Three Weeks of Power Renovation: Plastering, Painting, Plumbing, Electric, & Flooring

Well, the baby is set to arrive in just five weeks, so we've been playing a game of beat the clock. We're trying to time our renovation projects so that they flow right into one another and so far, we're doing well. First things first - storage! We've cleared the house of many possessions. Just in case we didn't mention this in one of our previous posts, our first renovation goal is to make the front yellow room (which has been our main storage area) into a functional laundry space. Right now our washer and dryer literally sit behind the kitchen sink and greet you every time that you walk through the backdoor. Here is what we're doing to create our future laundry room:

1. Tearing out part of the wall behind the half bath
2. Modifying the plumbing in the half bath to work with a new laundry pair and a laundry tub
3. Running the proper electrical wiring to accommodate a 220 line



Wall space behind half bath - Before plumbing/electric work

4. Cutting through the stone exterior wall of our house to allow for a dryer vent
5. Repairing the interior wall (hang drywall, add texture, paint)



New W/D hookups, sink plumbing, outlets (note the 220 line) and vent exhaust pipe

6. Painting window trim (as we never got to that before)



Ben blended the new drywall seams to the plaster, added texture, and painted

7. Ripping up the carpeting and installing new cork flooring



The original tile in the room (to be covered)

The cork underlayment for the new cork tiles

Cork tile flooring ready to go!

Believe it or not, we're through steps 1 through 6, in part due to the help of John Kerns (the same guy who installed our bath tile) as he can run electrical, modify plumbing, cut through stone, hang drywall, and rip up carpeting in just two days. Ben (the rockstar remodeler that he is) has been a machine working every night to keep us on track for the washer/dryer delivery.

Now, since we're crazy, we are breaking the cardinal sin of renovation and remodeling two areas at the same time. In addition to the laundry room, we're overhauling the main part of the house, which includes the living room, dining room, and hallway. We know that with the baby coming, it's now or never if we want to get it finished once and for all. Now, it's not like we haven't tried to get our act together. We removed wallpaper from the hallway about a year ago and wanted to get the plaster cracks fixed, but the bathroom remodel got in the way. Since the bath is done, we called Tom Kelly back in to repair the plaster cracks. In the picture below, you'll notice the original color of the walls (hidden for 59 years behind the mirror above the fireplace). If you look at the top right of the image, you'll see where Tom prepped the cracks for repair.

Original wall color of the house. Note upper right corner (plaster repair work in progress).

Once the plaster cured (7 days), Ben cleaned the walls and the painters came in. Before you chide us for hiring painters, keep in mind, the baby is coming very soon, so power renovation requires help. Our painters, Justin and Jeremy, are firefighters who paint on their off days. They were lovely and painted our ceilings and walls in just one day.

TV is finally mounted on freshly painted walls

Locating a contractor in a small town

This is not so much an update as it is a commentary on locating contractors. In early March, I tried to contact Tom Kelly to come back to our house to repair plaster cracks that were located in the hallway, main living area, dining area, and even on the ceiling in some parts. Despite only being cosmetic defects (according to our structural engineer), fixing the cracks has been a task we wanted to tackle since we moved in and haven't been able to address due to other issues [please see 18 previous blog posts].

Now, one would think that calling a contractor that you've already used and loved would be relatively easy. Not so. We knew that Tom moved the same week he finished up the bath/master plaster ordeal, but we didn't know his phone number changed. When I called his old number, the recording noted it was no longer in use and offered no alternative. I checked the Internet, but only the old number was posted. I searched the new Bedford phone book (which I've learned is THE way to contact people to living in this area) - again, old number listed. At a loss, I called the Bedford Chamber of Commerce. The woman I spoke with was extremely nice and suggested that if I tried all numbers listed for Kelly, I should be able to locate one of his relatives. This idea made me remember that Tom's brother was in the area and might be able to pass along my message. I reread our blog to locate the brother's name (see our blog does have a purpose!) and left a message on his answering machine. Tim (Tom's brother) called Tom that evening and Tom called me the next day. This leads me to Tip #1: If you can't reach a contractor, try calling individuals who have the same last name as you may be able to find a relative.

Tom repaired our walls early this week (doing, as always, an amazing job). Given the baby's arrival soon, we decided to seek out some additional help, namely a painter as we have a lot to paint and I can't assist due to the fumes. Tom gave us two names - Jerry Wray and Bruce Decker. Again, I went straight to the phone book, found Jerry Wray's number and gave it to Ben. When Ben called the number, he had a lovely conversation with Jerry Wray's widow who let Ben know that everyone calls her about Jerry Wray (the painter), but sadly, Jerry Wray (the painter) does not list his phone number and she is not sure why, but she gets all of his calls.  This leads me to Tip #2: Know when to move onto your backup contractor.

So, I find the number for Bruce Decker, who Tom informed me was a firefighter that painted on his non-shift days. Ben calls and actually gets in contact with Bruce. This is how Ben described the experience in a summary e-mail to me:   

So the dude is a firefighter, he works at the high school and does something else - mostly not painting anymore. He once worked on a crew for a guy that owned a company that was solid. That man has retired, but his son is a firefighter and owns the business now - painting on most days that they are off...

