October 2015: Blackout shades for the bedrooms

So this was a short project but a satisfying one.  The window treatments throughout our house have been languishing.  Out of sheer laziness, we left the ones that were there when we bought the house (most of which were probably installed in the 80s or earlier).  Our children's rooms had those ugly metal horizontal blinds that (a) do not block any light so are pointless; and (b) are a strangulation hazard to babies and toddlers.  So out they went, and I installed these cordless (i.e. child safe) blackout cellular shades instead.  I did it all by myself while listening to the Serial podcast, and only needed a handheld drill/screwdriver!

Note: yes, unfortunately there is light coming around the sides of the shade.  I bought shades off Overstock.com rather than spend $$$$ for custom shades, and so they're not a perfect fit.  But they're a lot better than what was there before!  And as a bonus, I get to feel both thrifty AND handy!

October 2015: Bidet in the master bath (enough said)

So this happened.  I did it all by myself, with a glass of wine and a flathead screwdriver.  It is so amazing.  I would go so far as to say: game-changing.  I can't believe I didn't install one years ago!

April 2015: Toddler's Closet

Our son's closet was pissing me off.  It was a jumble of crap on the bottom, and the hanging rail was too high for him to see his clothes (which started to matter when he turned two and wanted to start choosing his own clothes for the day).

A trip to Home Depot and $89.00 plus tax later, and we were armed with a closet organizer to install.

Here are the after photos!  Our son loves the double rail so he can see what's hanging on the lower rail, and all the crap came off the floor and onto shelves.  Only took an hour or two to install!

May 2013: The 3x4 bathroom closet

This is the renovation I'm proudest of (so far).  All the houses in our neighborhood have these teeny little "powder rooms" behind the kitchen.  The realtors claim these houses are "1.5 bath" but in reality the rooms are so small that it's more like one and a quarter.

Anyway, ours was in rough shape.  Hideous brown tile on the floor, hideous pink tile on the wall all the way up to the ceiling, an enormous beast of a toilet that didn't flush properly -- or didn't STOP flushing -- a square sink that was far too deep for the narrow room, and inexplicably, a medicine cabinet mirror and toothbrush holder.  Why would there be a toothbrush holder when the room is too damn crowded to even stand up straight in, let alone brush your teeth?  It's a mystery.

Aside from the ugliness, the room also smelled bad.  Whether it was from mildew under the ancient tiles, or an imperfect seal between our toilet and the sewer, we didn't know and didn't want to know.

We endured the bathroom for a year and a half because the renovation of the upstairs full bath had been so traumatic that we were loath to do another one.  But it was during my baby shower when we had a lot of people over, and we were sending even the pregnant guests all the way upstairs to pee because we were so ashamed of this powder room, that we realized it was time to fix it.  I mean, it SMELLED BAD in there, for goodness sake.  We hired a contractor to do a complete rip-out down to studs and replace everything.

We added an electrical outlet, even though it was totally unnecessary, because the electrician swore that it was required to be "to code."  We also added a light switch so that one switch controlled the overhead light and one controlled the vanity light, and then ran a dedicated circuit from the bathroom down to the circuit box.

We went to an upscale tile store to pick out the tile, because as the contractor pointed out, in such a small space, you can splurge on really nice tile and still not break the bank.

Finding fixtures that would fit in such a tiny closet was the biggest challenge.  After tons of research, internet searches, and comparing dimensions down to the tenth of an inch, we settled on an American Standard dual-flush comfort height toilet, and this sink, only 9.3 inches deep!

I fell in love with a waterfall faucet in brushed nickel, which then informed the rest of the accessories choices (towel bar, toilet paper holder, etc.).

We picked out a tilting mirror to accommodate all our guests, both short and tall.  And I spent days on the internet obsessing over hundreds of light fixtures until Steve pointed out that no one was ever going to look up in our bathroom, because the view of the lower part was so nice.  :)







Everything went in and then it was time to paint.  I wanted something rich, intense and colorful to stand up to the wall tile.  We chose Behr "Wild Sage".  I was a bit nervous about putting such a dark color in a small room, but I'm so happy with the choice.

And voila, the big reveal of before and after!

Before: Claustrophobic nightmare in brown and pink

After: A roomy and relaxing spa retreat!  Okay, not roomy, but better.

January 2013: The nursery

Not much DIY work to this one, we mostly just cleaned it up, picked Behr's "Desert Cactus" for the walls, caulked and repainted the window frames, and voila.  The biggest project in here is that Steve replaced our normal "on-off" light switch with a dimmer switch -- which has been KEY during middle-of-the-night feedings.

Once again, Blogger is not letting me upload or embed the video, so click here. 

This was a fun project while anticipating Baby O.  :)  One the room was set up, I used to just go and relax in there by myself before he was born.

Oct 2011-March 2012: The Kitchen, Phase 1: Painting & appliances.

So, what to say about this kitchen?

We believe this was re-done by the former owner in the 1960s.  Turns out that Betty Draper's kitchen in Mad Men is almost identical.

No, really.  Look at those drawer pulls.  The same!

I know Mad Men decorating is all the rage at the moment, but we weren't really feeling the love with this kitchen.  So this was actually our very first DIY project, started before we moved in.

