Building Our Nest

When we were clearing out the nursery, I finally got around to actually measuring the dimensions of the room, the windows, doors, etc. So you can imagine my surprise at how wildly off I was when I created the previous floorplan for the nursery. Here’s what I had pulled out of my head:

This is how the room is in actuality:

It is actually much larger than I had thought and more square than rectangular. I was pleasantly surprised to discover the following things:

• We will be able to fit a rocking chair next to the crib against that wall
• There is room for an 8×10 rug rather than a 5×8
• Having just the far wall designated for built-in cabinets is plenty. Kelly convinced me that wrapping around the wall will just be more hassle than it’s worth and will inhibit opening the door all the way

Kelly has now gotten the skim coat on the ceiling. Next step, patching and sanding – then on to the window trim scraping!

It might seem kind of strange that “progress” to us means that we now have an empty room. But, progress it is, since the room we designated the nursery until now has been the craft/office/storage/”attic staging area” room. But this week we (especially Kelly) worked hard at clearing it out so that we could get started on the demo (scraping the popcorn ceiling, window trim and ripping up the carpet).

Here are some pictures of the cleared out room, ready for demo:

Well, cleared out except for work tools and such...

Horrid icky carpet that has to go

The crib nook, bookshelves and closet

Door to the hallway, with the mother-to-be

The wall where the built in cabinets will go, eventually...

And this evening, as I was writing up this post, we had even more progress! Kelly got to work scraping the ceiling and it went a lot faster than he expected! All the bumps are gone and he says that he can’t see any cracks or seams on the ceiling, so he’s not sure why the popcorn was put up in the first place. (Hopefully, this bodes well for popcorn removal in pretty much all the other rooms in our house too…)

All he has to do now is give it a good sanding, then a skim coat of drywall mud

Of course, it made a huge mess in the room, but that’s just part of progress in any renovation, right?

Ok, I should probably give a few more details on the nursery inspiration board I made.

Colors, fabrics and inspiration board

The first thing I should mention is that we are planning on finishing this room from floor to ceiling. Like the majority of the rooms in our house, the ceiling has a “popcorn” texture which is just downright awful. We plan on scraping the ceiling, patching and painting it. We will also rip up the carpet and refinish the floors. The baseboard and window trim (which was most likely painted with lead-based paint and is flaking off) needs to be scraped and prepped for new paint. We will also need to replace a few broken or cracked panes of glass as well as re-caulk the rest of the panes in our almost 100-year old non-energy efficient, but gorgeous windows.

See this gorgeous yellow color?

This is what we have planned for the wall color. It is Glidden’s Canary Song, but we will most likely have it color matched at Benjamin Moore, which is the only paint Kelly will use. (I should say “use happily” as he has used other brands of paint before, but always with grumbling…) The cheery yellow color will be accented with these two bright fun colors:

These are Behr’s Peacock Feather and Bamboo Leaf, respectively, again we will color match them and use Benjamin Moore paint. The green will be for a beat up old dresser we bought off of Craigslist which has great bones. It will be the changing table and go along the wall to the right as you come in the door. Why buy a changing table when you can use an old dresser which has storage too? The blue color will show up in the back of these little nooks which were created when a previous owner took out a chimney (the previous fireplace was in the kitchen downstairs…) We will also trim out the front of those shelves, as they are a little unfinished.

The closet will most likely lose the door (otherwise there isn’t much room for the dresser on that wall) and have a curtain hung there instead. Hopefully we can get a new shelving system in that closet as well and paint the paneling – white probably, but who knows.

Oh, and that lovely teal blue color will also show up in the rug, which we hope to create with FLOR carpet tiles.

We chose all those bright fun colors from this great fabric, which will be the curtains:

That line of fabric has some other great coordinating prints, which you can see here:

We will use some of those fabrics for the closet curtain and crib skirt and probably some pillows or something too.

In order to get maximum darkness in this room with so many windows, we will also install some dark brown bamboo shades, which are from Home Depot. The shade of brown is to ground the room a bit more and to connect with the floor color as well, which will be a medium tone brown.

Let’s see, what else is there. Oh yes! The crib. That one is easy-peasy. IKEA’s clean lined inexpensive Gulliver crib. Simple is best, in our opinion.

