Master Bath

Hello blog.  Long time, no talk.  I should catch up more, but for now, here's my inspiration for when we remodel our master bath.  Hopefully this project will occur some time before I die and will begin an end in less than a 2-year span of time.

The Deck Saga

Since we've been here, we've had trouble figuring out what to do with the deck on the back of our house. The deck has held the original building permit on our house open for the last 7 years because it has never been completed. After getting a few professional opinions, we decided our best option was to start over. So, I reluctantly kissed all of my bathroom remodeling money good-bye and Matt started to tear down the deck. He spent several days taking all of the Trex off so we could reuse it, but it only took about 45 minutes to tear down the framing. Our posts are still standing because we plan to reuse them and finish the brick.

One of the main reasons we decided to start over is that we were afraid we had water issues because the deck was never properly flashed. This was definitely confirmed by the state of the sheeting under the ledger boards on our bays. The ledger just fell off because the sheeting was so rotted. Hopefully the rot doesn't go beyond the sheeting.


The good news is that in a few weeks we should have a useable deck. One that our kids can actually go out on. One that has stairs from the yard so we can use our kitchen doors to go outside! One that will, hopefully, be so spectacular I'll forget all about missed opportunities to remodel bathrooms.

Tabula Rasa

Here's the exterior photo of our house from the real estate listing.



And here's the exterior now.



We've gotten a lot of compliments on how nice our house looks and all we've done is rip things out. This neighborhood is easy to please. I guess the take-home lesson is: nice plants + wrong location = ugly.

In other yard news, I bought a crazy hippy lawn mower (the Fiskars Momentum) and we love it!

I used to like painting. . .

I've been painting. Surprise!

I finished painting the trim in the hall and entry. I had to make a lot of repairs before I could start painting. The trim was really battered and the bottoms of the door jambs looked like this



Now they look like this



I filled the gaps with grout and then caulked. Certainly not great, but at least the kids can't put things in the holes anymore.


I painted the linen closet



And Winnie's closet



I just need to finish painting the doors to offically be done with the paint in Winnie's room. I'm painting the hallway side of all my doors gray--a darker shade of the color on the walls.



I painted one door and then decided that it wasn't quite dark enough so I had the paint retinted today. I might get the doors done this weekend, but since the weather is supposed to be so nice, we're going to work in the yard. Maybe the kids will get to jump on our trampoline.



See it there sticking up above the dirt? Matt started to dig the hole out and this is what we found



Hardened 80 lb bags or mortar. They totally fill the hole and start about 6 inches down. That will be hours of trampoline fun.

The House, Lately

Hall before



Hall in progress



Entry before



Entry in progress



Family Room before (sorry about the small picture--it's from the listing and I forgot to take any others before I started painting)



Family Room in progress



I should be farther along in my painting, but I keep getting distracted and doing things like this



and like this



and like this



P.S. If the bag happens to be your birthday present, pretend you didn't see it here first. :)

Us Lately

The pink room has grown on me

We've been working on the "cutification" of Winnie's room.







We now have a room that feels mostly done--as long as you don't look at the closet wall. I still need to paint the closet and the doors are still off awaiting paint.

Winnie's Room. Before & After (sort-of)

It took a month, but I have finally painted a room in our new house. I started with Winnie's room because it was small, the walls were in the best shape, and I didn't like how the dark color made the room feel like a cave. I wanted a light, bright room and Winnie just wanted pink. Here are the before shots of the dark plum colored walls.

I don't think the pictures really reflect how dark this room felt, or how banged up the walls were. And they certainly don't reflect how the pink on the closet doors clashed with the purple on the walls.

Here's one wall patched and ready for paint. Keep in mind that I started with this room because the walls were in the best shape, so it would require the least work to paint.

One coat of primer and two coats of paint on the walls. Three coats of paint on the ceiling. Two coats of paint on the trim. The trim and ceilings in our house are beige instead of white. I think painting Winnie's ceiling a brighter white made the biggest impact in brightening up her room. Here's the contrast in the ceiling before and after.

And finally a pink princess room. At first I wasn't crazy about the color, but Winnie loved it so much I decided to leave it alone and now it's grown on me. I think once I get a few things on the walls to break up all that pink it will look better. You'll notice I still haven't painted her closet and bedroom doors - they need to be sanded down so you can't see the ridge where the panels were painted. I also want to try spraying the doors instead of painting them with a brush.

I have some white curtains to hang, a white mirror to go over the dresser, a wall lamp to go over the bed and some art to hang before we're finished with Winnie's room, but for now it's nice to have one room that feels fresh and clean.

Bumps in the road

It's official. We are no longer home owners. We closed on the sale of our house Friday. The new owners take possession on Saturday. Late last week it was looking like we were going to be able to get into our new house with time to spare before we hand over the keys to this house. The sale of this house was going smoothly, and our financing was all arranged for the new house pending the results of last Thursday appraisal. Sadly our appraisal on the new house brought all of that to a screaching halt. The house appraised for more than we're paying (yay!), but it turns out we can't get financing for the new house without adding a railing to the never completed back deck. No big deal, you might think, until you find out that the deck looks like this--

42' x 10' and falling apart. Matt and I were willing to put a railing on even still, but then we realized that it would require a permit. I called the city and found out that there is already an outstanding permit--not just for the deck, but for the whole house! That opens up a whole new can of worms. Given the current condition of the house (broken windows, over-spanned deck beams, etc) I don't think there's any way an inspector would come out and pass off the railing without requiring that we fix all of the other problems. The permit has been open long enough that the city could make us bring anything and everything in the house up to the current code if they wanted to. I don't know how much code has changed in the last 6 years, but it wouldn't take much for the costs to add up. So we're negotiating with the bank that owns the house and trying to decide who's going to put up a railing and if we want the building permit to be closed before we're willing to buy.

