New Little Old House

Our carpet job yesterday was quick and dirty, but it’ll do. We used a remnant piece that we got on sale for less than 40 bucks. At that price I don’t care if it doesn’t last forever.

Thank goodness that furniture has a way of distracting from carpet and paint flaws. I just tossed the furniture we used to have in the porch back in there; eventually we’ll figure out how to make it more functional for us. The table serves as a great hiding place for a few things we wanted to store. We use the table more for yard parties than for regular use in the porch, so it’s fine in the corner.

We have come a long way.

I kind of like that this is one area for which I can take credit since I give Sam the props for most of what our home has become. My contributions during and since pale in comparison to the year he spent transforming this little house. So the porch, imperfect as it is, makes me kind of proud.

We know that the porch is falling off the house and needs to be completely rebuilt someday. All of this work has just been a disguise. We’ve talked about starting  over: tearing off the porch, expanding the front bedroom (now office) into some of the current porch space to create a decently sized master and closet. That would cut the porch to about half of its current size. We even had a contractor give us an informal cost estimate; the price wasn’t that outrageous.

Will we ever do it? Who knows. It would depend most heavily on how long we want to stay here. We’re happy for now and not looking to go anywhere. We’ve got dreams, though, of other homes and other places in which they would be. (You should see what I’ve been Pinteresting.) But we’re not in any rush. I’m happy to have our porch made over for now— it’s a much better place to welcome guests and watch the seasons go by.

I wrote several weeks ago that I just wanted a comfortable spot to relax with a glass of wine. That’s exactly what I did yesterday evening, curled under a blanket in my porch.

The slothlike work on the porch continues. This weekend I got the carpet out. We intended to do it last weekend, but decided to have an impromptu bonfire with a few friends instead. Carpet could wait for another weekend—like this one.

Unfortunately when they laid the nasty gold shag however many decades ago, they nailed down the carpet and pad with a lot of nails (I wish they had used staples). I spent a long time pounding nails in, pulling some out, and getting out the little carpet bits stuck around each nail.

The task wasn’t as gross as I imagined it would be, not at all. The floor underneath is in fair enough shape. There are some loose and rotting floorboards but we’re just gonna ignore those. After all, the porch has larger structural issues. Remember how it’s falling off of the house?

In retrospect I should have pulled up the carpet first thing because it got a lot of dust all over my fresh paint job. I guess it’ll wash off. I was able to paint the bottom edge today now that the carpet is gone.

All we have to do is finish painting the trim (Sam’s made a bit of progress on that but our Halloween decorations were blocking the windows until today), lay down the new carpet, wash those windows, and put in the furniture!

Our kitchen is pretty good-sized and we’ve made careful use of the space. However, our cupboards are still overflowing. This area is the culprit:

The upper cabinet holds some bread, but mostly booze. The base cabinet is our recycling center. These all seem like things that could be stored elsewhere, freeing up space for all of the crap atop the fridge, all of the food falling out of the other cabinets, and our big cookware like our roasting pan and wok.

(I must confess that I staged the liquor shelf before taking this picture, trying to hide the embarrassing stuff like the blue raspberry vodka behind the classier bottles. In the process I broke a margarita glass. Oops.)

Never fear—we’ve got plans. We’re searching Craigslist for a great liquor cabinet for the dining room. Our preference is for something of mid-century vintage, but the prices are a little high and the pieces sell fast. I call it the Mad Men effect. A lot of mid-century modern furniture (which Sam turned me on to) is pretty affordable but bars are not so much.

I have a very zen approach to Craigslist; the right piece will come eventually if we are just patient and watchful. Whatever we find will replace this console stereo in the dining room.

This radio (which Sam bought several years ago for about $30) looks cool but it doesn’t hold anything beyond a phone charger. The right cabinet would add just as much personality but also actually have function. We want at least some enclosed space so we don’t look like lushes (I swear we aren’t). We want to celebrate the furniture, not our blue raspberry vodka.

I was seriously tempted by this semi-rare and gorgeous Broyhill Brasilia commode table I found, but it’s just too short. I’m now pretty enamored with Brasilia line, though, so perhaps the right item will come into our home down the road.

We also both like this Ikea cabinet, but if we wanted to spend $300 we could buy a really nice vintage cabinet instead. That’s greener, more interesting, and higher quality than an Ikea option for the same price.

