Search Results for: dressing bathroom

February 13, 2015 | By Sage |

A Surprise-Filled Hallway Makeover

Our hallway and stairwell area has been lurking near the top of the makeover to-do list, and I’m excited about the possibilities — I think there’s a lot of potential if we can just lighten things up. It’s small and without a lot of natural light, and with a lot of wood trim and paneling it’s pretty dark and drab. Here’s a reminder of what we’re working with:

We use the built-in cupboard at the end of the hall as a small pantry

I’ve procrastinated on the space, though, because even though I knew what I wanted to do with the hallway from Day 1 (fresh coat of paint in the same color as the loving room, paint all the trim and doors white), I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do with the stairs. I have some wild-ish ideas, which I’ll share more in a future post — and everything I’m contemplating involves a lot of paint. It’s a bit daunting and paralyzing.

As a result, my life was starting to drift toward too much pinteresting, not enough action. So finally I decided to break the stairs and hallway into separate projects. I mean of course they need to look good together, but getting the hallway trim, walls, and doors (to the bedroom, bathroom, basement, and study) painted without having to tackle the stairs at the same time felt so much more manageable. So one weekend I busted out the paintbrush and got to work painting all the trim and doors. It took days, and I emerged with the tell-tale claw hand. Whenever I’m painting trim, I ask myself why I ever started this and pledge never to paint again.

But of course, paint again I did. The next weekend we did the walls, painting them “Moonshine” by Benjamin Moore to match the living room paint (a project that I promise I am posting about soon — next week!). Our cat Murphy was a huge help — we discovered that he loves to sit under the step stool while we work, and he’ll follow it around as we move it.

Sam rolled the walls while I got to work on cutting in around the ceiling and trim. I quickly discovered that whoever installed the dinky molding along the ceiling didn’t bother to fill in the nail holes. Pretty much par for the course in our house…. It wasn’t super noticeable when the trim was dark wood, but when I started painting it the holes became very obvious:

So I went around the whole ceiling filling in the holes with wood filler, which of course was a little challenging given that the holes were in the apex of the curved trim and thus hard to attack with a putty knife. By the time I finished just that, Sam was basically done painting all the walls and I still had most of the cutting in to do. Agh. (They also didn’t caulk between the trim and walls, but that will have to be a project for another day.

Anyway, fast forward many hours, and we were left with a freshly painted hallway at last. The only thing I didn’t paint was the built-in cabinet at then end of the hall that we use as a pantry, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do something more colorful on the doors. I did get started with wood filler on the many (many many) dings and gouges on the doors in preparation.

About a week later, I decided to stop procrastinating and just paint the cabinet white — I figured I could always do something more colorful down the road if I wanted. I removed the doors so that I could paint them more easily in the basement. That left me with this lovely sight of our messy pantry, where I noticed for the first time two different kinds of wallpaper — one kind on the back of the top few shelves and another along the sides.

But that isn’t what caught my attention. Do you see what I see lurking near the chicken broth? Is that a light switch?!?! It was at this point that I started leaping around excitedly. You see, like in much of our house there is no overhead light in the bedroom — but in most of the rooms there’s at least a light switch that connects to a wall outlet where we can plug a lamp in. Not so in the bedroom, which is a pain because the lamp is around a corner so there’s a lot of fumbling every time we enter the room. After I calmed down about finding this light switch, I tested it, and indeed: this light switch, inside our pantry, operates an outlet in the bedroom (the bedroom door is the one right next to the pantry). So the best I can figure is that at some point someone decided to build this pantry, and they did so right on top of the light switch that was on the wall outside the bedroom door. In the photo you can even see that the structure of the shelves cuts off half the switch plate. Once again, someone cut some major corners.

Anyway, this got the wheels turning. I started thinking, what if I didn’t put the doors back on the pantry? What if we turned it into a built-in bookshelf kind of thing, and actually left access to the light switch? I did a lot of staring and squinting and imagining and consulting with Naomi (and Sam). And I decided to go for it.

First, there was the question of where to put all the stuff in the pantry. I was able to redistribute a lot of it to space in our kitchen cabinets that we weren’t using very efficiently, and then I got a door-mount rack by ClosetMaid (affiliate link – read our policies) for storing some cans:

Store cans on back of basement door -- Plaster & Disaster

Yes, I only painted the outside of the basement door when I was going on my paint-it-white spree. The claw hand had gotten pretty painful by this point.

For the pantry-turned-open-shelves, I wanted to paint the back a bright color with the rest in white — but it appears that the new pantry was built on top of an existing smaller cupboard, so there were all sorts of wonky angles and bad carpentry where the new structure met the original. I thought that by painting the whole interior — including the top and bottom of the shelves — the same darker color with just the front of the shelves white, all those imperfections would be much less noticeable.

