November 2015, it Begins!

 Two Sundays before Thanksgiving I finally got started. It was more exploratory work than large scale demo because I wanted to find out what in the world was going on with the two wall boxes at the entrance to the bedroom. The only thing I can figure is that after wiring went in someone wanted to move the switches to the other side of the room. Not like it matters a whole lot anyway, but I wanted to get it out of the way.

There's a whole lot of something going on here...

I have no idea what's going on here. Previous owners must have owned some kind of badger...

... or maybe a wolverine? Or Wolverine!

Last view of this cruddy hallway from the bedroom!

Figuring out this crud was fun... Even if you're moving the entrance to the room and the light switches you at least need to know what's going on with the existing wiring.

And sometimes it's a mess you need to do a little more!

It was all worth it because a week later I was able to get the new light fixture put in. This thing is heavy so there's some pretty decent bracing up in the attic. I like it better than a ceiling fan that will never get used even if it's not the fixture I would have chosen.

Might as well do what you can with the stuff under the floor in the closet before you go to the trouble of demoing out your bedroom! The plan is to run conduit from where I want to put the electronics to the space behind the tv but that may be too much trouble.

That's where November ends, and the real fun here is about to begin!

The Great Bedroom / Bathroom Project - The Before (Part 2)

This is all of the other stuff. Closets, half baths, and all the other things.

 

This is my ex's side. Entering the closet, this was off to the left. The bigger side which was these two racks plus another that's very hard to see off to the left side of the picture.

This was my side. Every bit as terrible and to the right when you entered.

I took this picture from a bit farther back because the view was going to change with the hall for the half bath going away.

Same sort of thing as before but you can see where the new half bath is going in.

No lighting in there yet, so what you see is what you get!

The old half bath was small and really hard to get a picture of. Most of this area, including where I took the picture from would become the master closet.

It's hard to tell, but I think the wall behind the toilet ended up needing to move over just a bit. The little hallway separating this area from the family room was nice but did terrible things to the usefulness of the master bathroom and closet so it had to go. The washer and dryer would move from the garage to right where the toilet is.

Just a pedestal sink. nothing fancy, it just is what it is I thought they were ok until I actually had a place with one and realized there's no storage whatsoever with these.

All of this behind us, let the demo begin!

The Great Bedroom - Bathroom Project, the Before (Part 1)

Fall 2015

The nice part about "Before" posts is that there isn't a whole lot of writing involved. The bad, I took a ton of pictures and will probably have to split this one up into two posts. So time for some fun...

The Bedroom...

The view walking in to the bedroom. Not so great, the layout is exactly the same as it was the day the movers showed up with the addition of this doorway. It seems like such an obvious place for there to be one it had to have been in the original plan. Definitely looking forward to turn that long narrow closet into something actually useful.

Stuff on the floor because we went from a great house in San Antonio to here. I was still missing that place at this point.

Yep, it's a mess... never was really into this fan either. It came with a remote that did the fan + TV and VCR. Very useful in 2015!

She was pregnant with our first when these pictures were taken, about 3 months in. No way this will be done by time the baby gets here!

No storage... yep. The bathroom vanity was terrible and there was absolutely nothing else in there at all to put things, so you're on your own here.

 Still can't believe there was no door between the bedroom and bathroom when we moved here. I just got lucky and found this one set out by the street nearby and it happened to fit the opening. This was the view entering the bedroom.

And the bathroom...

There's a lot to unpack here! Glass block, made around 2002 this is the most recent use I've ever seen of this as a shower surround by a huge margin. It's absolutely terrible to use because it's a mildew factory with all of those fat grout lines. Glass tends to get dingy too thanks to the soap. I didn't take a picture inside the shower because it really didn't look like much, but imagine a shower head on the visible wall and on the other. Each with its own valve, locker room style. It never really had much in the way of visible leaks but there was obvious separation at the lower corners between the tile and blocks.

So much going on here too. Track lighting never was that great because maybe due to the moisture, the lights would flicker after a while and the connection to the actual tracks renewed. There was no storage whatsoever in the shower so things tended to sit out here. Floor was difficult to keep clean, there were also no towel bars anywhere so this glass block wall was the only place to put them.

