Urban Camping

Oh, hello there

2010-12-01T20:54:00.026-05:00

At long last, the kitty crapper is no longer the first thing you see on this page. That’s because I finally have something to report. And it’s good news! (no, I’m not pregnant)

More work has begun on the house. It’s been almost two years since the first phase of the renovation ended, and then we spent months and months painting the entire first floor plus our bedroom and bathroom on the second floor. Then we took a bit of a break. Money might have had something to do with that. OK, and laziness. We have been trying to find a contractor to continue with the renovations, so that also took some time. The contractor who completed Phase One is, unfortunately, unavailable. However, over the summer Michael just happened upon a contractor at the farmers’ market where we pick up our CSA shares. Now, we’re scheduled to finish the second floor plus do a little work on the third floor. We can’t afford to do everything we want to finish the interior of the house, but this will at least makes things a little more comfortable. So here’s a summary of what’s on the horizon…

Second bedroom:
New floors
New drywall on some walls, to cover electrical stuff
New baseboards
New window

Second full bath:
Everything - Michael already stripped this room down to the studs

Hallway: New baseboards to match others installed during Phase One
New window at the top of the stairs

Third floor: Install HVAC unit and frame a bench around it
Replace windows at the top of the stairs, in both bedrooms, and in the walk-in closet

Of course, this will be followed by lots and lots of painting, something we are paying someone else to do this time. I was really not looking forward to painting the wall that goes up along the stairs to the third floor; we already have 12-foot ceilings on the second floor, which extend to lord knows how high going up the staircase.

An issue we were pretty concerned about was keeping dust out of the spaces where we live. The first time around, we were living two floors above the work, so it was never a problem. Fortunately, Chris, the contractor, has installed some plastic sheeting upstairs to keep our living spaces dust-free. Here's what it looks like going up the stairs to the second floor:

From the top of the stairs looking down the hallway:

Just outside our bathroom and bedroom:

The "doorways" are two sheets, the one on the outside of the work area slit down the middle, the one within the work weighted down, so it's a little tricky getting through them, especially when carrying a basket of laundry. When we came home on Monday, when all of this was installed, we heard a tiny "mew" coming from the other side of the sheeting just outside our bedroom. Apparently Tanga was "trapped" in the bedroom all day before figuring out the new doorways.

The plastic sheeting reminds me of that scene in E.T., which always freaked me out as a kid. So it's a little creepy upstairs in the hallway.

Some work has started in the bathroom. This room used to be the bane of my existence. The plan is to move the shower across the room, then put the sink and toilet across the room from the shower. We've already picked out a toilet, pedestal sink, and shower stall and all the fixtures.

This room is awfully tiny, so it's hard to show the work going on. Here we have the framing for the wainscoting along the brick wall, where the sink and toilet will be:

We're planning to keep the brick exposed above the wainscoting, but we'll paint it white. The subfloor is in as well. Funny thing: there's still a remnant of one of the old layers of flooring:

The work is moving along, so it won't be another six months before there's another update.

True love is...

2010-06-13T10:15:00.012-04:00

...your significant other buying you one of these:

...because he/she can no longer stand the sight and sound of you almost barfing every time you clean the litter box.

In a few days, a Litter-Robot will arrive at our door, and that day cannot come soon enough.

Due to the adjustment period with the cats and the lack of air conditioning where we used to keep the litter boxes (fact: heat plus poo equals the smell of death), we've moved them down to the laundry room, right off the kitchen. Not the ideal spot, but we can deal temporarily. I'm the one who usually takes care of cleaning up after the cats, which has never been a big deal. However, the addition of not-so-little-anymore Elvis has made this chore almost unbearable. I won't go into any details, but she's disgusting.

So when Michael told me after work the other day that he ordered a Litter-Robot, I declared him the best. husband. ever. And then laughed because this could count as an anniversary present. We've talked about buying better living room furniture (new sofa and a love seat and/or chair) in leather, which would be perfect since the traditional three-year anniversary gift is leather and we didn't buy each other gifts this year. But I'll take a Litter-Robot over better furniture any day. It's that bad.

Very funny...

2010-05-03T21:08:00.004-04:00

This little gem is courtesy of The New Yorker, via my mother:

The evolution of a dining room

2010-03-28T09:40:00.009-04:00

We finally have a put-together, grown-up dining room, mostly thanks to my awesome family and their generosity. But before I post pictures of that version, here's a look at the transformation of the dining room.

It's come a long way from that room with the chimney about to collapse to an interrogation room to a formal dining room. My favorite part is the china cabinet, where I am finally, after almost three years, able to display our wedding china.

(I don't usually have flowers on the table; I hosted a book club meeting this past week, and while shopping for the food at Trader Joe's, decided to buy some flowers for the get together, since they were $5.)

There's also another addition to the kitchen - it's a bookcase from IKEA that fits perfectly in one corner to store cook books and display some pottery (and keep the recycling bin accessible but out of the way).

Meet Elvis

2010-03-24T18:09:00.012-04:00

We have a new addition to the family:

This is Elvis, and if you look closely, you'll see why we named her that:

Elvis was a stray(?) that started coming around occasionally, then we started to see her more and more often until it was a daily occurrence. She was extremely friendly, and so tiny, and so stinking cute. She had on a flea collar, but no tags, and looked pretty healthy, so we suspected she belonged to someone (so we also assumed she was already spayed). Then we noticed that she was either putting on weight (we were feeding her every day, so she was probably eating more) or she was pregnant. Then it became pretty obvious by the way she was carrying the weight that she was pregnant, so off to the vet we went. She was early in the pregnancy, and since she's so tiny anyway, the vet took care of that issue (which, while sad, was a also great relief, and honestly, Richmond does not need more kittens to find homes for). The vet also spayed her, gave her shots, etc. She's healthy, and now, after dropping almost $200 at the vet, she's ours. She seems to be OK with this:

Guess I'll have to add another stocking to the mantle this Christmas.

The fatties are not so OK with this new arrangement, however. Elvis quickly became the dominant cat, which is hilarious because she's half the size of the fatties. But we're all adjusting slowly and soon, I hope, things will settle down. In the meantime, I don't exactly hate the fact that she snuggles with me at night.

I love you, IKEA

2010-02-28T13:02:00.006-05:00

Last weekend, we went up to northern Virginia for an engagement party, and while we were there decided to hit up IKEA on the way home. We went specifically to buy some shelves for the kitchen, but while we were looking, we came across several things we've decided we just couldn't live without. One thing it turns out we can live without? The shelves we intended to buy and the whole reason for going there. We couldn't buy everything we liked because the Camry can only hold so much, so we'll have to go back to get the rest.

So last week we walked away with an island and two stools, and we are quite pleased with this decision.

We've always planned to get one - our kitchen space just begged for an island. But we couldn't afford one when we picked out the cabinets and decided to wait and just buy a stand alone island at a later time. After a couple of years of searching for one that wouldn't break the bank, we happened upon this one at IKEA and, in a rare occurrence, both of us really liked it. I'm so glad to have some seating in the kitchen now. I can talk to Michael while he cooks, instead of watching The Real Housewives of Orange County or something equally trashy and feeling guilty because I just want to sit.

Patience, patience

2010-02-14T18:26:00.002-05:00

Yes, it's been a while. The house is exactly the same as last time I posted, but more updates should be in my not-so-distant future. The tax refund gods are being extremely kind this year; so kind that our refund will cover almost 75 percent of the costs to finish the second floor. Hooray! This means we don't have to take out a loan or wait until we save up the cash, delaying the process even more. It'll probably be a few months before work starts again, assuming our contractor is even available. In the meantime, we will enjoy our painting-free weekends by playing video games, watching Netflix through the Xbox (my current addiction is America's favorite serial killer, Dexter), and napping (with or without a cat). Our Christmas present to each other was a new flat screen TV - one big enough that I can actually read the scores during football and basketball games. We really should enjoy the TV while we can.

On eating better, or trying not to become a fatty

2010-01-09T11:41:00.012-05:00

I have nothing to report on the house. We've basically stopped with the renovations for the time being while we figure out how to pay for the next phase - that being redoing the second full bath and finishing the second bedroom and hallway all on the middle floor. We are doing little things here and there, like replacing all of the switch/face plates a few at a time. Those things are pretty expensive when you buy a whole bunch at once, which, like everything else related to this house, we learned the hard way. We bought all of the kitchen ones at the same time and dropped $100 on them. Although, I should disclose one thing: we actually had switch/face plates everywhere, but somebody (hint: not me) didn't like them and insisted on upgrading. Which is how we ended up spending $100 in just one room.

I don't think I've mentioned The Curtains yet. Michael hung up curtains by the stairs on the first floor to keep the warm air from going upstairs and keep the cold air from going downstairs, since we don't have HVAC for the second and third floors yet. He also hung curtains up outside of our bedroom and bathroom, where we have space heaters to keep us warm, to keep the warm air from escaping. They're not the most attractive things, but they do seem to help.

One of the benefits of the curtains, at least for the time being, is they hide the treadmill, which Michael brought in from the shed and put next to the stairs. We will start using it one of these days. Michael and I both have got to be the two laziest people when comes to exercise. I. Hate. Exercising. I've been blessed with a seemingly high metabolism my whole life, plus good genes (thanks, Mother) but my pant size is telling me that my metabolism is probably starting to slow down a bit. I've also been on a healthier eating kick, and exercising more seems to go in hand with that.

I'm trying to cut out as much processed food as possible, and while I've made some significant changes in my diet, it's going to be a long process, no pun intended. And it's not just cutting out processed foods; it's also being more aware of where our food comes from. I'd read some articles about industrial farming when Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, was released. He wrote the book after questioning the food he ate as fatherhood approached and how he would have to make food choices for his child. Reading all of this got me thinking about the food I eat, so I finally started reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which had been on my list for a while anyway.

So in addition to actually reading food labels and cutting out foods with high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, and various other corn-derived fillers and preservatives, I've cut out a lot of meat and certain dairy products. I think I'm on my way to becoming a vegetarian, which saddens me because I can't imagine never eating NC barbecue or a Bojangle's chicken filet biscuit again. I might make exceptions for those things. I have no qualms about eating animals; I just have a problem eating the meat from ones that might have been injected with ammonia, hormones, or antibiotics or might contain traces of feces, not to mention the cruelty and awful living conditions of factory farms.

So my rule for meat now is that I have to know where it comes from before I'll eat it. I'm more lenient when it comes to seafood, though I'm trying to be more environmentally friendly and eat fish that's low on the food chain.

I only buy organic milk and eggs now (which is totally worth the exorbitant costs), and I would like to include butter and cheese on that list, but...baby steps - this is a very expensive lifestyle change. I eat a lot of cheese and I hate to think of the amount of money I would spend if I just ate organic cheese. But it seems to me that the costs, and benefits, in the long run are worth it. I also want to get in the habit of shopping for this kind of food before we have kids so that when we do start a family, our kids won't grow up eating the same crap we've been eating our whole lives. We're really lucky to have Ellwood Thompson's and the Belmont Butchery in Richmond, as well as several CSAs to choose from; otherwise, making these changes would be much more difficult. I don't think I could drive out to the Whole Foods in effing Short Pump every single week.

At long last

2009-12-13T20:41:00.007-05:00

We have finally finished painting the first floor, unless the inside of the kitchen pantry counts.* We'd been working on the laundry room and half bath for months and I finally finished it up this afternoon. Michael hung up some shelves in the laundry room for additional storage, which has freed up a little space in the pantry. We might be addicted to Costco, so that coupled with the little storage space we have presents a bit of a problem. But we're working on creative ways to store all of our crap, albeit a bit slowly.

I've also been meaning to post pictures of some curtains we now have up on the first floor. Since these windows are on the back of the house and face the alley, we weren't in too much of a hurry to hang something for privacy. But my lovely mother and aunt were generous enough to make some curtains for us. Here are the custom-made kitchen and bathroom curtains:

We did not have time to paint the pantry walls before we moved into the new kitchen; it'll be a weekend project sometime, probably when we get more storage in the kitchen and will have to shift things around anyway.

