Finishing the studio - new cabinets!

Where does the year go?  I just realized I left blogging last April, as if nothing else had been going on  in our lives.  We actually have completed multiple projects since then, and I am going to work on them one at a time.  So since I left off after we started our central heating/air project (and we have loved our central air!), I am going to go through the rebuild there first.






This is what the original closets looked like. We took those out, so we could better utilize the space.

We listed the doors and drawers on Craigslist for free, and someone came and took them away.  I hate it when people throw things away, when someone else can use them!
















So now we had a big open space. I knew I wanted to put a lot of my fabric bins in there, so we measured and figured out the size opening, and framed it in.  We also painted the interior after repairing all the cracks/dents/crud.

We framed it out, installed the shelves, and .......

took off a year.  LOL.  We did other things, but nothing here.  All my studio stuff sat in the garage in boxes, which gathered sawdust and other dust. We did this and that, and then my daughter said that they would be coming out in June of 2018, so in April (because we don't plan ahead so good), we started working on the plan that we had earlier, but now had a reason to get it don.  We scraped the ceiling (which had water damage from when we put a new roof on - it RAINED during a drought  on the ONE DAY we had no roof on, and some of the paint in this room bubbled.

So we scraped the old paint, fixed the bumpy ceiling, and Dale did a skim coat over the whole thing, which made it look FABULOUS.  Then we installed a ceiling fan.  Then we began work on the murphy bed:

I think I must have snap-chatted most of these pics, because this is all I have!  We created a box, put in the murphy bed hardware, installed the box to the wall, then built shelves around it.


Then we applied 12,398 coats of white paint. Seriously, it felt like I was painting and painting and painting.....but finally got the wall all done, and it was awesome.  Then we painted the walls a lovely shade of lavender.



In this picture, everything looks scrunched down by the one side of the room, because my daughter and her husband were coming to spend a couple of months while we all worked on renovating an airstream with them.  So I pushed everything to one side since they'd have the bed down all the time for awhile.  I don't know what those weird dark splotches are on the picture....hmmm.  Anyway, here's a weird pano of the room:




I need to take some good pics of the room - I've added a couple of shelves for paints, etc over the desk, and a shelf for Dale's Smokey Bear collection.  But right now it's not all that organized because I still need one more shelf but that got pushed to the side for some other projects....which I'll write about soon!

Working on the house....

It's been awhile since I posted anything!  And it's not that we haven't been busy, I just needed to sit down and write some stuff down.  So I'm going to just jump right in.

For the past few years, we've been living in a drought out here in sunny Southern California.  Which has resulted in a lot of challenges, but one of the ones that has becoming a bigger issue for us is the increased heat of the summers. When we move out here to Long Beach, we had that great experience of year round nice weather, not too chilly in the winter, not too hot in the summer.  But with the drought - and more likely, as part of climate change in general - it's been substantially hotter during the summer.  We went from having a summer that had maybe 2 weeks in the summer where we wished we had air conditioning, and managed through that with a window air conditioner in the bedroom, to a situation where it's unbearably warm for extended weeks, and last year, nearly the whole summer.  While that may lesson now that we seem to be out of the drought and back into a more "normal" cycle, realistically speaking, it's only going to be warmer, not cooler.  So we have been giving serious thought to installing central heating and air.

In the first 4 years here, we haven't had to really rely on our sub-par heating system. When we bought the house, the inspector told us that really the heater needed to be replaced, as it wasn't heating enough.  It's a radiant heater in the floor, in the wall between the hall and the living room.  Not attractive, not functional. This is what it looked like when we bought the house.

When I built the bookcases, I actually built around the heater and installed metal grates in the doors to let the (insubstantial) heat radiate out.   This is how it's looked for the last 3 years.

To get central air, we'd need to have ducts and a whole system installed.  So in the fall, we got an estimate from a couple of companies, and it was more than we wanted to pay.  So we thought about it, and this spring, we decided to see if we could do a little bargaining (use the lower estimate to get the company we liked better to price match, which they did, even going $500 below), and got it scheduled.



