If you wait long enough, even slow progress adds up

If this were a movie, the following would be a time lapse montage with inspiring music playing. (Got that scene set in your head?) Ok,

January 2018

The vanity wall has been redone and drywalled. (Reread this post for reminder of disaster.)

After that comes primer:

The bathroom and closet would have been done (primed) at this point.

March 2018

The vanity is installed (pictures coming below) and I put inserts in the back of the medicine cabinets. I covered them with wall paper. Nothing is permanently attached so it would be easy to change. Shortly after this Troy installed the shelves and that's what holds the insert in.

By April I had the bathroom and closet painted. It's a warm light tan colour (Valspar 3005-10B Gardenia if you're really curious. Depending on your screen settings, the picture in the link may or may not look like my wall.).

We had had water flowing since the previous November (2017). That was a very very happy day.

Troy installed the purchased mirrors with piano hinges to be the door of the medicine cabinets:

Moving on to the bedroom. The drywall went up at the same time as the bath and closet and I think was roughly done at the same time. Getting the bathroom done being our first priority, the bedroom lagged behind.

We got in a slog (cue the ominous music for our montage) about mudding and sanding, and it was not done for a long time.

A really long time. Meanwhile, Troy did get some doors installed in February of this year. I think it was just in time for the superbowl when we had some people over.

The bathroom and closet doors are in; the main bedroom door is not.

This happened at some point along the way:

A few months after we started using the shower, we noticed water in the office below. Troy really didn't think it was his plumbing (I mean, really! As if!) but he opened the wall anyway to confirm that yes, indeed, his plumbing was not leaking.

After more investigation, he saw that the caulk had failed and the water was seeping out where the shower wall met the tub. This shower/tub unit advertised that you didn't need caulk in large letters. Troy would have caulked anyway, but further in the instructions the instructions said that if you didn't use caulk, the unit may leak. What? I think they advertised you didn't need caulk because the walls are made of a material that caulk really doesn't want to stick to.

Troy super redid the caulk and we haven't had any trouble since. And we have a hole in the wall.

We decided to cover the hole with a mirror. A mirror we could remove later if needed. In other words an access panel.

The mirror is in a great spot at the end of the little hall between the closet and the bath. Troy did a great job finding matching trim and then detailing it to match the vanity mirrors.

The  mirror is hanging from a French cleat and is completely flush to the wall because the cleat is attached to the studs, which are recessed from the drywall. It really is slick. The other thing that tickles me about it is that we used a mirror we already had. It was large enough to cover the hole and the frame Troy built covered damaged parts of the mirror so it looks almost new. And cost us $0.

I think some time in May we declared the drywall done or we would have been doing it the rest of our lives. And I set to priming

and then painting. The walls are a light grey that looks purple, but mostly in daylight. Since I'm mostly in my room at night with the light on, maybe it will always look grey for me. :) (Valspar 4001-1B Winter Calm if you're curious.)

I also got the doors painted. Dark greyish brown (DutchBoy 447-7DB Velvety Night)

We went with silver coloured lever type handles and got enough for all the doors upstairs.

A current shot of the bathroom, where you can see the curtains I finally found and bought:

I would say I've looked long and hard and in the end I found them at Menard's, where we buy everything else for the renos. But only because I gave up on having linen.

The only wall decoration I've hung:

I found this cheeky cheetah and zebra pair at Goodwill a few years ago. No, please don't think I have a jungle theme going on! But they're snappy and match the brown/grey or gold/silver thing I've got going on in these rooms.

We're getting close enough to moving into the bedroom that I got serious about shopping for furniture. I wanted a narrower tall dresser for myself so it could sit right in the closet. (In fact, I'll be building the closet shelving/rods around it.) I found this curved beauty at one of the antique "malls" near here.

If you look closely at a picture further up (in the closet behind the partly open door), you can see the curved-drawer secretary that I just bought for my nightstand. They're not a set but they've got the same look and style.

And then at Goodwill, I found a pair of these chairs:

I love the little wing arms and they feel good to sit in. Yes, I'm a little leery of used upholstered furniture, but I really like these and they looked pretty good. They had zero smell as I drove home with two of them stuffed in my car so I take that as a good sign.

I was thinking I was going to reupholster them but Troy liked the existing fabric and since it matches my grey/brown theme, I'm going with it. I'm hoping one chair will fit in the closet (a place to sit to put your socks on) and the other can be in the bedroom. Otherwise I'll find room for them both in the bedroom. In case you're wondering, $10 each. I was going to paint the legs to match the doors but I don't have enough paint. Buy more now or wait until I'm painting the main bedroom door?

Currently, I am up to my eyeballs in trim, getting it painted and ready for Troy to install.

A priority since the baseboard needs to go in the closet before we finish up the storage part of it. I am dying to get my clothes in there.

Not to Leave out the Dining Room

After all the work on the living room, we moved on to the dining room. (I could tell it was getting a little jealous and feeling shabby in comparison.)

The dining room had been drywalled and insulated quite a while ago. I believe Isaac did the first coat of mud, but that's as far as it got. Troy and I finished the sanding and did more mudding (repeat ad nauseam).

South wall.

West wall.

Finally this week it was done! I primed,

South wall.

West wall.

and then painted:

South wall.

West wall.

Long south wall between living room and dining room.

There's an awkward spot where the old paint of the living room meets the fresh paint of the dining room. I'm pretty sure I'm going to leave it at one coat right now (it looks pretty good) and save the second coat for when I can do all the walls at once (including the interior walls which aren't finished yet).

While we've been working on these two rooms, I have been moving the insulated blinds to whichever room had the least dust and dirt. (The two rooms have three windows each which mirror each other.) Now that they're both going to be living spaces again, I could finally pull the second set of curtains out of storage.