However, we did recently make an Ikea trip for some other purchases. We picked up a recycling station for $10 that will clear out our lower cabinet (and let us stop using paper bags). The recycling will move to the little back entry, which currently has two shoe racks lining the wall. One of the racks will move to the front porch when I finish painting that.

Somehow the to-do list keeps outpacing the done list… good thing we plan to stay here for a while!

How do we fill a free Sunday at the O’C/T household? With 5000 pounds of gravel, of course!

We had two projects to do with all of that gravel. The first was pretty urgent: our alley. The alley behind our house is actually an easement alley, meaning that each of the neighbors owns the section that runs across their property, and we agree to let the others use it. The six houses have to do the snow removal and maintenance ourselves.

We are lucky enough to have the largest section and the part that’s on a slope. Over the past two summers, big rainstorms have washed out our part of the alley.  A few weeks ago the crevasse got too bad to procrastinate any more; the alley was barely traverseable. The Toberman Trench, as we called it, was 70 feet long and over a foot deep in some places.

Sam and our friend Bryan get all of the credit for the alleyway job. While I was working on the front porch, they scooped up what had washed out, filled in the hole with that and the gravel we bought, and used a compactor to get it all packed in nice and tight. We hope it will hold up well for at least a few years.

(I think this photo belongs in a Ford ad. Gotta love our truck for projects like this.)

I helped out with part II: the parking pad. The space between our house and the next-door neighbor’s is narrow, shady, and weedy. I call it the ugly patch. The back portion adjoining our driveway is especially hideous because there’s some busted-up concrete, so even weeds are patchy. We think there used to be a parking pad there, and that’s exactly what we planned to do again. As I’ve written before, we will eventually join the parking pad to a French drain along the side and rain garden in front.

We put down some landscape cloth and then spread the remaining gravel across it.

We need to haul some more gravel and do another round of compacting, but the finished parking pad will look largely like this. Our garage is tiny and we have a lot of gadgets, so this will be a nicer place to store the snow blower, truck topper, etc. than our driveway. A big sheet of gravel may not be attractive but it’s much better than the ugly patch and a cluttered driveway.

All of that gravel made for an exhausting afternoon, especially for Sam. But we feel so good for having finished those grueling projects.

Our porch is not pretty. In fact, it’s beyond ugly. It’s the one space we haven’t really touched at all, except to take down the awful bamboo shades we inherited.

We haven’t worked on the porch for several reasons. First, it’s literally falling off of the house. At some point it will need to be completely torn off and replaced. That’s a big and expensive project far off in the future, but it means we don’t want to pour tons of time and money into perfecting the porch right now.

The porch is also just a lot of work. The window sills are all rotten (and some are really crooked due to the porch falling off), a few of the window panes are missing or cracked, and the whole thing is just covered in grime and about 15 layers of peeling paint. We’re afraid to pull up the gold shag carpet.

But we’d really use the porch a lot more if it weren’t so embarrassingly ugly. It would also be nice if porch gave visitors an accurate first impression of our home. So we’re finally getting around to a makeover. First, we had to clean out all of the stuff:

I spent an entire afternoon scrubbing the walls. We used some peel-stop paint and then primer to improve the worst spots. Getting a perfect paint job would take weeks with all that we’d have to strip, scrape, and sand, so we’re not aiming too high.

For now, we just want to get the place painted and put down some new carpet on top of the old. We’ve already got a bit of furniture that will be fine for the time being. Down the road we’ll get the windows passably fixed. There’s also a window opening into the office/front bedroom that someone inexplicably boxed out and turned into a shelf unit from the inside. (So ugly… one of those many wtf moments you encounter in a house that has changed hands many times over many years.) We’ve got the window to put in that spot, so we’ll do that at some point.

Soon I’ll have some photos to share of the prettification part!

Just like the house, our yard was really neglected when Sam bought the place. The only good thing it had going for it was our enormous lilac bush on the front corner of the yard.

The other houses in our little matching row have extremely small yards, but we lucked out by having a double lot. We have alleys along both the back and side, so it’s not a super-private oasis. But we have a garage and huge driveway while still enjoying a lot of green space.

One of Sam’s first improvements was to pave the driveway. We’ve also put in a retaining wall, garden, and three trees. (Shout-out to the City Trees program for making that affordable). The bonfire pit has been moved and rebuilt, though our amateur concrete job hasn’t held up that well.

