The Dining Room

Well, faithful readers, believe it or not we've been working hard for the last few weeks...months?...I just waited until now to share it with the blog.  Or didn't have time until now to actually write about it.  Whatever.

Let's think back a few months to our original dining room:

Ah, that wallpaper!  That border! 

We couldn't wait to fix this room.  Well, much like our adventure with our master bedroom, we started scraping, and a few weekends later...wallpaper be GONE!

Sean isn't actually posing for the camera, he just always looks like this when scraping wallpaper.

 Just getting the walls bare felt SO good, even if it left a complete mess in the dining room.

Once the upper wallpaper had been removed, we decided to tackle everything below the chair rail.  Yes, someone had wallpapered down there...and then painted over it.  Brilliant. It was cracking and starting to peel (and looking really bad), so we decided to just go for it and scrape it all off.  We tested the paint for lead, which it wasn't, so that was good.  But it was clearly old paint, and the only way to get it off was to basically hack at it and chip it away slowly with the scraper.

It took an entire economy-sized jug of elbow grease, but we did it.

The bare plaster was so pretty, it was almost a shame to prime over it!  But, of course, we did...

...and then it was finally time for color!  (If it feels like I'm skipping all of the nitty gritty details on this project, I am, since I feel like we already sort of covered that with our last wallpaper adventure...let's just get to the good stuff.)

Paint!  This is called "Leapfrog" by Sherwin-Williams.  It's a very happy green.

In progress shot, before the bottom half was painted...

 Somehow I managed to not get any photos of the trim, but we did paint the below-the-chair-rail wall white as well as put fresh paint on the crown molding, windows, chair rail, and baseboards.  All of the trim in the house is very beat up (scuffed, stained, yellowed) so having the fresh white on there looks SO good.  And voila!

Just for fun, a before/after comparison:

The photos just don't do it justice...it looks AWESOME!  (If I do say so myself).

Of course, the dining room isn't really "finished" since we still have work to do in there...but it feels like a real room now, and everything else will be decorating.  Still on the list is:

• Replace the chandelier
• Install curtains
• Rug?
• Hang pictures
• Line north wall with bookcases that can also double as wine/glass storage
• Build radiator cabinet

We did have a Cards Against Humanity party with some local theatre friends to break in the new room, and it looks kinda cool with our furniture in there:

I think it will feel less dark once we get some art on the walls. I'm still not sure about the console in the corner, but it made the room feel less empty and sad.  

So voila!  Progress still being made.  We'll take a little break over the holidays but I'm hoping to have more frequent updates in the new year.  Happy Holidays!

What I Did Today

Install insulation!

Bad blogger! Bad, bad blogger!

Well, it happened: I became one of those bloggers who dropped off the face of the earth and stopped updating.  My job is not always conducive to doing major home renovations and documenting them on the internet, what can I say.

But have no fear, my three dear readers!  (Yes, Mom, that's you...and Bailey...and my grandparents who get this printed out and delivered via snail mail.  Am I missing anyone?)  My heart never left you.  When I'm not putting on elaborate productions of avant garde plays for my students to suffer through, my thoughts are with wallpaper removal and power tools.  I swear.

Nothing major has happened to the house lately since my job is pretty much 24/7, but we've managed to make some minor progress.  So here, to fill the void, I give you a mish mash of house updates:

Update #1: We made our first big purchase for the house!  Granted, it wasn't the first big purchase that we wanted to make (granite countertops)...but I still can't complain.  Look at our two beautiful new babies:

The washer that came with the house was too ambitious...it wanted to be a clothes washer AND a floor washer, but spitting water all over the laundry room floor is not the same as washing it, no matter what it thinks. Actually, it makes it MORE dirty. So out it went, and in came these two new pretties.  I wasn't sure if we'd be able to afford front-loading machines, but we found these old models on sale at Best Buy and saved $400 on the pair...score!  They were the last two brand new ones they had in stock, so we didn't even have to take the floor models.  

One of the things I hated the most passionately about apartment living was shared laundry rooms.  I HATED saving up quarters, then having to check and see if the machines were available, then setting a timer and having to move all your stuff right away so you're not that one asshole who leaves their stuff in the machine all day...hated it.  So I am entirely too excited to not only have our own machines in our own house...but to own ones that don't take quarters.  Now if only Sean will let me do laundry every now and then.

Update #2: It's been fun to start thinking about decor, even though we can't afford to do everything that we want right now.  I have some ideas and am trying to collect and organize them (with help from sites like Pinterest) but we haven't had time to do much real decorating yet.  However, I did pick up this little, inexpensive guy while I was in California last week:

 I thought he looked sort of sweet on the vanity in the bathroom.  Just ignore the ugliness that's happening above his head. He'll look even better once that's gone.

