LBP - Storming The Door

Unlike many people in the United States a storm door is not a necessity and their homes look super adorable with a nice door. Well here in Wisconsin, we don't get that luxury. Our harsh winters make storm doors almost, but not absolutely, a necessity. If you have an exterior door in awesome money saving condition with great weatherstripping, it isn't a necessity.

We have a decent standard steel door with a foam core for warmth. It does the job.

So why do Wisconsinites tend tend to have storm doors? Well storms door tend to create a tiny pocket of air in between the two doors and keeps some of the heat from escaping. 20-40% depending on how energy efficient your current door is. Also, ever gotten blasted by a -20 wind chill after being in a nice warm house? Sometimes its nice to get a semi-cooler blast at first at about 30 to 40 degrees. On the other hand, we have hot summers and having a variance for that much, you like to get a breeze in the house as well while keeping the bugs to a minimum.

I chose a Larson First Impressions Full-View Clear glass and screen storm door from Menards. What the website doesn't show is the fact in-store you get to chose your choice of three tempered glass inserts, color of the finish of the actual door and a handle style. We got the white finish with a two-line glass and aged bronze (oil-rubbed bronze) handle. I wanted to be able to still see our door (eventually we will paint) and any wreaths I might (and will) hang.

From these photos, you can tell we installed these in mid-March. Max and Mark tackled the installation which was actually pretty quick and painless.

After unscrewing the old storm door, they used the same fitting and installed the new door.

Mark did the screwing while Max held the door frame steady.

Let's be honest, you follow the directions and magical things happen.

Max put the finishing touches on the door frame and added the door handle.

After all that. Here we have our new door!

Here is the before with the old door circa summer of 2012. It's has a very country bumpkin look to it and it did absolutely nothing for warmth for us. 

Flash forward from March to July. Here is our after July 2013. Much cleaner lines and much less dated. Looks pretty snazzy with my herb wreath. 

And although we currently have the full screen in because it was summer, it was very nice when it was cold out not to get blasted by the cold every time I went outside. I say, win!

2012 New Year's House Resolutions

With three out of our four Christmas celebrations out of the way, we start to reflect on 2011 and look forward to 2012 with even more excitement. Max is more excited since he's sure the world won't end next December. I'm still a tad bit skeptical but thanks to NASA I feel a little better about it. Might buy some supplies just in case people get crazy for a day or two. Anyways, a little reflection.

At this time last year, Max and I were just randomly thinking should we resign our old lease or start entertaining the idea of buying a home. I had no idea we were in for such a crazy adventure this year. We hooked up with the buyer's agent in March and by May owned our home!

Then all things we accomplished in a year. Wowza!
Here is a vast, but definitely not complete list, of some our projects:

- Bought a new refrigerator and had many issues including cabinetry and store mishaps
- Got a roommate, then he moved out
- Replanted Hosta
- Planted a "garden"
- Took seven trips to Sears to get a working lawnmower
- Redid most of our master bedroom in a weekend
- Refinished the bedroom's hardwood floor
- Painted and trimmed both bedrooms
- Completely tore down and rebuilt both bathrooms...ugh just thinking about it
- Took out a wall in the living room
- Painted part of the living room (formally spoken of as the dining room until we decided on the eat-in kitchen space)
- Started composting, still working on getting Max fully on board with it
- Got crafty
- Got to experience all of Mr. Fix-It-Mark's full throttle forward work ethic
- Replaced all the hallway doors with fancy white ones
- Found some great furniture deals at Goodwill, Salvation Army and estate sales

Quite a list for just randomly thinking, "maybe we should buy a house" a year previous!

At our "family" Christmas dinner with just Max and myself, we brainstormed everything we wanted to get done this year. This might be a little ambitious but worth trying.

1. Re-do our lawn and landscaping. 
Sounds simple enough, right? Well there is a lot we need to do with this beast.

- Regrade our front lawn. Although we like the humor of our Halloween gravestones this year, year round, it looks like a hot mess.
- Remove thorny corner bush and plant something a little more attractive.
- Add more plants/bushes throughout front yard. Maybe look into Stein's professional landscape design.
- Replants new flower beds. All of our current ones are over grown and not cute at all.
- Research better urban gardening techniques to prevent lettuce "trees".
- Install invisible dog fence for Turk.

2. Make a patio.
We love to grill, but right now we are limited to huddling around a tiny grill in our driveway. Not ideal.

- Research most cost-effective building materials (brick, stained concrete, pavers, ect.).
- Purchase new grill.
- Create privacy panels so our neighbors aren't raining in on our party, unless we invite them of course.

3. Finish painting all upstairs walls.
Pretty self-explanatory but we still have the hallway, kitchen and half of the living room to do yet.

