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!

Deck expansion

Another project that we didn't do!

The deck in the back yard was all pressure treated lumber, 12 feet deep, 14 feet wide. This was fine for a smaller table but a standard 3 foot x 5 foot table with chairs just about took up the whole thing. You can squeeze 6 in one of those tables, but its a little tight, and if we're grilling and chilling outside, I'd rather not be on top of everyone. So we were thinking of 2 things - getting a bigger outdoor table and expanding the deck to accommodate it. Here is the deck v1.0:

So the original deck only had 1 set of stairs, heading out to the back yard. As the new deck is going along the house, we're going to be much closer to the driveway. A second set of stairs was installed to make it easy to get in the house via the back door. Here's a mid-process and an 'after' pic. We're lovin' it (and so is a very young Barkley)!

Spring cleaning

Alright, so summer is technically almost over. But there were some projects that were done here at G'mas house that we were a little late in posting. In the month of May we did two things...actually we didn't really do them. For a welcome change we paid someone real money to do home improvement projects. In both cases work was done that we would be ill equipped to fulfill, and we're delighted with the results:

Kitchen Backsplash:
Here is a quick refresher. Before:


Whoops! Okay, that was before in the extreme...ahh the good ole days!

Now here is what our kitchen looked like pre and post backsplash:


Tiles look great. Oh, and under cabinet halogen lighting was installed as well. I still have some trim to install so you won't be able to see the lights, but who's counting!

Tree Trimming
We (or more correctly, our neighbors) have a huge old oak tree in our backyard. While it does help give our house a more woodsy feel in the city, it nearly closes off all direct sunlight in the back yard. And the branches were getting so huge that before the end of the summer I'm pretty sure some branches would actually touch our house. So a friend of ours knows a tree guy, and next thing you know, they're here with all the heavy equipment. And in like 2 hours, Poof! all gone. Limbs cut, chipped and hauled out. Here is the big boy in all its pre-op glory:

Bucket operator making short work of some big limbs:
Carnage:
Post-Op tree:

The difference was immediate, and all we hoped. We get more sun in the back yard, so that means the house is a bit more bright. It also means that we don't have to limit our plant selections to the shade loving section. Next summer, I'm hoping to build a couple of raised beds to grow my own. That would have been pretty disappointing if my tomatoes/beans/etc only got 1 hr (or less) of direct sun a day. We'll see next summer!