A Tale of Two Guest Rooms

After a long renovation process you really do lose some enthusiasm for creating new projects. But, the serial renovator is never cured, just in remission. Even though we are thrilled with the results, the kitchen/laundry room took a lot out of us (and our bank account). So, we took a long break and then we were once again triggered by the desire to improve our spaces. This time it was the two guest bedrooms. One had been set up as a guest room, at least it had the appropriate furniture, ever since we moved in and the other had always been a storage room, in fact serving as our master closet for about four months while we were doing the master bath.

Here are the photos of the two bedrooms from the real estate ad:

Upstairs in the back of the house

Upstairs in the front of the house

This is what they looked like when we moved in:

Upstairs in the front of house

Upstairs in the front of house

Upstairs in the back of house

Upstairs in the back of house

We were thankful for the beautiful hardwood floors throughout this house and we refinished all of them right before we moved in. Neither of these rooms had pink paint, another reason why we could wait as long as we did to renovate them. But, they did have the plain slab doors, small door casings and baseboards, and no crown moulding. We painted the ceilings and had the crown put in when we did most of the other rooms, within weeks of moving in. But, we held off on the baseboard and finishing the crown moulding until we were ready to dive in and fully complete these rooms. We also put the panel doors in when we were doing the rest of the upstairs so they would all match. But, we waited on the closet doors until we were ready to finish these rooms. And, we took advantage of a sale on wood blinds when we got the blinds for the master bedroom and put them in all of the upstairs windows at the same time. That also gave a better look on the outside of the house. No one could tell from the outside that the window casings didn't match the blinds and the rooms were not finished.

The first step was getting the trim work finished and the closet doors replaced. That went pretty quick and thankfully moulding designs stay around for many years, so you don't have to worry that the style you picked out won't be available when you get around to new rooms. It is one of the few items you can still count on like that. It is hard to believe, but people used to buy furniture, china, and silver a few pieces at a time over many years. Now, if you don't buy all the pieces you want right now, you won't find matching pieces ever again. Maybe on some china and silver, but really you'd be lucky to still find those patterns 5 years later and only if they were really popular. Anyway, I started the prep work on the back bedroom first since we decided to finish that one first. It made sense because we had all of the furniture and most of the accessories. It would be that much easier to get done and be ready for guests. And we had guests coming, so we set a hard deadline for ourselves.

Painting was the first step and Alan had to do all of that difficult sanding on the walls just like every other room in the house. We continue to be amazed that an entire house could have such a crappy paint job. You'd think you'd figure out how to avoid all those roller marks and drips eventually. Or, maybe an entire team of incompetent painters each did one room simultaneously. At least that would explain why there was no improvement. I knew I wanted to do a purple/gray color in the front bedroom, but I tried more paint colors than I ever have trying to find the right color for the back bedroom. I did have a rug already and needed to stay within that palette. And, turns out I don't have an unlimited palette that I like. There are only certain colors I like to see around me all the time. I ended up picking a green color that at first glance looks exactly like the master bedroom, which again at first glance looks like the kitchen. Apparently gray/green and beige/green are favorites of mine.

Once the room was painted, it was just a matter of decorating. We still aren't totally finished with the accessories, but here is how the back bedroom turned out:

The furniture was in our guest bedroom at our old house. The rug came out of our old dining room. And the loveseat, which is also a recliner, came out of our old family room.

We immediately started on the next guest bedroom. This time the color was easier to choose because I knew what I wanted, but I still must have looked at four samples before picking the final color. I also wanted this room to have a completely different feel. I patterned it a bit after the powder room downstairs. A little wild with some bling.

The bed and armoire came from our old master bedroom. We sold all the other pieces as we had upgraded the bed to king quite a few years ago, so we could sell a full set of furniture with bed and keep the second bed and the armoire to use as base pieces in a future guest room. Ended up working out like we planned.

We saw these chairs at Home Goods and bought one thinking that you only really need one crazy chair in a room. But, after an extensive search to find another chair that would work in the room, we gave up. We thought it would make sense to have matching chairs after all. We knew we were right when we went back to Home Goods about a month later and the other chair was still there. Guess we were the only ones that liked these chairs. Thank God.

Like the back bedroom, we still need a little more work on accessories and we keep threatening to paint the little table under the mirror silver and black, but the room works and it is finished enough that guests can enjoy it.

I'd about decided that I just wouldn't have any more posts on this blog because I just couldn't see us doing another project any time soon. But, even though we really don't have any more money for this house, we were triggered by Spring to once again want to get serious about the landscaping. So, we are getting bids on that project now. Next post I'll get started with that project. It won't get done as quickly as the other projects, but I am hopeful we can do it a section at a time so we can at least feel a little bit of accomplishment. That is one good thing about landscaping, you can tackle a big project a piece at a time and not feel like you are living in a construction site.

