the blue house on the corner

The Back Room - Rocking Out The Fireplace

2011-12-15T13:46:00.001-08:00

The fireplace, oh how I love the fire place. I don't think I ever shared any of my fireplace inspiration pictures, so here's one of the main ones.

I love this fireplace for many reasons, the main two being the stacked stone and the dark wood mantel.

First step was getting one of our friends Bill the Furnace guy to come by and spenf a Saturday with Derek hooking up the gas to the fireplace. Once that was done we secured the box into place in the frame and set out in search of some sort of stone tile for the face of the fireplace.

We visited The Tile Shoppe in Mississauga and found a really great deal on some stacked slate ledgestone.

So we laid down a piece of melamine to protect the floor, screwed in cement board and got to work!

While I'm normally the tile person in the family Derek tackled most of this project himself, and I must say, he did a fantastic job.

The space there at the top was left empty to accommodate the mantel Derek planned on building. Once the tiles were set Derek framed out the top portion of the wall, setting it back the somewhat random distance I deemed to be appropriate.

From there it was a matter of drywall, trim and painting. Then one night while I was out with some friends, Derek worked his magic and used some lumber we had around the house to create a mantel that looks like it's one giant piece of wood.

We picked out a stain that's fairly close to the colour of the floor and got the first coat on.

And then we waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

And then we finally added the second coat of stain.

Since then Derek has added two coats of clear coat and it's looking really really nice. Here you can see it decked out with an assortment of Santa's and other Christmas gear. It's hard to see the gloss coat, but trust me, it's there!

This room is where we spend the majority of our time in the evenings hanging out, so having the fireplace is really wonderful. We can keep the bulk of the house set to a fairly low temperature and then just flip on the fireplace if we get chilly. Maybe in the future we'll install a fan to help push some of that heat around, but for now, it's nice to enjoy our cozy little family room.

And yes, I realize I need to clean the glass. Hush now.

The Back Room - New Sits

2011-11-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

When we last looked at the back room it was January and we'd framed in the fire place,

painted the walls,

hung curtains and moved in the sort of crappy, not at all matching, one piece of a sectional couch.

Since then we've come a looooooooong way and have nearly finished the room. All that's left to do are a few finishing decorating touches and maybe some furniture reorganization.

First up on the list, new furniture and a rug!

We knew that out space was fairly limited so we went out looking for a couch and 2 chairs. Ideally we wanted some sort of slipper chair and spent a bit of time shopping around. Eventually we decided on this sofa, the matching arm chair and coordinating accent chair from The Brick.

I wasn't 100% sold on the pattern on the slipper chair, but that can always be covered/changed in the future. The colour of the sofa and arm chair is called Graphite and is a really great grey/brown mix that falls nearly perfectly between the colour of our floors, curtains and walls.

Around the same time we also picked up a laaaarrrrrggeeee shag rug from Home Sense.

Here are Derek and Chloe modeling the new additions.

Next was finishing up the fire place!

Updates

2011-11-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

Um, wow, it's been a while since I've updated here, nearly 9 months. That's long enough to grow a person!

Speaking of growing a person, that's the biggest thing on the DIY list at the blue house on the corner right now. Yup, I'm knocked up. 17 weeks and counting.

the little one at 12 weeks

So, as you can imagine, we've got quite the deadline for the many many many projects we've got on the go. I'll try my best to stay more up to date with the blog, as we should be getting a lot of work done over the next 23 weeks. The next few posts will be a lot of catch up from where we last left off with finishing the floors.

So, in the coming days look forward to posts about:

- the backroom/fireplace
- adding faux wainscotting to the dining room

- painting stripes on the walls in the smaller guest room
- replacing the giant window in the old sitting room with a smaller counter height window for the kitchen
- kitchen plans
- how not to hang frames on a photo wall
- tiling the kitchen
- building cabinets

and much much more as we work our way through the house!

I can't guarantee they'll come in order, and I can't promise I won't throw in a post or two about what's happening in the house right now, but, I will try to be better!

Floor!

2011-02-26T10:10:00.000-08:00

Well, the hardwood is pretty well done on the main floor. And oh em gee it is so nice. After living with plywood floors for over a year, any floor would have been welcome, really, but this stuff is just quite superb.

With the help of the very talented Eva Kovalcik of Atlanta, GA we now have a plan for the new kitchen. Looking at that plan (which I'll share on another day) and the layout of the rest of the house we decided where we wanted to lay tile for the kitchen. Once we had that figured out, Derek got right to work laying down the rest of the hardwood.

It took us around a day and a half to finish up and man we're a good team.

When you're using the random length boards there are a few "rules" to keep in mind. Between one row and the two behind it you don't want any joints within 6" of each other, and you want to keep a good mix of long and short boards. So, picking out the right size boards is sort of like a puzzle, and I'm never one to shy away from a puzzle. I may have exclaimed a time or two (after laying out a perfectly spaced row that created very little waste) "I'm good at this game". I would get the next row or so of boards ready while Derek came behind me with the stapler. Working together we were able to just fly.

Here's what it looks like now.

Derek still has a bit of work to do on the stair nosing going towards the back door, and the baseboard still needs to go down, but we're starting to get there.

Now, to get going on the kitchen!

Finishing Touches

2011-01-17T11:30:00.000-08:00

As promised, I'm going to share the (mostly) finishing touches on the back room. I apologize in advance for the crappy iPhone pictures. I, yet again, left our camera at a friends place. Whoops.

First up, the fire place. This is more kinda than mostly finished, but still, it's very important.

When we first moved in the house had an old stove style gas fireplace.

Gross, right?

Using one of our connections we were able to get a brand spanking new Lennox gas fireplace for only $700. Comparable fireplaces in stores around us were easily $1500, so we got a really, really good deal.

We wanted to keep the fireplace in the corner to maximize function in the room, so, following the instructions, and using our big ol' brains, Derek got the framing done and set the fireplace in it's new home.

Isn't that better? The only change that's been made since then was the addition of our Christmas stockings and some lights. We'll be calling up Bill the Gas Guy soon to help us hook this guy back up.

Next up was paint. Like our previous paint choices we wanted something that went well with all the other colours in the house. Since you can see all the other colours on the main floor from the back room, it was important to us that it flowed.

We knew we wanted to go with a grey, so I picked up about a million different swatches and we started eliminating. In the end we settled on Ashes from the Behr Premium Plus Ultra line.

I don't have any in-process painting pictures, so we'll move right along to floor!