The vanity was the biggest offender. It's made from some piece of repurposed furniture and the mirror was something new. It was also too narrow to be of much use to two people whose height are 5 inches apart. Another major issue was that in order to run the drain and supply pipes there were all sorts of cuts and holes through its structure. The countertop was just the original wood without any extra finish or protectant. It was in terrible shape by now. I ended up painting the countertop black and sold it to a couple of guys for $550 so hey, their problem now! Her being very pregnant at that time really helped get full price.

Lots to see in this picture too. The wonderful vanity, and the tiny and irregularly shaped closet off the right. The toilet is just kind of in there with no actual TP holder anywhere. No real storage anywhere in the house so things were just kind of out a lot. It always looked cluttered no matter what.

And in this corner we have the bathtub. It wasn't a terrible idea except for its size. Corner tubs take up an enormous amount of space and it came at the cost of any number of things that would have made a huge improvement here. The other problem was that the pipes would build up mildew, so sometimes little black bits when the motor was run. Next to a window and made from fiberglass of some sort, there was also a fair amount of yellowing going on.

Finally, just a view from higher up for perspective. It's one of the few places I would be able to easily do an after picture from the same place

Part 2, everything else...

Planning the Next Project: Bedroom, Bathroom and More!

Backing up a little bit from the last post to the beginning of the year, planning for the bathroom started as soon as the giant kitchen + everything else project finished. Talking about ideas began even earlier when work started winding down. These are the things that happen when the topic of kids begins to come up, as if the horrible layout (and everything else!) of the existing bathroom wasn't already motivation enough to get the next big thing moving.

Here's the house as it was modeled on November 15h, 2014. Most of the work will be in the top-right corner of the house, with a little more to close off the hall that was made to access the master bedroom when the addition was built in 2002. It's no longer needed since I just opened it up to the family room.

The overhead view shows things a little better. In real life the shower was more of an L shape and bigger but this worked well enough. Windows in the master and half bath are not shown. The closet is really small and a strange shape with next to no storage, and the toilet is just out there in the open. Already mentioned the hall that was used to enter the master bedroom, the plan was to turn that area into something that's actually useful.

 

This is what the idea was as of January 15. Get rid of the hall to the bedroom and put the floorplan back to about what it was when the house was built. Split the long closet that was made back when I moved in by walling off the DLP TV hole from the addition the previous owners made. Half of it is accessible from the family room, the other half with double doors from the bedroom. The hamper concept was inspired by the house in San Antonio that I was *really* missing at this point. The master closet and water closet were both just kind of made from leftover space. The half bath moves to where the dartboard area was, and the plan was to add a window. I didn't like having it open directly to the family room, but it's either this or have an actual closet

I posted the layout the gardenweb (now houzz as of August) forums for advice, and all kinds of suggestions came in. Everything from moving the closet over where the tub and shower were, which I wasn't a huge fan of because the bathroom would lose its big window and all of the plumbing would have to be completely redone. To pretty much what they look like below, which is their final layout. Also a huge quality of life improvement, the washer and dryer can come in from where they were way over in the garage.

Fun fact about the whole washer/dryer in the garage thing, a squirrel can get stuck inside a washing machine when the door is left open. Also, a pair of welding gloves does a great job of protecting your hands while retrieving a squirrel from inside of a washing machine and setting it free outside!

So I finally had a plan to set out and build, minus the window in the half bath because that was going to be a lot more trouble than it was worth. Thanks to houzz we also had a pretty good idea about materials and the overall look everything should have although final material choices weren't made yet. All that was left was to take a little break to recover from the previous adventure, do the 'before' pictures and get going!

2015 - 1st Half of the Year

It's no secret that I like the outdoors... except after moving out here. The heat, the humidity, and the little tiny biting midges... it's just impossible. "Outside" was easier to deal with back in Texas because only the first of those three things was really a problem, and also plants grew really slowly. In Charleston if you turn around the grass has grown 4 inches because it rains roughly every other day from late spring - early fall. Landscaping was terrible, this fence was worse, and I set out to do a little something about it.

So I was told around 1979 the previous owner's parents planted a couple of loquat trees right up against the house. Like up against the bricks, which is a terrible idea for plenty of reasons. It took a chain saw, a lot of digging, and the truck to remove the larger of the two (also conveniently located right next to the gas meter). 

