinets:





And just you wait until tomorrow (or maybe the day after...) I am promising to get caught up! Just a teaser:

We have the tile laid down in the hall bath, which is also painted and the fixtures will be 100% installed tomorrow.

The kitchen is 90% done. We have the FABULOUS damask wallpapered upper cabinet doors on, the granite countertops are in, the tile is 2/3's done, the grout goes down tomorrow in the kitchen and bath.

The Hallyway has (most) of the wainscot installed, just waiting for paint.

We have can lights and full electrical everywhere, just a few outside lights to install.

The hardwood floors are being refinished starting on monday, finishing on friday.

The Master Bedroom final wall has been demo'd, extended, re-framed, drywalled, mudded, taped, textured and painted! As well as the Master Closet, fully finished (except for the closet organizers)

And so much more...as you can see I have limited time to blog. Not to mention I took a day off last week with 2 girlfriends and accidentally spilled a glass of wine into my purse (don't ask) and my camera is out for repairs, so that has also put a damper on the photo-blogging. I am using Warren's camera now, and will upload the latest shots of the improvements shortly! It really is amazing, we've come so far. Can't wait to do a Before/After blog....we are 3 weeks from being DONE. I mean baseboards and crown moulding done. Whew. I better go to bed, so I can get up at 6am start all over again. We're at the point where there are a ton of little things to do. That amounts to a BIG job, but at least all the big jobs are out of the way, which made for a monstrous job.

Visitors are welcome! We won't be asking people to grab a sledgehammer and take down a wall anymore...we're at the point where it's much more fun to be here at Allentown!

Pantry Mural

The pantry is such a small room, and one that I could handle without relying on anyone else to do something for me first. We considered wrecking the right side wall that was original to the house, old plaster that had been paneled over with a considerable amount of glue. The result of the paneling coming down was that there was a ton of glue to be scraped off and also chunks of plaster came down while demo'ing the panels. We've been trading work with our neighbor's brother but you know how that goes...we haven't seen him in a few weeks, and Warren wanted him to do the demo and help drywall in there. I decided that I was having none of that. I am so sick of waiting for people to help and it holding us up, so I made the executive decision that I would scrape the upper portion of the wall and fill in all the damaged parts, and then install wainscot underneath over the damaged plaster. So while Warren was at tennis last week, I went to town on the wall with a heat gun and a scraper. I filled in all the holes with mud and then got going on the rest. I also had to mud and tape the wall that we put up on the left side, as this panty was converted from a small bedroom, the other half is our walk-in closet.

I created the sketch with a slightly Mediterranean feel in mind, although that's not totally the style of our house. But this room is a pantry and I really can do whatever I want, so since we are no longer so close to the beach I did a small secluded beach with a ledge that the chair rail will sit just under. I hung some fresh fish and herbs from a bar that will still be visible when the door is open. The rest of the walls are Dunn Edwards Terracotta Sand, a color I use a lot, it's the color of the entire interior of the back house. The wainscot is not nailed on yet, we're getting there...not sure that the nails we have fit our nail gun, and with so many things to do, it's easy to leave a project unfinished. Ugh, that's the story of my life right now. Well, all the paint is done in one room, all we have to do in the pantry now is 1. install the wainscot 2. install the chair rail 3. Paint both, so I take it back, not all the painting is finished 4. insert the finished trim in the new can lights 5. refinish the wood floors 5. design, purchase and install the pantry storage cabinets and shelves 6. install baseboards and crown molding. Wow, so close. Well the mural itself took me about 7 hours, so hopefully the rest of the work will move along quickly as well.

Let there be {sky} Light!

Whilst installing the roof, we decided to install 2 Solartubes in the ceiling of the kitchen and the existing hallway bathroom. That bathroom lost a window as we are going to add a Master bath off the back of it, and has zero daylight. The Solartubes are amazing! I took a few pictures with the cover off (I was mud and taping the ceiling in the kitchen and didn't want to get it dirty, and it looked so cool!). The inside is polished aluminum, so highly polished that it looks like a mirror, which captures the sunlight from any angle in the sky and reflects it into the room. This should give us a huge savings on the electrical bill down the road, as we will not have to use the light in the bathroom during the day at all, and will extend the period of time that sunlight lights up the kitchen as well.

