Brightening it up

When I first walked into this home back in August, I thought to myself that if I got this house, I couldn't wait to rip off the valance over the sliding glass door, and do something to that horrid little fireplace.  It's such an awkward setup - the fireplace in the corner, and with it being all dark and brick, it was just a black hole!  So today, I got out the leftover tan paint from the walls (it was freshly painted - not my first choice of color, but it will do for now), and painted the fireplace.  Tedious work - but what a difference!

Now it blends into the rest of the room, and suddenly, arranging the furniture doesn't seem so complicated.  Also, getting rid of that curtain valance really cleans up the room.  I've got a set of nice, neutral curtains that I am going to hang tomorrow; a LOT of sun comes in during the late afternoon.

I know some people aren't thrilled with painted brick - but this was not pretty brick, my friends.  We are planning to eventually drywall over this, add a nice mantel and tile later, but this free update really freshens it up.  And, as I was cleaning the junk away from the corner (American flag, some random dowels), I see on the floor a gas valve -- what?  We have a gas fireplace?  We were told this was a wood-burning fireplace.  There was so much soot and ash left in the fireplace, you can't even see the gas pipes.  I shoveled all the ash out, found the hatch for the cleanout and discovered the gas pipes, which look pretty rusty.  They'd need to be replaced, but at least the gas is run.

Well, in other news, it looks like we won't have the bathroom finished before we move in.  That's not totally unexpected, random plumbing and electrical issues took up more time than we'd hoped for.  We are hoping to get the shower functional during this next week, but we have to move in tomorrow so we can vacate our rental by Monday.  We may have to live with a plywood floor for a week or so, but nothing we can't handle.  The first house we remodeled together didn't have a functional bathroom for well over a month, and we managed.  The hardest part will be keeping our troublesome cats out of there, it's a veritable playground for the naughty kitties!

Sometimes it's the small things

Above, on the left, the original light fixture for the entry.  Hilariously old, but really I still have a secret attachment to it, so it may end up somewhere else (after being cleaned up and brought back to a tarnish-free finish).  On the right, the new hall fixture.  Sigh. I hate the ceiling tiles, but that job has to wait its turn on the ever-lengthening list. 

Today, we continue work on the bathroom - most of the plumbing is done, but we have to finish electrical before we can get the drywall going.  Here's a look at the change so far:

Before and after looking from the doorway - we removed the shower and the built-in closet.

And of the view from the back wall by the window looking towards the hall.  We took out the tub and tiles. We're changing out the door to a pocket door since the room is so small - having a swinging door either blocks where we will put the vanity or the toilet - so a pocket door is just the solution.  I love pocket doors - this house has several, so it's consistent with the rest of the house. I took down the original panel door, removed the laminate and I'm sanding/refinishing the door to use in the pocket.

We have to move in this weekend, finished bathroom or not.  So we better be getting busy!

Oh, Rubbish...

The pile of trash is growing...


If our yard was even remotely attractive, I would have rented a dumpster to get the demolition trash out of the way.  A lovely pink tub, piles of plaster and broken tile, plus a lot of old wood full of nails -- yep, that's the view from the living room right now.




On the bright side, demolition seems to be pretty much done, and tonight we got started on the plumbing: new hookups for the laundry area in the garage (although I have to buy a washer and dryer still), and the drain system in the house got roughed in. 



I also changed out the light fixture in the front entry, but forgot light bulbs, so I didn't take a picture.  Meanwhile, I'm also getting stuff moved over bit by bit.  The weekend will be here before I know it and we'll have to move all the big stuff, too!

Progress -- still demolishing!

One of the things you find out when you do any kind of renovations is that no matter what you gear yourself up for, there's always something else that unfolds along the way, making everything more complicated.  For us, it was finding that there was a 2 1/2" mortar bed under the tile floor and an equally hard mortar bed behind the tiles around the tub.  Getting these broken up was a back-breaking job - enough for Dale to get his back strained so that Friday night, he was very stiff and in a lot of pain.  So we took one night off, then got back to work on Saturday. 