We shopped around a bit for our flooring, going back and forth between dark flooring and medium flooring and back again. In the end we settled for red oak flooring in a stain called Cappuccino. It was actually a last minute decision. We'd brought home a sample of red oak in the stain Walnut and were set on ordering it, but decided to take a look before we finalized the order at the next lighter stain colour. I'm really glad we did too, because the floor we ended up with is just perfect.

Since there was still a good bit of work to do in the front half of the house, Derek started the flooring install just before the bathroom.

We worked together and the floor went down pretty quickly. One of us would pick out the next row or so of boards while the other nailed them down. We switched off a few times and in one night we got the hallway by the bathroom and about 2/3 of the back room done.

We then finished that up the next day. By then, it was Christmas!

Over the break between Christmas and New Years I spent a about 2 days putting a second coat of paint on the walls and caulking and filling all the holes/joints on the trim, and then priming and painting the trim out with a nice, bright, shiny white.

A set of brown-ish curtains from Home Depot later and we were ready to move the couch and TV into the room!

So, that's where we're at now! We're officially moved into the back room as our living room, and the old living room is now the pre-kitchen. It took Derek approximately 37 minutes to start tearing the walls down once we had the couch moved out.

Right now we're in planning mode for the kitchen, which will be the next big thing on the list. Once we at least get a plan drawn up for the kitchen we can start moving along with laying the rest of the floor.

Up goes the ceiling!

2011-01-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd break this up into a few different posts, but, well, we might as well just get this over with, right??

The last time I updated this thing (I promise to try and do that more often now!) we'd removed the hump between the house and the back room and put up all of the insulation. The next step from there was to get the vapour barrier up.

Since we were planning on reusing the potlights that were already in the room, we picked up some plastic "buckets" to put around them. Up they went along with some ventilation panels to put up at the roof.

From there we added Roxul insulation above the plastic and between the beams in the ceiling.

Then up went the poly for vapour barrier.

By this point you could really feel a difference in this room. This was around the end of October and it was starting to get a bit chilly outside.

We had decided that we would not turn on the furnace until we at least got the vapour barrier up in the back room, so this was a big day for me. That is, until I went to turn on the furnace.

Yup, nothing. The thermostat was all lit up, the furnace was turned on, but it would not fire up. Crap.

So, we spent another week in the cold, and had a call in to Colin's friend Bill, who just happens to be a gas guy. I decided to double check absolutely everything before Bill came over. I pulled the face off of the thermostat and lo' be behold, the pins that connect the face to the actual wires that run to the furnace were bent. Apparently we hadn't actually used the furnace since we did wall tear down and thermostat relocation back in April. So, crisis averted, heat back on, no gas guy required. Yay!

When we'd pulled down the ceiling in this room we were rather perplexed by why they'd put up 2 layers of drywall with some strapping in between. Well, as the first sheets of drywall went up with Tim's help, it became glaringly obvious.

What? You can't see the problem? Here, let me try and help. The green line below is straight. The blue line traces the contours of the ceiling.

Ok, so it's still hard to see, but, longs story short, a ceiling should not have "contours".

So, off to Home Depot the boys went, and up went a dropped ceiling. The guys decided it would be a lot easier to drop the ceiling than to attempt to level up each joist individually.

The guys finished up the carpentry and got the drywall up on the ceiling. I think they might have finally called it a night around 3 am?

Bright and early the next day we were up and having breakfast. Tim had to be on the road by 10am and we wanted to make use of his truck to take advantage of a buy-2-get-1 sale on trim at Rona.

That's what $1000 worth of trim looks like. Not that much, eh?

I guess I'll leave it there for now, but I promise to show you the (mostly) finished back room soon.

Hump no more

2010-11-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

Can I just say how nice it is to have a flat floor?

Yes, most people probably think that flat floors are pretty well par for the course and, well, standard, but not in the blue house on the corner.

You see, when the previous/original owners added in the family room addition, they didn't seem overly concerned about the fact that the floors of the addition and the main house didn't match up.

(do you like my update floor plan? it's approximate)

It's not even that the floors don't match up. That wouldn't have been as much of an issue. The issue was more so that there was a GIANT hump between the two rooms. There was quite literally a ramp that led up to the doorway to the family room and then a ramp that led back down again on the other side.

You can sort of see it here, in the picture that also shows the many many layers of flooring we had to deal with in the den:

The garbage bag is sitting at the very top of the hump, and where you can see the plywood, well,, that's the down slope.

So, Derek did what Derek does best and I came home one day to find that this:

now looked like this:

which quickly became this:

Yes, that's dirt. In my house.

I wish I has pictures that illustrated just how unlevel the floor was. At the door between the addition and the main part of the house the floor was 3 1/4" higher than the floor in the main house and at least 1 1/2" higher than the floor in the addition itself.

Also, there was next to no insulation in the walls of the addition, nor was there much in the ceiling or the floor. And don't even get my started on the vapour, or lack there of, barrier.

With lots of help from the cats Derek got the floor/ground tidied up, pulled out all of the errant nails and generally just got the space ready to put back together.

One of my good work friends, Colin, came over to help Derek work out his plan of attack for leveling the floor. The plan involved lots of lumber, brackets, and some fun power tools.

Derek used the reciprocating saw and his fancy new hand planer to bring the floor as close to level as possible. At the very least, it's flat. He beefed up the structure, added in hangers and put blocking in allllll over the place.

One very very big trip to Home Depot later saw us outfitted with most of the supplies we'd need to finish off the room. It also meant we lost use of our lovely bathroom for a few days. We got very lucky, as the timing of a sale on Roxul (the green batt insulation) and drywall just happened to coincide perfectly with this stage of the project. We ended up having to rent the van from Home Depot to get our haul home. And, honestly, I'm surprised we'd never rented the van before. $20 + gas for 90 minutes and we brought a LOT home. See?

Chloe sat on top of the pile of insulation for as long as it was there. She loved it!

Also, the pile of junk in the front? That's my dining room table. Oh joy.

We used strips of Tyvek stapled to the underside of the floor joist to hold up the insulation in order to put the vapour barrier on the warm side, unlike before. The cats were so used to playing down in the dirt that they had to see if they could walk along the newly insulated floor.

Luckily, no one fell through.

After that, Derek screwed down the new plywood and we no longer have a hump!

You can also see my handy dandy insulation job here. Now, normally I loathe insulating. I hate how the bits just get everywhere, but this time I was motivated to grow a pair and do it. You see, at this point we were nearly the end of October, and it was starting to get mighty chilly. We outright refused to turn on the furnace until that back room at least had insulation and vapour barrier on the walls, so, I sealed myself into a somewhat impermeable jacket and went to work.