The crib will go in this little nook:

We will also move one of our current living room couches (the one with the pull out bed) up to the nursery, slip-cover it in tan and put it in front of the long wall of windows.

You can see the very badly not-to-scale floor plan here:

Now, one of the biggest projects in this nursery plan (besides all the prep work of scraping the ceiling, trim, etc. which we hope to hire out…) is something that will most likely not get done before the baby comes. It’s that other section of wall to the left of the door. We want to design and build a whole wall and a half of built-in storage. Closets/storage is at a premium in this house and so adding some built-in storage would be a very good thing. Plus along that left hand wall by the door to the bathroom is an exposed heating duct. Not a great thing for a nursery, so we will enclose it within the built-ins. Oh, and the built-ins will all be painted a crisp white.

So, that’s the design plan in detail. What do you think?

I know, I know, we haven’t even finished up a bunch of old projects, much less blogged about the progress we’ve made – on the stairs, on the driveway gate… However, this project is very important and has a strict due date for finishing!

That’s right – a due date.

Baby Kellen will make his appearance on or about January 22, 2012, so we’ve got a nursery to create!

We have decided to turn the office/craft room into the nursery – it’s adjacent to the master bedroom through a Jack-and-Jill bathroom, so it really is the perfect spot for it. There’s no way I’m giving you all any pictures of the room in its current state (dumping ground for storage and a mess with office stuff and craft stuff), but here are some pictures from before we moved in:

(We’ve got some work to do on the windows and window trim, that’s for sure…)

(Looking towards the bathroom through to the master bedroom)

(The biggest closet in the house and cute little shelf area from where there once was a chimney)

I’ll go into detail in a further post about what exactly we are going to have to get done in this room (newsflash: it’s a LOT!) but here are two pictures for you to contemplate in the meantime.

Hopeful floorplan

Colors, fabrics and inspiration board

This color scheme is so happy and bright, and I chose it even before we knew we are having a boy. I think it works just as well for girls.

More to follow…

Ellen hinted a post or two ago that I would be forthcoming with a great big story about the driveway gate project. Now that it is mostly finished (my projects seem to have a habit of getting about 93.54% complete) I will do an installment series about the process.

I’m breaking it down because, honestly, working in an aircraft hangar in the summer heat is frying my brain and body. I barely have enough energy to watch last night’s Daily Show, let alone do some creative writing about home improvement that sums up the project with a wry observation about life in these modern times. Maybe I expect too much of myself as a writer…

Speaking of heat, I had planned to get this project done before summer kicked in so that I could do nice indoor projects like trimming and painting the stairs with the air conditioner cranked way up. I am pretty seriously reality challenged when it comes to project time estimates, though. Cost estimates, too. The adage about everything taking twice as long and costing twice as much really is true.

The main reason the gate project has taken so much time is that I also have a habit of making things way more elaborate than they need to be. For instance, I decided that the thing to do for the gate was to do all the construction with joinery, instead of plain old angle braces and screws. I used blind mortise and tenon joints on the frame, tongue and groove planks for the fill that are nested into a groove running all along the inside of the frame. I knew this approach would take much longer, but it may have quadrupled the time I thought it would take.

Delays and postponed completion aside, I am very glad I chose to build it the way I did. The finished product is much more attractive than a run of the mill gate and I am very proud of my accomplishment. The whole reason I wanted to fix up a house is that it is leisure time for me. Not some task to be accomplished, or mountain to climb because it is there, or war to win.

Home improvement is one of the things I relish. It restores me. When taking time to build the world around me, taking time is part of the experience. It is both journey and destination. Taking time allows you the freedom to do the job right and enjoy the process. Delighting in a squarely hung gate door or the precision of my measurements (115″ opening filled by 114.75″ of gate, oh yeahhhh) is what I love about fixing up this house. Getting it right will always take longer than doing it just to get it done…

Look at that, I managed to write about life despite myself. Next time I’ll tell you the story about how I got started on the gate.

Kelly

This post is our entry into the Making it Lovely Social Space Makeover Contest.

When we were looking at houses, we knew that one of the things high on our priority list was a house that would be a good place to entertain. We love to throw parties – dinner parties, Halloween parties, random come-over-for-some-XBox parties, etc. When we first saw this house, we loved the way the house seemed to draw you in – from the front porch to the living room, through the dining room and then down into the den. It was a very welcoming layout. And being open and hospitable to friends, guests, (and sometimes even strangers) is important to how we want to live our lives.

