Spring Thaw

Welcome back to a more regular update schedule on our home reno project. We took a very necessary planned break at the start of 2023 to get healthy and plan out projects for the year. Unfortunately this planned break was directly followed by Brie's workload at her actual, factual job forcing her to work 60 hour weeks for over a month and just recently the house took revenge on her for her constant meddling by having her slip off the back deck and badly sprain both her ankles rendering her couch-ridden for a couple of weeks. I also had some high stress job stuff happen, but everyone's already heard about all that so let's get on with the recap! 

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There isn't a particular narrative through-line to this stretch of the year other than the natural ebb and flow of choices and life events, one into the other. I decided that I wanted to put extra effort into spending time with our wonderful group of friends here in the DMV and so I set up a monthly movie group, which people have been curious and kind enough to attend, and we've also been fortunate to host and attend many game nights and convivial gatherings with a superlative group of people. Times are grim out there and it's buoying to have good people at your side. Let's talk about how each ongoing project has/hasn't progressed over the past 5 months. 

The Privacy Fence: We're very much in the same spot as November. We've successfully installed the fence posts and received the cedar planks for the crossbeams. The goal was always to get these in before the first frost and then work inside the house over the Winter. 

This has been put on hold until the Summer due to the aforementioned delays. Should be a 2-3 day project: stain the wood, cut it to size, install it. Oh, I just remembered another reason why we chose to wait, so let's move on the Workshop.

The Workshop: We knew that at some point our DIY structure would leave behind the tools and facilities at hand. Makeshift cutting tables and saw horses are fine for ripping a board or cutting off excess bits from flooring, but it doesn't allow for smaller, detail oriented cuts. Another reason for the slowdown in work is that sometimes you gotta let that caterpillar take time to become a butterfly.

I think it was mid February that Brie started mainlining youtube videos about how to build your first workbench. I've learned that in wood working subcultures, this is akin to a Pangaean hunter/gatherer youth's first kill: ritualistic, euphoric, but marked by growing pains. It seems to be very cyclical: one learns enough about working with basic tools and lumber to craft a rudimentary bench, then uses that to upgrade current abilities and practice new skills. Eventually the reach of either the skills attained or the projects desired exceeds the grasp of the table and a new workbench is designed and built. This pattern of growth is repeated multiple times until death. Or something like that. 

Brie is currently about 95% done at time of writing. The notched out section will house her table saw so she can make precision cuts on much larger pieces of lumber and sheeting. I believe an eventual upgrade will be an in-table router slot at the other end. 

This is where we'll be making the cuts on the fence lumber later this season. It's also where we'll be making the cuts on the kitchen cabinets (look at that segue!).  

The Kitchen: The is another space that was originally slotted into Q1 for 2023 but now is Q3. The original plan for this space was to paint the uppers dusty rose or some form of muted pink and then pair that with a heavier, rich blue on the bottoms.

We moved everything in the kitchen out to my office as a makeshift pantry and then brought in a cleaning team to properly prep all the surfaces (the energy needed for that deep clean was better given to others so we could focus on the real work).

Forty year old contact paper on every shelf. We also numbered the doors and moved them to the workshop with the intent of painting them and then matching them back to their original positions.

We then removed this behemoth display case that made no sense. The current plan is still to use that wall space for some form of gallery shelving. Not open shelving, just housing cookbooks or something else aesthetically pleasing. And yes it revealed the original yellow paint. Yum!

So we're left with this cavernous bank of open shelves (we've since moved some key items back in post-cleaning) and Brie gets inspired. "What if we changed the profile of the cabinets?"

We knew that the kitchen part of the reno was closer to a refresh. There was no need to spend tons of money on new cabinets when the old ones were very sturdy and why replace working, if less than stellar, appliances when other items in the house were actually outdated or broken?

However the style of cabinets here are full (aka standard) face frame cabinets. That means that on top of the cabinet opening there is a flat frame (you can see it in the pictures above where the doors are off) that slightly cuts into the size of the opening. These give a very particular visual style to a kitchen, where the cabinet doors sit on top of this frame. This look is extremely dated for what we're trying to achieve. In addition, they require exterior hinges that sit on top of the cabinets, again affecting the visual presentation of the kitchen. 

