Monthly Archives: May 2012

Whoop! Whoop! (Wallpaper’s done!)

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Some of you will remember the awful internal debate I staged with myself when trying to decide what kind of wallpaper to hang and even if I should put said wallpaper up.  Thanks so much for all the feedback from all of you who commented! It made it a lot easier to make a decision. Even with all the comments and suggestions I still had to make three trips to the Benjamin Moore paint store in order to decide what I really wanted.

Here’s a snapshot of the choices I started with:

I asked for readers to vote for their favorite(s) to see what choice would be the most popular. I got a lot of feedback on here as well as on my link posted in my Facebook feed….and the results wereeeee:

Choice #1          8 votes

Choice #2         0 votes

Choice#3          0 votes

Choice#4          1 vote

Choice#5           5 votes

Choice#6          2 votes

Choice#7          0 votes

Choice#8          4 votes

Choice#9          2 votes

Choice#10        1 vote

Choice#11         2 votes

Choice#12         2 votes

Choice#13         1 vote

Choice#14         2 votes

Choice#15          3 votes

And although my personal favorite was #11, clearly Choice #1 was the winner! I loved #1 but I was on the fence about it because the pattern was ultra-white and all my accents and even the ceiling I had painted a cream color…a pale, cream color but nonetheless it wasn’t stark white. I considered some of the comments which swayed me towards a more neutral choice. I also took to heart the advice given to me by a couple of you who screamed the word “NOOOO!!” when you heard mention of wallpaper. I therefore struck a compromise with myself.  I would ONLY wallpaper a very small area AND I would focus on a design and pattern that complemented the walls of the bedroom rather than contrasted against it like I had originally planned.

So naturally, I ended up choosing a wallpaper that isn’t even one of the 15 choices! 😉 It IS the same pattern as #11 BUT it is more similar in color to #5 or #10.

After all the deliberation, choosing the wallpaper ended up being the easy part! Benjamin Moore has to order the paper from Thibault.com and the wrong color was sent to me (how ironic that the wallpaper that first arrived was very similar to #1?!). The salesperson at the store insisted that I would need 2 rolls…which meant a lot of $$. When the wrong pattern arrived I took the opportunity to insist that I only needed one roll…and wanting to remedy the mistake, Benjamin Moore obliged and even waived the restocking fee and shipping charges as well. Which meant I saved a lot of money in the end :)))

When I finally got my hands on the wallpaper we set right in to work.  Since part of the paper would be bordered by the exposed brick chimney we had to clean the bricks before applying the paper.  In removing the plaster and scrubbing away the dust, the mortar had become a bit stained. My dad suggested applying an acid made specifically for cleaning stone to get the brick and mortar back to sparkling.

Meanwhile, my mom and I started measuring and cutting the paper to place the first strip on the wall.  I purchased a gallon of wallpaper glue from Lowe’s and poured it into a paint pan.  The glue can be applied with a roller or brush. Simply lay the paper on a flat surface and start covering it from edge to edge with the paste.

(Although the directions say to spread glue on the back of the paper, I found that after trial and error it was much easier to roll the glue directly onto the painted wall)

The actual hanging of the wallpaper is the trickiest part. Managing 8ft of soggy paper is not the easiest task in the world. Luckily, I had someone who lived through all the wallpaper nightmares of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s to help me out-my mom 😉

The whole process was super easy and finished in less than half an hour! Oh and we had over half of the roll left which means I can use it for artwork and other nifty things in order to kind of carry the theme throughout the bedroom. Check out the finished TV nook!

I love how the paper has a metallic finish to it that changes from gold to silver to gray to brown depending on where you are standing. It really pulls out ALL the colors of the room. You may be wondering why there is a electrical plug smack in the middle of all that papery goodness..but that’s where the TV is going to mount so no fears! 😉 All that’s left is to trim out the walls and it will be a gorgeous!

I AM SIMPLY OBSESSED WITH THE WAY THAT IT TURNED OUT!

Much love and until next time!

-L.

We takin’ it allll off!

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At this point we are halfway thru every project that we have started. Depending on whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist will change whether you see this as a good thing (yay! almost there!) or a bad thing (ugh! so much to go!). Me, I just see it as there is a LOT of shit everywhere I look! 😉

I feel like my life is literally in shambles right now. (Shout out to Nicole G…literally in shambles because everywhere I look there is dirt, dust, and things either falling apart or partially assembled! Oh and I feel like I only have 3 outfits anymore since I am always wearing work clothes 😉

Check out the picture of the master bedroom and you will understand exactly what I am talking about.

