Our New Old House

The electricians are probably going to wrap up today. We stopped by the house to drop of a light fixture for the kitchen and we took a look around. Here are pictures!

The house is in various stages of disarray, but no worries!

This is the light fixture that was removed from the basement hallway. Pretty gross huh?

The ceiling fan we picked out for the living room:

The light in the dining room that compliments the ceiling fan in the living room:

New light fixtures in the bathroom. We’re going for a chrome and white look for all the bathroom fixtures. These lights look a little out of place amongst the 70s wallpaper and dingy yellow paint. Just wait until everything is crisp and white! (Additionally, we have had them install a ceiling fan + light, but since that wasn’t fully installed yet I didn’t take a picture.)

The wood burning stove insert is all done, the chimney is re-lined, and the part above the roof has been rebuilt completely. It all looks GREAT and I’ve never been so excited for cold weather to arrive so I can try this out!

Just a quick plug for a really great business here: The company we hired for this, Alpine Chimney Sweep, was simply awesome! If you have any chimney or fireplace or wood burning stove issues at your house and you’re anywhere near Des Moines, I really recommend looking them up. They’re friendly, efficient, clean, and even bumped up our installation day because they had an unexpected opening in their schedule.

Here’s the stove unit ready to install:

While they had the chimney and firebox all cleared out, I took the opportunity to take a few pictures of an area most homeowners never really get a good look at: the inside of the chimney and ash dump.

Here’s the firebox all cleaned out:

The damper had rusted shut and debris from the crumbling chimney had fallen on top of it. It had to be removed anyway, so here’s what’s left of the broken pieces, leaving room for the new liner and stove pipe:

The view up the chimney:

I put my camera in great peril to get this shot looking down into the ash dump:

The front of our new wood burning stove:

A wider view:

I’m really glad they put the original flue damper handle back in its place. It’s not needed anymore, but it’s better than having a big hole in the brick where it should go. I can’t wait to clean up the area around the hearth and maybe paint the brick a different color. I have big plans for this fireplace area of the house! Big plans, I say!

Sadly, by the time we got around to looking at the chimney outside we’d lost too much light for me to take a picture. You’ll get your picture though, never fear!

I am absolutely thrilled at how much progress was made this week. I never imagined everything would go so smoothly and so fast. Here’s hoping for continued good fortune in the rest of our projects to come.

Oh! And another quick shout out to a damned decent guy, Matt, who works with Brandon, at least for the time being. Matt is headed back to Omaha to rejoin his lovely wife there and since he’s moving, he graciously offered us his futon, no charge! That’s great because we can use all the free furniture we can get! Thanks again, Matt!

[tags]bathroom, ceiling fan, chimney, contractors, dining room, electricity, fireplace, light fixtures, living room, photos, wood burning stove[/tags]

Here’s a quick update on where we stand on appliances:

We bought a new 10 cu.ft. fridge and a dishwasher (both Whirlpool) at Menards last week.

We browsed for a microwave + range hood and came up with these two options (both come in white):

And actually, I think that’s all we had to look at so far.  But with the fridge there and the new electrical outlets in the kitchen, the place will be moderately livable, so the microwave and stuff can wait.   

Pick-a-little talk-a-little CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP! 8/28/07 Tags: wallpaper, photos

Fans of The Music Man will recognize the subject of my blog post. Anybody who hasn’t seen The Music Man, just know that it references a song that is guaranteed to get stuck in your head if you hear it once, so consider yourself lucky for not getting it. (Now that I don’t work in Mason City, Iowa, the inspiration for River City in The Music Man, I’m FINALLY allowed to say I’M SICK OF THE MUSIC MAN!!!)

Now, on to the post!

That afternoon, Grandma came over from down the street and helped me scrape the paint off the wallpaper in the back bedroom and continue my progress in the dining room. Plus she brought me quesadillas for lunch! Can’t beat that!

She did get exasperated at my method of working on a little piece of each room at a time and said I move around the house too much. “You’ve got to do one room at a time!” she said. “But I’m bored of this wall. I want to work on a different wall,” I replied. She just shook her head and laughed at me.

Before long, I had moved on to the wallpaper in the kitchen. That was a lesson in home decorating mistakes of the past. First of all, when I came on the scene, the kitchen sported a coat of the nastiest “Harvest Gold” paint made only nastier by the dense layer of cigarette tar that darkened the color from “Harvest Gold” to “Baby Diahrrea.” I knew going into it that the paint was put on top of wallpaper, and that there were several layers of wallpaper over the plaster. What I didn’t realize was that the odd stripes here and there under the paint were actually masking tape. Whoever painted had put masking tape over each seam of the wallpaper, presumably because the wallpaper had begun to peel off. This was to my benefit, though, because it was easy to slip my razor blade under that and just start peeling away big chunks at a time. After that, the Downy made short work of the many layers underneath.

Here are some wallpaper pictures:

Kitchen:

Dining Room:
Grandma working on the dining room:

Hallway:

Front bedroom:

Grandma tried using mineral spirits to loosen the paint. That worked a little, but we’re going to try something a little stronger next time.

[tags]wallpaper, photos[/tags]

While we were scraping things on Saturday, Brandon was up in Clear Lake tending to the maintenance of our other house and picking up the tools we so stupidly forgot in our haste two weekends before. He had a busy day mowing the lawn, checking the basement (torrential rains in northern Iowa meant we had a little bit of water in our basement, but nothing very bad. Good thing we cleaned the gutters when we did!), and taking the jet ski out for a spin. “You have to run it every couple of weeks to make sure the motor stays lubed,” he explained. I didn’t begrudge him a ride, he’d earned it.

After he ate a quesadilla, Brandon got to work taking down the ceiling tile in the kitchen. It’s not exactly like a drop ceiling. We thought the tiles might be stuck directly to the plaster, or that there’d be some sort of frame underneath that they were attached to. Turns out they were stapled to two by fours that were spaced about a foot apart across the whole ceiling. Taking down the tiles was easy. Taking down the boards was going to be very very hard. Too hard. In fact, from the look of how cracked the plaster was in between those boards, we figured they were put there to actually hold the ceiling up as well as provide a framework for the tiles.

Here are pictures:

After taking down all the tile and consulting with our electrician, we’ve decided that the best thing to do is to leave the wood framework up and put drywall over it. It’s very well constructed and is actually doing a great job of holding the cracked plaster ceiling up, so we’ll just deal with it that way.

[tags]ceiling, kitchen[/tags]

On Saturday we went to Home Depot and Menards to buy light fixures for the whole house. That was fun, but it’s not getting any easier to drop that much money in a single trip to the hardware store. Mom and Brandon talked me into buying a ceiling fan/light for the living room. I’d always hated these because all the ones I’d seen in people’s houses were either really old and outdated, or were just cheap and ugly to begin with, with the exception of my in-laws’ house. The only ceiling fan I’ve ever liked was in Brandon’s old room in his parents’ house. So anyway, we got one that has a nice hammered bronze look with dark teak blades. We got a flush mount fixture for the dining room that also has a hammered bronze finish. My plan is to make those two rooms very similar, but decorate them differently enough that they each have their own distinct space. More details on that when it comes time to choose paint colors.

Here’s the ceiling fan we picked out:

And the light for the dining room that compliments the ceiling fan (the bowl on this one isn’t as yellow as it came out in my picture):

See?

I LOVE the overhead light/fan fixture we bought for the bathroom. It’s a little more contemporary, but very simple and I like to think timeless. (Again, not as yellow in real life.)

For the lights on either side of the mirror, we went with a bolder, and more expensive choice, but I think it will work really well.

So here’s our pile of light fixtures in our house. I told Brandon it feels like Christmas!

[tags]bathroom, ceiling fan, dining room, electricity, light fixtures, living room, photos[/tags]