The little solar lights along the retaining wall were a great buy this spring: $15 and 5 minutes of installation added a really nice nighttime touch.

As time goes on and we discover how we use our yard, we’ve developed a better vision for the space. We want to build a patio so the grill and dining set have a home. We need to get around to mulching and planting the strip alongside the house. We’d also like to put up a small section of fencing along the front to make the yard feel a lot more private. The garden and new serviceberry bush/tree help with that along the alley side.

And we have a big makeover to do on the other side of the house: a gravel parking pad in back, drain tile along the side, and a rain garden in front. Right now it’s just an ugly weedy area, but we hope to complete the project this fall.

Our old dining room set was indeed really old. It was a hand-me-down antique from Sam’s family. I never really found it attractive or comfortable, though it was kind of funky. It was also free; therefore we used it.

However, after 120 years of life and many moves, the table just wasn’t standing up to daily use. The dining room is really the hub of our small house and we spend a lot of time eating, working, and relaxing at that table. Every time we touched it, it wiggled perilously. The chairs were deathtraps; we found ourselves warning visitors not to sit down

Enter Room and Board set that we Craigslisted for a total steal. When we went to go see it, I kept poking the table, expecting it to wiggle. But that thing’s as solid as a fabulous rock. The chairs are plushy and comfortable, too, which is nice considering how much we sit in them.

One problem… the chairs definitely screamed “contemporary suburban home” which is exactly where we acquired them. Not our style. Time to try our hand at reupholstering!

Taking off the old fabric was definitely more labor-intensive than expected. Each chair had at least 100 staples—excessive to say the least. Sam quickly lost interest, and so over the course of a few days I pried off so many staples that my hands hurt.

Enter some awesome fabric from our neighborhood store Crafty Planet (a crafting hipster’s paradise, by the way). I attached the new pattern using far fewer staples, applied a couple coats of Scotchgard, and reassembled the chairs. Voila! Funky and colorful chairs that match our house much better.

When we first chose the fabric, we didn’t even notice the little critters. But hey, why not put a bird on it?

Our second bedroom is no bigger than the first, but we have a lot going on in there.

The office is the only room with defined “mine” and “yours” space. Neither of us spends too much time at our desks (Sam’s is on the left, mine on the right) but they are our personal storage and organization areas. The bookshelf is full of our books and games, the tiny closet is crammed with all sorts of things, and we’ve recently also added a small exercise machine. 

The best thing about our office is my chair. When I first moved in to our home, nearly everything was Sam’s. There wasn’t space for me, there wasn’t furniture of mine, and half of Sam’s stuff I didn’t like. So we almost immediately went to the Room and Board outlet and I picked out this chair. The chair is my sanctuary, my personal cozy corner. Because our house is so small, the extra seating is also nice when the living room is in use: if one of us is entertaining, watching a boring movie, etc. at least we have an alternate place to go hang out with the door closed. This chair is also ridiculously comfortable and durable. I once spilled nearly an entire glass of red wine on it and it left no stain. Ah, the magic of microfiber. The down blanket is a beloved high-school graduation gift that has made many a place warm and cozy.

The little white table also has fond memories. Sam handed it down to me when we were hanging out, but not quite yet dating—that period that kind of defies vocabulary. My roommate Jenny and I jokingly called it the “lover table” because, well, Sam wasn’t a boyfriend yet (though he wasn’t really my lover, either). That cheap Ikea table has come in handy in many a dorm room, apartment, and home.

We’re in no hurry to move on to our next house; after all of the work we’ve put in here we’re pretty attached to the place. It’s got its challenges, but also so many great features, and it’s really affordable. But when we do upgrade, we want three larger bedrooms over these two tiny ones. It would be nice to actually have a spare bedroom that fits a bed. Until then, our chock-full multipurpose room will have to do.

The kitchen was the largest undertaking in the renovation. Not only was everything disgusting, but the layout was terrible. We put a lot of thought into how to redesign the space and make it more functional. Sam rebuilt the ceiling, moved the window, and widened the doorway to the dining room.

I love our kitchen. I wish we had a bit more storage space, but we do pretty well with what we have. This is a room we have happily checked off our to-do list for now. Someday we’ll put in granite or concrete countertops and maybe tile the backsplash, but those are far from urgent.