June 2022 - Erin's Middle Niche

Gutting the Bathroom

Where to start?

Where to start would be finding someone to work on it. Contractors are really booked right now from playing catch up from projects delayed by COVID. I would really like to get this project done before we moved in since it is the only bathroom in the house.

Layout

The current layout looks okay in that picture, but what you can’t see is the shower/tub is really narrow. What you can see is how the shower curtain is not vertical because of where the rod has to be placed due to the door and door frame. What that all means is you get “attacked” by the shower curtain. It only wants to suction to you and not hang like it’s supposed to. I thought about getting one of the curved rods to give more space for now, but I’m not sure it would work with the door opening. And the shower curtain would probably have to be longer to be effective. Another fun part of the bathroom and shower is the light switch is actually located IN the shower. Yeah, that wouldn’t pass any inspections these days.

So what I’m thinking might work is to move the shower over by the window (if we lose that window it’s fine with me), move the toilet where the sink is, and move the sink where the shower/tub is now. Currently across from the toilet is a linen closet, which is great. It provides lots of storage, so I’m hoping we will still have space for something similar.

The door swing may be changed to allow more room in the bathroom as well. It swings into the room now and that takes up a lot of potential space. I’ve also looked at a split door which may work, too. The square foot area of the bathroom isn’t terrible, but the layout doesn’t use the space as efficiently as it could.

What’s next?

Besides finding a contractor, the one thing we did do was pull up the carpet (yes, carpet) that was on the floor. It had been there a long time.

I think that the original floor was probably wood and was rotting since it is a bathroom and was wet a lot. Then they put another layer of wood on top because you can kind of tell in the picture that it’s not level with the floor in the hallway and the boards are going in opposite directions. Then when those boards started to rot (there’s evidence of that) they slapped some carpet on it and called it a day.

The walls are not drywall or plaster, but some kind of paneling. It is very rough. Every time Morgan has to take a bath she says “We’ve GOT to do something with this bathroom.” I swear she thinks we are just going to redo the rest of the house and leave what is probably the worst part as is. Oh, Morgan.

Colors and decorating

I have a color picked out for the walls. It’s a dark green. Not the same as the Green Room upstairs, but it may get changed to that because I like that color a lot. I think the bottom half or 2/3 will be either board and batten or a bead board that is white. That style goes with a Craftsman house and would look nice. I don’t have a picture of the medicine cabinet, but I plan to refinish that and use it above the sink.

So, stick around and see what actually happens with the bathroom. And when it happens since it might be more in the long-term than short-term.

Ceiling Fixes

Natalie’s Room

The Pink Room/Natalie’s Room had a basketball size piece of plaster that had fallen off the ceiling. Most likely due to water damage. Obviously, that was a main repair Brandon tackled first upstairs. The rest of the plaster on the ceiling and walls was in good shape except for the normal cracks. The closets in all the bedrooms upstairs were the worst for cracks. I think that was due to the angles and temperature fluxes in those areas.

The reason Morgan chose the room with the smaller closet. I guess she thought we weren’t going to fix it?

Just like with the cracks in the walls, this had to get worse before it got better. Brandon made the hole larger until the plaster was tight with the lath on the ceiling.

I’m pretty sure this was about his stopping point for making it larger.

After this point, he used some plaster to start mending the hole. The plaster was hard to work with because it set so fast. This was also one of the first projects he did. I’m guessing if he did it now, he would be much faster at applying the plaster. After one layer of plaster and sanding, I’m pretty sure he moved to mud for the next layer. I believe it took three layers before he was happy with the blending and sanding.

We have primed and painted it. You can’t tell it was ever there. And now Morgan is questioning her decision about room choice. 😉

Looks pretty darn good for his first ceiling plaster repair.

Morgan’s Room

The Blue Room/Morgan’s Room didn’t have a hole in it, but we could see where there was water damage on the ceiling and when we pushed up on the plaster, there was a bubble formed.

Brandon really didn’t want to cut out the plaster (Natalie’s room was a lot of messy, dusty work looking up at a ceiling) so he researched ways he could repair it without cutting any out. I’m pretty sure this is the video he watched and read from on how to make the repair. He got two packs of these from Ace, not Amazon, though. 🙂

It is secured to the lath and ready for mudding and sanding.

This is from a different angle but you can see that it’s covered up and looks pretty good.