So that left a final crucial decision: what awesome color should I pick? I love love love the color in Naomi’s dressing room, and wanted to be a big copycat and go for something like that:

Colors and Textures - Plaster & Disaster

Source: Naomi’s awesome house

But I was worried that since the color would look much darker inside the shelves where there’s not much light than it does on the walls of a room, it would end up reading a lot greener than I wanted (since the paint on her walls has a green base, even though it looks like a nice mix of blue and green in her bright room). So instead I picked a much brighter blue that I thought would end up looking darker inside the shelves: Surf Blue, by Benjamin Moore. When I opened the can I was worried it might be way too bright and neon-y, but I reassured myself and got to work.

After priming and painting the exterior of the cabinet white, I still had to deal with the wallpaper. It quickly became clear that the orange stripey wallpaper at the top had been applied directly on top of the same flowery wallpaper that ran along the side. The orange wallpaper was peeling pretty badly, so I managed to pull that off pretty easily. That left the flowery wallpaper along the sides and back of the top few shelves.

Wallpaper in pantry -- Plaster & Disaster

Left: Peeling away the orange wallpaper on the top two shelves; Right: All the orange wallpaper gone, flowery wallpaper remaining

The flowery wallpaper seemed very intact and firm, so I decided to just paint over it — not advisable for a big, visible space, but for a few inside walls of a bookshelf I wasn’t too concerned.

Anyway, you must be getting antsy by now. I was too. On went two coats of Surf Blue, and then after some impatient waiting was the best part: decorating the shelves. And here’s how it’s looking now:

I love it, and I’m so glad I took the plunge to remove the doors! Plus by putting a basket on the bottom shelf (Naomi’s suggestion), we were able to save some storage space. With the light gray walls, white trim and doors, and colorful built-ins, the hallway is coming along quite nicely:

Making over the hallway -- Plaster & Disaster

Left: Looking down the hallway from the front door; Right: Looking into the hallway from the kitchen, at the side of the new built-in bookshelf

We still need to add art, but I want to wait until we figure out the stairs so that we can make some cohesive choices about what to put on the walls in both hallway and stairwell. I also want to get some new overhead light fixtures for the hall and stairwell, but that’s a project for another day. In the meantime, I’m basking in the transformation!

Update: be sure to check out Phase II of the hallway makeover, painting the stairwell and adding some pizazz to the stair risers with fabric, and Phase III, all the finishing touches (including new light fixtures, art, and painting the front door)!

January 16, 2015 | By Naomi |

A Whole Bunch of Ugly, Grainy, Cell-Phone Pictures (Naomi’s House Before)

We were not originally in the market for a fixer-upper. We thought we’d find ourselves a nice condo or small single-family home that maybe needed a little repainting. Or maybe it was a just a tiny bit outdated, but we would tackle that over time.

But then we realized that we actually DON’T LIKE SHARING, so a condo was out. And none of the single family homes we could afford had room for us to grow. So when we came across a three-bedroom fixer-upper in a great town right near our families… we were ready to think outside of the box and take on the project.

Oh, what we didn’t know then…

That was greatly helped by the fact that, although there was a lot that we wanted to change, the house was livable. The walls and roof were all in one piece, the heat worked, the water ran. What more can you ask for?

I’m looking forward to sharing a lot of the progress we’ve made, including our “big” initial renovation. At some point, I’ll also write up all of the precautions that we took before making the purchase to understand the full scope of what we were taking on. At first glance the investment looked pretty scary, so we spent a lot of time and money on many many different inspections, and a lot of time in negotiations.

And you’ll have to bear with the photos in this post. When we bought the house I had no intention of sharing it on the internet, so I was only taking pictures with my cell phone to remember it myself. I wasn’t trying to get every angle or every detail, and I certainly wasn’t worried about those small extras like focusing the camera.

Here is the house as we first saw it:

Here we have broken seals that made most of our windows practically opaque. See all that fog? That’s what happens when the seals don’t work.

Broken Seal - Plaster & Disaster - via and (c) FreeFoto.com

Get a job, seal. (image via FreeFoto.com)

Here is the floor plan we started with:

There were a ton of small, boxy rooms which did not flow well for us. To go from the kitchen to the living room we had to wind around through the dining room or through the hallway. (And, let’s be honest, we mostly eat in the living room in front of the TV, so this was a real pain.)

The wooden porch in the front was rotting, which was starting to cause damage to the house. It wasn’t used because the driveway has a pathway to the kitchen door, but not to the front porch. However, it blocked a lot of the light from the big windows in the living room and dining room.

And the color choices didn’t help with the light situation. Here is the view of the living room from the dining room, with the front door partially hidden in the left of the image:

That shaggy, blue-green, smelly carpet ran through most of the house. And the walls were various shades of gray and beige making everything look darker and dirtier than necessary.

The windows were vinyl replacement windows, so an extra few inches of gray framing blocked even more light. And with their broken seals they leaked a ton, causing a cold breeze.

You can’t see in the picture, but the walls are not plaster or drywall; instead, they are made from a material called luan board, which is like a really thin plywood or a wooden cardboard. Over the years it had warped so you could see cracks where the boards came together, and some of the walls bowed in different ways. It was also harder to patch holes made from hanging art, so it was pocked or still rocking the old nails and hooks.

And this picture also doesn’t show the ceiling fan, which came right out because it was probably not a good idea with our 8 foot ceilings. You can see the wires from where it was removed.