There is more bare drywall than paint!! You can’t even see the floor anymore!  And I feel like I haven’t been properly clean for weeks, despite my 3 showers a day.

So, naturally, we decided that we needed to really dig in and scrub this place from top to bottom- or in our case, from bottom to top since we did start in the dining room and work our way up the stairs 😉

Everyone knows that when you want something cleaned right, you gotta call in the big guns. Granny Big Guns, that is.  My lovely, wonderful, Grammy came down armed with a mop and plenty of windex and set right in to work.

She also made a great lunch for us! Yum!! THANK YOU!

My mom pitched in, too and showed off her own prowess with the mop.

The results were Ah-mazing. Look at the before and after of the master bedroom floor where we did the majority of the drywall application and dreaded sanding.

The dining room fairly sparkled after they tackled all the woodwork with qtips, toothbrushes, and plenty of Murphy’s oil.

Oh! And you can also check out my awesome new paint job in the dining room! Thank you Susan and Joe for all the help you gave me in there a couple of weeks ago!! I loooove the way it turned out! I will definitely get better pictures soon but the bottom half is a dark grey almost purple and the top half is a light lilac color. It looks great with the dark woodwork.

Raul’s mom, Margarita took on the ungodly task of cleaning the oven. The previous owners must have never, and I mean, NEVER cleaned this thing because it was absolutely covered in burnt food and grease. Even though we are not planning on keeping these appliances, we do need to use them for at least a couple of months so Margarita offered to shine them up a little.

Believe it or not, the boys even pitched in and did their parts to get the house looking spic and span, too.

My dad polished these 100-year-old doorknobs and the difference was amazing!

You can even see my reflection if you look hard enough! 😉

Raul defied his acrophobic mama and climbed out on the roof to scratch paint off the windows with a razor blade and spray them down with a coat of glass cleaner…or two. The amount of light that was being blocked out by the layer of dust and grime that coated these windows is gone and the difference is incredible! These babies even sparkle from the street! The only bad thing is that now I know we need curtains like ASAP!

Yes, he’s for hire!

Cleaning up the house meant starting to strip away layers of old paint, too. And I have one thought on that process. Ladies and gentlemen if I am ever elected president (which was my dream job according to my 5th grade journal) I will make it a punishable crime to paint antique doors and floors!!! The paint removal process takes hours of time and boatloads of patience. It is not a pleasant task. If you ever find yourself doing this my advice to you is to spend a few extra bucks and get the really, really potent stripper. I bought two different kinds and the $30 gallon was infinitely better than the $20 one. Spending a little extra will save you lots of time and energy. Plus a stronger stripper can prevent excessive sanding after you get the paint off. Stripping can be expensive (we are already through 3 gallons of this stuff) but I think that the impact of returning the floors and doors to their original sheen will totally be worth the effort.

In total we have 8 door fronts to strip plus a hallway, the floor of the 3rd bedroom, and several feet of trim board.  It is gonna be a loo-ooo-oooo-ng process. Also, the stripper burns like a you-know-what when it gets on your skin. It literally ate away my fingertips when I was working on removing the paint from the individual door panels with a razor blade. I promise you all that a manicure is my first stop as soon as we finish this house!

For now though I just feel sooo much better with the dust gone and the few steps that we have made toward a living space that we can actually inhabit!

Landscaping part deux!

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It’s been quite a while since my last post- sorry guys! But no one ever said remodeling a house was easy! We’ve been so busy that I’m not even sure whether I’m coming or going lately. Although I’m mostly going. Going to work on that big house, that is. And the projects are just piling up! It seems like we are just in the middle of everything. The bathroom is half finished, the bedroom is waiting to be painted, and the downstairs is semi cleaned and liveable (if you forget about the lack of furniture!). This past weekend we really did make HUGE progess on the backyard, though! Things went very, very smoothly with all the help we had! I can’t say enough how lucky we are to have the family and friends (aw, who am I kidding?! They’re family, too!) that we have.

The landscaping project started back up again on Friday afternoon. Raul’s uncle Francisco was back and so was his step-dad Beto. His sister Ivette and little brother Pavel pitched in, too. While I finished off my afternoon at work, Raul and Francisco went to purchase two tons of rock for our landscaping plans. One ton was just a coarse gravel that would form the base of of our firepit area. The second ton was a load of river rock that we would place under the two enormous pine trees. Although the pine trees provide a lot of shade, they prevent grass from growing and also shed a TON of needles. We decided a large rock would be best under the trees for easy yard maintenance.

I picked up Ivette on the way and Beto and Pavel joined the group at the house. Here’s what we started with.

