We are officially halfway done restoring the house. We have unofficially been on a break from working on the house for the past 3 years. The kitchen and main bathroom haven’t been upgraded since we bought the house. They are still awful!
List of projects and rooms left to be restored:
drum roll please…
Kitchen
Bathroom
2 Upstairs Bedrooms
Sleeping Porch
Back steps and stone patio
Put in a back yard and landscaping
Garage
New Fence
Hopefully, we will get either the bathroom or kitchen started and finished in 2009. Get ready for lots of inspirational kitchen and bathroom photos in the mean time. Planning is the fun part!
Photo taken from The New York Times article.
I just read an interesting article in the New York Times: “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Solvent“. A couple purchased a 1913 Tudor brick house for $65,000 12 years ago in Akron, Ohio. The home is amazing (before and after photos included in the article) with 6 fireplaces, solarium, billiards room and servant call buttons. The couple offered the owner 45K less than the already reduced asking price. The offer was accepted because the house was about to be condemned.
They tackled the majority of the restoration work themselves, saving a considerable amount of money in the process. The couple has no debt except for a 55K mortgage. It is an interesting comparison to people who purchased more house than they could afford and are now feeling the pinch.
The restoration, still ongoing, is not without personal sacrifice. One of the things that I have struggled with during our ongoing house restoration is the loss of personal time, family time and trying to strike a balance between working on the house and “having a life.”
When asked how long projects like re-caulking 733 window panes takes, the home owner replied:
“Years,” Mr. Giffels says. “This is where I’m glad I wrote the book 10 years later, it gave me a perspective of all the time it cost: All my vacation time, all my possible spare time, a number of years of my children’s growing up I gave to my children’s house. And once you get in it, you can’t get out, you can’t sell a house in that condition. When all of a sudden you realize what it is costing you in your life, it’s too late.”
Boy, I can sure relate to that sentiment. How about you?
Although, after reflection, the couple says they wouldn’t do anything differently. And, I understand that feeling, too.
A book, “All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-Down House,” recounting the couple’s experience comes out next month.
Jack’s favorite new sleeping spot.
The bathroom sink isn’t hooked up and hasn’t been operational since we have lived in the house. I’m glad the sink finally has a purpose.
We just celebrated our 5th year of home ownership last week. We are a little over halfway done with the house. What a journey this restoration project has been! We often receive questions about buying and restoring an old house. So, on the occasion of our anniversary with homeownership, here goes…
Would we do it again? Hmmmm. Halfway through our restoration I started to have fantasies about building a completely Modern house, something that you would see on the pages of “Dwell” magazine, where everything would be brand spanking new and streamlined. A few months ago I would have said NEVER. EVER. AGAIN. But, you know what they say about never saying never.
What have we learned from our experiences? If you are going to restore a house with someone, have a conversation or two about how you actually plan to accomplish this before buying the house. When we talked about fixing up the house, I imagined us lovingly working on it together. I had no idea the images floating around David’s head were of us interviewing general contractors…lovingly together. What can I say? We were young, in love and not so focused on the details. It never occurred to me that David wouldn’t “like” working on the house.
Things will cost so much more than you expect and take much, much longer than you imagine.
Know your limitations. Sometimes it is much cheaper and safer to hire someone than to attempt to do a project that you have no skill or aptitude for. Hire a licensed electrician, plumber, roofer, or foundation contractor.
It is just a house, just a paint color, just a piece of furniture, just a light fixture, or just a kitchen design. Try to keep things in perspective. If only I could have all those hours spent pouring through magazines, books and eBay back. I spent way too much time, and probably too much money, on things that seemed important at the time but, in the bigger picture, maybe they don’t matter quite so much.
My husband, David, really knows how to woo a girl, at least a girl like me. Last Saturday he romanced me at the local stone yard. We went just to look…at rocks. Be still my beating heart!
I have been dreaming of putting in a flagstone patio for the two and a half years after we ripped out the cement lawn. All that gorgeous stone was way too tempting. We ordered 600 lbs. of stone to be delivered this Saturday, ready or not.
I picked out the large stone on top (in the photo above). It is shaped like a big teardrop. My plan is to place the large stone in the middle of the patio with smaller stones surrounding it. Once we got home we realized that we didn’t order enough stone.
I have decided that we should lay a couple of inches of sand underneath the stone to help level it. That seems easier than tilling the patch of compacted dirt that is our backyard.
I remember the first time I saw Lulu. It was about 8 years ago at the pet store. Heather had seen her there previously and thought she was the wierdest looking puppy she had ever seen with short legs, big paws, big ears and a missing tail.
I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to get a dog but after driving around and talking about possbile pet names we decided to go back to the pet store to see her again. I asked one of the pet store employees if they could take her out of the cage and they handed her to me. She was so tiny and her fur was so soft. You could just tell that she had a great little personality. Lulu won me over and we took her home that day. She became a part of our family.