4. Refinish all our hardwood floors.
This includes our second bedroom, hallway and living room.

5. Redo a piece of furniture every 1.5 months.
This is sort of a personal goal since I don't foresee Max refinishing furniture, but I keep hauling in great pieces but not touching them. So I want to finally start making them look like they actually belong here.

6. Start putting artwork and photos on the walls.
Again, self-explanatory but this place is really bare and we need to start looking like we live here.

So what do you think? Achievable? What are your house resolutions for 2012? Big plans?

I leave you with a fun YouTube video I found of Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt - What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?

Side Note: I immediately went and watched (500) Days of Summer again after seeing this video. Comic source here.

The Bathroom - Bringing It All Together

The plumber came. He conquered. Sort of... We have two sinks and a toilet.

The story behind the "sort of" was he had to come back on two separate occasions. The first day he was supposed to install all these things for us and then we would be done with the plumbing. Max and I left him to make his magic while we were off at work. That day I got sick at work with the flu (funny part was I was scheduled for my flu shot a couple days later) and came home early. I planned to see either a working plumber or already installed fixtures. To my surprise, I came home to only an installed toilet. The garage door was still open so I thought maybe he had to run out to get something or was at lunch. Not so much. He never came back that day.

After three calls and two emails, we still couldn't figure out why he did not finish the job. We did get him to come back though. Luckily, this time he came on my day off and I could ask what was up!

The plumber explained that when he was there before while the walls were down, he told Max that he was going to need to move the lights in both bathrooms to line up with the new up-to-code plumbing which is 15" from the wall and other plumbing areas. Neither of us recall this statement. Max can be forgetful/absentminded but I remember details. This guy did not tell us that.

Anyways, we will need to move the light fixtures at a later time or replace them with some sort of a fixture that swings. I told him just install the sinks and we'll worry about the lights later. So he did. Finally.

Let's start with the half bath first. We installed a basic pedestal sink from Menards, the Torino Pedestal Lavatory 4" Faucet Center. The whole shebang for $59. Not too shabby.

We reused the chrome finished faucet from the main bathroom because it was quite new and the faucet did not need to match anything else in this bathroom. Quite shiny, you'd swear it was new!

See how the light fixture does't match up...ugh. We'll figure it out.

This give you a little taste of what it will look like with the upgraded college mirror on the wall. We just need to get some frame wire for it.

Onward to the main event! The full bath!

Here is the toilet from the first round of the plumber's visit. I mentioned here that we got a Mansfield Summit 3 from Menards. I mentioned it was supposed to have a high flush power. It totally does. WHOOSH!

On his second trip he installed our West Elm 2 X 2 Bath Console Sink with Faucet. It completely changes the look of the room and makes it more modern. Max loves the little towel bar on the front. That boy, he's always thinking of function. The contrasting wood grains and colors give the room another layer of depth.

Here is a shot of the sink basin.

Max's parents convinced us to get the matching set faucet. I'm so glad we did. It looks amazing. Pretty much is the cherry on top of a sink sundae.

Here you can tell the light is off-centered. Again.

Speaking of Max's parents, Mr. Fix-It-Mark and Ellen, stopped by last Saturday to put the finishing touches on the room. Mainly just trim work. Thank God. No more insane work days for awhile.

The room looked great before but its amazing how trim just pushes everything over the edge of awesomeness.

The window brings in so much light during the day. It's amazing. You really don't need lights at all.

Max installed my new Goodwill found draw curtain ($10) and Target curtain rod (also $10).

Together we put up my favorite part of the room. The Moroccan inspired mirror from Lowes for $65; allen + roth 30" X 30" Quatrefoil Octagon Framed Mirror. I completely love it. We hung it at a different angle than shown on the box or the website. Gives it a little different spin. Not that it wasn't already different.

We re-installed four of the five shelves that were originally there. The open concept closet was an idea for our inspiration bathroom from here. The lowest shelf was left out to leave space for a basket hamper.

This is about half of the things I need to wrangle in baskets in said closet. And I truely do mean wrangle. We bought a cabinet to put some of our everyday things but cannot install it until we move the light.

While the trim party was going on, Mark trimmed out the inside of our hall closet... Yeah, I'm amazed too...

So in review this is where we started:

This is where we are currently at but we still have the finishing touches to go:

Few more little things (toilet paper holder, baskets, couple of shelves for decor, pictures, hamper, new shower curtain and towel) and we'll have it all put back in order for a final reveal!

The total plumber bill was $3333, which if you can remember our $3000 budget for the main bathroom has been WAYYYYYY over shot. In our defense, we didn't foresee updating all of our home's cask iron plumbing. I'll have the final break down later in the final reveal. Luckily, part of that number can be broke down for the half bath.

