The First Pass with the Drum Sander

The Finished Results

After painting the back parlor room, G and I switched gears the following weekend to sanding the floor. We still had the sander and edger we were borrowing from our generous neighbor, with which we had previously sanded the kitchen floor.

We needed the back parlor habitable by Thanksgiving, since G’s mom was coming from Brussels to stay with us. At the time, G and I were camping out on the bottom floor and trying to get the top floor rented. The last time G’s mom had come for a visit, we were still living on the top floor, where we had just finished painting and sanding, and the bottom two floors of the house were still deeply “in progress.” We wanted to show G’s mom that the house had evolved since her last visit, and also give her a comfortable room to stay in.

We had about three weekends to go before T-day, so we needed to crank through the sanding and get on to the sealing, so we could let the floor dry, and then try to furnish the room in some kind of inviting way.

When sanding, G works the drum sander, and I work the edger. I hate the edger. It’s heavy and awkward to use, and extremely powerful and aggressive, so requires a lot of control. It’s also incredibly loud, and the whole thing creates a lot of dust too. The experience of sanding is really intense, kind of like spending a day inside an airplane engine. But the best part of it is the transformative results.

The back parlor floor cleaned up pretty well – I wouldn’t say perfect, being that there were a lot of stains and weird marks to begin with. We got maybe 80% of all the stains and marks up, but the floor still bears some evidence of its history.

Ceiling Painted with "Swiss Coffee," Priming Moldings and Taping Off

Cutting In and Painting the Walls with "Desert Twilight"

Ok, so with the Kitchen mostly buttoned up, G and I moved upstairs to the back parlor room. This room was to become our bedroom, and we wanted it to be both warm and comfortable as a space. I had seen some images at the time of a bedroom with a bold grayish-green set off with some warm rich wood tones that I was really digging. We decided to search for our own bold grayish-green color, and thought that someday, when our fireplace was stripped (and the firebox rebuilt and working as a wood-burning fireplace, you know, sometime after that fireplace grant came through), it would act as the warm rich wood tone that would go nicely with the beautiful bold walls.

We looked through our Benajmin Moore color fan, and settled first on a color called “Durango,” which I was all for. It was deep and rich and almost a greenish brown, or brownish green, whichever you prefer. For the ceiling and molding colors, we wanted a white, but something that was also warm and rich itself. G liked a color I think called “Mayonnaise,” which is funny because in Belgium (where G hails from), they eat their fries with mayonnaise. But then we settled on “Swiss Coffee,” which I think is a winner as a paint name. We used a matte for the ceiling, and a semi-gloss for the moldings.

Once we had the “Swiss Coffee” picked, we sort of chickened out on the boldness of the “Durango,” and hedged to a lighter version of grayish-green, Benjamin Moore’s “Desert Twilight.”

We started first by getting all the crap we had been storing in the room out of the room. The focus had been on the Kitchen and Lower Level after all our work in the Apartment . The Parlor Floor, once we finished closing it up and dealing with the ceilings, was where we stored things that we didn’t know where else to store – tools, pianos, G’s giant puzzle-piece artwork, etc.

Once we had the room cleaned out, and radiators removed (heavy, heavy radiators) we began by painting the ceiling and one remaining area of wall that still had the picture molding and lincrusta paneling. Generally, when painting, I’m on rolling and G is on cutting in. Over time, we’ve both gotten pretty good at our roles, and can knock stuff out fairly quickly when we need to. We got the painting of the room done in one weekend, working a full Saturday and Sunday. (The room had previously been primed with the help of G's friends.)

When it came time to get to the walls, we opened the can of paint and said, “well, here goes.” Along with the “Piano Concerto” of the bathroom, this was our boldest color yet on a wall (not withstanding the orange door in the apartment). But we were pretty happy with the results in the end, and thought the room looked both warm and inviting, but also somewhat sophisticated (at least by our broke-ass standards).

