Flush Like a Champion Today

For our second day of glorious homeownership, we had the privilege of removing and replacing some toilets. And by we, I mean our dollars and a nice plumber. You may recall that last night we had the water and gas turned on. We discovered on our walk through this morning that the upstairs toilet was leaking from the drain (or something equally gross - I may have had to go to my happy place for that discussion.) Our contractor who was there turned it off. Then the Kid (who never made it to school today... whoops!) had to go potty. In the black potty, since that was the only one that worked. I mean, I had been told that it worked. The Kid was terrified of this black potty. And I mean, why wouldn't you be? It's an enormous black maw opening up underneath you, full of God knows what germs and stuff and BLECH.

It didn't flush. The problem was with the kit inside and not the actual toilet, but I hated the toilet so much I didn't even want to repair the kit. The Mr. was kind enough to indulge me and had a plumber out within a few hours. (I am indulging him in his survey spending, so it all works out.) We are the proud new owners of a  Gerber Viper commode:

Why in the world you would want to name a toilet after a snake, I have no idea. It invites one to think, that's going to bite me in the a$$. The plumber had it on his truck so it wasn't like I selected such a thing, although its pristine whiteness does fill me with joy. The plumber and I discussed this unusual naming choice, and he tells me that the next model up is the Avalanche. The Avalanche. This does not create a pleasant mental image in my mind. Mr. Plumber says that they want people to know how aggressively they flush. They flush like CHAMPIONS. They flush so hard they are HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH. In your face!

So the limousine of toilets is now sitting in the middle of the office, awaiting its trip to the big dumpster in the sky. Go with God, disgusting filthy toilet.

So the even worse toilet upstairs has been removed and the water pipes cut down (or something? I am not a plumber.) Unsurprisingly, the pipes are original to the house and in terrible shape. The water damage on the dining room/kitchen wall may be due to pipe failure inside the wall in addition to the water leaking down from the upstairs bathroom. Despite this, the mold guy's perspective was that the wall is in fine shape and can be treated, sealed and painted. We will most likely end up replacing the pipes from the second floor to the basement. It isn't fun or cute or trendy, but it needs to be done and we want to do this right. This is our long term house and we are making long term decisions. We'll be discussing this with the bathroom guys and seeing how it affects our timelines. They said the mold remediation and the bathroom would take about three weeks to complete, but this is obviously going to push it back farther. We'll see what happens, I guess. 

In other news, the master bedroom was my project of the day (with some help from the invaluable Grandpa T). We got all the carpet out, most of the staples and tacks, and most everything from the walls. In our WTF? moment of the day, I encountered this: 

I removed about a gajillion of these nails today. Our theory is that they were trying to fix a squeak in the floor. The nails have no pattern, rhyme or reason and were put in OVER the carpet pad. Seriously? All in all, the floors are not in bad shape but this particular area of damage is going to require some attention. When they installed the carpet they took the shoe molding from the existing baseboards and moved it up about two inches. We'll need to remove it and reinstall it in the original position. Knowing that has to be done puts another point in the 'paint trim' column for me, although so far I'm about 55% in favor of leaving them stained. That's a debate for another post, for sure. So now we have a room that looks like this: 

Not too shabby for a couple of hours work. The plan is to do the other bedrooms tomorrow and Friday so that we are ready for the bathroom demo Saturday morning, followed by the carpet removal on the landing, stairs, living and dining rooms. (While the Mr. leads a crew taking out all the basement paneling, ceiling and extra walls). I did get the dumpster ordered and if all goes as planned on Saturday we should have the mold guys in next week to get started. 

We had a showing on our other house tonight, so we had a picnic in the driveway. We could be doing a lot worse. 

Day One Progress Report

God bless you, dearly departed homeowner. God bless you for buying the expensive wallpaper. God bless you for priming the walls before it was applied. God bless you.

I have about 90% of the wallpaper in the house removed. And this house was papered. It came off in full sheets in my hands. I used no tools. My nails are all still present and accounted for.

Lest you think I've been inhaling some sort of toxic gas and hallucinating, we made a short (and apparently hilarious?) video to demonstrate:

This was actually one of the more 'challenging' wallpapers in the entire house, because it was more paper and less fabric underneath and was tearing horizontally. Most of the floors are covered in entire sheets of paper. Like so: 

Did I do that? 

My back and feet tell me that I did. 

So in addition to winning the wallpaper lottery today, I also unearthed this little gem: 

Also known as the gorgeous hardwood floors in my bedroom. Score. 