What a difference two years makes

2009-11-29T17:04:00.004-05:00

On Friday we went to get our Christmas tree and decorated the living room. Last year we were living with Michael's parents and put up a tree there. Two years ago was our first Christmas together as a married couple, and even though we were living upstairs while work had just started downstairs, I still insisted we put up a tree. It's a tradition I wanted to start from the very beginning, no matter what the circumstances. So we went all the way out to the Ashland Berry Farm to pick out a tree and put it up on the third floor, where we were pretty cramped already. We didn't have a fireplace and mantle, but we did have his scary gas heater thing on the wall. So the stockings were hung on the wall with pushpins.

(I didn't realize that Tanga was in this picture until I uploaded it just now - he's that blob there on the bottom right)

This year, our Christmas decorating is a far cry from two years ago, what with the finished living room, and a piano to boot.

And, we have a mantle to decorate:

Yes, we have four stockings, two for Michael and me, two for the kitties. Keep the crazy cat lady comments to a minimum, please.

Meet my new best friend

2009-10-27T19:56:00.004-04:00

I never, ever, ever, ever thought I could get so excited over a vacuum cleaner. We've only been the proud owners for a few days, but I'm pretty confident that this is the best purchase we've ever made.

It might be hard to tell, but it is TINY - it weighs around 11 pounds. But it's amazingly powerful. Here, I'll show you:

That's after running it over the rug in the living room; I'm not going to tell you the last time it was vacummed, because I can't remember. We apparently had enough hair in it to make another cat.

Before you judge us for spending such an obscene amount of money on an appliance we don't really need, let me explain. Cleaning the house, before the construction, was never really an issue. We didn't have a lot to keep clean, and honestly, any cleaning was pretty much pointless. Now that we're living in the house again AND work continues on the house (slowly, mind you), I'm always pulled between cleaning or working on the house (mainly painting these days). We just don't have time for both, unless we give up sleep, which ain't happening, because we will take advantage of sleep as much as possible until we have kids. Painting usually wins because I always tell myself I'll clean the next day or the day after that, and then I never do. Also, we both have full-time jobs, and lives.

I've mentioned the fatties several times; they're also extremely hairy, even though they're shorthairs. Both of them shed really bad. As do I. I'm amazed I'm not bald; the bathroom floor can't stay hair-free for more than a few hours. So between the amount of hair, cat and human, and dust, our floors get pretty gross. I have a canister vacuum from my little apartment days, which worked just fine, but lugging that thing around our house, up and down the stairs, is such a pain. We also have a shop-vac, but I hate using it. It's dirty in and of itself, and even more awkward than the canister vacuum. I got a Roomba for Christmas last year, and while it works great, it's not something you can just run whenever you feel like. It is LOUD. And I have to supervise it because it gets stuck on our thresholds, which are the size of speedbumps. So letting it run while we're away may or may not work. I also don't think to run it in the mornings when I'm rushing to get a million other things done. So, it came down to either buying a better vacuum cleaner or getting a maid service. The Dyson seemed to be cheaper in the long run.

What I did with my evening

2009-10-24T19:06:00.000-04:00

Here's the story of our sofa: It was mine to begin with. I bought it from IKEA five years ago and it served me, and some guests, well. I moved it with me to Richmond since we needed a good sofa. One of Michael's roommates had left a couple couches at the house, but they were pretty gross. I have no idea where they came from, and they looked like they used to be white at one point. Also, I just don't trust couches owned by single guys. So those went straight to the dump, and my couch was now our couch.

Then the sofa met Tanga. His claws, specifically. We tried everything to keep him from using the sofa as his scratching post, but he always managed to find a way. So I gave up on that and resigned to buying a new slip cover for it when we fixed up the new living room. It probably helps to mention that the sofa is actually a frame plus slip covers, which is fantastic because if you want to change things up, you can buy a new slip cover for a $250 or so and voila! New sofa! Yay for IKEA!

Then the sofa met an insane amount of dust from last year's floor finishing and drywall sanding. Since the slipcovers are easily removable and washable, I washed them. Then I got impatient and put them in the dryer. With heat. BAD idea. They totally shrunk. Which wasn't THAT big of deal, since I'd planned all along to buy new covers anyway; I was just trying to hold out on that since we have more important things to spend money on.

Then came the idea that buying a new slip cover is pretty pointless with Tanga around. He will destroy the next one just like he did the first one. We decided to save up for a leather sofa, since the cats aren't that interested in destroying our leather chair. So we threw some blankets over the couch to tide us over until we could afford a new sofa.

Then I got tired of living in a house that looked like recent college grads lived in it (seriously, I'm almost 30 years old - I'm tired of the whole hand-me-down furniture look) and bought a drapey kind of slip cover. It actually looks pretty nice...until you sit down and move just slightly. The cover shifts, the cushions shift, and you have one pretty white-trash-looking sofa on your hands.

And by now, several items have popped up that we need more than a leather sofa, like redoing the second bathroom. I'm also THIS close to going out and just buying a Dyson already; I want to punch my current vacuum cleaner in the face. So, we've just been dealing with how awful the sofa looks, and really only caring about it if people come over; only then will we actually fix it. I did some research (i.e. typing "how to fix slipping couch cushions" into Google and hitting Enter) and found several options for keeping couch cushions from shifting. I went with the velcro option.

Which brings me to a couple of weeks ago when I spent part of an evening literally velcroing the sofa cushions to the frame...and crossing my fingers that it would work. I bought industrial strength velcro, too, just to be safe. I also had to tape up the cushions themselves with some packing tape, in lieu of fabric glue, because the fabric came loose. So now whenever you move, the couch makes a crinkly sound. Lovely.

So far, so good. The cushions seem to stay put, and I've gone almost two weeks without cursing at the couch.

And yet, despite this improvement, I can't get over how white trash our couch is and it's still sitting in the house, a prominent feature in our living room. Let's run through the list, shall we?

Corners clawed to death by cat
Original cover shrunk in dryer, rendered useless
Cushions taped together so they don't fall apart; holding out until I buy some fabric glue.
Cushions that won't stay in place plus drapey slip cover that won't stay in place, leading to the bottoms of the cushions being velcroed to the frame

Now I'm asking myself why we didn't just suck it up and buy that leather sofa. Ah, hindsight.

When lolcats and real life collide

2009-10-08T20:21:00.003-04:00

Read this.

Then check this out.

I don't know about you, but it made me lol.

The first floor is almost done. Almost.

2009-09-29T20:20:00.007-04:00

Still not a lot of work going on here. We FINALLY put color on the walls in the laundry room and half bath downstairs. The bathroom shouldn't take too long to finish; the minimal amount of trim in there makes life so much easier. We, or I, rather, decided to use yellow in the bathroom because a) it looks good with the black and white floor, and b) we had half a gallon left over after painting the bathroom upstairs. This is Restoration Hardware paint, people; that stuff ain't cheap, so we're getting our money's worth. I absolutely love the way the color turned out downstairs. The natural light, of which there is none upstairs, makes a huge difference. I ALMOST want to redo the upstairs bathroom, but that'll have to wait for when we have nothing better to do on the house, so that will happen, oh, pretty much never.

Choosing the color for the laundry room was a bit challenging, mostly because I wasn't able to rely on Restoration Hardware this time, for two reasons. One, it's such a small room, and it's really not worth buying that much paint for that much money for a laundry room. Two, Restoration Hardware didn't have any colors that would work in that room anyway. We had to go with a color that would work with the red in the kitchen, the yellow in the bathroom, and the cappuccino in the hallway. We narrowed it down to blue, so off to the Lowe's we went to choose from the million shades of blue.* I wanted a bright blue, something cheerful, even if it is a laundry room. You have to go through that room to get to the bathroom, so it should still look nice, right? We're surprisingly thrilled with the color; it looks so nice. But who comes up with the color names? We chose Boudoir Blue. It still makes me giggle. Because I'm 12.

*Again, I must reiterate why I adore Restoration Hardware paint so much: it saves you the hassle of choosing from so many options of a single color. You want a green? Here's three: dark, medium, light, and you know whatever color you choose will look fabulous. It's so worth the $30+ price tag per gallon to save my (and, consequently, Michael's) sanity. Seriously, picking out toilets was hassle enough.

Special delivery!

2009-09-18T19:04:00.006-04:00

We have an announcement to make. Something very special officially came into our lives today. This is something we've wanted for a long time but never thought the day would finally come. Y'all, please join in welcoming the newest member of the Kolonay family and say hello to our new baby (grand):

This is our birthday present to each other, since our birthdays are just 10 days apart. We agreed to buy a piano after consuming a drink or two, and, well, we stayed true to our word. Michael's been wanting to learn how to play, I've been wanting to pick it back up, plus we want our kids exposed to music as early as possible.

We originally planned to buy an old used upright, something that would complement the house; lord knows we've got the room. The first store had what I had in mind, but we didn't want to buy without shopping around first. The second store had a much larger selection, but nothing really jumped out. Until we saw this beauty. She was built in 1921 but restrung about 20 years ago, so she has the look we want but with a lovely sound. Y'all, it was a freakin' steal. We just couldn't pass it up. Yes, we ended up spending much more than we budgeted for (please, with this house that's just how it goes), but it's so worth it. I'm sure my parents will be happy that those eight years of lessons didn't go down the drain after all.

And now for something completely different

2009-08-31T18:23:00.009-04:00

I've strictly used this blog to document the progress of our home's renovation. But I must digress this time to write about something that happened over the weekend in our neighborhood, so it's close enough to the subject of the house. In fact, it was just next door.

One of our neighbors had this puppy - this adorable, black lab mix (we think). He occasionally got out of the yard because he was small enough to fit through gaps in the fence. So he was then confined to a pen in the yard, pretty much all the time, since we rarely saw anyone out there with him. Not the greatest life, but we figured since he wasn't being physically abused, we wouldn't say or do anything. And besides, it's none of our business. This isn't the kind of neighborhood where you get up in other people's business anyway.

Michael noticed on Saturday that the puppy didn't look so great, so he kept an eye on him throughout the day. Then later that afternoon when he went to rinse some paint brushes off outside, some kids were out there, so he went over to check on him. The puppy was on death's door, he said, when he came back in the house. We made some calls and ended up loading the puppy and the kids, whom we'd never met before, in our car and rushing to the emergency vet across town. The little guy didn't even make it to the vet's office.

I've lived a pretty sheltered life. I'm also extremely sensitive when it comes to animals and their well-being. I'd never witnessed the death of a person or animal before, and while I didn't actually see it, it happened right behind me in my own car. I heard him die, gasping those last few breaths. It was so terribly heartbreaking. You can imagine the blubbering mess I was reduced to on Saturday.

I wished we'd stepped in sooner. I wished I'd encouraged Michael to do something when he first noticed something was wrong instead of trying not to stick our noses where they don't belong. But that probably wouldn't have saved his life. I figured he was dehydrated and his kidneys shut down (he had been peeing blood, apparently), but who knows. He lived outside, all the time. It gets really hot here in Richmond. You do the math. Something was wrong, and had been wrong, and no one else did anything about it.

After the sadness, anger begins to take over. Anger at people who have absolutely no business owning a dog, let alone a puppy. I read about it, I see it on TV, tales of neglect, but it's never happened this close to home. If you can't handle the responsibility, the hassle, the ruined furniture/carpet/shoes/clothes/whatever, don't get a pet. And if something doesn't work out, there are so many places, especially in and around Richmond, where you can take your pet if you can't give it the care it needs. It's so simple - I just don't understand how people can be so oblivious. Or just plain ignorant.

When we got back home after this whole ordeal, after I was finally able to let it all out and compose myself, I went into our living room and sat down next to Tanga and just petted him, thankful that we still have him around for many years to come. We complain a lot about our little orange terror, and his cross-eyed partner in crime, but we still love them and would do just about anything for them. I just hate that all pets aren't so lucky. So any of you out there with pets, please go love them just a little extra. And if I ever find out someone I know has a pet and is responsible for letting it suffer just a fraction of what our neighbors' puppy suffered, I will hunt you down.

2009-08-24T20:22:00.017-04:00

I've often thought that the title Urban Camping no longer applies to this here blog, what with the major renovations having already taken place and the fact that we have a working HVAC system now. And yet, this house continues to surprise me. Like at three o'clock this morning, when we had, according to the local weathermen, torrential downpours. Three inches in an hour kind of rain. Previously when Richmond had terrible rain like this, the ceiling fell through in one of the second floor rooms; that room is now our bedroom. Michael had been worried about it leaking in there, even after getting a new roof and all the repairs made, because of some other minor issues that haven't been fixed yet. But we'd survived several bouts of rain since then, and so far, no leaks.