Update #3: I don't ever intend for this to become a political blog, but we've got some things happening here in Minnesota that worry me.  We are one of four states this year who are voting on gay marriage.  The other three could potentially make it legal, but not us: gay marriage is already illegal in Minnesota, and no matter what happens in this election it will stay illegal.  The vote is just on whether or not we should amend our state constitution to make it even more illegal.  Stupid, right?

Republican lawmakers have already basically admitted that they put it on the ballot because they hope it will drive conservatives to the polls.  Apparently preserving people's civil rights is less important than making sure enough people on your side show up at their polling places.  Nice guys.  Real nice.

Anyway, I've never put a political sign on my lawn before (I've never had a lawn to put one on...) but I feel strongly about this issue.

I'm proud to have it out there, regardless of what the neighbors think...as I told Sean, if they feel differently, then I don't really want to be their friend anyway.  I like my friends and coworkers, and I think they should have the same rights I do.  It's pretty simple.

So we shall hold our breath until November 6, and continue to enjoy fall, and hopefully attack the wallpaper in the dining room in a few weeks once my program review is over.

Fall is here...

Well, I'm opening my first show of the season this week, so needless to say the home improvements have slowed to a near halt.  However, we have plans made...just waiting for a four day weekend later in October so we can strike.

We did manage to finish putting up most of the kitchen cabinet doors this weekend.  There's only two left, now, which both need some tinkering.  Maybe we'll actually have completed kitchen cabinets before Christmas.

In the meantime, Sean and I took a long walk with Brody yesterday and I brought the camera along to capture some of the beautiful fall colors.  My photography is pretty amateur-level, but I'm learning.  So...enjoy beautiful Austin, Minnesota.

Our street.

Sadly, all of the trees on our property are still green.

This is the park (almost) across the street from our house.  The Canada Geese always hang out in this pond.

It's the little things you do together...

Well, the school year is now in full swing and it hasn't made it any easier for us to make progress on the house.  I needed a major break from kitchen cabinet doors, so I decided to tackle some smaller, more manageable projects the last few weekends.

Remember how right after we closed on the house I just couldn't wait to start tearing at the wallpaper in the front entryway?

Yeah, well...then we started working on other things and it's looked like this for the last month and a half:

So, last weekend I decided it was time to take the wallpaper down for once and for all.  It's a small space and fortunately there was only ONE layer of wallpaper in here, so most of it went pretty quickly.  I worked on it by myself and the main walls took a bit over an hour.

I should mention that one of the best things about this home renovation is that Sean and I split the work up pretty well.  We both work on big projects together, but some things I've tackled by myself, and other things Sean has taken on solo.  He's pretty much in charge of all of the maintenance stuff...getting things serviced, cleaning gutters, trash pick-up, basic yard maintenance, etc.  I'm more into the home organization and design stuff.  It all balances out.  Anyway, Sean didn't skip out on the wallpaper in the entryway because he's lazy...he had spent the previous day setting up a rain barrel and redoing our gutters.  So he's working hard, too.  That stuff just doesn't make for very interesting blog posts!

Ta da!  SO MUCH BETTER without the wallpaper.  The tile is still ugly, but at least it's not ugly-clashing-with-more-ugly any more.

The last thing I had to scrape was the inside of the arches.  Those had multiple layers of wallpaper carried over from the living room and dining room, so they took a little more elbow grease...luckily it was a small area, though.

We found this pretty flower...we think this was the original 30s wallpaper.  

All it takes is vinegar & water...

...a good scraper and some elbow grease.

The dining room side came down easy.  The living room side was more of a problem.  I was worried about that side, because the living room has several layers of wallpaper underneath the paint.  We thought about scraping it down before we moved in, but it's such a large space and it would have taken us so much longer, we figured it wasn't worth it.  The wallpaper had already been painted over by the previous homeowners, so we figured that we weren't committing too big of a sin by just adding one more layer of paint.

The problem was that we somehow have to find a way to cut the edge at the archway.  I am still trying to figure out what the best thing will be to do this.  I was able to use an x-acto knife and get a fairly neat edge.

This is looking up at the arch...right side is the painted living room.

I'm thinking I might try some light spackle just to smooth down the edge, and then sand and prime and paint. Fingers crossed.

Of course, nothing is that easy.  In fact, maybe I shouldn't have said to Sean, "Wow, this wallpaper is coming down too easily!  It's not even a challenge!"  

I was tempting fate...and fate can't resist temptation.

 Ok, so ONE SIDE of the arch into the living room is not wallpaper.  It's some sort of plaster that was painted over.  You can see where I tried to lift it off (thinking it was paint over wallpaper) and it just chipped away.  My guess is that there was some sort of damage to the wall at one point and they patched it up, but I couldn't tell that until I started trying to scrape it off.

I was tired and stopped at that point, so it's still just sitting there like that.  I'm thinking now that the best thing to do would be to spackle the edges, get it as smooth and even as possible, and just paint over the whole thing.  Grrr.