This morning, we picked up a jackhammer so he could make quick work of breaking up the floor.  Within 45 minutes, it was broken up into small pieces that I could carry out, and he was on his way bringing the jackhammer back to the tool rental place.  When he got back, I was just sweeping up, and now the bathroom is a nice, blank slate.





You can see the floor is two different levels -- higher by an inch on the right in the picture above, where the tub and the linen closet were.  We then took off the subfloor in this area - we need the floor to be all one level, so we are dropping the higher section down and bringing the lower section up, each by 3/4" - which will work just fine.  Taking up the subfloor also allowed us to get a good look at the existing plumbing, so we can see how we are going to run the new plumbing.  On the right here, the existing tub/shower will be split into two runs, one for the sink to the far right, and the second shower head near the back of the wall shown above.

On the picture on the left, the existing sink plumbing will be moved to the right and higher for the other shower.  At least we're leaving the toilet plumbing completely alone!  You can also see in the picture to the left, the old wall heater, which was totally rusted out, but the wiring was still live.  When we went to check out the breakers, we were lucky enough to see the bathroom ones labeled.  So we flipped that breaker and disconnected the wiring there and another box that had been closed up.  And since we were still working in the area, we just left the breaker off.

So - while we still had a rental truck, we went to the home improvement store and bought our long list of supplies; wallboard, cement board, plywood, lumber, plumbing and electrical supplies, insulation, vent fans and a window, among other things!  Our goal is to keep the remodel around $2000, and we spent about half that today.  We drove back up to the place to unload the truck and store everything in the garage - and none of our lights would work! We thought it was because we had put in a work order to change the electric and gas utilities over, and we ended up unloading everything in the dark.  It wasn't until I went through the house getting things locked up to leave that I noticed Dale's circular saw had it's powerlight on - glowing in the middle of the dark house.  Wait a minute....I flipped a few switches, and found one light that worked -- it turned out that one of the breakers we flipped had to have nearly 3/4 of the circuits on it -- whoa, we need to check into that.  But we felt pretty silly stumbling around in the dark, when all we had to do was flip the breaker to get light back on!

Demolition begins on the bathroom

Got the keys this afternoon, and Dale and I grabbed a bite to eat and headed over to the house to tear some stuff up.



The vanity was a real trip to pull out - it goes against my nature to break things up if someone else could use them - on home improvement shows they always show people bustin' stuff up with sledgehammers, when you can usually just unscrew things and take them out in one piece.  Well, that is not the way it worked with this ugly vanity - we had to break the whole thing up into bits.  For such an ugly thing, it was sure built to last!






The walls and ceiling were covered with a smooth laminate - it was contact cemented to the walls, so that was a lot of work to rip out.  We had to break it off in small pieces to fit in the trash, too -- it was brittle and sharp.  And don't the walls look fabulous with the dried glue all over them?!  It actually looks worse now!  All this will be covered with nice fresh greenboard.









My job was to dismantle the built in linen cabinets - this has to go so we can put a shower in.  Again - built to last, and I had to dismantle the whole thing with a sledgehammer and pry bar.  I did save all the drawers - we can use them for storage and I've got a few design ideas they might come in handy for.

So at the end of the first night (and we actually don't officially own the house until tomorrow!), our bathroom looks ten times worse than it did when we started - but we're on the way.  We did find that there was some extra-strong construction that would normally be great, except when you're trying to take it out:  the floor has a 2" thick cement slab (which made us wonder why it cracked) that will need to be jack-hammered out, and the tub surround also has a one-inch thick mortar bed which also needs to be jack-hammered out.







Since it was getting late and we don't want our neighbors to be mad at us before we even move in, we finished up for the night by dragging all the trash out to the curb.  Tomorrow Dale will get an earlier start on hammering out the concrete floors and walls. I've got to work late, so he'll be working solo for a bit.

We also bought a new lockset for the front door - this place had been a rental and who knows what keys are out there floating around, so that's the first thing he'll do tomorrow!

Closed!

