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.

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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!

in which we all paint (interior, eggshell).

Kaatje's room was the first bedroom we completed, years ago.  I was pregnant a year after we moved in, or so, and we needed a lead-paint free room for the baby...  along the years she's made it her own, of course.

(my mom made the quilt for me when I was growing up, 

the dresser is goodwill, rug from IKEA.  

recently Kaatje gave all the butterfly things to Greta, as they're not her style anymore.)

Kaatje decided it was time for a change.

after a trip to Big Box Home Improvement Store for no less than 3 colors of paint, and noting that we only had a few open weekends before all the spring weekend events began, we bit the bullet.

removing everything from the walls really showed us how much the room did need a new coat of paint (or two).

her other big request was a loft.  with under 8' ceilings in the upstairs, we're not sure Kaatje's idea of a loft matched the actuality of a loft she'll have to duck under in a year, but it did open up more floor space - and is certainly more fun!

we found a no-longer-made IKEA loft on craigslist for cheaper (and much faster!) than Jeff could have built, borrowed a trailer, and in a week of layering paint and arranging furniture, the 10-year-old has a room of her own design.

(the cubby-hole shelf we found while we were walking the dog.  

a few whacks with a hammer to remove the bottom, a couple coats of poly on the top, which had been the side, and Kaatje had a new shelf, perfect for "collections.")

it was a nice short (relatively inexpensive) project, perfect to finish in this short spring we're having.  a feeling of accomplishment for all!

10:50 pm

I'm just happy I'm not holding a paint brush.

(just helping to hold a newel post, when needed.

and those suckers are heavy.)

...and having way too much fun sorting books.  again.)

We've been having long long days of what feels like treading water, but all is moving forward, truly.  For the first time in about 12 years, we'll soon have a upstairs that matches our lovely main floor!  (okay, 3/4 of the upstairs will be lovely - that lead-paint flaked back porch will eventually be lovely if we're still here 12 years from now!)

note: the above is not the paint color, this is compact fluorescent lighting on our new paint.

and now it's time to go mark my curtain rods... and I suppose go to bed at some point, too...

inside and out, work around the house

A long weekend, and our only plan was to see how much we could work on around the house.  The poor girls - it's a good thing we have 3 dogs right now for them to play with, and that their friends down the street and next door were also in town, because they were sorely neglected (she said tongue-in-cheek).  We hardly saw them at all, except for them checking in for hugs and food.  (mostly food.)  They'd help us rake, or shovel, or water, or plant for a little while, then run off again!

Saturday was supposed to rain, so we planned inside work, but woke that morning to gorgeous sun... so to the garden we went!

First, we removed a section of garden on the south-east side, and I replanted the removed hostas and some purple iris on the north side (the iris in a sunny spot), while Jeff pulled out all those and some perennial geranium.  After all the re-planting, we re-sloped the dirt away from the house, Jeff using a 10' board, level, and tape measure to figure the slope.

Above you see the finished sloped dirt!  Yay - dirt!  We'll be filling this area with more native perennial plugs - 6-packs of little plants that will fill in thickly just like the rest of the south side plants.

Next for these areas is creating a wide grass path through the raspberry/day lily/blue flag mess, planting a blueberry patch (the pots in the above pic), and making a fence and gate to the path to the front yard.  We do love our fences around here.

Sunday after church, while our lovely bro and sis-in-law and family watched the girls, Jeff and I took care of a friend's hobby-farm-at-a-duplex, then took care of the 3 dogs, before heading over for a nice chat before evening church.

Back to work Monday!  Waking to a downpour and thunder, we decided to make the day an indoor work day (though the weather cleared by noon, it was a muddy mess out).  Last week Jeff (and Gret, to a much lesser extent ;) started removing the painted-over wallpaper in the stairwell:

For the amount of time she spent scraping, she had a lot of fun uncovering the old wallpaper from under the paint.  Jeff got this far with dry-scraping:

then yesterday before lunch we removed the rest of the painted-over wallpaper:

We're going through all this trouble because the steamer won't remove the wallpaper through the paint... so first the paint and the layers it's stuck to come down, then we steam and scrape, then wash with water and baking powder, lastly come back and wash with TSP and rinse (Jeff does that, I won't touch TSP).

It doesn't seem like much, and it didn't feel like us for all the work it was, but by the end of the day yesterday we got this far:

All the paint down, and the start of white bare plaster - our goal.  To get to this point is seeming to take forever, but we're thinking and hoping the rest of the stairwell steaming and cleaning should only take another full day of work.  ...so we know what we're doing the next rainy Saturday!  (all the while shaking our proverbial - and sometimes literal - fists at those who stick 5 layers of wallpaper to ceilings of stairwells then paint over it...)