Kitchen Space - Ready for Kitchen Install

Kitchen Install - G and I get to know Ikea

Kitchen Final - Up and Running

When we last left off, G and I were just about done with the kitchen install. (It had been a long haul since Day One, and the maggots we found there found there). There were some odds and ends left – cabinet doors and drawer pulls and things like that. We had successfully assembled our Ikea kitchen – put together the base and wall cabs, put them in place, installed the microwave, installed the range top, assembled the island, cut and installed the countertops, installed the sink, and then called the electrician and the plumbers to come back and hook up the appliances. (By successfully, I mean we finished, but not without some hiccups – we ordered the kitchen from Ikea our first summer in the house, thinking, hey, we’re gonna need this new kitchen pretty soon! But in reality, it took us nearly two years to get the point where we were ready to actually assemble our new kitchen. This meant limited warranties had expired on the appliances we had bought – microwave, oven, range top – and that we were only now, two years later, finally opening the boxes and seeing what was there, and what was missing. And there were some things missing! See previous posts for more on that...

We had planned the kitchen space when we first designed the layout of the house, and when we decided we would go with Ikea, we spent some time with their kitchen planning software laying out their cabinets to suit our original design intent. We had to modify our own plans (the kitchen along the wall was expanded by one cabinet), and to achieve the island we wanted, we had to go off of Ikea’s grid somewhat, and used some wall cabinets as base cabinets to get deep cabinets on the sink side, and shallow cabinets on the other side, with a sort of cutout where we could sit two stools with space for legroom.

Once we had put everything together, the electrician was able to wire the dishwasher and install two outlets on either side of the island. He also wired the oven and the range top igniter (range top is gas, oven is electric). The plumber hooked up the sink, installed the faucet, connected the dishwasher, connected the range top to the gas line, and hooked up the fridge to its water supply. (G and I had decided to spring for having the plumber run a water line to the fridge so we could have water and ice through it – our own American luxury! Which took a little time to convince G of its necessity, or at least benefit. She never uses it. I love it.)

Et voila! Looks easy, in hindsight. Really, the hardest part for us was cutting the countertops to size. We used Ikea’s butcher block counter tops, for their warmth and also their price point, but to really cut it perfectly, you should have a table saw. We didn’t, so we did our best with our circular saw, using cutting guides that we screwed into place to keep the cuts straight as we went. Results were decent, not perfect. But overall, we were really happy with how it turned out. And pretty impressed with ourselves that we were able to pull it off. Sort of like that scene in the Matrix where Keanu Reeves says, “Whoa, I know kung fu!” For us it was like, “whoa, we built a kitchen!”

Some previous kitchen-related posts, if you're interested:
Here Comes the Kitchen!
Kitchen Chronicles, Part 2
Kitchen Chronicles, Part 3

Update:

It’s been a long time, folks.

Why the year-plus hiatus? To make a long story short, G and I had been in touch with the New York Times last summer, and the House and Home section was planning to run an article about our house, and the ways in which we have managed to renovate it on the cheap.

There were two caveats:

One, we finish the renovation before the story could happen.

Two, no blogging.

The Times wanted the story to be an exclusive, and they couldn’t have finished images of our house being published elsewhere before they had a chance to publish the story themselves.

But, I pointed out, I’m sure the Times readership dwarfs the readership of the Bed Stuy Reno! It really shouldn’t be an issue.

Still, that’s how they operated, I was told.

So, I had to make sure then, if I was going to stop blogging, that the article would be a sure thing. Since it would be some time before the reno was really done, to cut myself off from blogging about the work was a real sacrifice for me.

No problem, I was assured. Just finish the project, and when you’re ready, we’ll be here to do the story.

About a year later, with the renovation more or less done (is it ever really done?), and phonecalls and emails back and forth between the writer and myself, a date for the interview was scheduled – October 15th, with the story to drop sometime by the end of the month.

Until I get the call today. The House and Home editor has decided to put the kibosh on the story. It turns out too much time had passed, and the editor now deemed that our “on the cheap” renovation wasn’t cheap enough. Or the aesthetics no longer exciting enough. Or the whole story not unique enough, since other similar articles are scheduled to go to press soon.

All of which I completely disagree with! Similar stories? I think in order to fully understand the project, you need to get the full story, of how we went from crackhouse with maggot-infested fridge, to pretty-nice house, with a lot of salvaged original details mixed with our own aesthetics and sensibilities, all on a shoestring budget. Not to mention the fact that we updated our electric, plumbing, and put in a new three-zone heating system.

