Upstairs Bathroom Befores and After

I keep adding and updating paint but here's where I am now - almost totally finished except for the medicine cabinet I need to build but have no idea how to... so feel free to send ideas
BEFORE (with my BFF James about to take out the wall)



AFTER:

My Grandmother's Wallpaper

In the past year I've heard several women - always women of course - use the phrase "Wall paper is back." One was my mother who said that wall paper was back in and that there are so many neat patters and it was totally affordable now.

Here's the thing. Wall paper is not back in. It's only back in for people who are annoyed with what they've got and they want to cover it up. It's back in to wall paper manufacturers. I call bullshit - wall paper is not back in. I'm not saying that it can't be beautiful or amazing - but I'm sorry... I've got a bedroom with walls that follow the roofline. Do you honestly want to try and hang wall paper on that? I didn't think so.

I've never posted photos of my bedroom on here - but it so far has been the only room I haven't touched... until now. I was going to hold off and do it last. It's an amazing bedroom. Huge - probably 600-700 sq ft. Larger than my first apartment. It was a regular old bedroom, but in the 80's my grandparents knocked out the walls to the attic and built into it. It's amazing.

There is this wallpaper on it that is a sky blue with these little pink flowers with white leaves and stems. It makes me think of the movie Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lang... There is this scene where Dustin Hoffman - dressed as Dorothy - is at the country house with Jessica Lang and her father and Jessica Lang is talking about the wallpaper she picked out with her mother for her bedroom when she was a kid. Her mother told her that the wallpaper was going to be up there for a long long time so to chose something she liked a whole lot. Every night when she went to sleep and every morning when she woke up it would be there.

She asked her mom which wallpaper she would chose and her mom said that she'd chose the ones with the little daises and rosebuds on them because rosebuds are so cheerful and always waiting to bloom. Jessica Lang's character says she made so many plans looking at that wallpaper - she was always waiting for those rosebuds to bloom.

Of all of the things that I've done to this house - this was my grandmother's last stamp on the house. In 1989 when my grandfather set the house on fire everything got replaced, repainted, redone. Everything except the walls upstairs. In their bedroom there was this awful wallpaper she always wanted to get rid of but never did. In my room, it was paper she picked out and had put up.

Today I started pealing it off.

I'll keep it on two smaller walls - just because it's the last thing of her that's in the house. I know that she'd be happy with what I'm doing - the fact that I'm cleaning it and saving it and making it better, but it makes me sad that she's not here to see it when I'm finished.


So - here's the thing about old wallpaper. It often covers up even older wallpaper. . . and even older than that so on until you get to the plaster.

Such is the case with the blue sky and the little rosebuds. They cover up an awful kitchen looking grid paper that covers up some kind of palmtrees that I am going to guess is actually from the 1930's or 1940's. This paper is the same paper that we had under the three layers of paper downstairs I took off early on in the process.

I've done wallpaper before. I've gotten good at it. What I learned is that the super expensive solution that you buy and squirt on the walls to loosen the paper .... is crap.... and it's expensive. The best bet is a 1/3 solution of fabric softener and warm water. I can't remember who told me about this - but it's 100% dead on and genius. Always use warm water. The hotter the better. Also chose a fragrance that you don't mind smelling for several weeks.

If you're dealing with plaster - get a knife style scraper that looks like a giant razor blade. If you're dealing with sheetrock... use a putty knife. If you're on plaster you can scrape - but if you've got sheetrock when you scrape will peal off the first layer of the paper covering the sheetrock. I learned this the hard way. I assumed because it was old walls they were all plaster... not so much. The new attic walls are sheetrock from the early 80's - the room is plaster.

Some is going to scrape off the first layer of wallpaper but if you squirt it and soak it enough the first two layers will come off because its so thick and softened ... what with the fabric softener and all :). That bottom later the only solution is to soak it and scrape and then you get disintegrated brown sludge. Yummy.

Here is some inspiration for what I want my bedroom to look like when I'm done - think Hollywood Glamor - gray, black, white, and Tiffany's Blue:




I really want to figure out how I can put this chandelier in the apex of where the front roof meets the back roof - no idea how I'll do it

My House is Starting to Look Like a Real House!

Simply said... it took my breath away.



I mean what do you say? I went to that above from this

And I've got this now...

Here is what the porch looked like last night when I was leaving :)



I had them take the railing off and I'm going to get some white plasticy stuff. I'm overwhelmed. they still have the back and the west side to do - but seriously - the end is in sight and I'll have a house that is beautiful on the outside :)

Last Friday Rick - the siding guy - said that a woman from around the corner was walking in the neighborhood and stopped by and asked the workmen if "he" had sold the house. Meaning my grandpa. He said... "Mr. Burris? Um... no I don't believe so... he still lives here..." and she said "Oh.. well I just can't believe he's fixing it up... I mean it was a little dilapidated.. and what happened to that old car in the back yard??" Sigh....

When the whole project is finished I'm going to have a big party and I'm going to write a special letter of both apology and invitation to the neighbors.

Refinishing Wood Floors

One of the rooms that was added on to the house when I believe they added the second story in the late 1930's is what should be the true master suite. It's got a full bath and the room is huge with his and hers closets. My grandfather was using that as his "shit" room. Meaning when I was cleaning the house and he would say "I can't throw that away!" I would say ... "fine... put it in your room."

Eventually - one afternoon when he was at work - my mother and I went in there and started pitching things in trash bags. With the help of my mother and my friend Josh we liquidated the room in three trash bags and a porch load of stuff. We hid the bags of stuff in the car and dumped them in the bowling ally parking lot trash cans.... Then I pulled up the carpet to check out the floors underneath. Other than the fact that some dumbass spray painted the floors along with the baseboards... so that sucks. And the carpet pad is so old it is pasted and glued to the floor in a really awful way.


another shot of the room after we painted it

And the process of the floors...

Notice the carpet pad glue and residual carpet pad. It turns out... you can't sand this off. Didn't know that. . . .probably something everyone should know. Don't try to sand the glue and carpet pad off the wood floor.

Also - this is probably a good time to mention that the sander I got was probably not the best sander. I was expecting the mother of all sanders, right? I was ready too - doors on, towels under the doors, windows open. I was ready. Turns out.. this sander is something that doesn't really sand it very hard - its like three hand sanders in one machine and it had a vacuum on it. The vacuum was a cool feature but I can't help but wonder if I had the super industrial sander if it would have taken me a lot less time and sand paper pads which .. we spent probably over $100 on.

So ... trying to sand off the glue and carpet pad makes your sandpaper look like this:



So if you're getting this... you're doing it wrong. Turns out the glue gets heated and melts onto the pads - then the glue cools and then your sander sticks to the floor! Oh yeah... it was a happy learning experience. Then you end up with this stuff on your floor:



So we go and get this stuff:


And you put it on and let it sit for a minute or so and while its still wet you take a little putty knife and scrap it all off. Wear a mask... open all the windows. This is essentially paint thinner - except it doesn't remove paint... I still had to sand that off with the hand sander along the base boards.

Things get a little better:


And then keep sanding.... a whole lot... and sand more and more and more


Then sand more and more and you end up with this:

New Siding Adventure

This week the siding started. Apparently when you install your windows and siding you always install windows first and then siding because if there's a lot of re framing then your siding goes on top of that stuff. So we did the windows first - windows are in...


But the siding is going up next... We found Rick from a friend of my mother who once worked with her but now her husband and her do construction and contractor work. She typically works with contractors and whatnot to organize projects. But I'm running the show so she just gave me the name of a guy and I called him.

He was super nice on the phone - and really great when he first came out to look at the house and meet me. We had a great conversation and he talked to my mother for a bit while I helped the cable guy who was there to rerun a cable line to another room where the office is now. He was supposed to come back that next monday to measure but totally flaked... but... it was the week of Thanksgiving so.. I sighed and started looking for other names.

A week later he was out at the house apologizing and measured everything. Since then he's been A+. The bid he gave me was WAY beyond my price ... so we had to figure out how to readjust. Once we got to my $10,000 limit with a few adjustments we were good to go.

I chose the color Montana Suede. There is going to be an extra layer of foam that will go on between what we have up now and the new stuff so that we have a bunch of insulation where now... we don't have much at all. All of the windows are going to have caps over the new framing and trim - the posts on the porch will be covered, porch that we repaired earlier this year will now be covered with siding ... and new guttering and flashing to help direct the water away from the house and not to run down between the house and the brick veneer on the lower level.

The hideous Tudor Style boards are coming off and we're taking the house back to its older style pre hideous tudor boards... So my estimation of what it will kind of look like will be this below - except on the right side my mother wanted to see what it would look like if the siding was vertical.. which is stupid but I did it anyway so ignore that part...

The way the house will look via photoshop - except all the stuff on the porch is gone now ...

Yard Work Project From Hell

When the appraiser came through to look at the house before we did any work the first thing he said was that our back yard and in general front yard looked pretty rough. Not just because we have a garage that is literally falling down - but the back yard looks like someone could get lost and perhaps die from carnivorous plants.



So this is what I'm dealing with here.... It's pretty bad. I didn't take a picture of the back side of the garage where I'd found that my grandfather had been hoarding stuff ... and a family of opossums had built a nest.

After six days of raking leaves that hadn't been raked in probably 10 years, cutting down small trees that had grown just a little taller than I am from seeds falling out of other trees - and generally thinning out the poison ivy and various other weeds and whatnot.

Here's what I've got now.

Managing electricity in an old home

What I learned when I had our electrician come out to the house at the beginning of this project is that in the 1930's when the second story of the home was put onto the house - they didn't exactly allow for the extra power usage by a whole second floor. What he thinks happened is that they branched off the power from the downstairs and just brought it upstairs.

A friend of mine who does construction and whatnot said this is typical of older homes. So the guys at Yukon's Twin City Electric - Russell specifically who has been really great and super helpful - hooked me up for a pretty reasonable fee. With the exception of the master bath renovation I think we're done with electrical work! I have new lights in my closets and lights and plug ins in the bathroom upstairs now... so I can dry my hair IN the bathroom.... (It's the little things)

Updating the power was one thing - but we were running on an old fuse system and would blow them every time we were drying close and watching TV at the same time. When we get our new energy star appliances and new heating and air conditioning units I imagine this will be easier but in the mean time ... bringing our electricity up to code was probably a good idea...

Before - except I didn't take a picture of the fuse panel...


After! (Also note the fancy windows!!)