Slowly slowly things around this almost 100-yr-old house are coming together!

upstairs remodel 2: demo(lition)

The demo started with carefully removing all the doors in the project.  We're still not 100% sure what we're going to be doing with this area "after," but we tend to be hoarders when it comes to the usefulness of previously used house parts, (at least until that rollaway dumpster shows up), so in the basement the doors will go.

Jeff and the girls worked on this part while I was gone in the morning.  Give those girls a screwdriver and they know what do to!

So the doors go, then there's a big huge pause while we go about much of our early afternoon before getting back into it.  Pull out the little pry-bar and the hammer!  (and the trash cans and the shop-vac)

First we pry off the door frame, carefully removing the transom window.  Then it's on to the horrid material they used to box in the cabinet: some sort of thick cardboard/extremely thin wall board stuff.  They didn't even use 2x4's to build it, Jeff says it looks like they ripped 2x4's. 

Doesn't take long to get that down, thought the shelves take a bit to carefully remove.  The shelves are each a single solid plank of pine, without knots.  That's a big tree!

Then, the last of the framing comes down.  And the space is open!

 

I scrub with an old sock and vinegar & water, and we find the fun mysteries of "what used to be there"...

The landing railing probably was some really neat oak, going by the rest of the trim in the main floor.

This art deco wallpaper trim we've seen in other places in the house.  We think it's the original, what they would have had when they finished the house originally.  I'm not sure about that floral stuff.  Maybe another era, but it doesn't seem to be the same vintage as the art deco stuff.  The weird brown covering the wall is wallpaper, but very degraded.  The blue to the left is about 3 layers of wallpaper, or more, painted over.  That'll be fun to remove!  (ahem.)

So, here's before and after (well, "during" I guess):

So much more open.  So much more vertigo inducing!

Maybe it's the influenza, but every time I'm standing up there to go down, I sort of feel like I'm falling a little.  There is a handrail, but because of the doors, it's short and doesn't go up far enough.  We still really like it though.

Hopefully soon I'll be healthy enough to start in with the wallpaper; I do love a good weekend of wallpaper removal.  We'll keep you up to date.

upstairs remodel 1: before

(I'm taking it easy and hanging in here in recovery mode today, so you get a long post!) 

So before I decided to take a lovely week-long break from life (and my senses) and get laid up with influenza, Jeff and I had taken a good Saturday afternoon and started on a long-needed project.

Actually, to be more accurate, this project was started within the first year we moved in; we almost immediately, due to flaking lead paint (come on people, no latex over oil: duh!), took out all the trim in the whole upstairs.  As we worked on the bedrooms, Jeff would make new trim as we went along, and sooner than later all the bedrooms had new trim.

The hallway, on the other hand, sat.  And sat.  Trim free.  Dust collecting in the spaces between the edge of the floor and the wall.  And sits, here, 10+ years later.

Let us pause a minute, and I'm going to give a quick history of the house, as we know it thus far!

Our house was built in 1917 or so (not exactly sure, due to an unhelpful abstract).  Almost immediately, within 5 years or so, a main floor bedroom was taken out, dormers put in upstairs, and bedrooms, hallway, and small bath added upstairs.  The heating system was changed from convection air to hot-water radiator.  Porches (we think, at this time) were added up and down to the back of the house.  This was the original family owners: the Ward family.

In the 1950's, the Dahlheimer family moved in.  This is the family from whom we purchased the home (yes - we're the 3rd owners in 100 years!).  For good or bad, not much was done to the home from that point to when we bought it, but what they did do, they were hacks.  They painted over wallpaper, they were talked into caulking every single crack in the home (really, the interior trim does not need to be caulked along the wallpaper, thank you), and anything they built, they did in a slip-shod way.  (Sorry, Dahlheimers, but you were great to not paint the oak trim!)

We're pretty sure the D family was responsible for this dark, creepy upstairs stairwell and hallway.  Come along and check it out:

The stairwell has a bend in it, halfway up you turn 90 degrees to your right and continue up.  We actually do like these doors quite a bit; they're awesome for sound control both up and down, and we close them in the summer to help the whole-house fan pull air through just the upper level.

However, that weird wall to the left is a ugly, hack-job linen closet, which Jeff hates.  Hated.  And the stairwell here is dark, long, and awkward.  Even after living this way for so long, I still would have to feel for the edge of that first stair with my foot before descending.  It's dark even with the lights on, as you can see.

(yeah, that is a unfixed hole in the wall at the landing of the stairs.  The wallpaper in the stairwell has to come down before it can be fixed!  I'm not going to tell you how long it's been that way.  but long.)

We knew there was hardwood floor under the closet, and we knew the walls of the closet weren't plaster (um, or even wallboard, as we were to find out).  So, before we set to finish the trim in the upper level, the closet and the rest of the upper stairwell area was to go.

It's been 12 years!  It's about time.

(pics thanks to Jeff, while I was on a shoot that morning)

Next: tear down!