We had already set aside a chunk o' change to completely gut-renovate the master bath, so the kitchen face lift had to be done on the cheap.  I'm not in love with the layout of the cabinets, but for now we are leaving the bones and just changing the aesthetics.  This phase was: (1) sanding & repainting the cabinets and updating the hardware; (2) stripping the wallpaper and painting the walls; and (3) replacing the decades-old appliances.

The first step was pretty gross: removing all the cabinet doors and drawers and cleaning off the decades of accumulated kitchen grease.  For that we had to use TSP.  Then Steve bought a power-sander (one of his first power-tools, but certainly not his last) and sanded every door, drawer-front and the fronts of all the cabinets. Even after we had scrubbed with TSP, his sandpaper got pretty gummy with leftover grease.  He went through a lot of sandpaper.

Once sanding was finished, he patched the holes in the cabinet doors where the old hardware had been drilled, primed and painted the cabinet doors & fronts Behr's "Spice Delight" in semi-gloss, and installed new hardware.

Before

After

Before

After

Meanwhile, I was using wallpaper remover to strip off the green floral wallpaper in huge swaths, trying not to take any of the wall with me as I went.  When we were down to plaster, we patched up the big holes and repainted.  The color of the walls is Behr's "Straw Hat."

We also found tall free-standing Ikea cabinets that are so close to the rest of the kitchen color that they look like built-ins, and sit at the end of our breakfast nook without blocking the radiator or back window.

Before

After

Despite our best efforts at patching, the walls were in pretty bad shape, so we installed wide crown-molding to hide some of the worst sins.  We also repainted the bottom molding, window frames and sills a glossy white, cleaning up the whole look.

We ordered this in-wall spice cabinet, custom made and pre-painted in the Spice Delight color, and Steve cut a hole in the wall and installed the cabinet.  (He even trimmed the light-switch cover to fit between the cabinet and the door frame!)  Instant additional storage!











Finally, we bought new stainless steel appliances: a fridge and a dishwasher.  (The old oven was in okay shape.)  So now we don't have a dishwasher that sounds like a 747 taking off in our kitchen every time we run it, so there's that.

Before

After

When the Sears guys were hauling away our old, army-green fridge, Steve peeked at the back and the sticker said 1975 -- so it was older than we are.  Felt a bit disrespectful just sending it to the dump, but...










The biggest cost of this phase of the kitchen project was the new appliances.  Other than that, it was a few hundred bucks for the custom-built spice cabinet and Ikea standing cabinets, another couple hundred bucks for the crown molding installation, and aside from that... just the cost of TSP, drawer/cabinet hardware, and paint.  The rest was good old fashioned sweat equity!

Before

After

The next phase is to replace the old, stained and chipped laminate countertop and backsplash.  Finally, we will have someone come in to rip up and replace the floor, which is peeling up at the corners of the room, and torn and stained in other places where we have strategically placed rugs for now.

Stay tuned!

January 2012: The bedroom walk-in closet

This closet in our master bedroom was really puzzling.  It was lovely and deep, with room for lots of things.  And yet, the only storage in it was a bizarre bent-wire hat-holder thingy on the door, and two hanging rails... parallel to each other.  Oh, and some half-assed plywood shelves along the top.

Seriously, what IS that wire thing on the door?

The rails hanging one behind the other made the closet totally worthless, because you had to wade through the first row of hanging clothes to get to your clothes hanging in the back, like Dr. Livingstone hacking through the jungle.

I guess this is what happens when you buy a house from a 94-year-old widower.

For two months after we moved in, most of my clothes stayed in their moving boxes or were exiled to the office closet down the hall.  Then Steve's parents came to stay with us, and Steve's dad offered to help with some DIY projects. I begged him to build me a proper walk-in closet! Steve's dad was like, "is that really the highest priority with everything else that you need to do?" but when I started weeping and tearing my hair out he agreed to do it.  (Okay, not that bad, but I did beg.)

Steve and his dad pulled out all that parallel-rail nonsense and started anew with a closet kit from Home Depot that included three rails and a shelving unit.  They even moved the light from the side wall to the top of the wall above the door, so it wouldn't get in the way of the new shelving!

The tricky part was the measurement of the closet, which was very deep, but also very narrow, so that hanging rails would only fit in an "L" shape in the closet.  They put one rail along the back wall, for dresses, suits and long sweaters, and then two rails one above the other on the right wall, for shirts, slacks, and skirts.

And then I got a lovely set of shoe shelves... *sniff*

The closet was narrow and the left wall was too shallow for another clothes hanging rail, so instead, we got some flat shoe drawers from Ikea.  (More shoe storage!)  Steve had to be clever about putting those in, because there was molding all around the bottom of the wall, so he had to cut the molding for the cabinets to fit flush on the wall.

We hated the hardware that came in the box, though, so I went back to Home Depot and picked out some Martha Stewart cup pulls, which Steve dutifully installed.

So here is the "before" and "after" shot.  The total cost was $118 for the closet system, $160 for two Ikea shoe racks, $30 for the fancy cup-pulls on the shoe racks, and a weekend of Steve's and his dad's time.

Before: a vast cavern of wasted space.

After: Hanging rails! Shoe racks!  And yes, the weird wire hat-hanger thingy is still there.

There is even room for a rug in our walk-in closet.  A rug!

Maybe the men thought this closet was not a high priority, but I was so overjoyed to finally be able to unpack my clothes.  And as Steve's TV DIY hero says, "Happy wife, happy life."