Adventures in Renovation

Most all the painting is finished now. The bedroom is green with a white ceiling. Pictures coming soon. I've been taking it easy lately because I've been feeling really burned out and tired. I thought I could relax because I was going to get my floors refinished this weekend but now that's all totally fallen apart. So much for slackin' off.

Last week I was trying to nail this guy down to refinish my floors last weekend but he couldn't do it. So he told me he'd call me at the beginning of this week confirm for next weekend. Of course he never called and didn't return any of my calls, as guys in the business are famous for. And when he gave me the estimate he said next weekend should be fine. But that's how it goes. Everyone just tells you what you want to hear and then does whatever they want to do. It's hard to find people that are straight with you.

So I've been screwin' around for two weeks counting on this guy in my schedule. Now he's MIA and my backup floor refinisher can't come till August 22nd. That only gives me 5 days to put up the baseboards, get my electrical guy to come out and install the outlets, switches, and lights, and move all of Vicki's stuff into the house. That really screws up my schedule. So I've been calling around and I'm meeting another guy tomorrow morning. He was rated #1 in the City Paper's Best of issue, but that probably means he'll be plenty booked up and won't be able to get to work on my house very soon. Either that or real expensive.

Now I'm kind of contemplating refinishing the floors myself. After the tile grout fiasco tho, I'm really hesitant to tackle something that could potentially be much more difficult than I originally thought. And I know it could easily be one of those things that turns into several long-winded house blog posts.

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By popular demand, here are some pictures of the yellow bedroom, the yellow ceiling, and a view from outside the bedroom looking in thru the transom.

Posted by at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Vicki and I did quite a lot of painting yesterday. About 8 hours maybe. The bedroom is completely painted now. We painted the ceiling and one wall in the bedroom yellow. The other walls are white and one wall will have a photomural of an autumn forest on it. Yeah, I said photomural. Trust me. I saw it on MTV Cribs. It's going to be awesome.

The real eyebrow raiser tho is the yellow. It's yellow. Really really yellow. Canary yellow. Sunshine yellow. Not subtle at all. The more and more I painted it, the less and less I liked it. It's pretty primary, especially in anything less than daylight. Not sophisticated. Very Romper Room. It looks nice on the one wall, but the ceiling is too much. It makes everything in the room very yellow. It's just not relaxing and comfortable enough. It's tense. I breath a sigh of relief when I leave the room. Pretty much the opposite of what I was looking for.

I think I'm going to have to repaint the ceiling. I think Vicki's going to kill me. She thinks I should have made that decision after the first coat. It's true, it would have been easier if I had. We had to put three coats on to get it uniform. But I think we've been trying to talk ourselves into the color ever since we started painting it. I'm just not convinced.

The original idea behind the yellow ceiling was to make it so that you would see this yellow glow when you looked through the transom from the other room. And it sure is cool when you see it from there. But I could have gotten the same effect from much lighter or subtler color.

We also painted the ceiling of the rest of the upstairs yesterday. The ceiling paint we used was pretty cool. It's this magic paint Glidden makes that goes on pink and dries white. It's a lot easier to see where you've painted and where you haven't. It's not a very bright white so I hope it doesn't look weird next to the Behr white I'm planning on painting some of the adjacent walls. Hopefully doesn't do something weird like change color in a couple years.

Posted by at 1:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There's a hole in my wall! Woo hoo!

Why am I so excited? Well this story goes back a couple weekends. Saturday, July 2nd. My Dad comes up to help me work on some kitchen demolition. We talked a lot about what to do about this one wall.

Just about who comes to see my house says how great it would be if I could knock out the wall between the kitchen and the living room and open it up. It's one of the first things I wanted to do with the house too. Here's a sketch I made before I had closed on the house and was doing a lot of conceptualizing. Oh, I used to have such lofty ideas.

But since everything on this house has taken way way longer to do than I ever imagined, rebuilding that wall was just too much trouble. I was worried that once I started to take apart that wall, I would screw up enough stuff in the living room that I would be creating a bigger problem. Like pulling at a thread on your sweater.

So my idea then was to take off the 1/4" plywood that someone had laminated the wall with and wallpapered over, take down the screwed up plaster behind that, and replace it with some nice new drywall. Only on the kitchen side of the wall. Leave the living room side alone.My Dad thought I could save some time by just drywalling over the plywood that was there, but I just felt like that was contributing to the problem. The reason everything in this house is such a pain to begin with is because no one repaired anything. They just added another layer or veneer over top of it.

Amazingly enough, behind that 1/4" plywood is a giant window! It looks like is was originally built into the house that way. It's giant. Almost completely floor to ceiling. It's nuts. After we pulled down the plywood, there was another layer of wood over the window because at some point someone decided they wanted a knick knack shelf instead of a window and boarded up one side and built selves in the window. Then eventually both sides were covered up again and cabinets were hung over it.

