Our bedroom is finished! Out of all the rooms we have completed, I am enjoying this room the most. It feels so nice to finally have a little haven, a place to rest, after basically camping out for all of these years. Why didn’t we do our bedroom first?

The room was in awful shape before with peeling wallpaper and holes in the walls.

This room was my home office for years. How did I ever work in here? Lets face it, the room before is not at all inspiring.

The bedroom feels very warm and inviting now.

I framed and hung artwork over the bed from a printmaking course I took while in college.

I am in love with the little closet we had built into the dead space behind the wall. I like that the closet feels like it has always been here.

Our contractor did an amazing job building the door and matching the trim with the existing trim in the house.

This room was missing baseboards and some of the original trim.

New baseboards and trim were installed, replicating the rest of the trim in the house.

These windows were salvaged. We had added them to the house when we worked on the exterior. They needed some attention.

The windows are now working smoothly.

Open bedroom door and closed bathroom door.

Closet door, bedroom door and bathroom door.

The armoire survived being pulled through a second story window and is just slightly worse for the wear.

The bedroom ceiling has been repaired. The plaster was filled with numerous cracks. I’m just glad to say good-bye to the hideous ceiling fan!

Closet before and after. The elfa closet system is working out well.

Details
Paint Color: Dunn Edwards called Chocolate Milk (DE6059); Restoration Hardware Empire Rosette sleigh bed; Crate & Barrel Jules accent table; West Elm organic cotton sheets; West Elm Lexington quilt and shams; Overstock silk curtains; flor tiles rug; Restoration Hardware fan; eBay ceiling fixture; etsy table lamp; sarah & bendrix artwork; Luke Stephenson love bird prints; artwork above the bed is from a college print making course; elfa closet system; and last, but certainly not least, our contractor Juan Reyes 626.793.7091

Our new front gate! We don’t have the funds to swing for the whole fence, at least not for a while.

I tried to disguise our old gate and rusty chain link fence with vines and climbing roses.

Our fence is made out of redwood. The new fence makes such a difference. Our front entrance looks more inviting.

The design of the fence is based of a 1915 Thorburn’s Seeds advertisement. We hired a carpenter to build the gate using this advertisement as a guide. I requested that the posts be squared off to better match the architecture of our bungalow.

Our oversized letter slot from House of Antique Hardware. It is called the Bungalow Mail Slot. I admit the name sold me!

The mailbox is built onto the back of the gate.

We are in love with the new gate!

We have moved into our newly renovated home office and are loving it! We were able to work a lot of our inspirational ideas into the room. We ended up using an IKEA table that we already owned as a desk. The white leather office chairs are from West Elm.

The original closet was very long and narrow…and had no light! This is a far cry from the large his and hers walk-in closets of today. We added double doors for easier access, as well as lighting. A salvaged door was modified to match the original.

The room prior to the renovation wasn’t in the best shape, especially after removing wallpaper from the plaster walls. We had the walls patched and re-plastered. Where the wallpaper has been completely removed, you can see the blue-grey color of the walls from 1912. We painted the room a darker shade of the original paint color.

Ah, the newly built-in window seat is one of my favorite parts of the room. The space was just crying out for it!

I really love our new work space. It is such a comfortable room to spend time in.

Bookshelf – IKEA; Grey Pop Tartan carpet tiles – Flor; Nelson Pear Pendant Lamp – Design Within Reach; red leather lounge chair – CB2; white leather office chairs – West Elm; desk – IKEA; and wall color – Benjamin Moore, Secret AF-710.

The bathroom project is finally complete. Whew! We are thrilled with the results.

Starting with an inspiration photo, to picking out all the fixtures, to taking the room down to the studs and slowly putting it back together again; this has been the most difficult project completed in our house. So many decisions…

The updated bathroom is the project that has increased our enjoyment of the house the most. It is hard to believe that such a little room can have a big impact.

Our contractor built a door to match the original closet door and framed out a larger storage space.

For the first time in 98 years our house has a shower!

The ceiling fixture and sconce from Schoolhouse Electric help pull the room together.

My favorite things about the remodel? The marble floors…

the additional storage space…

and the color…

All the soft white tones make me happy!

When we purchased our bungalow it was covered in asbestos siding.

Our enclosed back porch covered in asbestos siding. 2003

The asbestos siding was in such poor condition that we decided to take our chances and remove it.

What we found underneath was a poorly constructed porch enclosure. 2004

Underneath the asbestos we found a poorly constructed, rotting enclosure. The enclosure was built with scrap wood and odds and ends.

Siding made from found odds and ends. The window juts out 10″ from the wall.

We were unsure what to do and didn’t want to put a lot of money into this little back porch. I considered covering over the whole mess with siding and dealing with it at a later date. I was lucky enough to receive some sage advice from a more experienced house restorer, “Covering over this would be like trying to fix a skull fracture with a band aid!”

The only thing left to do was to tear the whole mess down. 

The back door has been relocated to provide  a better traffic flow. Temporary plywood enclosure. 

New wood siding is a treated with an insecticide to prevent termites. Stained glass windows from a 1915 house found on eBay.

Primed and ready for paint.

Testing the final 2 paint color combinations. 

The house gets painted. 

The new back porch. 2004

Taken from the second bedroom/office looking into the bathroom. The door on the opposite side of the room leads to the back hallway. The smaller door is for a built-in linen closet.

The floor was covered in vinyl tiles and old linoleum. The linoleum appeared to date around 1920-1930s and must have been glued down with some old fashioned version of superglue because it was horrible to get up. The floor was black around the toilet and tub due to some serious water damage, so I stained the floor a dark walnut color for now.

