The Fun Never Stops

I haven’t written in a while.

A very long while.

A lot has happened in our little house, since my last writing. We now have club chairs. We have a wall of artwork in our stairwell. We have a rug in our living room, and a table lamp, and all sorts of things that were missing, as of my last post.

There are still no dining room chairs, however. It’s the only excuse I have to get out of hosting Christmas and Thanksgiving. Hah!

We’ve had grand plans for the house, and intended to start on them in February or March.

We were going to buy a king-size bed, so we could both sleep comfortably. We were going to add lighting and a legit stair rail to the stairs, so I wouldn’t repeat last year’s tumble and concussion, when the wall of our landing “broke my fall” via my head. We were going to enclose and renovate our master bedroom, which is currently open to the living room below, and renovate the master bathroom, too, because it’s hideous. We were going to enlarge our closets, because they’re tiny, useless cubby holes under a sloping roof. We were going to take in some of the attic space and add a skylight so I could have my own little study/migraine room for when I need to get up in the night time, so I wouldn’t have to go down the stairs.

I had everything priced out, down to which knobs would be on the kitchen cabinets, and which toilet seat we’d be opting for (one with a built-in bidet), and which closet system we’d install.

Then my husband pointed out to me that the ceiling above our kitchen – and below our master bathroom – seems to be sagging, at approximately the location of the bathroom wall, above.

We decided to call an engineer, just to make sure everything was okay before we proceeded with the renovation.

And all hell broke loose.

The floor joists supporting our master bedroom aren’t sufficient to support… anything, really, except a ceiling. The structure above the kitchen is messed up, somehow, but we won’t know exactly how unless we rip out the ceiling in the kitchen. We need a beam across the opening between the kitchen and the dining room, because whoever renovated back in the 1960s or 1970s tore out a bearing wall there, and didn’t put in a proper beam, so there’s nothing supporting the exterior wall of our master bathroom, above. (Hopefully, this makes sense to non-building professionals.)

TLDR: We’re screwed.

I brought in a contractor, anyway, to talk through what we would have to do to renovate, and he informed me that we’d have to do the kitchen and the master suite all at once, and the ceiling in our living room would either have to drop, or we’d have to have exposed beams in the living room.

We have 8’-5” ceilings (because construction in 1955 wasn’t as standardized as it is today), and we’re talking dropping down to 7’-10”.

Nope.

I called another contractor to get his opinion, and his opinion was vastly different. He said that a bank would be unlikely to loan us the extra money for renovations that wouldn’t add square footage and possibly wouldn’t get us the desired return on the house (a serious concern of mine). He suggested ripping off the roof and the master bedroom altogether and just building a second story. It would add about 600 square feet to the house, and would vastly increase the value of the home.

But we don’t know if our foundation can support that much weight, because adding walls AND a roof to a house that is obviously under-engineered already is a terrible idea.

As an alternative, he suggested building a new foundation off the back of the kitchen, expanding the kitchen and rebuilding the screened porch, and building a new master suite over that, plus beefing up the structure (which he said wouldn’t require beams and dropping the ceiling, though the floor level of the upstairs would raise slightly, so there would be a slightly lower ceiling upstairs). Our current master bedroom would become my migraine room, and we’d go from being a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house to a 4-bedroom, 3-bath house, which would vastly increase its market value.

I suggested to my husband trying to sell for the value of our current mortgage, and just buying a different house, rather than putting $150,000+ into a renovation on this one, plus the cost of renting an apartment for 6 months while the work is performed.

He wasn’t a fan of that idea.

After some discussions about the house, we’ve come to a conclusion: Everything will be put on hold.

We don’t want to take out a loan for the entirety of the cost of renovation and addition, so we’ll have to save up for a couple of years to make that happen, regardless. We’re just going to wait and see. In two years, when we’ve saved up the amount we hope for, we can decide if we really want to invest more money in the house, or if we want to buy a newer patio home somewhere nearby.

In the meantime, we’re buying an inexpensive platform bed and a king-size mattress. We’re going to paint the master bedroom a cheerful shade of white – it’s currently a hideous yellowish beige that’s dark and depressing – and I took advantage of a bedding sale at Target to buy pretty and affordable linens. We’ll install a stop-gap handrail and motion-sensor light in the stairs so I won’t be in mortal peril going downstairs in the middle of the night when I have a migraine and need to move to a different bed to writhe around in agony.

And I’ll try not to have a panic attack about the house, every week. (I’m not exaggerating. The uncertainty of everything has been incredibly stressful, for me. Hello, Klonopin!)

And we’ll live with the house we have.

For now.

In the Home Stretch

We have now lived in our "new house" for 9 months, and we are so close to getting everything put together.

"Everything" is relative, of course. We have no dining chairs, and no club chairs in the living room. My husband's office is sans desk, right now, and also desk chair, lamps, bookshelves and filing cabinets. Some of these deficiencies will be rectified when my husband gets his bonus in April - "when you get your bonus" has taken on an almost mystical quality, at this point - but others will wait a while longer.

