In the Office: Built-In Shelves and Cabinets

All was quiet for a while --- the next major home improvement was in November 2013.  The office was not an attractive room and just didn't seem very inviting.  Plus we needed more storage room.  So, for storage, for aesthetic reasons (particularly important to me, since I work all day in there three days a week), and for resale value, we wanted to put in some nice built-in cabinets and shelves.  So here's what it looked like "before":

Here's what it looked like after we cleared out all the books and a lot of the other stuff to make room for the workmen:

And below are the beautiful new cabinets, close to finished -- they dramatically change the room!  The lower part of the right-hand cabinet contains pull-out file drawers (they were still working on those at the time of the photo).  On the lower left hand side there are standard cabinets.  There is a window seat between the two pieces.  Our painter painted them a beautiful color similar to that of the window molding, which made them look like they had been there forever.

Cleaning Out Beneath the House

The space below the house was a big mess.  Apparently people had been storing stuff and leaving debris down there for decades.  Having the debris there was bad for many reasons:  it created a fire hazard; it created shelter for varmints, critters, bugs, and snakes; it created hazards for people moving around under the house or trying to get access to electrical or plumbing parts; it created an environment for mold; it inhibited ventilation under and through the house; it created the potential for injuries and tetanus, etc., etc.  We hired Jamie's wonderful employee Deedee and her husband to clean it all out.  They spent days on it, and I think they hauled off a dozen truckloads of junk to the dump.  The fact that the space under the house is only about 4 feet high added to the laboriousness of this task.  There was a lot of old lumber (not worth saving), lots of old shutters (not usable), cinder blocks, pieces of debris from plumbing or electrical work, and general trash.  One surprising find was a large collection of old vintage coke bottles --- which we gave to Deedee because she collects Coca-Cola things.  I only kept one bottle because I liked the fact that the stamp on the bottom showed it was manufactured in Galveston.  I also kept a nice classic liquor jug.  Now the space under the house is clean and open, and I think it's much better all around.

Revenge of the Mold

Early in 2013, I pulled aside one of the living room curtains to look out, and was extremely dismayed to see black mold growing on the bottom of the window frame between the Magnetite covering and the window glass.  I checked some other windows, and sure enough, a number of other windows had this as well.  This wasn’t supposed to happen — the Magnetite is supposed to create a hermetic seal, so there should be no way for moisture or air to get in and feed mold.  I had someone from the Magnetite company come out and look at it, and they told me that the Magnetite was sealed — the problem was that the windows on the outside were not.  The caulk around the window panes was old and moisture was able to come in.

So again the house was thrown into disarray in February 2013 as we hired Uncle Bill and his crew to clean, treat, scrape and paint the window frame inside all 12 windows with Magnetite, as well as caulk all the window panes on the outside.  These are big windows, so it was a major undertaking.  And it was frustrating to have the upheaval and expense over something like this, which wasn’t adding to the beauty of the home but just fixing an unforeseen problem!

And the Paint Goes On -- the Breakfast Room Cabinets

The last thing Uncle Bill’s crew did during the November-December 2012 chapter was to paint the breakfast room cabinets.  These are the cabinets that our other contractors had built back in March, and that we were going to paint ourselves.  (Though we didn’t ever get around to painting them, Jamie did stain the countertop himself.)  Somehow we didn't take any photos of the cabinets after finishing.  Here is one that I just took in June 2014 --- please disregard the piles of books (they are to donate to the public library) and the boxes on the floor (they are to hold the books)!

Painting the Main Hallway - Finally

The front hallway was the only major room we never reached on our own – we ran out of time and steam before we got to it.  We had only removed a couple of patches of wallpaper.  In October and November 2012, Uncle Bill’s crew removed the wallpaper, repaired the walls, and painted the whole thing.  Above the chair molding we used the same Meander Blue that we used in the guest bedroom and rear foyer.  Below the chair molding we used a dark red – I can’t remember the name, but it was the result of many tests with poster board.  The paint transformed the entry to the house, in a good way.  So here is the listing photo showing the front hallway as you saw it from the front door:

Below, this is what it looked like when we had moved in and put up pictures (and a lot of clutter):

 Here are some in-progress photos from the other direction, facing the front door -- first, getting ready to tear that wallpaper off (and all furniture shoved into other rooms --- a condition we were not unused to):

 Next, the blue part is done, as well as crown moldings::

And the finished product --- a much nicer introduction to the house:

Crown & Picture Moldings

Uncle Bill and his crew were around for a lot of October and November 2012, making smells, messes, noises, and beautiful results.  They did a lot at the same time, but I will start with the picture and crown molding.  We felt that these tall beautiful rooms were meant to have decorative ceiling and wall moldings.  So Uncle Bill’s crew installed and painted (1) crown molding and picture molding in the living room, dining room, office, and rear foyer, (2) crown molding and chair molding in the front hallway, and (3) only picture molding in the two bedrooms (we wanted them a bit more casual).  It’s hard to capture the outcome in photos because it’s an all-surrounding effect, but here is an attempt:

A Recipe for Disaster: Gaps Behind the Bookcases

Because there are no straight lines in the house, and because the bookcases were level, both bookcases had gaps underneath where the floor sloped under them.  Before installing the bookcases, the workers had removed the baseboards.  Unfortunately, there was nothing behind the baseboards — just a hole through which you could look and see the ground under the house.  For some reason I took photos and didn't tell them to close these up --- I just assumed they would.  Here is the gap on the west wall:

 And here is the gap on the east wall:

When I used a flash, you could see the ground below the house!

They did not do anything to close this up.  They just built the bookcases up against these openings.  So it looked like the opening was closed, but because there were openings under the bookcases and cracks between the boards comprising the cabinets, outside air flowed through these openings, into the house, and into the cabinets at the base of each bookcase.  This caused hot, humid air to sit in the closed cabinets which resulted in........MOLD.  I didn’t know this until much later.  We ended up hiring our initial contractors to go under the house and cover up the openings, and Jamie caulked the inside of the cabinets.  This helped the problem go away, but it still gets humid in there.

October 2012: Bookcases in the Back Foyer

I wanted some built-in bookcases behind the french doors leading into the back foyer.  With my innumerable boxes of books, we had far more books than shelf space.  We needed tall bookcases because the ceilings are so high.  Here is a view of the area where I wanted to put them --- in the space behind each of the french doors in the foreground.  (Beyond the french doors, leading to the front door, is what we consider the front or main hallway or foyer.  The area in the foreground, which we call the rear or  back foyer, is a smaller room that is separated from the main hallway by French doors.  It has doorways to the office, breakfast room and guest bedroom.  This photo was taken during wallpaper days, but by the time we put these bookcases in Jamie had already stripped and painted the rear foyer with the same Meander Blue used in the guest bedroom)

I had bought some really tall disassembled bookcases from a listing on Craigslist back on March 28, and they had been sitting in the garage for some time.  In an attempt to save money, we hired a different contractor, Uncle Bill, to put the bookcases together (we got his name from the insulation guy who did the garage attic).  They ended up putting a lot of work into them, practically as much as it would take to build them from scratch.  Here are some pics of the result -- it was my mistake telling them to use a real white instead of matching the duller off-white of the existing moldings:

With these, I was finally able to unpack the last of my boxes of books from the old house.

Making Jamie's Workshop Habitable

Over October and November 2012, we made a lot of progress on Jamie's workshop.  His workshop is the attic of the garage building, about 20 x 35 feet in size.  Like any attic, it got very hot, to the point that it was virtually unusable in the summer.  There is a window unit, but it is not strong enough to deal with Galveston summer heat.  So in October, we hired a company, Champion Insulation out of Houston, to put in expanding foam "open cell" insulation.  After that was done, the ceiling was a mass of yellowish-white globby stuff. Jamie quickly got to work nailing up sheets of Luan plywood on the ceiling.  Here is how it looked by Thanksgiving:

(That's Jamie's niece on the left and ELISSA's bosun on the right.)

The Eastlake Mirror Arrives

I’m not entirely sure when we got the Eastlake mirror for the fireplace, but Jamie thinks it was before the ceiling moldings went up, so I’m putting it in September 2012.  We had been using a dresser mirror over the fireplace and it didn’t look quite right.

We were having trouble finding one to replace it, though, because the height of the ceilings meant that we needed a really big or tall mirror.  Finally we saw a nice Eastlake mirror at an estate sale but felt the asking price ($1000, reduced “for us” to $750) was too much.  There’s a whole somewhat amusing story as to how we came to purchase it later, which I won’t put here in case this blog ever goes public (we felt that there was some questionable conduct by a person involved).  Anyway, it fits the room beautifully and most people assume the fireplace and mirror came with the house.

