This is of the fireplace room before. This is just after we cut in with the primer. You'll notice on the right hand side, my dear spouse left a message. The sofa you see in the middle is a hand-me-down until we can furnish the room on our own. It was a nice green, but we found it to be a little too dark. Besides that, the house as a whole is just really green, so the decision was made.

Take note of the green sofa. We actually gave that away on craigslist - the young ladies who came to get it said it was "Shabby Shiek" and were psyched to get it. Had we known it was fashionable, we may have kept it!

DECEMBER 2003
This is the anxiously awaited doorway we installed. It took months because we had to special order the sidelights. Apparently they were what's called in the argot, "non standard" standard. Huh?

The door wound up painted red to match the other trim on the house and the sidelights green, again to match the other trim lines.

Inside, the door is blue, to go with the "harvest brown" walls. It's all very tasteful, so sayeth the Home Depot color coordinators.

This is the before shot of the door. I'd say it's a pretty big improvement.  We also did away with those tacky gold house numbers with the black ones shown above, which would have been a big improvement if that were the only thing we had done.

April/May/June 2004. We were busy, busy bees working in the yard. Since the house is at the end of an unpaved, dead end street, people have felt it easy to dump old brush at the end of the street. Looks gross, but has provided for really rich, nutrient laden soil. This was good when we needed to fill in some holes in the flower bed.

We actually got around to getting the arborvitae Jay's dad gave us as a gift some time back (some dollars earmarked for this endeavor). You can see them out near the street. It's amazing to see this picture now (January 2006) and realize how much they've actually grown.

I did a lot of work on building a stupid walkway. From this angle it looks great, but a year and a half down the road, it's crap. <sigh> This is for the birds. Yet I just can't seem to get my stuff together enough to do something about it.

Also, in 2004, we had gutters installed on our compound residence as well.  15+ years of rain running off the roof had taken it's toll in trim and flower beds. 

Winter 2004

When we bought the compound residence, the third floor was completely hunter green. The room was one of the things we loved about the house, but the color was SO overwhelming. The entire room, save the top part of the ceiling - the small strip on the top most part of the ceiling between the vaults - was green. And oh so dark. The green was a serious gloss paint as well, I think someone got some free paint somewhere.

It took 4 gallons - FOUR!! - of Kilz to cover it up. We did the room in a light blue, which really opened it up nicely.  I don't really have any before and after - you'll just have to take my word.

This room is now the de facto "man room" and office in the house. Since the boy's nursery moved into what had been our guest room, I guess it's now also the guest room.

It looks appreciably different from when this picture was taken, but the idea is the same. It's still got a lot of clutter we could do without, but we're moving in the right direction.

When we bought the house, we also had no grate covers on the floor. So we actually put some nice ones down. The whole first floor has very tasteful cast iron grating from Massachusetts' own Reggio Register.

July 2005

Just days before the annual Mid Summer Soiree, our dishwasher crapped out. THIS was a huge issue.

So, the hero of your story decided it "ain't no big thang" to pull off another do it yourself gig. Well, to make a long story short, after trolling several stores and demaning next day delivery, one small flood, and some burned hands later, a new dishwasher was installed. Plumbing is not a hobby.

The Mid Summer Soiree was saved, however my home improvement self confidence was somewhat tempered by this experience and hasn't totally regained it's full form. Once it was in, it looked 100% better than the hunk of junk that had been there - the black never really did look right next to the bisque refrigerator.

January 2006

Well, how do you repair an oven that's got to be at least 65 years old? One of the things we love about our home is the fact that despite it's age, we've been able to create a somewhat antique-y look, anchored by this stove. When it breaks down as it recently did (Dad says, "Gee, I think I saw an arc back there!") we were at a bit of a loss.

Fortunately, doing some internet research on the Roberts & Mander oven, we found an Antique Appliances store in Georgia that was more than ready to help.

My handiness has now extended to fixing a leaky faucet AND replacing crappy doorknobs with handsome porcelain knobs. The boy is MOVING ON UP.  In the meantime, I've painted the bathroom.  Quite modest, I know.

