It's been a long time...

It's been a long time

I shouldn't a left you

Without a dope beat to step to

I feel like I've been here before: Checking in after a long winter that was short on daylight and remodeling progress.  When we last left you, we had just completed the half bathroom and the kitchen was next on our list. Well...it still is, but our regularly scheduled remodeling plans have been pleasantly interrupted in order to convert the office into a nursery.  That's right -- exciting times ahead (on so many different levels).

Here's a look at the preliminary design board that I threw together about two months ago in order to surprise my parents with the news.  Quite a bit has changed since then, but this gives a peek into the general direction we are going:

We put the board together before we knew we were having a boy, but we were generally going for a fun, modern and gender-neutral nursery. 

As mentioned above, the kitchen is still technically the next project, its just been rough getting motivated to actually start it.  Most of the material selections have been made, its just making the calls to get some quotes on new cabinet doors that seem to be holding me up -- just don't want to deal with it. Its one of those things where once I make the first call, I suspect everything will fall into place.  With our first child on the way, at least we I have a (somewhat) solid deadline!

Stay tuned (and thanks for visiting)...

Textured Ceiling [No More]

You may remember us mentioning the textured ceiling in the office in a previous post. Not sure if you can tell by the picture (you may have to click it to enlarge it), but it was not a sprayed acoustical ceiling (i.e. popcorn ceiling) -- it was a very thick plaster-type textured effect that had been applied to the ceiling at some point in the house's history. Luckily this was the only room it had been applied in. And further, this was the smallest of the major rooms in the house. But don't be fooled, removing any type of a textured ceiling is one of the toughest and dirtiest "light" remodeling jobs there is.

From the day we first saw the house, we knew it was something that would have to be addressed at some point. The question of when to do it became obvious when we discovered the wood floors. It just made sense to do it before having the floors refinished. However, the question of what to do with it wasn't so obvious. We considered scraping it off, skim-coating the ceiling to level out the valleys, covering it with drywall, covering it with ceiling panels, or covering it with birch plywood. There were pros and cons to each potential solution.

Finally, it came time to begin and we decided, almost by default, to scrape it off in hopes of leveling out the ceiling. We thought that if we could scrape it, do a bit of sanding to level it off enough and then use a good flat ceiling paint, it might hide the craters enough that we could live with it. So...the scraping began. Using hats, leather gloves, eye protection, dust masks and a paint scraper, we took short shifts scraping. In the picture below you can see a row where we managed to scrape away the major texture -- what was left was a crater-looking surface, much like that of the moon.

I can't even begin to describe the mess. There are no other pictures of the process because, frankly, after taking these two pics, it was the very last thing on our minds! And here's the kicker...after we had finished scraping more than half of the ceiling, I removed the light and vent you see in the first picture, and what do you know, the texture started to peel away from the original drywall like it had in the guest bedroom. Time to make another decision -- stick to our original plan, or try and remove all of the texture down to the original drywall?

We went with option #2 and the long and tedious process of chipping away began. Much like our experience in the guest bedroom, there were some spots that peeled away with ease, but this was definitely the minority. In a number of spots we had to resort to water and sponging to loosen the plaster texture in order to scrape it down with the putty knife. The final step was drywall patching and finishing. Did I mention the mess?? A number of evenings and some very sore necks and arms later, it was another memory to be tucked away (and quickly forgotten) in this greater remodeling scheme!

Wall Work

Man...the walls in this place are really working us over! If the wall-o-wood wasn't enough, we found "buried" wallpaper on 3 different walls -- buried in the sense that the original wallpaper had been painted over numerous times. Our first discovery came when a corner of the wallpaper started to pull away in the dining room. We didn't just want to cut away the peel, repair it and add another coat of paint. Since the discovery of our wood floors, and their impending need to be refinished, we decided now was the time to fix the walls correctly.


Using putty knives and water soaked sponges, we were able to wet the wallpaper and scrape it off of the dining room wall. Interestingly enough, as you can see in the picture above, the wallpaper only covered a portion of the wall -- we're thinking it was a mural of some sort. Anyway, it revealed a ton of nail holes to be repaired, two cracks and the two large seams, all of which you can see above. We did our best to skim-coat it with drywall compound in trying to blend the cracks and seams into the existing painted walls. The results, after a coat of Kilz:


Time for an easy one -- the master bedroom. While removing the baseboard I discovered this lovely wallpaper.


Sweet, huh?!?! As you can see, this wallpaper had also been painted over. My first thought was "Oh no, not again." However, after further inspection, I discovered that the wallpaper glue had completly "dried-up" and, no lie, I was able to gently pull each individual section off the wall in a complete strip, paint and all. Below is a pic of the wall with about two strips left to go. You can even still see the pencil lines drawn by whoever was hanging the wallpaper!


Oh, and much like the dining room wall, the original owners had only put the wallpaper on one wall, so that was definitely a positive. After it was all removed I used a plastic putty knife to chip away all the loose glue particles, re-set the old drywall nails, patched the holes and two coats of Kilz to cover the greenish color left behind by the glue residue.

Finally, we turned our attention to a wall in the office. This wall had also originally been wallpapered, but then painted over. Do you see a theme here?!?! This job mirrored the dining room removal process -- water and scrapers to remove the paper (and paint) and then the messy job of patching holes, repairing minor cracks and two coats of Kilz.