Blog — "year of the house"

It's been a while since I've written about any of our house updates. To be honest, life has taken over and this past month has not been focused on The Year of the House in any way. The weather has been beautiful and so there have been baseball games to go to, hikes to take in the parks, walks to go on with Lilah, and outdoor cafe tables to sit at. The last time I even mentioned anything about our house, I wrote about painting our bedroom. And despite our determination to get that job finished, I am sure you can guess how that turned out.

With all of our spare time being spent outdoors, we've been thinking a lot more about how to turn our outdoor spaces into additional rooms of our house. We have our finished patio to enjoy and a fairly barren roof top deck. Believe it or not, the roof deck is one of the coolest outdoor areas in the heat of the summer, so we're determined to create a lounge-y room-like space to enjoy. Here are a few of the sets of furniture that we think would do the trick.

via Crate & Barrel

via Frontgate

via Kingsley-Bate

We're still trying to make an ultimate decision based on pricing, size, style, and upkeep. In addition, there is the continual question-- do we go teak or all-weather resin wicker? Andrew is busy at work making dimensioned paper pieces and scooting them around on a mock up of our roof top deck. Outdoor lounge furniture turns out to be more expensive than we had thought, but everything that we've liked is great quality so we'd have to look at it as an investment. In the long run, we'd rather have something that lasts than have to get new furniture again in a few years.

Which set is your favorite? Any of you have teak or resin wicker? And why did you make your decision one way or another? Maybe you can sway us toward our ultimate choice.

By now we should be done with our half bath, right? Wrong. Seems there was a little measurement issue that I may or may not have warned Andrew about. And that measurement issue may or may not have turned out to be as I had suspected. Thus, our toilet did not fit back into the half bath and was off by a quarter of an inch. Crap. (Did you think that pun was as funny as I did?)

There was also the small part about water leaking from the sink water hookups under our new cork floor. And the part about a fan air drying it for a 24 hour period. And so Andrew was back at square one, re-hooking up the sink, with not a minute left in the weekend to start worrying about moving the pipe for the toilet.

Now the sink is back in its place and we have been leak free for another 24 hour period of time.


Andrew is now busy fixing the piping under the toilet, so that we can finally move the toilet out of our living room and back to its proper location. First, he moved the drain collar over about 2 inches, which meant doing a little cork floor patch for the adjustment as well. This is what it looks like in the bathroom:


And this is what it looks like in the basement in our laundry room:


Yes. That is a gaping hole in the drywall that had to be opened in order to get everything back to working condition. So as I traipsed down to the basement to do some laundry the other night, I found Andrew sitting on the dryer with some PVC pipe in hand, getting some serious work done. And by serious work, I mean making a telescope out of PVC pipe.


Finally, after the fun was over, he got back to work. Lilah decided it was best if she stayed out of this mess this time around and opted to be lazy in her bed instead.


Hopefully all will be finished in the next few days so that we can finish up the rest of the original project, which was to install the horizontal wood panels. Here's to hoping that the next time I update you, the half bath is at least back in working condition with little left to be done!

This past weekend Andrew worked away at installing maple panels in our half bath. Wood paneling doesn't always sound so lovely, but remember this post about our final goal to have a Frank Lloyd Wright bathroom? This is what we're going for. Not that old 70s wood paneling you're thinking about.

In order to get a clean, nail-less look, the first step in the process is to mount something on the studs called a z-clip (because it's shaped like a z).



After these lovely clips were installed, Andrew used a router to create a reveal that would show between each panel. Yes, he bought a ridiculously expensive router just to do this. (Cue in Tim the Tool Man Taylor grunts and sounds). And there's a back story about this router that I won't get into that may or may not have been the reasoning behind these flowers. But in order to spare him of anymore embarrassment, I'll leave it at that. Plus, I'm getting way off topic.

So next is to screw the other half of the z clip onto the back of the panel. Then the panel just locks into place. These clips are supposed to withhold some ridiculous amount of weight and help create a seamless look with no putty holes-- a definite bonus.



Two more rows of panels will be added along with a final cap on the top row. The next step will be to stain and finish the panels. Once all of that is done, the sink and toilet can go back in, freeing up space in our living room. Though as I've said before, the sink and toilet hanging out in our living room right now sure makes it looks classy.

And of course, none of this work would be getting done if it weren't for our stealthy contractor, Finn.


I've yet to witness it, but I've heard he's pretty handy with a hammer. What do you think of the progress thus far?

Right now our studio/reading room is a bit messy while we work on getting rid of some things we've had in storage since we moved into our house. We're doing better than our last move. At our old apartment, we'd been there for a little over two years and had boxes that had yet to be opened. For now, we're one step closer to finishing this room as I work on transitioning my huge collection of paper, shipping supplies, and other such things into this empty half of our closet.


And see that lovely pile of crap in front of the closet. That's off to Goodwill. It feels amazing to purge the stuff that's been sitting around for a few years. In the meantime, remember this half bath project? Andrew has been diligently working away at this the whole weekend. Things seem to be going a bit more quickly today than yesterday and hopefully I'll have an update for you soon! In more important news, maybe the toilet and sink that have been sitting in our living room for the past six week will finally find themselves being reunited with their appropriate space.

The time has come. The self-leveling underlay has been poured in the half bath and it is finally time to lay the cork flooring. A few update photos courtesy of Andrew who snapped away while he was working.




The flooring looks great! Now just to finish it and then get wood for the final piece of the project. I'm happy to announce that this is one home improvement project that has taken as quickly as I had hoped, unlike a project that started with "f" and ended with "ence." I prefer not to talk about that one in terms of the project anymore, but only in terms of outdoor enjoyment factor if you know what I mean.