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.

I like Minnesota’s seasons best when I embrace them and try to live in seasonal rhythms. Our fall has been long and beautiful; I’ve tried to take full advantage of it. I did many miles of hiking (much more than I did all summer), enjoyed one last bonfire with friends, cooked hearty comfort foods, and tried to appreciate the natural beginnings and ends of autumn. Fall also means putting away a lot of things for the season. I cleaned and packed all of my camping gear (though I do plan to try winter camping this year)…

… put away the garden …

… and cleaned up the yard.

But one thing hasn’t gotten done yet: the porch, of course. Our first snowfall came today, oddly late but still too early for me to finish my painting.

I am dead set on finishing this danged porch that I’ve been working on since July or so. If I wait until spring I have to look at my half-done project all winter and by spring acceptance will set in. I’ve got more determination now than I ever will again about this.

So as the first snow blew in this evening (literally inside the porch around our janky crooked old windows), I threw some long underwear under my paintin’ clothes and set out to finish the last coat of trim paint.

With space heaters going and the door to the living room open, the porch eventually got quite warm, definitely enough to let the paint dry properly. We have decided that we’ll leave the heaters out there all winter (they would just be in the garage otherwise). If we turn them on and curl up in a sleeping bag the porch will be a nice place to watch a pretty snowfall.

The painting is finally alllll done! It only took me, oh, two months. My paint job won’t win any awards for perfection by any means, but the porch is such a huge improvement over what it used to be. Tomorrow will be the final day of work. Sam is going to razor all of the paint off the windows (we purposely painted right onto the glass on the upper panes to add just a bit of sealing to the ancient frames) and then we’ll lay the carpet together. After that I definitely need to clean the windows and the metal frames the best I can and then just arrange the furniture. So excited.

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!

I didn’t have much time to work on a Halloween costume. With less than 20 hours before I had to be at a party, I managed to squeeze in a quick thrift-store trip. I walked in with a few loose ideas and walked out as a women’s suffragette. The vintage suit, ruffled blouse, and awesome hat were easy to find. But I still needed a “votes for women” sash and didn’t have time to go to a craft store. So I made do with a 99-cent pillowcase I grabbed at the thrift store.

I tore the sides open to make a long strip of fabric, pinned it into a sashlike shape…

Ironed in some no-sew hem tape…

And finished it off with a few minutes of Sharpie work.

Perhaps not perfect, but definitely passable. I was surprised that people could actually figure out what I was!

We’ve been too busy to get around to much over here, but I did at least make my first centerpiece last night. It leaves something to be desired (especially in the proportions), but it took five minutes and stuff I already had. 

In that first photo you can see a glimpse of the liquor cabinet we did indeed score. I’ll show it off more when we have figured out how to accessorize it.

In a month or so I will definitely tackle a much more ambitious centerpiece, but at least this is a start.

Inspired by two timely posts on my favorite home blogs, Offbeat Home and Young House Love, I’ve set a new little goal for myself. I like decorating for the seasons but I don’t have much and don’t really want to acquire more clutter. We do decorate for Halloween (Sam’s favorite decorating holiday—we’ve got to get around to it soon) and Christmas/Hanukkah, but that is only a small part of the year.

So my new goal is to bring just a touch of the seasons into our home by making seasonal table centerpieces. Because our dining table is so central to our life and so prominent in the house, it is the perfect canvas. And just one centerpiece is easy enough to handle. No clutter, little expense, and not too much time.

Per Offbeat Home, I think I want my first one to involve some pretty Indian corn. And come December I know just what I want to attempt:

The porch is finally painted! It took me quite a while to do the ceilings and walls—a couple of weeks, mostly on Sundays (I didn’t get much done during the week because I rarely got home with enough daylight left). I had it allllmost done when we went out of town for a week, but I had to save the last of it until we got home on Sunday evening. But now it’s complete and it looks great.

The color is a pale blue, which wouldn’t have been my first choice but looks pretty sharp. Sam bought the paint off of the mistint “oops” shelf at Home Depot, meaning that selection was limited but cheap. We paid $5 for a $30 can of high-quality paint and primer in one.

I’m really pleased with the coverage. I did two coats, but even one would have sufficed. 

Most of the porch work has been mine alone—Sam hasn’t been that interested and is always working on other projects when I’m out on the porch. But now that I’ve painted the walls and ceiling, he will do the trim because he’s one hundred times better and faster at it. Then we’ll tear out the carpet, paint the bottom edge along the floor, and lay the new carpet (bought on sale from the remnant area, of course). We’re both so happy with the transformation so far.

I haven’t had much time for writing lately thanks to some weekend getaways, but this weekend’s trip up north afforded me a chance to browse the Ikea catalog. Sam and I might have found the perfect bedroom storage solution to supplement our small room with a smaller closet. Behold: 

Two wardrobes like this would fit the limited space we’ve got, while serving as the nightstands we don’t currently have (as I’ve written before, I’ve been using a cut-up Three Buck Chuck box). Having more storage might help us keep our clothing put away better and we’d do a better job of wearing and paring because we could actually see what we have. (Young House Love has made these wardrobes, too.)

I may be so excited about this idea that I designed the wardrobes on Ikea’s website. One problem: the system is much more expensive than we’d like to spend. The other problem: these wardrobes are too big for our bedroom! Sam’s side of the bed is only 14” from the wall. On my side, the open door comes within about 1” of the mattress, so my nightstand ends up behind the door when it’s open. That gives us 16” of depth to work with, though there’s a few feet of width behind the door. Our two sides don’t need to match, but it would be nice. I’m so enamored with the idea of adding more vertical storage and taking advantage of wall space (the only kind of space we have in there) that we’ll keep trying to figure out a solution.

While the colors above don’t resemble ours, I do like the printed fabric above the bed. The great news is we’re already halfway there! Thanks to a Groupon to Dali Decals we scored a deal on some decals to substitute for a headboard. I wanted to put them up soon, but now they might have to wait until we can buy and install some storage. Patience, patience!

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!

As I wrote earlier, our bedroom sorely needs some love. It’s about time that the mattress gets off the ground!

We have a few criteria for a bed frame:

1. Cheap.
2. Thin profile and no footboard. The distance between the foot of the bed and the dresser is already only about 15 inches. If we give up much of that floor space, we won’t be able to open the dresser drawers.
3. Bold. This room has high ceilings and pretty sparse walls. Our headboard can handle attracting some attention.

A lot of traditional headboards are either too big or too expensive, so I am exploring DIY options. Some of the my favorite inspirations: