Before & After: Office

We knew when we moved in we needed some place to put Conan's computer (which currently resides downstairs because we don't have any AC and in the summer, this room is like an oven). We designed and built these shelves and the desk along with nifty sliding compartments for a printer/scanner. They really are super handy and when the weather permits, we'll move the computer back up here because it's a shame to waste this space.

 I got the (incredibly heavy) Brown-Morse office chair at the DAV for a whopping $3.50 and all of those fabulous old bookends, we got from a church that was going out of business (Do churches do that? Well, they were.)

Up next:

Speaking of paint, we got the bathroom paint (eek!)

and

Stripping an old door to it's original woody glory

Stay tuned!



Before & After: Upstairs Hall Corner

We really haven't potsed much about upstairs but that's all about to change. It's kind of a mess up there what with the bathroom being torn up but that will be done soon (eek!) and we'll have pictures galore!

For now, here is a little before and after of the end of the hall near the front of the house. From left it goes Master Bedroom, Home Office, Guest Bedroom (which you can read about here).

As you can see from the "before" it was a pretty colorful house.

The office shelves were next and finally I got around to painting the guest room.

The guest room window is one of the few in the house we have actually re-corded and re-glazed.

It works like a dream and I'll post about that arduous process as soon as I can!

Also on the agenda:

a post about the office shelving

and for all you wood lovers out there, I'm stripping one of the hall doors that was painted white!

Stay tuned!

*The poster above our bed can be purchased at our Etsy shop*



Painting

Since our plans were to get married at this house we of course set right away to painting over all the walls.  First was the bedroom, then the office, then the living room, the dinning room, the laundry room, and lastly the hallway.  So let me show you a few photos of us working on the office and the living room.

Yup, we painted over the old wood, and we've had more people lose their minds about that than anything else.  Some people act like I punched their grandmother, but everyone needs to just chill, the wood was not in perfect shape, and a lot of it would have needed to be fully replaced to look well again.  This was the best solution since we only had about three months to turn this place around before we were to get married...oh, and it also looks awesome now.

Anyway, here's the thing about painting: a good quality primer is your best friend.  Go to Lowe's and buy the five gallon bucket of Kilz2 and hit it.  Two or three coats of that stuff will take care of about anything, and you'll waste a lot less of your expensive paint trying to cover up the old stuff.  Here's another thing about painting: don't buy cheap paint.  Good stuff is thick because it contains a lot of pigment, and because it contains a lot of pigment it takes fewer coats to get to the color that you want.

We bought the expensive Valspar paints that they sell at Lowe's to do the bedroom first and it was so easy we thought we'd save some money and paint the office with something quite a bit cheaper.  It took at least twice as much paint to get to the final color, and every now and then I still notice a thin spot.  The rest of the house was painted with better stuff.

I don't actually have many really good 'after' photos.  I thought I'd shoot some yesterday before I went to work (I only work half-days part of the week), but it was cloudy and I really wanted some photos with sunlight coming through the windows.  So anyway, that'll be my next task...er, blogjective?

Interior Tour

We had taken some photos on the walkthrough, but rather than post those, I'll show you some photos that I took the first week that we had the house.  We hadn't moved in yet, because we had to repair the flue for the water heater and patch a couple of leaky pipes in the basement--credit for this goes to Katherine's mom who brought over her plumbing kit and with a few dollars worth of parts from the neighborhood Ace Hardware got everything going.

This is our living room. The wood looks alright in photos but it was honestly pretty heavily stained and marke.  The floor, however, was evidently refinished sometime in the semi-recent past and was actually in pretty good shape; everyone that comes in says, "oh did you refinish these yourself?"  You can also see our beautiful old windows that still contain mostly original glass--nice and wavy.

Here you can see our fireplace and mantle. Through the door to the right is our dinning room which is painted a slightly darker shade of purple.  You can also see our very nice sort of knock-off Danish Modern chairs; the one by the fireplace was $19.95 at the DAV and the one in the dining room was part of a set for $40 off of craigslist.  

This is our main staircase (there's a servants staircase that leads up from the kitchen).  It's actually a little crooked due to the house settling a little over the years.

The view from our dining room back into the living room.  Note the doors.

Here's our kitchen.  You can note the water damage on the ceiling, which I watched closely for a few months after moving in without noticing any additional evidence of water penetration.  I believe at some point in the past the upstairs bathroom was partially remodeled after causing the damage here.   On the windowsill is a little plastic cow that we found in the basement, shrink-wrapped and covered in dirt.  All in all though, the kitchen is good looking so it'll do for now, but it's on the list of rooms needing a remodel.

Another view of the kitchen.  You can see the back room that eventually became our laundry room. The electric oven works well and gets very hot; however, when we moved in there was no 220V outlet for it, only a gas-pipe sticking up through the floor.

Here's a view from the upstairs hallway showing, left to right, the "master" bedroom, the future office, and the future guestroom. The hallway, like the future guest room, is also white but it appears to be just painted over with primer.

And here's the "master" bedroom.  I think it was originally two rooms and they cut through the wall and added that archway.  This is the first room we painted, and you can see Katherine knocking the dust off the walls so we could get started with the Kilz. 

And at the back of the house is the sunroom, which was the only room in the house that was still carpeted.  Katherine tore it up one day and we shoved it out the windows.  The floors are very rough underneath, but Katherine's got some plans for it.