To get ready, Dale and I had to do 3 things: remove the old heater, and remove the water heater from its cabinet outside the house, so we could put the new furnace in there, and remove the catio so they could put the condenser unit.  All these things needed follow up, and that's what I'm going to show here.


First, removing the heater.  That was a chore! It involved Dale crawling under the house and disconnecting the gas, and removing some of the elements that he could reach from there, and then us removing the screws and parts and dragging it out.  No pictures of this process, it was loud, exhausting and filthy - but at the end, we had our old heater all taken apart and ripped out.



Here it is, sitting on the curb waiting to be picked up by metal scrappers.  It sat there for about an hour before someone loaded it up and took it away.




Then we were left with a hole to patch.  Dale was cracking up because I was sure some critter was going to come up the hole, and every noise I heard I was sure was a raccoon or feral cat or squirrel or something coming up.


That's the dirt under the house, y'all.  Gross.  We actually put the grates back over it but they were just sitting there and I've seen raccoons in our neighborhood.  Anyways....




Then we had to build this up, both in the hall here, but also within the cabinets.





I built new shelves inside, and replaced the metal grate panels with the original panels, which I had saved.  Then I repainted and got everything all installed.  That side looks good ---

Then we had to build out the other side, and patch the floors:

We had bought some flooring (unfinished) to match the original flooring, so I had to blend that in with the existing planks, after putting in a plywood subfloor.  We insulated the space, and then added some cement board, and now Dale has to build out the wall and plaster it over, and you'll never even know it was there.

So -- the other thing we had to do was take out the water heater from it's closet:

and install a tankless water heater on the outside. This was so they could put the furnace unit in that space. We ordered a tankless heater, and got started on the project, building a panel, getting the unit put on the wall -- and then......


We ran across 2 problems, just as the HVAC people came to get installation going.  We were going to pull the water heater, we had it drained, ready to pull out, and the HVAC people looked at the cabinet and said, "we can't put the furnace in there."  Not enough room in the attic for the plenum (air handler), and no route for an air return.  Great.  So we turned the water heater back on and refilled it, thinking, we can do the tankless thing in a day or two anyway, and then while we were looking at the tankless, it requires 3/4" gas lines, and we have 1/2".  We call the gas company, who comes out and says, "you need an upgraded meter."  Yay.


So we are STILL waiting on that (which is why the picture shows unconnected pipe), and using our old water heater.  We'll get this connected as soon as we get our meter upgrade (any day now!).

The other problem needed more thought.  We were not happy, our sales person had contacted the company and had done measurements before we signed our contract, and now they're saying, we have to put it elsewhere. They looked in the attic (too low, we have a low angled roof), maybe we'd have to use the guest room closet and move the closet into the water heater space (they are back to back), but they have to send a carpenter out to frame out the space and get it ready.  And that should be in a week or so. So we were pretty frustrated. But, it gave us time to think, and we decided we'd rather put the furnace in a different space - right off the entry where we have a door to the bedroom that we use as a studio.  This space, that open door (this is from a long time ago before I added a glass panel to the front door) :

Here's the space from inside the room.  It was a little jog and the only purpose of it is to have a place for the door.  it's about a 2.5 x 2.5 foot space that can't be used for anything, and if we close it off, it still leaves us one door into the room, from the hall.

It's kind of odd that this bedroom actually has two doors, one of them off the front hall.  We'd talked about extending the hall closet to use more storage space there - we'd been to an open house in the neighborhood, and that's what had been done there, so it was something we'd thought of before.  One of the problems with that room is that we always treat it as a hallway, and it was awkward, so closing off that space was a good use of the space.  So by the time the HVAC carpenter came out, we had a new idea, and they thought it was ideal.  So now it looks like this:

They moved the door forward, the door swings the other way, and the space has been insulated so it's quiet.  The intake is on the living room side behind the small tables, not even noticeable.






