Day 14: We’re getting there

The contractors are making progress, but it looks like they’ll be with me another week or so. Plus I’m told the carpet could take up to three weeks to order and install. So right now I’m breathing deeply and trying not to get too fed up with my bed-dining room (bedining room?) situation. There is light at the end of this tunnel. And it will shine down on adorable built-in bookshelves.

I have decided to behave more like a real blogger and, you know, actually arrange my images in a way that fills my blog layout. And doesn’t funk up my RSS feed. Also, I’m going to (try to) color correct them. This will not save the fact that half of my pictures are taken with my phone in the dark, so I don’t know exactly why I’m bothering except that I feel peer-pressured by other home design blogs.

Let’s get on with it.

Things are looking pretty solid in the bedroom! The first three pictures were taken tonight, but the final one was taken during daylight hours yesterday. With the green awnings down, the room is so much brighter.

And I have a great view of Center City!

See it? Way off in the distance? Calling to me with its promise of coffee shops and cocktails and clothing stores that aren’t Forman Mills? “I’m merely a slow trolley ride and cumbersome transfer to the El away!” it says.

Sigh.

Things are also happening in the second bedroom, where you may remember I crowbarred out all of the closets, got exasperated and left the room for dead.

The guys are slowly patching things up. A little sanding, a little paint, a little trim, and we’ll have added another two feet to the size of the room. I can’t wait to hang art!

Day 11: A room is born

YES.

The bedroom is totally starting to come together now. Almost all of the drywall is up and I have some recessed lighting. I also picked out a ceiling fan (which was really difficult, given the very grandmotherly designs available at the big box stores), and that should be installed soon. Then we do spackling and priming and trim and doors.

The guys are actually coming in a little under budget, although that may change since I have a feeling they’ve put in some long hours this week. But I really hope to have a little money left over. Closets aren’t any good if you can’t afford the organization system that goes inside them. Also, the crew found some active knob and tube wiring running through my second story, which is bad (and expensive) news. This comes of the heels of Dad discovering a few weeks ago that none of my grounded outlets are actually grounded. We’re kicking the can down the road a bit on that repair.

But let’s end on an positive note. Like many old Philly rowhomes, my house had aluminum window awnings. Green ones. You ever heard the wind whipping through these things, especially if their wall anchors are loose?

I won’t have to hear it any more.

Day 5: Bedroom Update

We’ve made it through the first working week of this bedroom renovation project. A few days ago, demolition had progressed to this point:

That’s the original “closet” from when the house was built in 1920. It’s too narrow for hangers, so mine had been made deeper by building out a wall in front of it. Still, I thought we’d have to work within its general length and height, but I came home today to find this:

Bam! Gone. Later, 90 year-old closet! Looks like I’ll have plenty of room from now on.

And here are some (more) ceiling pictures:

No more wires. No more pipes! Just insulation, and lots of garbage bags.

Foreman Ox approves of our progress. (He’s shedding! Such a big boy.)

Wanna see my roof?

The contractors stopped by today to demonstrate how a proper demolition is done. Here are the results, as documented by a crappy cell phone camera (don’t ask where my real camera’s battery recharger is right now):

Beams! Ladders! Piles of debris!

Ancient wiring! An old pipe from a gas light…?

Bricks! The Black Oil*! That pesky hole in the roof!

You get the idea. It’s freezing in the room, and it smells so strongly of tar that I wondered if I were about to be feathered as I retreated to my dining room dorm.

The contractors, at least, are remarkably clean. My carpet is spotless.

*I watched too much X-Files as a kid, I know. My dribbling roof tar is probably not an alien virus. Probably.

Fundraising Auction

I had a contractor come out to the house on Friday, and he worked up a plan for fixing my bedroom ceiling. To raise money for this project, I’m auctioning off all of the weird stuff I’ve found during demolition and basement cleanup. Bid confidently, my friends, knowing that you can own an authentic piece of Crap from Lauren’s House.

