Building Our Nest

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?

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!

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!

You might have noticed this little detail in Kelly’s sketch from the last post:

That is not something just the future when we build the fireplace – it exists now, because I made it!

I had been wanting to keep our firewood in something other than the uber-ugly plastic milk crate it existed in all winter, and got the idea to get a little crafty with a $15 galvanized tub from my local thrift store. (And when I say “local,” I mean 6 blocks away, local…)

First, I got Kelly to find a nice modern, but not too cold, font and print out the word “Firewood.” Then, after cleaning off the outside of the tub, I used a spray-adhesive to arrange the letters around one side. It was a good thing that adhesive was labeled “repositionable” because it took me 3 tries to get the letters to fit just right.

For a little more detail, I masked off one section of the tub with painter’s tape.

Then I started priming and painting. Forgive these next few pictures – I started this project in the late afternoon and by the time I got to painting, it had gotten dark. I was working in the backyard by the glow of the floodlight.

Then, when everything was dry, I removed the letters and the painter’s tape and had a cool new bin for firewood!

And here it is with wood in it, next to our (yet to be renovated) fireplace.

Who wants to see some gorgeous wood on our refinished stairs?

You can see at the very top of the last photo that after the last coat of poly was dry, Kelly started covering the stairs over with paper, so that when we paint the risers, we won’t have to deal with cleaning up drips of paint. It started to hurt his back and knees, so he only got about halfway up the stairs.

But that was enough for me to start priming the risers and the trim.

This whole process of finishing the stairs is going to take a while, as it includes spackling, sanding, caulking, priming, painting, cutting quarter-round and installing it, painting some more…

But you can already tell the difference it is going to make:

While my parents were here in town, they wanted to help with the stair project. My dad helped to pull up some carpet during the first phase and then he waited for a few weeks while Kelly worked on the sanding part, which as I mentioned, took a lot longer than we had anticipated.

The plan was that my dad would come over in the morning after we had all gone to work and stain his way down the stairs and let it dry before we got back home from work. We had bought a water-based stain so that it would dry more quickly, and it really did! I was home from work one of the days he applied the stain, and it was dry by the early afternoon. And since I was home, I was able to get some pictures of my dad in action, working on the stairs.

One of the things we had been worried about was that the raw wood had some areas that were darker and some that were lighter, after sanding away the lacquer stripe. And even after the first coat of stain went down, you could still see some lighter areas:

But we shouldn’t have worried – after the 2nd coat of stain, the color was perfectly even and dark and gorgeous!

(yes, there are more posts coming! Next up: adding the poly…)

Sanding the stairs took a lot longer than Kelly had been expecting, because of that stripe of varnish running down the center of the stairs, that had been under a runner at some point in the past.

It's like some kind of skunk staircase

Kelly started in on the sanding a few weeks back, but quickly discovered that the varnish was gumming up the sandpaper pads for the circular sander he had rented. The smaller palm sander that he owns worked better, but using the smaller sander was taking forever.

After a number of hours and many more sandpaper pads, Kelly took the advice of one of his coworkers and used a lacquer thinner to help strip off some of the thick lacquer so that the sanding could go quicker. And it did!

So here are a few pictures of the gorgeous raw wood.

And get this! The treads going around the corner are one solid piece of wood!

Up next: staining the wood…

We began the process of ripping up the carpet on the stairs a few weeks ago, when my parents were in town. I was so glad to see that nasty carpet go.

And we were very happy to find good wood underneath all that carpet! We also uncovered evidence that the stairs had previously looked like what we want to do with them: stained treads, white painted risers.

However, there had also been a runner on the stairs, which meant that there was a thick stripe of lacquer on the treads, which made the sanding process a lot longer than we had wanted.

The top of the staircase, which just makes me want to continue ripping up carpet in the upstairs hallway...

More about the sanding process in the next post!

We have already done quite a lot of work on the staircase refinishing project, including ripping up carpet, sanding and putting down two coats of stain. But before I blog about the process, I need to show you what we were working with in the first place.

Here are the bottom steps of the staircase, which are in the hallway off of the living room. Check out the cool bench seat! It currently holds a bunch of crap that we have thrown in there in tidying up before people come over to the house…

The paint is all peeling off, the carpet was horribly dirty and stained and generally, the stairs were just unappealing.

We have already replaced the faded red curtains that came with the house, painted a red accent wall next to the bench seat, hung some pictures and a coat rack and replaced the landing lighting. At this point, I thought we needed to catch the rest of the landing and staircase up with the other things we’ve done.

Because frankly, this staircase is horrible and needs major work:

So, here is the plan. The staircase treads we will refinish in a nice walnut color, and we will paint the risers white. Sort of like this:

Picture from Apartment Therapy

We are also planning on painting the rest of the walls a light gray color, and keeping the trim the same bright white as the risers. Kelly and I are still debating on whether to paint the trim detail on the banister around the bench seat with that same gray with white trim detail. I’m for it, Kelly isn’t sold yet. We’ll let you know how it goes…