Remodeling, Week 3

Shaenon K. Garrity

This is where I write stuff.

Remodeling, Week 3

18th-Jan-2010 11:24 pm

This weekend was cold and wet and there was no heat in the house and it SUCKED. Hopefully we'll get the heater working tomorrow. In the meantime, we did get a lot done. Photos behind the cut.

Andrew continued his demolition of the bathroom. We selected a contractor earlier in the week, and Andrew wanted to finish stripping the bathroom ASAP so the contractor could get to work on it.

I finished painting the spare room. So long, blue painter's tape!

Then I got to work on the living room and foyer, which I'd been itching to repaint since the first day we saw the house.

I ran out of paint for the foyer, so that'll have to get finished next week. I also started taping up the kitchen for painting. Still haven't lined up someone to replace the kitchen floor.

Meanwhile, in the bathroom: Can you see anything? Yes, wonderful things.

Under the bathroom tiles he was removing, Andrew found the original 1920s-1930s floor tiles! We don't know if we can uncover these intact, but it'd be great to keep the original floor in our remodel. You can tell I'm domesticated because I'm really excited by the prospect of having a vintage bathroom floor. The house is full of surprises, only some of which are horrible.

By the end of Monday, Andrew had cleared everything out except the bathtub, which is steel and will need to be carried out in one piece. Still, this is an impressively demolished bathroom.

Also, Andrew changed the locks, we bought light fixtures, and we lined up an electrician to update all the WWII-era wiring. (Andrew is not excited by the prospect of vintage electricity.) So it was a busy three-day weekend. But cold. And wet. And cold.

Tags:the little house

Comments

19th-Jan-2010 07:51 am (UTC)

blackbyrd2

It's looking beautiful!
Steel tubs can be valuable, even if they're not your choice of style. You might look into selling it to a refurbisher or whaddayacallit- Those guys who sell salvaged bits. If you're not already.

Edited at 2010-01-19 08:12 am (UTC)

19th-Jan-2010 12:36 pm (UTC)

deadcat_vagrant

Your place is going to be damned nifty when it's done!

19th-Jan-2010 01:32 pm (UTC)

jeff_morris

Shortly after we bought the house, we discovered that our electrical service was woefully inadequate and dependent on two fuse boxes (they converted the garage into a family room). So we got a bid from an electrician and had him get everything switched to circuit breakers and bring the house up to spec.

Turns out that the previous owner--hereby known as "Mister Fix It Badly"--did his own electrical wiring. My wife said she learned several new curse words that day, listening to the guy in the attic.

19th-Jan-2010 02:13 pm (UTC)

dirktiede

Making good progress. Gutting that bathroom must be freeing. It feels good to tear all the bad stuff out, leave the good, and then rebuild. It can also be daunting, but you guys are doing great so far. The work is definitely showing!

Best of luck!

19th-Jan-2010 02:42 pm (UTC)

cat_named_eastr

Wow, I haven't seen lath strips inside a wall since I was a kid-- grew up in an architect's house built in 1910 that we progressively remodelled.

Those bathroom tiles rock if you can save them.

Changing the old electric wiring was very smart.

19th-Jan-2010 03:07 pm (UTC)

goraina

Wow, it is looking so good!

19th-Jan-2010 03:31 pm (UTC)

umadoshi

That looks like an impressive amount of progress! ^_^ Too bad about the cold, though. Good luck with the heater!

19th-Jan-2010 04:00 pm (UTC)

johnwwells

That's looking good! Do try to keep warm, though, if possible? This is not a great year to take a hit to the immune system.

19th-Jan-2010 05:06 pm (UTC)

ladygzb

What a relief to see those walls painted.

And ooooo ooooo oooooo! on those original tiles! Oooooo! Squeee!

19th-Jan-2010 05:28 pm (UTC)

lierne

Your house is so beautiful! I love the molding, the built in cabinets, the floors, the archway - it's filled with awesome. Good luck on the renovations!

