Bathroom Renovation

This project was a big one. Too big to do it ourselves, so we hired out the work on this project. We designed the layout and picked everything out, and that was probably work enough alone!

If you can't remember what the bathroom looked like, stroll down memory lane here. The new bathroom layout called for giving up 18" of space of office space by moving the wall back, which allowed us to build a separate shower stall. On the opposite wall, the bedroom had a few feet of underutilized space plus there was a few more square feet adjacent to that that was walled off, completely unused so we added that to the bathroom too. All in our bathroom went from about 72 square feet to over 100, and it feels even more spacious.

Early stage pics:

In this one you can see where the old wall was by the strip on the ceiling, along with the new wall set back from there. Perpendicular to that you can also make out the small wall that formed one side of the bathtub/shower alcove.

Here is one of the door to the bathroom, without and later with some semblance of a floor and wall.

And this corner is where the shower stall will go.

Speak of the devil, looks like that shower stall is all framed out!
Somewhere in the middle of the project:

Subfloor in, wallboard up and taped. Guest appearance by our vanity!

...And the floor tiles are installed. We used regular white marble tiles for the majority of the floor, but for a nice bonus we bought basketweave tile and installed them in the center of the floor in a 4'x6' pattern, bordered with small (3/4") black marble tiles. Nice.

Back to the shower stall. We used standard issue American Standard/American Olean white tiles from the big box home improvement store for the bulk of the stall, accented with some nice tile from our fancy tile store.

Stall in progress:

Close up of the built-in nook.
Close up of the accent tiles

Next up was the beadboard and the counter tops. We went with white marble counter tops, and had that same marble cut for atop the knee wall on the shower and for above the curb below the shower door.

Finished goods:

First lets get to the shower stall, complete with glass door and side panel:

Double vanity was seen earlier, but here it is in all its glory, with his and hers medicine cabinets along with three shiny bath sconce lights.

For all of the talk of the shower stall, you might have wondered about the bath. Yep, we have one of those too. Here it is, near the window which got a new set of blinds to keep it all private.

A bathroom wouldn't be a bathroom without a toilet, and sure enough we have one of those too. We placed this on the opposite wall from the vanity. Most of this space was reclaimed from the adjacent bedroom.

Hope you enjoyed our bath. Now the work continues inside and outside of the house!

Updates - First floor

Lots of updates at Grandma's house. Looking at the previous post, I didn't realize I didn't post any pics of the finished goods so let's get those out of the way first.

As you walk into the house now you are greeted by the staircase that was once black and white, now natural pine and white (plus we added one small pendant light at the entry).

Then of course there is no more hallway. Instead you see our dining room. The main color was Benjamin Moore Cedar Key with one accent wall in BM Dinner Party, which was the original color we chose for the dining room.

Couple more shots to round it out:

Bye Bye Hallway

Okay, the posts have been on hiatus...but Grandma hasn't! We have a nice new fence, the front yard is partially torn up and has established perennials that get better every year, we've finished the tile backsplash around the stove in the kitchen, among other things.

But you don't care about those things. You want to see destruction! And before and afters! Well, hopefully there will be an after here, but we have some before and during from our current project, which is a demo of the hallway wall on the first floor.

I know what you're thinking, you're taking out a wall on the first floor, therefore the second floor will collapse without it. Not so. Its not load bearing. It was put there to frustrate me and make everyone who came over disorientated. Here is the floor layout drawing I put together so you can see what we're dealing with.




and here it is in its current state:

And here is another one. Going from the hallway to living room, there was a 30" wide door frame. For some reason, folks seemed to LOVE doors a century ago. We're opening up that another 10 inches or so, so it will be less of a doorway and more of an entryway. It's all about reducing the claustrophobia.

Before (you can only see the edge of the doorway in this pic, sorry):

And of course, now that the wall is gone, I can get a much better angle of the doorway that is now no more:

Still have lots more to do. In fact, the work has really just begun. We have to have the electrician come and wire some new lights, then insulate the exterior walls, then a little bit of framing, then hang new wallboard and trim, and paint. Also, we might strip the black paint off of the staircase. That could always be done after the walls are up (actually, should be done after that, and not a moment before).

Edit #1: We're halfway there:

New lighting, and new strapping for the wallboard:

...and with wallboard:

And here's the view from the front door. Notice that the handrail and balusters are gone (they're in the shop getting stripped). Compare this one to the pic at the top of this posting.

with wall board:

Plastering is scheduled for tomorrow, floors should be in next week. Then it's down to installing trimwork (and a new door for the basement), and picking a color.

Half Bath

This was a bit of a milestone over at grandma's. We almost demoed this when we renovated the kitchen. Since that project was all we could handle, we held off. So for about a year and a half this bathroom was affectionately called the men's room. The color scheme was a bit unique, and it had a certain gas station bathroom feel to it.




I'll spare you the details, but it's good we had a full bathroom as we started this in November and though there are a couple of details to finish (there always are!), we really didn't finish until the end of Jan.

Here's some 'during' pics:




...now with some paint and beadboard:


And finally, some of the finished product:
(note the retro black and white hex floor tile)

Guest bed closet

When we moved in to grandma's house, one of the first projects was to overhaul the closet in our bedroom. The wall plaster and paint was chipping, and the layout wasn't ideal (only upside was the fact that it was a little deeper than some closets you might find in a 150 year old house.) Making a bit of lemonade here, we were able to work with it by putting a set of shelves on the side and 2 sets of racks in the main part of the closet. It's no McMansion walk-in closet, but it works for us.

The guest bed closet, however, was a pretty low priority at that time. Sometime between Thanksgiving and New Years, we finally got around to improving the guest bed closet. Its dimensions were virtually identical to our closet, so the plan was duplicated here.

Anyway, here's what she looks like:
Before:

After:

The broom closet

This project was in process the last time we updated the blog (aug/sept timeframe). Between the living room and the kitchen theres about 2 feet of hallway - well I'm not sure if you can call it a hallway, but at any rate its this 2 foot wide no mans land. On either side we have AC ductwork running upstairs (one for supply, one for return). When we bought the house, the right side of this hall was framed with a louvred door acting as a broom closet. To the left, they sealed it up with drywall. During kitchen renovations, curiosity got the best of me and that drywall came down, revealing an unused space (complete with requisite cracking/peeling plaster). At the time, we had bigger fish to fry so this area was left as is. Eventually this area's time would come, and that time was now (well, really that time was in august, but you get the idea).

When the kitchen work was done, I did make sure that there was electrical supplied to this area to support an outlet or a light somewhere down the line. With that available, we decided to redo the broom closet and then build a bookcase in the dead space on the left. Then one can recessed light on the top (handy to find the book(s) we'll want to refer to. Since we have some nice ikea bookcases about 3 feet away in the living room, we really didn't need a bookcase for more fiction/non-fiction works. Rather, this baby is just for our cookbook collection.

Once we figured out how to frame out the AC ducts, it was really a matter of hanging drywall, mudding said drywall, painting, and finally installation of door and bookcase. Since this area is on the small side, its hard to get good pics. And not surprisingly we never took pictures of how this area looked when we bought it. But I think you get the idea:

Bookcase before (this is almost how it looked for months and months:
And after framing out the back wall, hanging drywall, and some more of the Benji Moore Fusion paint we love in the kitchen, to tie the two areas together:
Now its ready for the bookcase and cookbooks:
And on the other side, the broomcloset.
Before (thats it, way back when the kitchen was in process):
Gutted:
...and here's the 'after', new walls and a new, smaller door:

Walkway

You just have to love home improvement. You make one thing better (deck) only to realize that you now need to do something else that you didn't see before (walkway). So now that the deck has a set of stairs that faces the driveway and we're coming and going that way much more often (at least in the summer months), a proper walkway was only a matter of time.

You've seen the deck before and deck after pics in the previous post (scroll down), so we'll just stick to the walkway here. We ordered pavers, gravel, sand, and more sand, which was delivered before the long end of summer weekend. Oh, in addition to the walkway, we also bought some stones (and a couple plants) to dress up the area between the walkway and the house. I'm very proud of this project, I think it looks better in person than the pics show. Here goes:

This one really shows the area in question that we're working on:

And once the materials showed, it was time to dig.


And dig. And fill, and tamp...


and level and tamp. And fill, and level and screed. Then place pavers. Then cut pavers. Then sweep sand on the pavers, hoping it fills the cracks (for the most part, it did).

And finish the edge pattern before tropical storm Hanna. Post-Hanna, prep and landscape the area inside of the walkway. Phew! Looks very good. Barkley loves it!