A room reaches its full PO-tential

Ok, this was the largest bedroom in the house. It was probably one of the darkest and ugliest bedrooms I have ever seen. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to make us run screaming.

We learned a lot of things while working on this room. Like the previous owners had this thing for HUGE nails and a LOT of them. I don't know if the nails were on sale or what but we pulled out one 2 X 4 that had 63 of these nails in it. 63!

It doesn't look that large in these pictures but believe me - when you're laying hardwood floors.. you learn just how big a room is.

First order of business... moving the door to the bathroom. It was in the hallway which we had decided to turn into closets. One for each of the master suites we had planned. One thing I haven't mentioned is that we took down a lot of walls. Luckily, the roof was trussed so we could move any wall without worrying about whether or not it was load-bearing.

The photo to the left shows part of one closet and the doors of the other closet where we busted through the wall to gain access to the bathroom from the bedroom. The door on the far left is the
hallway. We tore up the carpet. Tore out the closets. We still weren't happy so we cut out a window and installed French doors to the outside.

Now... when I saw "we" cut out the window. I actually mean our very good friend, J. Again, this is when we still had friends and he volunteered. Neither of us could lift the saw that he had to use to cut through the brick exterior. It took nearly all day but there's a doorway where the window used to be.

It was late that evening before we actually got the door in. Unfortunately, I lost most of the mid-construction photos of this room. As I recall, it was relatively uneventful with one exception.

For any of those that have ever finished drywall - you know what a mess it can be. There was drywall dust everyhere.

We spent the day at the office, came to the house after work and spent all evening working. We

were ready to go back to the apartment and die but wanted to clean up the drywall dust first. Trace got the bright idea to use the leaf blower and push the dust out the doors. OMG!!! It was like a white out in the bedroom. She had to follow the power cord back to the wall just to be able to get out of the bedroom. She looked like a ghost. We just left it to settle and went home.

I'm skipping quite a few steps here - like before we put down the hardwood floors and were trying to decide what color the curtains should be. We hung one of each color on each window.

And the fact that we tore these hardwood floors out of an old house during the hottest part of the summer. We both fell through the sub-floor in that old house and I nearly clawed Trace's eyes out trying to get out because I was terrified there may have been a snake under the house. And covering up the trap door in this room that dropped down onto the water heater - purposely.

The floors turned out beautifully as you can see in the above photo. And we finally decided on curtains. This room looks nothing like the room we started with.

I did all the molding - crown, case, baseboard, and shoe molding. The door on the left is a walk-in closet. It was once the hallway. The door on the right is the bathroom. There is another walk-in closet in there. No need to put away summer clothes and pull out winter clothes - there's a closet for each. At least theoretically but we're both clothes horses so it doesn't work EXACTLY that way but pretty close.

The walls are painted with a greyish-beige color that I think is called buckskin or something like that. The ceiling is painted the palest shade of pink called Blush. The molding just makes it pop.

We still have a few finishing touches - like dropping another cable for the television. That is going to require someone to go under the house and run it and we all know by now, it isn't going to be me.

As you can see, the dogs are patiently waiting to come back in.

Voila! Finished. One room, at least..

First things first...

 When we bought the house, we knew it was going to be a while before we could afford to do the kitchen remodel. I love to cook and I have a pretty definite idea of what I want. This... is definitely not it.

So although the kitchen wasn't a priority, something had to be done because I just couldn't live with this. It was bad. I couldn't make up my mind if i wanted to pull my hair out or take a hit of acid every time I walked in this room.

We took down the border along the soffit. That in itself was a big improvement. Then we painted the cabinets. Again - big improvement.It was almost livable by this time.

A trip to Lowe's or Home Depot revealed that a can of appliance paint can be a girl's best friend. That olive green wall oven HAD to go. The refrigerator taking up half a room had to go as well but what to do with it?

At the same time, we were taking out the hallway wall and the bar that was attached to it.

