Home: Remuddling through...

[godfry n. glad]

I've watched Roland's posts on her newly acquired home and am pleased.

I've been down that road. The home in which I currently live has been in the process of remuddling since before I moved into it more than 25 years back. My wife, Ivy, was afflicted with the home decorating and remodelling disorder (HRARD). Upon marrying her, I became a slave to her affliction.

My home has been through multiple remodels. Some rooms have been redone thrice, in my experience. Much of that, though, is merely paint. But some of it is deeper than the merely cosmetic. I have tales to tell and I have free advice to give. I suspect others do, as well.

So...this thread is for home remodelling stories.

[godfry n. glad]

I live in a 1922 wood frame construction bungalow. It sits upon a slightly substandard sized lot in an inner city neighborhood in major Pacific Northwest metropolitan area. It's a nice neighborhood of single family homes with a few multiple family homes scattered amidst them, shot through with auto-oriented commercial along the traffic arterials.

It's modest. Basically a two bedroom home. I think it was originally a "kit home" and was probably purchased locally. It has a finished half-basement, which is a remnant of having removed the original sawdust burning furnace (once known as "the octopus in the basement"), with a full foundation. It's sided with cedar shake siding, unpainted (a story in itself) and has mostly double-hung windows. There are hardwood floors in the main rooms, living room and dining room, on the front of the house; the rest of the flooring is softwood, fir, most likely.

My wife bought it in 1977, when she was single. Purchase price was $25,000 and she put half down, thanks to an inheritance from her father's death. The remodelling started when she got a home improvement loan from a city program that existed to help single women buy and upgrade inner city houses. Out came the sawdust furnace and in went gas. Everything was reducted. Twenty five years later, we replaced the old gas furnace with a newer, far more fuel efficient, gas furnace.

We have since finished the upstairs, which, when I moved in in 1984, was an unfinished attic that had served as temporary home for many of her musician friends, a domestically dynamic lot. Last decade, we accomplished something Ivy had dreamed of for years: installing a second bathroom, with walk-in shower, upstairs. That was effectively the end of the project that started with our returning a fancy food processer wedding gift for the cash to put down a subflooring upstairs.

Front room - redecorated thrice, imx
Dining room - redecorated thrice, imx
Kitchen - remodelled once, augmented twice, imx
Lower bath - remodelled once, imx (she'd done it twice before, already)
Corner bed - redecorated, twice
Side bed - redecorated, thrice
Hallway - redecorated
Stairwell - redecorated, twice
Basement - re...done
Upper bath - complete remodel add-on
Upstairs suite - remodelled and redocorated, twice.

I was amused by the responses to the wallpaper in Roland's new place. There was an article in today's paper about some really unique wallpapers found locally...with Asian fairy tale animals. We had wallpaper on every wall on the main floor. Ivy liked none of it, but she preserved the wallpaper that is, to this day, still visible inside the closets. It's verrrry fifties. She removed all of the wallpaper in the house, excluding the hallway, with a 3" putty knife and a spray bottle of vinegar water. Only in the hallway and the lower stairwall was wallpaper ever returned.

Taking down the wallpaper throughout the house revealed that the front rooms, reflecting their better floors, had better walls, too. It's a very fine and very hard wall, whereas the hallway and bedrooms have lathe and plaster walls that you can permanently mark with a thumbnail.

Anybody got any preferences?

[biochemgirl]

Holy cow, nothing that extensive for us.

We just moved in last April so we are in the process of doing things. Luckily the house is in great shape it's just minor cosmetic things. We just got done painting the bathroom today. The previous owners had a thing for butterflies and flower stenciling everywhere and seeing that at 5 every morning was making me want to hurl. Butterflies are now gone!

We've also painted the kitchen and bedroom. Replaced the kitchen sink, some minor things like that. We have plans eventually to knock out the wall in between the kitchen and dining room to make a bigger kitchen and to add on to the back.

[godfry n. glad]

Hey, bcgirl...You've been there only since last April? Well, all that stuff I listed was accomplished over a span of almost 20 years. We never did more than two of them at any given time, and usually it was just one project (if I had anything to say about it, which was rare).

[biochemgirl]

I still think it's quite impressive.