We love our den. It’s a cozy space, where we often curl up as a family, watching movies, eating dinner (more often there than in the dining room these days it seems…). Jack and Kelly play on the Xbox in there, or surf random YouTube videos. It’s the one place in the house that we want to keep carpeted (though we desperately want to change out the carpeting for some newer, plusher stuff…) We love the architectural features from where the old outside back porch used to be. We love our big red sectional, which was one of the pieces we bought when we got our homebuyer’s tax credit.

What we don’t love about the space is this: it needs to be recarpeted, like I mentioned; it needs paint and some electrical work (there are some random wires sticking out of the ceiling); our storage is flimsy particle board bookcases and we’d love to have something built-in with some closed-storage options; the chairs are some randoms we had inherited from previous apartments and family friends. Dreaming down the road, we’d love to have french doors instead of the sliding ones that go out to the back yard. We’d also love to be able to somehow tap the main house’s AC and heat so that we don’t swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter. (Kelly has a few ideas about how to make that happen…)

Anyway, since we’ve got a whole huge house to eventually renovate (and not a lot of cash to make it happen) we’d love to be able to win the makeover contest being offered by Nicole at the Making it Lovely blog. Here’s a video of our space and a few pictures.

Our Den – our Social Space from Ellen Filgo on Vimeo.

Once it’s completely finished, Kelly will have what I’m sure will be a long post with all the details of how he created our latest project. But for now, here’s a sneak peek at the driveway gate!

Some of our blog readers have been in the house (even slept in the guest room), some may have seen the house tour video we made a year ago, but I just realized lately that some of my readers might have no clue how our house is laid out. So for all you readers who are wondering, I drew up some house floor plans recently (using floorplanner.com). Just as an FYI, these are so not to scale, though the proportions are fairly good:

The first floor

Major things we’d like to do on the first floor:

• renovate the kitchen from top to bottom
• as a part of the kitchen reno, move the washer and dryer upstairs
• the den needs a lot of work, including electrical and insulation, new carpet and some fresh paint
• strip and stain the built-ins in the butler’s pantry
• tear out and re-fit the pantry with better shelving
• new drywall and flooring in the back hallway off of the kitchen
• Pull up carpet in front hallway and install new a floor (the one place in the house that the hardwood is in horrific shape…)
• finish fixing the trim in the living room
• de-popcorn-ify all the ceilings that have it (this also goes for 2nd floor)
• possibly board & batten walls in the dining room?
• re-caulk and paint and finish windows (this also goes for 2nd floor)
• other things I’m probably forgetting

The second floor

Major things we’d like to do on the second floor:

• Pull up carpet and refinish the hardwood floors
• Paint all rooms, fix trim etc.
• Turn the hall closet into usable space for stackable washer and dryer
• Renovate both bathrooms with new tile and fixtures
• Create built in storage in office/craft room (which will hopefully turn into a nursery soon)
• De-texturize Jack’s bedroom walls
• Have I mentioned the windows yet? Do you see how many windows there are in this house? That project alone will take forever… *sigh*

Oh, and of course, finish the stair project! Could our list get any longer? I really don’t think so… This doesn’t even include the outdoor projects (i.e. the jungle that is our backyard and the almost ramshackle-y two story shed that needs fixing up.) We seem to have been focusing a lot of attention on the outside – particularly the front yard – lately, but that’s just because it’s prime gardening season around these parts. However, another outdoor project got shoved to the front of our to-do list recently, so you can look forward to Kelly posting about building a driveway gate – whenever he finishes it!

By the way, if you’re a new(ish) reader of our blog, don’t be shy, say hi! What kind of projects do you have on your list?

It’s the promised gardening post!

So, when we first put down the grass back at the end of October, we left an area around the tree on the right hand side of the lawn grass-less. You can see that area in this picture:

We though that it might be nice to create a little flowerbed around the tree, as well as possibly create a path to the driveway – which there was when the ivy was in place, as you can see from this picture:

(Ugh, that ivy!)