My best friend and her husband had looked at the house when we did. Luckily for us, her husband had a phobia of buying a home and we got our offer in first. Or maybe.. not so luckily. Anyway.. she loved the green and white tile and wanted what we took down so we took it down very carefully.

In taking down the wall and the bar, we learned something that would leave us scratching our heads and pretty much set the tone for the rest of the remodel. We gave up the head-scratching and wondering "why" after a couple of months.

There was a light on the bar. When we took the wall down, we cut the power that was going to that light. We later went outside to open the garage door. Hit the button - nothing happened because there was now no power to the garage. Don't ask me. I have no idea but the entire house was wired strangely. Oh joy! I hate electrical work! 


It's amazing what a little paint can do. We still have the ugly tile and countertops to deal with but at least we're not giving new meaning to the phrase "Go Green." It took a coat of primer and 2 coats of white paint to cover up that green and then we put a couple coats of sealer over top of that. At least I no longer had the desire to try hard drugs.
We took out the hallway wall, took down the green striped wallpaper and put up drywall.
We created a door from the kitchen into the tiny bedroom and turned it into a utility
room. We also cut a hole in this wall and stuffed the refrigerator through it. All
we see from the kitchen are the refrigerator doors, the rest of it is in the utility
room. We all thought Trace was crazy when she came up with this idea but it turned out well and it gets the refrigerator out of the way.

We
knew we wanted to put hardwood floors in the house but we also knew we'd never be able to afford to have them done at one time. We came up with a viable second option
though - recycled floors. It was not necessarily our intention to go green but it
was economical. These floors are from a 100-yr old farmhouse in Wisconsin. We found
them on eBay. It's 3/4" maple. The guy took them up, took the nails out and delivered
it for about $1 a square foot. Installing them was not necessarily fun but the improvement was definitely noticeable.

We took everything out of the front part of the house and moved it to the back part of the house. We lived on fast food and anything that could be put in the microwave for 3 weeks while we were finishing the floors.

Sanding the floors was a pain in the ass. They had different finishes and different heights because they had been in different rooms. We sanded them in a weekend. We worked round the clock but the guy at the rental place made the mistake of saying there was no way we could do it in a weekend.
I gave up around 2am Monday morning. Trace woke me up at 5am. She had been falling asleep on her trips up and down the floor. I got up and finished it in the next 3 or 4 hours and we got it back to the rental place on time and we were finished.
Pffftttt.... This guy had apparently never ran across two very determined women.
We had a timeline... we were trying to get this finished by Thanksgiving.

Now we just need to get them stained and get a million coats of polyurethane on them, let them harden for 2 weeks and we can move furniture back in.
Our friend, Pat, came over to help. We actually still had friends at this time. They weren't afraid to come for dinner. A note to anyone who tries to take on the task of remodeling an old house - demolition is fun for everyone! Construction is not so much fun. You will have more friends than you know during the demolition phase but they will gradually thin out as you move to the construction phase. We couldn't even bribe them with dinner and I'm a great cook! I can't say I blame them though.
So these two are the twisted sisters of wood floors. Pat with a rubber glove and an
evil gleam in her eyes... I was a little worried for Tracy's safety. It took me
forever to convince Pat that floor stain didn't make a good self-tanner. I think
she finally believed me.

The three of us stained the floors and then went gambling at the track. We couldn't
put another coat on for 4 - 6 hours. What else are we gonna do?

The floors turned out beautifully but the green and white tile was still driving me crazy. A quick Google search yielded a temporary fix. If you use a good, oil-based primer - you can paint ANYTHING - just don't try to clean up the roller or brush. It will be ruined one you are finished so plan on tossing it. You'll make a bigger mess trying to clean it.

We used Zinsser oil-based primer and it sets up as hard as enamel. We chose Gold #3 from the family of colors we'd been using for the walls and painted the tile.
We then went to Michael's and bought a paint pen and went along the "grout" lines and put two coats of marine sealer over it.

We did the same thing with the countertop. We primed it and let it harden. We chose
Gold #4, bought a couple packages of gold flakes to mix in the paint. We put 2 or
3 coats of paint on the counter and then 3 coats of marine sealer over top of the
paint. It has been over 2 years and it still looks good.

