Lego Land Year In Review: 2008

When I started this website a year ago, I envisioned weekly posts, hopefully informative and funny, offering a glimpse into our sawdust-splattered lives, the restoration, and perhaps a little architectural design history thrown in for good measure. My goal was to bring our family and friends along for the ride, maybe even help other renovators tackle similar problems. I’m a huge fan of Heather’s blog, 1912 Bungalow, and I hoped (naively) for something equally entertaining. One year later, I have posted...6 times...so I think we can safely assume that this website will never reach its intended potential. That said, Jasun and I have been working instead of posting, so I offer to our readers, as a consolation prize for being so patient, the Lego Land Year In Review: 2008...

Family Room : Sept 2007-March 2008

That’s right! It took us 6 MONTHS to complete the family room (see the first post, The Rule of Three). To be fair, we were simultaneously working on the master bedroom during this time, but looking back, the duration seems excessive. Still, one mantel, 4 windows, and what seemed like miles of baseboard and door trim is a lot of wood to strip and sand, especially when you do it multiple times. I’m fond of telling Jasun that, in reality, it didn’t take us 6 months to finish the family room; it took us 2 months to finish it three times. I’m happy to say that now, after endless hours pondering rugs, photos, paintings, sconces, lamps, and other miscellaneous decorative “finishing touches” the family room is officially complete…as in, I don’t plan on changing anything in it for at least, say, another month.

Before & After: Lattice Window in the Family Room. (And it now OPENS, too!)

Before & After: Front Door in the Family Room. It's difficult to see from the picture, but the door trim's wood grain creates a deliberate tiger stripe "V" at the top of the door frame's arch. A really neat discovery!

Before & After: Family Room

Before & After: Family Room

Dining Room: June 2008 – December 2008

It didn’t take us 7 months to finish the dining room….did it? There was definitely some down time in there when our focus was on other projects and rooms, at least I hope so! Wow. 7 months! We had quite a few problems with the dining room stain, which I won’t go into here. Suffice it to say that weather conditions should be perfect when you’re applying a cheap stain like Minwax products, something we weren’t aware of until suffering a few pitfalls. We didn’t have to re-sand the trim like we did in the family room, but we did have to use a hairdryer several times to perform a few “emergency fixes” to the stain.

The Arts & Crafts cabinet in the corner is actually a drop-front desk. The floor-model radio actually works, and we’ve managed to get stations from France on a clear night. The chandelier is from 1910, although I’m not sure if the glass if original.

Before & After: Dining Room

Guest Bedroom: Aug 2008 – Nov 2008

2008 was a busy football season. During October alone, I think we had 3 visitors in 4 weeks! A comfortable guest bedroom quickly became a high priority. Unfortunately for our 2008 guests, I think most of them slept in a half-finished room with a platform Ikea bedframe and mattress. At one point, my brother-in-law and his wife slept there without the added “amenity” of a door! (We were the equivalent of a crappy road-side motel where things like “blinds” and “cable TV” were luxury perks.) In preparation for the 2009 football season, the guest bedroom is now open for visitors. We repaired the broken glass in the windows, stripped the paint so that they actually open, and painted all the trim in an authentic satin milk paint from Heritage Village called “pearwood”. The doors (which are now a part of the room instead of being a bonus) were stripped, sanded, and stained, and I’m happy to say that they now actually close (and lock!) without being forced. We also thought it might be neat for our guests to get a sense of history while staying with us, so the walls are decorated with the original ads for the house from the 1930 Sears Honor Bilt Modern Homes Catalog that boast “Easy Payments of $45 to $65 a month!” If only…..

Before & After: Guest Bedroom

Master Bedroom: Nov 2007-Feb 2008

Inspiration for our master bedroom design came from an Arts & Crafts design book and a 1920’s magazine photo featured in one of Heather’s meticulously researched 1912 Bungalow postings:

Arts & Crafts 1920's Magazine Home Decor Ad

The image actually depicts a child’s room, but we liked the whimsical color combination so much that Jas and I decided to apply it to our bedroom:

True to my indecisive nature, I applied no fewer than 12 different green paint samples to the dresser drawers before finding the appropriate color. We won’t mention the fact that I had already painted the trim accents with a tan-ish green and consequently had to paint all the accents twice. (I also made Jas repaint the bedroom walls twice because the first cream color had a surprising blue-ish undertone, for which I blame the energy-saving light bulbs....are you beginning to understand why it takes us so long to do everything?)