Alternately an inset cabinet door gives a cleaner, more modern profile and allows the hinges to live inside the cabinet. The side by side above shows it pretty well, though they're using shaker style doors (they have the cut outs on them) and we have solid front cabinet doors.

So while the doors await painting, Brie did some measuring and realized that the doors could easily be cut down to transition them to inset doors. But to do this, she would need a workbench (and we've come full circle).

So with the fence and the kitchen on hold while brie finished her workbench, what exactly have we been doing?

The Office and the Hallway: Though I only showed off the paint finish and some flooring process shots, we did wrap up primary refresh on my office. This was done early to transition it into a pantry/storage room while other projects progressed.

The cork floor has been great with the light/dark contrasting purples we used. Ignore the green inside the closet, that's the original color and will be a later touch up project. We also needed to finish the office flooring, b/c now all three 'bedrooms' off the hall are floored and we can begin flooring the hallway and tying them all together. Of course one must paint and finalize fixtures prior to installing flooring.

The original hallway lights were these odd little gumdrop shaped things that were proportionately far too small for how high the ceiling are and gave little to no light throw. They were far better suited to a submarine than a home. Our initial experiments with replacement fixtures leaned into pendant lights that did in fact fill the vertical space but were far too thin and reedy to fill a space only wired for two fixtures. This sent us down the path of looking for larger, more robust flush mount lights. The gold trimmed drum lights with frosted diffusers that we settled on have been perfect. They tend to blend in like they've always been there and fill the space with plenty of usable light.

The paint job is sort of old news by now with so many friends and family having come through the space this year, but I want to cover it for non-locals and history alike. 

I wrote about Supergraphics in the 10-ish Days of Blogmas and how important defining spaces through paint and color is to certain types of mid-century designs. Embracing the geometry of the house (the A-line roof, the floor to ceiling rectangular picture windows, the tongue and groove pine ceilings) was always core to how we approached the designs renovations. Part of this meant filling the vertical spaces with outsized lighting (floor lamps sourced from craigslist/FB marketplace for less than $250 total) 

All of these fill that lovely verticality while also adding their own particular curved geometry as a counterpoint to the hard natural materials and rigid angles of the house.

The other element at play was just how much wall space there was and just how miserably neutral it had been rendered. I spent most of last year thinking of the walls as white, but Brie corrected me in the Fall and once we painted the hallway a base coat of white it was clear that in fact all the walls were shades of tan, but the hallway was one shade, the kitchen another shade, the dining yet a different shade, and finally the front room (green carpet room) was actually a white paint tinted green to match(?!) the carpeting. In retrospect we may have been living in one of those prison experiments where they lock prisoners in rooms painted different colors and observe the results.

Back to that funky album cover I posted above. We knew that making the long back hallway into a moment was key to tying the wide open public spaces to the private spaces at the back of the house. We toyed briefly with an eye ball theme, covering the walls with paintings and sculptures and various types of realistic or interpretive eyes and partial faces. That was a fun icebreaker thought exercise but ultimately fits more into a heightened Victorian redesign than a mid-century one. 

Brie liked the idea of using paint to draw the viewer conceptually and physically into the hallway and that Graznya Bacewicz album cover spoke to her as something that had the interplay of color and neutrals, curves and lines. I then sourced this runner that brought all of that together.

We then set out to define a scheme that would have the enticement we wanted, that used the vertical space, and that reflected the colors and shapes in the rug and inspiration piece. Brie mocked up the following.

This is a panorama view of the hallway. The pink and dark blue from the kitchen are coming in at left of screen, the large blocked colors represent the left hand side of the hallway as you're entering it (to me  they're bright ship sails or a colorized doorway from the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), the door at center is the view of the principle bedroom if the door were closed, and the paint that closely matches the album cover is the right hand side (bathroom side) of the hall. You can also see that the panorama has the ceiling in play and we're considering bringing some paint elements onto it.