The backsplash was uneven where it connected to the wall so we took a rounded shoe
mold and attached it to the top to even it out. It is painted in the same family
of Gold colors we've been using although it looks white.

You can see a little of what we did to the ceiling in the photo on the left above
this one. The ceilings are only 8 feet. The ceiling fans made the ceiling feel even
lower. We painted 24 inches of the ceiling the same color as the walls and then
painted the center of the ceiling a shade lighter (Gold #2). This brings the eye
up and makes the ceilings look higher.

We later added case molding along the paint line to create the illusion of a tray
ceiling. It makes the room feel much more spacious.

A little paint can make a HUGE difference

Luckily, some projects were relatively easy to do but the impact was huge. Case in point - the storage building and the garage. According to neighbor Bill, one of the sons had that hideous yellow color on the garage and storage building custom-mixed. Hmmmm... I'm thinking it must've been on sale. Either way, these buildings stuck out like a sore thumb.

We had already picked out our colors and wanted to make everything look cohesive so I got to buy a new tool - a power sprayer. You would've though it might have kept me from getting so much paint on me but uhmm... nope. I'm the world's messiest painter. I end up wearing almost as much as I get on the whatever I'm painting. Without the power sprayer, this would've taken weeks. As it was, it took a couple of weekends and I'm fairly certain we now own stock in American Tradition paint. The garage alone took 4 coats and could probably use another.


The tree in the photo to the right is a plum tree. We tried to save it but it was too far gone and although we loved the shape, it had to go. Trace was out working in the garden one day, raised up and saw a snake laying under this tree. She said that it grew as she got closer. She was going to be brave and kill it but by the time she got to the garage, she was fairly certain it was an anaconda. So she hopped across Bill's garden and asked him to come rescue her.

Apparently, it was "just" a black snake. It does not matter to me if it's a plastic snake. A snake is a snake is a snake and the only "good" snake is one that I never see. I don't care to share my world with them but I don't want to see them. He said, "Well, I'll go get one of the boys and they'll take it home with them." She looked at him and says in all seriousness, "Bill, are they moving out of state?" Bill laughs, "Well, no." She tells him, "Bill.. you have to kill this snake. If Lethie finds out it was out here, she'll never step foot outside the house again." So he killed the snake or at least, that's the story Trace told me. I choose to believe it because I enjoy the outdoors so much and don't want to be confined inside the house for the rest of my life. Lie number 2 revealed!


So this is what the garage and storage building look like now. I think the storage building looks like an old one-room school building and I want to put a bell on it and a cupola.

We spend a lot of time on the porch of the storage building. Neighbor Bill and his wife love the color so much that he asked us for a paint chip. Apparently, the porch of the church they attend is now painted this color. His wife came over and thanked us for painting the buildings. She hated the yellow color. This was an easy fix.. Too bad they weren't all like that.

Cabin Fever

This is what the backyard looked like when we moved in. The fenced in courtyard area with a little flower bed in front of it and all the overgrown bushes in the center of the backyard, split it up horribly.

Taking all this stuff out was one of the first things we wanted to do but then we found out I had to have surgery so it was not as much a priority as getting a bedroom finished so I would have some place to recuperate. We'd just have to live it with it until spring or so we thought.

It doesn't look so bad in this picture but looking at it from the house was a differnt story. It looked like an overgrown jungle.


My surgery wound up being more extensive than expected and my recovery period went from 6 weeks to 12 weeks. Fall came and went and winter reared it's ugly head. Once I got a little strength back, we would take daily walks to the barn and back. It seemed like miles the first few times. As we'd pass all this overgrown nonsense, it would drive me crazy. I guess I can be a little obsessive/compulsive and with all that was going on with my body, I would obsess on some things for days or weeks. There was a brief obsession with McDonald's french fries but luckily, it didn't last too long.

