blood, sweat, and trim

And so it begins…

We’ve been house hunting.  For about 3 weeks.  We love our agent, she’s the shortest person ever and has an awesome sense of humor.  We found a house online on Wednesday that looked amazing.  We had MOSTLY nailed down that we want to be in NE Minneapolis because Noah’s going to school at the U of M, St. Paul campus and I work in downtown Minneapolis so NE is sort of in between.  We drove by late that night and Noah aimed his high beams on it.  That is not a metaphor.  We liked it.  We saw it yesterday, and we liked it more.  It has an amazing room above the garage with skylights that can be an art studio.  I’ve always wanted an art studio above the garage that I can walk across the yard to.  It has a huge mostly finished basement for Noah to make music in and have band practices.  It’s BIG despite appearing cute and cottage-like in this photo.  So we wrote an offer yesterday, its first day on the market.  It was one of THREE OFFERS that day. Apparently Minneapolis’ housing market is back on track.   And today…our offer was accepted!  AAAAAAH! 

It needs some work, but nothing like the last one.  I can’t wait. 

cutting ties

New life in Minneapolis

I guess to be honest there is very little blood, sweat, or trim in our lives these days.  Wait, that’s not true: Noah found a great skate park and on Wednesdays he goes to ‘old man night’ where the 40-year-olds are all there at the same time…so there has been some blood for him. 

BUT: I don’t want to let the blog die.  We will buy a house in Minneapolis as soon as we manage to sell our Chattanooga house…and today we had an offer!  But it was very low.  We countered it but our hopes are not high…so we take this only as a sign of movement and life in the housing market and for our house specifically but imagine it will not be the one.

We’re loving it here…it’s actually pretty nice to be in a rented condo and not have to work on ANYTHING house-related.  We’ve been in nesting mode, though, snuggling in for the winter, even though it’s been crazy for MN: barely any snow and often above freezing.  Odd. We’re enjoying exploring the city’s restaurants, live music, and hanging out with new friends and lots of family. 

Here are a few photos of our very urban condo, right when we moved in, including Christmas tree…we’ve got to get better about taking pictures. 

The main room: we since sold the dining table to my friend Nick, no room for it.

Kitchen with big island, very practical, noteworthy for house hunting:

Bedroom is huge, plenty of room for my desk, sewing machine, and lots of clutter:

And this is the view from in front of our building on one of the few snowy nights we’ve had. 

We’ve both said how crazy it is, we remember sitting in Chattanooga, before I even interviewed in Minneapolis, talking about it as a possibility.  Maybe it would be fun to rent a loft downtown just because it’d be so different, we could imagine sitting there, drinking coffee, looking out at the snowy city below…and it CAME TRUE.  Magic.  And some hard work.

For SALE!

So this post is a little late…we’ve been busy, MOVING TO MINNEAPOLIS!   Most of you already know this….

So, we need to sell our house in Chattanooga…it’s gorgeous, and inexpensive for its size and style…so we are crossing our fingers as we are now paying rent in MInneapolis for a lovely condo. 

So we traded this:

For this:

Quite a change!

Here’s the listing for our house:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/718-Talley-Rd_Chattanooga_TN_37411_M89131-77823

We plan to buy a house in Minnesota at some point.  We need to sell this one first.  But Noah plays drums so eventually we need to have four walls of our own…to be continued…

Master Closet

I decided that since it’s been over a year I could stop the count up of days.  Too much math.  We (mostly Noah) have been doing TONS of work on the house. 

I scraped, spackled and painted the master closet…Noah’s nice enough to let me use this one and he uses the one off of his music room.  It was bad. 

I removed the top-most, peeling layer of wallpaper:

Which exposed more child graffiti:

And then I painted floor, ceiling, and walls white.  I added trim around the bottom to seal off the sometimes-2 inch space between plywood floor and panel wall.  Then re-installed the shelving and racks. 

All my black clothes look funny in that white box. 

The back door used to be pathetic with missing trim, safety motion lights, a piece of gutter nailed above to catch drips:

I added new trim and painted it black to match the shutters and installed a simple light fixture.  Huge improvement!

Next up: Noah’s driveway re-do and new doors in the entire house!

DAY THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIVE! (YESTERDAY.)

Can’t believe one year has passed!

This bathroom is DONE.  What a long process.  I painted the ceiling with three coats of white, the beadboard with two coats of white, the walls with one coat of gray, and this morning I added the 1/4 round to the baseboards and I think that does it. The late afternoon sun is making weird reflections in here, those are not spots where I messed up the paint.  I hope.  I’d still like to find a better mirror, probably painted white, but that will take some antique store browsing.  This one is an antique that was my grandparents and very cool but a little small. I painted the sconces to save them, they were a strange rusty color. 

It was hard to find a shower curtain with gray that we liked.  We ordered this one online without realizing it was kind of glittery.  But the grays and warm neutrals are nice with the new gray paint and the wooden floor and all the white. 

Finito.  The list is getting shorter!

Day Three Hundred and Sixty Four!

Tomorrow is one year that we have owned this house.  Wow!  

We got our new shower this week…we decided to go with a professional install.  We actually ordered cool tile to do a large-scale (3”) mosaic-look ourselves but the tile never showed up, we’re kind of wiped out when it comes to major projects, and we wanted a quick solution.  We chose one of those companies that comes in and puts a fancy liner OVER your old tub, not re-glazing…it looks amazing. They also put these tile panels on the walls, all the way up to the new molding I installed and replaced the fixtures in the shower and the sink.  If we were going to live here for 20 more years we would buy a new tub, tile the shower, etc…but we’re going to put this house on the market. So we need to get it looking good FAST.

