Renovation :: Basement Bathroom and Hallway

May 25 2018,

Ahhh. Another section of the house done.

Slowly but surely we are renovating the home. We have been in the house for approximately 7.5 years. And things are coming along.

With this renovation, we finally did the basement bathroom and hallway.

Let me take you on a tour. Here is what it was when we bought the house.

And after.

I used elements similar to the guest bathroom. In this bathroom, I used bigger subway tiles and the finish was matte. I used the same tile for the floor. The glass tile behind the sink was slightly smaller, but in the same color. The room was painted white. It's simple and functional and gives a clean feeling.

We also recently got the basement hallway done. Yesterday we hung our art on the wall. We still have to do a few painting touch up, change an outlet to a prettier outlet, change one door, make doors for the water heater cabinet and put in hand rails. But the bulk of the work is done. Phew.

These are pictures of the area before we moved in. The last owner had two sets of washer and dryer. One here and one upstairs in a closet. They took the better of the two when they moved, so would I. So they took the one here. I love where the current washer and dryer is, because it is next to the bedrooms. No hauling of things up and down, up and down.

Below are pictures during the renovation.

This green wall below on the left side was slightly bubbled. Hubby took it all the way down to the studs and fixed it so that it did not look funny. 

After renovation. We had original painted the whole area with Sherwin Williams SW6240 Windy Blue. After we painted it, we realized it was way too dark. So we repainted it the next day and chose Sherwin Williams SW7551 Greek Villa. We have Greek Villa in a bunch of other rooms, and I love the white.

Below is the repainting with Greek Villa.

This is a metal wall art that I found at an estate sale a few years ago. It was at a Boston architect's home. This is a landscape of Boston. It has the prudential, the Boston garden, the state house, the north church and other places of interest to Boston. For $39.00, it was a steal.

Below is a tjap from Indonesian that my folks hauled all the way from Jakarta for me. Below is "Hoot Hoot".

There are three other tjaps in the room.

So there, two rooms done. We still have the master bedroom and bathroom to do. I don't know when the plan is, but nothing has been said. Hopefully not soon. We also have to paint one side of the house this summer. Easy peasy, just have to find a few good days to work on it.

Happy Dance!

Quilt & Bitch

Renovation :: Bedroom Hallway

November 19 2017,

"Let's work on the area in front of the guest bathroom" my husband said on Monday afternoon.

"Sure".

A little bit of mudding, patching, painting, cutting trim, painting. It's easy peasy.

Turns out that instead of doing this one wall, we ended up doing the whole hallway.

This was the one wall we planned on working on.

When we hired contractor 7 years ago, they f***ed everything up. We had asked the contractor to take out a small piece of carpeting underneath the door trim. Big mistake. They teared everything down and when they put back the stuff up - it was a shotty job. The contract had indicated that they should leave the walls in ready-to-paint condition - of course, that was not the case.

So Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were spent fixing the hallway. With Christmas music in the background, we worked on fixing the hallway. I have realized that I often paint while listening to Christmas music. Even though it is still early in the season, it created the perfect mood for renovation.

Don't judge my messy laundry closet.

Due to the coldness of the garage, I setup painting the trim and baseboard in the dining room and in the hallway on saw horses. It worked out pretty well.

By Saturday, we have a finished hallway. Pretty.

Don't look too closely at the mitered corners.

And here is the wall that started it all - all fixed up.

The only thing we had to buy was rollers. Each roller costs $4.00. A hefty change. Everything else we had, including the paint for the wall. For the wall above - we had to strain the paint because there were a lot of gunk in it - so I took my mother-in-law's stockings and cut the leg off and used it to strain the paint through. For the other walls - we used the same color as the living room, because we still had a can of it - Sherwin Williams Greek Villa SW 7551. I love this white color. It is a beautiful white. Not too white and not too beige. I think it's the perfect white.

Our next project will be a big one. Hopefully hubby will start on that really soon. It's more involve and scarier.

Vanamos!

Quilt & Bitch.

Even More Dirty Little Secrets

01.15.2016

So yes, we did not win the Power Ball, and what that means for us is we can continue hoping and dreaming. $14.00, spent and no return.

In other news, since last Sunday, I have been crazily working on a quilt for a friend who is going through chemo. Her favorite color is pink.