I just couldn't bear this view from the porch but there was little I could do about it at the time. Luckily, West Virginia has strange winters. It can be 15F today and 65F tomorrow. So somewhere between the first snow and the last, we had some really nice weather. We both prefer to be outside on any given day of the week so when the weather broke and we could get outside, we were both ready.

Taking the fence apart was easy enough. Taking out some of the posts was even relatively easy. Others... not so much. They were set in cement about 18 inches down. Not just a little cement. These people were fairly certain that using a lot of REALLY BIG nails and a lot of cement could hold together what they lacked in construction skills.

I am still recovering from surgery and was truly not much help other than taking the screws out of the fence and taking it down. Trace was stuck digging around the cement posts to try to loosen them. Once they were loosened, they were heavy! We still couldn't get them out so I went to the garage and brought our ATV over and would gently ram the posts until they either broke off above ground level or we could rock them loose enough to pull them out. Then we'd tie a rope around them and pull them with the ATV. There was one moment of terror on the first post when it unexpectly broke and I nearly ran over Trace with the ATV. Ooooopsie!

On to the bushes. Being that we would need to mow around the stumps, we decided to try to take them out by the roots. Trace dug around them and then we'd tie a rope around them and pull with the ATV. Then she'd dig a little more and we'd pull a little more. On and on this went. The tallest one took forever to get out. We were about to give up when it finally pulled free and landed on top of me as I was pulling it out. All I hear behind me as I'm scooting up closer to the handlebars is, "Keep driving... Keep driving..." Never mind that I'm being poked and stabbed by this thing just "keep driving."
Two days later, we were back to several inches of snow but my daily walks to the barn and around the property by this time, were much more pleasant because all that riff raff was gone.

It took two years of digging up all the overgrown flowers that were in the flowerbed where the fence was. There were millions of lilies growing in there. They were so tightly packed that they didn't even bloom.

We were giving away lillies to anyone who would take them. The neighbors.. my family.. planting them in other spots like along the driveway and beside the garage. We even through some on the ground behind the storage building and before we had another bonfire, they were blooming without even being planted. Lillies are hardy plants.

The backyard looks much cleaner now. We transplanted a few of the younger trees that were planted along the fence and planted grass and you can't even tell now that the fence or the flowers were ever there.

Unfortunately, the summer of 2007 brought with it a severe drought so the grass doesn't looks so good in the last picture but it was nice last summer.

We must've lost our minds... Part 2

This is the overgrown mess that was the front of the house. That is a HUGE rhodadendron there at the corner of the porch. It was nearly as tall as the roof. I'm sure it was probably lovely in the spring but I am TERRIFIED of snakes and any place they may be able to hide... It had to go. Getting the bush/tree itself down wasn't bad. Getting the roots out of the ground - not so easily done. After hours with a hand saw, we gave up and I decided to ruin a blade on the reciprocating saw to get the roots out of the ground.

We also decided the aluminum rails had to go. Have you ever tried getting 20 yr old screws out after they've all but rusted in place? Not fun. Recip saw to the rescue - again.

The day after we took possession of the house.. we came home to find one of the sons sitting on the porch of the storage building. They still had a bunch of stuff in the garage, storage building and the house that they were just going to leave. Uhmmmm.... no. We told them they had to get it all out and deal with it. It wasn't our problem. He said they'd get it out the next day. No problem... until we get home and there is NO ONE there but a fire burning right next to the barn. When he finally shows up an hour later, all he has to say is, "We burn there all the time." !!!
I think this is the evening he talked about putting on a mask, sneaking on the property to scare the "city girls" and the "we have a gun" exchange occurred. There was instead a call put into our real estate agent who called their real estate agent and strongly suggested they not set foot on the property again.

That very same day, I found out I had to have surgery and would be out of commission for at least 6 weeks. Surgery was scheduled in less than a week. I wanted to pick a project that I could finish before I had surgery. The porch drove me crazy. It was GREEN!!! It went so well with the white brick lamp post, the earth-tone brick circular planter beside it and the yellow buildings.. I wanted to get the cement part of it sanded and all of it painted before I had surgery. That way, it wouldn't drive me crazy when they brought me home from the hospital. It's the little things folks... the little things!