This job was a lot of work. And unfortunately, it was a lot of work that I couldn't really help with. We will never know why the previous homeowners thought that the job their contractors did on this addition was acceptable, but I guess it doesn't matter now, it's gone!

Next time I'll share the oh-so-lovely story of the ceiling, including how we found out why they had 2 layers of drywall on the ceiling with strapping in between! Spoiler alert: it's not because the ceiling was flat.

Paint!

2010-10-07T19:06:00.000-07:00

Nope, the bathroom isn't totally finished yet, but thanks for asking! Actually, the giant pile of drywall and plywood is preventing us from even using the bathroom right now, but that's a story for another post.

Once we mostly finished up the bathroom we moved on to the rest of the main floor that was ripped up.

Just after we removed the wall separating the dining room and the soon-to-be-library, it looked like this:

April 11, 2010

Shortly after that, the old plaster came down and it looked a little like this:

April 23, 2010

All of that useless vapour "barrier" (aka wax paper) and pitiful 1940's excuse for insulation came down, Roxul and good, proper plastic vapour barrier went up and then we got to drywalling. After that, it looked a little something like this:

July 25, 2010

(yeah, it took a while, so what?!)

Then, it was time to pick out paint colours! Oh joy. When looking around at some dining room pictures, and watching LOTS of HGTV and DIY networks, I fell in love with the look of wainscotting. I looked up many different blog posts on the topic if diy'ing it, and decided that it was definitely something the Derek and I could handle.

One of my main inspirations was the dining room from the show Home to Flip.

Image from cherishtoronto,blogspot.com

I love everything about this room. I love the wall colour, and the print on the wall, the wainscotting, the crown moulding, everything. I knew I wanted to go with a teal for the walls, so we started out with a few paint chips that we thought could work.

Since we're planning on making a built-in bookshelf/desk in the space we're calling the library, we thought we'd paint the wall that will the be back of the bookcase in a fun colour. With the teal we'd already imagined, and the blue of the bathroom, a nice grassy/mossy green was our first thought. Into our hands when a slew of possible paint chips.

Next, we decided that we'd like a nice sand/wheat/beige-but-better colour to run through the common areas of the house. This colour is basically going to run along the main floor hallway, up the stairs and onto the second floor. It was important that we picked a colour that would work well with the teal and the green that we choose.

So, we did what any smart DIYer would do, and taped the paint chips we liked up to the wall. At first, there were many, however, it was quite easy to throw away some, as they were just too pink. Having lived in peach for the last 10 months we wanted to steer far far away from anything that even hinted at peach or pink.

We left the chips up for a few days and looked at them in different types of light. Occasionally one of us would tear down one that just wasn't right and move some things around. We ended up pulling these three colours together:

On the left is Woven Stray from the Behr Premium Plus Ultra line, on the right is Dragon Fly, also of the Premium Plus Ultra line and in the centre is Grape Leaves, from just the regular Premium Plus line.

At first we were hesitant to buy the "fancy pants paint" that is the Premium Plus Ultra, but after asking around (thank you August '09 ladies) the verdict was that it really was worth the extra money. And man, do I agree.

First up we painted the library. It took two coats to get a good, even covering. And yes, we primed first, don't worry!

Oooo, pretty.

Then, like any good ~~nerd~~ DIYer we busted out our (new) laser level and marked out the boundaries of the dining room paint.

Then, we set to painting. In our house we usually paint as a team. I cut in at the corners and, in places where there won't be crown moulding, at the ceiling while Derek goes through and rolls out the rest of the wall. Generally, we finish up at about the same time.

After having to do 2 coats of the green to get good covering, moving to the Premium Plus Ultra paint was a significant difference. As long as you take your time, you can easily get great coverage with one coat. There were a few spots that needed a second pass with the roller, but you're totally fine to touch those spots up while the paint is still wet.

We've still got a little bit of mud work to do in the hallway (where we had to cut open the wall because we thought the shower valve was set too far forward) so we've only gotten a little bit of the Woven Straw colour on the wall, but here you can see all three new colours together.

Also, you can see that even though the dining room isn't done, there's a whole pile of stuff in there now. Where did that come from you ask? Well, the back room of course! But that's definitely a story for another post.

To complete the series of pictures you saw at the beginning of this post, here's what the space looks like now:

September 5, 2010

That's it for now. Next time I'll tell you the story of the uneven addition and the hump in the floor that is no more!

Things that move water.

2010-09-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Look at me. I'm such a good blogger this week.

Now that we had the vanity in place, we moved on to installing the toilet. The day we decided to do this was so grossly hot outside that things didn't exactly go as planned.

The first step in installing a toilet is to install the flange bolts.

Well, one of our flange bolts took a very unfortunate drop down the toilet drain. We'd only just taken the rag we had blocking the drain out, so sadly, the bolt was lost.

Off Derek went to Canadian Tire. That was trip number 1.

For some reason, when the plumber was here and installed the new plumbing for the toilet, it was installed a bit too close to the ground. Once we got the tile on the floor, the closet flange was below the level of the floor.

That's a closet flange. Not ours. Thanks about.com

Thankfully, while we were browsing for toilets our favourite store ever (Home Depot of course) I made note of these fancy things called, ideally enough, closet flange extenders.

Basically, it's a ring of plastic that's the same shape as the top of the closet flange that's attached to your plumbing. It has a gasket material on the bottom that seals to your existing flange, and holes to screw it into your floor. Using these little pieces of awesome we were able to bring the level of the flange up to the proper level.

Getting those rings from Home Depot was trip number 2.

The flange extenders come 2 in a pack. After we put the first one down, we tired to install the toilet. Unfortunately, due to both the extreme nasty heat severely softening the wax, and the fact that just one flange extender didn't quite bring the level up high enough, the wax ring just didn't make the seal we were looking for. We didn't pour any water down the drain, but our experience from installing a toilet in our other bathroom, we know what "feel" we were aiming for.

Another trip to Canadian Tire for a second wax ring was trip number 3.

With the second extender in place and the new wax ring in hand, we got the toilet installed in no time. Yes, it might have taken a total of 5 hours from the start to the finish, but we got it done.

The next thing we tackled was installing the shower head.

The decision to take the toe tester out of the shower stall lead to a slow, constant drip from the shower head pipe sticking out of the wall. The original shower head we bought was a normal, stick out of the wall and bends down type, and would have continued to drip.