Afterthought

No matter how long or how often you do renovation projects, you don't always do everything right the first time. Sometimes you miss something. Or, you thought about it and decided against it for some reason that doesn't make sense to you later. Such was the case with the laundry room. After about of year of using it we determined that we really needed a light over the sink.

Seems like such common sense now, but I remember considering it and then dismissing it back when we were constructing the room. The room was made out of half of a hallway and two back-to-back closets. Both the hallway and one closet had overhead fixtures and we kept those, just changed out the actual fixtures. It almost seemed like overkill to have two lights in that small room. So, it just didn't seem necessary to have a light over the sink. It is ridiculous to me now that I thought about it that way.

So, we recently added the light over the sink. The ceiling joists didn't allow for a recessed fixture, which was our first idea. So, we went with a hanging fixture. Then, we had an outlet to the left of the sink, but the electrician didn't feel comfortable trying to add the wire in such a tight space with the glass tile that was around it. His solution was to put the switch at the door where the switch for the overhead lights was. But, I knew that would never work. When you are at the sink you want to reach over and turn on the light, not turn around and go back to the door to do it. So, we made a two-gang box where the old outlet was and this required that we tear out some of the glass tile and patch it. It was a bit of work on our part, but worth it and we had all of the extra tile and grout that we needed to do the job.

Here is how this turned out:

Getting a small, but very bright, incandescent hanging fixture proved difficult. But we found this one and it works great.

And you can't even tell that we tore out tiles and patched it.

The moral of this story is really think through what you need and want in the space and just do it. It never works as well to rethink it later and change things. And, even if it works as well, it is usually more expensive and more difficult.

Final(ly) Kitchen Reveal

The kitchen took a really long time to complete. Way longer than the last kitchen we did and way longer than we expected. It really takes the fun out of it. Between the issues with the contractor, having to figure out some of the solutions ourselves, and then, of course, the flood, it was a difficult and stressful project. But, it all turned out great. It was a major transformation and it is good to look back at where we started. Remember these photos on the left from an earlier post? Now, on the right is where we ended up.

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Before

After

Here are a few more shots of the finished kitchen:

Mixer stand is really convenient.

Still need to reupholster the chairs. Going to do a rust color. The chairs were cheap, so the reupholstery will cost more than the chairs, table, and bar stools put together. But, I never intended to leave the drab taupe microfiber on these chairs when I bought them. Sure wish I knew how to reupholster furniture. That would be a big savings.

Really enjoying the beverage center.

Glad we ended up doing the table and chairs instead of either an office desk or banquette. Provides maximum seating, traffic flow, and flexibility.

Once we finally finished the kitchen, we took a little time off. But, then we had the two guest bedrooms to do. While they did not require the construction, they did require a lot of work on our part and then the decorating. We are down to some details in those rooms, so I'll post those next.

The saga continues . . .

Levitation

One of our favorite features in the kitchen we renovated at our old house was the floating glass bar. I saw a photo of something similar, but more modern, in a magazine and thought it would work well in our large island design to break up the large expanse of granite. We had to engineer this ourselves and had iron brackets made along with the custom glass. Here is what that looked like:

In our new kitchen we had a peninsula in the design and it made sense to have a bar there. We liked the floating glass top design so much that we decided to repeat it in the new kitchen. Our contractor, however, couldn't figure out how to do it, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise given their lack of getting things right. So, we had the engineering know-how, having done this before, but in a new area we did not know the resources for the iron and glass work.

We used the Internet to research iron work. Turns out no one in our county does this type of work--hence the complete lack of iron fencing. We wondered why no one did that, figured it was the expense, but no, it was just lack of resources. Our search took us across the river to Westchester county and it turned out that we found a great company that does terrific work and really cares about the quality of the job, Mohegan Metalworks. Here is a look at the custom-fabricated iron posts in the new kitchen:

We knew the design we wanted since we had engineered this bracket before in our old house. No need reinventing the wheel when you have one that works.

This particular bar is a bit longer than the bar was in our old house, so it needed three brackets instead of just two. Also note the cabinet door to the right of the far right bracket. We put our grill tools in there and it works great. Looks like when the glass goes on top it might be hard to get into, but no.

These brackets are trickier to install than it might appear and they had to come back three times before the final installation was perfect, but the beauty of that was that Mohegan insisted on perfection on their own. Normally I'm the one insisting on getting it right, so I was thrilled that our vendor was taking this view proactively without any urging on my part.

Now we need to find glass. While we were picking our our tile in Artistic Tile, our consultant recommended Galaxy Glass in New Jersey. So, we went there to look at options and get samples. They had some beautiful options. One we could not get a sample of, but it was molten glass, where they build a form and pour molten glass in it, like you would concrete. The glass gets bubbles in it and looks like a big block of ice when done. But, the minimum depth on that option was 2", which makes for a really thick countertop. Consider most glass countertops are 3/4" thick. We asked for an estimate anyway, but knew that would be too overwhelming in the space.

Other options looked good and we thought one of these would work well, depending on the price.

This was simple frosted glass.

