Upstairs porch reveal: sleeping porch to guest room, fall 2013 to fall 2014

Back in the day, we had this porch:

It's always been a funny room at the back of the house on the upper storey, way at the end of a long hall we never went down.

Plaster walls crumbling, uninsulated and unheated, lead paint flaking from (single pane) windows and walls - it was a combination storage and get-away room, but very rarely used over the 15 years we've been in the house.

We'd finally reached the end of a lot of other projects, and decided it was time to (literally?) tackle this one...  fall of 2013:

Jeff got the walls down and new ceiling rafters put in before our long hard winter started.

Then there was a long winter wait:

Finally, spring.  We decided to take out the window in the wall, that went to a small storage room off the hallway.  We didn't want to take it out, but neither of us could figure out a reason why we shouldn't.  There were lots of reasons why we should, starting with not having to refinish a whole window.

After Jeff rebuilds the walls and adds insulation, the window guys come:

and the drywall guy comes (if you need a drywall guy in the Mpls area, we can tell you who not to call - but he did get the job done):

Painting is always exciting:

And the last bits always seem to take the longest (especially when we can't find the trim we want off the rack, so Jeff makes his own and I prime and paint it).  Summer is moving along, I'm buying things here and there that we'll need to finish the space.

We get bogged down in the details...  I have an idea what I'd like for new sheets, but have trouble matching the ones I choose (lovely nice ones on clearance, so no returns) to anything else, like duvet covers or curtains or flannel sheets.  The things you work out in your head are sometimes so hard to convert to a real space!

Being an area people need to comfortably sleep, and facing directly east, the porch needed good curtains.  This turned out to be a huge hassle of time and energy and money, but we did eventually figure out a cozy and dark plan that should keep out the 5 am summer sun, and maybe even help keep out the 4:30 pm winter sun-set cold, all the while making the space feel private and secure.

~~
Finally, end of the summer, "finished":

The girls give their own high praise:  "it's like a hotel!" they exclaim.  To me, that means finishing touches are still needed, like pictures and little things that make it a home.  These will come along the way, I'm in no hurry to fill the space with things just to fill it.  There will be adjustments that need to be made, too;  so far the new windows and insulation has kept the fall cold out, but we'll see how the heater can compete with the -20's winter. 

Now we walk down the hall just to stand in the room and enjoy the space.  We hope our houseguests will enjoy it, too!

bedroom circa 1920 - computer room circa 1999 - movie room circa 2014

Before (December 2013) ~

Although we liked this room, it was awkward for both movie watching and guest hosting, feeling crowded and busy.  (But the dog's comfortable!)

(Note to our overnight guests:  sheets were always washed and the dog banned from the room before your stay.  Just saying.)


During (January 2014) ~

We removed all the books and shelving so Jeff could build risers to raise the bookshelves above the arms of the new couch.  We never could get at the books in the lowest shelves, as they were under the sides of futon, so this would fix that problem.

Now, not only can we get at the books, we can access the outlets that were always behind the shelves!

February ~

This is how far I could help Jeff move the 250 lb television we purged.   His brother kindly came over to move it as far as the back porch, where it sat a few weeks, until Jeff discovered the responses to his sales ad had been going to his e-mail's spam.  After that, it was gone the next day!

This is what one's living room looks like the evening of a giant-swedish-furniture-store run.  The futon frame was sold to church friends, the futon is clogging the upstairs hall, awaiting its place in the yet to-be-completed upstairs porch guest room (currently frozen).

Building a 111" couch in a 112" space required creative reading of the instructions.  (Please note the small clock above Jeff's head, it does read 11:05 pm.  We were proud to finish before midnight!)

After (March 2014) ~

~~
Our 19-teen home (exact build date undetermined) originally had two bedrooms downstairs like most bungalows.  Within a decade after building, the owners raised the roof and added bedrooms upstairs, opening the front bedroom into the living room for the staircase.  When we purchased the home, the elderly former resident (who with her husband had purchased the home in the 1950's) lived in this remaining first floor bedroom and shut off the upstairs.

When we moved in, we used this room as a computer room, with a couple desks.  I had a hard time finding any photos of that era (it wasn't pretty).  Between Kaatje and Greta's births, we remodeled the bathroom adjacent to this room, taking the bedroom closet to enlarge the bathroom with room for a shower.  Around this time we moved the television to this room, noting how well "out of sight, out of mind" works with small children, and purchasing a futon so the room could also be used for guests as children were expanding into our former guest rooms upstairs.  The room stayed in this form for many years, probably near a decade.

The current update was prompted by the long winter, some Christmas money, a minor knee injury that made it hard for me to sit on the futon (we always kept it as a bed, as the quite comfortable bed made a very uncomfortable couch), and perhaps the Olympics.  We wanted to update to a flat panel TV and have a place where all four of us could sit comfortably to watch movies (or the Olympics) together, and we're very happy with the result!

(Final note:  the dog is getting over the loss of his favorite yard-viewing spot.)

busy, inside.