August 2006

Okay, well, I said I would be pouring a walkway this summer. Not so much. Instead, we've decided on some other home improvements - not that a walkway would be a bad thing, but we've come across some other needs.

My first plan of attack was to build a shed. There's this little spot of our yard where the end of the street has kind of gathered a lot of junk - the neighborhood's yard waste primarily - that is a little un-sightly, so I figured this would be a good place for our compound's "out building." Particularly since if I screwed it up, it would be sufficiently hidden in the shrubs. See, always thinking!

I took to laying a foundation with helpful information I found at Popular Mechanics. Now, I didn't use their plans - which actually had I, I could have done a lot worse. No, they estimated their shed at about $2400 and I wasn't in that business. We found ourselves a handsome enough 8x8 shed kit at a local "off price" store. Between Home Depot, Lowes, and Grossman's Bargain Outlet (Home of Dirt Cheap Prices and sponsor of the Wiener Winer Line), we did pretty okay.

I went about my site preparation as described in the Popular Mechanics site - I got some crushed gravel and set out with my tamper and cinder blocks to set out a proper foundation. Ever mindful of my almost complete carpentry incompetence, I followed the PM directions to the letter. While the foundation was dead on - level and solid, thank you very much - I didn't really go about reading the directions for my kit and had a few false starts. As you can see from this picture, we (my father-in-law) probably should have framed the walls, attached the panelling, then put it up. The roofing joist you see there did come down so we could do some other work. I'll say, though, while we did fumble the ball a bit, I never would have gotten as far as I did without his help and he really busted his hump helping me out.

At the end of day two of construction - or day three of the project if you include the almost full day I put in scrounging materials and leveling the foundation...now that I think about it, yes, Day 3 - the shed was pretty well constructed and in place. With the help of yet another friend, the shed's roof went on straight and true.

I've now got some roofing and some finish work to do - after looking at some of the construction sins, I see now what finish carpentry is all about. I've now flashed the roof and laid the tar paper. She should be waterproof at this point and I'll be working intermittently over the next few days to get the singles up, at which point I'll have a picture of the finished product and surrounds to show.

September: The shed itself has been shingled and painted, although the trim still needs paint. We've painted it to match the color motif of the house.

We've now moved onto the basement. Take a look at that before sequence. Holy COW! Look at all that crap!   Work started the day after Labor Day. 

	Angle 1	Angle 2	Angle 3
Before
Start
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3

Angle 1 is looking at the back wall, Angle 2 is a view of the stairs to the main floor, and Angle 3 is looking at the furnace/AC and near wall. 

Day one (Tuesday) consisted of laying out the walls and finalizing the plan as well as beginning the framing.  We had made only one change to the plan.

Day two (Wednesday) saw more framing and running the electric wiring.

Day three (Thursday) the majority of the sheetrock went up and the area started to take on the shape of our vision for the space.  Angle 3 is now taken from the door way of our new laundry room and the area under the stairs that used to hold our foodstuffs is now a storage area.

Day four (Friday): The rest of the blueboard and the plaster was started.  The plaster will be finished on Sunday.

Day Eight (Tuesday): The plastering was finished on Sunday and a lot of trim was started on Monday. The posts you see in the background in the earlier pictures are now boxed in. At some point it ceases to make sense to keep trying for the same perspective, so going forward, I'll try to keep close to the same perspective, but please know it won't be entirely the same angle simply because things get in the way.

	You can see from this point of view that the columns that are not now part of a wall have been boxed in and the trim along the ledge of the windows has been done and primed.
	We initially were not going to have any additional entry other than the existing door leading outside. At the last minute we decided to add a second entry and a small closet. The entry way will have a Pergo flooring, as will the laundry room. The rest will be carpet.
	Here's a great view of the stairs. You can really see how things have progressed since day 3. On the right in this picture, is the laundry room. (Angle 3 in the previous series. There will be a new railing at the bottom.

We've decided on a Glidden color called "Stucco" - it's too subtle and nuanced apparently to get an accurate depiction from the Glidden color selector on their website. It's a yellow/brown with the slant toward yellow.

And now...finis!