So here's a sneak peak of the work area. I decided to post this because a friend of mine came over to our house and was very surprise how crude the sewing area was. I could feel her pity. My excuse was that I was suppose to move into a bedroom, but that had gotten postpone because of water damage from new year's eve. It was really just an excuse, but it is the truth. She felt sorry for me that she offered her unused sewing table. Hopefully by this summer, the sewing room will be ready for me to occupy (home improvement projects for us tend to take a while - hey, we're doing most of the work ourselves).

So for the last five years, I've been moving around the house sewing.

Here's a compilation of my past sewing area setup.
May 2012 :: Dirty Little Secret
July 2012 :: More Dirty Little Secret 
March 2013 :: Falling in Love + A Bitching Session
  the one above was when I was sewing on the breakfast counter.

So that was then, and this is now.

So this area is similar to the area set up from the post "Dirty Little Secret". Notice the Chinese New Year decorations on the mantle, Chinese New Year is coming on in February 8th.

Below is my cutting area, and yes, it's on the floor. I can't cut properly on a table. And us Asians are use to working on the floor, so it's more comfortable for me to cut on the floor.

This is the sewing area. And yes, that's the new machine (about 2.5 years old now). Because the bench was designed not for a table, but for a bench, the height is not right. So hubby put a box underneath the mofo sewing machine, and it raised it up just enough that I don't have to hunch down. The sewing machine is a Janome 8900 (SE - special edition). The only difference is the red face cover. :)

Notice to the right of the sewing machine is a thread spool? Because of the height of the sewing machine, I had to put a plastic take out container to raise the thread spool up to the right height. Simple, but effective.

This corner is my ironing area. If I'm ironing smaller pieces, I'll do it on the floor. See my $5.00 Rowenta iron there? It's still working, but I think it's about to give up on me. The ironing board is for staging the quilt I'm assembling, and ironing larger pieces. This board would usually live in the dining room under the breakfast counter with the quilt on it when I don't need it.

Another view of the cutting area.

Well, that's done for now, off to cleaning the area and to clean for the new year. My next post will probably be the final result of the quilt.

Now go make a mess.

Quilt & Bitch

Renovation :: Guest Bathroom v.3

October 19 2015,

When we moved in, in 2010, the guest bathroom looked like this. The house was built in the late 1950's. Most of our neighbor's bathroom who have not renovated their bathroom, their bathroom still has the retro look.

So when we moved in, we had the bathroom renovated. No pictures came from this renovation, because it looked horrible.

The contractors who did it, did such a bad job that after we fired them, we didn't trust their work and had to redo it. So fast forward to May 2015. We had friends over for a graduation and they were using the sink. All of a sudden, the pipe for the sink starts leaking.

It was a good time to demo everything anyway, so that's what we do. Hubby had wanted to keep the existing floors - but I convinced him to take everything out because we did not know the quality of the work. It turned out that the plumber did not glue one of the pipe, which led to the leaking. It leaked all the way to the basement bathroom - but luckily that was already gutted and down to the bare studs.

The culprit

Hubby + I (mainly hubby) did most of the renovation and supervision. We hired a plasterer, a tiler, and a plumber. This is the plumber that couldn't rough our original Kohler Escale sink (even after we gave numerous warnings that the first plumber had not done it right either).

So after at least 6 trips to the tile store, and a minimum of 30 trips to the local box store (no exaggeration), we have a finish bathroom.

The concept of the bathroom was based on the bathtub itself. The bathtub is the Kohler Expanse Curve tub. I like the curve look and carried it throughout the bathroom. The light has a light curve, the shower curtain rod has a curve, and the vanity handles. It is the attention to detail.

The floor tile is a dark bluish gray with light gray lines. I went for a darker tile color so the floor will hide the dirt well. The bathtub tile on the left and right is ceramic white matte and in the middle is glass. I've realized that glass tile was expensive, but I liked the look of it, so we minimized the cost by doing the ceramic white matte. On the sink wall, we tied in the area with the white glass tile.

Originally, we had wanted to tile the walls where the toilet nook was, with ceramic gray matte tiles. Unfortunately it was back ordered and would not be available for another month. We ended up painting it with Sherwin Williams "Lazy Gray". The "Lazy Gray" was not too dark and not too light.

