Category: Home Improvement

This was hardwood floor refinishing week at my house. Here's what the bedroom floor looked like once it had been sanded, filled, stained and covered with one coat of finish. I should have taken a "before" picture so you could really appreciate the difference.

Here's how it looked during the sanding phase. You can see the original finish (such as it was) around the edges:

I believe it's now almost finished except for buffing and the replacement of the shoe molding.

I worked from home part of that first day, and on my way back to the office I stopped by City Hall to start the process of getting a building permit for my replacement windows. Red tape-o-rama. I think I've done everything I can do and the rest is up to the contractor. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it'll all get sorted out by the time the windows arrive from the factory.

My husband and I have agreed that we'll wait to move back into the bedroom until everything is finished. We've gotten used to sleeping in the living room and it'll be more satisfying to put everything in its place when the room is completely ready.

While I was cleaning out my husband's closet in preparation for the closet floor refinishing, I noticed that there was a small paper bag stapled to the dry cleaners' plastic draped over a pair of black slacks. I tore it open and discovered the iPod Shuffle that I'd lost a couple of years ago. Makes me wish I'd been more observant when I was putting away that batch of dry cleaning way back when.

Once the floor is adequately cured, I'll be ditching those robin's egg blue walls in favor of a chocolate shade and probably going with a cream color for the trim, door and closet doors. I still need to get with our buddy who sells blinds and order some window shades, and I have a piece of artwork I bought from May that needs to be framed. We could probably use an area rug or two as well.

At this rate, it looks like we'll be moved back into the bedroom by mid-October, barring any unforeseen problems. Once we no longer have a huge bed in the middle of our living room, I'm looking forward to inviting people over to meet Toby.

Speaking of Toby, here's a quick update on him. We haven't finalized his adoption yet, but we probably will next weekend. Here's how he looks in his fall jacket on cool mornings:

And here's his first exposure to the new winter coat I got him. He has a few doubts, but I'm sure he'll appreciate it when it gets colder:

Have a great weekend!

I had to check my Twitter timeline to see how long it took and it turns out I spent about four straight hours yesterday removing the wallpaper from my bedroom walls.

Here's what it looked like before I started, and please note that this photo somehow fails to show any of the many terrible wallpaper hanging flaws that were very evident throughout the room.

Of course, what this photo does show is one of a pair of cool (antique?) cobra-shaped wall sconces I have. I don't think they'll fit into the new decor scheme, but I need to find a place for them somewhere in the house because I love them.

So anyway, I started by peeling off the green part of the wallpaper. Naturally all of the backing remained.

You may be able to tell from the photos that this is a very small room. We had two bedroom options when we moved in and we chose this one for sleeping and eventually turned the somewhat larger one into a TV room. We have a queen-sized bed, a dresser, two small nightstands and a clothes hamper, and that's about all you can cram into the room and still be able to walk around without bumping your shins.

I didn't want to take all the furniture out for the de-wallpapering, so I settled for moving the nightstands out and pushing the dresser and bed into the middle of the room.

It turned out that the dresser and  my husband's nightstand had both suffered the same fate over time: the nails that held on their thin wooden backer boards had worked their way almost completely out. I hammered them all back in so maybe we'll have gained another few years from our cheap Scandinavian bedroom set.

I filled the steamer and just as it was heated all the way up and starting to steam, I realized I couldn't find the scraper I'd been using. I looked and looked and looked and finally found it in my trash sack with the discarded wallpaper. Sheesh.

The steaming and scraping took more than three hours but I did it all without stopping because my rented wallpaper steamer had such a high capacity that it never ran out of water that entire time.

When I was finished, the room was restored to a plaster-patched robin's egg blue, which was the last color that had been painted on the walls before the former owners began wallpapering and then painting over the wallpaper. I'd already steamed off those many layers of paint and wallpaper back in 1995 when we moved in.

From the chips in the paint, it was evident that the room had also been painted a coral color in the past. As far as I can tell, every room in my house had once been coral and robin's egg blue in turn.

Did I mention that removing wallpaper is messy?

The cats seemed to think the entire process was riveting and each of them spent large amounts of time in the room watching me. It turned out that they were really just acting as lookouts.

When I finished with the steamer I discovered that they'd found their Nulo treats on top of the fridge and savaged the bag in the living room. (I don't know why my hand is magenta in the photo. I'm sure it was a little red from hours of holding a scraper, but still…)

By the time I was done, I was exhausted and covered in wallpaper paste and paper fragments, so I was happy to hold off on the cleanup until after I'd had a lovely Mexican dinner and split a pitcher of margaritas with A Librarian.

Once I got home, I finished shoveling the detritus of my project into a trash bag, put the furniture back where it belonged, changed the sheets, showered and promptly fell asleep.

Now I just need to figure out what exactly I'm going to do with the room and when. I need to have someone else give the ceiling a new texture and caulk all the way around where the walls meet the ceiling. I also need to hire someone to refinish the hardwood floors because that is not the kind of project I'm willing to tackle.

However, I'm fine with refining my earlier plaster fixes on the walls and making any other repairs that are needed. I love to paint and I may recruit my sister to help me add a faux finish to help hide the bad parts of the walls. Once I've gotten the hired work out of the way, I guess I just need to settle on a decor scheme, choose the colors and jump on in.

But that will be later. For now, I'm just glad to have gotten this far.

Now that I have a glimmer of evidence that spring may someday arrive, my thoughts are turning to the large areas of my yard that are bereft of decorative vegetation. Last year we had a new sidewalk installed to replace the 70s-o-rama brick and railroad tie marvel that we’d been tripping over (what do you know? – literally and figuratively) since we moved in. As part of that process, I removed a couple dozen mini rose bushes from the flower bed nearby and moved them to the back yard, to a bed that was more to their proper scale. Now their former bed is an expanse of mud and old cypress mulch. Not pretty.

Over the winter, my husband bought me some software called Instant Landscaping. It has a lot of cool features, but my favorite is one that lets you load photos of your house and yard and play with different plants and other yard features until you’ve developed the perfect plan. I’m looking forward to trying it out as soon as I get this year’s tax issues out of the way.

I’m a lousy gardener, incidentally. Even my indoor plants are chosen for their ability to go long periods of time without water. Of the things I’ve planted outside since I moved here more than eight years ago, only a handful are still thriving. I lucked out in purchasing several perennial purple geranium plants. They come back every year and keep getting fuller and prettier. I planted some Stark Bros. colonnade apple trees a long time ago, but every year they produce only a few blossoms and never any apples, except for the crabapple tree. Since I don’t know what to do with crabapples, the squirrels are pretty much the only beneficiaries of my “orchard.”

The first spring after we bought this house, I spied an area of the back yard that had clearly been used as a garden. I tilled it, added manure and peat and everything else you’re supposed to, and planted every kind of vegetable I could think of. The tomatoes did okay, but everything else either failed to come up or quickly languished. I tried again the next year with even worse results and that was the end of that. I don’t know why, but that area of the yard is so sterile that I’ve been trying for the last six years to grow grass there, but to no avail. The nearby fence line is the best place in the yard to pick up a nice case of poison ivy, though. Yay.

So that’s my tale of incompetent gardening. I’ll try again this year with the big, empty flower bed, but I’m already envisioning a carefully-sculpted application of sod that will make it about half its current size before I begin. It’s best to keep everyone’s expectations realistic, I find!