Port Richmond Row

I took a day off from work and devoted the hours between 7:00am and 9:00pm solely to working on wrapping up this bedroom renovation. I only stopped to eat, tweet, and to take the following progress shots (and food shots, too!).

So here’s what you would have seen if you had been foolish enough to join me for this 14-hour final push:

Above: painting baseboards, some final drywall patching, installing and caulking closet trim, painting bookshelves, breakfast.

Cutting and installing baseboards, lunch, oh crap I broke an outlet cover, creating a support system for the bookshelves (a system which you should not copy, because I’m fairly certain a professional would snort disdainfully if he saw me designing bookshelves that rest on screw heads).

Routed grooves in the bookshelves to hide their screw supports and installed the first shelf, put a bird on it (can you spot Paisley, my lucky little hand-sewn friend? I bought her the week I got offered a new job!), trip to Ikea, two new lamps purchased and set up.

So I now have a tiny little vanity shelf with a wall-mounted adjustable lamp and standing mirror, where I can do makeup in the morning. It’s a sweet set up. Maybe a little too sweet. I keeping looking over my shoulder to make sure I don’t in fact live with someone who would not appreciate purple closets and stuffed paisley birds.

But no, I can do whatever I want. It just feels like I’m getting away with murder here, for some reason. Like, just wait until you see the closet I have devoted to neatly organizing and displaying shoes, bags and belts. It’s shameful. But so awesome.

Anyway, I think I might have this whole project wrapped up on Sunday. I have a dresser to oil and wax, and two more bookshelves to install (these will probably hold actual books and art, not just annoyingly cute Urban Outfitters necklace stands, I promise). I could use a few more art pieces for a blank wall, but that will have to wait until I can thrift some more picture frames.

So we’re aiming for 53 days total. Ouch. We’re at the point where finishing this thing warrants a bottle of champagne. Right? Say yes.

I’m still here. With pictures!

Work is progressing slowly. My available time is hovering around one weekend day per week, plus a few mid-week evening hours when I can manage it. Consequently, this project is poking along. On the one hand, I made myself a promise that I would not move my bed back upstairs until I had installed baseboards. On the other, sleeping in the dining room seriously sucks. So on Sunday I compromised:

I installed one board. Good enough!

So the bed is back where it belongs. The little patterned wool throw I grabbed in the IKEA as-is section for $10 while I was shopping for window blinds. It will probably live downstairs at some point. But it’s so drab in here that I’m keeping it nearby for now.

I finally – finally! – got these closet doors back up. I have a set of double doors and a set of single, and I had taken them all apart to paint them. When I started to run out of paint I thought I should re-hang everything and just concentrate of the front faces of the doors. I should have numbered them. The single doors are a quarter of an inch wider than the double doors (who does that?!), and of course I mixed them up and caused myself a huge headache. Also headache worthy: all of the doors scraped against the new carpet. So they were all given a bit of a shave with a miter saw and a palm sander.

The doors need another coat of this purple, but I do like the variation in the color here. Perhaps when they’re solidly purple I’ll go back over them with an uneven wash of inky blue.

Next up: Lots and lots and lots of trim!

Jack was nice enough to help paint this crazy bedroom of mine last weekend, and he was nice enough to come back and do it all over again this weekend. He’s actually the one who found this paint color (Behr’s Almond Cream), which we tested for the proper ratio of tan-ness to gray-ness by dragging a big patch of leftover carpet with us to the hardware store.

I don’t know why this carpet was so hard to match, but there were very few pale, neutral colors that we could find to complement it. What we ended up picking is dangerously close to boring old beige.

But if the carpet loves it (and I think it will once all of the drop cloths are moved out), I love it. In this house I’ve definitely been gravitating towards quiet wall colors, preferring to treat the rooms like blank canvases to fill with more interesting stuff. Such as that lovely chair (in the top picture) that I trash picked and will some day refinish. Since my furniture tends not to match and I decorate with whatever objects I find interesting, sticking with unobtrusive paint colors gives me a little more freedom to move things around.

So with the walls painted, here’s the to-do list for the rest of the room:

1. Hang the closet organization system. Did that today.
2. Find a window treatment for my bay windows. I’m avoiding curtains and will hopefully DIY a solution with two rolling blinds: an inner blind to block street lights at night and an outer blind to filter daylight.
3. Paint, cut and attach baseboards.
4. Paint, cut and attach shelves for the built-in bookcase.
5. Finish painting the closet doors purple.
6. Hang closet doors and trim.
7. Dance.

I probably won’t get to step 7 next weekend, due to the nastiness of step 3. But we’re so very close!

Ok. Fatigue with the project is setting in.

This thing looks better, though! You’re probably not supposed to patch wood with drywall compound, but the contractors left a bucket of it so this repair was free. Since my art school days, I have been a firm believer that spackle (and related products) solves all problems. And the only thing better than spackle is free spackle.

There are approximately six coats of it on this board. I think there may be six coats on my brain, as well. Certainly up my nose.

I had hoped to prime this thing today but of course, I’m behind schedule. With the carpet coming on Monday I have myself convinced that any work I ever wanted to do in my hallway should be done NOW. For the last four days I’ve run home from my job, grabbed the putty knife, and attempted to patch every fingernail-sized scratch in sight. I even got up at 6:00am on Tuesday in order to fit two spackle layers in on one day. I need to stop and get this thing painted, already!

Ugh. You guys. I would show you more pictures, but seriously, I’m so exhausted. I shouldn’t even be typing right now. In fact, I’m going to bed.

(Don’t even tell me to put a bird on it. I’m too wiped out to check Youtube so I won’t know what that means until approximately next Tuesday. Although this is kind of hilarious.)

Over past three weeks it has felt strange having all of these people in my house doing manual labor for me. I think I’ve missed sweating over my own grunt work a bit. Luckily, I now have this mess to deal with:

The last of the purple carpet!

As much as a loathe the purple carpet, I hadn’t yet ripped this last bit of it out because I didn’t really want to deal with what was under it. The carpet was hiding a very old baseboard that I can only assume is covered in lead paint, and nailed to the wall on top of the baseboard is a little strip of wood (studded with a bajillion carpet tacks). Probably because this wall is the original plaster and a bit wavy, someone picked a wood strip that was a little narrower than the width of the board below it. That’s going to make it very difficult to patch this sucker up and pretend that it’s one nice, tall baseboard.

I tried removing the little strip, but it in turn is covering up some crumbling plaster. This house has layers and layers of hidden WFT moments. Touch one thing and three more fall apart. So the little strip stays, and I lined it up as best I could with the face of the old baseboard and fixed it in place like that. Now I’m patching and skimcoating the entire thing so that I don’t have to sand lead paint. Finally I’ll add a little molding to the top, to cover any gaps between the little board and the wall.

It won’t look perfect but it is a 91 year-old house. And my mother has advised me to stop punching unnecessary holes in it. She’s probably right.

As I’m working on the baseboard I have so many other things to accomplish. The contractors have cleared out, and it’s now my job to paint the bedroom and all of its (unhung) trim before the carpet comes on Monday. Then the guys will come back for a few hours and hang the trim / adjust the closet doors.

Then it will be the time on Sprockets when we dance.