This is the worst thing that happened today:

Oh wait. That's the wall I'm going to open up anyway. Looking at the state of the wall, we may end up removing it entirely now. Either way. It's cool. 

I also got the water and gas turned on and the utilities switched over to our name. We met the next door neighbors to the north, who don't live in that house but come down randomly every few weeks to mow and stuff, so we were able to have a fence discussion much earlier than anticipated. We had two other contractors out to bid today and are looking forward to their numbers soon. I will call and order the dumpster for the demolition party tomorrow, it will be dropped on Friday and the sledgehammers attack on Saturday. Depending on my discussion with the mold guy, we may have all the carpets and wallpaper down by Saturday as well. 

Am I crazy or are things going really well over here? Don't get too excited. It won't last. 

The armadillo and I meet with the mold remediation dude at 9 am. 

At Last!

My love has come along...

As of 4:30 p.m. today, we are officially old home-owners! After the months of negotiating back and forth, the seller didn't even come to the closing. He came in Sunday afternoon and signed everything before we even got there. If I had known that, I might have had a much better night's sleep last night. As it was, I had stress dreams all night about trying to get to closing and there were a million escalators at school and I was trying to call the Mr. and tell him where I was and how hard I was trying to get there and water kept getting on my cell phone and then I had to walk across campus in the dark and I got attacked by werewolves. 

So in comparison, it's been a pretty quiet day, really. Wallpaper removal and contractors are on the docket for tomorrow, along with a bunch of phone calls for utilities and dumpsters and all that. 

(P.S. For months I've been texting our realtor: If we get to closing, I'll bring cupcakes. If we get to closing, I'll kiss the seller! If we get to closing, there is going to be champagne. We got to closing, and then he drove us back to the house for a champagne toast. Our new next door neighbor came over to toast with us. Pretty sweet afternoon.)

(P.P.S. Do you SEE that window frame??!?!? And the formica backsplash?!?!) 

Pink and Black Bathroom

There is actually one room in this whole house where I want to keep the wallpaper as is: the downstairs half bathroom.

This may be because I have no idea what to paint this room, and I kind of enjoy the swanky little fish. It's also in much better shape than the other wallpaper in the house.

The current plan is to replace the toilet and sink with vintage looking white fixtures. The black toilet just really squicks me out for some reason. Is that weird? I'll put in a pedestal sink instead of the nasty vanity and paint the cabinet over the toilet a glossy black. Then we'll rip down the curtain and call it a day.

The tile floor has a lot of yellow in it, actually, and has been painstakingly laid to be flush with the hardwood floor. So we're not interested in replacing it unless we absolutely have to. There are a few wonky spots where they've done some repairs, but we have no idea what's behind the vanity or the toilet.

I'll admit that my first impulse was just to demo the whole thing, but one of my BFFs convinced me to keep it  as a highly coveted vintage find. It grew on me, what can I say. 

My only other idea for this room is chalkboard paint above the tile: 

The Mud Room

This isn't a particularly exciting room, but it's an important one. With a large dog and a small child living on 150 acres of park, a good mudroom is a must.

See this flooring seam? There's an even bigger one running straight down the middle of the kitchen.

We have to replace the exterior door for sure, and we don't plan to use the washer and dryer hook ups. So the plan is to have those taken down, take out the pantry (hiding behind the door jam to the left) so that there's room for the fridge, and do some built in storage under the window and along the wall. Once we move the doorway to the kitchen, we'd like to squeeze in a utility sink in that corner. 

The only rooms in the entire house with painted trim are the mudroom, the kitchen and the upstairs bathroom. The upstairs bath and the kitchen will all get the BM Mayonnaise treatment. I'm still undecided on the color scheme for this room. 

This HouseBeautiful picture makes me think about the orange bathroom, and about how making that connection would be so clever: 

The Kid actually had that striped jacket (from Target!) and just outgrew it. Dang. Do people in HouseBeautiful shop at Target? 

The Idea Room 'organizational boards' is what I'm aiming for on the north wall: 

I can totally DIY this, right? 

But if not, I like this too: 

My dream utility sink: 

The Mr. laughs at this picture. But he's okay with a Home Depot sink/cabinet combo doohick. 

The Kitchen... Dun dun DUUUUUUNNNN

In terms of our budget and our schedule, the kitchen is the big bad. It is the most sensitive to being out of date, impacts all of our lives on a daily basis, is a primary entertainment venue, etc. etc. You all know about kitchens.

The refrigerator isn't functional according to the seller's declaration. Thank goodness. The alcove to the right has three doors: to the left is the side exterior door/basement staircase, to the right is the pantry/closet and then across from the staircase going up there is a coat closet. You can actually see out the front door when the doors are closed.