19th-Jan-2010 05:57 pm (UTC)

_fluffy

Oh, nice. Now I'm feeling sorry I ever suggested you walk away from the short sale.

I love when removing something tacky and "modern" shows the nice vintage stuff underneath. Like pulling up horrible avocado-green smoke-stained carpeting and finding wonderful old natural hardwood flooring that hasn't been damaged TOO horribly by the carpet installation. In the 60s a lot of people had really bad taste.

19th-Jan-2010 07:26 pm (UTC)

shaenon

Whoever owned the house in the '80s did a lot of tacky, tacky things to it. They built that kitchen, which they painted Day-Glo orange. The living room was apparently purple.

I could understand wanting to cover the bathroom tiles with something warmer or more practical to clean, like linoleum or even vinyl, but covering them with different, uglier tiles? Whatever, 1980s homeowners.

19th-Jan-2010 08:24 pm (UTC)

dnaltews

It's nice to see a short sale work out for somebody... I avoided them like the plague because of all the horror stories.

19th-Jan-2010 06:29 pm (UTC)

0x0_kate_0x0

I love the color green that you picked.

19th-Jan-2010 07:17 pm (UTC)

jaderabbit

Beautiful! I can already see the house feeling better.

We have a space heater you can borrow, if you like. Not sure if it's worth the hike out here to get it, but you're welcome to it if you'd like. We haven't used it at all this season.

19th-Jan-2010 07:28 pm (UTC)

shaenon

Nah, it's okay. With luck it'll get fixed today. It's weird, because the furnace is fairly new and doesn't have anything obviously wrong with it. It's just hooked up incorrectly or something. Every recent repair to the house seems to have been done by somebody's brother-in-law.

19th-Jan-2010 08:57 pm (UTC)

jaderabbit

I am familiar with this syndrome, and I feel your pain. It's great that you and Andrew are taking the time and the trouble to do things right.

20th-Jan-2010 10:05 pm (UTC)

garrun

We had that in our house - the previous owners went by the last name of Love. Any hack job to the house became known as a "Mr. Love Special" (Bow-chicka-wow-wow!) We're still finding them 3 years later... but we didn't get a chance to gut the house, we had to move in ASAP. You're in good hands getting it all done now.

With such a beautiful vintage house, I have an image of a Moustacio-shaped wood burning stove in the corner, with a nice copper or brass finish and a stovepipe hat that is actually a stovepipe...

20th-Jan-2010 03:42 am (UTC)

thedragonweaver

Oddly enough, the electrician that my sister hired kept most of the 1920s-era wiring in her house because it was in good condition. He did add a lot more into it, due to modern load needs.

The real kicker is when they got the roof done. The roofer was practically in love with their original redwood underlayment— the dovetailed redwood underlayment. My brother-in-law speculated that they might have paid for a complete new roof if they'd let the roofer take those pieces away.

On the bathroom tiles— if you can't keep the originals, you can get replicas without too much difficulty. They sell small-format tiles on wire mesh backing, so you won't go insane trying to place thousands of little tiles accurately. And check salvage yards, because you never know when you'll find an appropriately-aged mirror or other perfect piece for much less than you'd get retail.

21st-Jan-2010 05:32 pm (UTC) - Old Bathroom Floor

Anonymous

Shaenon! That is exactly the same vintage floor that we found in our bathroom when we remodeled in 1989. The goop that adhered the 1970's cheap flooring to it just wouldn't come off, so we had to cover it up again with the flooring that's in there now. There were some missing tiles, too. I hope that you are able to restore your floor to its original condition. The house looks great so far. What year was it built? Ours is c.1935.

21st-Jan-2010 05:34 pm (UTC) - Re: Old Bathroom Floor

Anonymous

Oops! I forgot to identify myself: Aunt Kerry.

Leave a Comment to the Entry

This page was loaded May 17th 2012, 2:09 am GMT.