And the Paint Goes On — the Breakfast Room

In July, Jamie finished preparing and painting the breakfast room.  This had taken a long time, and we had been living with the breakfast room in an unpainted state for so long that we had hung our pictures on the wall anyway:

(looking toward front door)

(looking toward kitchen)

But eventually it got done.  I painted numerous pieces of poster board with various yellows and we finally decided on one.  On July 13, 2012, I wrote in an email: “By the way, home improvement continues over here, with the nice layer of fine dust that comes with paint prep.  But soon the breakfast room will be a pretty light yellow, and we'll be able to eat in there again.”  On July 15, 2012, Jamie finished painting the breakfast room and we moved everything back in.  “That leaves only one big room [the main hallway, visible in the top photo abive with its floral wallpaper] left to be painted, and we've pretty much decided to hire someone to do that room, because there is plaster under the wallpaper and we don't know what to do with plaster.”

Here's the breakfast room after painting.  This was actually taken later in the year (at Thanksgiving) and includes a new red rug.  We had a black floral rug under the table initially, and it made the walls look greenish.  The red rug warms it up a bit.

Torrents in the Bathroom

Our first major rainstorm hit in July 2012.  Later, I walked into the back (guest) bathroom into puddles of water.  Naturally, I figured it had something to do with Jamie and the shower.  But the curtains were also soaked.  We figured out it was coming through the window.  When it rained again, we saw that it did not just trickle through, it gushed through at the top of the window frame, in streams that arced up to two feet from the window frame.  Until we could get it fixed, we put out buckets and pans to catch the streams.  In an email dated July 9, 2012, I told my mom, “There's no more water coming in right now, and we've cleaned up the water on the floor and have a dehumidifier in there.  But there's a ladder blocking access to the toilet, so we'll be using the other bath for a while anyway.”  The rain kept coming, and on July 15 I wrote: “[W]ith the recent downpours, we had rain spurting in around the guest bathroom window frame (to the tune of one to three gallons per downpour!).  Jamie inspected the outside and discovered a quarter-inch gap in the top of the window frame.  He has made temporary repairs (tape) and we've stayed dry since.  Ah, the joys of owning an older home!”  Later in July, we hired a gutter company to clean the gutters, install protective gutter guards, install a new downspout or two, and repair the window leak repaired by caulking and installing a metal threshold piece over the leaky window frame.

Beautiful New Curtains for the Living Room

The living room came with lace curtains for the windows, which was fine for filtering light and preventing people from being able to see into the house, but I wanted something more decorative.  Because the ceilings are so tall (13 feet), the windows are also very tall, especially one that goes all the way to the floor.  So I needed to order custom curtains.  I found a wonderful place called curtainsmade4u.com, and ordered curtains for the four living room windows using the fabric above, called "Mirth Lark."  It took a while for the curtains to arrive, but they were worth it.  They are beautifully made and the rich red in the fabric glows.  Here is a photo of the living room when the curtains went up in June 2012:

Plumbing Problems

After my move-in, we did not have as many big renovation tasks.  Instead, we started learning ways in which the house was defective.  These were not really old house issues so much as maintenance issues caused by indifferent custodianship over the last couple of decades.  For example, in May 2012, we learned that the shower pan under the walk-in shower was leaking and water was coming down under the house.  We also had bad leaks under the kitchen sink which caused the under-sink cabinets to get smelly and moldy.  We hired plumbers who fixed the shower pan leak and replaced the kitchen faucets to stop the leaking.  Fun.

April 17, 2012 – RBD MOVE IN!!!!

The movers came to the Houston house on April 17, 2012 and had all my stuff moved in by the end of the day.  Even before this, Jamie and I had moved a lot of stuff in my car as well as by renting a U-Haul once or twice.  The day before the move, Jamie was in an accident when a driver filed to stop behind him at a red light and totaled his car.  My move-in transformed the house into a colossal mess, with boxes and stuff everywhere.  Here's a view looking down the main hallway from the front door:

Another view looking down the main hallway from the other direction:

 Even the master bedroom had stuff stacked everywhere:

 Here's a view from the dining room looking into the "office," which seems to hold nothing but boxes at this point:

More Paint Goes on in April — the Living Room

The living room had to be painted before I moved in on April 17, 2012, because we couldn’t have done it afterward with all the rugs and furniture there.  So Jamie scrambled to get it done in early April after the floors were done but before I moved.  These photos were taken on April 12, and they show Jamie taping paper on our freshly-refinished floors to make sure no paint could get on them.

The closest "after" photo I have is two weeks later, after I had moved in and stuff is everywhere --- you can't see the color very well, but it's just a nice light beige or off white that sets off the white window trim.  We had tried about a dozen different colors (on poster board or on the wall itself) before settling on this one.