The office is through the doorway. The stove will end up switching places with the fridge so that we can set the fridge even with the countertop. The cabinets above the fridge also have that glass front top row, and we will vent the cooktop and microwave through them and to the exterior, with a false back on the cabinets so you can't tell.

This door will get moved to the left to allow that strange recessed cabinet to get bumped out. The side cabinet next to the stove will be taken away to make room for the new doorways, so the fridge will be right next to the doorway. We'll have to get started on the project to actually get all the cabinet hijinks straightened out.

There is a nice pair of windows over the sink. Unfortunately, the window frame is in very rough shape, the counter and backsplash are all the same material and are also in rough shape. I actually like the top row of cabinets and I don't hate the doors of the middle cabinets, so painting the cabinetry and putting new hardware should get us pretty far. The cabinets were quite expensive when they were put in. I can only imagine how much they spent on all the funky countertops here and in the upstairs bath.

The little door is actually the first floor laundry chute access. Huzzah! I'd like to take the cabinet off the wall, paint it and use it as a hutch in the dining room. The wall will be opened up to about where the cabinet ends, so that we can have access to the island from the dining room. We have the original swinging door for that door frame in the basement. There's been some casual talk of hanging it between the kitchen and the mudroom to keep out the chill. 

So clearly, we have a lot of work to do in here, but by putting in new appliances we could live with the rest of it for awhile. We're hoping that we don't have to do that, but it all depends on how well the essential items are doing and when we sell our house and for how much. We would love to put in quartz counters, but may have to do an intermediate step of putting down new vinyl flooring (there's a huge, peeling seam running down the middle of the floor that I didn't get a picture of) and some new laminate counters and then saving our pennies for a few years before we do the 'real' renovation. It all sounds a little (or a lot) daunting, but even if the kitchen had been redone right before we moved in, we would have ended up doing at least some updates and new appliances over the next 30 years. We may anyway, but at least all the changes will be ours. 

I would like to take this moment to hop up on my design soapbox. It's past time we let go of this open cabinet kitchen craze. I have heard all the pros and I'm sure you have to, but the con is pretty huge: this is the  kitchen, people. Where people are cooking. Frying, flouring, mixing, cooking. Everything on those open shelves is going to be filthy every time you want to use it. Maybe you don't mind washing things twice, but I certainly do. I am way too OCD to even consider open cabinets. 

My plan is to paint all the cabinets BM Mayonnaise, and paint the interior of the glass front cabinets either the same aqua as the dining room or a lighter shade of it, which will also be used to paint the new faux beadboard ceiling in the kitchen. We want dark brown countertops and actually really like our current vinyl floor so we'll probably stick with a different style of vinyl. 

I love this kitchen from Modwalls, and I would even allow the open shelves for cookbooks. I'd go with an undermount sink instead of the big farmhouse. The Mr. has a personal vendetta against stainless steel appliances so we've selected everything in white. Due to his other vendetta against glass tile I probably couldn't get this backsplash, which is in a color called Surf (squee!) but I luuuuuuuuuurv it. Like, I want to lick this kitchen. It's delicious. 

He has approved an opaque subway tile backsplash in white (so avant garde!) but he doesn't care about the pattern so much. Thanks to this post by Kate at Centsational Girl, I was able to get his okay for a herringbone pattern (Sarah Richardson for HGTV): 

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Mr. is the one who does the cooking and the dishes in our household, so he gets the final word on all the kitchen decisions. I love colored glass tile but I don't love it enough to cook every night. Alas. 

Office

The office is kind of low on my list, because the Mr. won't really be working from home until after construction and generally prefers his cubicle at work when the weather is warm. But here it is.

The fancy lens makes this room look strangely long. It's wider and shorter in real life. You can see the pink and black bathroom through the door on the right. The built in opens up and my goal is to put all our hanging files in there and then put cushions down for additional seating. The Mr. uses a laptop on a lap desk (with the ugliest recliner in history) for his work, so we don't really need to do a desk. 

This is the part of the room that will be affected by the kitchen reno. The door to the kitchen will be removed and walled up, so that the cabinets continue around to the island which opens up to the dining room. The closet will be knocked back to make room for the refrigerator which will be flipping sides with the stove. It shouldn't affect the door at all, just the interior.

This awesome light fixture has already been claimed by another BFF. She's a lucky, lucky girl.

The color for this room is going to be the same as the living room, whatever that ends up being. I need something neutral to offset the bright dining room and the design challenges posed by the pink and black bathroom. Also, the Mr. wants all walls to be white. Always.