The remainder of the landscaping in the front yard was awful as well, so I took out all of it and planted some new things. Thousands of weeds came along with, but up until the horde showed up things looked pretty good!

I also planted a pecan tree in the hopes of getting pecans sometime reasonably soon. If the grass and everything else grows like crazy this will too...... right?

(9 years later she still has yet to get any pecans)

The old fence gone, now with a new one in place. This was really fast to put up. Just cut the dog eared part off of the pickets and use the cut off bits as a spacer to keep the gap between all of the pieces of wood the same. The frame for the gate pieces is made of chain link fence pipe and both of them have a caster from Harbor Freight on the bottom to help keep them from sagging. Works a LOT better than the old gate which has no support whatsoever and was made from pieces of wood that were all warped and junky.

Wrapping up the first half of the year, indoors. The first big project done and behind me but under pressure to finish the design and get the next one started. On a more personal level things weren't going so well since the previous summer. The first rental house had a major construction accident during what was supposed to be a simple roof replacement. The other three parties insurance companies just pointed their finger at each other, I had to hire an attorney, and some of the advice given was bad.

I also lost an immediate family member in the fall, right around one of the last updates before the multi-year break this site took. It wasn't until summer that I could really begin to process it all, but that was left incomplete for a long time.

The calm before chaos returns.

The End of The First Big Project

The post I thought would never happen... the first major project at this place, finally finished. Here's how the last part of it happened.

After going on way too many tours of homes I ended up with a huge thing for lighting. It doesn't take a whole lot to make a big difference in a place. At least one or two places had toe kick lighting so I had to learn how to do it myself. It's not really that hard. LED strips, a transformer, some low voltage wiring, and there you have it! Unfortunately there's a gap in there because it's impossible to install at the dishwasher. 

Not very visible when it's light out but I installed more LED strips underneath the shelves in the pantry that I made. It would have been a lot easier to see if the doors were open, but the inside of the pantry isn't exactly the nicest thing to look at so let's just pretend that it's all organized in there. Pantry doors are actually just closet doors that I ordered online. They can be used for all sorts of things and have held up great after being used for 10 years!

Did I mention that I like lighting? I've done cove lighting in every room that it made sense in and it makes a huge difference. This is just LED rope lighting on a dimmer and has been used easily 5 days out of the week for a decade now without complaints.

I also finished up the new front door early in the year. Mostly finished.... I never did put varnish on the trim pieces around the windows after staining them but they held up well enough until I refreshed the door much later.

Wrapping the exposes LVL that used to be hidden above the ceiling with veneer was the final piece of the project. To do this I bought some walnut veneer and gave it a couple coats of water based polyurethane. It matches the kitchen cabinets pretty well, and looks a lot better than a painted beam would.

The old and the new

And, done! Merry Christmas

Nine Years, a forgotten username and password later....

 Once upon a tine I planned on getting this thing caught back up. Then life happened, work, having kids, divorce, and becoming a single parent decided to hop along with. Not to mention immensely huge life changes of a more personal nature.

This picture sums up the state of the place and life in general.

 

 The 1870-1890s Eastlake piece is my distant past carried forward. It was in rough shape when I bought it at a neighbor's garage sale the spring after grad school. A piece between two drawers ruined by wood boring bugs, failing, poorly done refinishing job from som point, the entire thing had been completely neglected. A basket case that I completely repaired and renewed. It is survival.

The art on the wall and floor lamp are from a brighter time in my life, back in San Antonio the first of two times I lived there. They were from a peak moment in terms of friends, social life, work, and more or less everything really. Something unmatched until much more recent times. It is happiness returned.

The small table and chairs for my kids. Mom bought them when I was 4. I love my kids, no explanation needed.

The bathroom in the background for what all has happened over the last 9 years. The floorplan in this corner of the room is changed. A short hallway to the left gone, the dartboard area the previous owners penciled in when they added on to the house now half of something new and much better. It is my life and personal identity made right.

 What's not present is clutter. I am no longer married. 

I've said a few times before that I'll be back much sooner with the next post, and there is a LOT of content to cover since then! This time I'm not making any claims or promises. I want to catch this completely up but that's a bit of  challenge. When regard to future posts I make no claims but am hopeful they will come along naturally and in short order.

- Michelle