So, applying our knowledge of hydrostatic pressure and general fluid dynamics we started looking for a shower head that came on an arm of a different shape. Thankfully, Pfister had one that fit the bill perfectly. A quick special order from that place we go to all the time and some teflon tape later, we had a functioning shower head!

The fact that the shower head arm goes up above the level of where the pipe comes out of the wall is what keeps it from dripping. And bonus, we got a rain shower head!

Next step, installing the sink and faucet.

We had some issues with the drain for the sink. When we ordered the sink, drain and faucet back at the end of January, the lovely lady at Home Depot suggested we get the pop-up drain, since it's a bathroom, and, well, having the ability to plug the sink is a good thing.

When the drain finally came it we just put it in the back room with everything else.

A few weeks ago (so, like, 7 months after we'd ordered the drain) we went to put everything together, and well, the drain would not work. Because we got an overflow sink we needed a drain with a longer drain pipe in order to accommodate the extra height of the sink. Well, this one just wouldn't do.

So, we took it back to Home Depot and went to see the nice lady in the kitchen and bath department. I was inadvertently bitchy to her, and I felt bad. Turns out, the company sent the wrong part. Our lovely Home Depot associate had done everything exactly correctly. She took down our info and had the correct drain to us in a matter of days.

We finally got to sink install time. A butt load of teflon tape and silicon caulking, and some McGyver style improvising later, we have this!

I'm not 100% sold on the towel holder thingy yet, but attaching one to the wall might be tough. The pocket door is immediately to the right of the sink, so it could go there, but it might be tricky to install securely.

That's about it. All we have to do now is a few paint touch ups, clean up some silicone from various spots and get the glass guy in. Oh, and hang the mirror. Right now we're focusing on getting the dining room finished. Just last night we painted, but there's still a lot to be done.

Paint type things

2010-08-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

Hey! Look at this! 2 posts in a week! We're on a roll. I'll try to keep it up.

Once finished the tile in the shower, the next step was paint. First, primer! It made such a huge difference just having the walls all the same colour!

Please note, these will, for the most part, be iPhone pictures, so excuse the less than awesome quality.

After primer, paint!

The colour we chose for the walls is Ralph Lauren Bellflower Blue, which, by the time we got around to painting, Home Depot was no longer selling. Huh. I really love this blue.

I spent a loooooong time pressed up against the ceiling cutting in. That's part of the reason we're putting up crown molding in most of the house.

Once we got the paint done, we tackled the vanity. Sadly, while our floor was nice and flat, it wasn't perfectly level, so Derek had to do some fine jig saw work to the bottom of the vanity to make sure that the top was level.

Then, we pulled our frosted glass counter top out of the box and excitedly laid it on the vanity.

Only to see that, oh crap, you can see right through it! (um, duh, it's glass) I guess that we'd hoped that the frosting would make it a bit more opaque than just translucent.

We brainstormed solutions and tossed around ideas like staining the tops of the vanity, applying some sort of coating to the underside, or even getting a sheet of aluminum or stainless steel cut to size (which I could have gotten done at work, yay for being friends with the machinists!)

Aluminum

Stainless Steel

We didn't really like either of the metal options, so next we turned to paint. I picked up a whole bunch of paint chips at Home Depot in colours that I thought looked like glass green. And lo' and behold, one of them was exactly the colour of plain glass (you know, when you look through the edge?)

Behr's Premium Plus Ultra Mild Mint was the colour that worked. Thankfully, since it was such a small area that needed to be painted, we got away with just buying one of the $5 paint samples. Two coats (and a few cat paws later) it looked absolutely perfect. A good bead of silicone attached it to the vanity.

In the interest of keeping this post from becoming an absolute novel, I think we'll leave it there. Next time, finish plumbing!

Oh, hai. Remember us?

2010-08-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

Oh, hey, how's it going? It's been a LONG time, but don't worry, we're are getting work done in the blue house on the corner. Actually, we've gotten a lot done. Sorta. But, I can't throw it all out at you at once.

Unfortunately, someone (me) left our camera at our friends house when we went to a party there for the May 24th long weekend. These friends also happen to live 2+ hours away. We only just got the camera back near the end of July, so, there's a bit of a gap where our work wasn't quite photo-documented the way I'd like, but, there are some ok iPhone pictures we can share. I'm going to take a few (2?) posts to bring the world up to date on where we are in the bathroom, and then we'll move on to what we've done in the rest of the house.

When we last spoke we'd finished laying the tile in the bathroom and had it all grouted. The next step was tiling the shower.

The first step in the process was mixing up some thinset to apply the Kerdi membrane to the walls and floor. As I mentioned waaaaaay back in January we used the Schluter Kerdi system for the shower.

Image from schluter.com

The first thing that goes on is the Kerdi Band. A 5" strip of membrane that helps to seal in all of the corner joints. That was definitely me work and not Derek work, as it was finicky and required a small amount of patience.

Once all of the corners had been covered in Kerdi Band, it was time to put the membrane up on the walls. Now, here is where I will fully admit that I made a mistake. I grabbed the wrong trowel. So instead of having a nice thin coat of thinset with the small, v-notch trowel that Schluter recommends, I grabbed the big honkin square notch one we used for the floor. This resulted in a THICK later of thinset that didn't exactly dry smoothly, and really built up the corners. So, always make sure you grab the right trowel!

We let the thinset set up for a few days and then got to work on the tile. The tile we got for the shower walls is a 4"x16" white ceramic tile. They're huge. We played around with a few layout options and decided that we really like a running brick pattern with a 1/3 offset. It makes more sense when you see it.

Derek got started laying the tiles and made it about 3 rows before the number of swear words quickly out numbered all other words. Tiling, not his forte. I stepped in and continued on.

See the pattern? At this point, the camera-forgetting weekend happened, so the only other shower progress picture I have came from my phone.

We sort of played around to see where we wanted our row of mosaic tiles to go, just sort of taking a look as we went to see what we thought looked best. We settled with just about eye level.

Neither of us can remember for sure how long that took, but I think it was one good, solid day of work.

The next wall had all the freaking holes in it, but, we had our diamond hole saw from doing the floor, so those were easy as pie.

The best advice I can offer for tiling is to make sure you clean our as much thinset as you can before it dries. We spent DAYS cleaning the thinset out from the grout lines. The worst was in the mosaic tile. So, even if you're tired from tiling, take the time to get the thinset out while it's easy!

