Hell House

A couple of years ago, my husband and I purchased a falling down house with intentions to restore it and sell it. You know, flipping.

And for a little while, we were making progress. But then we hit a snag when building a loft bed for Button led to redoing our kitchen and floors. Yes, we made our home more livable before fixing up a house that we don't live in. It's the only reason I have any sanity left at this point.

Here we are two years later with the house from hell.

Last winter, we sort of didn't do much renovation over there. Okay, we barely went by the place at all. And now, we are paying for that... literally.

A pipe burst last winter and water went everywhere. Since the furnace flooded out, the water froze... all over. The living room was a sheet of ice. The walls did soak up some water but thankfully, the ice slowed the process. With a few machines to rid the house of the moisture, we were left with no water but a hell of a lot of clean-up.

We had to tear down every wall in the living room, all the walls and ceilings in one upstairs bedroom, and part of the kitchen ceiling. The furnace was replaced already and after a service call to the heating peeps and the gas company, the heat is working just fine.
(The heat was fine earlier in the year but this winter, there was a snag. We spent a few hours over there Monday and we damn near froze. No heat in Minnesota heading into winter. My toes were icicles and I was miserable.)

No, we aren't happy.
Yes, I felt like I was drowning when I saw the work ahead of us.
No, we will not give up.

It's sort of a blessing in disguise, if you look at it the right way.
The old walls were disfigured in some places (too many patch jobs over the last 96 years). At least once we are done, they will all match and look great, which equals more money when we finally get the house on the market.

Here's the living room. Isn't it beautiful?

Button is smiling but feeling our pain

And here's the beautiful kitchen!

The one thing that I got done the other day before the temps bottomed out and the snow fell:

The Vine from Hell at Hell House:

 

For over an hour, I clipped and cut and pulled and fought that damn thing. Button was awesome and collected the remnants and piled it all up for me, never complaining one time. She actually enjoyed it. (Although I'm pretty sure what she enjoyed was helping me, which makes me happy... and babbling while working.)

The Vine met it's death:

 

The Vine tried to kill the fence but the fence only ended up slightly wounded. With a little pulling and reshaping up top, the fence will live a longer life than The Vine intended. (And now that it's clear, we can get that damn sign off of it. No clue where that came from and when. It was on it when we bought the house.)

It's going to be a loooong winter. And the house will take a little while to fix, too.

Extreme Makeover: Kid Edition

Hey all!

I know, I said I'd have pics of vacation over a week ago.
And I don't have them edited and marked yet.
*hides face in shame*
I've been such a bad blogger!

BUT!

I do have 3 pics to share.

Almost two years ago, we moved Button into her own room. A year or so later, we realized that she needed a desk and there was no room to put a desk in her room. (The house was built in 80 and it's really small and narrow.)
We could have bought a loft bed from IKEA but our ceilings are too low for those that they usually offer. And we didn't feel like paying over 200 bucks for a bed.

So, my husband made one for her. He designed it and built it while I finished it (staining and such).
She LOVES that bed. At first, the desk was under the bed. But as she got a little taller, the desk needed to be moved into the open. (Also, when we bent down to assist with homework, we each cracked our head on that beam a few times.)

This is the most updated picture of Button's bed:

 

As you can see, her bookcase is now under the bed, as is her Lego bin and reading nook.

She loves it and you can usually find her in that beanbag reading the days away.

Peanut got Button's old smaller bed from Ikea and it's worked up until we realized that she was also running our of room. (Sadly, they both have a lot of furniture.)

My husband and I kept saying, 'she doesn't have enough room'.

But before, she was too young to loft her bed. (Okay, it wasn't just her age. It was her ability to ooze out of her bed and end up on the floor so much.)

Well... she now has a loft bed.

Again, my husband designed it and built it. Since her room is already painted white, we went with a white bed. This way, I can add color easier. (Button's room is hard to shop for. That purple and green don't match much.)

When we made Button's bed, she had no idea. We worked on it while they were with their bio mom one week and then surprised her when they got back home.

We couldn't surprise Peanut since they are home everyday now.

But she actually liked knowing and bless her... she never bugged us asking when it would be done.

Peanut's new bed:

 

 

I LOVE her new bedspread. So much color and it's fun!

She still has her pet net but now she can get them out for herself.

As you can see, she isn't going to be falling oozing out of there any day soon.

Her 'reading cave':

She loves the new room. We also replaced her old pink curtains with turquoise curtains which make the room so much brighter.