Here are some process shots from the earliest efforts. We were fortunate to have Blaine and Gabby up at the same time we started painting. Any time we've worked on the house with friends the final results have felt better. Some more advanced shots below.

We have been universally pleased with the results so far. We've opted to paint the right hand side of the hall plain white for now (not pictured) b/c those walls are coming down some time in 2024 when we renovate the bathrooms. We also aren't adding any final touches to the paint job yet until we can tie in the kitchen colors. All three back rooms have (or will have) different stylistic influences. Brie's craft room/guestroom is a little scandi-boho, my office is going to be a little more mid-century space age influenced, and the principle bedroom is eclectic and rich in colors and patterns. Part of the allure of this direction for the hallway is that even if the rooms themselves aren't direct matches to one another, the hallway serves as connective tissue and stylistically all those rooms belong in a house that has that hallway.

Power HRG: Through events too boring to describe, we came to be partnered with a large multi-focused home renovation and energy efficiency company called Power HRG. Turns out the former owners used them to install the very good replacement windows and sliding door for the side deck and their lifetime warranty has now been transferred to us. Woo-Hoo! Power replaced our gutters, facia, and downspouts last month and will eventually be part of our effort to replace the front windows and install windows in The Room (almost to The Room!). They also install energy efficient doors and since we're reverting the breezeway back into an exterior space later this year, The Room needed to have an exterior door. Enter Power.

Let's talk about The Room.

The Room: Brie and I gutted the moldy mess of the room over the Fall/Winter and left it sit to watch for leaks until it was warm enough to work in it again. Good news, no leaks. We had Cesar our contractor come out b/c The Room needed all new wiring for 1) outlets 2) a 220 for a mini split and 3) ceiling lighting. He went away to work up a pitch but he did confirm that we needed to address the Styrofoam on the ceiling. Did you forget about that? That the former owner had insulated the ceiling by using tar and glue to affix a layer of Styrofoam boards and then used double tape and brackets to attach another layer of Styrofoam over that?

I took a day and removed the brackets and top layer of boards, but it became incredibly clear that getting down the glued layer was gonna be a true son of a bitch. We are fortunate to know some heroes and their names are Grace and Isaiah. They helped us dig fence holes in the Fall and they arrived and help us spend 2 hours chopping at 40 year old ceiling glue. The true number one, star of the match though is Isaiah- more machine than man, he has never met a hole he couldn't dig or an immovable object he couldn't budge. Oh, he also happens to be an incredibly upbeat, giving, and kind person. Lucky to know them.

The ceiling having been shucked, the room was now truly clean and clear. So it was time for Cesar and his electrician's to come in and rewire.

Fresh outlets, new breakers, and tons of led recess lights that will eventually clip into the dry wall ceiling. This also meant that we could go ahead and order the subfloor and insulation. So we did!

Construction tip: Each one of those vertical spaces between the studs is called a 'bay.' We started vacuuming them out and loading in the insulation strips. We're going to finish insulating The Room, then install the subfloor (the stacked wooden squares). The subfloor is wood on the top and plastic on the bottom, with grooves to allow the concrete to breathe without worrying about mold. Once the floor is in, then we'll take down the storage areas you can see in the above right photo. Then comes the time for new walls.

We need to remove the weird constituent "window" the former owners installed here and frame in a new wall. We'll install two clerestory (pronounced 'clear-story') windows that mirror the roof line and are above normal head height. The goal of the clerestory window is to allow in light while reducing heat and maintaining privacy. We'll also be removing a garden bed that's just out of shot in the photo above and installing a breezeblock privacy wall to house/hide all our trash and recycling bins. Brie put together a mock-up of what the exterior will look like with the new windows, breezeblock wall, opened center breezeway, and new fencing.

We're still discussing exterior paint options (here it's a sage green), but we know that it'll be something better than the current naked mole rat pink. We've also procured a vintage table as the centerpiece of The Room (which will primarily be used as a rec room/games room/entertaining space).

Vintage Italian from the late 70s/early 80s art deco renaissance. It's pretty freaking amazing.

That's all the news that's fit to print for right now. Since we're back in full swing, posts will become more frequent as well.

-S.