Until last night. I woke up to the rain hitting the air conditioning unit and after not going right back to sleep, I got up to use the bathroom. When I walked back into the bedroom, Michael was also up and standing by the window. I thought he'd gotten up to see what was going on outside. Instead, he's standing there with his hands cupped, asking me to get him a bucket. Oh, the sense of dread that filled me then. It wasn't a bad leak, just a slow drip, and Michael noticed that the leak got much worse any time the wind blew. I was more worried that I may not get back to sleep because of the drip, drip, drip than about the bigger issue here: there's water coming into our house. But this isn't something that we're terribly worried about; we haven't had a big rain like that in a while, and the house has stood up to normal rain just fine. There's siding we need to have replaced on the dormer upstairs, which is how the rain was getting in, and it's one of the many things left on the to-do list. We'll just be taking care of this item sooner than we thought.

Speaking of our new bedroom, I never posted pictures of the finished product. So here's a look at what the second floor of the house looks like, keeping in mind that we're about halfway done with this floor.

At the top of the stairs is the old bathroom that's been gutted. We have a piece of sheet rock blocking it to keep the cats out.

Kirin found a way in a few times (i.e., she squeezed her fat self through a slightly larger opening). Michael didn't believe me when I told him the gap needed to be smaller. So she'd get in there and crawl around under the floor, with all the exposed insulation around, which might account for the sneezing problem she's developed recently.

Here's the floor that Michael fell through:

Moving along, here's the hallway; the bathroom is to your left, the stairs going up and going down to your right.

Next is what used to be the upstairs kitchen. This is our work room for now, as you can tell, and will one day be another bedroom.

Now we come to the bathroom; this used to be a hallway that was just wasted space in the house.

And here's our bedroom.

(sorry for the ironing board; I didn't feel like moving it for the shot)

And here's the view from the bathroom, looking back toward the hallway and stairs:

Oh yes, those are more green stairs. I just can't escape them.

Grumble, grumble

2009-08-03T20:24:00.001-04:00

My parents came up to visit this past weekend, so on Saturday, the three of us went out to see some of Richmond's historical sites while Michael stayed home to work on the house. Honestly, I thought he'd take a nap instead.

So we come back to the house, and Michael greets us at the door. The first thing he says is, "You know how you always wanted that skylight in the kitchen?" Turns out Michael was working upstairs in the old bathroom, which sits on top of the kitchen and does not have a floor anymore, and put his foot through the ceiling. I swear, I thought the days of holes in the ceilings were behind us.

On the up side, this happened while my dad was here. My dad knows how to fix anything, so he helped Michael patch the hole fairly quickly. All that's left is to sand and repaint the patched section, and hope it's not too noticeable.

Oh, and Michael's OK. He's a little bruised, and there's a slight chance we may not be able to have kids, but he's fine. Which should've been the first thing I asked him, instead of asking how bad the ceiling looked while trying not to freak out. He's so lucky to have such a caring wife.

Good riddance, window bars

2009-07-29T19:41:00.001-04:00

...because nothing says "Welcome to the ghetto" quite like bars over a window.

We're getting back to work on the house; Michael's still gutting the old bathroom upstairs, so I'm prepping the laundry room and half bath on the first floor for painting, since painting those two rooms is a relatively small project that I can do myself while Michael tackles bigger projects. As part of the prepping, I finally took off the bars over the window in the old laundry room/new half bath. For some reason, this is the only window in the entire house that had bars over it, and it bugged the crap out of me. And for anyone wondering if that was really such a good idea to take the bars down, since bars are usually installed on windows for a good reason, yes, yes it was a good idea to take them down. Because they are ugly, and there are more aesthetically pleasing ways to safeguard our home.

Why does nature love our house so much?

2009-07-16T17:40:00.003-04:00

It’s been very quite around here lately, especially since we haven’t been home. We spent a week on the Outer Banks like we do every summer, but this year’s trip was cut a day short because Michael had to go to a conference in San Diego. A conference whose expenses were paid for by his work, which meant a free hotel room right by the water to take advantage of. So the only thing we had to pay for was my plane ticket (super cheap, by the way) and my meals. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay the whole week like Michael, but the two and a half days I spent there were fantastic.

So during the 12 or so hours we spent at our house between the trips, you’d think not too much would happen with regard to the house, especially now that most of the major issues have been resolved. Like big holes that have been sealed off but at one time allowed creatures of various sizes to get in. Silly me! I went up to the third floor looking for something and saw that yet another bird managed to find its way inside, probably through a gap between an air conditioning unit and the window sill. I have no idea how long the little guy was stuck inside; not long enough for the cats to pick up on it, fortunately. Michael got him back out, though, but we had to take out the window unit to prevent this from happening again. No big deal, since we don’t spend any time up there anymore, but I thought once the giant hole in the ceiling on the second floor was gone, birds getting into the house would be a thing of the past. Now if we can just get rid of the ants finding their way into the kitchen so that we can stop putting cat food in bowls that are placed in bigger bowls of water that may occasionally spill (and by "occasionally" I mean always), I'd be a happy urban camper.

We're back, plus some before and after time

2009-06-12T19:26:00.043-04:00

We have finally moved back to Church Hill, and it is marvelous. While we miss the delicious (and free) home-cooked meals nearly every night, the 10-minute commute is awfully nice. I’ve gotten an extra hour back every day, half of which I use to sleep. The fatties are back as well and have adjusted, I think. Kirin has always adapted to new environments quite easily, but Tanga always needs a little more time. He spent most of Sunday evening after we moved back walking around and hissing at everything, including us, but he’s back to his usual over-affectionate self again. I have to share the story of corralling the cats for the move. Getting them into their crates is always a challenge because they totally know what’s up and will hide. Tanga’s easy, since he’s more comfortable with being picked up, but Kirin is stubborn, plus she’ll pick the worst place to hide. At the in-laws, her hiding place of choice was inside of a box spring. We can usually get her out without much work, but Sunday, we had to strip the bed, lift off the mattress, and literally dump Kirin out of the box spring. You’d think we’d learn to close off all access to rooms where they can hide before attempting to get them in their crates, but we always think it’ll be much easier than it actually is. But, we’re all back home now, and for the first time in two years, Michael and I have a decent place to call home.

We still have lots left to finish on the house, but it’s clean (for the most part) and comfortable. Next on the list is redoing our old bathroom on the second floor. After that, we will probably paint the hallway upstairs. The door to the bathroom may get moved, so why bother with the hallway if it’s just going to get messed up? Then we’ll have the second bedroom (currently housing our tools and materials for any work we do inside the house) and the third floor (currently a spare bedroom and storage area) to tackle. We also have the outside of the house – we’d like to redo the deck, plus the yard is in need of some landscaping. Our backyard is mostly concrete with a giant sycamore in the middle of it. If anyone has ten grand they’re willing to part with so that we can cut down that tree, that’d be great. We also want to replace the fence with one that gives more privacy.

And now, it is time for something I’ve been wanting to post since before the renovations started: before and after shots. The before shots are about a year old, and it’s hard to believe that the house ever looked like this, even though we lived here and saw it every day.

To start, here's what you'd see when you first walk in the door:

There was a wall there to the right (the living room is one the other side), and those awful green stairs AND the green floor. Now, when we come home, this is what we see:

The space has been opened up, the floors refinished, and the stairs repainted black.

Next, here's what the living room used to look like:

That used to be the furnace there on the right, with the duct work coming out and going along the wall. This room also had a drop ceiling. Now, the living room looks like this (Tanga, once again, makes an appearance):

Onto the dining room; here's the before...

...and here's the after:

Quick detour: that odd looking structure on the right? Is a homemade scratching post. Michael made it out of the scraps of wood we had around (for Kirin) and the couch cushion covers (for Tanga) that shrunk because I was too impatient and put them in the dryer. (Not that big of a deal, since we'd planned to buy a new cover anyway. Yay for IKEA!)

And now we move into the kitchen. Here's the before...

and here's the after:

Here's another before and after shot:

Here are a few more pictures of what the first floor looks like now:

Among the many things we need, one of them is a larger TV; the new living room makes the one we have look so, so tiny. Here's the dining room, though Michael's started calling it the interrogation room because all we have in there, besides the scratching post, is the one table and two chairs across from each other:

And finally, here's a shot of my favorite view in the house. This is taken from the couch, looking back through the dining room and into the kitchen. I love it because you can see all three wall colors.

I'll post before and after shots of the second floor, which is mostly done, later on. We don't have the Internet up and running at our house yet (I'm currently taking advantage of my sister-in-law's wireless connection); I hope it won't be too long before I can update again (I know all five of you readers hope that, too).

Almost home

2009-05-16T07:50:00.004-04:00

We've set a date to move back in - by the end of the month. This may or may not have anything to do with the fact that the obnoxious neighbors across the street, who never seem to have anything better to do than blast their car stereos at any given time, are moving out at the end of the month.

We've gotten a lot of painting done. The living room and hallway are done. We've got drapes ready to hang up, and the room is ready for furniture (this is where we call in assistance from Michael's brother-in-law to help move furniture and then we buy him dinner and/or beer). The kitchen is getting close to being done. We decided on red for the kitchen (I love the combination of black, white, and red). It was pretty intimidating at first, and of course red paint seems to make a bigger mess than the more subdued colors we've been using. But it's looking so good; it's a very warm color, perfect for a kitchen. It needs just one more coat and then the trim needs painting. We've also started painting the dining room; the ceiling is done, and we've got one coat of a very light grayish-blue (Light Silver Sage from, you guessed it, Restoration Hardware, who also, conveniently, make the lovely shade of red for our kitchen). The first set of stairs are done but still need touching up along the walls and risers.

Upstairs, we're moving into the bedroom; we have all of our basic furniture, plus we finally bought a mattress for our grown-up bed. I've been cleaning out the closet and drawers from the third floor and moving everything into the new bedroom. In doing so, I've also been throwing away/donating many, many items. Living with my in-laws, where I couldn't take everything with me, made me realize how I really don't need so many clothes/shoes/purses. So far, I've collected five garbage bags of clothes and three or four large shopping bags full of purses and a few pairs of shoes to take to Goodwill. The amount of extra closet and drawer space is a nice bonus.

And the bathroom upstairs is almost done, too. It just needs some touching up on the walls and then all the fixtures installed...whenever we get around to buying them.

I'll post pictures soon; everything is looking great, and I can't wait to share.

The green stairs are (almost) gone!

2009-04-22T19:08:00.013-04:00

I may have mentioned my disdain for the green stairs. I started painting the first set of stairs yesterday; I got half of them done in about two and a half hours. And while it's tedious and quite time consuming, it's also relaxing, in a weird way. I'm actually looking forward to finishing them. It also helps that the results are satisfying - the glossy black stairs look so much better than the green.

And a comparison of the green and the black:

Yeah, I'd say it's an improvement.

More painting...

2009-04-07T19:29:00.026-04:00

We've got paint on more walls: the living room and hallway downstairs and the bathroom upstairs. As always, the paint colors don't translate so well through the camera. The living room and hallway are supposed to be cappuccino:

The bathroom walls are butter, though it's hard to tell in this picture:

The other picture I took of the bathroom has what appears to be orange-ish colored walls, so this is the best I could do.

We've also put a fresh coat of paint on the rails and banister on the stairs going up to the second floor. It looks so much better; I can't wait to get the stairs painted.

We've also got the tile down on the hearth in the bedroom. No grout yet, but here's a sneak peek:

And a close up of the tile, since it looks blue in the above picture (it's gray, actually):

In other news, we recently bought night stands (finally).

Apparently, there's this little furniture place in Farmville. Yeah, we'll be going back.

We (or my very generous family, rather) bought a bed and a dresser for us right after we got married, but we didn't have room for it (I know - a house as big as ours and no room to put spare pieces of furniture sounds a little ridiculous, but there was a bit of demolition and construction going on). So the new bed and dresser, purchased in North Carolina, have been at my parents' house for about a year and a half. My folks are driving up to Richmond on Friday, with furniture (yay!), for a visit. So that's one step closer to being able to move back in.