Aside from the fact that we need to strip and re-stain the wood doors so that they match the woodwork in the rest of the house and also need to hang up some more artwork, the master bedroom is officially finished. Someday, I’d love to open up the ceiling to expose the roof beams and maybe add a south-facing window with leaded glass to catch the morning sun. Check back in another decade…or two….or maybe when we win the lottery (which would be a miracle since we don’t buy tickets.)

Before & After: Master Bedroom

All Those Little Things: 2008

You’ll notice that there appears to be a gap in our dates where we didn’t do anything in April or May of last year. I swear that we were working. It doesn’t seem like we ever have free time or moments when we’re not doing some type of project, so chances are good that those months were spent decorating, performing finishing touches on various rooms, and resolving some of the house’s minor idiosyncracies that drove us nuts but contribute to a liveable home once they’re resolved. A smattering of examples:

Mailbox - The $4.99 Walmart mailbox that was affixed to the front our home was destroying its Tudor destiny, as far as I was concerned. Unfortunately, handmade Arts & Craft forged iron mailboxes are apparently traded as collateral for your firstborn child on the black market. We got lucky and scored a hammered iron beauty at an antique store in Winchester for something like $20. All it needed was a good cleaning. Now I just have to teach the postman to open it from the front instead of shoving all of our mail in the slotted top. (Picture Coming!)

Basement demo: I can’t attach a picture for this one, because we were so horrified by the basement “finished room” that we were afraid it would break the camera (and I didn’t even want to stand in there long enough to snap a photo for fear of the man-eating bacteria and huge spiders that call that area their home.) This room, which we have dubbed, simply, “the scary room”, is where the previous owners apparently chained their children when they were being punished. It boasted rotting carpet, 70’s faux wood paneling on both the walls and the ceiling, and it stunk so badly that its stench was like a living thing that would grab hold of your nostrils and then turn them inside out. When the humidity of the 2008 summer increased the stink to such a fever pitch that it started permeating through the rest of the basement, it was time to do something, so Jas and I donned our HEPA masks, work gloves, and goggles, and started tearing disintegrating carpet out to the curb. It wasn’t officially on the list of short-term renovation projects, but it’s a great outlet for frustration: pure demolition! At present, the “scary room” has almost been cleared, and the stench has been greatly reduced. Some masonry sealant and several heavy coats of primer should knock out the rest of it.

Fixed Leaky Faucets - Kitchen & Bathroom: There’s nothing quite like renovating an older house where progress is agonizingly slow and things go wrong on a daily basis. Add to that stress, however, low-grade faucets from a shoddy brand that plumbers haven’t even heard of breaking and pouring water straight through your floor joists and into your basement, and you have a classic scene from The Money Pit.

Cons: Cost of a plumber for one hour of work in State College, where all of the contractors drive Lexuses.

Pros: Plumber kindly teaches you how to sweat pipes, ensuring that you can do this sort of thing by yourself the next time….which comes in handy 2 weeks later when the other faucet breaks.

Rewired Phone & Internet Lines: This project was completely Jasun’s, and is one of the great benefits of having an IT guy in the house. We have Verizon as our internet provider, and while I can’t complain about their service, the router that they gave us cuts out periodically, requiring a manual reboot. Since all of the phone lines coming into the house are located in the “scary room” (see above), every time the internet went out, we had to bolster our courage and head down there to flip the router switch a few times. I kept thinking, “This is ridiculous. We have this beautiful telephone cubby in our hallway that would be a perfect storage area for the router.” So when we found a reproduction candlestick rotary dial telephone, Jas had the motivation he needed to rewire the phone and internet lines to route through the telephone cubby. Now if the internet cuts out, we just walk down the hall, open the cubby door, and flip a switch. Beautiful.

Added a Fan to the Downstairs Bathroom: This project was notable for two reasons:

1. Jasun’s brother, Jeff, came to help us install the ducting and cut the hole for the fan, and

2. We found out that our entire downstairs bathroom is essentially made of concrete spread onto wire mesh backing.

That’s right! The entire house could be carried away by a tornado, but that bathroom (and now probably the fan) will be there for eternity.

General maintenance: Then of course, there are all those other things that you have to do for a home even when you’re NOT restoring it: the general maintenance stuff, like caulking wet areas, cleaning out gutters, mowing the lawn, gardening, weatherstripping, repairing window screens. The list goes on and on, but I'm glad that I finally got these pictures posted! Seeing the before and after shots makes me feel as if we've actually accomplished something in the last year and a half!