I bought an orbital sander and started working on the porch. (Buying tools becomes a recurring theme. I will still tackle any project that comes along as long as there's a new tool involved.)

It was a good ol' fashioned sledgehammer that took out that lamp post and most of the planter that's beside it.

I'm making progress. I get the rails down and the porch sanded and painted two nights before surgery. At least progress I can live with until the spring when I can rent a jackhammer to take out the sidewalk to no where.

At this point, we still haven't moved in. We were living in an apartment about 3 miles away. We'd go to work in the mornings and come home in the evenings to work on the house then we'd go to the apartment, shower and die for 3 or 4 hours and start all over again.

So flash forward to spring and the weekend we rented a jackhammer. OMG!! I did the entire sidewalk by myself. It was really bad when the jackhammer would get stuck and I had to pull it out. My arms were so sore the next day, I couldn't even type. It was 8 inches deep in some spots. Craziness!!

This was the weekend our next door neighbor confessed he and his wife can't wait to get up on the weekends to see what "the girls" are going to do next. They also told us how happy they were that we bought the place and were trying to fix it up because it hadn't looked this good in years.

This same spring we chose two separate colors that complemented the colors in the bricks on the house and painted the peak of the porch and the shutters.

We still weren't happy with the way the front of the house was looking so another trip to Home Depot cured that. We bought paint and lattice. We painted the top portion of the grey facade white about the width of a header all the way around. Then painted from that mark to the ground a dirt brown color and put the lattice over top of it. It looks like there's nothing but ground beneath the lattice.

We then went to the farmer's market for flowers. We change the flowers with the season. Rather than planting them directly in the ground and digging them up in the fall when we replace them with mums, we dug holes and put the pots in the holes. In the fall, we only need to pull up the pots and replace them with the pots of mums.

We also extended the porch deck to cover the steps that were there. We plan to put circular steps on either end of the porch and create a foot path around the the sides of the house.

The hanging fern warm up the porch and give it some interest. Unfortunately, birds normally nest in them and water them can be terrifying if you don't know a bird is living in there.

We also took out the yucca plants that were right in the middle of the front yard. They were overgrown and didn't actually bloom. I am not crazy about yucca in the first place and it was another hiding place for snakes.. I call them "yucky" plants. Can you tell where the new grass is in the photo to the right?

Unfortunately, right now I can't find any really good pictures of the end result. The one below shows only a third of the porch but you can see the sidewalk area filled in nicely. Hopefully, this summer we'll get to putting the steps in. Not having steps up to the front door gets a little tricky on Halloween. So we go to the end of the driveway with our camp chairs and pass out candy. That's how we introduced ourselves to the neighbors. We took them a treat Halloween night.

Now, let's have a moment of silence for my recently departed Jeep. That's it in the background of the photo to the right. Trace had a little trouble with slick roads this past December. She hit some black ice and started spinning and wound up flipping it. It's a total loss but luckily, she only hurt her hand. It could've been worse but believe me, I miss that car when I'm loading both dogs into my Camry.

More to come....

We must've lost our minds... Part 1

This is my first blog/rambling so please bear with me. I've wanted to start a blog for a while but really didn't think I had anything to say. After looking through a ton of old pictures, I realized I have a lot to say... about the nightmare of home remodeling.

We'd been looking for a house for a couple of years. Looking at listing after listing trying to find something even remotely interesting to actually go see. Now, for those of you who have ever been to West Virginia and especially those who have ever looked for a home in West Virginia, you'll know that there is a language indigenous only to West Virginians when it comes to real estate listings. For instance, you see a listing that says, "Updated A-frame, 2 baths, 12 acres, close to town.. a must see!" You just KNOW this is THE one! For three days, you anxiously await the open house. When you get there, what you find is actually a chicken coup with his and her outhouses on 1/2 acre of flat land and 11 1/2 acres of cliff side, 15 miles from the nearest "hard top."