Here is the view of the dining room from the living room, with a “disapproving Brad” for scale:

The dining room was tiny, with hardly enough space for a table for four. All the built-in storage (usually a good thing!) felt really imposing because it was all around you in a small space. The storage was also in terrible shape, with painted hinges, drawers that stuck, doors that didn’t stay closed, and shelves that were unstable.

The one window in this whole front area that got good light – that east-facing window in the back of the picture above – was small and off-center, and also had a broken seal. (Dammit, seal.) All of the finishings were really cheap – builders-grade lights, flat vinyl baseboards with peeling paint, boxy window cornices, and “industrial” wall grates.

The kitchen deviated from the established color scheme:

In here, we had a vinyl floor, laminate counter, laminate backsplash, and walls all in different shades of yellow. To be fair, the orange curtains helped pull it together. The room was really small, because a looming yellow wall cut it off from the rest of the house.

We also have handles in the middle of the upper cabinet doors. We didn’t notice that in our first walk-through, but once you do you can’t unsee it. It drives me absolutely crazy. Why?!

But the problems were not just cosmetic. The faucet didn’t work well, and the dishwasher leaked constantly, causing rot under the floor. Some of the veneer was coming off of the cabinets, and the laminate counters were falling apart in places.

Also, none of the outlets were GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter) outlets, which basically means that we were a lot more likely to get electrocuted if something went wrong here. Nowadays GFCI outlets are required in all places where there is water, like bathrooms, kitchens, and basements, but apparently that wasn’t the case when this house was done.

The hallway resumed the standard color scheme:

This is the “main drag” that runs down the center of our house and connects nearly all the rooms. It was super dark and depressing. Beyond the fact that it has no direct access to natural light it was only lit by two dim recessed fixtures on either side. Even in the daytime it was very dark in the middle.

This is where all the various shades of paint used in the house came together. In the hallway alone, we had six different shades of gray and beige. In a few places, we even changed color right in the middle of a piece of trim. You can also see our shiny brass doorknobs, painted-over brass hardware, and cheap hollow-core doors.

The carpet was pretty beat-up, and was creased in some places. You could also hardly open that door at the end of the hallway because it dragged across the carpeting.

The bathroom was one of the better spots:

The vinyl floor is a neutral pattern that mimics tile, and while the vanity is made fully out of beat-up laminate, at least it is white. The tile looks like nice white tile in this picture, but it is actually a deep salmon-pink that was coated in white enamel many years back. You can see some places where it has cracked and peeled, but overall it is in okay shape.

But don’t get me started on that ceiling…

I have many feelings about the bathroom ceiling…

…

Maybe we should just move right along. I’ll do a post on that in the future.

All three bedrooms are about the same size:

Up front, across from the kitchen, was a room was so green you could film a move in it and set it anywhere. Even the doors and closet were painted green to match. But it has a big window and hardwood floors – even though the pretty wide-board pine is punctuated by a big stripe of some other type of wood entirely. This is the room that I took over to be my office/dressing room.

The room we chose to make our “master” bedroom has the only south-facing window in the house and real hardwood floors. Still, it is pretty small, and we’re only able to fit a bed, bedside tables, and one dresser in the space. We also had to do something about the vinyl replacement windows and cornices.

This last bedroom smelled awful, with something weird coming up from the brown carpet. I still have no idea what it was. It smelled like death and toxic chemicals. It has only one window that opens to the outside, and another that overlooks the three-season porch in the back. It is also the only room with crown molding and real wood baseboards – but of course they were painted several different colors.

So, now we’ll move along to the three-season porch:

This room has its plywood under floor exposed, which in a rare stroke of decorating genius and foresight is painted this year’s Pantone color of the year. So it is very current and trendy.

It is also quite musty, and is not insulated or heated beyond the wood-burning stove.

This space was built with three windows on either side, but no windows facing south to the back-yard, where you find the best light and view. It is a major missed opportunity that we hope to rectify down the line.

Finally, the basement:

Here we have a lot of space, relatively high ceilings, laundry, a utility sink, an extra room framed out, and also a bonus bathroom (installed without notifying the town, apparently, but fortunately now grandfathered in for us). It has a door out to the garage. The furnace, water heater, and oil tank are, in the words of our home inspector, “fully depreciated in value.” We’re just hoping that they can hold out until we make the switch over from oil to natural gas, which we want to do soon.

I think there is a ton of potential in this basement, but with so much work to do on the rest of the house it will have to wait for a good long time. The stairs to the basement are also quite treacherous – narrow, steep, and low – so we’ll need to do something about that if we want to make the basement good living space in the future.

If you’re still here, thanks for looking at all these ugly old phone-camera photos! This house has so much potential but it is kind of hard to see it in these pictures.

For a sneak-peak at the progress, you can check out my house tour, where I’ve put up a few more recent shots. This is after a renovation, decorating, and a whole lot of DIY efforts. The tour is pretty sparse now, but I’ll be adding more and more as I do some posts on all the work we’ve done. So stay tuned!