The inside of the room now looks like this.  we didn't ask them to smooth it out any further because we are building a bookcase unit over it.  this room now has a closet (that we are removing) on the left side of the wall, and on the right side is what you see here, the closed off space.  We are going to build a full wall of bookshelves and include a door to the closet and a murphy bed for our visitors.  On the other wall, across from it, I used to have two bookshelves, which I just sold this morning. This is where I am going to move my desks.









So next, we are going to demo the old closet. We've removed the doors and drawers, and we'll clear it out and get shelves built in for storing fabric and larger items.  Then we'll continue to build the walls out and then get some shelves and a bed built in.  Next post, I'll outline the plans!

Books in --

It sure looked like a lot of shelves, right? I was looking forward to "styling" them a bit with some fun objects interspersed with my books, artfully arranged by color.  Well - they're arranged by color, but as usual, I underestimated how many books I own, and they are kind of packed in.  I do like the color arrangement so far -- it helps to keep the shelves look neat.

They've been in boxes in the garage for about 2 years -- when we moved from the first rental, I didn't have shelves to unload them into, and I didn't want to buy anything to fit a rental.  Then when we moved here, we had no where again, but I knew I was going to build something -- so off into holding they went.



I unloaded them, and started stacking them in colors.




and I kept unloading them.....








 and kept unloading them...











it seemed like it would never end!




And to think that I had pared down the collection by a TON when we moved from Indiana.  And I don't even want to mention it, but I have at least this many books in my office at school, too.

But here they are!  The shelves below are almost full as well -- all the brown ones are in there, and anything that looked less than lovely (weird spines, wire bound, etc).  When we finally remove the furnace down the line, I can actually move some more down and then-- maybe then -- I can add some curios to the shelves.  And to think I had a few thoughts as I was unpacking/sorting that maybe now I could buy some more books?!  Not going to happen!

Boy, are we tired!

Well, we worked our butts off today, trying to get the living room near completion.  We actually hit almost all of our goals today, which is great.  We finished the coffered ceiling trim, we got the ceiling re-painted (we had done it in semi-gloss, and I hated it, so another coat of Swiss Coffee, this time flat), caulked, Dale skim coated the wall of the sliding glass window and I finished painting the shelves!  woo hoo!

The only thing we were thinking we might get to today was to install the TV/electronics, but we decided to go out for dinner and take a hot shower instead.  We figure we'll be ready to do something in the morning. 

I do love it with the pocket door closed!  We still have a stupid place holder light fixture in the middle of the room -- we want to put a ceiling fan in, but we have so many other things to worry about that we are going to wait on that for a bit.  Oh, and the recessed lights we had to pull down to paint around, I want to check out paint job in the morning.  Painting a flat coat on top of a gloss coat - hard to tell what's been painted and what got missed, especially with the lights glaring right in our eyes!























I am so ready to get my boxes of books unpacked and fill the shelves, but I want to let the paint cure for a week or so.  Books are heavy and I don't want them to mess up the paint job.  That was 1 coat of primer and 3 coats of topcoat -- I do NOT want to paint that again. 


I do still have some touch ups of the ceiling trim- I got 2 coats on today, but they could use a third.  So in the morning, we'll touch up and then get some stuff moved back in, although we still have walls to work on.

The biggest project in here that we still have left is doing something with this fireplace.  We are actually going to skim coat the top half and then plaster it so it is smooth, and then retile the bottom half with some ledger stone.  I would LOVE to find a really nice set of fireplace doors that fit the opening -- I'll have to keep my eyes out for those.  I've seen beautiful cast iron ones, but they're probably way outside what I'd like to pay.  Once we decide on what kind of stone to put on the fireplace, I'm also going to tile over the brick hearth.  Probably travertine or slate, but we'll see how that goes.