I picked up the key this afternoon!  Yipee!

Demolition begins tonight - hope Dale doesn't have to work late.  I also scheduled a truck for the weekend so I can get a bunch of stuff moved over, even though we hope to get the bathroom 99% finished before the final load gets moved.  Since we have to pick up supplies - lumber, drywall, etc, it will be handy to have a truck to zip across the way to Lowe's or Home Depot.

Getting closer to closing!

We met at the escrow company last Thursday to sign a pile of papers, looks like we may close on Tuesday.  We did the last walk-through on Friday (to be sure it's in the same condition as when we agreed to buy the house), and got some last-minute paperwork signed and forwarded.  So hopefully we are in the final stretch.

One of the things we will have to do a lot is get the back yard looking decent.  The plants that are there are overgrown and not all that attractive, the grass is dead and the trees are a mess.  So I know I want to do some work to get the yard looking good, but I don't want to spend a fortune on plants.  I'm a big fan of Freecycle, a web service to get rid of things without throwing them away - I've gotten some great plants from both there and on the 'free' section of craigslist.  

These succulents were a craigslist score, and the cannas and the phormium were from Freecycle.  We've also got a bucket of horsetail that I've culled from the overgrown beds here at the rental house we are in - there was a straggler tree that needed to be cut down and in order to do that, I had to clear out some of the overgrown plants.  I ran out of pots and so it's in an old stucco bucket! On the front porch, I've got some taro plants, more succulents and a rhododendron.  We also picked up some rose bushes, but they're looking a little less than healthy right now - they might have been dug up earlier than they should have by the people we got them from.

Someone listed some agapanthus this week, which is one of my favorite plants, but I have no where to put it right now!  But I'm going to contact them later this week to see if they still have some left --

One of the best things about living here in California is that plants grow beautifully -- and I should be able to get my yard landscaped for next to nothing.  Too bad we weren't already moved in - last week, someone posted 3000 sq feet of brand new sod that they'd used for an event - it was placed in the morning and they needed someone to come pick it up that night at the end of their event! Hoping that I can make a good score like that when I'm ready for it!

....still waiting.....

Well, I'm trying to be patient, but I am really anxious to get the closing done with so we can get started! We spent the evening at the new place last week, while the heater guy was getting the burner replaced.  We got a chance to wander through the yard, check out all the drawers in the garage, put light bulbs in all the overhead light fixtures so we could check out the rooms -- we just want to get started!

One of the things that we'd like to take advantage of, however, is a grant program that targets folks buying their first home in California.  It's $10K, worth working towards since it'll pay our closing costs and part of a down payment, but it turns out that we make just a bit too much money together, so our lending agent restructured the loan so it's just taking my income into account, so that added another week or so to the process.  I was hoping to get closed at the end of this coming week, but I don't think that's going to happen, so there goes another weekend!

I did get these really cute end tables on craigslist this weekend - $40 for the pair. I have a fun project in mind for them, so maybe tomorrow is a good day to get that started.  One of the things we've discovered in the past couple of years is that modern furniture styles just aren't our thing  -- so I'm looking for more traditional pieces, and these fit the bill.  Terrible picture, but it'll only make them look so much cooler when I take pictures when they're done!

Gypsy Trailer project

If you haven't read Honey Rock Dawn, a blog by Shreve Stockton, you should check it out.  So there was a post on her blog where she had received a hunting trailer from a friend, and she fixed it up as a gypsy trailer.  This summer, I showed it to my daughter Lindsay, who was all about getting one as a project.  And she did! She found a bargain 12 foot trailer for only $200, and we are going to get it all decked out so she and her partner Ange can use it for adventure trips.

 So I have to post some 'before' pictures -- because it's gonna be AWESOME when we finish and no one will believe how miserable it started out.











It does have some good qualities:  it's small, so it can be towed behind a regular car (even though they have a small SUV).




It has a little kitchenette, with an oven!  Seriously, who bakes anything while they're camping?!

It has a fold-out back bench that turns into a bed.  The picture to the left shows the fold-down table (and a kinda gross blue sheet over the side window).

