I'm a' quitting!

Hey all, it's long overdue - I have to admit that for personal reasons, I will no longer be writing my blog. I love reading other blogs about home stuff and have a lot to say/write but something holds me back. I think a big part of effective writing online is a willingness to share information about yourself - a willingness to let people into your private life for a little while. Unfortunately, things have changed in my life and I no longer feel the comfort I once did in posting things freely and publicly online. Although I would love to continue sharing, blogger is no longer the appropriate forum for me to do so.

So that leads me to good-bye - not forever, mind you, I will still be an avid reader (and occasional commenter!) on other blogs. I just won't be maintaining this space anymore. All that to say - if you are interested and want to keep in touch, I do have an active (and I mean Active) flickr account where I post (dozens and dozens) of detailed photos of all of my projects. It is, of course, completely restricted - if you have a yahoo or flickr account, let me know in the comments below and I can add you as a contact.

(oh and of course I won't publish your comment if it contains personal information!!)

Sneak peak

So our bathroom is done, our living room is painted, our floors have been refinished AND our master closet is done...

We still have to paint out our hall/entry, our spare room AND finish decorating (uh huh, of course). A sneak peak to make you curious:

My living room is yellow

As someone that typically goes a Bit Mild on colour, I surprised myself by picking a deep mustard colour for our living room. It's on the walls, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed by the choice. Deep breaths, right? Art deco inspired spaces are SUPPOSED to be colour saturated. Right?

!!!!!

Our bathroom reno - the demo begins

Okay, so you saw what it most recently looked like - and what it started out looking like...so what's happened?

Well, we started with a massive demo - we had decided to absorb the closet in our master bedroom (you can see it in the floor plan here) in an attempt to get enough space to have a separate tub and shower (can you imagine?! I know!). That and the fact that our plumbing was in exterior walls meant it all had to come out.

Bye bye ugly vanity with your broken drawers and god awful tiles!


Bye bye toilet that never ever seemed to flush properly!




After taking out the toilet and sink, the hub went to town ripping down the drywall and quickly discovered that it had been put up over the original bathroom walls (plaster and gypsum, of course!). CHECK IT OUT, at one point my house had a classic vintage pink bathroom!

Coming in from the hallway, love the chaos! Check out the pink walls...with the east facing window, I added tinfoil and a window a/c unit thinking it would help keep the Boiling Heat out (it didn't).


As I mentioned before, we had decided to absorb the master bedroom closet - so you can see the demo activities from our new (and temporary) second point of access to the bathroom. You can see that obviously the walls were at one pointed tile lined - though not with ceramic tiles, with plastic ones (?!)


Peeking around the wall from inside the tub (oh la!), you can see that the original sink had faced the toilet (vs the door, where the pre-demo one had been). And that it had a built-in medicine cabinet.


BUT WAIT, it gets better! Check out this shot, you can see the shape of the original light fixtures AND a cubby. A cubby lined with the original, red red red swirly plastic tiles. This discovery made my day, I saved one of course.


I had to include a close-up shot. Check it out, they were a deep red with pink swirls? Must have been an epic bathroom.


And, of course, the door heading back into the hallway.

Second Floor - Tour of Our Before

When we started this whole reno process, I was so keen. I even posted a tour of our first floor before we started. Wow, I impress myself. Now that we've been working hard on the second, I realize I never posted a tour of the before - better late than never, right?. Or really, a follow-up tour of the after or "current state" of the first floor. BAH!

;)

Anyway - so here it is, a mock-up floor plan of our second floor space.


Somewhere out in e-lala land, I have a ton of before photos that are vastly superior to these. Sadly, this is what I currently have on our hard drive..follow me up the powder blue stairs (carpet, walls, everything!)


At the top of the stairs sits our master bedroom, great view of the ugly ceiling fan and the attic/dormer storage.


The hall to the second bedroom and the bathroom:


Our second bedroom, complete with mirror tile, ceiling fan and dirty dirty blue shag carpet (oh the memories!)


Here's where the hall turns towards the bathroom...this is actually an intermediate shot - you can see that the walls are no longer blue and a light has been added.


This, of course, led into this epic space:


Which included great details like a floating ceiling and a custom made carpet (grosssss!)




Of course, you can see these and the intermediate steps for our bathroom in this post.

Changing out the cold air intakes

When we moved into the house, we noticed that all of the cold air intakes for our furnace were large and irregular in size. They were the original wood grates and when you looked inside, the vents had become gross gross gross. Right away, I wanted to change them...

Upon inspecting the situation in the basement, I quickly realized that the ducting for the cold air intakes was actually non-existant - basically, there's just a closed-in section between two joists (does that make sense?) that also lines our foundation wall (?!?!?!). This means that the air that being pulled in for reheating also passes all along our cold foundation wall before returning to the furnace. Blah! How is that efficient? With that in mind, I realized that eventually I would want to put in proper insulated ductwork and pull the cold air intakes away (at least a little bit!) from the cold exterior walls of the house.

So what does this have to do with right now? Well, with the plans to refinish the floors underway, I knew it would be important to resize and change out the vent covers now so we went out and bought some pretty art deco inspired vent covers from Home Depot. We chose 4x10 aluminum floor register in a nickel finish by Decor Grates from Elite.


Luckily, through all of our other reno projects I worked hard to salvage original floorings and molding. So the hub pillaged our supply, framed in a smaller hole and pieced matching hardwood into place. The difference is a little noticable but when the floors are done, that should disappear.


And with the new cover, voila!

Dick and Jane's Spot - Art Outside the Home

Art Home - gotta check it out!

Dick and Jane's Spot

I love it, from Curbed National.