We've been busy/Welcome guesthouse!

I've been utterly consumed for much of the past year with planning and building a guest house and regrading the back yard. It's been my intention to do a bunch of step by step posts but I never get around to it!

Here's a little summary.

First a before/after:

Polished concrete floors!

Exposed fir beams! Skylights!

Before window coverings...

Tiny bathroom.

Custom shower!

Pebble shower floor!

Gradient stairs!

I built that table! 

Microclover just starting come in; rain garden.

Microclover spreading and rain garden starting to come alive!

Oh, and we got a puppy!!

Finally, a hood!

It took weeks to get it then we discovered that the previous owner had, in keeping with the way he'd done EVERYTHING, only vented the previous hood directly into the attic :( so we had to install a new vent through the roof, etc etc.
But now look! 600cfm and quiet. Yay!











Things I've learned in the hood-buying process: there are basically next to no deals on hoods unless you find them on closeout at a place like "homeclick"; never buy anything from homeclick (terrible customer service and even when something is "in stock" you may not see it for two months(!), hire an appliance installer who can do everything (electrical, roof stuff, etc.)

Meet Berta (the Bertazzoni)

We were on the lookout for a 1950s O'Keefe and Merritt or Wedgewood range but decided that buying something modern would be the safer and ultimately more practical purchase.

Craigslist to the rescue again.

A nice couple wanted to get rid of their brand new gorgeous Italian professional-grade range--they bought a new townhome and wanted something different. I spent no time arguing that selling it for 60% of retail was totally crazy and instead just wrote the check.

We had the gas line extended and happily removed the crappy electric range we'd been cooking on for nearly a year. And then THIS arrived:

I'll put a better picture up when we aren't so busy cooking perfectly-cooked things. (Note the "Forearm Forklift" straps still on the floor. I have to say, these straps were INCREDIBLE. We lifted a 200lb range like it was nothing.)

But back to the Bertazzoni: this thing is an amazing machine!!

Now, to find a hood.... Sigh.

In the meantime:

I was unsure either was done because neither was brown enough, but both were cooked perfectly. I mean PERFECT.

Front Porch! +Sculptura!

After many ridiculous bids, the highest being $5K, I designed this little porch and hired my handyman to frame it. We love it.

Before:

After:

Keep in mind it will blend much better in a few months after it "silvers out" a bit. We are so pleased with it and so are the neighbors. It made my day that a contractor/designer who is going to be building the guest house (spoiler alert!) asked who designed it.

Plus a little bonus I found at an estate sale today:
Russell Woodard Sculptura Chairs, now en route to be powder coated.
Yes!

Front porch

Painting the front of the house really highlighted how terrible the stairs look: failing paint, spalling concrete and that terribly-placed handrail. The quotes for removing the concrete ($700) and building a new front porch ($3000) were way out of budget. Back to the drawing board.

After many conversations with contractors and smart friends, plus a considerable amount of time spent on Houzz, I've just purchased the materials for a small porch. It might end up turning out alright. We'll see!

The general idea (mock up):



With this sort of relief:


The framing:


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Patio and garden

We built some simple cedar raised beds and filled them up with veggie starts. We were a bit late to planting but they are looking good!

The boxes are made of cedar fencing, which may prove not to be the most long lasting, but with major backyard changes coming next year we thought it best to keep it simple in case we have to move them anyway.

And here they are full of future food. 

(Note freshly assembled metal patio furniture from where we'll watch the garden grow. :)

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Location:Patio and garden

Studio design

I've met with two builders now to design a "studio" that includes a sleeping loft, bathroom and separate shed/storage area. The design will be simple, clean and hopefully cost-effective.


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Screen door!

The screen door is in. It's essential because this 1952 bungalow was designed with zero opening windows in the living room.

Ka-pow! Yellow.








Also, DIY light cover.



And ugh...I still have to paint the gutters and soffits on the sides of the house. Boo.


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Location:Screen door!

Paint!

Front of the house is painted!

(Painting gutters is misery.)


Body color is Benjamin Moore Gunmetal and trim is Benjamin Moore Graphite. The soffits are painted Sherwin Williams' Plymouth Green.
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Exterior design help, continued.

Well, this is never ending.

We still don't know what to do.

So far we've talked with contractors about tearing out the front steps ($600, even without replacing them), pouring new concrete (a problem because of the crawlspace access), building a wood deck around the existing steps (the contractor spent nearly an hour here, then I never heard back) and, finally, cladding the existing steps in flagstone and tearing out the walkway to also create a flagstone path. Whew.

And it's all expensive.