I thought I remembered that one of them wasn't even finished yet (and that turned out to be correct), but I got a worse surprise when I pulled out the two that were finished.

I didn't think I'd be able to capture it in a picture, but they are a nasty bright shade of rusty orange! I had these blinds wrapped up in a sheet to protect from light damage (and it's not like they were stored in the sun), but obviously something happened to the colour. Yucko.

One of the blinds that was not in storage.
The lighter areas are faded from UV
exposure.

The colour of these blinds has been a problem from the start. When I bought the fabric, I thought it was primarily navy blue with a gold tone from certain angles (like flip-flop paint). Once they were hung, however, they never looked blue again. They're kind of a drab brown, and all the time we've had them up, they have looked horrible with the brown paneling that was on the wall. (I actually wonder if I picked up the wrong roll of fabric off the rack after wandering around looking at everything they had.)

I had intended to pick out a paint colour that would complement them better, but forgot all about it when actually picking out the paint. It's all for the best though; these curtains really need to be updated.

I found this picture on the Joann website. I think
this is the colour I was looking at. Just keep
in mind that it is a large scale print. I'd guess
the birds are about 6" tall.
Yay? Nay? Let me know.

I took a look at Joann's earlier this week and the only thing I found was a really bright big bold bird pattern. It might be a bit too much, especially as there's so much of the blinds--six big windows. But I might do it anyway. I can try it on the one blind I have to finish anyway and see if we like it before I do all of them.

Redoing these blinds is going to be a shitload of work. I am not looking forward to it. But on the other hand, it will be expensive too...

Living Room Update

From my experience, there are two magical moments in a room reno: When the drywall goes up and you have that first real-life experience of the physical feel of the room, and when the first coat of primer goes on and those walls suddenly looked finished.

Today I got the primer on the new walls in the living room. :D Big smiley face.

But let us back up. We tore the room apart on the last day of December and through January worked on getting it sealed and all the cracks insulated. Yes, there were big cracks in and between the wall boards. In early February, Troy installed a new front door which made a huge difference. By the end of the month we were installing new windows. In early March we reinforced the ceiling joists. Then Troy started the framing.

Then spring came and summer and we got busy with other stuff. But in late August and early September, Troy picked it back up (the threat of cold weather becoming ever more looming) and got the framing done.

Northeast corner

East wall

South wall

Then it was time for drywall. Troy and I did some together and then Troy's dad came for a day (or two?) and they finished it up. Boom! a room.

Panoramic view from northeast corner to southwest

Northeast corner

Southeast corner

Southwest corner

Northwest corner

The pictures are a little ahead of the story since you can see that the mudding is done in them. Before that could happen, we had to blow insulation in. We did that a few weeks ago on one Sunday. What a difference compared to the weeks of Sundays it took to insulate the shop. Troy just finished the mudding/sanding this afternoon and then I was up with a paintbrush and roller.

Primer. Boom! now you sense what the finished room will feel like.

Panoramic view from northeast corner to south wall.
(The freaky blue streaks are artifacts from the overhead light.)

Northeast corner

Southeast corner

Southwest corner

Northwest corner

I decided to prime the ugly wall in the last photo as well, but couldn't do it today. It's not the finished wall and we don't know what will happen there (plumbing and electric has to happen upstairs first), but even primer will look better than what's there.

Looking around the room before I cleaned up the paint supplies it looked very finished to me. But I realized that to a lot of people this would still be considered the "depths" of construction--there's no flooring, no ceiling, no trim, and an unfinished wall. But we are going to finish the painting, hook up the electrical (Troy's working on it as I type) and move in the furniture. The rest will come later.

Island Dressing

So we had this island. It was very useful and we liked it a lot. But its "backside" needed a little work:

Just the unfinished back and sides of the cabinets. But I had a plan, or at least an idea that I had torn out of a magazine, and I showed it to Troy. He said, "I can do that." And off he started (a couple of weeks ago)...

We used OSB since we knew the surface would be painted. First a base layer which concealed all:

Then Troy piled layer upon layer to build my dream. Here we are "mocking it up" when my sister was visiting:

Then he dressed it up with some trim:

Then it was my turn. First some primer:

Troy thought it was really cute that I used a drop cloth to protect our subfloor. (An old shower curtain--they make great drop cloths because nothing soaks through. But nothing soaks up either, so you have to watch you don't step in a drip or spill.) Anyway, there was no way I was going to live with a messy paint job for a few months (or years) even if it was going to be covered up later.

The the real dressing--the gloss paint:

Remember I had to fight for it at Lowes? Totally worth it.

And finally, the corbels I found online a year or two ago:

They're a mismatched set and I still really like them. I'm a little unsure of the dark wood finish with the paint, but I'm sticking with it. (Besides, Troy won't let me paint them, even if I wanted to.)

This was a fairly quick project, partly because Troy was really gung-ho to get his part done. And partly because it's a nice small project and not a freaking giant 30 x 70' wall!! (Ok, sorry, flashback to working on the shop there. I've got a hold of myself now.)

The only snag was when I realized Troy did the base trim correct on one side, and for some reason a different way on the other side. When I gently pointed this out to him, he tried to convince me that it was ok and I would love it, but I soon talked him back to the side of reason. He pondered the fix over a day or two (at first he thought it would be really easy, but then he kept realizing how well he secured everything to everything when he made it and then it would seem hard again), and then did a very nice job of fixing it so I could finish painting.

As this is one of the first things you see from the front door as you look into the kitchen, I wanted to to be a real feature. I'm very happy with what we ended up with.