First up, one brick. Decent condition. Surprisingly red. Very much affected by the law of gravity.

Next, this pretty little lady who was found in a closet wall:

She has a personalized inscription on the back and was probably a gift from a high school friend of the woman who lived in the house before me. I guess I shouldn’t accept bids on this one. I’ll probably try to return it to her.

But this! This is worth bidding on!

C’mon, I know someone out there still has a carburetor. And couldn’t we all use a little brushing up on our grille identification skills?

Personally, I won’t date a man who can’t tell the difference between a ’67 Comet and a ’66 Fairlane.

And now we come to the weirdest, most disturbing Piece of Crap:

When I first saw this, I thought “Oh cool, vintage frame to steal.” Then I saw “hair lip.” And now I just don’t know what to think.

This is a reprinting of one of Benjamin Franklin’s records of patients admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital in the 1750s. Which certainly sounds cool, but do you really want to walk past this thing in your hallway every day and ponder 18th century treatments for ulcers? (Maybe you do. If so, bid!)

Also, does that say “Palsy of the Bladder?” And prolapse of the — oh God, never mind. If I write the full phrase out, my blog will get traffic for all the wrong reasons.

Their cancer cure rate was quite remarkable, though.

So leave a comment and tell me what it’s all worth to you, readers! Construction starts on Monday.

Reservations

When I was a Sophomore in college, my then-boyfriend had a roommate who put the side of his bed right up against the window in their dorm. “Wouldn’t it be fun,” I thought, “to wake up and be able to peek out the window without even sitting up?” I had seen a room in an artist’s house with a similar configuration; he had designed it so that he could lie in bed and watch the sun set! So that Sunday, I got to work moving my own bed.

My dorm, however, was very different from my boyfriend’s suite and the artist’s house. I had a single room in what I understood to be a converted 19th-century epileptic ward. It was tiny and narrow, and to fit my art supplies inside of it I had found these ridiculous 3 foot-tall bed raisers and crammed everything underneath the bed frame. I also kept a 20-gallon fishtank in the room, somehow.

Moving the bed was no minor task, as there was zero room to maneuver. But I was determined. I pulled out everything stored under the bed, removed all of the furniture by the window, drained the fish tank (holding the actual fish in a bucket), removed the bed raisers so that I could tilt the bed enough to scoot it past my desk and dresser… and then I got stuck. The bed wouldn’t fit. I could get it over to the window by lifting its head up at a 45 degree angle, but there wasn’t enough room to lower the head back down. My dorm room was so narrow, it couldn’t fit a twin bed turned sideways.

At this point I believe I was 3 hours into the process and I had also cut my knee on the bedframe. But I had no choice: everything had to go back to the way it was. I spent another 3 hours undoing everything I had just done, while listening to The Cure and sobbing quietly.

There was a moment or two yesterday in which I remembered the bed by the window catastrophe and wished that I hadn’t touched the house. I’m sleeping in the dining room. My dinner table is in the basement. My clothes are in my office. I can only breathe through one nostril at a time. Oh, and today I decided I should start moving outlets around so now the power to the TV is cut. Who knows how long this will drag on?

I think it’ll be worth it. I think. At least now I have my Dad to help/give advice/stage an intervention. He would have told me to measure that damn bed first.

Demolition, Day 3

Today started off well enough, save for the fact that I’m fiercely allergic to the drywall dust I’m kicking up in this here row home. Avoid dust and cats, my doctor tells me, which he must realize is completely impractical advice for anyone who isn’t living in a hermetically sealed chamber with no friends. If you have friends, they are cat people. I call this Mittens’ Law.

Anyway, my strategy for today was to don a dust mask and then wrap my face with a silk bandanna. It looked about as sexy as you think it did.

I finished removing the craft room closets this morning. Look at all the extra space I have! “Doesn’t look like much,” you’re probably thinking, but keep in mind that I took this shot while pressed up against the opposite wall. A few extra feet makes a difference in a space this small. The room could now accommodate a full size bed instead of just a twin, which I will remind myself is good for resale value as I repetitively flush out my nasal cavities with saline over the next week.