The drywall is about 90% complete (just like so MANY of our projects) in the kitchen, I put in the insulation and although I swore I'd never do it again, hung drywall. Warren helped. Haha, he actually did most of the drywalling in there, I followed with mud and tape. I think he got the better end of the deal. The worst part of drywalling is the mud + tape. But now that I've done it before I have a better system and don't think I will get White Lung disease this time. Last time I had to drink Theraflu every night and coughed up drywall dust for a week. I have a better respirator now, and have it down to a science, and got a different brand of mud, so things are much better. You can see in the first picture the hot pink mark on the ceiling...the mud I am using goes on pink and dries white, so you know when it's ready for sanding, takes out the guess work, and this stuff is much smoother to work with. Very similar to doing Venetian Plaster actually, except I am just doing the seams. If you've seen our back house, you know that we have some seam issues in there, we didn't know all the rules of drywalling yet. One more thing to fix. Yay.

Speaking of things to fix, here is my 2nd? 3rd? cousin Willy ripping into my freshly painted wall to fish a wire through to the new switch. I knew I was getting ahead of myself when I painted the dining room, but it felt so nice to have a room feel somewhat finished! Well, we have rewired the entire house with Romex from the old Bulb & Tube, so there are some serious patches to be done. He looked like he was enjoying that WAY too much. And, we've figure out that patching the old plaster walls takes a piece of 1/2" drywall PLUS a piece of 1/4" drywall on top of it to get the closest to the thickness of the walls. Good times.

And the the beat goes on

Some pretty things we have: Our roses are out of control amazing!!! They need to be replanted because some of them are right on top of eachother, but they're thriving! Need some tlc, a little aphid killing, but they look amazing.

And, TA DA...here are my kitchen cabinet doors. Since they were totally different than the lower cabinets in style, I decided to work WITH them different styles rather than try and make them match. The lowers are just plain white, the uppers have the most awesome damask wallpaper on the inner section. Obsessed.

Our cousins were down for the day last weekend, and let us know that the shoes tied together and thrown over the telephone wires across from the house were a sign for a "drug drop". We are pretty sure that the druggies were the previous owners, so Warren go up on the roof of the house across the street and took them down. Hope there's no retribution from a dealer or junkie. Seriously. But I think when we bought the house, that element disappeared. Keep your fingers crossed.

Here is my sweet set up in the back. I have our beach umbrella set up in a patio set umbrella stand, over 2 saw horses, with my Android phone playing music from the Grooveshark site, through my crappy radio/cd player, with a beer. Yep, it's just like being at the beach, except for the awesomeness.

And, this is what the inside of an attic looks like with out a roof, in case you were wondering.

It went from a little "skylight" to us taking down the ceiling from above, which was way easier and more fun than you'd think. The roofers took out the old insulation (which did NOT have asbestos in it, thank you very much) and that left us the open air attic so that we could climb up and kick down the disgusting stained ceiling from above. There's Warren, with some plaster in mid-air.

So the kitchen has been completely open for 2 days or so. And the roofers have installed the sheeting and are putting on the roof today, after the inspector swings by to check off on things.

While the roof has been off and the rafters have been open, the electricians have wired the kitchen with Romex and we have the lighting design in place. Can lights, under cabinet lights, lights over the bar, fan light, and we are considering installing a Solartube for natural daylight.

We are putting the drywall up on the ceiling hopefully today...we started last night with Jack (who has earned his invitation to our party for people that have come over to help out), but weren't able to finish in time...I am sure the neighbors are already less than thrilled with the roofing all damn day, so for us to be sawing drywall with a circular saw past 8pm seemed out of line. Today it is.