This spring we hope to get the french doors put in to replace the slider.  We removed most of the trim from the slider before Dale redid the wall, so it should be a pretty simple affair to take the slider out.  We are going to go ahead and trim out the doorway so it looks finished, it'll be pretty simple to take the trim down to replace the door when we're ready to do that.

Well, hot showers and putting our feet up.  I think tonight's the last night we'll have our giant TV at the foot of the bed!  I look forward to getting my bedroom back!

Shelves are coming along!

I've been working a little bit each day on the shelves, and with a big push this weekend, I have 99% of the building part done. 

Where I left off is when I had the base cabinets pretty much done, other than the base molding.  I had installed the cabinets, painted (and painted and painted - 1 coat of primer and 3 coats of semi-gloss top coat). 

Dale had applied a skim coat to the wall to even them out, I sanded and primed.  Then I had 2 sheets of plywood cut at Home Depot to 11" wide, and I started on the right side, to be sure I could work out all the problems before I had to make everything fit.  We knew we wanted to run the coffered ceiling edges along the front of the bookshelves to integrate them, so I had to leave 5.5" for the end panels, and that left me a rather short shelf over the doorway.  I decided graduated sizes of shelves would work best, so I got to work building the first set of shelves, and anchored them in.

In the meantime, one of the coffer beams was slightly out of place, which we didn't realize until we took down the plastic and stood in the kitchen, then it was apparent that one of them was a little bowed.  So we took that down and reworked it. 

This is what I got done yesterday.  I still had the facing pieces on the front of the shelves to add, to cover the plywood edges and to bulk up the look of the unit.  But this morning, we decided we should take a break and go to the Rose Bowl Flea Market --

Hoping we could find some interesting stuff -- amazingly, we ended buying only a bag of glazed almonds!  Nothing the whole day!  I saw stuff I liked, but just wasn't inspired to spend the money.  We did enjoy looking, and we'd packed a lunch so that was nice to sit under a tree and chat and eat our sandwiches halfway through. 




But when we got back, I got back to work and finished cutting and sanding all the edges, then got them glued and nailed up:

Fill, sand, paint, and so.much.caulking to do!  I ran out this evening, so I need to get more in the morning, but I have 3/4 of it all done.  Just the last set of shelves on the far left to finish up.  Then I can prime and paint.  And now we can finish these boxes on the ceiling, with the two rows of molding (and more caulk! and more primer! and more paint!)  But it's the home stretch now.

I have a busy week at work, so I won't be able to work much on these until the weekend, but I am hoping to get a little done every day again, maybe a coat of paint for an hour or so a day.  I did manage to get the baseboard molding in, so it's just the cabinets and that last set of coffered boxes to finish.  The fireplace is looking really bad now -- I've just slapped paint here and there on it while I'm working on the shelves, but Dale is going to do a nice coat of plaster over the brick and maybe he can get that done this week (along with finishing up the wall with the sliding glass window.  Who knows, maybe we can move furniture back in here soon!

Bookshelves/cabinets

We've had floor to ceiling bookshelves in the past, and one thing that bugged me about them is that sometimes we have books or magazines that we want to keep, but they look messy and terrible.  So I knew I wanted some closed shelves as well as open bookshelves.  I've been looking on Pinterest a lot to see what it is I really like, and I tend to like traditional shelves over cabinets:

I seriously thought about building he lower cabinets, then came to my senses and decided to buy unfinished ones from Lowe's -- Home Depot has the same ones, they're unfinished oak and I've used them before in a previous house and was happy enough with them.  Mostly, they just need to hide my mess!

Because the walls have all kinds of issues, including the door not being centered, a tv will need to be wired on one, and there's a floor heater that we aren't going to replace for a few years -- I had to buy several sizes, but I know that when I paint them all they will read as one unit. 