And the Paint Goes on in April – Guest Bedroom

On April 9, 2012, Jamie finished painting the guest room a beautiful color, Sherwin Williams Meander Blue, which we loved so much we ended up painting the back foyer and the main hallway (top half) the same color. Somehow we failed to take a photo of the freshly painted guest room -- probably due to getting ready to move my stuff from Houston.  So here is a "before" photo of the guest room and a sample of Meander Blue:

Refinishing Floors — March-April 2012

The above photo is of the living room, from the listing photos.  I actually thought the floors were lovely, with a rich dark patina from years of wax buildup.  But they were not in great shape and needed to be stripped, sanded and refinished.  Bill Hynek's team did this in March and April 2012.  Right after he gave us an estimate in mid-March, I got a contract on my house in Houston and was set for closing in April.  We were desperate to have the floors finished before my houseful of furniture and boxes arrived at the house.  Bill started on the floors, then went on vacation, then came back and finished up in April just before I moved in.  Because Jamie had already moved in, they had to move everything around the house as they worked, doing one room at a time.  Here is the living room floor --- sanded and ready for finishing --- on March 23, 2012:

We decided to have the floors finished with wax rather than polyurethane because we didn’t want to have to smell the polyurethane.  The living room walls remained unpainted during all this time.

Moving into March: Breakfast Room Cabinets!

With the little hutch moved out of the breakfast room, there was room to put built-in cabinets across one wall.  Above is a "before" picture showing the wall that we wanted to build cabinets across.  I drew a diagram of what we wanted, and our contractor built them in March 2012.  From an email:  “Because Gran's breakfast room was kind of the hub for our family and friends in Selma, the idea of having a breakfast room is really meaningful to me.  Probably the reason I want cabinets across one end of the room is that Gran's breakfast room had that.”  Below is a photo of an interim state of the cabinets, before the countertop and drawers/doors were installed:

And below are the finished cabinets --- well, finished except for painting the cabinets and staining the countertop.  To save money, we thought we'd do these things ourselves.  Jamie did eventually do the countertop stain, but we ended up paying someone else to paint them later in the year.  It also took a while to get the drawer pulls and lower cabinet handles installed.

A New Bedroom Light Fixture

As I mentioned before, we didn't like the light that hung in the master bedroom (above photo).  At an antique/junk shop we found a beat-up light that we liked.  It wasn’t an antique, but definitely qualified as vintage, judging from the state of the metal and electrical parts.  We thought it had good bones.  In late February 2012, Jamie re-wired it, cleaned it, painted the metal parts with a bronze paint, and hung it in the bedroom.  He also added a ceiling medallion.  The result:

Moving the Walk-In Closet

There is this wonderful kind of crazy walk-in closet in the house.  It's a nice size in square footage (for an old house), but is funny because it has a 13-foot ceiling like the rest of the house, and has shelving stacked up almost to the ceiling, most of which is completely inaccessible. Anyway, this closet opened onto the back bedroom, which we designated a guest bedroom.  Here is a peek into the closet from the guest bedroom:

We wanted it to open on the other side, onto the little hallway by the front bedroom, since we planned to use that as our master bedroom (note that it was only due to the Magnetite windows that we could do this -- otherwise the front bedroom would be too noisy due to Broadway traffic!).  So in mid-February 2012, our contractor’s workers moved the entire doorway (with frame, door and transom) to the new location, cut open the wall and installed the door there, sheetrocked and painted the old opening so you can’t tell it’s there, and removed all the shelves and clothes rods and turned them around to face the new door.  Here is the door assembly in its new location off the master bedroom.

The first photo below shows the sheetrocked wall in the guest bedroom where the walk-in closet door used to be.  The bottom photo is a glimpse into the closet in its new location, but before they put the clothes rods and shelves back in.  Our contractors discovered during this process that the closet used to be a hallway (right next to the main hallway) between the two bedrooms, and a prior owner closed it off to make the closet.

Moving the China Hutch

Here is the listing photo of a corner of the breakfast room, showing the built-in china hutch.  It was a very weird place to build in a hutch, because the wall next to it (on the left) had limited use without blocking the hutch.  It also was just odd visually, because it did not face the room.  We wanted to build cabinets across the entire interior/back wall of the breakfast room (the wall on the left as you're looking at the picture) and this hutch was in the way.  On the other hand, we really liked the hutch itself.  It has a very nice vintage character.  So on February 16, 2012, our contractors removed it from the wall.......

And we had it installed in the "back foyer."  That's the back of the hallway that is separated from the front part by a set of french doors.  Here it is in its new location (with the guest room in the background):

Later we hired people to finish the left side of it, which previously had been flush with a wall.  The hutch has served beautifully in its new location as a linen closet.