We are fighting the winter with bustle around here, keeping in mind the long weeks ahead.  "Little" projects seem to be a good start:  on a thought and a whim, I stopped one morning to pick up a pint of chalkboard paint to perk up a Saturday with no big plans (never mind Jeff had to go right back out for primer, that I didn't consider).  A week later (what? 24 hour dry time between coats?!) the big blank-slate cabinet doors are now really a slate!  For the record, I followed many on-line recommendations to wait at least 48 hours after the final coat (I did three coats) before "priming" the chalkboard by rubbing the side of a piece of chalk over the whole thing, then wiping with an eraser (I used a dry cloth), before use.  Unlike me, be sure the chalk piece you're using is a good one, mine had little bits in it that scratched the board.  I'm going with the distressed look.  I think Jeff's grandpa, who built the cabinet as a baby-changing station for him and his siblings as babies, would smile at my change.  (And if we get sick of the dust, the original fronts are the backs, so we can just turn them around again.)

~
After finding all the parts for a large photo album on super-clearance months ago, I suddenly got in my head to chose pictures and print all of 2013, including two trips.  I've used on-line photo album sites before, but these sites mostly frustrate me with their pre-set crop sizes and lack of easy customization.  I am always happy with the slick results, but never enjoy making the album like I feel I should, spending hours on layouts.  I'm also not a scrapbooker of recent definition, think of how your mom's or grandmother's scrapbook looked and that's my idea.  So I'm going to try out a new album system of sleeves and cards about which a fellow shopper at the store-closing sale waxed poetic.  We'll see how it goes.

~
We are blessed to be able to work on our house periodically with updates;  the upstairs porch is on hold as the frost layers the inside walls there, but we decided to do a very hip update (for us) and do a mini (but expensive!) makeover of our little movie room/library.  The girls and I did most of what we could to help - our front porch floor is now layered in books - but now it's Jeff's turn as he has some building to do.  We're hoping we'll be watching the Olympics in style, when the time comes!

Throw in homeschooling, baking, knitting, (blogging?  beating bowser?  playing every physics game on physicsgames.com?), and fueled by tea and a cookie or two, it's just a little easier to face the coming weeks of single digits.

upstairs porch - the (slow) start

Home projects around here are slow, but they do get finished (and, need I add, all paid up along the way).  I took some "before" pictures of our little upstairs porch back in May, when we started thinking about what we'd finally do with the space.

Five months later we started on demolition, and now it sits, patiently waiting!

This room, with no insulation and its crumbly walls, most always has been used for various storage.  More than likely it was a sleeping porch when built, and when the windows are open here and at the front of the house, we get a lovely breeze east/west;  we certainly appreciate how well these old houses are set up, making do without air conditioning.

We don't let the kids much play here, due to the flaking paint (and cold, six months out of the year), but every once in a while I'd come back here to read or knit.

Finally we decided that the best use of this space would be a small guest room, just big enough for the double bed (a well-made futon) we currently use in the library/tv room, plus a little chair and table or small dresser, and maybe even a bookcase (of course!).  I am also excited to someday have a new couch for movie watching, reading, and game playing where we currently use the futon in its bed form.

~
Demolition was Jeff and a crowbar, pretty much entirely.  I don't mind helping, but we knew the work was going to be filthy and would take all day, never mind that there really is not room for two people to work (one of them swinging a crowbar) in this small space.  So I stayed clean, worked around the house, and brought Kaatje to her basketball game.

We did some final clean-up work a couple weeks ago:  pulling the nails left from the lathe, pulling down more tar paper, getting the plaster out of the crack where the floor meets the walls.

There's always surprises!

Jeff was wondering if he'd find what we found above, and he was right. 

This porch is attached to the back of the house, above our downstairs back porch (not to be confused with the downstairs front porch.. yeah, I know).  We don't know exactly when the porches were added, but this used to be the east exterior wall, and above is proof of the matching symmetrical window to the one still there (which goes into a tiny-but-larger-than-a-closet storage room).

None of the porches were insulated, all had single-pane double hung windows without any weatherproofing, none had heat.

I'm kind of sorry (but also relieved) to say were now considering removing this remaining window.  Like I said, it goes into a storage area, is useless, would be hard to refinish and match to the new drywall, etc, etc.  It's also more than likely lead paint (over beautiful thick oak, of course).  And really, aren't there enough windows on this porch?!  I will be happy to have those two little sections of wall to utilize.

The ceiling here is under eight feet, just by a bit.  Kaatje took one look above the rafters and immediately requested a tiny play loft, but we measured, and the peak would be under four feet, with a drastic slope down from there (not to mention the freezing cold and boiling hot it would experience under the roof).

We talked her out of it, but did decide to raise the ceiling just a bit.  There might even be room for a ceiling fan!  ...but then I won't get the chandelier I was hoping for!

I won't get in to the structural problems we discovered (there's always bad surprises, too, in a 100-year old house), but we expected as much after doing the porch below this one.  We're honestly not sure what the people who built this were thinking sometimes (all the time), but Jeff will have to do a chunk of work before we can think about moving on with wiring, insulation, windows, and everything else that makes a room a room.  How about that light hanging job above, where they drilled through a joist to push the wires through?!  Don't mind that it's the center of a structural beam!  Please don't ask about any of the framing.

Remember this was the outside wall?  Here's the original roof line with the original stucco.  I get a kick out of that little decorative wood piece under the eaves.

And check out that wiring job!  The knob and tube wiring cracks me up:  they had to run that precious wire the shortest distance possible, often taut to the light.

~
So here's to the start of a new project, which is tied to more projects as usual.  We'll probably change our plans multiple times along the way, both little things and big, but it's fun to see where we start.