Category: old home

WOO! I’m back. I’m trying!

    Its been a hectic couple of days!  Every day seems to be more busy than the next.  Sounds exciting right?  Sort of.  I’m burning out.  The shirt orders have been crazy, the overtime at my other job is non-stop, and the work around the house is never ending.  Last weekend, Nicole and I decided to scrap any house work and keep our schedule as laid back as possible so that we could take a day and do what pleases us most.  Shopping.  Yeah, yeah, I know.  Not a very manly activity right?  Whatever.  I love shopping, I love clothes, and I fully blame my mother.  I was her shopping companion all of the years growing up.  Hours of shopping for clothes, shoes, etc.  I was raised to enjoy this activity, find sales, combine coupons, and search for bargains.  We spent all Saturday having a shopping therapy day and it was just what we needed.  We took the portion of our checks that we would normally spend on the house, and we bought some much needed clothes for ourselves.  I managed to get myself a nice button down and a sweater for winter that is totally awesome.  One thing in particular that I saw at Urban Outfitters, was so awesome, so incredibly stupid, and hideous, I had to share it here.   I present to you this work of art (I should have purchased this):

Kelly Kapowski

    Anyways, now onto the house (I can’t think about my poor decision not to buy this).  The kitchen is exploding with life and Al is really making progress.  We ran into a few roadblocks that I was able to overcome.  First off, the pendent lights we ordered had recessed light adapters on them.  It wasn’t too big of an issue because I was able to just splice off the adapter and hard wire it into the ceiling.  I love how these lights turned out.

The back splash on both sides of the kitchen is now finished.  Al finished the other wall today and installed the rest of the remaining cabinets that we had to get shipped because the originals that we ordered were cracked.  Now all of the cabinets and the back splash are up, along with the microwave.  Next up is the floor and ordering the granite.  We cannot wait to get the appliances moved in.

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Busy Busy! Quick Update!

    I had taken 2 half days and a full day off this week to get some work done in the new house.  This would also allow me to work with Al (our contractor) to learn some things.  The heat wave hasn’t made things very easy on us but we were determined to make some good progress.  We got all of the cabinets put together on Monday and Tuesday.  Wednesday we put them up.  We love the way they look in the kitchen.  When they were on display in the store, we were sort of on the fence about them.   





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Full Weekend of House Work

    This weekend was super busy.  Friday night we set a goal for what we wanted to accomplish this weekend and we made sure that we actually did it.  Our main goal was to tackle a few more of the old windows and paint the sun room.  Like I had mentioned a few posts ago, the sun room consists of 7 large, old wooden windows.  Instead of immediately spending what would probably be over a grand for that one room alone, we are going to repair and fix up the windows that are in there which will buy us a little time and make them look a lot nicer.  I ordered some new glass and grabbed some more window glaze.  Nicole picked up the painting supplies and we were ready to work all weekend.
    Saturday afternoon when we got back from Home Depot, we received a call from our friend Patrick.  He was bored and looking to help out so we told him to come down, we sure could use the help.  I started pulling windows out while Nicole started priming the room.  She wanted to prime it because of the old water stains that were present.  The paint we decided on was a light blue/gray.  It was a color that was going to go really well with the old mahogany.  Here are some “before” pictures:

    After Pat and I repaired the old windows, we joined Nicole and helped paint the room.  With three people doing it, it took hardly anytime at all.  Here are some “after” pictures.

 
     The room looks pretty awesome now.  We also took down the terrible Gothic light that was hanging from the ceiling and replaced it with a basic ceiling fan.  I installed a dimmer so that we didn’t have to have intense lighting while watching TV.
     The weekend flew by, but we got everything done that we set out to do.  Next weekend will be a new set of goals to accomplish!  Today I got to relax, as we went to Nicole’s mother’s house where I got to sit down for a few hours and watch the Red Bulls game.  It was soccer Sunday for me and I loved every minute of it.

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Raining in the Sun Room.