The grouting of the shower was pretty easy, although it did take quite a while, and we probably mixed up too much grout at one time, but it got done. Installing the tile on the shower floor was a fun job. We ended up getting a special tool from a stained glass shop here in town to cut the glass mosaics on an angle.

Rotary nippers turned out to be the perfect tool for the job. Home Depot doesn't sell them, so you'll need to find a stained glass shop, but they were only about $20. (or you can borrow ours)

Here's the final thing. You get a preview of the wall colour in this shot, but hey, that's ok.

I love it. Here's a closer look at the floor to. Love that x a million.

Now we just need to get the glass guy in, and the work on this bad boy is done. We've already installed the shower head, but I'll tell you about that in my next post, where I'll also share the store of the toilet install, and the fiasco that was our pop-up drain.

And then there was floor.

2010-06-09T19:50:00.000-07:00

I'm a bad, bad blogger. And a slow renovator!

I cannot wait to have my house put back together. We'd only lived here a month before things started coming down (and by things, I mean walls), so, after being here for more than 6 months, I'm ready for the dust to be finally settled, for there to be paint on the walls and some sort of flooring other than plywood.

That being said, we're getting very close with the bathroom. We have to install the tile on the floor of the shower, grout the whole shower, paint the walls and install the fixtures. I'll touch on the tiling of the shower stall another time, for now I'll tell you the story of the floor!

Neither Derek nor I had any experience with tiling when we decided to take on this project so we turned to the best resource any DIY'er has: Google and message boards.

A question put out on the Decorating & Renovating board on The Nest led to a ~~new obsession~~ great blog with a lot of awesome how-to's, Young House Love. John and Sherry tackled a bathroom reno that had them installing 12x12 marble tile on the floors and subway tile in the shower. Huh, that's what we're doing! Reading through their tiling post a million times, and consulting many other internet resources (including the John Bridge tile forum, which has as much information about tiling as a library has books) we (mostly, sorta) figured out what we needed to to.

Since we planned to install marble tile, and since our floors had a bit more deflection that is generally recommended, we opted to install Ditra on the floor as a substrate over the plywood.

Anyone that watches Holmes on Homes (or any of Mike Holmes' other shows) is probably familiar with Ditra. He uses it in basically all of his bathroom renos, and well, if it's good enough for Mike, it's good enough for us.

The Ditra goes, as I mentioned, on top of the subfloor and under your tile. It acts to strengthen the floor by absorbing any movement that may occur. It also acts as a water resistant membrane. It could easily be made fully waterproof (with some of the same stuff we used for the shower) but we opted not to take that step. Just the Ditra alone provides a lot of protection.

Images from Schluter.com

It's also bright orange.

Our first step was to measure and cut out the sections of Ditra that we'd need.

Chloe helped.

After that we laid down a layer of thinset using an appropriately sized v-notch trowel and pressed the pieces of Ditra down, smoothing it out using a grout float.

We let that set for a day or two and then began planning the layout of the floor tiles.

The way we saw it, we had two options for lay out. We called them even and offset.

Even

Offset

The magic of the internet allowed us to nearly instantly poll a large group of people to find out what they thought worked best.

The results were unanimous for offset, which is good, because that's what we liked best too. It's also really great for hiding less than perfect work, which is ideal for first time tilers.

So, we laid out some guide lines (that we never ended up using because they were quickly covered in thinset) and got to work.

Bonus tip: To keep chalk lines from quickly being erased by your feet and tools, cover them over with regular aerosol hairspray!

Here's me at the beginning of the day:

We quickly worked out a great system. Derek would cut any pieces that had to be cut (on the wet saw set up in the basement) while I laid the tile. For large runs of full tile, Derek would work ahead of me and trowel out the thinset on the ground while I set and squared the tiles.

As you can see above, we opted to use white thinset for the marble instead of standard grey. As a natural stone marble is much more porous than ceramic, so it's possible that the colour of the thinset could be seen to seep through the tile. Going with white thinset eliminates the possibility of any unsightly splotches.

We kept working away in this fashion alllll day long. As some point we realized we were kinda hungry and scarfed down some grilled cheese and then quickly got back to work.

In order to ensure a good bond, we chose to not only trowel out thinset on the floor, but also back-butter each tile.

Nearly 9 hours later we were finally down to the last tile (or so we thought)

We got that last tile in place and stepped back to admire our awesomeness.

Then we realized that the two tiles right in the centre of the door were way too light. Such is the nature of natural stone, not every one is exactly the same, so we asked ourselves if we wanted to pull them up and replace them with others (thankfully we had lots of extras).

Exhausted Andrea and Derek thought that we could live with the colour variation, but we knew that Future Andrea and Derek just wouldn't be satisfied with a less than perfect job when we had the opportunity to correct it, so, up the tiles came, and down new ones went.

We got cleaned up and then promptly drove to Wild Wing and consumed more wings than a normal human should be allowed to.

We gave the floor a good day or so (ok, it was a week) before we tackled the grout. We opted to go with a light grey that matched well with the veining in the tile.

Apparently I forgot to photo-document the grouting process, but it was fairly straightforward and didn't take a ton of time. I can say though, Meka definitely approves of our tiling job!

That's all for now. Once I get my camera back (I we may have forgotten it at a friends house 2.5 hours away at a party a few weekends ago) I'll share the shower tiling process (which has been slow, but steady) and then we should be up to date!

Please excuse this break from our regularly scheduled program...

2010-04-11T14:12:00.000-07:00

... but what went down in the blue house on the corner this weekend is just too big to hold back until the bathroom is done.

Friday night of this weekend Derek's family came down to celebrate his birthday (the mister turns a year older on Monday!) and help us plan out how to best approach the renovations of our main floor.

First thing Saturday morning (after we downed 5 pots of coffee, no joke) the boys started taking down the drywall/plaster board (I give that a slashy because the previous owners put drywall on top of the old plaster board) in order to get a look at the bones of the main floor.

Derek's Dad starting to plan out where to cut.

Half the wall down.

Plaster down!

The boys continued taking down the outside of the walls as the morning when on.

At that point Derek's dad starting talking about what we should do, using words like double jack studs, king studs, double headers and more. What really caught my attention was the part that went something like "If you guys go get the material now, we can have this done today".

One trip to Home Depot, a pack of bungee cords and a red pillow case later, we had a load of lumber at the house.

We did learn that, with a bit of comfort sacrifice on my part, that we can fit two 2'x8'x10"s, four 2'x4'x10"s and twelve 2'x4'x92 5/8's in the back of a Dodge Calibur.