I was so excited, I was freaking out. All I have to do now is open up this hole again and viola! Open floor plan. Now I'm going to build up the inside of the window a little to make a bar height counter on the living room side, and regular counter on the other side.

Posted by at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Vicki and I painted the bathroom yesterday. It was so exciting. And so BLUE!!!

This is actually the first room I've ever painted myself. I've never painted any of the rentals I've lived in (although I did put up a photo mural in one apartment). So not having much experience in this kind of thing, it's been really difficult to pick colors. I'm used to picking colors for a business card, or a painting, or my clothes. But living inside of a color is just entirely different.

I've been doing lots of research to try to find some inspiration. The idea for this came from a tiny picture in Dwell magazine. I've also always wanted to paint something like a movie blue screen used for chroma key compositing effects. I figured this was a room I wouldn't be living in all the time so if the color was too intense, it wouldn't necessarily get on my nerves.

Posted by at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sorry it took so long to finish this exciting story. I know, the suspense must be killing you. But don't worry. It has a happy ending. I've been lazy about my blog updates so we'll have to roll the clock back to last Thursday when I was still fighting with grout.

I felt thoroughly defeated after staying up all night Wednesday trying to grout my tile. Thursday looked bleak. I was wasting valuable tile scrubbing hours having to go to work. I had fleeting thoughts that I might have to saw out the grout and start over or tear the whole thing up and redo it. When I get that tired I get really pessimistic.

Lucky for me I took a break and did a little research on the internet while I was at work. I read some message boards, formulated a plan, and made a shopping list. Once again the Tile Your World message board save the day. There were a lot of people with grout haze problems and everyone recommended a 50/50 solution of vinegar and water or if that didn't work, a commercial grout haze removing chemical.

I went to the grocery store on my lunch break and bought some vinegar and every possible scrubbing thing I could find that might have some effect. The vinegar worked like a charm. It was amazing. The grout haze vanished. Check out these before and after photos of the clean-up.

The vinegar also softened up the grout enough that I could get the extra out of the joints too. Out of all the tools I tried using, the wire brush and a putty knife worked the best. Since my tiles are porcelain, I could scrub with the wire brush and not scuff up the tiles. I used the putty knife to detail the edges of the tile where extra grout was creeping in. It took about 5 more hours of work, but it was worth it.

The only problems left are several tiles that were damaged in shipping that I didn't notice. They have some marks on the surface that were stained by the dark grout. Right now tho, I could care less. Let's call it pre-aged.

The next day I was completely sore from hunching over and scrubbing. I ached all over so much I felt like I had the flu or something. But the final result looks awesome. I just wished this hadn't been the first tile I ever laid. I could have used some more experience.

Posted by at 2:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I stayed up till 5: 00 in the morning last night working on the grout in the bathroom. I started at about 9:30 maybe. Read all the instructions carefully. Mixed the grout. Laid it in the tile joints. I cleaned the tile a half hour after I was done grouting just like the instructions said. Then I left around 12:30 AM to go make some coffee and wait for the grout to set up enough. The instructions said to wait 1 1/2 to 2 hours so I came back in an hour to clean up again. That's when everything went horribly wrong.

The grout was way too hard by then and I was having a really hard time trying to scrub off the excess from the joints and the haze on the tile surface. I was using one of those dish sponges with a nylon scouring pad on the back of it. I had to really really go at it to take anything off and I was having to scrub almost every joint in between each tile. It took me an hour to do about a 2 ft square area maybe. And the longer it took me, the harder the grout was getting. I was even scrubbing the scouring pad right off the back of the sponge. Then I tried a really stuff nylon brush I bought for stripping paint and that worked even better. I was able to do a bigger area much more quickly but it was still taking a long time. So the hours ticked away and the sweat poured off my body. All the while the grout got harder.

Finally around 5:00AM I gave up and went home. In all that time I only cleaned up about maybe 12 sq ft, only about a quarter of the whole space. The whole floor looked like a mess. I was ready to cry.

Posted by at 4:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I stayed up till 2:00 in the morning last night tiling my bathroom, but it was worth it. It's all done and ready for grouting! It looks awesome too. Well, it looks as good as it's going to get. I ran into some snags, but they worked out in the end.

When I laid everything out and cut all the pieces, I had a few lines draw to guide me. But when you lay down the mortar, those lines get covered up. So I misaligned something right from the beginning and didn't know it till stuff was slowly going out of alignment as I went along. I had to shift stuff, fudge other stuff and improvise some cuts here and there. Also, when I laid it out initially, I tried to make all the less than perfect parts fall under the tub. But somehow the stuff I laid last night looked best on the parts covered up by the tub.

I'm hoping the grout hide some of the seams between sheets but more likely my choice of dark grout will make some other mistakes stand out more. All those little mistakes would be less noticeable with a light grout, but I've already used a dark mortar underneath so I'd get ghosting if I went with a light grout now. Too late. Oh well, good enough. I'm caring about little stuff less and less as everything drags out longer. Just get it done!

Posted by at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)