They got it home successfully, and now we are in scavenger hunt mode, looking for cool stuff we can use to fix it up.  We're trying to do this as cheap as possible, so mostly free stuff or garage sale stuff.  I've got tons of fabric, trims and paints, so I'm getting those things set aside, because we're going to spend the Thanksgiving weekend working on it!




We anticipate being VERY VERY tired, but tired in a good way, from working like crazed painting/sewing/building/wiring/flooring nuts. 

Repairs

We're buying this place 'as is' with the seller being adamant that they will not do any repairs.  So when we got the FHA inspection/appraisal, any repairs that would be required to the property up to FHA standards would be our responsibility.  There were only three repairs listed, which was great. 




The first was that the toilet had a cracked tank as well as a broken lid, which would need to be replaced.  Rather than find a lid that fit an outdated toilet, we just bought a new toilet and installed that.


This was a really unpleasant job - the toilet had been in place for 50 years - which meant 50 years of crud built up.  But we scraped all that and got a nice, (higher) toilet installed.  Of course, we will have to take this right out the day after closing when we completely gut the bathroom, but now FHA is happy.

Next on the list was the overflow downspout on the water heater.  The water heater is not too old, but it didn't have a downspout attached to the overflow vent - which would mean that if the water heater developed a problem, boiling hot water would spray out at about eye level, making it impossible to reach in and turn off the main shutoff.  So we soldered a fitting on a copper pipe and screwed that on.  15 minute fix.

Notice the straps that attach the water heater to the back wall. These are earthquake straps, so if an earthquake hits, we won't be a rockin' and a rollin' out of the closet.  You'll notice also that this closet opens up to the side yard, not inside the house.  We are likely going to remove the water heater from this small closet, add on a water heater cabinet and put a forced air furnace in here.  That's down the road.

The final thing that needed to be fixed was that the floor furnace did not fire up when the thermostat was turned on.  Could have been a thermostat issue or a furnace issue - so we had the furnace guy out.  He replaced the thermostat and the heater started up, but the burner is not firing on high, so we are getting some minor parts replaced this week.

So this should clear up all the repairs. We were worried that we'd have roof issues (it's not a new roof, but it is not leaking) or termite repairs (there is visible termite damage in the studio) - so we feel really lucky that we had no additional repairs to make at this point, since if the whole deal falls through, we've just repaired someone else's house!

A bit more paperwork in the works - had to fax a bunch of new financials today - and the closing date is getting closer!  Time to get those bathroom plans finalized...

Kitties

I named this blog with something we used to say in our family - kind of a 'quit your complaining' kinda thing.  Don't like what we're having for dinner? Tough kitty puffs.



But I also have a couple of ridiculous kitties.  Meet Persephone and Mercury.  This is them at the vet this morning, getting their shots and check up.  They are Oriental Shorthair cats, long and lean and always into trouble.  Sweet and loving, too.  They will be helping us with our remodel, since they 'help' us with everything.



They are 2 years old, they are brother and sister and in this picture, they're wearing their harnesses that I can attach a leash to so they can go for a walk.  Well -- not really a walk, usually just wandering and sniffing plants and crawling around getting tangled before I give up and bring them back in.

Mercury is the boy, he's a very playful guy.  He loves to fetch and race all over the place like a crazy nut.    Here he is in his morning routine of falling over to roll on his back, waiting for a tummy scratch.  He's a very handsome fellow (it's official, that's what the vet said this morning).

This is Persephone.  She looks cute, but do not be fooled.  She is up to as much mischief as Mercury is.  She just has a better 'innocent face' than he does.  She loves people and is much braver than her brother, she will jump on your shoulders to say hi.  We had a guy come out to service our floor heater, she followed him under the house (without my knowing about it), and as he was laying on his back pointing the flashlight up in the heater box, there's her little face snooping to see what he's doing.  I hear a "why, hello there kitty" coming from under the house, which is how I discover she's escaped from her bathroom prison to follow him into the crawlspace.


So - the namesakes in a way of the blog, and they will be featured helpers in our home fix-up process.  You'll see them in pictures, no doubt, since they're right in the midst of everything.

Waiting.....

We had our appraisal and FHA inspection done late last week - a couple of minor repairs to do and everything is going along just fine.  Basically, all the hurdles have been passed and now we are just waiting for the closing day! Because we are breaking our lease here, we have to cooperate to find a new tenant so this weekend was big cleaning day - Dale worked in the yard and I scrubbed the house.  An ad will go in this week and hopefully we find someone to take over the place.  We can close early if we do find a tenant, but what we'd really like is someone who wants to move in November, which would give us a little time to get the bathroom finished so it is functional for when we move in!



 I was telling Dale that I can't wait to get clipping on the trees - there are 2 avocado trees, a lemon tree and a bottlebrush -all of them completely overgrown. I'd like to get them whipped into shape - although we may end up removing the bottlebrush and lemon eventually (since they're where we'd like a pool to be!).












One of the avocados is large  & gorgeous, the other is small and sprawling and will probably go.



This is the nice big one---->








The other kind of tree we have is a bottlebrush, which is something that's indigenous to Australia and is pretty common here in SoCal -- They can have lovely red flowers all over, but the one we have is terribly overgrown and needs to be cut back quite a bit so it will bloom.  It does have a nice weeping habit, so maybe I can make it more manageable.  These are almost the only flowers on the tree, which should be pretty much covered with them.










Finally, the lemon tree which is a huge mess.  The only fruits are way too high to reach, it needs to be topped and shaped, which would mean no lemons for awhile, but it's a hot mess as is, so it needs some serious trimming.


Trimming the trees is not a big priority, but the sooner I get them trimmed, the earlier they can start to bear fruit and flowers, so I'd like to get to work on them soon!  You can see in this picture of the lemon tree how dead the yard is -- it needs LOTS of work, but just trimming the trees and raking the dead leaves will go a long way.

Bathroom ideas

So after we had a chance to spend some time in our future house/project with a measuring tape, I sat down and drew out a map of what we had.


It's a pretty awkward layout, especially since the door currently opens up to block the bathtub area.  We are going to remove that door and put in a pocket door, which would open up the space and make it more usable.  We are also planning on removing the tub and instead having a shower placed along the wall with the window.





Our new layout would look something like this:


The shower looks a little deeper than it should but that's the basic idea.  the two walls that frame out the shower do not go to the ceiling, just to the top of the shower door, open above so the shower won't feel confining.  We're hoping to find a sideboard or dresser or buffet or something to convert to a vanity.




Here are some of the inspirational items I am thinking of for our new bathroom - white subway tiles with a marble floor for the shower, patterned cement tiles for the floor of the bathroom, some nice border pieces to accent the subway tiles.... just thinking right now.  It looks pretty white - we'll be painting the walls above the subway tiles with a color from the patterned tiles.  I'm leaning towards a minty green. I think Dale will veto that (but I get my way most of the time, so we'll see).

Inspection - and photos!

panorama of the backyard

We are performing our own inspection, for two reasons:
1.  We've done this before and feel confident that the things we find are things we will be repairing.
2.  We have a previous inspection (done less than a month ago) to go by.

So, today we had access to the house for a couple of hours.  Dale climbed all over and got filthy, while I took photos and measured the heck out of everything.  We've remodeled/restored several projects in the past, and I've always regretted not taking more 'before' shots - so I took about 200 pictures of the house today.

I'll be posting photos as we go, so I'll only put a few on today of each room.


Bathroom

 

This is the first room we're going to be working on - we plan on doing demolition the day after closing.  There's nothing in here we like - slick melamine walls, ugly pinkish tan toilet (with lots of cracks) and tub, crummy sink, terrible medicine cabinet/light, non-functioning wall heater.... the list is long.  There's also a nice long crack across the tile from the toilet to the tub.