The guys kicked the ladies out of the house (I took a nap in said Dodge Calibur) so that they could do the "stressful part" (in their defense, replacing a load bearing wall with a couple of 2x8's and some 2x4's definitely qualifies as stressful in my book) and about 30 minutes later I was called back in the house to take a look.

Bam, wall gone.

Next they moved their focus to the living room wall. In fairly short order (ie, the time it took me to have a shower and get ready) they had that wall opened up and reinforced.

We cleaned up a bit and then headed over to my parents house to have a nice birthday dinner for the husband.

Sunday morning the work started up again. Unfortunately the dust that a renovation causes did not agree with my lungs, so I spent the morning at a walk-in clinic getting a prescription for an inhaler while the guys took down the last wall. Sadly, that means no pictures of the doing. Instead, I'll present some before and after pictures using the pictures we took the day we took possession. You'll notice things are a biiiit different.

Yeah, it's a bit different. Basically now the main floor living area is all open. There's a small "T" shaped wall left in the middle of things to carry the load, but things flow so nicely now.

And if you're wondering where we put all the plaster and such that we've torn down, well, it's in the basement.

Yeah. Next weekend we're renting a bin.

And with that, we'll now return to our regularly scheduled programming. Next time, bathroom tile, I promise!

tap tap tap Is this thing on?

2010-04-07T19:09:00.000-07:00

Sooo, it's only been 2 months since we last saw each other, and as much as I'd like to say that the bathroom is totally finished and in perfect working order, that's not quite the case.

The month of February saw Derek working looooong hours and us not having a lot of motivation to get things done afterwards. Since then we have gotten a lot done, but what fun would it be to tell you about it all in one post?

So, for today, you get lights and drywall!

As I mentioned before our good friend Jesse came by to help us with the wiring in the bathroom. Once we got the drywall up on the ceiling, we were able to put in the potlights (with the valuable help of our good friend Tim, that is).

Tim also helped us by running the wiring for a row of potlights down the hallway from the kitchen towards the bathroom, and a row in the soon to be library.

Ooooo, lights! (and yes, we use a snow shovel to scoop up ~~construction~~ destruction debris.

Along with lights came drywall. Which I must say, really helped to bring the room together.

After putting up the drywall came mudding.

First coat:

Second coat:

Finish coat:

Yeah, ok, you got me. That was the same picture 3 times. But that's about as exciting as mudding gets.

Next time (which will be way less than 2 months from now) I'll share the details of our fancy new marble floor.

Splish Splash

2010-02-07T19:02:00.000-08:00

After staying up into the wee hours of the morning to get the shower pan installed, our plumber arrived bright and early.

Derek was quite nice and let me stay in bed for a few hours while he was up after a mere 4 hours of sleep to oversee the plumbing job.

I have to say though, those extra 2 hours of sleep I was allowed were not the most restful, as all I could hear was the sounds of a drywall saw cutting up walls. When I finally emerged from our room, this is what I saw in one of our guest rooms.

Holes in the wall, wood chips and insulation everywhere! In order to properly vent the new drain lines in the bathroom, the plumber had to go up through the back wall of the bathroom and drill through the top plate of that wall, then up through the bedroom wall, through that top plate, and connect in with the current vent line in the attic.

That`s the attic. Fun yellow insulation.

When he was here the first time, the plumber made our main vent stack a thing of beauty. 45° Y`s, and a whole lot more connections, but everything is now at or above code, which is how we roll. Wanna see the new stack? Of course you do!

Derek giggled all the first night about something the plumber said when he was first taking apart the stack. "Oh, look, there's some debris". Derek's called poop "debris" since then.

Here's a bit of the mess of fittings that were part of the process.

Yes, we use a snow shovel to pick up ~~construction~~ destruction garbage.

So what did all this mess get us? New plumbing for a sink, a toilet drain that's now a reasonable distance from the back wall, and plumbing for a brand spanking new shower!

Sink plumbing! (with new vent)

Shower plumbing!

Our main decision now is whether or not we want to keep the plumbing in for the "toe tester". Basically, the drain near that bottom. You can use it to test the water temperature with your toe (hence the name) and then use it to drain the water out of the line when you turn the shower off. As of right now, we think that due to the limited size of the shower, we might keep it out, but the plumber advises to keep it in.

What do you guys think? Does your shower stall have a toe tester? Should we keep it, or ditch it?

Next time, lights!

Shower Stall. We has one. Well, almost.

2010-01-25T05:32:00.000-08:00

I apologize for the lolspeak, but it only seems fitting, as through this whole shower building process it seems to be the cats favourite place to sit.

Just to refresh your memory, this is our inspiration for the shower stall.

image from artistcraft.com

Nice, isn't it? Basically that's a neo angle shower still waist high knee walls and a frameless glass door.

Unfortunately, we don't have the floor space to make ours quite that big, so I set about figuring out just how big we could make the shower and still leave a reasonable amount of space in front of the toilet.

We're visual type people, and like to be able to see what we're doing before the whole thing comes together. So I whipped up something quickly at work one day to get an idea of the spacings we'd have, and sort of what this bathroom would look like when we were done.

The block beside the sink is the space the toilet will occupy. With that model we were able to see how much room there was in front of the toilet and adjust the overall shower dimensions in order to maximize both the clearance in front of the toilet and the shower area. A quick Google search revealed that the standard from the front of a toilet bowl to the closest obstacle should be 21" and that a comfortable shower size is at least 38". While we weren't able to get the full 21" in front of the toilet, it'll still be comfortable. Making sure the shower was big enough was slightly higher on our list of priorities.

Once we'd figured out all the math involved, it was time to start building.

Laying out the base.

Building up the knee walls.

Installing mold resistant drywall.

Ready for the shower pan.

We really wanted to be able to tile the floor of the shower, so one of the prefab shower kits from Home Depot was out, and we didn't want to have to deal with building up and properly sloping the pan ourselves with deck mud, so our best option was a Shluter Kerdi shower system.

image from schluter.com

The kit comes with a presloped styrofoam shower pan, the special Kerdi drain and enough of their membrane to waterproof the entire shower stall. The great thing about using this kit is that we could just cut the styrofoam pan down to the exact size and shape that we needed.

So with the hole cut out for the drain I made a template of the base of the shower stall and got to cutting. Putting my degree in Engineering to good use we ended up with a pan that fit, in the words of Ace Ventura, like a glove. Out jig saw made quick work of the cuts and soon Derek was mixing up thinset.

Using a v-notch trowel I got to work laying down the thinset.

See? I do work too.