Probably the longer you're in a place the more you want to change it as time goes on. I think my parents added on to their house probably 3 or 4 times, it was just a tiny house when I was growing up. And of course they add on a sun porch with hot tub AFTER I move out!

[livius drusus]

Wow, that must have one seriously fancy food processor.

The only remodelling stories I have is from when I was a kid and my parents bought my great-grandmother's house from the estate after she died. It's a late 1700's 2 bedroom which didn't even have indoor plumbing when we bought it. My great-grandmother was a old-style Yankee straight out of a Mark Twain novel, and her outhouse and iron hand pump in the kitchen suited her just fine.

I don't really remember much about the renovations per se; a lot of repainting and new faucets and whatnot. It's the coolness of the original features that stuck with me, like the 2-foot-wide American chestnut floor boards and the huge slate hearthstones.

[Dingfod]

My parents bought the house that had belonged to my dad's Uncle Brian. Uncle Brian, who died at age 96, lived in that house since they moved old two farmhouses into town in 1922, joining them together to make one house. My parents found that the front bedroom was in fairly good shape, painted it and moved in, putting up plastic to separate that one room from the rest of the house. Over the next five years, they gutted that house down to the floor joists and wall studs, even replacing a number of the former because of termite damage. The place was replumbed, rewired, redone from there. They made two bathrooms out of one, two bedrooms out of three, and another bedroom out of the old milk room off the old back porch, which they enclosed. Uncle Brian ran a dairy out of the house until the late 1950s, that's why there was a milk room, where he bottled the milk brought in from dairy farms in cans. I'm sure they could write a book on remuddling.

[godfry n. glad]

Okay...Here's the kitchen.


entry from the dining room,
one of the two major front rooms.
the back door is the far side.


same view,
standing in the doorway.


looking back from across the room,
toward that same doorway.


view into kitchen from the hallway.
door to basement at right,
door to main bath unseen on left.
photographer standing in front of
both main floor bedroom doors.

stepping up to that same door,
and taking the view to the right,
you see:


sorry, no view to the left.
it's the back door.

The major renovation was prior to my arrival on the scene. It was done in the late 70s to early 80s by a fellow with whom I now play poker. It's been tinkered with ever since. He's done at least two tinkerings himself.

It's mostly oak. The back door is fir. The kitchette table is maple. The counterboard is maple. All the decorative material is oak.

When I first saw it, the place where the tile counter meets the wood was where the upper cabinets turned and jutted out into the room, above the slab maple counterboard, which also jutted out into the room. This created a more defined kitchen from kitchenette space, and a maple slab nookish kind of space, but made for a lot of excess movement between the rooms. The kitchenette, itself, rescued from its past as a mud porch, was a major addition to the space in the first major remodel. Plus, the dangling cabinets were open...no doors. The major renovation of the renovation was to take down the flying buttress cabinet and place new cabinets back to the wall. This meant dislodging the cabinet upon which the maple slab rests and turning 90. That was done with the result you see.

Soffitts? Afterthought.

Exhaust to exterior from stove. Afterthought.

Glass doors on cabinets. Afterthought.

The biggest remaining aspect to change? The floors.

This is the major lesson I learned from this. Black and white checked floors get lots of raves. People think they are wonderful for some reason. Let me tell you...they are a pain in the ass to keep clean. Oh, no worse than any other kitchen floor, but between the two solid colors, they show every spill and splatter and Crumb to it's absolute glaringly worst. Unless you have a professional cleaner, I do not recommend this floor.

[livius drusus]

I LOVE that tile in the kitchen. Is that original?

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

I LOVE that tile in the kitchen. Is that original?

Floor tile? Or counter tile?

Nothing in this kitchen is original. Original would have been 1922. This is a 1980 remuddle on a 1922 (or more likely, 1958) predecessor.

ETA: Since it's not very good pix of the kitchen counter tiles, it must be the floors. They're vinyl tiles. See text above.

[livius drusus]

Originally Posted by godfry n. glad

This is the major lesson I learned from this. Black and white checked floors get lots of raves. People think they are wonderful for some reason. Let me tell you...they are a pain in the ass to keep clean. Oh, no worse than any other kitchen floor, but between the two solid colors, they show every spill and splatter and Crumb to it's absolute glaringly worst. Unless you have a professional cleaner, I do not recommend this floor.