He bookcase and toy bins fit so well under the bed and now she has a whole corner on the opposite side of the room to play with her toys.

I wish we could loft our bed. I want my own reading cave.

 

The Gathering Place

When we renovated our kitchen in late 2011, we knew that we wanted to get a new kitchen table.

But we had no idea what we wanted, other than to ditch the current table that is almost older than my husband. We ditched the chairs during the remodel (falling apart, old vinyl) and ended up just getting a few unfinished chairs from IKEA until we could find something better. I stained those to match the cabinets back then.

A few months later, we found what we were looking for.

This is the Portland Corner Bench from Whittier Wood Furniture: their site shows the Trestle Bench  and Table, too.

I cannot remember what website we got this from but they dealt with primarily unfinished furniture.

I knew that it would be a little bit of work since it would need to be sanded and stained.
When it got here, in 3 boxes, I knew that it was going to take a little time to get it all done.

In total, there were 32 pieces. Yes, 32.
Corner Bench: 20 pieces
Trestle Bench: 6 pieces
Trestle Table: 6 pieces

I could have had a wood working place do it for me... for 400+ bucks. No thanks. Stain is cheap and I am not afraid to get dirty.

I was going to start it once it got here but then it got cold. And since I needed to be able to sand every piece, stain it, then sand, then poly it, then sand again and apply more poly, I knew it had to be an outside kind of job.

We waited.

I think I started on it in April (2012).

Since Spring was already in full swing due to a seriously mild winter and March temps hitting the upper 70's, we pulled the cars outside of the garage to give me the room that I needed.

I think it took a solid week. And when I say solid, I mean 8-12 hours a day out in the garage. Every piece had to be done separately and I didn't have a big table to work on. (My husband ended up setting his sawhorses up for me with OSB across the top, forming a table.)

Each piece was sanded by hand (too many crevices and too much design to use an electric sander). Then I had to stain the pieces and wait for that to dry. Then go back with a second coat of stain to get the color that I wanted. (I realized too late into it that I could just let the stain sit a tad longer on the first coat and then wipe, and get out of having to do a second coat. Oh well. Lesson learned.)

After each coat of stain, I had to sand. Then it was time for the Polycrylic. (The stuff that makes it shiny and seals out the water and other stuff that can damage wood.)

Since it was going to be used in the kitchen and used A LOT, I had to do several coats of poly, sanding between each.

And then I was done.
We had a kick arse table.
With storage in the bench!

Almost a year later, I still love my table.

I Want to Tear Something Apart

Spring is actually peeking in on us here in Minnesota and it's bringing out my want need to destroy something. It's very therapeutic. You should try it.

No, not something that belongs to someone else.

I'm talking about RENOVATION!

We have done a lot to this house. My mother-in-law owns it and we went it from her. It's a decent size but the four of us have a really hard time fitting into it. A few years ago, we were dying to move out. But then we decided that since it wasn't time to move, it was time to improve.

It started with making a loft bed for Button. (Post about that coming soon.) And then somehow, it turned into let's rip up the carpet-let's destroy the kitchen-let's gut the bathroom. And so we did.

From start to finish, it took about a month. Below are collages I made of the changes that we made to the house back in the fall of 2011.

THE FLOOR:

 

Gross. Looking at these pics again makes me wonder why it took us a few years to rip that nasty mess up and toss it. 

~As you can see in the first pic on the left, there was a little wear and tear. 

~The second pic? Yeah, that's carpet from the hallway laying next to the stairs for a comparison in fading and ick. (I tried cleaning those stairs about 6 times.) 

~Then you see where there was water damage to the carpet pad.... AND how it seeped into the sub-floor. And then we had to remove the entire sub-floor as well due to the people that built this place used nails, not screws. Talk about SQUEAKING.

It was horrid. I went to town on that carpet with box cutters. Seriously, I felt a little maniacal and got slightly worried. But I got over it.

Bamboo!!

~First pic: New sub-floor and then a vapor barrier.

~ Ooooh! It's happening! 

~ Hey, there's my hard working husband installing our gorgeous new floor.

~ All done! (It's not the orange in real life. My camera was being a turd and the lighting in the room back then was severely lacking.) And yes, that appears to be the original Parent Trap on TV.

Bathroom

That green paint seemed like a good idea in the beginning. But within a week, we hated it. Before this gutting of the bathroom, we had already replaced the 20+ year old bathroom tile and painted the walls that nasty green. Gross.

Here there, studs.

Yup. The only way to go... all the way (down to the studs.) Tearing those walls out was a great way to relieve frustration and it was exercise.