We laid down the pan (well, I did, Derek can't stand the sound of styrofoam rubbing together, so he removed himself from the room) and stamped it down.

Then, while Chloe warmed her butt on the new tray, Derek mixed up a bit more thinset to set the drain.

A few minutes later we had the drain set and called it a night.

By the time we finished setting the drain it was 3am. Our plumber arrive bright and early at 7am the next day (I guess technically it was the same day, eh?) to finish the work he'd started earlier in the week. Next time I'll show you all our fancy new plumbing, and the holes they made in my house to make it happen!

You are electric?

2010-01-23T08:05:00.000-08:00

Before we shared The Vision with you all we'd just finished up containing the magic. Since then quite a bit has happened, but we can't share it all at once, now can we?

Last Friday night our good friends Tim and Jesse came by to help us with the electrical for the new bathroom.

Tim on the left, Jesse on the right, and our house is still incredibly dusty.

Jesse was kind enough to run all new lines for our bathroom, and give it it's own dedicated breaker. After Derek and Tim took a trip to our other house (Home Depot) for some supplies, we also had pot lights installed in the ceiling. Derek and Tim also lowered (and leveled) the ceiling to a respectable 8', instead of the random arse 8 foot something.

With the ceiling now level and the wires all run, we turned out sights to some things that would fall into the category of "finishing", like drywall, and doors.

Derek hung (and rehung) the frame for the pocket door, drilled a hole through the wall for cables and insulated and poly'd the back wall of the bathroom. The back wall used to be the exterior wall of the house, so it was rather thick and had a nice coat of stucco somewhere in the middle. So, we borrowed a masonry bit from my stepdad and drilled straight through.

Speaks softly, carries a big drill.

Pocket door!

We drywalled the ceiling and the back wall (which then had to come down, but we'll tell you about that later) and then turned our sights to the construction of the knee walls for the shower stall. But, I think we'll leave that for the next post.

I will, however, leave you with a few picture of the little cat. Apparently our little Chloe likes to watch TV.

Watching Heidi Klum on Leno.

And the movie Eight Below.

What a nut.

The Vision

2010-01-18T18:36:00.000-08:00

Originally we thought that we'd design the bathroom off of a plate we got when we were on our honeymoon in Greece.

But we got such a great deal on marble time through Derek's work that the design idea has had to shift a little. But we will find somewhere special in the house for the plate.

The tile we ended up with looks a little something like this:

Which as far as we can tell is white carrara and they are 12"x12". The plan is to use 1/16" spacers and a white-ish grout that "goes" with the tile.

As far as the rest of the bathroom, we've got a few ides. For the shower we're going to go with a neo-angle design set in the corner, with waist high knee walls and frameless glass doors. A little something like this:

image courtesy of artistcraft.com

Beautiful, isn't it? Like the picture above we're planning on using subway tiles (also being acquired through the tiles guys at Derek's work) but adding in an accent of glass mosaic tile. While hanging out at our new favourite store (that would be Home Depot) I put together this little mock up on the floor. The marble is fairly close to what we have for out tiles.

As far as the vanity and sink goes, Derek found this picture on the Rona website that we both realllllly like:

image courtesy of Rona.ca

We've decided to go with the frosted natural glass counter top, kinda like this one from Rona:

image from Rona.ca

Now, instead of going with the white vanity like they've got in the picture above, we're planning on something more along this line:

I would love to find something old and reclaim it, but we'll have to see how that goes.

As for the wall colour, we're thinking that we'll go with something the matches the blue glass in the tile mosaic.

And now, to pull it all together into a "mood board" as those designer types are want to do:

See? Fancy!

Next time I'll show you what's happened so far. That may or may not include a ceiling and shower walls!

Containing the Magic

2010-01-13T18:02:00.000-08:00

Because this bathroom is going to be pure magic when it's finished. And what do you contain magic with? Walls of course!

As of the last entry Derek and I had just finished peeling "the onion" to reveal the original subfloor. Once we had that all cleaned up we started putting 3/4" OSB plywood. Glued and screwed as only Mr. Mike Holmes (or Mr. Derek) would insist on.

10 tubes of this stuff later:

image courtesy of PL

And a whoooooole lotta screw later, we're left with a little something that looks like this:

Ooooooo, pretty, floors!

Just to refresh your memories, the layout of the bathroom before was like this:

The new plan for the bathroom is this:

We eliminated the "door" between the hallway and the den, and are moving the door to the bathroom into the (newly named) library. In order to make the best use of space we decided to go with a pocket door, so the opening you see now is where that will be.

The walls went up very quickly, because Derek is a framing all-star. He's also a big fan of friction fits. Seriously, we probably didn't even need to use nails to keep this wall in place (obviously we did).

The first wall being built:

And the first wall going up:

Don't you love a man in a tool belt?

Building the next wall:

Little Chloe playing supervisor to make sure things went according to plan:

The building of the last set of walls happened while I was doing the whole work thing (apparently staying home sick doesn't mean sleeping, it means building), so here's a shot of the finished walls!

Complete with Meka sighting, as we can't include one cat and not the other!

Basically, that's where we're at now. Our good friend Jesse is coming by on Friday to help us with the electrical (because he knows how to do that kind of stuff), as well as Derek's best man Tim to help with some other random things.

After that we've got to get the plumbing sorted for the new shower. We're still not sure if we'll be doing that one on our own, or calling in a professional. Time to do some internet research I suppose!

Next time I'll share with you some of the design plans we have in mind!

The Onion

2010-01-03T17:26:00.000-08:00

When we moved in the main floor had 2 different types of flooring, awesome (crappy) wood laminate, and blue carpet.

Laminate

Blue Carpet (trust me, it's blue)

With the tearing down and out of the wall between the bathroom and the den came the pretty much complete demo of the den, including tearing up the floor.

Pulling back the carpet revealed some of those sticky vinyl floor tiles that were popular back in the early 90's.

This sticky tile was stuck to a full covering of 1/4" underlay plywood, which Derek had a fun time puling up. After bringing up the first sheet of plywood (which is oddly only 4'x4') we were greeted with nothing better than the 1970's in the form of a vinyl sheet.

Me, being the curios person that I am, started peeling back a bit of this awesome flooring to take a peak at what was underneath. What was there, do you ask? More vinyl!! This time in a wood pattern more reminiscent of the 60's.

Now, we weren't born yesterday, so we know that even back in the day when this house was built the flooring of choice wasn't vinyl sheet, so we knew there had to be at least one more layer under there.

So what did we find?

Linoleum!