Closer view of the linen closet door. It might be difficult to tell but the plaster wall to the right of the linen closet is scored to resemble subway tile. Notice the big crack in the ceiling above the linen closet. There are huge cracks all along the ceiling.

The walls were painted none too carefully before we purchased the house. The paint has peeled off in the past few years. It appears that the plaster color was originally left natural, the woodwork was painted a muted gold color (I often see it referred to as ‘wheat’ in modern paint samples), and the ceiling was a vibrant green color. The second bedroom/office walls were painted the same green color as the bathroom ceiling.

The bathtub and wall tiles appear to date from the late 1940s – early 1950s. We assume there was originally a clawfoot tub. The daughter of our home’s second owner told us that the house did not originally have a shower. Her family added a shower downstairs off the back porch. That area had been gutted when we bought the house. We now use it for our washer and dryer.

Our idea was to add a clawfoot tub with a shower attachement, but It has been pointed out that it might be difficult to get a clawfoot tub shower enclosure/curtain rod to fit into the available space because of the slanted ceiling. I’m not sure what we will end up doing?

Our duplex apartment from the 1930′s had a bath tub and a seperate shower stall which I loved, but no room for something like that in our 6ft x 12ft space.

We are fairly certain the bathroom originally had a high-tank toilet based on the holes in the floor. I found the outline of a wall hung sink. The pedestal sink in the photo is from our old duplex apartment and dates from the 1930s. The property manager was throwing the sink out so we grabbed it.

The strange thing is how high the medicine cabinet is placed. When I look in the mirror I can only see my eyes and I’m average height. I wonder how tall the original owners were?

Photo taken looking into the second bedroom/office.

One of my favorite things about the bathroom is the woodwork. The mint green register grate matches the others in the house, and was salvaged from Liz’s Antique Hardware located on Le Brea Ave. It needs to be stripped.

The problem is that this is our current kitchen…and this is what we want.

I have begun planning, or trying to plan, the best way to restore our kitchen. It’s a little tricky for several reasons. We have 3 doors leading into the kitchen on 3 different walls, 2 large built-in cupboards, and really no easy or inexpensive way to expand the space due to bathrooms, a stairway, plumbing and heat runs to the second story behind every wall.

On the south facing sink wall, a tile backsplash, counter and under the counter cupboards were added some time in our home’s past. They block part of the original built-in cupboards on the east and west walls.

I want to rip out the tile and MDF cupboards and plan on restoring the original built-in cupboards and having new doors made for them. The current doors are cheap MDF replacements of the originals.

I would like to have smaller cupboards on either side of a new sink to house the two modern conveniences that I am not willing to live without; a dishwasher and the microwave.

The fridge is visible from both the den and back porch, not the most attractive view. I have considered insetting a 24″ deep fridge into a wall to keep it from sticking out into the kitchen so awkwardly. The problem is a stairway on the other side of the fridge wall prevents us from insetting the fridge in its current location. Moving and insetting the fridge next to a built-in cupboard is an option but would leave us with a displaced stove.

The stove is overlapping part of the doorframe.

I am most unhappy with a large drainpipe next to the stove that has an unattractive box built around it. The original plaster wall was cut when updates needed to be made to the pipe.

There is also an equally ugly box on the ceiling hiding two water pipes. The water pipes can easily be moved inside the ceiling, so that is not a big deal.

I’m feeling a little bit at a loss and locked into our existing layout. We could remove one of the original built-in cupboards to solve some of these space issues but that really isn’t an option I’m considering. I want to keep those cupboards and I love all the storage space they provide. Is that unreasonable?

All suggestions and ideas are welcome.

Update:
Here is a link to a diagram of the kitchen.

The front entry seems so much more inviting now.

The plaster wall has been repaired, the wood stripped and stained, and the walls painted.

Looking into the den before.

Looking into the den now.

Built-in book shelf and the gentleman caller’s bench.

David stripping the paint of our fireplace and fireplace today.

:: See how we brought back our fireplace’s luster after the bricks faded during the paint stripping process. ::

Stripping away layers of paint.

Lulu in the finished living room.

See Living Room Resources to learn about the products used in our restoration.

The dining room was the first room completed in our house. This was before we started writing about our “adventures” in home restoration on the web. So, you don’t get to read all the gory details about how we almost killed each other selecting a paint color for the walls or how I caught the wainscoting on fire.

Dining room before restoration and after.

The woodwork was covered in about 18 layers of paint. We got to relive each decade as we stripped the paint away. There was a groovy 1970′s phase with purple woodwork and hot pink walls.

In the before photo, I had started to strip the paint from the wainscoting. You can see just how dark the original mission finish was.

I had originally intended to paint the dining room a deep burnt red color. We went through 9 different shades of red trying to find the “right” one. After the first 2 paint jobs, David “loved” everything no matter how awful it looked.

Before and After

In the end we settled on this warm golden color, Shelburne Buff from Benjamin Moore’s Historical Collection. Several people have tried this color after seeing our walls and been dissatisfied because the color wasn’t gold enough.

Dining Room After

When a wall is painted a dark color like red, it will need to be primed before a new color is applied or else the dark color will bleed through. Lots of people out there probably already know this, we didn’t. The red undercoat has altered our color. Our walls are not a true Shelburne Buff. But, we are very happy with the color…whatever it is.

Dining room After. The light is from Restoration Hardware. We have since purchased an antique fixture off of eBay but have not installed it yet.

After. Our box beam ceilings and Lulu just because she is a ham.

More about the resources used in our dining room here.