My husband and I decided to go ahead and have the floors refinished before "bonus day", because having the fake fireplace removed left a gaping hole in the floor. And the idea of moving furniture in, and then having to move it back out to have the floors redone later, did not appeal to either of us.

We got in touch with a local flooring contractor, and decided he was our guy (partly because nobody else would call us back, following Hurricane Harvey and the construction boom it caused, and partly because we chatted about what an amazing biographer Ron Chernow is while he measured the house). Initially, we were supposed to have our floors refinished two weeks before Christmas.

But...

Given all the work from Harvey, the flooring contractor had to bump our date back, and he was going to start 4 days before Christmas.

Four days.

Four days when we would have to have the dogs boarded somewhere, and we would have to stay in a hotel, all while dealing with the holidays. And there were no vacancies at our preferred boarding places. And no hotels that would accept two humans and two dogs during that time. Four days before Christmas was obviously a "no-go", especially since we were celebrating in Houston with family from out of town.

Our flooring contractor was elated when I asked if we could postpone things until after New Year's Day.

The only problem was that we found out our start date was being pushed back after we'd dragged my brother-in-law over to the house to move all the furniture outside.

We did the best we could with the mattress from our guest room on the living room floor, serving as a sofa, for almost a month. I'm sure our neighbors think we're strange, or were convinced we'd rented the place out to college students, given the sudden downgrade in seating.

Did I mention our 44" wide dining table had been placed in our kitchen, where the space between the countertops is 54" wide? And that the dining table is almost as long as the kitchen? No?

I should have mentioned that.

We are now some of DoorDash's favorite customers, and now that things are relatively back to normal (and our dining table is out of the kitchen) I daily expect our delivery guy to drop by to make sure we haven't died.

Prior to the refinish, our floors were a lovely shade of 1980s golden-oak (a.k.a. orange), with some areas that had experienced spills which removed all the finish from the surface, exposing the bare wood beneath.

I was not too fond of them.

We had our floors refinished to a beautiful strawberry-blonde color, since the floors are red oak, interspersed with white oak.

The "media center" is temporary, a holdover from my first apartment 15 years ago. The front drawers are goldenrod fiberglass flecked with gold threads, which unfortunately don't show up well in this picture!

I love love love the color (half Dura-Seal "neutral" and half Dura-Seal "Cottage White", if you're wondering). My husband loves the color (and loves that I'm happy with the color).

There's just one problem.

There is a streak in the floor, about 8 feet long and 1/8" wide, as if someone's shoelace dragged through the finish before it had completely cured. It's visible from the dining room, though almost invisible when you're standing in the living room. It isn't in a location where we intend to put a rug, because it's right down the middle of the path of travel between the staircase and the dining room.

We initially thought we could live with it, mostly because we're just tired of "camping out" in our house.

But we ultimately decided to have it fixed. Which means the dogs will have to be boarded (again), right after returning from Dallas, where they stayed with my endlessly patient mother. They'll get to have an afternoon at the house today (Thursday, January 18) before they go to our boarding-place of choice, tomorrow (Friday, January 19).

I feel like the worst "dog mom" ever.

But our dogs will come home (Monday) to beautiful floors, and an unobstructed view out the front windows, at least until 8 weeks after "Bonus Day."

They are also coming home to a house without water, because our exterior water main burst, at some point in the past 72 hours, and our pest control guy alerted me to it around noon. I have purchased bottled water for "plumbing" purposes, and my mother will have to stay at my sister's house for tonight, at least (though I'm sure she won't mind seeing her non-dog grandchildren).

Also, after the days of freezing weather we've had, I returned home from buying the bottled water to find that we'd won the emergency trash pickup lottery, but hadn't put our trash out. I sprinted down the driveway with an overflowing trash can, and decided afterwards that a medicinal glass of muscato was in order.

I mean, there's no water to the house, right? Got to stay hydrated somehow.

Designing Woman

We've been in our home for almost six months, now, and it is slowly coming together.

The living room and dining room are both painted (Walls: Benjamin Moore's Distant Gray; Trim: BM Wedding Veil), and the vintage Chin Hua dining table I ordered six weeks ago is now happily ensconced in our dining room. With the exception of a random chair from the now defunct Heights restaurant, Shade, it is chairless.

(I purchased the chair from the restaurant when they were renovating. The morning we became engaged, my husband and I ate brunch at Shade, and I am sometimes sentimental to a ridiculous degree!)

Vintage Century Chin Hua dining table. Chairish.

About two months ago, he suggested we go ahead and get the floors refinished, rather than waiting until April 2018. I agreed happily. The sooner the floors are finished, the sooner we can bring in the rest of our furniture and really start to nest.

A couple of weeks after the flooring decision was made, he suggested we go ahead and move the laundry into the house, while we're at it.

I am over the moon.

When we first toured what is now our home, and I saw that there was no laundry room indoors, I told my husband that was a deal breaker. We had a tense little standoff in the kitchen, because it was really the only thing about the house we didn't like.