Green Room

Ugh, the green room. It (and Morgan’s room) had wallpaper. Didn’t really realize it until we started doing the crack repairs and it peeled. At first we weren’t that concerned about it. The girls had a blast using the various putty knives to peel it from the ceilings and the walls.

Besides throwing boxes over the banister, this was probably their favorite task.

Yes, Natalie was right up there helping to peel it off, too. Neither girls seem to have a fear of heights or ladders. The floor was COVERED with wallpaper shreds.

After we peeled off everything we could get with the putty knives, Brandon went over it with his sander to catch any other edges. Then did some mudding to remove any ridges. So we thought it was good to go for priming and painting. BUT when we started priming the ceiling (and the walls), that dang (keeping it PG here) wallpaper bubbled right up. It was frustrating and timewise a set back, but in the grand scheme of rehabbing an old house, not an expensive set back. So we got to get out the putty knives again and start Round #2. After that round of mudding and sanding, the prime did hold. There were a few tiny bubbles show up, but we looked the other way and kept on painting. I’ve painted over a lot of wallpaper and never had that happen when it’s felt so tight to the wall to begin with.

It’s Done and look at the “new” green in the green room. I LOVE it. I’m wondering where else I can put this color.

And to cap off the wallpaper issues, when we peeled off the tape on the ceiling to do the wall color, of course some wallpaper peeled off with it. So Brandon went around and had to touch it up in all the bedrooms. We are glad to be done painting upstairs!

Refinishing the floors

So obviously we were excited to find hardwood floors downstairs when we pulled up a corner of the carpet. We did that WAY before we had painted because we were curious. Considering the upstairs had hardwood, we were pretty sure the downstairs would as well. Although the upstairs is a wider plank and I think a different wood than is downstairs. I’ll try to get a better picture of the upstairs floors this weekend. They are currently covered in a lot of dust, so that may prove difficult.

Pulling the carpet

This part was fun for me and the girls liked it too. It was a big deal to get to the point where we could pull it up and get it out of the house. My lungs were really excited about it. Plus, it was fun to find out what was underneath that 50+year old carpet. Below is a link to a video of the girls pulling up the carpet.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7jXflUYWfHs

Then it was pulling up all the staples and tack strips. It’s a job I don’t mind at all. Morgan and I had a pretty good system for it, too. She would pop the staples up with a flathead screwdriver and I would follow behind and get them with the needle nose pliers. Brandon worked on the tack strips while us girls did the staples. Natalie floated in and out of both processes as 3 year old’s do.

Process that we will most likely follow

Once we got the carpet up, we could see that the floors would need refinishing. The living room has a rug-sized area that is a different stain than the rest of the floors. Plus the south facing windows in the dining room and office/computer room created some sun damage to the floors.

This shows the two different stains and the “rug” that was stained around.

We are going to start upstairs with the refinishing because neither of us have ever refinished floors so we want to start in the rooms where most people probably won’t see. So if we screw up it’s not at the front door when you walk in the house. I am hoping this weekend we get the rest of the upstairs painted, so we can start prepping for the refinishing. I know we will have to get all the quarter round off, which means we will have to label all of it and try to bundle it by room/closet. Then there’s the dust that will need vacuumed, mopped, and vacuumed some more before we even start sanding and creating more dust. We will be getting the ducts cleaned after all this dust has been floating around. 🙂

Brandon and I both have longer weekends over the 4th, so I am thinking we should be making good progress upstairs those days. Once that is done, I’m going to move the girls air mattress upstairs to get them used to sleeping upstairs and farther than a few feet away from us (at either house). I think that will be a major hurdle. I predict it will take a long time before they are sleeping in their own rooms upstairs.

Stain Color

Of course with all this progress on the floors means we need to choose a stain color. I’m pretty decisive when it comes to paint because I know that can be changed relatively easy in the future. But the stain color makes me a little nervous. It’s a big commitment. I don’t think I want to match the trim exactly due to the amount of red that is in the trim. I think that I want something slightly lighter and more neutral in color if that makes sense. So going back to the “rug” picture above, I want more of the rug color, less of the border color. Anyone have any thoughts on that issue? The built ins are even a different color than the trim, so I think it will be fine if the floors don’t match the trim.

Fun Side Projects

Some of the fun projects we have started.

Fixing up the house is a lot of fun, but so are the little side projects for decorating and furnishing the house and yard.