 

The first step was to create a circle with heavy duty edging that would establish the perimeter of our entertainment/firepit area. Creating an even circle with no measuring device was a lot of fun! 😉 We got it figured it out though eventually using a long piece of string and a few mathematics principles that I had all but forgotten from high school! 🙂 Once the edging was staked into place, a layer of black cloth was added to prevent any plants from growing into our gravel area.

This stuff comes in rolls and in order to get it to fit into a circular shape we utilized little metal stakes…and a few boxcutting knives. After the black mat was secured, the real fun started. Shoveling a (literal) ton of gravel into the biggest POS wheelbarrow ever (flat tire, anyone?) was about all the exercise that I could bear for the day. Raul, Ivette, and I took turns hauling the gravel from around the side of the garage and dumping it into the circle so that Francisco and Beto could rake and level it. About halfway through we remembered that we had forgotten to dig the hole for the firepit. But better late than never! We quickly utilized our geometry skills again and dug a hole for the firepit to sit into. I still need to go check out some landscaping blocks to build up the sides of the pit but we made sure that a few sticks could burn okay in the hole in the ground. 😉

Soon enough (well, not really soon enough!), the circle was filled and my new bangs were sticking to my forehead from so much exertion. But we were all set to go so that we could really make the most out of all the help we would have on Saturday.

Saturday brought cool weather (Thank God!) and an early start for some of us. Francisco and Raul headed off to get a few more materials and I bribed my sister’s boyfriend out of bed with McDonald’s for breakfasat. Corey and I started by hauling away a huge pile of concrete that I had broken up and set to the side a few weeks ago. One of the previous owners or tenants had poured concrete all over the roots of the pine trees which didn’t maintain any sort of shape for long and was crumbling into huge and heavy pieces when I bought the house.  Although you can see the pile of rock stacked against the garage in one of pictures above, the photo really doesn’t do it justice. Between the two of us we probably hauled 10 wheelbarrows full of this stuff to the driveway so that I could load it (at a later date) to be dumped somewhere else. We managed to rake out the area in front of the garage and have it all prepped for mulch before Raul and Francisco returned.

They got back in the nick of time as Raul’s mom, stepdad, and brother as well as my own dad had just shown up! Beto got right to work assembling the most important of our new purchases- a brand spankin’ new wheelbarrow!

We tested out our new toy for stability. Check!

Soon, it was back to work, though. The first step was to carve out the shape that we wanted the river rock to take on and place edging to mark the boundries. Then we had to rake out all the dirt and fill in other places in order to get a good slope so that the rain water would run away from the house. Although more shoveling and digging sucked, we did find a bonus. There were several nice, big stones that we unearthed that we recycled to use as stepping stones leading into the garage entry door. Score! We are sooo fortunate in that we have been able to reuse and recycle so many items that were left at the house. I am glad that I negotiated to buy the house as-is 😉 We probably have discovered more than $1000 worth of useable treasures.

After the dirt was spread and leveled we began laying down more of the black liner along the west side of our backyard, under the two pine trees.

While a few worked hard at securing the liner, others started transferring another ton of river rock to the backyard. I am sooo glad that our friends Phil and Sarah and their little family showed up at just the right time! Having two more able bodied workers was a giant help.

With four shovels and two wheelbarrows, moving the rock wasn’t nearly as bad as shoveling the gravel had been the night before.

Oh yeah! And look at all those concrete pieces that Corey and I moved in the pic above! No wonder my biceps are hurting today!

Check out this (not so great) picture of the river rock under the trees.

While the transfer of the river rock was under way Raul’s mom, my mom, and I all stepped away for a little bit to start preparing lunch. The best part about having a large group of people working on the weekend is the delicious meal that Margarita prepares! Beans, rice, carnitas, and Nelson’s chicken tacos with salsa and guacamole and some great lemonade made by my own mom. YUM!!!

By the time lunch was prepared, the guys had moved on to the last part of the project; creating a bench out of some old landscaping timbers (I told you we’re big fans of reusing and recycling!)

Lunch was a great time to relax for a bit and chat with all the people who had come to visit and help us.

But little Maliah wins the award for cutest visitor by far!!! She got to take the nap that the rest of us wanted!

After lunch my dad and Raul made a quick trip to Felger’s Peat Moss for some mulch to fill in the pathway from the steps to garage and also along the exterior garage wall. I can’t believe I forgot to take a picture of the finished project but I guess after 10 hours of landscaping my brain (and body) were fried. My mom snapped a quick photo to tie you guys over to my next landscaping update!

I can’t say thank you enough to EVERYONE that helped out this weekend!! What we accomplished together was incredible…and fun! I appreciate and love you all so much!!!!