Busy Memorial Day Weekend!

First of all, I hope everyone takes advantage of the five dollars off any gallon of any paint at Home Depot this weekend!--- We sure did!

Will we have a room done by the end of this long weekend? NO.


Rick convinced me to knock out the wall and make the worlds tiniest bathroom a little big bigger. So, that is a wreck. But, at least that project is under control! I've made it a point that Rick and I by friday, have the tiny bathroom finished, and the guest bedroom finished. Then! This upcoming weekend, we're sanding the first floor, floors! AMEN!

I would say it's safe to say that our house right now, is at the pinnacle  of insanity. We got a huge dumpster on tuesday and it's about three fourths full. We're gonna need another one when we hit the kitchen someday. We've been on a, "seek and destroy" sort of mission since getting this dumpster. Knock out all of the walls that we need too, and anything else while we have the dumpster. But once we're all done knocking things out we're going be on a roll making the rooms super awesome!

While dad and our friend Carlos hung out with us this fine Sunday, we...

• Took apart and removed old non-functioning radiators from the third floor
• Repaired the rotten floor in the tiny bathroom
• Figured out some electrical and plumbing needs for the tiny bathroom
• Knocked down the huge wall dividing the guest room into two rooms 

The list looks so short to me, but hulling the plaster up and down stairs, and throwing wooden laths out the window... it was a long day!

(I have a "what makes a wall an old wall" post in the makings in my head.) 

So, the biggest accomplishment was the guest bedroom! After a unanimous vote, we decided to knock out the dividing wall.  Here  are the pictures! Ps. they are panorama pictures! 

Here you walk into the guest room. 

To your left is a big closet, then you walk towards the window and to your left to enter into the 2nd half of the room, the purple side. 

Here, is the purple side of the guest room.

Paint job? Barf.

This is where you walked into from the pink room.

In the corner, then you walk into the guest bedroom bathroom.

You can see our classy blue towel as our curtain to blocked the neighbors out. 

www.blinds.com has our blinds somewhere in-transit yay!

 NO WALL!

yay!

To the far left would be the door you walk into this room from the main wall way. So i'm taking this from the corner. In the far back left of the picture behind the christmas cat blanket covering the dresser mirror is the guest bathroom.

NO WALL!

This is the guest room as you walk into it from the hall way! 

Bathroom and closet to your left. 

You can see our really amazing water damage as well in this picture. :(

Now it's time for a little plaster repair, and paint and... wah-la! a huge awesome finished guest room! With the exception of the floor. Second floor  floors will get done later in the summer. 

Have Fun BBQin'! 

Worlds Tiniest Bathroom

Well, we are the proud owners of the worlds tiniest bathroom... or so i'd like to believe!

This former coat closet now hosts a tiny little corner sink and john.

The sink is my favorite part, but when one cat followed by another and sometimes another wants to keep you company as you pee, that little room sure gets tight! The old owners laid down some nasty laminate flooring and some very uneven tiles along the wall. I thought, "tiniest bathroom, fastest room to finish!" Wrong!  After hack sawing off the toilet from it's rusted bolts and ripping out two layers of rotten moldy wooden boards/ make shift floors we found that the floor was rotten to the floor beams. Wah. Wah.

After much debate to decide if we should knock out a wall and try and expand the bathroom any more, which we think is very possible, we decided not to. It's just a guest bathroom on the first floor. If you're my guest and you want to do more than sit on the john and wash your hands in my bathroom, then maybe we might need to have a little bit of a chit chat.

This weekend. My goal. With my dad, who's coming to visit this weekend again! Hi Dad! Is to put new floor down and slap up some sweet subway tile and paint, get a new toilet seat and hand towels and a mirror! Then, then! then! then! We will have our  first room of the house done! Our tiny 12 square foot bathroom on the first floor! Oh I am so excited!

Rick, hugging the almighty john trying to get the damn thing off the bolts. 

Our best friend MOLD! 

yay!

and SICK!

So this is the part that we saw out, and replace with fresh new happy unrotten wood and then super cool tile that my dad will teach me how to lay! Then, I'll be back here at my desk excitedly showing you pictures of our first room done in the house!  yay!

Oh, today, I'm so behind on posting... we were going to try and finish the yellow and grey room, the former bedroom, but then we discovered that two of the walls are rotten. Huge bummer. I'll admit I was ready to cry because I was so excited to have a room done. In light of the situation the room has weird curved walls... because theres more room to the room behind the walls! But the wall between the rooms is full of asbestos insulation which Rick and I were not ready to encounter and hacked up our lungs and throats for about an hour. That stuff is serious stuff!