On top of that, we determined that we indeed have lead paint so the cost just to prep the house properly (requiring removal with an infrared heater) is as much as I thought it would be to do the whole job. We have opted to let the professionals prep the house and remove the lead paint, and we will get to paint it. Yay! (feigned enthusiasm)

Back to the porch though. I think we have to live with it as is for a while. We can move the crawlspace access for $500, which will allow us to landscape the small plot next to the stairs more easily and wait another year or so to build a porch :(  I guess there's no rush, but still....

Here's the mockup:

Upcoming: we are almost finished selecting paint colors!

Exterior design help wanted, Part 2

Here is another mockup of the front porch, this time enclosed in wood painted to match. We like it!

Landscaping success!

After wrestling out 2.75 stumps left behind from the total front bed chainsaw massacre a couple of months ago, we planted a beautiful shore pine and were a little underwhelmed with the results. We needed a professional.



My buddy Doug from Gardenmakers came and removed the last of the stump I couldn't excise and came up with a game plan for us. This weekend, in just 7.5 hours, the front yard was totally transformed!

Here is the rock that went in the bed. Turns out two of the three local stone dealers went out of business and the one that was left wanted a ridiculous amount for a basic rock. Five hundred dollars for a fairly average looking rock?? We went to some other garden shops looking for a "counterpoint to the pine," as Doug put it, and found nothing but birdbaths and gnomes. Then, my buddies and I happened upon a construction site and spotted a rock just sitting there in the mud next to the street... So.....we picked it up and put it in the trunk. Turns out it is some sort of classic local olivine or something, finding new life as a little mountain in our quiet garden.



I really don't think the construction site will miss it.


Another productive weekend at our little bungalow!

I am so excited to get this house painted, but we're getting so much rain it's not going to be possible for a while. Once the painting is complete (I'm budgeting four weekends--one per side of the house, which might be optimistic--I really have no idea) we can start in on the back yard!

Exterior design help wanted!

As spring finally approaches, we are ready to begin planning some exterior renovations. Paint is coming soon, as it's needed badly, but the more exciting planning is around landscaping. We are tackling the northeast bed this weekend, so I'll post pictures of that soon (a landscaper friend recommended building up a bed for our beautiful tree to sit higher up, so that's the goal in the next few days).

The design question now is about how to get rid of the awful handrail that splits the picture window. It's such an eyesore for me and I can't wait to tear it down. (See how much better lifting that tree will look?)

I want to extend the front steps so there is a longer platform/patio beneath the picture window. I am hoping we can resurface the concrete that is there so it will match the new. Here are two mockups: one with poured in form concrete and one in which the vertical walls are clad or created in brick.

(concrete)

(brick)

(Ignore the roof peeking up behind the house--that's a future addition and another story!)

I think the brick keeps the house more inline with the "mid century modest" style that it is.

My questions are:
1) What kind of costs am I looking at here?
2) How much more expensive would it be to use brick?
3) Is it even possible to find brick that matches?

Any input is welcome. Thanks for stopping by!!

Ode to a Kitchen Faucet

I just finished doing the dishes--not a chore I adore exactly but not the worst either (read: mowing)--and thought I'd give some deserved praise to, yes, our faucet.



Had anyone told me I would spend well over $300 for a faucet I would have called them nuts so I guess it's good that no one warned me how expensive faucets are and how it just didn't matter in the end. When you really start looking at and comparing faucets you see that there's a world of difference between them. (Also, who knew the Italy is famous for them?) It's an item you use every single day, multiple times per day and you expect it to last a long time. I think there is literally nothing else in the house that gets used as often as the kitchen faucet, so why not get the one that is AWESOME then?

We got a pull-down model and it switches from a stream to a glorious spray at the flick of a button and just makes you want to be a tiny gnome and crawl in the steaming sink shower, too. Okay, that might be going too far, but if you are wondering if you should get the cheap faucet and maybe replace it later when it breaks, don't! Just get a good one and enjoy the faucet bliss.

(Unfortunately, I can't remember the model, but we bought a Danze.)



On the turntable:

Lorde - Pure Herione

Solstice tree!

Yesterday was my first day of vacation, which I celebrated by eating for breakfast a very special pink-iced sugar cookie shipped to my door from Larry's House of Cakes. To deal with the resulting sugar rush, I went for a jog around the neighborhood and met a new neighbor who was busy limbing a tree in his front yard with a chainsaw.



Not more than five minutes later, our front yard went from this:

To this:

You know when someone you know well shaves their mustache and their face looks all weird and wrong? Turns out the same thing happens when you take away ALL of the plants in your front yard.









Why would we do such a thing? Well, the plants that were there before had not been trimmed in many years and there was just no saving them. Any pruning would have left us with only wood, so we decided to wipe the slate clean.