No, we haven't moved back in yet

2009-03-25T19:39:00.030-04:00

It seems we keep finding more projects that we have to do before we can move back in. We still haven't put tile down on the hearth in the bedroom (...because we haven't even gotten the tile yet). We've also decided to paint at least one set of stairs before we bring the cats back; it sounds like it'd be pretty challenging to paint stairs with two cats around who are used to having free reign. The risers and railing need touching up, and we're going to paint the stairs black, so it's nothing too involved, but I'm sure it'll take much longer than we think. Speaking of stairs, here's a look at the stairs going up to the third floor, before I finally took the shop vac to them:

Now just imagine this saw dust and dry wall dust all over your living space, and maybe you can understand why we moved in with Michael's parents temporarily.

We have made some more progress elsewhere in the house. With the help of one of our neighbors, the living room and hallway downstairs are primed. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference a fresh coat of paint, even primer, can make. This space is so much brighter and feels even bigger. I've decided on Restoration Hardware's Cappuccino for the walls in the living room and hallway; this color will continue up the stairs and into the second-floor hallway. I absolutely love this color, and I'm so excited that I finally get to use it.

One other thing, and this is purely to entertain the crazy cat lady in me:

This is the wall below one of the windows in the bedroom, before it was painted; I just had to get a picture of the dirty paw prints on the wall. It's actually pretty gross, when you think about it, but I still find the little paw prints cute. Back in the good old days when it was just Kirin and me, I had a screened-in porch that Kirin got more use out of than I did. I didn't keep the porch as clean as I should have, which lead to Kirin leaving gray paw prints all over the white bathroom floor. I still found them adorable. (I swear I'm not one of THOSE cat owners.)

Yet another quick update

2009-03-14T09:35:00.003-04:00

We are so close to having our new bedroom finished. The painting is done, all the walls, trim, and even the high, high ceiling, plus touchups (except for one spot where the outlet faceplate didn't fit, at all, and Michael had to saw out part of the baseboard and spackle and now just a tiny part of the wall needs touching up). We've also decided that the hearth needs something. It's just brick, which was painted doo-doo brown to match the floors that were onced painted doo-doo brown. I painted them white, and while it's a slight improvement, it's not great, and Michael REALLY doesn't like it. So we're going to put some tile down. This shouldn't take too long (oh, how many times have we said that?). We're thinking just some white subway tiles or something similar. I'm holding off posting any pictures until this room is DONE so that I can also record a video of a walk-through in the room, just to get a better perspective of things to post on here.

One year (plus)

2009-02-28T08:44:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me that one year has passed since I started writing about our house and our journey into renovation land. I thought it would be fun to mark the occasion by listing the accomplishments we (and our contractor and his crew, mostly) have made in the past year.

1. New HVAC system installed for the first floor, plus duct work in place for the second and third floors unit.
2. New electrical system for the first and second floors (now I’ll be able to use the hair dryer and not worry about breaking a circuit every time).
3. New plumbing systems for the first and second floors.
4. A completely gutted and renovated first floor.
5. New siding on the addition.
6. A new kitchen that pretty much had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
7. A new half bath.
8. A new laundry room.
9. A new full bathroom that two people can fit in comfortably at the same time (no more fighting over who gets the sink – we each get our own!).
10. A demo’ed bathroom that fills me with glee every time I walk by it.
11. About half of the windows replaced.
12. Many new light fixtures that were surprisingly exhausting to pick out.
13. The most beautiful refinished floors I’ve ever seen. So beautiful that they make me want to never leave this house. I would hug them if I could.
14. A marriage that’s still intact.

I love lamp

2009-02-23T19:45:00.006-05:00

Still working on finishing the bedroom, still living with Michael's parents. Our contractor has finished all the work he needed to do with the new windows and door; now we're just patching up any holes and filling in any cracks before we can finally paint that last wall. Our contractor would've been completely done, but we need to replace two cabinets in the kitchen that were damaged from the pipes that froze. Thankfully, that's all that needs to be repaired, and we're not close to being ready to paint the kitchen anyway.

I bought table lamps for our bedroom:

We don't have bedside tables to put them on yet, but we will have lamps. Restoration Hardware had them on sale at a ridiculous discount; I just couldn't pass it up. That's it for now!

The bane of my existence is gone

2009-02-01T09:24:00.036-05:00

Not as much painting going on lately, though I primed most of the new bathroom yesterday all by myself, including the ceiling. Painting ceilings sucks. The human neck was not meant to bend in certain ways. At least the ceilings on the first floor aren't as high.

Other projects we're working on are fixing up the bedroom windows and the mantle as we wait for the new window/door installation to be completed. Michael started replacing the frame on one of the windows so that it will match the other, a project someone else started a long time ago and never finished. Shocking, I know, that a project was started and not completed in this house. One window as the rosettes and fluting, the other has just the fluting along the top. I was pretty nervous about him tackling this project, because it would turn out either really awesome, or we would end up begging our contractor to fix it. What he did was take one side of one of the old door frames (we've got several of them), which also has the rosettes in the upper corners and fluting along the top and down the sides, and cut it to the same size as the window frame, since the old door frame is the same width as the window frame. It fortunately was a success; now he just has to do the same for the other side of the window. It's not perfect, but with a little spackle and sanding and a fresh coat of paint, it'll look great.

The mantle is almost ready to be painted. The fireplace was covered over, and since we don't have the money to open it back up and get it working again, we're leaving it that way. But it still needs some work before we paint it. We bought a flue stopper for the big hole in the fireplace. We're just waiting for...whatever he used to hold this piece in place to set before putting the stopper in. (Michael, of course, is not awake yet, so I can't bug him about what all this stuff is called. I'm pretty sure "fireplace thingy" is not the correct term.)

Elsewhere, Michael has torn up the old bathroom, where the pipes froze a few weeks ago. I managed to get a few pictures of it before it was completely demo'ed.

Of all of the things in this house, this bathroom was the part I hated the most. First of all, it didn't have a real door on it (something I neglected to get a picture of). It looked like someone installed a bathroom in a closet, and thought leaving the closet door was a good idea. It was one of those sliding/folding doors. With no doorknob. And no lock. Do you have any idea how frustrating this was for a girl? No privacy whatsoever. This was especially frustrating when the construction was going on and a whole crew of men were around. I wasn't there that often when they were working, but if I was and needed to use the bathroom, it would almost reduce me to tears.

Second, there was no ventilation. Third, there was no insulation, so in the winter, it got pretty cold. A space heater solved that problem, but somebody didn't like it running all night. Maybe if this person was the first one up in the mornings and actually went in there when it was cold and had to sit down on the freezing cold toilet seat, he would've thought differently. Fourth, the walls were the ugliest shade of yellow. It was like mustard, and I hate mustard. Fifth, no tub, just a shower stall. A pain in the neck to clean, and you can't take a bath, which is nice every once and a while. Sixth, it was filthy, and no amount of cleaning ever got it up to my standards of clean. Seventh, there was a window that some fool thought was a good idea to cover up.

And surprise! There were about four or five layers of flooring in there.

The floors are gone; the toilet, sink, and shower are gone; and the window's exposed along with some brick. Like downstairs, this brick wall was once the back wall of the house; this bathroom is part of the addition. So, where the window is where the shower stall used to be; the mirror and sink used be to the left of the window.

I think we're going to put in another full bath in here eventually, since we've got the plumbing in place, but we'll rearrange where everything goes. We'd also like to keep the brick exposed, but paint it white. We're all about the exposed brick in this house.

OK, so there was a little water damage after all

2009-01-24T10:15:00.023-05:00

After looking at the kitchen the next day, we found that there was some damage from the pipes freezing. One of the cabinets has some noticeable damage, and the ceiling in the laundry room has a little bit of water damage, too. But, things could have been so much worse. The water somehow leaked into the cabinet without ruining any of the cook books on the upper shelf and then collected into the casserole dishes stored on the lower shelf:

The rest of the water ran down the wall below the cabinet. We just set out some bowls to collect the rest of the water, turned on a fan, and let it finish drying out.

In happier news, the windows and door were installed. They're not completely finished yet; there's still some molding or framing or something else to do before we can tackle that last wall in the bedroom.

One small setback - the glass was cracked in one of the windows when it was delivered. And that's why there's blue tape all over the window. There's also a new window on the third floor in our old bedroom.

And the new door:

And just for comparison's sake, here's what the old door looked like:

I guess the new door is an improvement. I kind of liked the crappy stained glass and bad paint job (which seemed to be the theme throughout the house). And the duct tape was a nice touch. Honestly, how lazy do you have to be that you can't even bother to try to keep paint off of the glass? IT'S NOT THAT HARD. If you're going to the trouble of painting the windows in the first place, then at least try to be careful. There's this stuff called painter's tape. It works, and it's inexpensive. Use it. I don't expect things to be perfect, especially in a house like ours where it's so old that perfection is just out of the question for a lot of things. But don't just slap some paint on and then leave it all over the glass. I guess it's fortunate that most of these doors and windows are getting replaced anyway, because that's one less thing to give me an aneurysm.

Frozen pipes

2009-01-17T23:22:00.055-05:00

That's right - some pipes froze. And fortunately Michael caught it before things got worse, only because his sister's pipes froze, which prompted Michael to run over to our house during his niece's birthday party to check on things. The culprit is the old bathroom on the second floor; here you can see where the pipes froze, thawed, and broke apart.

There was no heat whatsoever going on in this room. There is now. We've got some leakage downstairs in the kitchen and laundry room, but nothing was damaged. Just some water to clean up.

This recent occurrence reminds me of the last time we had a leak in the house, and I'm surprised I haven't written about it yet. It was rather traumatic. It was August 26, 2007. I remember this well because it happened on my birthday. The day before, I officially moved to Richmond. I'd been back and forth for a few weeks, but that day involved the big truck and moving all the heavy stuff into the house - and it was the last day I was in my apartment. There was no turning back. So, because that day was pretty exhausting, I decided that for my birthday, I wanted to do absolutely nothing. We went over to Michael's parents' house that night and then spent my birthday lounging around before my lovely mother-in-law cooked dinner for us. Then we went back to Church Hill. Oh, and we brought the cats back with us.

We'd gotten married three months earlier, and a few weeks before the wedding, I took Kirin down to the in-laws. Between the preparations for the big day and the honeymoon, I was not home for about two and a half weeks, so I thought it was best to have my future in-laws look after her, even though we didn't know at the time where we would be living after the wedding (this was decided two days before the wedding when Michael accepted the offer for his current job). Michael did the same thing with Tanga. So, three months later, we finally took them to our house.

I bring this up because I was already under some stress before seeing what had happened in the house. You see, I kind of freak out any time I have to put at least one of the cats in its carrier. I hate seeing animals caged up, and even though what I'm doing is for their own good, and even though they're not going to remember what happened, I still hate it and stress out and feel guilty. So all I want to do is get home and let the cats out. We get to the house, and I'm the first one in. I heard what sounded like water dripping somewhere. It had started to rain a little, and this was before we had the roof fixed, so it leaked upstairs in one room pretty much every time it rained. Then I realized the water was coming from upstairs into the first floor. I look down and see where Michael had placed a contractor bag in a corner; this turned out to be such stupidly good luck because that bag caught most of the water. So aside from a little of the ceiling in the hallway falling through (which ended up being torn out completely anyway), the first floor suffered little damage.

Let's move upstairs to the old kitchen. Specifically, the ice maker and its water line that ruptured sometime between us leaving the day before and getting home about 24 hours later. The kitchen floor was one big puddle. Again, no major damage since we knew that room was going to get redone; it was just a mess. So I'm freaking out because I want to let the cats out, but not when there's a huge puddle in the kitchen for them to walk through and track water everywhere. So we clean it up as best we can, and the cats are free. Aside from worrying about the cats, I handled the whole thing pretty well. But then something really small set me off into the first of several break downs over the stupid house.

I went up to the third floor to turn on the air conditioners. We're cheap, and since the cats weren't around, we turned off the window units before we left the house to cut back on the power bill. Apparently, Michael had switched which outlets the units were plugged into, or I just forgot which units were OK to run. The house used to be seriously under-amped, and you couldn't run more than one, maybe two things on the same circuit. You couldn't run a hair dryer at the same time as pretty much anything, a lesson that took me a long time to learn. It was very confusing to remember which outlets belonged on the same circuit, since just because two outlets were on the same wall or even in the same room didn't necessarily mean they were on the same circuit. So a few minutes after turning the air conditioners on, the power on the third floor goes out. I lost it. It was my birthday, and here I was in a dump of a house with a big mess downstairs and it's hot and I broke a circuit, again, and now I'm sitting in the dark. And as always after I have these episodes, Michael continues to put up with me and my freak outs over the house - comforting me and trying to make me feel better - reminding me why I married him, along with the stupid house, in the first place.