This one we loved! It has copper screen sandwiched in between two pieces of clear glass. Cool! Next to it is smoked crackle glass, but we thought that one was too dark.

Then, we got the estimates. Holy cow! Molten glass was $10,000, so good thing we knew we didn't really want that one. Other two pieces were each about $5,000. So much for the cool copper screen. No way we are even considering paying $5,000 for a piece of glass that is only about 4' long.

So, we went to the place we got our shower doors done to see if they had anything interesting. Everyone makes the simple frosted, so we found that, but they did have others.

This one had a pebble effect and it could have worked.

Prices were still high, but half of what Galaxy was quoting. Still, more than we wanted to spend and more that we did spend when we did our old house only a little over 3 years earlier. So, that gave us an idea. What if we went back to the place we got our glass in Memphis? What we needed was simple and we could provide all the measurements. It could be shipped here. Only drawback is that we'd have to install ourselves.

So, we called Glassical. They couldn't provide the copper screened version, but they could do the frosted glass and could have done any of the other pebble or cracked glass versions. And, unbelievable, even shipped their price was half of the last vendor, so 25% of the original Galaxy quotes.

We opted for the frosted glass under the principle of less is more. There was enough going on in the kitchen already and simple felt right. Since this was long distance, we did have to provide a detailed scale drawing and accurately mark the locations for the stainless steel mounting discs underneath. While it is possible to just put felt or rubber spacers on the brackets, we wanted it to be secure and that requires screws. So, we were a little nervous and measured and remeasured about a dozen times before we finalized the drawing and hit the send button on the email.

Here is how it turned out:

As we learned at our last house, no more than two people will ever sit at a bar, so we designed it to fit two stools. We also got two cool pendant lights that are over the bar that line up with the two can lights that are over the prep sink area.

This is the view I have when I'm prepping food. Guest can sit at the bar with drinks and snacks and we can chat.

Here you can see how the bar floats above the counter top.

So, that was the last element in the kitchen. Next post will be the final reveal!

The Great Flood

Mother Nature has nothing on a plumber that does not know how to install a Dornbracht faucet.

As we were about halfway through the kitchen project, Alan took me to lunch one day. When he arrived home, he found the house flooded. The hot water connection on the kitchen sink faucet, the Dornbracht Tara Classic that we loved, had blown off and hot water was spraying the inside of the under sink cabinet for a few hours. Well, it was hot until the water in the basement got high enough to shut off the water heater.

I'll never forget when he called me to tell me. I never heard such terror in his voice before. I instantly thought that he had come home to find all of our cats dead or that one of our grandchildren was critically injured or killed. Once I realized we were talking material damage, it wasn't so bad.

But, it was a mess. Alan acted quickly and got the water shut off and called the plumber to cap the line so we could have water to the rest of the house. Then, moved everything out of the flooded areas into other rooms to save what wasn't already ruined. Sometimes it is a benefit to not have completely level floors. The water moved into the family room, avoiding the rooms we had already completely renovated and decorated. Then, with hardwood floors, the water seeps in between the planks and then it flooded the basement--another area we had not yet begun to renovate.

Most of the damage was to the building materials. Drywall in the stairwell going into the basement, all the insulation in the ceiling of the basement, and several cabinet doors and all the kick trim under the cabinets.

Our insurance company called ServiceMaster to do the water damage control and clean up. The did a great job and saved our floors. I was just sure the hardwood would buckle and we've have to replace it, but we didn't. The downside to the water damage control is the noise. We had 5-6 industrial blowers and suction units in the kitchen and family room for five days. Imagine you are in the back of a jet for 5 days straight. We had to just use the downstairs to get in and out of the house and spent any time we had to be in the house upstairs, where at least it was just a dull roar. So, our new kitchen was rendered virtually useless again. The gas burners on the range would not stay on unless the fans were off and we needed those on to dry everything out. More meals at the diner down the street.

So, you might be wondering where the pictures are. The whole ordeal was just too painful to photograph. The contractor never took any responsibility for the faulty plumbing job, in fact blamed us for picking out this weird faucet that probably wasn't made right. The lesson I learned from this was never have any contractor or subcontractor do any work they cannot prove they have done before. I challenge anyone to pick up a magazine on interior design or kitchen design and not find a Dornbracht faucet in the photos. I reached out to one of our customers at work who builds really high end homes. I knew his plumber had to have put in dozens of Dornbrachts, and sure enough, that was true. Hired the experienced plumber and we haven't had a problem since.

Here is the photo of the faucet before it was installed.

The center faucet is in place. This is the pre-rinse faucet.

It took a really long time to fix all of the damage. We had to order new kicks and several cabinet doors, which take weeks to arrive. While we were waiting, the doors that were the most soaked had the time to really dry out. The one that took the most water cracked in half once it completely dried.

Here is the finished faucet, installed correctly.

Next post I'll feature the glass bar top. That is another project that we had to do ourselves. And, we were quite surprised at how we ultimately sourced out the glass.

Look for the next post soon.