They're just so geometrically pleasing, I can understand why everyone loves looking at them even if they'd hate maintaining them. My ideal kitchen would have some kind of terracotta tile, although nowadays there are so many great-looking composites and synthetics I could easily go a whole other direction.

What are you going to change the floors to?

[godfry n. glad]

Originally Posted by livius drusus

What are you going to change the floors to?

We actually liked the durability of the vinyl tiles. A local outfit has been making available the 'marbled' vinyl tiles that we as children saw in the hallways of practically every schoolhouse in the US. Only in multiple colors. So, we we're basically thinking of replacing it with other vinyl tiles. (We never got very far on discussing the color.)

[curses]

OK, after seeing the tile job in my friend's house, I have a story!

Backstory: My friend just bought a house, and we're doing some light remodeling to get it ready for her to move in.

My husband and I have spent every Sunday for the past month or so helping her paint a few rooms in the house. One of them had shelving units with no back built in, so they coated the wall behind it (poorly) with gloss paint. That was my husband's job to remove, and it's taken just shy of 3 solid hours. I've had the task of installing a cat door in a metal outer door (ended up a bit off level), putting up curtain rods, installing new lighting fixtures, removing built in shelves and putting them in another room...pretty basic stuff.

The biggest chore is the tile job in the living room/kitchen/laundry room. The guy that's doing it isn't a pro, but a friend of a friend who does this stuff on the side. So he starts to install the tile last week. It's taken him awhile, but he's gotten to the last few squares in the living room, and none of the lines are straight. It looks as though not only was he not using spacers, but he didn't bother to measure and set plumb lines either. The tiles are different heights, like he's used too much mortar on some, and not enough on others. It looks pretty bad.

Now we've been assured that it'll look better once the grout is in. Maybe it will, the laundry room looked nice. I do have a question for anyone who's ever used slate tile, though. He told us that it's uneven because all the tiles are cut unevenly. I couldn't really see it, they looked even to me when stacked up in the boxes. How true is this?

[Roland98]

I've done my share too, godfry. This is my 3rd house I've owned. The first, we took up the horrible carpet and put down laminate, painted EVERYthing, took out a hideous old rusted bathtub and replaced it with a new shower, vanity, floor (well, basically gutted the bathroom; I think the only thing original after we were done was the medicine cabinet and the door).

The second was my favorite so far, a 1904 arts and crafts home. We ripped up all the carpet again (hardwood floors underneath), sanded and refinished them. Again, painted everything; and also gutted the kitchen and bathroom there and replaced almost everything. Also re-did the back yard deck and the entire back yard (it was a disaster when we moved in, overgrown with vines). I also uncovered/restored a gorgeous fence arch that ended up framing my sister's wedding (which we held in the back yard).

So far for this one, I've un-wallpapered everything, painted the kids' rooms (not quite done with Zav's yet), living room, kitchen, and did the texture paint in the bedroom. As far as wallpaper removal, the best $50 I ever spent was a wallpaper steamer. Literally peeled it off after scraping for hours (and ruining my hands, ouch) with the chemical crap. Left to do: flooring in all the downstairs rooms, paint the bathroom, finish the kitchen (in the process of painting the cabinets; decided the ugly wood had to go), replace front door. The roof shingles probably should be replaced as well, and the gutter in the spare room/garage outside needs replaced. (Might be on PV and my summer agenda )

Oh, and we also redid the bathroom of the house my ex and I rented here in Iowa; they had not one but TWO layers of hideous carpet in the bathroom, so we yanked that up and put down ceramic tile (and this is a giant bathroom, like 12 x 12 or so) and put in a new shower (the old one was cracked and had been "fixed" with a garbage bag for the last few weeks before we moved in). And I helped my sister renovate her house too back in 2004....jesus, I should start renting myself out for this sort of shit, I think.

[godfry n. glad]

No, no, no, Rollie.

Figure out how to get people to pay you to give advice (and keep your hands in your pockets while watching them work.)

Carpet in the bathroom? That strikes me as ill-conceived. Particularly two layers of it.

[Roland98]

Yeah, good call. Need to get me a consulting business.

And yes, the bathroom carpet was a terrible idea, especially with 2 kids and splashiness during baths. That's one reason why we offered to do it. (The others were because it was hideously ugly shag on top, and because the landlord paid for the materials and then gave us a free months' rent for our labor. )