So, before, our shower was embarrassingly awful.  Terrible liner, the worst-case scenario knobs and faucet, a huge hole where our contractors moved the shower up to accommodate Noah’s height, random wooden trim boards where it met the wall, unfinished drywall and paneling edges, etc.  HIDEOUS. Not to mention the mold creeping in from behind all this mess.  Also, the tub was scratched and un-cleanable. 

Also before, including the temporary extend-a-rod. 

AFTER…aaaaahhhhh. So clean and new and perfect….it’s amazing.  It’s very hard to take photos of a shower in a 6-ft wide bathroom.  Sorry.

Complete with a corner shelf.  No more wire thing hanging from the showerhead.

Money well spent.  I don’t care if it is some kind of polymer stuff.  It’s CLEAN and bright. The installer also swapped our faucet, which was randomly black, not matching anything:

For the one that matches the shower fixtures:

Tomorrow I’m going to finish painting in there and I’ll post photos of the whole dealio.  Yahoo!

Day Three Hundred and Fifty Nine

We had three days of intense work this weekend…we are doing another huge project: painting our damned popcorn ceilings.  Ugh.  We bought a sprayer to make it a little easier and less neck-cramping…Noah decided the best way to go about it was to just strip down:

Yes, that’s a harness the machine comes with.  Yes, he’s wearing a t-shirt sleeve on his head to keep the overspray out of his hair and safety glasses and xmas polar bear boxer shorts.  Yes, he has them yanked up to his armpits because he got a tattoo on his hip touched up and the waistband irritates it if placed any lower.  And yes, that’s my baby.

We’re using that cool ceiling paint that is lavender until it dries, when it turns white.  Very helpful.  It took longer than expected.  It doesn’t look perfect.  And our necks hurt. But a white popcorn ceiling is WAY better than a dingy popcorn ceiling.  So there it is.  We are doing a bunch of rooms upstairs, too…but the ceilings are 3 feet lower up there so it will be easier.

This is an amazing tip my mom gave me.  Our bathroom window, which is one of our really great craftsman style with the four panes above, was glazed/painted/weathered ridiculously nastily on the outside, and all that crud shows through on the inside and ruins the serenity that one hopes for in the bathroom.  So I carefully taped perfect rectangles (cut with the X-acto in the corners,) about 1/4” away from the wood on each pane, purposely leaving some glass exposed, and I painted it with two coats of paint to hide the yuck.  It worked!

Before:

After: Wow!

Man, that was a very satisfying before/after for me. Also I am halfway through painting the trim, molding, walls, light fixtures, etc, in there…and the pros are showing up Wednesday to install our new tub liner and shower surround and faucet and showerhead/fixtures…ooooh.  So exciting.  We were going to tile it ourselves but we decided we wanted a quicker fix. It’s not the crappy vinyl you’re imagining…I think it will be lovely.  Dramatic changes coming soon!

I also discovered a submerged alien in our flowerbed:

More to come soon.

Day Three Hundred and Fifty Two

So we worked on the downstairs bathroom a bit when we first moved in to make it tolerable, but we never liked the paint color, the tub/shower still need to be re-done, and the crown molding in there was shoddily attached and….upside down!  Nice.  So yesterday I went nuts in there again.

The ceiling is an icky off-white and this atrocious light fixture was there when we moved in.  Ugh.  Awful. You can see the terrible crown molding here.

So for starters I ripped it all out and threw it in the tub since it will be refinished.  (Please ignore disgusting grime, soon to be gone.) 

Revealing multiple layers of wallpaper, as usual:

And then spent HOURS building this molding that I think I made up…maybe it has a name.  I just used 1x4’s and 1x2’s. It matches the style of the house better than regular crown, which I’ve always hated…and is a little easier to work with in a house that contains no regular/straight walls, ceilings or corners.  With my regular miter cuts there are only minimal gaps.  And Dad, you’d be proud of me: when it was necessary I used the grinder to shave off sections so that it would be flush to the wall or ceiling.  I did it RIGHT.  

Now I just have to patch, caulk, prime, paint, replace lights, re-do shower and tub, and we’re DONE.  Again.  It’ll be so nice when it’s all new. 

I worked on screen printing for my online store, the crosbie, today, which has been picking up lately.  A customer ordered this custom coat rack and I thought I might make a little version for our bathroom for towels and robes and things when I’m done…it would be a nice addition:

OK.  Many updates on the way!

Day Three Hundred and Fifty One

We’re on a roll again…or I guess we never really take that much time off, but we’re just doing maintenance, like mowing our huge yard or weeding or cleaning…we have a LOT of space to take care of here.

We finally replaced the very ugliest of our ceiling fixtures, which always takes about 3 times longer than you hope it will.

Guest room before, worst case scenario, brass, fake wood, missing a glass shade:

We put this down at the bottom of the driveway and it was gone in about 5 minutes.  Our neighborhood is really dependable for that kind of thing.

And after, a nice little new white one.  I’m not a huge fan of fans (!) but here it’s nice to have them.  We also need a round vent cover for that lovely hole in the ceiling in the before photo. 

This one was such an eyesore in our kitchen nook, still covered with sawdust from sanding the floors before we moved in:

And now, Noah enjoys the new simple fan in the nook:

Coming up next is my progress on the bathroom…replacing crown molding with my own craftsman-style trim…took a long time but well worth it!