AND blogged about it! Garnering advice, counseling, materials, help, and new friends. I really think the Times missed the whole importance of the blog. The Bed Stuy Reno has been as useful a tool in our renovation as any of the number of others sitting in our basement. I mean, what other way to ask people how to sand and seal a floor, and get 40 responses back in a day? And all speaking from first-hand experience. We're not the first people to renovate a house of course, but using the blog as a critical resource in doing it yourself, that's a story I have not personally read about yet.

Needless to say it was very disappointing, and, I thought, pretty unfair to boot. In the end, we were penalized for taking a long time to finish our renovation, despite being assured it would not be an issue. And ironically, the time our renovation took was a function of being “on the cheap,” the whole point of the article in the first place!

So, while I have lost a year of blogging, with no Times article to show for it, there is a bright side. G and I have done a lot of work on the place in the past year (less blogging meant more working), and have taken a lot of pictures to prove it. Seeing as how I’m no longer bound by an exclusivity agreement, I’m going to start updating the blog again, both with work already done, and the projects that continue.

Yes, work still continues, but it’s of the more finish and design-y variety, and less the necessities of the basic shell and enclosure. We’ve got some great stories to go with the projects, like how we built a complete built-in custom floor-to-ceiling bookshelf along the lower level wall, complete with a built-in desk and return, all for about $650 bucks all-in. (Hint: the Home Depot and Lowes both have loose return policies.)

Stay tuned!

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.

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..

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.

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.

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.

. . . 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.

G's own inspiration, from sketch to realization. If you look at her sketch, you will see that she actually counted the exact number of tiles we needed - bright yellow turns out to be a pricey color. Basically, any tile that is a bright color is expensive. The half bath is unfiltered. It's just this tiny little room, that will have a lot, really a lot, of color. The sink will be mounted in the corner where this crazy yellow tile wall you see will frame two mirror panels. The color palette is as bold as the tile, I'll post pics as soon as we get the paint up.

Since we didn't plan all that well ahead, G and I had a washer and dryer hookup plumbed on the Parlor Floor pass-thru closet we created, but we didn't put a drain in the floor for under the washer in case it ever leaks. Since the machine would be sitting right on the wood floor, we decided to build a pan and tile it - in case the washer leaks, which can happen, at least the water will be held in one spot until we can figure out what to do with it.

I installed cement backer board on top of a layer of plywood and then tiled on top of that. We had really limited time before we needed to get the machines in, (we were having some help with the lamination of the ceilings, and the same guys would be connecting the machines in this spot) so it was really 1-2-3, get it done. We had leftover white hex tiles and subway tiles for the curb and walls, which we got on really quickly. After I grouted, we let it dry overnight, then protected the floor and G came in and primed the new drywall in this closet nook with white primer, before the area behind the machines would be too hard to access.

The other week we had our appliances delivered. Fridge, dishwasher, and . . . washer and dryer. I can't really express how happy G and I are to see these beautiful, incredible, life changing machines, inside the house, so let's just take a moment to look at these pictures.

Earlier I had posted the beginning of the lamination process to deal with the ceiling in the front parlor.

http://www.brownstoner.com/bedstuy_reno/archives/2008/04/catchup_work.html

We had wanted to save the remaining detail there, and clean up the field as best we could without a major replastering project being on our hands. We did that by "laminating" thin sheetrock to the existing cracked and hole-filled ceiling, covering up the problem areas, and then taping and spackling the sheetrock. The thinness of the sheetrock still allows the remaining detail to have depth.

Unbelievably, this is the 200th (!) posting of the Bed Stuy Reno. I feel like attaching a cheesy 1995-era animated gif of balloons and streamers. But I wouldn't know where to find one, and I'm not sure it's a gif I'm even talking about.

Appropriately, this posting is about tiling. Above is an image set from the Lower Level half bath - you can see the floor prepped and ready for tile, G (on the phone even) preparing the tile and pattern, and then me installing it.

We had fun with this one. G decided to invert our typical field of white hex with black hex making the pattern. Where the star shape is corresponds to the future placement of the little wall-mount corner sink above. And near the toilet, G added a randomly placed Spirit Flower, inspired by one reader's comments in regards to the top floor bathroom tilework. So web 2.0.