On a brighter note, check out the color scheme of one of the bedrooms!

I think this example probably sums up why we want to repaint every square inch of the house. Sadly, this room looks better in the photo than in real life!

Out with the old and in with the new

Guess what! We sold our house! We showed our house 36 times. I think that equates to about 100 extra hours of cleaning so I'm very glad it's over. We close on the sale on December 8th. Yay! Homeless in time for the holidays.

Actually, if we're very good, Santa might be able to get us into our new house in just a couple of weeks. New house, you say? Yes, we're under contract on this lovely house in Springville.




(Please excuse the smoke bush trying to devour one side of the house. The yard could use a little TLC).

Dream house? I'm not so sure. It's about 100 years to new to be my dream house, but this is the first house we looked that I didn't think needed a major remodel. The current interior isn't exactly my style, but I probably wouldn't have liked it if I couldn't think of some projects to do. There are some things I love about the house like the kitchen--it's laid out exactly how I would have chosen to have it if I had built the house with fantastic features like big deep drawers and a cabinet for cookie sheets right next to the stove.



And there are some things I don't love about the house. The master bath for example:

Doesn't it look like it would be soothing and restful to lean your head against a wall of uneven stones?

The house has 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a formal living room, great room and laundry up and an unfinished basement down. The house is on a hill so most of the basement is daylight. The future family room in the basement even has a set of french doors that walk out into the back yard. Upstairs there is a deck that spans the whole back of the house and can be accessed from the great room or the master bedroom.

The house is a lot bigger and nicer than I was expecting to be able to buy. I feel a little bit spoiled. I'll have a cold storage room! A garage! A pantry! A big, unfinished basement, just waiting to be anything I want it to be! For a while I think we'll just rattle around the house not knowing what to do with so much space (over 3x our current square footage), but everyone tells me that we shouldn't have too much trouble figuring out how to fill it up.

Now wish us luck in trying to get our closing dates to line up with each other!

A house obsession update

So, my dream house sold, and not to us. We weren't the first offer in the line, but all signs seemed to point to our offer being the one the bank was most likely to take. Don't trust the signs. Currently the house has a contractor's sign out front and really BIG dumpster on the drive, but not much else seems to be happening. I'm scared to drive by, but too curious not to.

We also made an offer on a bank-owned house in the Edgemont neighborhood. Edgemont is a good compromise between Matt and I. The neighborhood is old enough that the houses still have character, but they don't require quite as much work as my dream house. The house in Edgemont was a really good fit for our family, but it was also a really boring ranch. The yard was the redeeming factor in my eyes. The bank liked our offer, but not our closing terms. We'd set our closing date at the end of August and they balked at having it out so far. Unfortunately, that house is now under contract.

Our house has been on the market for just shy of two months now and we've had a lot of lookers, but no buyers so far. This is good and bad. Bad because it's really a pain to try and keep my house clean enough to show at a moment's notice! A lot of our stuff is packed away and I don't feel like I can start anything that will make a mess--like making bread or sewing. The good part of all this is that, right now, there isn't a house on the market that we're really interested in, so we're not feeling rushed to get out of this one. Tonight Matt and I took some video of the best options out there right now, but we've decided we aren't going to make any offers until an offer comes in on our house. We dropped the listing price of our house today, so hopefully we'll get an offer soon.


Matt's and my wants for a house seem like they would meld the best if we could build a custom house (of course). I surfed online floor plans, looking for a house that contained all of my ideal elements--a studio for Matt, a craft/sewing space for me, a good mud room that could be the main family entrance, an eat-in kitchen with good views of the yard and at least 3 bedrooms on the same level. I actually found a plan that is almost exactly what I would have come up with if I'd been working with an architect--the Lakeland Cape Cod from simplyeleganthomedesigns.com. Here's the floor plan.


First floor:

Second floor:

I created a gallery of interior/exterior photos here.

(My only complaint is that the house is a little too big. If we were really to build I might work with the architect to see if we could scale it all down a bit.)

I was really getting behind the idea of building until we started to look at lots. Lots in the Edgemont neighborhood cost as much or more than houses! How can this be? How can anyone afford to build a house--you're instantly upside down. I guess they are depending on people who plan to stay in their house forever and don't care about the market value? The lot we really like is .31 acres and would fit this house plan really well, but it's listed for $134,900. That is $10,000 more than our new listing price for our townhouse and only $50,000 less than a house of comparable size and acreage just sold for only two blocks away. Maybe we could build the garage for $50,000 and live in a studio for a few years while we save up. I'm sure the neighbors would go for that!

All dressed up and ready to sell

As of tomorrow morning, our house is officially on the market. We took the pictures and signed the contract tonight and the listing should be up in the morning. I was just done vacuuming when the photographer got here. There's no way I would have made it without the help of my sister-in-law who ended up watching the kids all day! Thanks, Jenny!

We packed up, paired down and painted to try and make our house show better. Here's a little tour:

The front--with a for sale sign!

Looking into the living room

The living room facing the window

The dining room

The kitchen

Upstairs bathroom



Master bedroom

The kids room

I think most of our rooms look pretty good in photos, except the kitchen. I would love to have had time to paint it to brighten it up and simplify the color scheme, but it's not going to happen. At the rate I finish projects I would need at least a year.

Of course, there are still a lot of little things that need to be done. Hopefully we can get to most of them tomorrow.

6/25/10 - Our listing is up!