ANGLE 1		BEFORE
ANGLE 2
ANGLE 3(a) - entry (no longer visible from original angle 3 - day 3)
ANGLE 3(b) - the laundry room (what obscures the original angle 3 shot)

July 2007 - The Chimney

As you may be able to see from the picture of the house at the top, the chimney is quite tall - well over 40' high actually. It's needed some work for a while - waterproofing, a chimney cap, all that stuff. This summer our friend and neighbor Charlie - a remarkable man for a lot of reasons - suggested a plan and offered (commanded) to assist.

To give an idea, of the magnitude of this, this picture shows the two of us from the front where the house isn't so far off the ground. That's a 20' ladder we're bringing down and and another one that we're standing on.

This is the after picture where the chimney caps - there's two stacks - are in place and the chimney is coated with Thompsons Waterseal.

The end result was that leaks into the fireplace were eliminated.

September 2008 - The Kitchen

So far, our kitchen renovation has gone smoothly – as long as you don’t count such things as budget overages as anything other than de rigueur. This is largely because we haven’t done anything yet. Okay, we’ve stripped off most of the wall paper and found some interesting things with that, but otherwise we’ve just kind of been waiting. That waiting stops today.

Okay, it really started last night.

Our contractor came this morning to start ripping the place apart – the cabinetry comes Monday…sometime. They give you a 4-hour window for delivery. Spend $20 on a pizza, get 20 minutes. Take a second mortgage out to renovate and they have you rot on the vine for 4 hours. Worst, I can imagine the window we’ll get will be in the middle of the day such that nothing else of value can be accomplished.

At any rate, the actual fun began last night as we have to move the pots, pans and assorted other sundry items. We have had some good preliminary fun though – most recently Tuesday night.

We’ve been working with one of the box stores’ kitchen consultants to build our space. While we were initially designing our kitchen, we noticed one of the displays had 3 pendant lights that were marked for clearance – marked down from $45 each to $15.98. We said we wanted them, but alas they were the last 3 in the store. Needless to say, anything out of the ordinary tosses everyone into a tizzy and it wasn’t until Tuesday that we could pick them up.

So, we went to the kitchen department to pick them up and were told we just had to check out at Customer Service. Well, customer service couldn’t find them on the paid order, yadda yadda yadda. To make a long story short, we were there for 45-minutes sorting this latest disaster out. They couldn’t find the SKU numbers and they’re part of inventory, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I finally told the store manager that I understood his problem, but that it was his problem and that it seemed to me that if it was a problem it should have been taken care of in the previous couple of weeks, that we’d been there for 45-minutes and at this point I had a 3-year old who needed to get to bed. Mrs. Mo explained that we’d just leave the pendants, and come back to return the fixtures we had just bought and buy others elsewhere.

Now, it took this for the manager to find religion. “They’re beautiful lamps,” says he. “Yes, we know, that’s why we wanted to buy them in the first place…we need to go now.” “But they’re beautiful…” We know, this point isn’t up for debate. We get it. We agree. “Okay, look, I’ll just make up a SKU number and I’ll deal with it later.” Ah ha! It only took ¾ of an hour, but he finally developed a leadership gene. He instructed the cashier to use some code and ring $5 each. I was fine with $15.98, but I’ll take $5. When she asked him again how much – she was busy banging in his fabricated SKU number – he was so flustered that he said $1. So, after about 55-minutes, we bagged $150 of lighting for $3, plus the state mandated sales tax.

Last night we moved – as mentioned earlier – all our crap out of the kitchen. Man, I like to think we’re reasonably neat, clean folks, but some of the funkiness coming out of those cabinets… It’s funny because when you start in on a project like this, you start to find these weird shortcuts others have taken along the way.

I moved the refrigerator to find that the pine flooring underneath had not been urethaned. Why? How much more effort would it have taken to urethane the 3x3 square where the fridge would sit?

Now, I used to own a house built in 1840 and I used the very same wall paper as that which was on, for the lack of a better description, an accent wall in our kitchen to cover a bunch of sins of the past – cracks in the horse hair plaster, etc. Over the past few years I’ve on occasion wondered what sin was being covered up – ours is a 20 year old house after all, but you only use that paper to cover sins. I now knew what sin was being covered. 