But we didn’t do anything right away, because, well, it was winter and not really the time to be planting flowers. So a whole lot of weeds decided they wanted to grow in that space instead:

But as the weather got warmer, gardening began to be on my mind more and more. One lovely weekend in early March, I went to Lowe’s on an errand and was struck by a particularly colorful display of plants arranged outside the entrance. The next day I went back and ended up buying a bunch of the plants I had seen – the begonias and the caladium, in their gorgeous purple and red and green – as well as some coleus, which had some more of the green and purple colors in it. I also got some mulch and potting soil.

Look at how gorgeous it all looks in the back of my car!

First I pulled out all the weeds, then I called my mother-in-law (the Texas certified master gardener) because I really had no clue what I was doing. She came over later, and along with Kelly and my brother-in-law Skip, we got all the plants in the ground.

Because the ground kind of slopes up on this side of the lawn, we discovered that we were going to need to create some kind of retaining wall on the side of this bed near the walkway. So Kelly and Skip hauled a bunch of the bricks from the pile in the back yard (left there by previous owners…) and created a little wall:

Look how much color we added to our front yard!

And now you can see how much it has grown after 3 weeks!

Sorry for the long gap in posting, folks. We have been working on some house projects, but just haven’t had the time to post what we’ve been up to. We have taken a bit of a break from the stairs for the moment in favor of working outside on some of the front yard landscaping. Kelly keeps reminding me that we need to get some outside projects done on the house while it’s still rather nice outside. We can work more on the stairs in air conditioned comfort during the unbearable Texas summer heat.

In preparation for writing up a huge gardening post, I dumped 600+ pictures off of the camera and in doing so I found some pictures I had taken of a quick little project we did in the upstairs master bath.

Now, please keep in mind, the upstairs master bath is a HUGE project in and of itself. The tub needs to be re-glazed, the tile (which looks like it was put on top of previous tile) was grouted and caulked in an alarmingly sloppy manner (actually which makes me curse the previous owners under my breath whenever I see it… which is every morning, so I should probably work on my attitude towards them…) and needs to be replaced at some point, the window well needs to be rebuilt and perhaps the window replaced, the lighting needs to be changed out (or added in the case of the ceiling, where there are a couple of old cloth wires hanging down…), the whole room needs to be painted…

I know, I know. I’m making it sound like the room is a horror show. In some ways it really seems that way, but I have to remember that it is still very functional and we live with it just fine.

Anyway, since we moved in, we had been living with a cheap-o vinyl shower curtain:

I liked the subtle leafy pattern, but that was about it. Those kinds of shower curtains always get dirty and ugly and Kelly would always complain about how he hated accidentally brushing up against the curtain while he was in the shower. It made him feel clammy and claustrophobic. So I went looking for a nice replacement. I found a “hotel weight” shower liner for only a couple of dollars at Marshall’s and then this pretty fabric curtain at Bed Bath & Beyond:

I liked the neutral palette, the leafy pattern and the pops of color from the birds. While I was perusing the aisles at BB&B, I had an inspiration: I wondered if they had those awesome curved shower bars like you can find in hotels. And they did! Since I had a pile of those ubiquitous 40% coupons, the new shower hardware came home with me along with the curtain.

Before I came home, however, I texted Kelly and told him that I had a surprise for him, but that it meant a project he had to do… Fortunately, he was so happy when imagining how his elbows wouldn’t touch the clammy vinyl that he was happy to get it all installed. Which first meant taking down the old shower bar:

Yeah, that bar had been there a loooooong while. And now you also get a closeup on the horror that is the grouting job. *Deep breaths* (Working on that attitude…)

So Kelly uninstalled the old rod in order to install the new curved one. He did have one hiccup during installation, as he first installed the new bar right in the place of the old one before realizing that the “cap” on the end of the rod was larger than the footprint of the old rod, so it would have to be moved. But it didn’t take that long to get the new shower curtain rod up and our lovely new curtain in place!

Kelly working on the installation

The curved rod

The new curtain!

Basically, this project gave me the idea for how to add a bit more of a creative touch to this bathroom. I want to paint the walls a nice light tan color and pick up on the rest of the bright colors in the curtain in through towels and accessories. I also want to paint an old chandelier (from a thrift store or the Habitat ReStore) one of the bright colors and hang it from the ceiling where there is currently a bunch of wires and nothing else… Stay tuned for that project…