Here you can see the progression of the floor. Carpet, sticky tiles, 70's vinyl, 60's vinyl, then the checkerboard linoleum.

I have to take a second here to tell you one of Derek's favourite jokes.

What do you get when you throw a grenade in a Parisian kitchen?
Linoleum Blownapart!

Ha, get it? Linoleum Blownapart? Napoleon Bonaparte? Yeah, I know, it's Derek's joke.

Unfortunately I didn't get a photographic journey of how the floor came up in the bathroom, but Derek assures me that not only was it multi-layered, but it was also so tacky it was fantastic. The bathroom had at least as many layers of flooring, but even more layers of 1/4" underlay between them. I did get a shot when he first started pulling up the laminate though.

As of right now, all of the walls and floors (down to the subfloor) are gone. I went out to get groceries and came home to this.

Zombie Demo crew for hire? Frank!

An hour or two of cleanup later, it looks a little something like this.

Yes, this used to be a bathroom.

That's all for now. We picked up a ton of lumber and all the plywood we need to strengthen and level the floor and build the new bathroom walls today, so I'll update again when there's actually something to look at because "Oh look! The floor!" over and over might get a little redundant.

Ringing, or rather Bashing, in the New Year

2010-01-02T18:22:00.000-08:00

When we moved into the blue house on the corner we decided we'd wait on any renos until we'd lived in the house for a month. You know, get a feel for the place first. See what we liked and could live with and what we'd like to change.

Well, a month a two days after we moved in the demo began.

It started when I asked Derek if we could plan on having the walls moved for the new bathroom plan by the time we had our house warming party (January 23rd). Derek almost immediately put down the Xbox controller and picked up a pry bar.

For the next 2.5-3 hours he tore down the walls in the bathroom on the main floor.

Here's what it looked like before he started:

The paneling was the first thing to come down, and then he started in on the wall right against the door. Here are a few pictures from the process:

Down comes a panel or two.

"Oh, wall paper, thinset and holes? Just cover those up with some drywall."

That night Derek busted up so much drywall and plaster board that I was sneezing and coughing for freaking hours, but dang, I'm so glad it's down.

On New Years Eve, after Derek got home from work but before we went to our party, we decided it would be fun to start taking off the wood paneling in the den.

Oh look, a random hole into the bathroom. How quaint.

Taking down the fancy trim.

Surprise! More peach!

At this point I got involved in the process. Because, I'm sorry, but demo is fun. One of the Christmas gifts I got from my inlaws was this amazing piece of demolition amazement.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the FuBar, winner of PopSci's Best of What's New Award and demo allstar. I loves it.

With FuBar in hand (Derek was gifted the matching hammer) we made quick (and very dirty) work of the wall adjoining the bathroom and the den.

Next time I'll share the story of the Den Floor, aka, The Onion, aka, it had as many layers as and share pictures of what the space looks like now.

Closing Day

2009-12-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

We closed on the house on November 24th, 2009. Originally we were supposed to be closing on December 1st, but the sellers agreed to push the closing day up a week for us to facilitate an easier move on our end.

As our lawyers office was just down the street from where my mom works, she was kind enough to pick up the keys for us once all of the closing tasks were completed. By 3:30pm she had the keys in hand.

That evening Derek and I headed out to take a look around our new house.

As tradition demands Derek carried me over the threshold the first time we came into the house. Since we were the first ones in the house, we had to reenact this in order to my mom and step-dad to get a picture.

What a goof.

The first thing I'm going to do is share with you the layout of the house. From there I'll highlight which area we're talking about. I figure you'd like to be aware of just what we'll be talking about.

Main Floor

So, that's the main floor layout. By the time we're done with this place, it will look significantly different. The main door to the house is down there in the Living Room but as the driveway is at the back of the house, the back door is the one most used, so, we'll start the tour of the house there.

At the top of the stairs if you turn to your right is the less than huge kitchen. It's rather long and narrow, but there are a ton of cabinets and a decent amount of counter space, I just have to figure out how best to use it.

After that we turn into the living room. This is where we've got the TV set up for now since our sectional couch goes the wrong way for the back room.

Aren't those curtains fantastic? It's hard to see in that picture, but the ceilings are coved. I'm still not sure what I think about the coving. Maybe I'll like it more with a better paint job.

Continuing on our tour we now go into the dining room. Before the second floor was added to the house this room was a bedroom. Hence the fantastic closets. Right now, they are my "curio cabinet" housing the boxes with the nice wine glasses, serving dished and china.

Yes, that pile on the floor in the first picture is some of the incredibly lovely boarder that's going on there with the peach walls. Just so you know, you won't be seeing that boarder anymore. It has all come down (and so very easily too *phew*).

Across from the dining room is the half bathroom. It's got some awesome paneling. Awesome.

Next we move into the den. Ah the den. Faux wood paneling and faux brick floor tiles on the wall. The previous owners had a computer desk in this room. We still don't know what will be going in there. Right now? Boxes.

The last room on the main floor is the family room. This is eventually where we went to be putting the TV. But that probably won't be until we start the reno's on the main floor.

Yup, that's a gas fireplace. My brother slept on the couch in the room the night we moved with the fireplace on low. It was easily 10° warmer in there than in the rest of the house. It's fantastic.

Well, that's all of the main floor. Derek plans on ripping down walls and moving everything around. We're thinking right now that the half bath will be our first reno project in the new year, but we'll see.

Stay tuned for next time, when we tour the second floor and I explain to you what we had to do in order to get the box springs up the stairs.

Our First Home

2009-11-29T16:55:00.001-08:00

Derek and I were married on August 29th, 2009. A month later we put in an offer on a house we'd seen twice. A few days later our offer was accepted and the house passed inspection.

On November 24th we closed on our first house.

Not even three months after our wedding we are the proud owners of the blue house on the corner. From the very first time we walked through this house, we could both see the incredible potential that it had.

The previous owners moved into the house in 1958, and to the best of our knowledge, they were the original owners. At that time the hosue was a single story two bedroom house with grey stucco and a white picket fence. In 1973 a family room was added on to the back of the house. It wasn't until 1996 that the second story was added on to the house, adding a third bedroom and a second bathroom.

The kitchen was renovated by the previous owners in 2006. At the same time laminate flooring was installed throughout the majority of the main floor.

Derek and I have some really grand plans for this place. Since the month of December is notoriously busy, and because we want to live in the house for a bit before we decide what exactly we want to change, no walls will be coming down until January.

For now I'll spend my blogging going through what's here now and what we think we might do to that area.