Yay! Color!

2009-01-04T09:28:00.018-05:00

We've got color on most of the walls in the bedroom, and it looks great. No regrets about choosing this particular color. The pictures, once again, don't do it justice; the color looks even better in person.

The mantle and the windows also need some work before a new coat of paint goes on them. Yesterday I took off most of the paint on the top of the mantle, thanks to the heat gun we borrowed from Michael's dad. We hope that sanding down the rest of it will be much easier now. We don't know how much of the paint we'll take off for the rest of the mantle, since we don't want to mess up any of the details in the design, particularly the fluting on the sides.

We've got some cutting in to do on the walls, then painting that last wall after the new windows go in, and then making the mantel and window frames look nicer, and then I think the bedroom will be done. We bought drapes (and yes, they're the purple ones) and the hardware for the bedroom at IKEA on New Year's Day. We were up in Alexandria visiting friends, and since you can't buy IKEA's textiles online, and we were up that way, I wanted to stop and see what they had. I think we'll be making more trips to IKEA as we start decorating.

A Quick Update

2008-12-29T17:55:00.012-05:00

Not a lot to report still. We're still waiting for three new windows and a door to be replaced; two of those windows and the door are in our new bedroom, which is holding the painting process up a little bit. Though I think the combination of the holidays and us being too tired to paint after work is just as much to blame. Plus, we don't want to start painting the wall with the windows, in case the wall gets damaged during the installation process. But most of the bedroom is primed, and the ceiling has been painted.

I know plain white walls aren't all that exciting, but they are for us. It's amazing what a difference a fresh coat of paint, even just primer, makes. It's starting to look like a real room. We have a color picked out and purchased. I cheated and just went with Restoration Hardware paint. I'm also using at least two more of their colors downstairs to save me the hassle of finding just the right colors at the hardware store for a little less money. At this point, I'd rather just spend a little more and not have to put much effort into it. So the bedroom will be a light shade of green - Bay Laurel to be exact. This room is taking a lot longer to prime than we thought it would; it's a pretty big room with at least 12-foot ceilings, plus two closets that also need priming (because it's me and everything needs to be done the right way, even the closets). But that's it for an update right now. As soon as color goes on the walls, I'll post more pictures.

Refinished (and gorgeous) floors

2008-11-27T09:07:00.037-05:00

I finally took a picture of the new bathroom; all it's missing are the mirrors above the sinks.

The floors are refinished and look amazing. I'm seriously reconsidering how long we'll stay in this house now because we will never have floors this nice again. Here are shots of the living room/entry, the hallway upstairs, and our new bedroom.

Now the brand new floor in the dining room doesn't look so good when it's compared to the refinished old floor. It looks downright cheap, actually, and it certainly was not a cheap floor. The refinished floor is on the left, the new floor is on the right:

And remember the section of the floor that was painted green? Here's a before and after of that section.

Seriously, we can't get over how good these floors look. There are just a few small things left and then the crew will be out of there. We've been living with Michael's parents the last two weeks while the last of the dust settled and the floors were refinished. There's some cleaning we need to do before moving back in and bringing the cats back - we don't want them tracking dust from the stairs to the third floor and the third floor itself down to the rest of the house. And we need to get curtains for the living room so that we can start moving into and enjoying the new space without feeling like we're being watched. Because we probably will be watched in this neighborhood.

And We're Back!

2008-11-20T18:59:00.042-05:00

So...a lot has happened in the past month or so, both on the house and elsewhere. We took a super fun trip to Texas, and I switched jobs. But back to the house. This phase of the renovation is almost complete. I didn't post pictures before we left for our vacation because duct work was going in for the second HVAC unit, and that's just not very exciting to see. There were a couple other projects going on then, too; we have new windows on the front of the house:

And the closets in the bedrooms were framed:

We also had, and still have, the new duct work intruding in on our current bedroom on the third floor:

Now, we have a new bathroom:

I apparently haven't taken pictures of the finished bathroom...I'll get to that next time. But the toilet and vanity and the lighting are all installed and it looks really good! The closets are done in both bedrooms. The door frames for the closets in the master bedroom have the rosettes and fluting like the door frames downstairs, which is a nice touch. One of the two windows in this bedroom has that same pattern in the frame, and I think we'll get the other one redone so that everything matches.

And, there used to be a door between the two bedrooms (formerly a kitchen and a big room we used for storage):

And I haven't taken a picture of that wall now, either. Well, use your imagination. It looks like a white wall now.

On the first floor, we have thresholds. Michael calls them speed bumps.

And now for the most exciting part - the almost refinished floors. You can see what they used to look like a couple pictures up. And that ugly green floor? It's gone! Here's what the floors look like after being sanded down:

They look so good that we're not going to stain them; the natural color is quite lovely. This makes me rethink paint colors now, since I thought we'd have darker floors, but I'll get over that. The floors upstairs have also been sanded; they don't look quite as good, but it's still a huge improvement. Here's the floor in the front bedroom, which used to be painted brown. The sanding wasn't completed when I took the picture; it looks much, much better than this:

And that's what has happened over the last month or so. The next big project will probably be painting, which we (and some of our loved ones) will do, and then moving all of our furniture into the new rooms. Then buying more furniture because all we have now is mostly what I had when I lived in a one-bedroom apartment. This house is a little bigger than my old 800-square-foot apartment.

2008-10-12T09:49:00.026-04:00

We've spent the last week moving into the new kitchen. Dave came over to help Michael move the appliances downstairs. He brought Michael's nephew, Nathan, with him. Nathan, who is 5, always has the funniest observations and questions about our house. For instance, "Why is there a big hole in the ceiling?" and "Why is your kitchen upstairs?" His most recent comments include "Wow, what a really nice floor," complimenting our new bathroom floor, and "It doesn't look very pleasant" with regard to our backyard, something we will fix up after we take care of the house.

The kitchen is still a work in process. Most of the items were covered in dust because the room next to the old kitchen was demolished, so we had to clean everything (hard to do when the dishwasher isn't hooked up) before putting it in its new home. I'm hoping we'll finish getting everything in its proper place today; the things left to do are scattered on the kitchen floor or piled in the dining room. Speaking of, check out our dining arrangements:

I guess it's good that we're getting more uses out of our tailgating gear.

Our old kitchen is gone. Here's what it looked like:

It's hard to tell, but those are tile counter tops. Because who needs a smooth surface to work on that's easy to clean in a kitchen? And the cabinets? The cabinets weren't even real cabinets; they were slabs of wood nailed to the wall. I don't think the person who installed them even bothered to sand them down a bit, because I was afraid of getting a splinter every time I tried opening one of the doors or drawers. No, of course they didn't have hardware.

But, that's all behind us now. Here's what that room looks like now (see if you can spot Tanga):

The ceiling was torn down, too, and even more fire damage was found.

Fortunately, this doesn't cause any structural issues that we'll need to fix. This room and the room next to it, as I've mentioned, will be bedrooms. Over in the other room, we have the closets framed.

And we have the plumbing for the new bathroom:

More finishing details...

2008-10-04T08:22:00.030-04:00

As I sat down to start this post, I heard some strange noises coming from downstairs. Of course, my first thought was that it was someone breaking in, but it was just another bird. Apparently the roof isn't completely sealed off yet. I had to get Michael up and the cats back upstairs, but the bird found its way out, we hope, through the same way it got in.

More finishing details went in this week. Plus we have a working bathroom on the first floor, and we almost have a washing machine back.

All of the floors in the living room are down, but they still need refinishing. Baseboards and door frames are also in the living room and along the hallway.

Molding is on top of the beatboard in the living room, so those half-walls look much better:

And here's my new favorite thing in the house - the columns on the half-walls that separate the hallway from the living room:

Finally, here's a look at the entire new kitchen floor:

We also have most of the hardware in the kitchen; we still don't have the doorknobs on the pantry doors, but the cabinets and drawers are good to go:

We are ready to move into the new kitchen. We had a cleaning crew in there yesterday getting it ready for us. Michael's brother-in-law Dave is helping us move the appliances downstairs tomorrow. We're planning on getting new appliances eventually, but the ones we have work just fine for now. We'll also move the rest of the kitchen downstairs, plus anything else in the old kitchen so that it can be demolished next week. I get the first swing of the sledgehammer once we've cleared out of the old kitchen. I'll post pictures of it when it's cleaned out but before the demo starts. It has to be one of the ugliest kitchens. Ever.

Yay! Light fixtures! (and trim!)

2008-09-24T18:19:00.030-04:00

The big project this week has been trim. The dining room and kitchen have baseboards and door frames, and they're beautiful.

The living room and dining room will have the rosettes and fluting in the frames, in keeping with the history of the house. We're very happy with how it's all turning out.

We have crown molding in the kitchen along the top of the cabinets:

The new light fixtures were installed today. I didn't break down and buy a Restoration Hardware fan; Home Depot's website has a pretty good selection, and there was one that we both really liked, so we just got that one. It looks fantastic in the living room.

And here's the chandelier for the dining room, the pot rack/light for the kitchen, the light for the laundry room (which I LOVE), and the light for the half bath:

There's a light over the kitchen sink - love it:

And last are the two hallway lights:

They started putting the boards down in the living room today, too:

All this time I've been looking forward to having floors again, and it's the lighting that I just can't over how great everything looks - who knew you could get so excited over light fixtures?

Another lesson we've learned

2008-09-20T14:02:00.016-04:00

We may as well live at Lowes, as much as time as we're spending there these days. Here's something we learned recently: don't pick out stuff after work, when you're tired and haven't eaten yet. It really clouds your judgment. We went back to Lowes this morning to return the two fans we bought. Turns out we don't need a fan with a light in the kitchen; we totally forgot we already have recessed lighting in there. And the living room fan? I just don't like it. We had dinner at Zuppa (seriously? Zuppa doesn't have a website? I guess the food's so good it doesn't need one) last night, and I remembered from the last time we went there how much I liked the ceiling fans. So now we need a fan in the kitchen without a light and something similar to the fans at Zuppa for the living room. Sounds simple, right? Not really. For the kitchen, we need a fan with short blades so that we don't get strobe light effect from the recessed lights. For the living room, as much as we love the fans at Restoration Hardware, which are quite similar to the ones at Zuppa, we just can't spend that much on a fan. At least not yet. I'll probably justify the expense later, after several unsuccessful trips to other stores. We are not pleased with the selection at Lowes, so we're on a mission.

We had other things to take care of at Lowes, so it just seemed like a good time to return the fans. We were short a light for the hallway, and we still needed a light to put over the kitchen sink. We also had to pick out hardware for the kitchen. So while we were looking at the lighting, again, but with fresher eyes, we decided to get something else for the hallway and the laundry room. So now we have to return more stuff. So that'll be a total of four items, so far, returned. And this is why you shouldn't pick out things for your house when you're tired and hungry; it just creates more work to do later.

In other news, we have floors in the dining room:

Yay! Floors! For real this time.

2008-09-18T21:22:00.015-04:00

The new kitchen floor is down, but covered up mostly for the time being. Here's a sneak peek:

And the tile is down in the half bath and laundry room:

Our dining room floor should be down soon; we finally picked out something and have the boards ready to be installed.

We have some of the trim on the first floor; the doors have frames now:

And there's wainscoting on either side of the mantle:

All this trim will be fun to paint. One last thing from downstairs is our new sink:

Complete with a garbage disposal AND built-in soap dispenser. It's the little things that make me happy.

As for upstairs, they started framing our new bedroom and bathroom. Here's the ceiling:

A view of the bathroom from inside the bedroom (special appearance by Tanga):

And a view of the bathroom (and Tanga) from the hallway:

We went to Lowe's last night to buy all of the light fixtures and ceiling fans for the first floor; those should be installed next week. We also bought a new microwave to install above the stove. We're leaning toward buying all new appliances for the kitchen since the ones we're currently using aren't as pretty as brand new stainless appliances.