The yard is pretty much a blank canvas since my grandma gave up gardening several years before she passed. My plan is to use some of my dad’s old hog feeders as raised garden beds. We will take the top ring off and I think that will be about the right height. We’ve read where you can fill the bottom 1/3-1/2 with limbs and leaves to decrease the amount of soil you need to put in, so I think that is the current game plan. These will be on the south side of the house, between the driveway and the house.

Outside Projects

I *think* it will be as easy as removing a few bolts to get that top ring off. Then roll them to where we want them. We’ll see…

Then I wanted to add some play things for the girls outside but didn’t necessarily want one of the huge playsets, so I perused trusty Pinterest for ideas. There are a lot of tractor tires around, so I found this idea for a climbing tower.

This is the general idea. I think ours is slightly different with the pole placement. It currently looks a little bit like below.

Actually all four poles are attached now. Next we are going to have my dad lift if with his loader tractor so we can mark the spots in the grass where we need to dig the holes. We have to do that because the a couple of the poles are warped like you can see in the picture. Then we will take it all apart and spray pain the tires some fun colors and resemble. (Can you see the girls in the distance? They were playing safari in the tall grass. Morgan goes in barefoot, but Natalie prefers some footwear.)

We are going to stain the brackets on the roof. Brandon ventured out to make sure they were in okay shape and they seem to be. That will most likely include renting a boom truck so one of us can be lifted up to stain them on the sides of the house. But I think it will really make the “pop” and give some interest to a very white house.

Morgan really wanted to get out on the roof, but that was a hard no. It’s steeper than it looks.

Inside Projects

The next one is one I’m most excited about completing, but it doesn’t need to be done until we refinish the floors downstairs. It will be the lighting fixture for the dining room. Brandon has also found a lamp for the living room he wants to build and I’ll share that once we get closer to making it. Here is the inspiration.

I have glass insulators I purchased from my grandpa Tumbleson’s farm sale, so those will be used and the piece of wood is coming from a barn my dad is taking down on this farm.

You can see the lumber is attached to my SUV to be pulled out, but Brandon ended up cutting it and pulling it out himself. He has a few others to turn into shelves for the living room.

Here they are getting all sanded and ready to be stained. They look great!

There will be many more projects to come. Brandon’s currently reading this book to Morgan at night before she heads to bed, so who knows how many projects will come from there? 🙂

Repairing the walls

So one of my first goals was to get rid of the carpet. It had been there for at least 42 years because it’s in my baby pictures at that house. It was full of dust that would cause me to sneeze, wheeze, and just be miserable for a couple of days after leaving the house. The girls playing and removing the furniture just kicked up all the particles that wreaked havoc with my respiratory system.

Prep Work

But before the carpet could be pulled up, we wanted to do all the painting so if/when we spilled it wasn’t a big deal. In order to paint, we had to fill in ALL the nail holes. My grandma loved pictures and put a lot of them on the walls. Then there were the cracks in the plaster walls. Neither one of us had ever done anything like that before, so we researched how on YouTube and This Old House. Are we experts on this? I’ll let you know after a few years if our repairs have held. I will tell you we have gotten MUCH faster at slicking on the mud and sanding it. My favorite video for repair was this one. It was straight forward, simple and made it seem less daunting.

Just some of the many nail holes we filled.

The girls got in on the work, too. They did a great job! They really liked sanding it down after it dried, too.

This is a crack in the dining room. It had what I was referring to as a “sister” crack in the office. Basically the same size and same location on the opposite side of the wall. These two were probably the biggest cracks we worked on downstairs.

So you actually have to widen the cracks first which seems counterintuitive, but it allows for the mud to grab on to more area. I just used a box cutter and followed the path of the cracks. For areas that were slightly wider than you see here we used adhesive mesh tape and then a couple layers of mud on top (thoroughly drying and sanding between layers).

This is what it looks like after it’s had one layer of mud. We tried using plaster but it set too quickly for our expertise. We might be able to do it now since we’ve nearly done the whole house but this system seems to be working. Again, we’ll see how it looks in 5 years. I’m optimistic but won’t be terribly surprised if we find some cracks pop up again.

This process has taken a long time because of the drying times, multiple layers, sanding, and then the more we looked, the more cracks we found. But the walls look really good right now. I realized I don’t have a great final picture, so that will have to wait until we head back up there next weekend! 🙂