BedStuy Reno: July 2008
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July 29, 2008
Lower Level: Kitchen Updater
Here are a couple pics from our nearly complete kitchen. All the appliances are in and working, plumbing is all hooked up, and the lights are on! The problem is, now that the lights are on, we don't really like them. In an effort to be energy conscious, G and I selected compact flourescent downlights for the kitchen, without really evaluating the quality of the light they give off. Now that they're in, we can see that the light they give is too cold and antiseptic.
July 24, 2008
Top Floor Apartment: Sanding the Floor
After we had finished painting, the apartment was looking good and was nearly ready to welcome G' mom. She would be staying in the back room of the top floor, where previously there had been a nasty green carpet covering the floor. We removed this and found two layers of linoleum. This wasn't really nice or welcoming for G's mom, so we decided to take up the linoleum and at least get a first pass done at sanding the old subfloor boards underneath before her arrival.
The linoleum was easy enough to take up, but the remaining mastic coating the floor proved persistent. It took several passes with the ridiculously tough sandpaper on the sander to get the boards looking good. We left the boards raw since any sealer we put down would not have time to dry before G's mom showed up. Instead, we left the final passes with the superfine paper for after her visit.
July 23, 2008
Top Floor Apartment: Painting in the Hallway
The hallway at the top of the stairs is hard to photograph because the space is tight. It's hard to tell the complete story. On the wall on the outside of the bathroom, we took down the cracked bulging plaster, left up the lathe, and resurfaced with new sheetrock. This had to be primed, along with some other cracks and holes I had patched. Then all surfaces in the hallway - except for the stairs and railings - were given two coats of white. Out here we also painted the baseboards white.
As I mentioned in the previous post, there are 5 doors in this hallway (kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, second bedroom, and closet with ladder to roof), and G selected 5 different colors, one for each door. The door in the last picture shown is to the bathroom, which we painted with a semi-gloss black (I think called blackberry?), which we had also used for the baseboards and mouldings in the bathroom downstairs.
July 22, 2008
Top Floor Apartment: Painting Jam, encore
More pics from our second weekend of intense round-the-clock painting in the top floor apartment. After we had primed where necessary, and applied two coats of white everywhere, the apartment looked mostly like the first picture above. Then we began hitting the mouldings and baseboards with the khaki-ish color G selected. For the 5 doors in the top floor hallway, G selected 5 bright colors to add some fun and energy. My favorite: the orange door.
July 20, 2008
Top Floor Apartment: Painting Jam, con't.
A before pic from the back room on the top floor, and a progress pic from the front room. When we began, we needed to prime the ceilings which had been laminated with the new sheetrock, and also prime the various holes all around the apartment that we had patched after the electricians finished their work up there.
Top Floor Apartment: Painting Jam
. . . and we're back. Though it may seem like we've taken a break, the opposite is actually true. We have been hard at work on the house, and as such, the reno blog has suffered. We had a serious push on the top floor, what will be the apartment, when G's mom came for a visit from Brussels. Since she would be staying with us, we needed to make a nice and homey space for her. It gave us a good reason to really crank on the top floor.
We emailed everyone we could think of and arranged for two back-to-back painting party weekends. The turnout was solid. We got a lot done, painting the hallway leading up the stairs to the apartment, the hallway at the top of the stairs, the two large front and back rooms, and all their respective mouldings and base boards. As I had mentioned in an earlier post, we had had our ceilings cleaned up by having them laminated with thin sheetrock, thus saving what plaster details remained, and covering up a lot of cracks, holes and imperfections. On the top floor, the ceilings had been "stuccoed," and it was nice to see that go.
For our choice of paint, we went with a simple satin white - the most basic 5-gallon jug you can find at Home Depot from Behr. For the mouldings and baseboards inside the rooms, G selected a light khaki-ish tone from Benjamin Moore, AC-1.