Yay! Cabinets!

2008-09-11T20:57:00.012-04:00

Kitchen cabinets and counter tops are going in this week. We're very happy with what we picked out. The kitchen is starting to look the way we both had it pictured in our heads.

Here's a look at our new sink. We're also getting a garbage disposal, which I'm very excited about.

And it looks like we might get real floors soon, at least in one room. We've also got a big pile of moldings and baseboards and such.

Scrubbing Brick, or What I've Learned about Mosquitoes

2008-09-08T21:16:00.023-04:00

We survived Hanna with just a drip. The roof was worked on last week before all the rain got here, but there was still one drip. Fortunately, Michael saw it coming and made preparations for it:

"What is that?" you may ask yourself. Why, it's a tarp suspended by twine nailed to the walls, of course. There's a hole cut in the middle of the tarp so that any water it catches will drain into the bucket. This was not Michael's first time setting up this contraption.

The ceiling underneath the stairs and in the second floor hallway have been torn down.

Our new $750 window was installed last week:

Here's what the old window looked like:

Much improved. Also, our new kitchen cabinets were delivered last week...

...and installation of the cabinets began today!

We've been cleaning up the brick in the living room, and it's starting to look pretty nice. The section above the mantel has not been cleaned yet, but both sections on either side of the fireplace have had one good scrubbing:

This is yet another thing that I cannot capture with a camera. In person, the cleaned sections look so much better. Speaking of cleaning brick, I would like to take the time to note that in cleaning up this brick, I have learned no matter what the conditions are, mosquitoes will find me, and they will feast. It's not surprising that all kinds of bugs get into the house; the doors are open a good portion of the day while work goes on, and the house isn't completely sealed off from the outside world (see the previous post about birds getting in). So I tend to get one or two mosquito bites after coming home and looking around downstairs at that day's work. However, I was dumbfounded when I discovered six bites on my left ankle alone after working on the brick Labor Day weekend. I had not bathed in close to two days, and I was covered in plaster dust. Yet that didn't stop the mosquitoes. So now I know that no matter the conditions, no matter how filthy I am, the mosquitoes find me just as sweet.

Yay! Air conditioning!

2008-09-02T19:00:00.021-04:00

Yes, when we walked into the house this evening, it felt...different. It wasn't the same temperature inside the house as it was outside. It was a comfortable 73 degrees inside and not stuffy. Our new heating and cooling system is up and running!

We also have the new window for the dining room. Our new $750 window for the dining room, that is.

The mudding is still being done on the first floor, and that's about it for the first floor for now. Work on our new bedroom upstairs is coming along. We've finally decided on the layout for the new bathroom and closets upstairs, too. We'll have two closets, one on either side of the fireplace in the bedroom.

The picture above is the outline of one of the closets, to the left of the fireplace.

On the other side of the room, the new bathroom will be where the hallway and the wall used to be:

We'll have a little alcove between the wall of the bathroom and the door that leads to the balcony. We didn't want to lose the light from that door or the access to the balcony; we'd originally planned to have a walk-in closet in front of that door, with the bathroom next to it in the space where the hallway used to be.

A history lesson

2008-09-01T16:46:00.033-04:00

I've been collecting bits and pieces of the house's and the neighborhood's history, and while there's probably a lot more information out there, here's what I've been able to find so far.

We refer to our neighborhood as Church Hill, but Church Hill is also made up of other smaller neighborhoods. According to the National Register of Historic Places, our house is in the Oakwood-Chimborazo District. It is bound by the Southern Railway tracks and East Broad Street on the south; North 30th and 32nd Streets, Melton Avenue, and the western edge of Oakwood Cemetery on the west; Nine Mile Road and the city line on the north; and the city line, North 39th Street, Crestview Road, and the eastern edge of Chimborazo Park on the east. The district's buildings are a mixture of Late Victorian, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles.

James Malone built our house in 1843, according to one source; another lists Richard Malone as the original owner. James Malone also owned land north of Leigh Street and east of 34th Street and several scattered blocks. All of the houses built before 1819 were demolished, making our house the oldest one in the district. The Malone house is a two-and-a-half story Greek Revival-style brick house. It has a side gable roof with a stepped parapet. Two chimneys are in each of the parapet ends. Two original gable front dormers flank a central pediment above the front entry. A Late Victorian cornice with a plain panel frieze and sawn brackets was added to the house. It was partitioned into two houses in the 1880s, as far as we can tell.

In 1965, the city conducted the Richmond Esthetic Survey and Historic Building Survey, in which our house was included. The remarks of the house include: "Handsome brick house largest in 'Shed Town'. Earliest example dated of step gable. Later extension in rear (wood) a curious structure which suggests the 1880s. Curious dormer enlargement, two-story porch and cornice are also later." The Library of Virginia has these records, which include a photo of the house from 1965, I assume. Since I need permission to use or reproduce these records, I'm not comfortable linking to them, but you can view these documents by going here and searching for "malone" to pull up the record of our house.

That's all I've been able to find using the Internet. I have to give credit to Michael's dad for finding the information about the Esthetic Survey and to Church Hill People's News for posting the information from the National Register of Historic Places.

More hidden treasure

2008-08-28T20:23:00.042-04:00

Our house? Is disgusting right now. We finally got rain, and it's just as muggy inside as it is outside. And there's all the dust from the work they're doing in that one room upstairs - it just goes everywhere. There's plastic sheeting and a door to try to keep it contained, but there's just no stopping it. I should clean a small section of the kitchen floor and take a picture of the comparison, just so we can remember how dirty that floor is. But I really don't feel like it. So, downstairs, not a lot going on right now. We've got mud on the walls and ceilings to cover up the seams and nails in the sheet rock.

You get the idea. It pretty much looks the same everywhere on the first floor. One small thing, though, is the wall on the front of the house is whole again, sort of:

The section on the left had been bare for a while; we're leaving the plaster on the rest of the wall and not replacing it with sheet rock. We went over moldings, baseboards and door frames yesterday with the contractor. That was a little frustrating because all you've got to go by is a drawing to-scale of the profile; they all start to look the same after staring at the pictures. That whole budget things gets in the way, too. I don't even know what we decided to go with. It'll look great, though, I'm sure. Our kitchen cabinets and counter tops are supposed to go in next week, then floors the week after that. I cannot wait to use our new kitchen. Or, rather, I can't wait for Michael to use the new kitchen while I sit there and not feel gross because our new kitchen will not have a layer of dust over everything. Upstairs: more demolition. The laths are gone from the ceiling, and it now looks a lot like the ceiling on the first floor used to look:

And that wall is completely gone:

We're starting to see more of the layers of walls in this room. I've gone over the wallpaper; there's also some lovely wood paneling. We can also see the brick underneath everything in some places.

They tore out the baseboards, too:

Which leads me to some sort-of exciting news...they found more stuff behind the baseboards. These were also found near the fireplace, so they're covered in soot and are a little burned.

This looks like an invitation or a reply card to the Grand House Social at 109 East Clay Street on September 2, 1932. That's all I make of it.

A photograph; no idea who it is. There's nothing on the back or anything else found to indicate who this might be.

This is holiday greeting card of some sort, but it's about the size of a business card. It says (or what I can make out):

Day and night, rain or shine,
The telegraph messenger comes to your door,
Bringing glad tidings of loves ones afar;
Please remember him now with a half or dime

Through the hot sun's rays on Summer's days
...blasts of Winter's night
He comes with "...sh" and a smiling...
...him a su...ntial mite.

Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.

Compliments of the Season

Not sure what this is. I think it's made of wood; all it says on it is "Glee Club."

Jack of Diamonds. From a really old deck of cards?

A magazine, but I can't find the name or an issue date. It's probably from 1955, when Dorothy Dandridge was nominated for an Oscar (thanks, Wikipedia!).

An issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch from December 12, 1954.

And a key.

This house is always full of surprises

2008-08-25T20:25:00.021-04:00

Work has moved upstairs. I wish I'd known that more demo would happen today - I would've taken before pictures of the room they're working in. They started taking down the ceiling in one of the rooms on the second floor - the same room where they took out the wall a couple weeks ago. This is the same room that has had a giant hole in the ceiling for the last four years. Here's what the ceiling looks like now:

This room used to have a closet that I wish I'd gotten pictures of before they tore it down. It was poorly built and just plain ugly. The walls inside the closet had what looked and felt like really old wall paper:

Here's a close up of the design:

But it gets better. There are at least two layers of wall paper under the green one. As far as we can tell, there's a blue pattern and then a pick floral pattern:

This room is a mess right now, but I can't capture just how messy it is:

This room also housed the litter boxes, so we had to move those upstairs to the third floor, where everything else is already crammed - we'll see how that goes.

On a completely different note, they tore off the plaster of one of the walls on the first floor - this wall is the other side of the dining room, with the stairs just to the left of it as you walk into the house. The surprise? They discovered that the stairs used to be up against this wall:

So the stairs used to face the back of the house and must have gone up to a landing before the structure was partitioned. Our plan, for now, is to clean up this brick and white wash it - it'd be a nice tie-in to the exposed brick in the living room.

Floors and walls and ceilings, oh my

2008-08-20T19:47:00.034-04:00

The big news this week is that we have new walls - they've been putting up sheet rock on the ceilings and walls on the first floor, and they're pretty close to being done.

That last picture is the kitchen; that's the pantry there in the middle. Here's a look at the ceiling, with the recessed lighting:

We picked out a floor for the kitchen. We decided to go with a fiberglass floor. We were able to take home a sample to see if we still liked it, and we do:

It goes very well with the laminate counter tops we picked out and the white cabinets. We'll need some color, though, probably in the form of a back splash. We'll probably use small white mosaic tiles in the laundry room and smaller black and white pattern tile in the half bath.

We will be able to use some floor boards from Caravati's in the front room...at a price of $10 a square foot. We still don't know what we'll use in the dining room. We're definitely going with hardwood, we just don't know what kind yet.

So my parents are coming to visit this weekend...they haven't seen the house yet. I'm a little nervous; they might drag me back home with them.

It's beginning to look a lot like a house

2008-08-16T07:28:00.024-04:00

I've been lazy the last week, so I've got a lot to cover. Our house is starting to look like a real house again. They've taken out part of the wall between the kitchen and the laundry room; a new wall will go in its place, with the refrigerator in front of it. And they've put up the studs in the rest of the first floor, preparing to put up drywall next week.

There's been so much work that we won't be able to see once the new walls and ceilings go up. I've mentioned all the electrical work that's been done; here's a look at new plumbing on the first floor in the front room, for the new bathroom that will go directly above it on the second floor (more on that shortly).

The threshold between the front room and the middle/dining room needed some work; it needed more structural support, so here's what it looked like before it was fixed. This is looking up at the threshold, where we had just wooden beams supporting the brick:

And here's the after, supported by steel beams on three sides:

In the middle room, we have one oddly placed window. It's between the chimney and the wall shared with the front room. It's also an odd shape, tall and narrow, and is the only source of natural light in this room. Of course, just like everything else, it needs to be replaced. That's not surprising; just look at it:

They've taken it out, and we have a board in its place for the time being:

And that's about it for the first floor for now. They didn't want to start the drywall on Friday, so they moved upstairs and did a little work. I'll post pictures of the entire second floor eventually, but here are a few that I took before they demolished one of the walls upstairs. This is looking from the bottom of the stairs on the second floor and is directly above the entrance way on the first floor. The wall on the left is the wall they tore down. A new wall will go up farther to the left, and a closet and a bathroom will go in the space between the partition and the new wall.

The door leads to a small balcony, but since we're putting a closet in front of it, it will be sealed off. It needs replacing anyway (shocking). Here's a view of that wall from the other side:

This room will be a bedroom. We're using it for storage right now; all of our crap is shoved up against the other side. We'll be moving it out this weekend; most of the stuff is trash anyway. So here's what that wall looks like now:

The work done taking down the wall left a nice layer of dust over everything in this room and the kitchen, which is off to the right. The cats don't seem to mind, though, but their paws sure do get dirty. Kirin is gray, so it's hard to tell when she's filthy, but Tanga the orange tabby can't hide it so well:

Now that we have subfloors throughout the first floor and no access to underneath the house, we've the let the cats have free reign again. I never posted a picture of our system that kept them from getting downstairs. We originally just put up a large map at the top of the stairs, but Tanga isn't as fat as we thought and can fit through the railing on the side, so he would just jump down onto the stairs and make himself at home under the house. That is until the workers showed up and he couldn't get back upstairs. Anyway, after several attempts, we finally came up with something that prevented the cats from getting downstairs. Behold:

That's a door turned on its side and old framed posters lined up along the railing, plus the map at the top of the stairs. Stupid cats.