The vanity piece came from Home Depot. We had wanted to use another vanity and something smaller, but they had a blow out sale, we couldn't resist not buying it. It does feel a little bit cramp because of that 48" big vanity. But it does provide a lot of space.

The blinds came from Levelor. We decided to use top down bottom up so that we can always have it half open to bring light into the room without compromising a compromising situation (does that make sense?).

After everything is said and done, I'm happy with the bathroom.

Renovating a bathroom is similar to making a quilt. Carefully choosing every single piece that goes into the room to make sure it is in unison.

What I learned from this was to take pictures. Take pictures of everything during the process. Every little corner, every little thing. From the beginning while we were demoing, and when the plumbing was redone, and when the plasterer was in, I took pictures. This helped hubby a few times, because when the tiler had already tiled the wall with the shower bar and the shower diverter, he had to reference back what was behind the tiled wall. This way when there was a question about something, all I had to do was show them the pictures.

One down, two to go.

Quilt & Bitch

Renovation :: Dining Room

October 8 2014,

We finally did it. We finally were able to tackled and start and finished what the contractors f***ed up. It has been four years since the contractor left and left us with a house that was half done. Basically whatever they touched, they f****ed it up.

So we first tackled the dining room. The dining room was originally painted a dark pink. I wanted this room to be orange. We painted a few oranges, but thought it was too dark. We went to lighter oranges, and finally settled on the Sherman Williams Flan (SW 6652).

We had been working on Benjamin Moore and Ace paints, because our local Ace was very close to us. But one day, hubby wanted them to mix some paints and they refused to do so. The guy said we opened the paint can incorrectly, and thus they could not shake it up. I then asked him how to open the can correctly, and he proceeded to show me. And viola, it was the same way I was doing it - I even used the same tool - the paint can opener that they can given to us. This Ace hardware store had recently changed ownership, and the previous owner knew me quite well, because I was always in there buying things, instead of going to the big box store. Hubby said thank you and left.

We drove to the Sherman Williams store which was 15 minutes away, instead of 5 minutes away and gave them our business instead. Good-bye Ace Hardware, hello Sherman Williams.

Before Renovation

Before Renovation

Before Renovation

Before Renovation

We had to paint our ceiling because there was a big crack in it. If you open up the first picture above, you'll notice the crack. Our ceiling is not flat but slightly textured, similar to popcorn. Hubby researched how to paint with the texture, and found Zinsser Popcorn Ceiling Patch to be the best solution. It turned out really well.

We also invested in a airless paint gun. We got the Wagner Flexio 590 Paint Sprayer Kit and primed and painted the ceiling with it. OMG, it is such an amazing tool. It was worth the $150.00 investment. It has already paid for itself. No rolling, no neck aches. The result was more than satisfaction. But we had to make sure we covered everything.

After we sprayed the ceiling, we had to spray the walls, so we covered the ceiling before priming the wall with the spray gun. It was not as successful, but we think it was the paint we were using, rather than the gun. We didn't strain the paint before using it - there were a bunch of blobs in it (the same has been sitting for a while) even though we did have it shaken.

I went onto youtube and found a great video on how to strain paint with stockings / panty hose. I had to sacrifice a pair of mine, but it was worth it, because we did not have to buy another gallon of paint.

During Renovation

During renovation

Below is the end result. Don't look too closely. We had to repaint the trim, crown molding, chair rails, baseboards again, because we had used the wrong color. Oh well.

If you do look closely, on the french door, you'll see paint swatches.

We also spray painted the doors with the smaller paint gun. We first did it by hand and it took 45 minutes each side to paint the panel. My back was hurting too much and I gave up and told hubby just to spray paint and pray that it'll be fine. It turned out beautifully.

The top half of the wall is Benjamin Moore - Strand of Pearls (CSP-395). Now that we no longer will be using Benjamin Moore paint, I have to find an equivalent of Strand of Pearls for Sherman Williams.

After Renovation

Below is a lamp that we found in 2012 at a yard sale for $25.00. We finally used it. The bulbs cost more than the chandelier. They are Sunlite 60T8 Antique Radio Style T8 light bulbs and cost approximately $10.00 each, totally $30.00.

The "chandelier" might not stay, we might get a different one.

 
So, after the dining room was completed, we are now working on the living room. And guess what the dining room looks like now? LOL.

Give us three more weeks, and the living room should be done.

Quilt & Bitch