    When we bought the house, we were aware of the leak in the drain of the tub.  We noticed it leaking into the basement from upstairs.  What we didn’t know was that it was eventually going to start leaking into the sun room shortly after we bought the house.  What was going to be held off a few weeks now needed immediate attention.

I sent this picture to Al and in a few days, once the renovation check cleared, he started work to see what the problem was.  Nicole and I had to go 3 days without showering and smelled like a couple of hippies, we couldn’t wait to shower!
    Al started in the bathroom, tearing apart the area of the tub to be able to see the pipes.  We couldn’t see the leak which meant it was in the floor.  This didn’t sound good.  He ventured into the sun room and cut out a small section of the ceiling where the leak was happening.  There sitting in the ceiling was a big drain pipe that was completely broken.  The owner of the house tried doing a terrible rig job on the pipe that was clearly meant as a temporary cover-up so that he could sell the house.  Super annoying but easier to permanently fix than to do what he tried doing.  He made an attempt to clog the break in the pipe with some foreign substance.  Fail.

Never a dull moment.

Al was able to repair the pipe and Nicole and I were able to shower.  It’s the little things you take for granted.
    This weekend we plan on continuing work in the sun room.  We are going to be doing a lot painting and window repair.  This will be time consuming and it will make it less tempting for us to go out to eat and waste money.  We spent a lot of money the past two weeks so this weekend we are taking it easy.   I plan on replacing another window pain and Nicole is going to do some priming so that we can paint the room.  Taking this house one room at a time is the only way to do this without losing focus and going mad.  Seeing as the sun room is the room we will spend the most time in, it made sense to make this our first priority.   Here are a few “before” pictures.

This has got to go…

   More pictures to come as we make progress!

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Finally moved in!

    I haven’t had much time to blog or even breathe for that matter.  This weekend we put together some support of friends, and my parents came down so that we could move everything into the new house.  My legs feel like jello but we are finally moved in.  There are a few roadblocks that we need to deal with but nothing all that major.  We need to survive one more week without a refrigerator because out appliances got delayed and now they can’t deliver them for 5 more days.  My parents made an attempt to bring the extra dryer over from their house down two flights of stairs.  It was just too hard to move it so Nicole are going to get a new washer and dryer next week hopefully.  In the meantime we will have to visit the laundry mat.  I’ll be posting some pictures tomorrow of the new landscaping in the front along with the progress of the sun room.

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Kitchen Remodel Phase 2: Knocking Out the Wall

    So the kitchen is fully gutted and today Al and I knocked out the wall dividing the kitchen and the dining room.  We will be putting up a new half wall, leaving a cut out and showing off a little counter space in the kitchen. 

The inside of the kitchen wall.  Prepare to meet your doom.

The breakthrough begins

Al has no mercy.

Almost through!

One thing we discovered is that when we tore out the wall the chimney was revealed.  The way it sat there between the cut out wall and the doorway gave Al an idea.  What if we keep the exposed chimney in that spot?  I loved it, we are looking to modernize the house, but we want to keep the old charm the house had that we fell in love with when we first walked in.  Juxtaposing the original brick fireplace in the house against the old original wood work, surrounded by new drywall and our (soon to be) new bamboo floors will hopefully give us that balance.

Completely opened up between the kitchen and dining room

Keep in mind the chimney will go right up to the ceiling, there’s still some plaster left to take down.  The chimney will just need to get cleaned off a little with a wire brush and it should look awesome when its all done.   

One of the best parts about tearing down walls in old homes is that you never know what you will find.  When we took out the ceiling in the kitchen, there were baseball cards galore from the mid 80’s up there (no, nothing valuable).  Today we found a 103 year old Buffalo newspaper.  The paper was disintegrating and crumbling to pieces but I managed to get a few good shots of it.