I mentioned last week that we were going to Lowe's to pick out some stuff. That was exhausting. It's hard enough to choose things when you need to stay within a budget, but picking out things that don't necessarily reflect our tastes because we want to be able to sell the house, ideally within a few years, makes it even more difficult. We don't want to spend too much money on something that we love but won't enjoy for very long. We don't want the house to look cheap either. Plus our tastes are very different from each other anyway, so we spent some quality time with Lowe's last Sunday. I think my feet still hurt from it.

We still need to pick out floors for the first floor. We're reusing original boards from the front room, but we're about 30 boards short to complete the room. The middle room will get new hardwood. We're still undecided about what to put in the kitchen. We thought we would just suck it up and put hardwood back there, too, but one of our friends pointed out that with all the appliances that use water in the kitchen, that might not be such a good idea. We're going to Caravati's today to see if they have boards to finish the front room, plus I've never been and would like to look around. I'd like to see what moldings they have; our house has door frames and windows like this:

It'd be nice to have that throughout the house. We're also going to a couple more flooring places. We've got a pretty big Saturday planned. I know this is exactly how Michael wants to spend his birthday.

Holy Crap, We've Got Subfloors

2008-08-07T19:16:00.018-04:00

I'll save the subfloors for last; they've done a lot of other work this week. The water heater is in its permanent spot under the stairs in the new laundry room:

The electrician has been here all week, installing new outlets throughout the first floor. There are wires everywhere, too, which makes me very happy. Soon we'll be able to run more than one appliance on the same circuit at the same time! If you look closely, you'll see the new wires and outlets.

Here's what things looked like when I left this morning, the insulation piled in the front room:

And here's what the first floor likes now with...drum roll please...subfloors! Woohoo!

We're supposed to pick out the fun stuff for the kitchen this weekend: floors, counter tops, hardware, etc. So it's been a good week.

Still no air conditioning, but floors might be in our near future

2008-08-04T18:06:00.010-04:00

Last week they started putting new siding on the addition in the back, which was finished today.

As for the inside of the house, it doesn't look like a lot of progress has been made, but that's only because they've been installing the new HVAC system under the house. You can see some the duct work in the front and middle rooms, since we don't have floors yet. But, our contractor said today that we might have subfloors by the end of the week.

And they framed the space under the stairs; our water heater will go in there. The old bathroom/new laundry room has also been framed.

We have new washer hookups in the old bathroom, and they've removed the washer and dryer, so it doesn't look like we'll be able to do laundry in the house anytime soon.

Air conditioning...so close!

2008-07-28T19:44:00.018-04:00

The HVAC people were here today and have installed some ducts for the new system (yay for almost having air conditioning).

And they did some more framing: the brick wall in the kitchen, the door between the kitchen and the future utility/laundry room, and the wall and door between the utility/laundry room and the new half bath.

And now for the bad news part of the post. We were out of town this weekend and realized last night around 9:30 that our fridge was not on and had not been on for a while. So we have no food, pretty much. We had to throw out almost everything, just to be on the safe side, but here is what we could save:

That's right: cheese and liquor (and lemon juice and hot sauce, but what good are they by themselves?). So when the apocalypse comes, we'll most likely survive off cheese and booze. Good to know. There are worse ways to get by, I suppose.

So for the record, the following appliances currently do not work in our house: washer and dryer (the power is cut off while they're working downstairs, plus the dryer's broken anyway), stove (no gas, which is also responsible for no dryer), and refrigerator (power to the circuit was cut off while they were working and forgotten about). Wait, I take back the refrigerator; Michael ran an extension cord from the top of the stairs on the third floor down to the fridge to plug it back in. So we have a working fridge and a lovely orange extension cord hanging down off the top of the stairs. Good thing we've run out of appliances to not have working. I don't think I can take much more.

The roof, the roof, the roof is torn down

2008-07-24T20:42:00.018-04:00

The roof of the porch was torn down today (yay!). The more of that porch that's demolished, the better.

Yes, that is a refrigerator on the right in that last picture.

More importantly, we now have a back door again and a new kitchen window that was moved from the side of the house to the back. The kitchen is closed in completely, so we have a door with a lock instead of boards covering the interior doorways. Check it out:

Remember how we're wondering whether to keep the brick exposed in the kitchen? Turns out it's not an option, really. There's some brick that needs repairing over the doorway to the dining room, so it won't look nice after it's fixed, plus we need a wall to hold up the ceiling joists and provide light sockets.

I probably won't post pictures of tomorrow's work until next week. We're out of town, again, this weekend. Two nights in a hotel! I've never loved hotels so much until I lived in this house.

We Almost Have a New Room

2008-07-23T19:41:00.022-04:00

The kitchen is almost completely closed in again. There's Tyvek covering the walls now - serves me right for being so lazy about taking more pictures. But it is raining right now, so it's probably best that the walls are covered.

Exciting, isn't it? The look on the inside is much better - you can see the room coming together quite nicely.

I know it doesn't look that great, but it's really very exciting for us. The wall on the left is the back wall; you can see half of where the door will eventually go. Next to the door is where a window and sink will go.

The other wall is the side of the house; the dishwasher will go there, and you can see part of where the pantry will go on the right.

Some plumbing has been done, too. It looks like pipes are in place for the sink and the dishwasher. I tried to get pictures of those (exciting, I know) but it's hard to see anything. But there is this picture of some new plumbing that's under the house. Notice that it's UNDER the floors, not along the outside of the walls like elsewhere in the house. I'll post pictures of that when the work moves upstairs and into our bathroom.

Our new back door and kitchen window have arrived, so those should be installed soon, I hope. They're hanging out in the front room, which has turned into a storage area while work turned to the kitchen.

One more thing about the kitchen for now: the exposed brick. The wall between the kitchen and the dining room used to be the back wall of the house before the deck that was converted into a kitchen was added on. So we have the entire wall exposed right now, and we're deciding what to do with it. As much as we like exposed brick, and assuming this wall would clean up nicely, it's probably too dark for the kitchen. I'd like to keep it as bright as possible since there's not a lot of natural light getting in. So we're thinking about putting in a half wall and white washing the rest of the brick that's exposed. It might be a nice tie-in to the exposed brick in the front room. Here's what the wall looks like now; I'm not sure if the brick is just really dirty or if there's paint on it.

Back from Vacation, Back to Reality

2008-07-18T22:29:00.054-04:00

A lot has happened since the last update. Work in the front room has stalled a little. While we were on vacation two weeks ago, they demolished more of the back room (the future kitchen) and found some problems (surprise, surprise). That room was once a deck, then someone decided to enclose it and make it a room but did it poorly, so there were all sorts of structural issues back there. There were floor systems upon floors systems, and you can really tell because there's a space of about 20 inches between the back door and where the first floor system was. So here's what we came home to, after a week at the beach in a very nice house:

Here's a close up of the space between the bottom of the door and the foundation:

Some more demo work was done in the old bathroom. They've taken out more of the wall so that the brick used when the house was partitioned is exposed. And they've torn out part of the wall between the laundry room and the bathroom. That whole wall will come down and be rebuilt, and we'll probably move the door over a bit. Right now, we're thinking that we'll put a half bath where the laundry room is and move the washer and dryer in where the bathroom used to be.

We have a new water heater, temporarily next to the stairs, partly blocking the path to the laundry. But that doesn't really matter, since our dryer's broken. We were going to have it repaired, but the gas has been cut off (because they took out the old water heater and the gas was connected that that), and will remain cut off for several weeks, so there's really no point in repairing the dryer when there won't be any gas to heat it. No gas also means we can't use our stove upstairs. But I think we can make do with the microwave, toaster oven and George Forman grill. Or we'll just go out to eat more.

Before all the drama with the back room, there was significant progress in the front room. We have the studs for the half walls and columns now:

Now back to the back room. Not only were there problems with the floor, the walls weren't in such good shape either. So they tore down the two exterior walls. And since our bathroom on the second floor sits on top of the back room, we were advised not to shower in there until there was better support underneath. Yay for sisters-in-law who let me use their showers in the evenings; boo for feeling gross all day because of the showering at night. But, it was just for two days, so it could've been a much bigger inconvenience.

So, here's a series of pictures of the gaping hole in the back of our house as they tore down the walls and started to rebuild the room. We have a very weird porch back there, which is also getting redone. It has to be the most useless porch/deck ever built. It had this enclosed space with plexiglass around it, but it was a tiny enclosed space so I don't know what you would use it for. We used it for storing appliances. Seriously, I don't understand this porch.

Of course, one of our concerns with having no walls, which means no doors with locks, was security, so the two doors left wide open were covered with some boards. The next pictures show the side of the house again, but without the siding and everything underneath it, stripped down to the brick. There are also some temporary posts along the back of the room for support.

Thursday they started putting in the new floor system (just one this time), and yesterday we had the back, load-bearing wall replaced. We haven't had a chance to look at the progress yet (we're currently in Pennsylvania for a family reunion) but I should get pictures up soon, once we're back in Richmond. But we are desperately wanting to see The Dark Knight, so we may not get back to the house in time to take pictures tomorrow.

One Wall Goes Up, Another Comes Down

2008-06-23T19:42:00.019-04:00

They've started replacing some of the structural support in the front room. They replaced one of the beams that spans the length of the room and put up temporary posts:

A waist-high wall will eventually go where those posts are, with columns for support. There used to be a wall there with a door that led to the downstairs apartment.

They also took out the furnace last week but haven't torn down what's covering that part of the wall yet:

And my favorite thing from today's work - they took out the entire wall where a door used to be at the bottom of the stairs.

Before:

After:

The space feels so much bigger without that wall there, as small as the wall was. It's really opened up that room.

Yay! Floors!

2008-06-19T21:44:00.019-04:00

Check it out, y'all:

They've started installing the new floors! We had some masons (the brick people, not the secret handshake people) come by yesterday (at 6 in the morning, by the way) to fill in some holes where duct work used to through the walls. There was a round hole above the fireplace that was tricky to fix, so it's really obvious where the hole used to be. We want to keep the brick on that wall exposed, so a strategically placed picture will have to cover up the glaring bandaid there. But it's not so bad on the wall between the front and middle rooms.

The masons also bricked up the scary fire place in the middle room; it no longer looks like it's going to collapse.

Also want to mention all the materials that are covering almost the entire walkable surface downstairs. It's kind of a pain, but probably not as much of a pain as it is for Michael, who's still on crutches. He's out of the cast, though, and onto the big boot. Here's the latest look at what we come home to:

We've Got Holes

2008-06-10T20:58:00.017-04:00

They've dug the holes for the footers for the floor system, which were inspected today by the city.

And then they started filling the holes. We've also got the start of a new sewer system put in.

It's still pretty hot, but not nearly as bad as last week. We had Michael's brother-in-law Dave come over to carry the rest of the window units up the two flights of stairs and install them, so we've got four installed, but we can only run three at the same time. Running all four will certainly break a circuit. Needless to say, we owe Dave, and Michael's sister for loaning us Dave, big time for helping us with that. I think we picked the hottest day of the year for him to come over.

Current temperature downstairs:

And that barrier to keep the cats from getting downstairs? Yeah, it didn't take long for Tanga to figure out a way around it. Turns out he's not as fat as we thought and can easily squeeze through the railings to jump down onto the stairs. He can get down there but can't get back upstairs, so he spent two days under the house last week while the crew was working. I didn't mind it so much that he was down there, especially since it was so hot everywhere else in the house; the first floor was definitely the coolest spot in the house. And he's a little asthmatic anyway, so it was probably best that he was down there. The third floor is now comfortable, so we've moved the barrier to the bottom of the stairs leading up to the third floor. They get really dirty exploring in the dirt, plus I think the cats have been using the dirt floor as a litter box - the actual litter boxes have been suspiciously empty lately. I tried to get good pictures of Tanga after he's been downstairs, but I can't capture just how filthy he is. I wasn't sure if Kirin was going down there until I petted her the other day, and my hands turned black.