So far we've been working for over two months on the two bathrooms. I'm so happy to have them both functioning and the bulk of phase one of the house is completed.

Who is ready to party?!

Blank Bathroom Canvas

So to start the process of redecorating now that we have all the hard stuff done, I wanted to give you a chance to see our bathroom as a blank canvas ready to be created...I feel like I'm gessoing canvases in my college painting class. For you non-artsy types who nothing about paint and/or gesso, gesso is the white coating that gets applied to raw canvas to make the paint stick better. That's the reason when you buy canvas at your local art store, its usually white, its already has gesso. There is your art lesson of the day.

This has been our transformation, thus far. Out with the old...

And in with the new!

Here is the closet sans door. I wanted to do open shelving to give the tiny space a more open feel. Here you can see the shelving planks ready for new tops.

Here is the back wall just waiting for color. Here is the taped down paper covering the gorgeous floor.

We wanted to replace the lighting after/during painting to make for a seamless transition. The hard part is since we are doing most of the updates after work and on the weekends, we have to replace the light when there is natural light available for us, mostly on the weekend.

Above the shower with the new Delta shower head.

The only issue with priming and texturing the walls was the dangling light fixture we had to have while working. It left a tiny area where we couldn't apply the primer right away. After the primer was finished drying, I carefully moved the fixture, a few inches over. Then using the very scientific tool, called my finger, dabbed the area until it was covered.

Now we are ready to start redecorating. Can you hold in your excitement?! How did you feel when you got to a certain point in a project? Completely relief?

Let There Be LIGHTs!

Now that some of the rooms are starting to take shape we wanted to be whisked out of the 70s and back to modern day with our lighting. Now that most of the half bathroom (aka fish bathroom, aka poop bathroom) was finished, it was time to give this old light a little "upgrayedd" (sorry a little movie humor from Idiocracy with Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph).

Fun back story on these projects.


Before we could start working on any of the lights, we had to scream figure out our fuse box and what was actually on each fuse. Along with the history we've had with our previous owners, it was a doosey. After screaming back and forth for about an hour and checking outlets if they were still live, we seemed to have it down. Even though some fuses have multiple rooms on them and others seems to have just one outlet. Who knows who wired this place...

I chose the Portfolio 2-Light Vanity Bar light, only in stores and not online, from Lowes. I was very careful in choosing a size since the light socket is quite close to the window and I did not want it to hit the trim.

Max has some made major amateur electrical skills (he rewired my laptop when Turk ate the cord as a puppy) so he did all the heavy duty work. I just chose the pretties. I loved the way the brushed nickel would look with the gray and white of the room. Very neutral but not cold.


In case you need to know how to install a new light, here is a quick video courtesy of Home Depot. 

Here you can see how close it really is to the window. I'm super glad I went with this one!

To personalize our bedroom a little more, I wanted to give Max a little bit of a sense that this is his home as well since I've been doing most of the decorating and color decisions. He loves paper lanterns so when I saw the VÄTE Pendant Light at my IKEA trip here, I knew it was perfect to make him feel more at home in his home. I grabbed a Hemma Cord Set and we were good to go!

Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of our before light, but it was basically a 70s wavy glass light cover with a few etchings on it. Not very cute.

He removed the face plate and we had a little trouble figuring out how to make this into a pendant light. There was a cross bar to hold the face plate to the ceiling but that was it.

When he cut the wires he noticed that they were double coated with casing. We split the outer white casing (that you see here). This is Max's "I'm concentrating very hard on this face". I see it a lot on the home repairs.

While he was working on the wires, I took the face plate for a little "upgrayedd" of it own (I can't help the humor from this cult hit, if you haven't rented it, do it!) I first peeled as much as I could off a super old 70s sticker that was on the face plate still. Having just a little residue on it, I sanded as much as I could down until the surface was smooth and no longer sticky. I gave it a quick wipe down with a damp cloth and dried it off. Then using Rust-Oleam's Ultra Cover Primer, I sprayed an even coat across. After that had dried I followed it up with two coats of Rust-Oleam's white glossy spray paint.

After the paint had dried, we used Gorilla glue to the outer casing we split to attach the pendant light to the face plate without putting stress on the actual electrical cords. Luckily, this is a paper lantern and does not weight much at all. 

Max reattached the face plate to the ceiling...

Then put the lantern over the pendant light... Notice his concentration face again.

Then voilà!

Max approves of his paper lantern light!

Total cost of the lights (will be later included in the whole room break downs):

Half bath - $40

Bedroom light from Ikea - $9 shade + $4 light kit = $13

What small things did you give the upgrayedd to your place? Have fun lighting changes? What is your favorite ebonics word?