I have finished painting the kitchen cabinetry (and have all the doors finished with my Damask wallpaper inserts!), so once the drywall is up on

the ceiling, we can drywall the walls, and reinstall the cabinets. We may have a kitchen in the Main House before too long! Except for the tile floor. I have a feeling, and it's not a good one.

Skylights, a Mermaid for Jackhammers, Jugs, 3 Floors and Surprsingly Pretty Red Flowers

To begin, we have all the flooring up in the kitchen and have reinstalled a plywood subfloor, ready for tile when we get to that stage. Warren pulled up 3 layers of linoleum and 3 layers of subfloor to go with them. Apparently the idea was (as many have done before) just to go right over the top of the existing floor...no one will ever know! Well, there was 1 3/8" of flooring in the kitchen. The wood subfloor we laid now transitions to the wood floors in the hallway and dining room perfectly, with out the big trip on the threshold. I mean that I would trip on those sections going in and out of the kitchen. Big time.

Our friends Kyle and Alicia just had a baby in March, and I painted the nursery for the, in trade for Kyle coming to take out the concrete all over our property. This is her sweet mermaid themed nursery. And, here is Kyle working the jackhammer. he taught Warren how to run one too, so between the two of them, we have a lot of rubble, but all the sidewalk things are gone, the old steps from the back doors, and the RV parking which will change into a vegetable garden when Ron gets his magic done.

Here are the surprisingly pretty red flowers. All of a sudden they were in full bloom, and they've not been watered or fed once. Well, it rained last week. So I guess that was it.

And, here are the "jugs". This classy wardrobe mirror with the sticker on it really says it all about the previous owners. So awesome.

Viola! We have a skylight. Not on purpose really. We took down the cabinets a while back, and now the roof is coming off, and since that section has a broken ceiling, we have a skylight. We actually are going to install Solar Tubes in the ceiling while we have the roof off, which will save on energy and bring in natural light which will really be great in the house.

Here is the roof coming off, in action! We were working in the office and this was going on outside the window. The neighbors LOVE us right now.

Blah Blah Blah

New stuff we have finished, or let's be honest...are working on still. The hallway has been painted, up to the point where it will now end. We have changed the layout of the house, so the door to the master will be about a foot into one leg of the hall, so that portion os much shorter, and what you are looking at here in the before/after shots is the pink walls and yellow ceiling of the previous owners all the way down the hall to the existing door of the master. A side note: I described the pink color on the walls as "pepto-bismo had sex with a dirty ashtray" to my cousin recently. It's a really disgusting color, and it has a 30 year glaze of nicotine. Which also made the ceiling color, whatever that originally was, disgusting as well. I TSP'd the walls and ceiling and then used oil-based primer, and then painted. In the after shot you see the ceiling painted white up to the point where the new door to the master will be moved to, and the walls are Dunn Edwards Terracotta Sand, same color we used in the back house. And, check out how the sand color we are using on the walls is similar to what used to be a white ceiling from the previous owners, the part I didn't bother to paint because I need to retexture it when it transitions into the bedroom. Wow, that's a lot of cigarette smoking in a hallway. What, was there a line like at a club to get in the door of the bathroom or something?

We have also been tearing up the kitchen. The walls are down to the studs, the floors are down to the original sub-floor (more on that in the next blog) and the bar cut out is started.

And we have cleaned up the floors a bit as we work, just so they don't get any worse. You can see that once they are refinished, they are going to look amazing. Original to the house, we are very lucky to have these floors, or I should change that to say that we will feel lucky when they are refinished. We have finally come to the agreement that we are hiring out that work rather than tackling it ourselves. Reality has set in.

We also took out the old floor furnace and Warren built the sub floor so that our wood floors can be repaired and replaced over that section.

Me, doing what I do best. Painting...not whatever you were thinking. The door had been a heavily stained and lacquered wood, that had to go. I do like the cut glass in the top though, not that I'd have ordered a door like that on my own, but since it's there, it's grown on me.