The first cabinets I worked on went over the floor vents.  I had to cut out the backs and centers to fit around the vent, and replace the panels on the doors with open metal grating so the heat can come out.  First, altering the cabinet boxes:

I took the horizontal shelves and cut them to fit vertically, to keep the heat confined to the center section.  I also had to move an outlet from behind the one on the left to the side of the base.







So far so good.  I got the other boxes in, moving one outlet, and running a connection between the wall and the base so we could hide our electronics and television wires.  We hung the bracket as well -- I really like this one we got from IKEA, minimal moving parts, nice and sturdy attached to the studs.

This week, I went to Home Depot and had them cut some 3/4 plywood to size for the top of the cabinets, then ran 3/4" screen mold along the edges, filling and sanding. 

The one on the right has a coat of primer, and you can see the outlet box.  Well, you could if Persephone did not want to get into every picture.

Another thing I was really glad to do was change out the pocket door and trim it out.  I've positively hated the previous door - it had a layer of painted paneling glued over the beautiful panels, and it was hideous.  After all the work I had done restoring the one from the hall, I decided to use that one and so Dale took out the old door, and put in the nice, refinished one in.  But we also had to remove all the old paneling "trim" they put around the door.  So I had to cut all new trim, but I got that done this week, and have added a couple of coats of primer and paint, so it looks great.

This is before I got the paint on it.  But Mercury wants equal time in the photos.













I've painted the doors and the cabinets and the door trim, and meanwhile, Dale has skim coated the walls, so they look a thousand percent better now.

He fixed the plaster problems on this side, and leveled out the wall.  I still have to do some more sanding, priming and adding baseboard before I can paint and call this wall finished, but it looks SO much better.






He still has the sliding glass wall to plaster - he added in the drywall but needs to give it a few coats of plaster to fill the cracks and gaps.  And wouldn't you know it, we are about a 12 x 20" piece of drywall short. I hope I can pick up a scrap somewhere this week.











So here is where it stands right now -- got the base cabinets in, painted with primer + 3 coats of semi-gloss, they may need one more coat or just touch ups, and I'm ready to tackle the shelves this weekend.

I'm ready to add baseboard and get the walls primed and the shelves put up!  We've also decided on an approach to the fireplace, something to hopefully minimize it's weird placement that's given us all kinds of trouble as far as arranging furniture.  But that'll be a little further down the line! 

Living room ceiling

As we were driving back from Indiana, we decided we had enough time to get started on one more project at home.  Our kitchen is 99% done - just need to scrape together enough to pay for countertops, but we're OK with keeping them plywood for a little longer.  And we do have a few other things that we'd like to do, such as:

• replace the 2 front windows with new single hung windows
• replace the back door with a full view or multi-paned french door
• hang some decor
• make a chair pad for the bench
• get a new kitchen table

But those things are going to happen over time.  Iam pleased with the way it looks -- no big "reveal" as of yet, because we actually moved a bunch of our living room stuff into the kitchen (the two big recliners, mainly), so I can't quite take pictures. 

But as for that drive -- one thing that's really been driving me nuts was theliving room - it's acoustic tile ceiling and the ugly paneled walls that are painted but still uneven, the giant brick fireplace that's in the worst place ever -- but mostly the ceiling.  This is what it looked like when we bought the place:

Kind of hard to see -- and these pictures look WAY better than the room did.  Nice floor (needs to be refinished, really scratched and gouged, but nice wood), the rest has gotta go.  Here's what it looked like before we moved all the furniture out and stripped out the room:

Best attributes:  good size, nice floor, lots of light from big windows.  So that's how we've had it for awhile.  Painted the brick the same beige as the rest of the room so it would blend in better, but other than that, nothing.  But we were getting this along the edge where we redid the kitchen and knocked out a wall:

That's the lovely beam we put in, and that's the ugly ceiling tiles that we had to cut back to access the area.  Brown, seriously??  what were these people thinking?





So, we cleared the room, taped off the doors and went to work pulling off the paneling and then taking down the tiles and furring strips on the ceiling.  It always looks SO MUCH worse before it gets better!

 And this is AFTER we took stack after stack of ceiling tiles out, and piles of furring strips and nails and all kinds of yukky trash.  Gross.

What we wanted to do was create a coffered ceiling.  We had one in our house on Bosart Street back when we lived in Indiana, we loved it.  I watched another blogger do hers in NO time at all, and it gave me the nudge to get going.  I showed the pics to Dale, and he was sold, so this is our plan.  But first, of course, there are some serious issues that removing the paneling showed us:

We knew there was some plaster damage here, the paneling was loose at the corner and we could peek in and see there were some issues.  Large chunks of plaster gone, and the stuff along the bottom -- well, that's just a mess.  What they had done was create a switch that turned on the outlet - but they ran the wire right above the wood there, flush with the plaster.  We could have hit it with a nail or screw anytime.  Totally  unsafe.  

The other mess is this above, around the sliding glass door.  All kinds of janky wood filler, and big swaths of plaster missing.  This is actually OK with us - we can fix the plaster, but I'm contemplating waiting a bit on this, probably just do some minor patching because we plan on removing the sliding glass door and replacing it with 4 french doors that we bought off craigslist for a hundred bucks.  We'll need to build a frame, and we can see here exactly what size we need to fit it to.  And it would be easier if we didn't get the plaster all finished out since we'd have to cut it again, and we want to get the doors done this spring, so we may just patch this up a bit and let it roll for a bit.  There is also some damage to the floors here which we'll fix when we replace the doors.

After we pulled everything down, we patched all the many many holes in the ceiling, sanded them down, then patched again.  I contemplated priming the ceiling, but we decided to go ahead and lay out the coffers at this point.

Don't you love the contact cement all over the walls?  it's nasty, looks like dried on snot.  We have to sand that down, too, and then do a very thin skim coat to level out the walls.

So after screwing 2 x 4s and some blocking to the ceiling, we attached the sides to the boxes that make up the beams in the ceiling.  This actually went really easily, and this is where we also ran into two more problems:  because we are intending on putting bookshelves all along the back wall, we didn't want to build the coffers all the way to that wall, so we stopped 12" short of the wall to allow for the shelves.  So they just sort of stop--

And then .... I threw my back out.  Went to school for a meeting and decided to throw away some old art projects left on the shelf, reached across for something and just felt something slide in my back -- and I was flat on my back for 3 or 4 days.  It hurt to do anything.  Which stinks, because that means we had to live with our house looking like this!

It finally subsided some, I'm still dealing with it, but I can manage as long as I take breaks and don't pick up anything heavy.  So I got the ceiling and beams caulked, primed and painted  --- 2 coats of primer, 2 coats of paint --
And it's looking really awesome.  Right now we have a stupid "boob" light in the center --we want to get a nice ceiling fan fixture, but we'll wait until we need to.  We decided that since we were going to all the trouble to smooth out the ceiling and we could see where all the joists were, we might as well install recessed lights while we were at it. so that added a few days to the job.  But they are AWESOME.

It's so nice that the crappy ceiling tiles are gone, and the ceilings are beautiful and smooth. 

I've done several other things -- finished a whole lot of trim, am halfway through putting in the base cabinets for the bookshelves, but we had to stop and do a bunch of electrical -- this house had all kinds of wacky circuits, and when we added in the recessed lights, we realized that it was time to do a map and get all the circuits mapped.

We listed every single electrical outlet, switch and light in the house, and tested each one.

After we did this, we realized that about 75% of our lights and outlets were on the same circuit, and we had two empties.  So back up into the system to balance that out.  We feel so much better and we know that there are dedicated circuits now to our electronics and that nothing is over-taxed.  And now, no guessing when we need to switch off a breaker to rewire an outlet or run a fixture. 

So while the living rooms are still gross brown, we have been making progress, and hopefully I'll get some updates up in the next week or so.  We are coming along!