Oh yeah. This is much better.

~ First pic: That tub is SO much better than the old one. It's deeper so ADULTS can actually get into a bath and have the water cover more than just your back half.

~ Second pic: We found the medicine cabinet at IKEA. My husband recessed it into the wall slightly so that it didn't stick out so far. The little boxes next to are supposed to be the other direction but this way, the shelves became boxes. Instant storage shelves.

~ Third pic: My husband and I tiled the entire shower and the floor. We are so happy with it.

~ Fourth pic: I found the vanity at Home Depot...slashed down over 100 bucks. I think we paid less than 40? I sanded it down and stained it to go with the rest of the house.

~ And the shower curtain I found at Targer just really went with the colors we chose.

The Kitchen!

I used to hate the kitchen. It is fairly large but the design layout left me with very little counter top space and storage. The space wasn't utilized correctly. I documented the kitchen more than the other rooms. I think by then I was actually remembering to get the camera out.

~ First pic: The cabinets were painted this DEEP chocolate brown. Seemed like a good idea at the time. But it was WAY too dark. 

~ Third pic: Why, yes. The people that built this kitchen STAINED THE WALLS behind the lower cabinets. We still haven't gotten over that.

~ Those cabinets are my doing. We bought Finish It Yourself cabinets at Home Depot because it was so much cheaper to do the finishing ourselves. I sanded, stained, sanded, poly-ed, sanded, poly-ed, sanded, and poly-ed those all by myself. Every cabinet. Every door. (The color is more of what you see in this pic. I think it was called Coffee.)

~ Last pic: The cabinets are so dark here due to the lighting in the room when I took the pic.

~First pic: Those corner cabinets were a NIGHTMARE. They were not helpful, being those 4 foot long blind cabinets that you have to crawl into to find anything.

~ Third pic: Oh, look. More stain on the walls.

~ Fourth pic: It's getting there!

~ Last pic: Oh yeah. That's why the lighting was off. I had the cabinet lights on, not the overhead lights. We put lights on top of the cabinets, in 4 of the cabinets, and under the cabinets. I love, love, love all of the different lighting, all controlled by independent switches. 

And the corner cabinets on the bottom are now Lazy Susan style which makes my cooking life SO much easier.

~ Firs pic: See what I mean about not using the entire space? The cabinets and counters just STOPPED at the fridge but there was still space to work with on that other wall.

~ Second pic: That stain on the wall is killing me.

~ Third pic: Oh, WOW! PANTRY SPACE. The lower cabinet has a Lazy Susan and it makes storing cans and whatnot so much easier. And I got myself more counter space! And a nook for the recycling! It's a win-win-win!

The ONLY problem that we had throughout the entire thing was the counter tops.

We went to Home Depot and picked quartz for it's beauty and durability. The company had grades A-E, A being the cheapest. We knew we could afford the B range so we picked out what we liked and headed over to schedule the measuring and install. Then we picked out the backspalsh to match.

The guy that came to measure was cool. He loved the cabinets (woot!) and did his job. And that was where he went wrong. He didn't turn in the measurements when he was supposed to and it was going to push the install back over a week. (At this point, we had slabs of unfinished wood being used and it was hell. Splinters!)

My husband talked to some lady at the company. She was not happy with our service and wanted to make it right. She asked if any other rooms needed counters. No. So she offered to let us upgrade the type of quartz, for free. We were weary about asking... how much of an upgrade? Uh, how about letter E!!! Yes, we got to go back and pick out a color of quartz from the highest price point they offered. We were ecstatic! And since the new didn't match the backsplash, we had to return it and get something else, which turned out better and a dollar cheaper per square!

Then the guys came to install it and again, the measuring guy screwed up. He had marked us as having an undermount sink on the form but put in the order for a DROP IN. We were livid. The guys installed the rest of the counters and then had to take the longest piece (and our sink) back to the shop to fix it. But the lady we had already talked to called and set it all right. They manufactured a new piece THAT NIGHT and gave us a free gift (see pic below).

Our quartz counter top!

And our free gift: A matching cutting block.

Sometimes, even slip-ups can result in wonderful fixes. We got hooked up for that guy screwing up.

Even though we really will need to move soon due to the space being limited and the girls growing, we can defintely handle living here a little better now. I love my kitchen. I love my floors. And I love the bathroom (although I would really love to have one of my own. 4 people sharing one bathroom is not fun. Not at all.)

Next renovation project: Destroy the back deck before it comes crashing down, killing us all.