That was last weekend.  Flash forward to this weekend, and this morning I was way too exhausted to attack the entryway again, so I opted to focus on a few quick and easy "feel good" things.  Sometimes you need those.  So, to offset the frustration of the last few posts, here are the AWESOME and EASY things we've done:

Our dishwasher has two drawers that can operate independently of each other (i.e. you can run one drawer but not the other), so it can get confusing as to which drawer is clean and which is dirty.  Enter two inexpensive ($3.85 each) magnets from Zazzle.com, and voila!  Problem solved. Here's a close-up:

They've worked great so far, and the yellow looks good with our new yellow walls.  

Then there was our cleaning supplies cabinet, which is one of the ones still needing a door.  So, every time we went into the kitchen, we were looking at this:

Yeah, we just kind of dumped all of our cleaning stuff in there when we moved in.

We bought a $30 storage rack and four small robe hooks (about $8 total) at Target, and about an hour later:

This actually makes me want to squeal and jump up and down.  Type A much, Lindsey?  Yes.  Yes, I am.

Maybe we won't put the door on that cabinet after all...

The Cabinets From Hell

After a brief hiatus (you know...first week of school and all that) we were back at work this weekend.  We could put it off no longer: the kitchen.  One of the first things we did when we started work on the house was take all of the kitchen cabinet doors off of the frame.  And here we are...about a month later...and our kitchen looks like this:

Not exactly conducive to cooking meals.

We HAVE been working on it, it's just that the progress is hard to see.  We did manage to get all of the pulls on the drawers, which look absolutely lovely.

That was the easy part.  I have to say that everything else about redoing these kitchen cabinets has NOT been easy.  I don't think I fully realized how much work this would be when we started.  Which is probably a good thing.

I've set up shop in our little "workshop" down in the basement.  I've got lots of ideas on how to better organize this, but for now, it's functional.  The previous owners left behind a good-sized work table, which is fabulous.

See all of those paint cans?!?!

We have quite the collection.  I'm saving the empty ones for an idea that I have.

In our typical bending of gender roles, I've been the one doing all of the drilling on the cabinet doors down in the workshop.  Sean's taken more initiative on the painting projects.

Priming...goodbye, teal.

He even made a fun archaeological discovery in the kitchen, when he went to move the stove out of the way so he could prime behind it.

Peek-a-boo...

This is actually about ten times more hideous in person.  The faux brick is actually wallpaper.  You can sort of tell if you look closely at the picture that somebody scored it at one point, I assume planning to remove it. Maybe they got lazy and realized that it was hidden behind the oven?

The green stripe at the bottom is actually carpet.

What a kitchen that must have been.

Anyway, over the last few weeks I've been working on putting hinges and knobs on all of the doors.  Long story short, we thought we'd save ourselves some time by only filling the holes on the hinges that we wanted to switch.  If you remember, the old kitchen had all of the cabinets hung from the same direction.  It looked weird.  So, we switched the hinges to the other side on some doors.  Unfortunately, once I got to putting the hinges back on, I discovered that they were an absolute mess.  The new hinges fit the old holes, but whoever put the old hinges on apparently didn't own a measuring tape.  There was no consistency.  So, I ended up just redrilling most of the holes anyway.  Needless to say, it took much longer than planned.

We finally got those finished and today we started putting them back up on the cabinets.  It was a little tricky to figure out (the doors are heavy and the hinges don't like to lie flat), but voila:

They look pretty awesome.  Except for this pair, which was the first we put up.  A closer look:

These were measured out with the same guide using the same holes but they aren't even.  We decided they look like Judy Greer's nipples in Arrested Development ("Say goodbye to THESE, Michael!").

But the fun didn't end there.  We had measured carefully to make sure that after we moved the hinges, two sets would fit next to each other side by side.  Well...

Theory is not the same as reality.  Not gonna fit.  No way. 

(That's a screwdriver.)

So much for our good plan.  Of course, if we were smart we would have put the hinges on two doors that were next to each other and then hung them to make sure they fit BEFORE we put the hinges on all of the doors and drilled the holes for all of the knobs.

Now we're going to have to fill, sand, paint, and redrill about four doors.  They got put back in the workshop and I will deal with them next weekend.

However, we did manage to get MOST of the doors hung, minus the few that won't fit because of the hinges and a couple that are sticky and need sanding down.  The ones that are done look quite lovely.

Remember the old kitchen?

(It feels so good to look at these pictures every now and then.)

Of course, there's a few holes here and there, so right now it looks like this:

...but we're making steps in the right direction.  Now just imagine the above picture, but with all the doors...and no clutter...and minus the green countertops...and with tile flooring...

Oh, and we painted the far wall:

Ignore the dirty baking sheet...we made pizza.

I'm not sure what I think of the color yet.  We'll do a second coat tomorrow.  Thoughts?