Time for the Office... Almost

The last room in our place that was crying out for attention was the office. It was the room in the least need of help from the beginning, and also had the only paint color that Ilana didn't hate. Otherwise it might have drawn our efforts sooner.

It seemed like a straight forward job: upgrade our desks and add some crown molding. Should be easy. Might not even be worth a blog post.

Then we looked at the closet. Due to our aforementioned hatred of mirrors, we had gladly removed the mirrored closet doors when we moved the washer and dryer into the office closet.

Oddly enough: We just noticed that other than this photo of the new plumbing for the washer and dryer, we never actually showed the washer and dryer in their new space. Oh well. You'll just have to imagine a side-by-side washer and dryer here:

While this was a VAST improvement over their previous location in our kitchen, we were not crazy about having a loud washer and dryer in an open closet in our office. They protruded too far out to have a closing door in the closet, so we had resorted to a curtain that stuck out at the bottom like a maternity dress. We wondered if we could come up with a way to seal off that closet, with the washer and dryer on the inside.

Then all hell broke loose.

We zoomed right past the half-ass solution of building the closet sides out enough to get a door across and to the dream scenario we started fantasizing about two years ago.

It's a little hard to explain, but here is what we started with:
___________
| W D |__ __
| /

W = washer, D = Dryer, and that thing on the right is a doorway with a door.

What we wanted to do was stack the washer and dryer, then turn them -90 degrees and punch a hole in the outside wall to make them accessible via our hallway. The only problem was, that the hole we wanted to make wasn't actually big enough to fit the two appliances. This is what we wanted:
___________
| |W/D /__ __
| / /

Not sure if that makes sense, but it's a smaller closet on the left, and a new closet accessible from the hallway with the washer and dryer. But again, there wasn't enough room for that closet. So we wondered if we could move the doorway.

We called in the handiest person we know (sorry, Frank, but you’re actually the second handiest person we know). Roger not only said he could to the work (without the second floor crashing down) he said he could do it affordably. Bam. Crazy idea brought to life.

Here's the hallway before shot:

And after the first day of work:

You can see on the floor the place where the old doorway was. It's said that we were only about a foot off, but that's how it goes. Then Roger patched everything up and added the new closet door.

From the office side, we got a new, smaller closet.

Then it was just a matter of finishing stuff up and getting the washer/dryer in place.

Luckily we had some left over floor boards, and Oscar came over and patched the floors so well that we forget where the old doorway was.

A nice paint job later, and we're done:

It may seem silly to move a wall just one foot, but we have to say, this may be our favorite project we've done in the house (except for the kitchen -- we still love the kitchen!). It's great to be able to put in a load of laundry without going into the office, then closing the door and not hearing all the moving and shaking (and for those of you who have been here while our washer is running, you know what we mean by shaking). A million thanks to Roger and Oscar for their help!

With the walls and closet done, we turned our attention to our desks and related storage. Stay tuned for an update on the progress there...

Finishing Up the Den

We are the worst bloggers. The worst.

We haven't updated since November of last year (10 months), which was 6 months after our previous post. We are very sorry to let our 3 fans down.

So let's catch up.

Starting with the den... When last we left you, we had added a free standing closet. That was most of the major work, except for some aesthetic efforts aimed at our media.

We bought our first flat panel TV (welcome to 2005, y'all) and decided to mount it on the wall so that we could swing it out for couch viewing or fold it up to limit its profile. We started with this blank wall:

Then a mount:

Then a TV:

Great, right? Except that we pillars of modern living still have a lot of other technical accoutrement. Here you see our TiVo, modem, router, mini cellphone tower, dust buster, and a whole lotta plugs (DVD not pictured):

So Seth got to work on a custom cabinet to go below the TV. Here he is planning it out:

It started off pretty basic, and Ilana worried if this piece was going to be the right addition for the den:

But then Seth busted out the router and dropped the design hammer.

As you can see, he's very proud of his work.

After adding the doors and some feet, the final product looked like this:

Then Ilana does what Ilana does best: paint the damn thing. For those of you (named Dennis) complaining about painting over pretty wood: we tried various stain options and none of them worked. At all. We have wood floors and no other wood furniture, so it just didn't "go." To keep it simple, we went with a paint shade slightly darker than our walls.

Photo available via the AbbyCam

And here it is, disguising all the disorganization of technology inside and fitting in nicely with the TV:

Look mom, no wires!

With the den done, that left only one room untouched: the office.

We thought it would be simple. Then we had a crazy idea.

To be continued...

2010's Been Good To Us

Hard to believe that we haven't posted an update since last December. Lots has happened since then, but I guess we've been doing and enjoying at the expense of blogging.

Here are some of the highlights...

1) Slow and steady progress on the bedroom. We finally bought some end tables for the side of the bed. And then Seth and his dad, Frank, did some awesome crown molding work.

They make a good team (along with Seth's fancy new brad nailer) and are especially proud of the "corner work" they did by the closet.

It's now on me to caulk and touch-up the paint job -- soon, soon...