When I moved the fridge, I noticed a hole in the wall paper. Since I’m taking the wall paper down, I didn’t think anything of punching a further hole into it…but then I realized what I had uncovered. Seems the sewer pipe from the bathroom upstairs runs down through the wall – which we knew – but what we didn’t know was that the wall paper was hiding the fact that the sewer pipe had not been fully enclosed in the wall.

And while on the subject of wallpaper, I found some interesting things out.  As I was taking the wallpaper down, I noticed that whomever had put it up did a really nice job of prep work, having actually painted the sheet rock underneath to protect the surface.  I was duly impressed....until I got to the ceiling level when I realized that they had prepared the wall RIGHT OVER an existing border....which made it even more difficult to get off.  If it's not one thing it's another in this house.  How does a 20 year old house (20 years of which we have lived here 5 1/2) have so much half assed stuff in it?


Above the existing cabinets, there is this strange boxed in area which has the effect of reducing the height of the ceiling to floor. Our guy said it was probably hollow and that he would take it down for the new cabinets. After having discovered the exposed sewer pipe, I was a tad hesitant to allow this to happen, but he knows best. As it happened, he did know best – it was hallow.

How do I know that? He called me to let me know that they had taken it down…but…it was fully a steel frame, and that it was designed simply to hold the cabinets. He was quite impressed at the craftsmanship, actually. Great. The one thing in the flipping house that wasn’t done half-assed is in the way and is being demoed. Now my real concern is that absent that encasement, the new cabinets will all come apart because there is no real support holding them up. We’ll see how that goes.  In this picture you can see the sewer pipe AND the funky boxed in space above the cabinets. 

By the end of this thing, we SHOULD have a beautiful new, contemporary kitchen. Where what existed – before today – was an odd sort of collection of starter cabinets and an antique stove, we’re going with the granite, stainless steel, wainscoting look.

Here's a shot of the kitchen as it is now - as seen facing the stove:




Here's what the layout will be:


 
And here's what the imagined kitchen will look like from about the same angle as the picture of what it currently looks like:



For sure, those stools running along that island will be a little more tasteful and won't be the only seating area - the perspective of the rendering would have you standing in the eating/seating area of the new kitchen. If you're trying to figure out where you are in the schematic/layout (second picture), if you look at it right to left, you would be standing in the right hand side looking toward the left.

The cabinets we chose are something called Shennendoah Charleston:



And the granite countertop is called "Uba tuba" - how can you not smile when saying "Ubatuba"?  It looks like this:



Now, my men Felber and Sully have both warned me about the perils of taking on a kitchen remodel. You’d think I’d listen. I need to tell you guys right now, I hear you and I get it.  This is all for now.  Much to do...I'll update this with a picture of today's demolition a little later.

Here's what the sink looked like when I left for work today (sans the crap on the counter, that is):


And here's what it looked like when I got home:

So we’re into the construction phase of the kitchen after having lived the weekend in conditions that could charitably be described as “survivalist:” No counters, no cabinets, everything piled in the dining room making it impossible to find anything (say, Salt?). There’s only so much frozen Wal-Mart pizza a family can eat, dig?

I spent the weekend painting the kitchen ceiling and finishing the wallpaper removal. However, we never did actually get around to picking out a paint color, and as such we have come to find that little bit of paralysis will come back to bite us in the rumpus room.

The delivery truck showed up dutifully on schedule at 8AMand my guy began setting up shop, making some pretty good headway. The appliances were delivered this afternoon. Okay, now here’s where the wheels fall off the wagon. 

It seems the cabinets were all slightly warped in some manner, shape or form, but one was so bad off, it couldn’t be installed. So right now, I’m not entirely pleased with Shenandoah Cabinetmakers. It’s going to take at least a week before that one is replaced. So there’s that. 