Needless to say, when we saw "Brick ranch, 5 bedrooms, 2 baths, lr, dr, rec room, den, detached garage on 7 acres just outside town.. A must see...," we weren't particularly hopeful but knew we had to look all the same.

Imagine our surprise when we pulled up and saw this:

Not perfect but definitely better than what we'd seen up to this point. We're both relatively silent until we park the car and look at the backyard.

Ok, we aren't yet foaming at the mouth but our hearts are definitely beating a little faster. We took a walk around the property before we even set foot inside the house. Lovely. Just lovely.

We walk around behind the barn and look back to the driveway and one of us says THE word that's been on both our tongues and yet, has not been said.... "POtential... It has POtential."

Potential... dangerous word for DIYers. The official definition is capable of being or becoming. For DIYers, the definition is more like "Oh shit.. We're in over our heads and don't even know it yet."

Our minds are racing... "we could cut down that stuff there in the middle, take down that silly white fence. Pffft... Move that corny little windmill.. Bury that power line running to the barn.." On and on and ON it went and we hadn't EVEN been inside yet. That's another blog altogether.

So after we did a walk-thru of the house, we found ourselves sitting on the back porch, looking at this. Sitting on a porch swing and the father is very old and the kids who are in their 50's, are sharing fond memories of growing up. I imagine my summers spent sitting on the porch swing with my beloved grandmother while she imparts words of wisdom and her wicked sense of humor. I'm sold! Where do we sign? I want to move in now! I have to say, for me, it was the porch swing that sold the house. They even told us if we bought the house, they'd leave the porch swings. They didn't.

We would soon learn this was the first of many little fibs they told. Of course, I'm TERRIFIED of snakes. When I say terrified - I can't explain to you how terrified I am at the mere THOUGHT of a snake so of course, I asked if there were a lot of snakes on the property. I was assured that in the 60 years they'd been there, only one snake had ever been seen. I felt much better.

I won't bore you with the details of what a pain in the ass it was getting everything in place to buy this house. There was a foundation problem that had to be fixed and by the time all was said and done, there had been threats from this "sweet, ideallic" family about scaring us "city girls" and casual mention on our part that we "had a gun" and "weren't afraid to use it." We had no gun. I could've pointed my finger and shouted, "Pow!" but that's about it.

We closed at noon and walked in at 3pm with sledgehammers, a chainsaw, a lot of hope and a few friends. I have cut more than 5 dozen trees and only one nearly killed me. The one you see at the very left side of this photo.

It was a plum tree and had all these vines growing up through it. The vines kept it from falling the way it should've fallen. I cut one limb and all but the main trunk fell on me.

Luckily, I had the presense of mind to hit the kill switch on the chainsaw as I thew my arms up over my head and sank to my knees. It nearly broke my arm. What I wound up with was a nasty burn-like skinned place on my arm and a bruise that went all the way around my forearm and HURT LIKE HELL.

There were 7 apple trees on the property, 2 peach trees, 2 plum trees and grapevines in the yard and on the barn. We're 5 minutes from everything including, thankfully, Home Depot and Lowe's. Where once we shopped at Macy's and Talbot's, we were now spending our time and money at the hardware store.

My dad raised 3 daughters so imagine his delight when he asked what I wanted for Christmas and I thought only for a moment and said, "I'd like a rotary hammer drill." He was on cloud nine!

If you've noticed, the house is brick. The garage and storage building, which are clearly seen from the house and coming up the driveway are yellow. YELLOW!!!

Nothing matched. The trees hadn't been pruned in at least 20 years. There was this overgrown mess in the backyard that closed off what could be a beautiful backyard from the house. You couldn't even see the front of the house for the overgrown bushes and there was this white brick lamp post that matched absolutely nothing! They could've at least painted it yellow to match the buildings that didn't match the house but no! This was a different color altogether. A sidewalk to nowhere and many other things that left us scratching our heads and various other body parts from all the overgrown poison ivy.

So... stay tuned. There's plenty of nonsense to come as I chronicle the adventures of two women trying to remodel an old house and the surrounding property.