Work Has Started, For Real This Time

2008-06-04T19:42:00.035-04:00

The contractor showed up this morning as we were heading out and he's begun work on the flooring in the front room.

That last picture is looking into the middle room (the future dining room) and through to the soon-to-be kitchen. These pictures may not look all that different from others I've posted, but it's a huge change. Hard to believe, but it's not as messy when you walk in the door. The floor boards we're reusing have been neatly stacked along the wall by the front door:

And all the crap that had been sitting in the middle of the room has been taken out. They've cleaned up the middle room a bit, too. Here's a picture taken from the doorway between the kitchen and dining room, looking toward the front room:

They took out one of the three doors that we keep closed at all times to keep the cats out from where work is being done, so it's a little weird not having it there anymore.

We're taking out that entire wall anyway so that the area between the door and the stairs is all open, but now we have to be extra careful about not letting the cats getting down those stairs. We have a system, though. Check it out:

If you think that looks an awful lot like a map of the United States, well, you'd be right. Tanga's pretty clever sometimes, though, so he'll probably figure out a way around it soon enough. Kirin will just sit there and cry about it. And, yes, our stairs ARE painted green. So is part of the floor. It hurts sometimes that someone would paint a floor as old as this one. It hurts even more that this person chose green.

Summer has unofficially started in this house. It's hot. And with Michael all injured, and me being the weakling that I am, we've managed to get just one air conditioner going upstairs. And that's only because Michael never put it away in the shed during the winter and it was still on the floor in the bedroom. It's on full blast. In fact I'm sitting on the bed right now, in front of the air flow, with the door shut, and I'm still sweating. The warm lump of fur sitting between me and the laptop doesn't help things, either.

Work Has Finally Started...

2008-05-13T20:14:00.009-04:00

We closed on the construction loan two weeks ago (April 30 to be exact), and we came home today to discover that our contractor had stopped by. We have what appears to be part of the new floor sitting downstairs, just waiting to be installed.

Michael tore his Achilles tendon a week and a half ago and is a little frustrated being on crutches. And being on crutches in our three-story house with no flooring on the first floor doesn't really help the situation. But seeing that tiny glimmer of progress when we walked in the door seemed to cheer him up a little. I know I was happy to see it.

Hidden Treasure, Sort of

2008-04-13T19:45:00.029-04:00

Several interesting items have been found underneath the house, and I've finally gotten around to posting pictures of them.

The first item is a whiskey bottle from 1886.

It says, "The Duffy Malt Whiskey Company Rochester, N.Y. U.S.A." The bottom has the date Aug. 24, 1886.

The other items are a four-page letter from 1942, a picture of someone who was in the Navy, and an envelope for the picture.

I can make out most of the letter. It was sent from Raleigh, N.C., and is dated October 2, 1942.

Dearest Stand,

I received your letter today and was not only glad to hear from you, but was greatly shocked at hearing from you.

I must admit that I thought you had completely forgotten me. I had to smile when I read this part of your letter (Darling, have you forgotten me?), not in a million years will I forget you and neither will I ever try. (smile)

You said something about being home from Louisiana. Does that mean that you are in the army?

Yes Stand, if you still want to come see me you are at liberty to do so anytime you wish so long as you let me know when you are coming. Darling you said that you are having a swell time where you are. Well I don't doubt that at all for I am sure that if anyone is having a good time you are one of the crowd.

Mrs. Bessie Alston Smith, the girl that used to work with you, told me to tell you "hello" for her whenever I wrote.

My brother, James, is living in Portsmouth, Va. now. His address is 134 Key Road, he has been there for five months. I visited Portsmouth and Norfolk during the month of July. And man I had a darn good time for everything was actual in the (groove). I heard your friend Kate and her husband were in Norfolk but I didn't see her while I was there. Kate lives near James but he is at home now because one of his brothers died last week.

Darling I'm awful sorry I don't have a photo worth sending you right now. I did have some but they were stolen from me in...Stand I don't (know) where James Strong is. The last time I heard anything about him he was in Hamlet, N.C.

Football season has started and I am having a swanky good time.

Annie Ruth Daye, Mary Louise Jones, Mary Dunn, mother, daddy, Tom and all of my gang said "hello" and that they would like to see you and so would I like to see you.

Smile and keep your chin up.

With love

xxx Dot xxx

We're not sure if the man in the picture is the same person to whom the letter was written; there's no name with the picture, unfortunately. But it's still a pretty neat find. I think we'll get the picture and letter framed eventually.

We close on the construction loan April 18, so real, actual work on the house could begin as soon as next week. Yay!

This Blog Almost Came to an End

2008-03-16T11:09:00.011-04:00

Michael tried to sell the house Thursday. Apparently he's as fed up with the house as I am, or he's just tired of hearing me complain. And dreams of living in one of those new condos downtown by the James might have had something to do with it.

So he tried to sell the house to one of those companies that buys houses for any number of reasons, just to see what could happen with ours. The company said no, didn't even ask about a price, because there's no quick turn around with big renovation projects right now. So it looks like we're going forward with the construction loan.

First Floor, Part Two

2008-03-01T10:34:00.000-05:00

So here's what the rest of the first floor looks like. Coming off the kitchen is what we call the middle room, which will be the dining room one day. This room is probably in the worst shape because of the chimney in there. It's a mess and looks like it's going to collapse any day now.

The white thing in the next picture is the mantel that used to be on the chimney. All five mantels in the house have the same pattern and came with the original house, so we're keeping them, even though the fire places were sealed off long ago.

And here's another view of the middle room:

Notice the lack of floors. The floors in the middle room and the front room, which I'll get to shortly, had to be taken up so that a structural engineer could take a look out the foundation. We're replacing the floors for the dining room anyway since the hardwood that was under about ten layers of other flooring was really damaged. The original hardwood in the front room though is still in really good shape, so we're going to reuse those boards. They need a little bit of love, but they'll be so pretty when it's finished. You can see the boards piled up in the next picture. This is the front room, the soon-to-be living room. That's the front door to the house, so this is what we come home to everyday.

The furnace is there on the right, but it'll be removed so that we'll have the entire wall stripped down to the brick. We'd like to have exposed brick somewhere in this room, but it needs a good scrubbing.

Here's a look at the ceiling in the living room. These boards, also original parts of the house, run the length of the room. They've sustained termite damage and are looking pretty rough. We've thought about restoring them and keeping them exposed, but that might be too expensive. Whatever we decide, it'll look better than the previous ceiling. This room had a drop ceiling when Michael bought the house.

And that's the first floor, for the most part. We've just gotten approved for the construction loan so real improvements should start in the next few weeks.

R.I.P.

2008-02-24T10:04:00.008-05:00

TV Room Space Heater
2004-2008

On February 21, 2008, the space heater in the TV room died. It was the first space heater Michael bought for the house, and it served us well, wherever we needed it. The space heater would heat the bedroom, sometimes the bathroom, until we decided it could be used to the best of its ability in the TV room. Together with a blanket over the doorway, the space heater kept the TV room warm and cozy so that we could enjoy our five channels of programming or the latest DVD from Netflix. As much as we appreciate everything it did for us, though, we're done mourning and will purchase another space heater as soon as possible. It's really cold in here.

First Floor, Part One

2008-02-17T12:21:00.099-05:00

Here's what our first floor looks like. These first pictures are of what used to be a kitchen; it will be a kitchen again when it's finished. This room of the house is not part of the original structure. We think it used to be a deck, based on the foundation and the floor joists—it looks like the floor for the kitchen was put on top of a deck.

The picture above is the kitchen's ceiling, which is supporting our bathroom on the second floor. But the roof of the kitchen wasn't made to support anything more than a roof, so there's no structural support for the bathroom. It's hard to tell in that picture, but the bathroom floor is made of a hodgepodge of materials, as if whoever built it used whatever material was leftover. I wouldn't be too surprised if the bathroom collapses one day; I just hope one of us isn't in there when it happens.

Off of the kitchen is a bathroom and a laundry room. The bathroom was a full bath but will be just a half bath when we're done with it, and we'll put the new systems in where the laundry room is now. We haven't decided where the laundry will go; it could go in with the half bath, or we'll convert our current bathroom upstairs into a laundry room.

The shower used to be under the stairs; how anyone over four feet tall managed to bathe in there is beyond me. It was also the filthiest shower I had ever seen. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures to share. It took up a surprising amount of room, too. Both of us were amazed at how much space we have now in the bathroom.

Brushes with Nature

2008-02-14T20:37:00.004-05:00

A bird was trapped in our house the other day. How did a bird get into our house, you might ask? The giant hole in the ceiling that's been there for three years may have had something to do with it. I'm just guessing.

We found a pile of feathers in our TV room Sunday morning, and with two cats in the house, my first thought was that there was also a dead bird somewhere nearby. We looked around for a bird but couldn't find one, so we gave up, but keeping mind that there could be a bird, dead or alive, somewhere. Then Tanga becomes very interested in the tiny space behind the couch, so we pull the couch out. Still no bird. Michael walks to the other end of the couch. Out comes a bird, crashing into the window and then flying right at me. Tanga is going nuts, trying to catch the bird, so Michael scoops up Tanga and throws him in the bedroom. The bedroom door doesn't shut, so I stand against it while Michael opens the window to let the bird back out. Tanga spent the rest of the afternoon looking for that bird.

This isn't the first time an animal's been in the house. We had a bird get in a few weeks ago, but it stayed in the room with the hole in the ceiling, so opening one of the windows solved that problem.

But a bird is a nothing. About a year ago, before I had moved in with my cat, Michael used to keep the window in the upstairs kitchen open for Tanga. The window opened out onto the roof of the addition, and Tanga would go out there to play. Michael noticed one day that all of Tanga's kibble was gone and his water bowl was a mess. Thinking that he just had a pig for a cat, Michael cleaned up the mess and thought nothing more of it. The same thing happened again. Kibble all gone. Water bowl a dirty mess.

Michael was studying one night at his desk in one of the rooms on the third floor. Michael looks out and sees a pair of eyes looking back at him. The eyes belonged to a raccoon. Guess what else the raccoon had been up to. That's right. Eating cat food and washing his dirty paws in Tanga's water bowl. But this didn't stop Michael from keeping that window in the kitchen shut. Even after Michael found the raccoon hanging out in the sink, with Tanga chillin' in the kitchen with it, he wouldn't keep the window shut. Surprisingly, when I moved in, I put a stop to that. First, I didn't want Kirin getting out, because she might take off, and second, I didn't want the raccoon to come back and visit. Call me crazy.

Welcome

2008-02-10T13:29:00.000-05:00

We created this blog so that our friends and family can see the progress as we renovate our house in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond. Built around 1880 (we think), the original structure was a mansion that was split down the middle, and we own half of it. When Michael bought the house in 2004, it was a duplex, and we are converting it to a single-family home. The first floor was one apartment, and the second and third floors comprised the other apartment. We're starting with the first floor while we live in the upstairs apartment; then we will switch to finish the second and third floors.

Not too long after Michael bought the house, Tropical Storm Gaston sat on top of Richmond for a few days, dumping a lot of rain—so much rain that it caused the ceiling in one of the rooms on the second floor of our house to fall through, leaving a very large hole in the ceiling:

Whenever it would rain, the roof would leak in that room. Michael called this experience urban camping. Even though we're not using the room with the giant hole in the ceiling (yes, it's still there), the term "urban camping" still applies because the house doesn't have a good heating system. Right now we have our own system of space heaters and sheets and blankets covering the doors to keep us warm in the rooms that we're using, since the furnace heats only the first floor anyway. So the hallways and stairs can get quite chilly. We also have two fat cats to help keep us warm.

The progress so far? The house has a brand new roof, and the first floor is being gutted. We've found throughout the house that previous "improvements" were really just giant band-aids—layers upon layers of flooring, walls, and even ceilings to cover up mistakes or poor judgment. For example, this picture shows the layers of flooring in what used to be a bathroom:

One of the first steps will be putting in all new systems. The house was built before indoor plumbing and electricity came standard with new homes, so those systems need updating, along with a new HVAC system. So next winter, the house should be nice and toasty. Once work on the house starts to pick up, we'll post pictures as we go, so please check back soon.