Pictures will come soon!

But during this event we bought some popcorn ceiling stuff in a spray can. It's supposed to make your ceiling have the little popcorn sort of texture on it. We had to repair parts of the ceiling so we bought this stuff to patch it. 

NEVER BUY THIS STUFF!

NEVER BUY HOMAX CEILING TEXTURE: POPCORN.

Never buy anything like it either.

This shit was gone, empty after five or six squirts. It covered practically no ceiling at all. Even with my newspaper taped all along the edge of the wall and the ceiling that crap went flying everywhere! I was covered in it, the walls were covered in it, the floor, my god. I think more of it landed everywhere else besides its desired destination. HORRIBLE. Then it started just dripping, glopping off of the ceiling! It wasn't even sticking! HORRIBLE HORRIBLE! HORRIBLE!

I went back with our huge bucket of plaster patch stuff and just went with the good old spiky kind of icicle sort of texture, ten times easier, and hundreds of times cheaper. 

THAT CAN, It cost us over 12 dollars! 

Biggest waste of money ever. 

KEEP YOUR CEILINGS FLAT. 

Ps. This is totally, AMAZING weather! Go paint a room or something this week! 

Five Sinks, Two Toilettes, Two Showers

Our Current major undertaking is the master bedroom bathroom.

We moved our master bedroom back down to the second floor and decided to rip out the wall of our tiny tiny little master bathroom and merge it into the big ol' handicap bathroom right next to it.

We need a plumber to come move pipes. 

You hear that Rick, hire a plumber. <3

First it all started with this room. This room is at the end of the octagon hallway that is our second floor.   Besides being Helga's favorite place to sit and swing at our heads as we walk up and down the stairs, this room was pretty pointless. It held a 30 gallon hot water tank. After at least and hour with Rick and my dad banging and wiggling and following pipes that went no where we decided it was safe to cut it out. We think it was added on to help the HUGE hot water tank in the basement get hot water upstairs faster and last longer. Which, really, is insane. I've never seen a hot water tank as big as the one we have in the basement! We could wash clothes on hot water, run the dishwasher on pots and pans, and use all five showers before I could ever imagine the thing having a hard time keeping up.

Oh! This hot water tank room, was originally a door to a bathroom which guest would have been able to go use. But the old owners turned a tiny closet on the first floor into a tiny guest bathroom so they could make this hot water tank room. So this door now leads you into the handicap bathroom, and now the master bathroom too. 

So, so long hot water heater, you will find yourself a new home on craigslist soon. Unless any of your readers want a 30 gallon electric hot water hear less than 5 years old, hit me up. 

Oh! While ripping out the walls to open up the hot water tank room I have found a nice big old wall of this killer wall paper! I've been saving all the different kinds of wall paper I find to make a little book, in memory of all the years of FAB wall paper. 

So this started to happen. 

We unearthed the home of our central air and heat tubes, which one of them isn't even taped together. (oh yay energy efficiency) We're still in the brainstorming part of this bathroom trying to figure what to do with the tubes, to move them, or just make a thick island wall, column... well it will really come down to what to do with the plumbing we will hid the plumbing in with the HVAC tubes. 

So, out comes the two layers of dry wall, black mold again, oh joy, and the original plaster and lath wall.

Now we have this! 

We can run a full circle around our second floor!

We're going to just let this be a huge huge bathroom  that connects the master bathroom to the not so blue, we don't know what to do with room. I guess in an ideal room, the not so blue room would  turn into a nursery. 

So start from the front of the picture next to the toilet... Two sinks for the original handicap bathroom, wall, built in dresser that is pretty much ruined by years of poor care and paint, then there's another double sink in the master bed room! Plus there was a single sink right in the middle for the actual master bathroom, where that little stool is.  To the left of the little single sink was a toilet, and a little glass door kind of shower, which we came to learn leaked from the drain not being attached to the drain pipe very well. Then there's the huge handicap shower to the left across from the toilet you see.

That's a whole lot of bathroom in not a lot of space. 

Here is my dad and our friend Carlos checking out where the leak was coming from, which was that little shower back in the in master bathroom. Here we found the old owners had dropped the ceiling almost two feet to hide a fast, quick, cheap fix to adding a zillion more pipes for a zillion more sinks and showers. At this point all Rick and I can do is take a big hold sigh and move on. One thing leads to another huge thing. 

Rick call a plumber. 