Lulu was the sweetest dog with such a great personality and calm demeanor. I used to take her to work with me everyday and she would just hang out in the office and contently lay by my chair as I worked. She was much loved by everyone who came in contact with her because she was so quiet and well behaved.
Compared to our past pace, 2006 was a very slow year on the house restoration front. We completed one project. Our project wasn’t even a large one, but it was labor intensive as all our projects somehow seem to be.
It has finally sunk in that we don’t have the stamina to have house projects going all the time, one after another, lets hurry up and get everything done so our house is restored all ready. Our what seemed realistic at the time plan, the one where we complete all the work on our house within five years? It’s now the 10 year plan or the hopefully we get the house done before we die plan. Considering this is our fourth year in the house and we are barely halfway done, I think the new plan is a good call.
We have decided that completing one project a year is a more realistic pace for us. Although, it would have been nice to have restored the kitchen and our main bathroom before we hit upon the one-project-a-year-for-a-more-balanced-life approach. I think it is going to be a while before I have the ever changing kitchen of my dreams.
January
My dad came to visit and finished some plumbing work he had started the year before. This culminated with hooking up the sink in our downstairs half bath. It only took us 3 years to actually have water running out of a faucet in one of our bathrooms. Yeah!
February
The episode of “Restoration Realities” featuring us aired on the DIY television network. Along with the show’s host and carpenter we built a period appropriate screen door and weather stripped our windows and front door.
Heather + Dave on Restoration Realities Part 1
Restoration Realities Part 2
Restoration Realities Part 3
Restoration Realities Part 4
March
Did absolutely NO work on the house.
April
Did absolutely NO work on the house, but may have scared a very nice sounding family away from the idea of restoring a rundown Craftsman home of their own.
May
Did absolutely NO work on the house. Starting to see a theme here?
June
Did absolutely NO work on the house.
Our little hallway and stairwell project has come to an end. The paint on the woodwork has been stripped away to reveal beautiful Douglas fir wood. The wood has been stained and varnished (twice). The walls have been re-plastered and painted (twice). Antique leaded glass doors have been installed between the back hallway and the sleeping porch to let in more light. The reproduction light fixture and switch plates have been installed.
The only thing left to do is sand and refinish the little back hallway floor. I’ll start on that after the holidays.
Photo taken from the dining room. We selected a blue green color from Benjamin Moore’s Historical collection called Wythe Blue HC-143. It’s a darker version of our first paint color attempt. Our bedroom plaster was originally tinted a similiar color to Wythe Blue and served as inspiration.
Top of the stairwell. Light fixture is from Rejuvenation.
Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking down.
Taken at the top of the stairway landing, looking towards the sleeping porch.
Photo of the antique leaded glass doors, taken from the upstairs bathroom. It is difficult to adequately photograph these beautiful doors due to the narrowness of the back hallway.
Photo of the back hallway taken from our bedroom.
This project somehow doesn’t seem as exciting as some of our past projects but it was just as much work!
The faded woodwork debacle left us feeling discouraged. If it had been a bedroom insead of a hallway that we pass through several times a day, we might have just shut the door on the room and our project for a few months.
Pablo mixed stain into varnish and sprayed that on our woodwork with a paint sprayer. No one was sure if this idea was even going to work or how well it would turn out. It took several tries to get the color right, but the end result looked much better then we had hoped for.
The downside was that the varnish tinted more then our woodwork. Right now we have a pink bathtub, toilet, sink, fishtank, computer desk, computer monitor, mirrors and anything else we forgot to cover. It should have occured to one of us to cover these things in plastic before we turned on the paint sprayer.
Good thing we already needed to repaint the hallway.
In every project there is always that “Oh, crap!” moment. Our “Crappity, crap, crap” moment is almost unbelievable. The stain color has faded, wait for it…AFTER the wood has been sealed with varnish. Several coats of varnish. It gets even better…A FEW WEEKS after the wood had been stained and sealed. “Oh, crap!” indeed.
We are just scratching our heads (it’s better then beating our heads against the wall) wondering how this happened? It wasn’t a slow, gradual fade. One day the stain color was dark and rich, the next day it wasn’t. We went to bed to dark woodwork and a project that was almost completed. The next morning we awoke to woodwork that looks faded out and a project that refuses to end. What cruel joke is this?
The only thing we can think of is that the wood has absorbed the stain…? Because the wood was dry? Because the wood was originally painted? Because we didn’t condition the wood prior to staining? Because someone in this house has really bad karma? All of the above?
Now, what to do about it?
1) Tried putting a little stain over the varnish, knowing that wouldn’t work, but hoping against hope it would. It didn’t.
2) Know that the “right thing” to do is to sand off the layers of varnish from all the woodwork and restain. I think about the amount of time and mess this would cause, after the amount of mess and work it took to even get to this point, and decide stabbing myself in the eye with a fork seems more appealing.
3) We are going to try to tint the varnish with a little stain color and have Pablo spray it on the woodwork.