We were worried about that until our agent brought us to a house down the street that is the identical floor plan, just reversed (and listed for 80K more than ours, although they added on a bathroom).  The same crack was on the floor in that bathroom, too -- so it must have been a builder design problem.  After Dale went into the crawlspace and checked it out, there is a section that could use some reinforcing that seems to be causing it.

Studio

This room is the first bedroom as you enter the house - it's going to be my art studio.  It's airy and light, big windows that look out the front of the house.  I won't be doing a lot of work on this room at first, except that this is the one room with obvious termite damage.

The previous owner had carpet in the house, and it looks like this area progressed with termites for years.  We'll be pulling this up and replacing the floor and any damaged subfloor areas (Dale looked while in the crawl space, it's not very extensive).  It's a big room, 10 x 13.


 Guest Bedroom

This room won't be getting a lot done right away, either - although we'd like to replace the windows and remove the very ugly window air conditioner.  But we do want to make it inviting for guests!

It's not huge, the smallest of the three bedrooms at 9 x 11.  But plenty of light with bright windows and a roomy closet.


Master Bedroom

This room will also be fine for just a while - but it's the room that will be getting most of the remodeling in the future.  We will be adding on to the backside of this room, out about 12 feet, and adding in an en-suite bathroom.  The house we looked at down the street added the bathroom on to the back of the room, but we'd like windows that overlook the backyard from the bedroom.  By extending the bedroom back, we'll also be able to add french doors out onto our future patio.






It's not a big room as it is now, only about 11 x 12, but when we get around to remodeling this one, it will be more like 15 x 12.  Another icky AC unit in the window.

We do plan on putting in central heat and air in the next year, and replacing most of the windows as we do each room. 


Living Room

The wall on the far left will eventually be opened up to the kitchen.

We really like the way this room flows into the backyard.  Huge 10' long sliding glass window!  Dale would like to replace it with french doors (2 sets) or bifold glass doors to open the whole space up.   It has a very awkwardly placed fireplace - in the corner, which will give us some issues about where to place furniture and all --

The other side of the room has a long, blank wall that we plan on building bookshelves floor to ceiling.  The floor heater you see will eventually be replaced when the central air is installed.  Through the doorway, you can see the built-in hall storage closets, which are pretty cool, and then the bathroom is to the right of that.  The doorway holds a pocket door, which we'll probably take out (but I love pocket doors!) so we can make this doorway wider.  We'll use the pocket door to replace the bathroom door so we'll have more usable space in the bathroom.

What you can't see in these pictures is that the back wall here has painted over paneling, which we may or may not remove, since we're installing bookshelves along that wall.  The ceiling is also covered with acoustic tiles, so I assume the plaster ceiling will need repair.  Luckily, Dale's a plasterer, so this doesn't scare us one bit.  The room measures 16 x 18.

Kitchen

Oh, I saved the best for last, ha ha!

This is a panorama of a long, narrow room.  On the left is a small eating area, which I have BIG plans for (built in benches, cozy dining space), we are planning on replacing the window with the AC unit with a door (there's a door at the end of the galley kitchen we'll be removing), and the rest of the kitchen will be completely removed when we get to the big kitchen remodel. 



The kitchen has some lovely 1970s era brick-look linoleum - ick - and yellow tiles that are pretty much cracked and chipped.  The one retro things that both Dale and I do like is the wall-mounted kitchen faucet and the breadboards built into the lower cabinets.  We'll save both those things, but the rest of it will be gone.  The wall on the right, here, will be mostly removed to open the kitchen onto the living room, to create an open concept space.  Rather than being a galley kitchen, we'll probably be making a U-shaped kitchen which we'll be able to do by removing that back door and replacing it with a window.


This space is large, 9 x 21.

That leaves the backyard, the garage and patios for a future post.  After spending the day crawling around the attic, the crawl space and touching disgusting stuff all over the place, we were glad to come home and take a shower.  We'd also met with our mortgage person to sign all the necessary papers there, and went through all the disclosures and tax info.  I still have a pile of papers to go through and return to the title company -- it's been a real change, buying in California, compared to our previous purchases in the midwest.