Eventually, when the drywall is patched and painted, I’ll reassemble my cheapo Ikea ANEDOBA wardrobe (created by the Ikea designer with the winning-est name, Tord Bjorklund) and use that for storage. In the extra space I’d love to include one of these convertible ottomans by Hollandia:

I’d use it as a dressing bench, but it also folds out to make a little bed! That’s about as close to a guest room setup as I’ll ever get. Unfortunately, it’s way out of my price range. A girl can dream…

While I was still swathed in bandanna I decided to tackle the drop ceiling in the master bedroom. This is where things got a little hairy.

I suppose I thought that the blue and poo ceiling was so ugly, whatever was lurking behind it couldn’t be that bad. But as I started pulling down the drywall boards I got a series of fun surprises.

Picture 085

The original ceiling is in really rough shape. It sags dramatically towards the middle of the room, and I fear that I (or my Dad and I, or a contractor and I) will have to remove it completely and start from scratch.

Additionally, the second ceiling was constructed… questionably. Is “questionably” is a good word to encompass the fact this beam appears to be suspended from a screw with florist wire? Also, as I yanked one of the panels down, the brick pictured above went sailing past my head. Perhaps the florist wire was necessary to counteract the weight of the brick booby trap. It all makes sense. If you’re a Collyer brother.

To avoid sleeping under that terrifying sagging disaster and to stay as far away from the dust as possible, I have set up camp in the dining room. The booze is practically an arms-length away! And I’m going to need it!

Surprise Demolition

For Christmas, my very thoughtful mother bought my sister and me sewing kits. You wouldn’t think such an innocent gift would end up costing me thousands of bucks, but…

I took my kit home to the craft room and attempted to put it in a closet, but I was kinda out of room. So I removed all the towels and sheets and art supplies and prepared to reorganize. But before I could get started, the sheer ugliness of my bare closets caught me by surprise.

I mean, this displays a pretty consistent inability to use a measuring tape. I may be math challenged when compared to my brilliant parents, but I can’t have people thinking that a) I made this closet, and b) I can’t add.

An hour or two later, I had grabbed a drill, a hammer and a crowbar and was pulling the closets down.

But before we get to those pictures, here’s a reminder of what the closets used to look like. There’s a whole wall of the mis-measured, crooked things. I had removed their doors and covered the uneven moldings with curtains.

Blah. You know what would be better than pretending they’re not ugly? Ripping them out! And reclaiming some of the space they’ve stolen.

I have a similar plan for the bedroom closets: take them out, refinish the walls behind them, and insert modular IKEA wardrobes. I think this is a better use for the space because all of these built-in closets are narrow and deep, so they take up more floor space than is practical in my tiny bedrooms. And things tend to get lost in the backs of them, since you have to stack everything in front and back piles.

Now, of course, since I’m taking the closets out I’ll also need to take the laminate floors out (they’re incomplete where the closet walls touched the floor). And if I’m removing them in this room, I might as well do it in the office too. So I’ll get my upstairs floors refinished like I did on the first floor. Then I’ll probably want to tile the bathroom. Then…

Window Grate

About a month ago, I was sweeping leaves on my front sidewalk when I noticed that the iron grate that covered my basement window was… missing.  Gone.  I had a momentary freakout in which I was convinced that an armed bandit had broken in and was hiding in my basement.  Stealing my socks, or something.  But no, the window itself was still intact and locked.

My neighbors offered the most likely explanation:  someone had stolen it to sell for scrap.

I’m reading that iron scrap is selling for about 17 cent a pound right now.  So I’m guessing that it was worth about $5.  And of course, it cost me an extra $220 in labor to replace.

Jerkoff.  Well, this new sucker is bolted straight through the wall of the house, so good luck getting another five bucks outta me.  And forget about my socks.