Model FRS6LF7JM

Model FRS6LF7JS

So, I start climbing over the survivalist mountain in my dining room and the refrigerator catches my eye. “WTF?” The  fridge had been oriented facing away from the pathway, so I didn’t see the front until I had climbed over Mt. Renovation. It was the wrong flipping fridge! Now, it may seem minor but we wanted Model FRS6LF7JS, but we got Model FRS6LF7JM. The difference is the handles: everything we bought HAD TO HAVE the same handles. They all matched up, a nice stainless steel bar. This one has black plastic handles. It’s a difference of $100, but it’s the difference between “Stainless Look” and “Stainless” as well. BEYOND Frustrated with this.  You can easily see the difference, AND it just wouldn't go with everything else.

They delivered the correct fridge, we bought that one, but it’s not the one we wanted.  They were right next to each other, as I recall, and I must've written an "M" instead of the "S."  It's all on me, I get it...just frustrated by my own incompetence. 

I know you’re saying, why didn’t you notice when you settled up. Well, we’ve got a receipt that has more paper associated with it than the mortgage paperwork we signed when we bought the stuff. In the greater scheme of things, $100 was just too small to be noticed in the total. It happens.

But the granite people are coming tomorrow for the template for the counter tops – the lower cabinets are almost all in and what’s not in will be.

Now, a few issues have come up. Where we expected to install the pendant lights is too close to the cabinet opening, so we have to cut open the ceiling again. Other than that, things are moving along. 

Here are some before and after shots:

BEFORE	NOW From Blogger Pictures
From Blogger Pictures	From Blogger Pictures	From Blogger Pictures

So things are moving along, but not quite as we had hoped....as my friend Old Harry says, I should have expected that. We bought our faucet tonight and we'll start to figure out what color we'll paint the place - a little late, but at least we're on it. Right?

Where to start...where to start....Well, in an odd bit of happenstance, the bead board paneling that surrounds the refrigerator area was inadvertently damaged the other day…so we need a new one of those now too. We have no kitchen sink, so we're using the bathroom sink for water and washing our plastic "Glad Ware" bowls from which we're eating the gruel we can at least now microwave.

Well, we THINK Lowes will have our refrigerator correct by then – our guy there said it wasn’t in stock (hello, of course) but that it should be in by next week. The cabinet that was warped should be delivered by next week. I’m hoping that panel I just discussed will be in next week…now, it’s a matter of getting all the stars aligned at the same time that could take some doing.

On top of all that, we (me) need to finish cleaning up the walls from the wall paper so we can get it skim coated and painted. Seems big Mo was a little slow on the up take with that one. There are some bull nose tiles we have to get, a bunch of things to return and we also have to decide on color. I know, such are the traumas of suburban life. 30,000 people in New York City wake up on Monday morning, pick up the newspaper and learn they’re not required to appear at work; millions of people in the world tote potable water from a riverbed back to their huts in clay pots they carry on their head, and our big worry is whether or not “sage” would be the best color to go in the new kitchen, returning some crappy light fixtures and picking out the correct tiles and chair rails.

Much work yet to be done, but we’re at a virtual standstill until other people make some things happen. Frustrating.

Once everything is done by the end of next week, we will look around and say… “great, now where are we going to put the dog’s dish?” and probably, “Oh, crap…now we have to spend the weekend organizing all our stuff into the new drawers.” 

We’ve owned this house for about 5 ½ years now. You’d think I would have known where we kept the coffee cups by now. I didn’t. And I’m going to remember where everything now goes? Fat chance of that happening. Truly.

From Blogger Pictures

Here is the new eating area of the kitchen…it’s really the old eating area, just more clearly delineated by the island we now have.  Note that big box on the right of the picture near the wall...that's a cabinet, not a seat :)

From Blogger Pictures

Funny, when I told Mrs. Mo I wanted to own an island  I might’ve been a little more specific as to what I was referring. 

From Blogger Pictures

You’ll see the lighting issue has been remedied. Our guy moved the boxes that were causing the problem with the cabinet doors and took a little off the pendent lights so they would be the appropriate length from the top of the island. Seems when we saw the lights displayed at Lowe’s the display was a little out of context – when we realized that the bottom of the light would be resting on the top of the countertop if they weren’t resized, we knew we had a problem.

From Blogger Pictures

Here you can see our old refrigerator taking the spot of the new one…also note the lack of a beadboard panel on the left hand side of that thing…there was a rather unfortunate incident with that. We’re hoping it gets replaced without further incident.