After some consideration, my darling husband made me a deal: he would do all the laundry until we were able to install a laundry room in the house.

Of course, I jumped at the offer, and we now live in a laundry-less house.

As time has passed, I think the world's most patient man has realized just why that unattached laundry room was a deal breaker for me, particularly this summer when you get sweaty just stepping outside, never mind while carrying a basket of laundry!

There is a little cluster of three closets, all adjacent to the bathtub/shower in our guest bathroom, and we've decided to turn them into a laundry room. The linen closet in the bath will be closed up, and will house the stacked washer and dryer. The hall storage closet will serve as the entrance to the laundry room, as well as standing space. And the third closet, which opens into my darling husband's study, will become space for cabinets, a countertop, and open shelves.

The bedsheets that would have lived in the bathroom will live in the guest bedroom closet, instead. We'll lose storage for towels, too, but the space beneath the guest bathroom sink is underutilized, and there's room for a larger vanity, if it comes to that.

Frankly, I'm hoping it comes to that, as the current vanity is of poor quality and has no aesthetic appeal.

In addition, we're removing the false fireplace and patching the wall, so we will no longer have to have a TV sitting four feet up in the air, and a bunch of useless trim protruding 12 inches into the already scarce floor space.

Hopefully, we'll be able to get everything wrapped up before Christmas. And, Oh! What a Christmas gift that would be!

"The Money Pit" is Real

After all the drama of the rewiring and poorly executed retexturing of our ceilings, we still had some plumbing problems to be resolved: a leaking sewage pipe beneath the house, the stoppers in both bathrooms didn't work, our kitchen sink had been hideously "resurfaced" with what looked like flat latex paint, and our kitchen faucet's sprayer was faulty: it worked perfectly well, but it wouldn't stop working until the water was turned off, and even then, it came on again once the water was turned back on.

The plumbing company's owner came to the house to give us an estimate, and announced that the drain from our bathtub was lead, and we should probably get that replaced. We agreed, and that was added to the growing list of services to be performed. It's amazing all of the things that your supposedly top-notch inspection company misses when they inspect your house. Lead pipes!

We were told by the plumbers who arrived to perform the work that it would take two days: one day for everything inside the house, and one day for the work performed in the crawl space beneath the house.

For two days, I stayed upstairs in our Master Bedroom, trying to keep the dogs calm, and failing. I hated to have to kennel Ginger, since she was already upset that we had strangers in our home, but had to do so after she jumped over the second-floor banister and onto the stairs so she could chase the intruders out of the house.

By the time I removed the mound of boxes forming a blockade to the top of the stairs, two of the plumbers were outside, and one was standing on the kitchen counter. She's not a giant, but she can be scary, and she's fast.

I apologized profusely and dragged her upstairs to her bedtime kennel, where she stayed with a rawhide "bone" for the remainder of the day.

I should also note that our air conditioner wasn't exactly pulling its weight in our Master Bedroom, that first day.

The second day, I at least had the moral support of my husband to help me deal with Ginger's frustration at not being allowed to chase the plumbers away. We groaned at how hot it was upstairs, but survived.

Until the plumbers left.

And we realized that our AC was no longer working.

We called a 24/7 HVAC repair company, and their technician arrived within 30 minutes. He also informed us of a fact we already knew: our AC was 20 years old, and it was a miracle it had lasted as long as it did. We needed one, and stat.

A previous consult with a different HVAC company had given us two options, one of which involved keeping our old unit where it was, but making a structural change in the attic. The other involved placing the new AC in an area we'd hoped to turn into an office and rerunning all of the ducts.

To our surprise and delight, the 24/7 HVAC company said they could put in a new unit in the same space, without having to replace or relocate any joists, that our ducts could mostly stay where they were, and that they could do the job for less. On a Saturday, of all things!

AND we were able to have our new AC set up to be zoned, so our upstairs Master Suite would be every bit as cool as the downstairs spaces.

Granted, we weren't thrilled about paying for a new AC - we'd hoped ours would last through the summer - but it was something we'd seen coming.

We stayed the night in a pet-friendly hotel nearby, and by the end of the day Saturday, we had a working HVAC system that blasts cool air when we need it.

We've had our fill of contractors, this past month, but fortunately, we'll only have to have one more in our home before we can really move in: the plasterers who will make our ceilings pretty, again.

In the meantime, my dear husband has been repainting some of the downstairs rooms and discovering that the previous owner painted the trim work with latex paint over oil paint, without properly preparing the surface, first. So he's elbow-deep in stripping the latex from the woodwork throughout the house (except for the kitchen cabinets), so it will be properly prepared for the oil-based paint we're using for our trim.

I help out, a bit, by standing in one place and peeling the latex off the woodwork in the biggest strips possible, a bit of meditative renovation work that I highly recommend.

It's cathartic.

And if you're curious about its soothing effects, I'm perfectly happy to brew some iced tea and let you go to town on our staircase. Or the mantle. Or....