Just look for the calf with the limp and turn left at the third rock past that.

Tip #3: You don't find people to do work using the Yellow Pages in Bedford. Instead, find a guy that knows a guy who knows a guy who can help you (and hope that the right series of phone numbers emerges along the way).

Long story short, we have the crew suggested to us by Bruce coming to make a quote on the project this weekend. Ben already is sold on hiring the painters as when he called, the ringtone was the ND fight song. Need I say more?

The Nursery!

So, the Grey room (which had previously been Hubba Bubba watermelon gum pink and green, but that was covered in a previous blog post) is going to be our Little Man's room. Over the last months we have been procuring the equipment necessary to begin rearing a child. Mind you, living in the middle of nowhere, from a logistics standpoint, means that most of that equipment comes with some assembly required. We chose a white crib, changing table and dresser set from Carter's via JC Penny (despite their Google shenanigans, we were cool with that).

Here are some quick pics of the space with the furniture set-up. Note the picture of his cousin Morgan on the stand next to the dresser - this may not be in this position when we're final on the space, but will definitely be in the room...you have to know your cousin starting out; especially if you're going to be so far away.

Things are kicking into high-gear with the reno. We have plans for floors in the front room (yellow room from previous posts) and main living area so that we can have a little crawler in nice, new, relatively awesome and tasteful space. We're going to try to kick the kitchen in the pants as well to start moving it faster once those are in...we're on a timeline afterall.

Kitchen Concepts - We can dream can't we?

First off - I realized that though we had made most excellent progress on the bathroom, we never closed the loop on the master. Where the paint had peeled away, I re-primed and painted and it looks fantastic. Becuase I'm taking a few minutes to blog from a coffee shop in Bloomington while Tiff is at baby yoga - I don't have a way to get some quick pics...yeah, I didn't plan well.

I might as well fill you all in on some other design ideas that we have for the house. I have been working in 20/20 Design (pretty standard Kitchen and Bath design software) to come up with some options for the kitchen. After many attempts that I was having trouble understanding how we would get to work (slab construction means no wet basement...but how do you move utilities, etc? The answer is with more concrete dust than we would care to deal with and cost that we would never recoup), we landed on a solution that will probably have an island without utilities that run to it.

As a reminder - here is what we are dealing with in the kitchen space (these were featured in a much earlier blog posting).

Things to note:

Soffits/Bulkheads. Great to bring down standard 24" height cabinets from the 50's, but a horrible waste of space in toe 2000's


The old track lighting and horrible drapes are already gone (per a post of some time ago, they were replaced - the drapes were thrown away because in our opinions, nobody should be subjected to those drapes...and they had never been washed/cleaned by the previous owner which made them a biohazard).

The sink is next to the range and there is no space for a dishwasher - which means we have a portable dishwasher, which has more recently taken to only operating on the light wash cycle, is generally a pain in the a$$ to wheel around and would require a new control panel ($200) to fix...such is life. Until we get the reno done, we are dealing with it. Tiff wants the sink below the window and I agree that would be ideal.

Unseen is the washer and dryer pair that is behind the half-wall. It was added there because, obviously, there is water, the ability to run a 220 line (in a scary fashion - typical of our previous homeowner) and those things just weren't so widespread in the mid-fifties when the house was made. (picture of a standard "laundry pair" from the fifties below - laundry pairs back then didn't consist of a washer and dryer, but a washer and a person. Also good to point out that new technology or nasty chores are much better when you make the implement smiley and/or rollerskate in advertisements. This art is now lost in the marketing realm.)


We needed more of a value line of cabinets to do the house in because of the potential resale value. MasterBrand, where I work, makes a good swath of products for the home at a lot of different price levels. You have seen the Aristokraft line in our previous posts about the bathroom, but for the kitchen Aristokraft didn't have all of the smaller cabinets that we needed to make use of the small spaces we would end up having between some of the appliances and the need for a sink base and lazy-susan (corner cabinet with a rotating shelf).


If we can get there, we want to do it in the Martha Stewart Living line.
From about the same point standing in the kitchen, you can see in this 20/20 perspective how opening it up will make a big difference.
You can also see (in the second rendering) the perspective from the living room.

Do we lose some storage in opening it up? No, we are actually reapportining it to make it more efficient. The island will have quite a bit or storage and we might even be able to put away our massive stand mixer. The cabinets below the window on the far right are actually vanity height cabinets. The window was lower and this enables us to make the space below them usable while varying the height of work surfaces and giving a bit of visual interest.

In staying true to the space, the Perry Street door style fits well with our mid-century modern home. It has thinner rail and stile (e.g. tops and sides of the door that you see), is availble in White and has glass options. I borrowed a picture of the door style "for real" below, as 20/20 renderings above don't really do it justice (I would also like to attribute the image to http://www.marthastewart.com/photogallery/martha-stewart-living-kitchen-designs)


So where do we go next? While we figure out some of the logistics of this big undertaking, we are working to get a flooring choice sorted out for what will be the laundry room and get up some pictures of the nursery as it takes shape!

What the hell have we been doing?

So...what the hell HAVE we been doing? Obviously not blogging right? Well, we have been crazy busy between our work (the stuff we get paid for), visiting home for the Holidays (yes - it has been that long since we blogged), working on the house and, oh yeah, growing a little boy. That's right - Tiffany and I haven't just been building a home, but also a person. It's official once it's on a blog or Facebook or something right? Not to diminish the amazingness of that announcement, the first image is of Tiff with her bump. He's coming, ready or not, in late May - so we've got a full-plate of reno before us trying to hit that timeline.

I had a rough go in the bathroom with some other things, and I don't mean that I ate a lot of cheese (I know, that was pretty low-brow, but I was just feelin' it). As you may recall - the bathroom became a near complete gut-job because of the water leaks. Tiff and I spent HOURS chipping up vinyl flooring in layers; but that was nothing compared to what lay ahead of us - bottom line? Thank you Fine Homebuilding's remodeling magazine (Summer 2010 "best-of" issue) for giving Tiffany an idea that would consume the better half of my weekends for a good portion 2010 and the beginning of 2011. Of what do I speak? Tim Leahy's article on skim-coating plaster for a good clean, fresh finish. Tim, I am sure that you are a great person; and maybe, after all, it is my lacking in reno skills that caused all of this...but I am still suspect that this was some sort of joke that professionals perpetrate on us dumb DIY renovators.

When Tiffany asked if we could do it, I gave her a resounding "hell yeah!" - after all, Tim's article was there next to articles by Gary Katz and Myron Ferguson (two pros that I revere VERY much). Just by being in the same magazine as Gary and Myron, it was going to be how to do it right and we should do it that way. In the end, it appears that Tim either possesses some god-like level of patience or an abundance of time to kill, neither of which this dude posesses. Let me put it in perspective:

• The room is approximately 15' - D x 7'- W x 9' H (not including the bump-out for the tub).
• Using some cowboy math (total wall square footage - doors, windows, tub approx.) I get about 249 sq. ft. of wall.
• The weekend that I applied the layer of fibatape (like drywall tape, but 3 ft.wide) and first two coats of mud was approximately 30 hours in the room, or appx.7.2 minutes per square foot...which doesn't seem that bad until you are the poor bastard that is doing it (this is the case with many things, in my bedfordreno experience).
• Mind you, that this covered the two prescribed coats from Tim, which when primed and painted still wasn't quite there aesthetically - another weekend of dialing it in (you want this stuff to cure right before you prime and paint it) with another layer of mud in many areas, re-primer-ing (new verb courtesy of me) and more paint and we had something pretty good.

I wish I had a picture of me in my dustmask looking like "Casper the Friendly Ghost" after all of the sanding (and itchy as hell, mind you). This made the final-push 3am session of floor chipping before our contractor laid the wall and floor tile look like a cakewalk. Speaking of which, we used John Kerns out of the Bloomington/Bedford area to lay our wall-tile, Ditra underlayment/separation barrier and floor tile - credit where credit is due, he was awesome fairly priced (two excellent qualities in a contractor). So - we have floors, we have walls; next comes the cabinets, countertops, towel bars and mirror; a lot of which we completed over this last weekend. It feels good to start getting a sense of the space.

We had the countertops fabricated locally from Bedford Limestone, a benefit of living in the limestone capital of the US, and it cost us about a third as much as a Quartz top (BOOYAH DuPont with your fancy $65/sq.ft. ENGINEERED stone...ours was engineered by the earth and fabricated by a nice dude named Greg - mind you, you'll still probably get us for the kitchen). Aside from being local as well as a nice natural accent, the limestone is also a feature throughout the rest of the house. Getting it from the fabricator, I rinsed the stones in the bath and sealed them outside on the porch to prevent stains.

We ordered the cabinets from MasterBrand (where I work) in the Aristokraft line in Teagan Maple Sarsaparilla. Coming soon will be the upper cabinet above the vanity on the back side of the bathroom with frosted glass inserts - VERY cool looking (why am I installing the upper after the lower? Because I plan to use a set of "wicked cabinet jacks" that I am creating from plans on thisiscarpentry.com as I can't exactly have Tiffany hold it in place while I secure it...) We will also have a limestone countertop on the vanity with an undermount sink pretty quickly. Keep checking back on the progress and we'll keep the updates flowin'.

On a lighter, less reno-vatey note, we've also begun to hang some art in the house - afterall, it's what really makes a place feel homey. This is one of my ND prints in what we call the "blue-grey sky" suite or guest room #1 or "Not the Master, Not the Nursery...that other room with the bed" - named after a descriptor in the Four Horseman narrative...yes, we're Notre-Dorks, but we're cool with it.

We'll get back in the swing of blogging normally and hit you all with some images of baby furniture assembly soon.