Last weekend, we stopped in The Garden Spot, the sweetest neighborhood nursery ever, and stumbled on this shore pine:









We bought it :)





And then we had to deal with our new purchase.















Being a novice at tree planting, I gathered what tools I could and had my best buddy/landscape lifeline on speed dial. Getting up the root ball of the space's former occupant was no easy task, and we still have four more stumps to go. E thought she'd give the pick a swing.



(No houses were harmed in the taking of this picture.)

A shore pine is the same genus as a Japanese Black Pine, but a different species. This was has been well-trained already and we will have to learn a bit about maintaining it and getting it to grow in a, aesthetically-pleasing manner. We think it adds a needed vertical element to our squat little bungalow and can't wait to watch it grow. 

What you can't see is that it was so cold and raining all day. It's time for an AMAZING Christmas beer from Kulshan Brewery, which happens to be a stone's throw from The Garden Spot. Keepin' it very local (except for the damn sugar cookies).







































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One bazillion shades of gray

Looking for the right gray pales only in comparison to looking for the right white.




We've decided! Valspar's "Tempered Gray" it is. A nice neutral not-too-yellow, not-too-blue, not-too-brown gray. It's on the top left and lower right below, along with "Urban Sunrise," the darker gray, along with "Frappe" which, thankfully, we didn't like so I don't have to think of that name, ever.




Tomorrow is painting day!

Re-thinking the mineral oil method for the butcher block

I wanted to be a mineral oil purist when it came to the counters. I really really did. But after some 20 or so go-overs with mineral oil and still the counters seemed to need more, I continued my search. I still wanted to avoid any toxic sealants, but the idea of just sealing it all up sounded appealing. Then again there was the nagging question in my mind, Then why did you get butcher block countertops at all?? 

Then I found the Old Town Home blog and discovered that someone else had gone through the same process. I'm following their lead, except I added in more sanding (by hand): 80-grit, 100-grit, 150-grit and, finally, 220. This was last night, even after a workout at Trailhead Athletics, mind you. My arms are pooped. A workout regimen is superfluous when you have a new house.
I applied Howard Butcher Block Conditioner and left it overnight. It said 20 minutes, but whatever. I wanted it to really get in there! I wiped that down this morning and applied another coat. It feels so smooth and just look at the water beading up:

Success.

Painting the kitchen cabinets.

To thwart the constant aggression of the HONEY OAK all over the kitchen, we opted to use a Rustoleum Cabinet Transformations kit, mostly based on the "no sanding" sales point. We read and perused countless reviews and pictures and decided it was worth $120 (probably closer to $170 with additional needed supplies) to transform our kitchen. More on the process below, but I can't wait to show you, so here it is! (updated pic):

More pics to come of the entire kitchen once we paint the wall. AND THEN WE'RE FINISHED!

In all, we are quite happy with the results. We chose the "Castle" color from Rustoleum and opted not to glaze them. I'm pretty sure glazing will go the way of honey oak sooner than later anyway. The kit worked fairly well and while there was so sanding, there was a LOT of scrubbing, "deglossing," as they call it. The most worrisome part is that this is possibly the most important step, because anything not sufficiently deglossed is likely not to hold paint, meaning it could just peel off in the future and leave us crying on our pretty yellow Marmoleum floor.

The DVD that accompanied the kit made it all look so fun and easy. They assured us we'd be sipping wine in the company of a golden retriever by the end, all with happy smiles on our faces. This wasn't exactly so.

E tackled the doors and drawers:

And I set to clean up the cabinet bases and frames. Here is what you have to do when the silicone securing the counter to the cabinet base was hastily applied. Scrape, scrape, scrape. And sand.




Prepped and ready for painting to begin! We started at 11 a.m. Friday. This was at 6pm, aka time for a beer:

There were two rather disgusting pull-out cutting boards that gave us the creeps, so we took the opportunity to bury them forever.



Door painting station (round #1 of 2):



Back of doors after one round of paint/"bond coat." First of two on the back. Plus 2-3 hours drying time between. Then same process on the front. Do you see how "Three Easy Steps" is a bunch of crap? To complete just this step, it took us from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon.



Here is the schedule after I got mad at it and wadded it into a ball:



From many reviews, we gathered that the top coat (polyacrylic) was going to be tough, and it was. It dries VERY fast and if you go back over it with more of the stuff after it begins drying, it pretty much pulls up ALL of the layers. Luckily, only one coat was needed--very quickly applied--plus many hours of drying time.
Also, when they tell you to keep track of which door goes where, pay attention. Putting it back together was an unwanted puzzle at 9 pm on a Sunday.

But now look!!!! 

We're thinking light grey for the wall color.... what do you think?