2) With some help from our new friend, Bristol, we painted the hallway, stairway, and upstairs doors. Little by little, we are wiping out the 1970s and bringing this place into the 21st Century. It truly is amazing the difference a fresh coat of paint makes.



















3) The mother of all home improvements: new flooring! We can't take much DIY credit for this one. We pooled all of our wedding gifts (thank you, thank you, everybody!) and, with huge grins on our faces, actually hired someone to pull up our old ratty, stained, cat-puked-upon carpet and put down beautiful bamboo flooring. Special thanks to Linnette Edwards, realtor extraordinaire, for giving us some great advice on what to get (and what not to get) and Danny Fox at the Floor Store for getting us a great price on the bamboo.


Note that the before photos don't adequately convey just how bad it was. Trust us. It was bad.

Sometimes we get a little sad seeing the old stuff go. Not this time.

Here's a side-by-side shot:

The finished product. We still like to sit around and bask in the glory of these floors. Seriously.

Moving on Up

The kitchen was done.

The living room was done.

The backyard was done.

So what was left? Or, rather, what was next? Apparently, it was time to move upstairs.

Yes, upstairs, the land of three severely neglected rooms. The land with one wall that is still unfinished (at least we put the sheetrock back up; not seen here). We did not choose to start in that room. Instead, we started with the bedroom.

One thing we've learned is that we're terrible at "before" shots. This is the best we've got:

In it you'll notice three things: 1) a 4 drawer dresser; 2) a shelf that was lower than we wanted; and 3) very light-colored and shiny walls. In order to be able to get both of our clothes to fit in this closet, we needed to raise the shelf (and the clothes bar that sat beneath it) and lower the height of the dresser. Did you know that you can cut the bottom drawer off an IKEA dresser?

You can. Step #2, raising the shelf and bar (pun intented), was fairly easy:

And voila:

Next up was the wall. First we tested colors:

After deciding on 173 (upper right), we thought that as long we were going to paint the wall, that this might be a good time to add a little sound-proofing, since we share the wall with a three-year-old who likes to wake up early and cry. We brought in our new contractor friend Roger to add a layer of QuietRock:

It was then spackled and (unfortunately) textured to match the rest of the room. And then it was time to paint. Seth painted the ceiling:

Ilana painted the walls and removed the old yucky blinds:

And Leone (Seth's mom) came in to continue her streak of being a part of every room-painting project we've done so far:

And now, with the addition of the new headboard, some new bedding, and the new wall color, we have a much more attractive bedroom:

We're currently working on our curtain options for both the closet and the window, and Seth is preparing for another turn at crown moulding.

Here is a bonus picture of Seymour, once again, not helping:

Living Room: Done?

Every week we put "framing the pass-through" on the to-do list. And every week we put it off until the next week. Well, not this time. What's more American than home improvement? Um, shopping malls. But DIY'ing one's condo is a close second. And it's a fine, fine way to spend a July 4 weekend.

We completed things from the kitchen side, but had yet to put finishing touches on the view from the living room. Sadly, though we have documented the view FROM the kitchen view well, we do not have a lot of shots of the view TO the kitchen from the other side.

This is the best we could find:

Eager to get moving, we started our project before we realized we didn't have a good before shot, so this will have to do:
The first step was to add texture. We hate texture, but texture begets more texture and there were portions of the wall that were smooth and looked out of place after we enlarged the pass-through. So we sprayed texture-in-a-bottle where needed:
Then we painted:
And finally, using Seth's new and now beloved mitre saw, we framed the whole thing in:
Ilana pulled out her killer spackling skills to complete the job. Dare we call the living room done? Nah. We still don't have art work on the walls. We'll throw it on the to-do list and maybe it'll get done by 2010.

Television, and Some Catch-Up

One of the nice things about starting to wrap up some of the "structural" elements of our work is being able to shift to actually making things look good. One of our first steps in this direction was to get a TV cabinet from our good friends at IKEA so that we can keep our TV more out of sight. We're very pleased:













Ilana once again used her unique IKEA-building skills to put together this two-box challenge in record time with top-notch results.

If this public policy thing doesn't work out, it's nice to know she'll always have career options in putting together MARKÖRs and MALMs.



We've also recently uncovered a few more photos from our interim "mauve" paint job (now covered by Maritime "Ahoy!" White). Here's one:

Perhaps you can now see why we went back to the off-white. It's not a bad color, it's just not a living room color.





Also, we realized that we've yet to post pictures of our new light fixtures:

This is in our stairwell. Once again, Matt our amazing electrician came through. He replaced our two outdoor lights with motion detector lights, and then replaced our two horribly ugly, 60s/70s/80s chandeliers (they were so bad it's hard to know which decade to blame) with some nice new fixtures (that Ilana got from Home Depot with encouragement from my mom).


We also realized that our picture of the new light above the dining room table allows us to show you the progress from one specific sight line in our house: the kitchen looking towards the dining/living room. Here's the complete series, with our new light making an appearance in the last shot:


I'll leave you with one more photo I found: that of a very cute Ilana painting once her hand finally healed: