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!

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!

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!

Ready to work on the floor this week!

As much as we wanted to do more last weekend, we had out of town company and so we had to do the fun things like visit the Getty Villa and drive around Hollywood and visit the LaBrea Tar Pits (one of my favorite places!). 

We got an interesting tour about the gardens at the Getty.

So last weekend we got NOTHING done!  so much for progress....
But we jumped into action during the rest of the week.  First off, getting the rest of the electrical and the ceiling done.  Our ceiling was covered in ceiling tiles and furring strips.  Taking all this down left a lot of holes, and we also had to remove a huge old ventilation fan from the ceiling.  So that left us with a lot of work to do on the ceiling.

Originally, I had hoped we could patch/sand/fill, but with the sum of all the work, Dale decided it would be better to skim coat the whole thing.  Which would be a huge amount of work for me, but luckily, he's a plasterer, and so he had no problem.  you can see how nasty it was before above...

 this was after a scratch coat, and the ceiling patching...

Then he did a finish coat, nice and smooth, and we sanded and finished last night, and I primed this morning:

And all the recessed lights are in. We aren't going to install the pendants over the island until we get it in place, but you can see the two boxes for those above.

By the way, that large section of purple drywall on the wall above is covering a hole that will be a pantry coming up in the near future.  We just put the drywall there temporarily to keep it looking better.  Dale did a veneer plaster coat on the wall to the left of the door because there was a ridge where the old cabinets were, and the layers and layers of paint over the past 50 years left a mark that was super defined.  We will be replacing this door, too, maybe with a slightly narrower door (this one is 32 inches wide, and it just barely clears the island.  30 inches would be better, and we want a french door there).  So that wall has a lot of changes coming, but for now, it's just going to stay a little bit neat.

We also finished getting all the old plumbing taken out, and connected to our new island plumbing -

We are also going to lower the bottom of the window about 7 or 8 inches, but we want to get the cabinets roughed in first, so we have a better idea of where the best height would be.  Today we are going to install the plywood and backerboard, so I hope to spend the rest of the week installing the tile floor.  We do still have some drywall to finish up as you can see above, but rather than put it in and then cut it, we are fine with just holding off a bit to be sure everything is where we want it before we finish that off.  While we were at it, we added an outside spigot so I could water the plants on that side of the house, and wash the car without dragging the hose all around the house from the other side.  We are also going to add an exterior outlet in the opening on the bottom left, so we didn't close that up yet either.

With any luck, we can get the tile done this week, and then we'll have the weekend to install some cabinets.  Since they've been taking up all the space in the garage all summer, it'll be great to have some workshop space in there again, too!