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Sun Room Repairs

    Something that I didn’t know was that if you have old wooden windows that need repair, your local family run hardware store will cut you new glass and even repair the windows.  Our sun room has 7 windows that all need attention.  They all have either cracked or broken glass along with pealing paint.  With new windows costing roughly $200.00 a piece, we needed to fix these windows up so that we could replace them gradually.  I measured the glass that I needed for the windows and then picked them up from the hardware store down the street.  Lets go in and see what we did!

“Ooh Coool”

This is no good.

    I removed both sashes from the frame by carefully taking off the molding around the window.  That was how these sashes were being held in place.  I then laid them on the floor and sanded them down.

The second piece pictured above was rough.  All of the wood holding together the little panes was rotted out.  I decided I was going to get rid of that wood and replace it with just one big window pane, like the other portion.  With some hand tools, I carefully removed the rotted wood.

After I got all of the old wood out, I sanded both sashes down the best that I could.  Nicole and I applied two coats each on each sash with some white, exterior semi-gloss paint. 

Once the paint dried, we placed the new glass into each sash carefully, and then inserted several push points around the glass to secure it in place.   I say carefully because my first attempt was a failure in that I held the glass wrong and it snapped, resulting in a dash back to the hardware store 15 minutes before they closed.  Total waste, but you live and learn.  The push points can be bought at your local hardware store for a few dollars.  When the glass was in place, we took our caulk gun and went around the glass with some window glaze to seal the deal!

Push points will secure the window in place.

    The window glaze takes about 2 hours to dry.  After that, you can carefully put your new windows back up!  Our first home project was a success.  We also replaced the cheap light on the porch with something a little bigger and better suited to the size of the house. 

And yes, we bought that special “bug away” yellow light bulb.  Thanks, Billy the Exterminator.  Ridiculous.  Amazing, yet ridiculous.

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Internet Finally Here.

    My internet has finally been hooked up, it was out for a few days.  My office has now been moved to the new house and I love it, its so much bigger than my old office.  Clearly it is not cosmetically appealing right now, in fact, I have a hard time believing this was cosmetically appealing ever.  I’m going to have to take off the paneling eventually and the atrocious wallpaper which is sure to be awful.  Everything else in the office is nice.  It has a huge window which I’ll need to sand and paint.  The light in the center is o.k. for now, although most likely I will be putting in a ceiling fan.  We have decided that eventually the entire painted hardwood floor will be bamboo so the floor right now isn’t an issue.

The cooler is there for much needed beverages as the appliances don’t arrive for another week.

    The kitchen is now 99% gutted out, with only a small section of the ceiling remaining to pull down.  Al measured the floor and is preparing to lay the leveler down along with the bamboo flooring.  We also still have half a wall to knock out.

    Today we are going to head over to Home Depot to get some yard things for some landscaping that we want to accomplish this weekend.  More to come!

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hello.


             For about 7 years I’ve have been stuck screen printing clothing out of my apartment, all too small to be performing such work in. Unsightly ink smudges all over the sink with screens and paper towel everywhere, after while it can drive someone nuts (my girlfriend).  Well, it looks like that’s all about to change as we are about to buy a house.

           After looking at a handful of houses that were just not for us, and one house that I was actually angry that they had the nerve to show us, this old house above ended up being the one that we both fell in love with.  It was built in 1880 and is loaded with potential but we all know potential means tons of work.  We decided to go with the 203k FHA loan which basically lets us take out extra money in  the mortgage so that we can make repairs, which in this case is the non-existent kitchen and the awful, unfinished, bathroom.  There is some sagging in the house from it being so old and our inspector also noticed some support beams in the basement that were unacceptable.  The original beams were rotted out completely and were no longer holding up the house like they were supposed to.  So with that information, we held our firm position in that we were not going to get the house unless the buyer repaired the beams.  Our overaggressive and sometimes offensive buyers agent went in full swing and before we knew it, the posts were already being repaired.  We go and look at the finished work Tuesday so we will see if they are done correctly.  The same people that did work on the rest of the house are fixing the posts which is sort of unnerving because the other work they did was terrible.  We shall see!  Can’t wait to fix up the new Super Sweet Shirt, Co. studio!

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