So in the end we're left with this small obstacle course to step around to go use the toilet when we're in the master bathroom. This is where we need the plumber to tell us where things are going, we know there are pipes under the floor. We need him to chop, sauder and move these boys into one convenient home. I gotta say though, we're gonna be RICH with copper and other fine metals they have used for plumbing in this old house :) 

I CAN NOT WAIT TO SELL SCRAP METAL!

So this is round one of master bathroom rehab.

Next post, the world's tiniest bathroom.

One Thing Leads To Another!

Hey Dad and Carlos!

 My dad came this weekend to help with the house!

I have two more major finals left this week so this post is gonna be short and sweet. I definitely have lots of pictures ready to post soon!

This weekend in short...

We accidentally put a hole in a wall, putting dry wall up. 

We knocked out more walls. 

We connected the bathrooms.

We removed a water heater that wasn't necessary. 

We fixed the rotten floor around a toilet. 

Then we found a wonderful leak coming out of our ceiling. 

(that's Dad and our friend Carlos above trying to figure it out.

We also upon finding the leak, realized how much they lowered the ceilings in our house.

Tomorrow we call a plumber. 

I think this is when we should own the movie...

The Money Pit.

Wedding Fever!

I'VE BEEN HIT!

I'VE BEEN HIT BY WEDDING FEVER!

I guess it was bound to happen!

All I can say, 

It's going to be pretty freakin' awesome.

If only our house was a doll house.

We're going to lose our hurrah when we run into unexpected events in the house,  they're becoming second nature!

We started ripping up our third floor bathroom, it all started because the toilet needed new parts put inside of it. The parts didn't fit, so we broke down and bought a new toilet. Which, likely is a brilliant idea when I start to imagine how many people have crapped in the toilettes in the house. sick. Then it turned into having to rip out the one, two, three, four, five layers of different kinds of floors, to find that the very bottom was rotten. joy. 

While working on this bathroom, it kind of gave me bathroom fever. We have this HUGE handicap accessible bathroom on the second floor, which I will, forever as it exists, tell you when I show you, it's there for when Rick gets real old and I have to wheel him into the shower. :) But, it's location happens to be right behind the makeshift wall which, whichever genius decided to build for a hot water tank closet. Our house is built based off an octagon. Our house has been butchered into a whole different layout for the dozen or so disabled folks who once lived in the house. So when Rick and I got to thinking about why the things were the way they are and how they might had been before, out came the hammer. We tapped holes into different walls to figure out that the hot water tank closet, which was once the entrance to a bathroom room likely a guest bathroom, and the bathroom in the master bedroom and the not so blue room are all connected. Ta-Dah! You should and can, and will be able to walk in a full circle through the second floor of the house. We haven't even gutted enough walls yet to walk though to each room, unless you're one of the cats, but I keep finding myself getting lost in the house all over again. Ha. 

So because of this discovery, mixed with our frustrations with all the work it's taking us to just pee in the third floor bathroom, and Rick's friend Carlos telling us just move to the second floor. (Our master bedroom) We've decided to rearrange the house. Our third floor master bedroom suite idea, thrown out the window. Our huge homemade bed unscrewed dragged down stairs and put back together and now sits in the former TV room. 

We're not quite set on what we're going to do now with the rest of the house, we have an empty room on the third floor, and a need for a TV room, but we sure as hell are not going to drag the couch up to the third floor. ( Rick, when you read this, remember I REFUSE to move that thing up those stairs.) 

Oh and we've gotten two sheets of dry wall up on the blue room. Ha, we're moving at snail pace, and it doesn't help that my dream of being a total bad ass with the power drill, isn't coming into fruition so awesomely.

Panorama Pictures if you click on them! 

This is the pathetic master bathroom. In front of the sink, if you were looking at the mirror that we pulled off, the other side of the wall, is the handicap bathroom and to the right where the shower is, is where the entrance from the hallway to the bathroom once was and is now a hot water tank room.

This is the wonderful handicap bathroom! The wall directly in front, if you could see through it would be looking over the sink of the master bathroom.{above} The big old hunk of wall right behind/next to the shower holds some of the hotwater tank room.

Hot water tank room! 

You can see the hole that's been started, and see into the handicap bathroom!

There's also a bunch of huge not duct taped together plastic air duct tubes in there too. Yay, energy efficient. ha. 

Today, we bring sad news that our beloved dog Cosmo is now in the great farm in the sky. 

Coming in at a little over 12 years old Cosmo has gone through so much and been there for so much. 

He kept it real through diabetes, the lost of his brother Cisco and laughed in the face of cancer. 

May this always happy pup, be happy and remembered forever. 

We love you Cosmo and miss you. 

Love,

Your Dad Rick and Allie