D-O-N-E. What's that's spell?

DONE.

Before I get into showing any pictures or crafting some witty banter about the week I just went through, let me give you a Reader's Digest snippet of what life has been like since October with the playroom:

1. Emptied the front second floor bedroom which was PACKED (i.e. inaccessible past 3 feet) into random parts of the house.
2. Started demo in the room in mid October with the idea of everything being done for drywall in November.
3. In reality, the room sat for months while I had one hour per week of time to work on it.
4. Framed in the new closet a couple of times
5. Installed new electrical in the room...over the course of 6 weeks
6. Parker got bigger and accumulated more "stuff" that crowded our living room.
7. I got older, grayer and more desperate

So that's about it. Last week I decided that enough was enough and pulled the ultimate DIY reno card: the "I'm taking the week off" card. It's a card that you can play from time to time, but must be used very sparingly and for the appropriate reasons. Well this was the time.

But since I do have a job with responsibilities I went to the office mid week for some meetings, so I got to write three days off as working. GO ME!

But I digress. So the week had to have a project plan and priorities...oh, and I had both. Check how it went down:

1. Monday - install all remaining door casing, first coat of paint on the playroom floor
2. Tuesday - caulk, install all baseboards, prime and paint (first coat) three of the doorways, second coat on paint on the floor
3. Wed - stuck at work
4. Thurs - create little railing thing for the bathroom, install all trim around closet, caulk
5. Fri - second coat on the three doorways
6. Sat - prime all playroom trim (including the nurse
7. Sun - both top coats on all playroom trim, prime radiator, install the railing thing, third coat of floor paint plus paint hallway floor.

Right now I have to say that Christina took on an extra job over the past few days to paint the stairs leading up to the third floor. While she always thought that was in the current plan, I did not. But in the end the stairs look awesome. The risers are the same white as our trim in the house, and the treads have the same floor paint which really makes them look nice. Too bad we'll be ripping those stairs down in a year or so, but hey, in the meantime they look great.

So that's what happened this week. The playroom needs some outlet covers (which I just realized I forgot to pick up) and the doors hung. In the pictures I have it looks like the base cap white is lapping up the wall, but I assure you that is some Nikon trickery, and not true. I just have to say that for the record or my head will explode.

We're giving the floors a week to fully dry then it's moving time. It'll be nice to get things like our spare TV, couch and entertainment center out of the way and into a proper room. Plus Parker keeps accumulating "stuff" that just needs to get out of the living room. I mean what 16 month old doesn't want the same square feet as a Chelsea condo?

Posh living on 13th St.

- Bryan

Hello....is this thing on?

Greeting fellow DIY folks, parents, friends and wealthy admirers. It's been some time since I've done a proper blog post and since I actually get people asking what we've been up to (I know...I'm shocked too) I decided to just put it all out there. Online. To strangers. Like Chatroulette.

Ever since Parker came into the fold here on 13th street, projects have slowed to say the least. What would have been 2 weekends of 8 hours days now takes 6+ months, as evidenced by our work on Parker's playroom/guest bedroom/bass gear storage. In my previous post I laid out what was going to happen, and since then work kept going at a snail's pace, but like the Ice Age...slow movement is still pretty big.

In the past 2 months I completed the electrical (with an eye popping SEVEN outlets in there) as well as the rest of the framing and general to-dos. Our drywall guy and his crew squeezed us in between some actually profitable jobs just about 10 days ago, and they wrapped up the painting last week. I've included some progress pics of the the drywalling as well as the final closet I built along with the look of the bays since we decided to cover up (NOT REMOVE) the old wood trim at the bottom for a cleaner look. IF we don't like it I can remove the three pieces of drywall and all is well.

Note the "H" design of the closet with the left and right "flairs": the top is for a TV and whatnot with power and cable, and the bottom is a traditional closet space. The left side is square in the closet but hide the radiator pipes, while the right side is open in the closet for shelves and additional storage. We LOVE symmetry around here.

The pic to the left here shows how this front room connects to the rest of the house via the main hallway on the second floor, but also to Parker's current nursery, thus creating a 200 sq ft suite for a 15 month old. ....Yeah. This is about 48 hours old now, and the door on the right is gone and undergoing some TLC and I have created and installed the jambs for both this doorway and the lower closet.

View of the bay with the filthy screens.

What I'm doing right now is wrapping up the rest of the trim which I hope will b done net weekend if I can get a hold of Tague Lumber and get a delivery of some door casing. We'll see about that. In any case, I'm sanding/priming/painting the door between this room and Parker's room and Christina is taking care of the old bay window trim. I'm running baseboards tomorrow in between racks of ribs and beers.

Parker Approved!

Pondering Parker's Playroom

After what has essentially been something like 7 months off from construction, we're back at it. And man, getting back on that horse was a tough one! Granted I’d much rather dabble in framing, electrical and the major items instead of trim and paint (ugh), there is an essential factor that you must have for any major work: time. That is far and away our greatest challenge right now.

With our daughter Parker now at a whopping 11 months old, she officially needs her own space to do what little kids do. So we decided to take this as our chance to redo the front bedroom on the second floor into a playroom that will eventually be her bedroom when she’s ready. As it happens, her nursery has an adjoining door to this front bedroom, so in the end it’s like she is getting her own suite at the Bellagio or something. It has a bay window that I'm already itching to make into a window seat!

(I’m banking on that move meaning that her nursery room can be taken over by me. What man doesn’t want his own cave with a mini fridge and HD cable?)

The room had been packed to the gills as a storage room for 18 months, so once that clutter was jettisoned I had to tackle the closet. Now, we’re pretty sure that the closet was original to the house, and it was built like a brick s#$%house for sure. The kicker is that I could barely ever use it. See, in the olden days, people must have had REALLY small feet or didn’t wear shoes. Because the original closet (you might be able to tell by the pictures) is a nice like 36 inches wide, but a mere 10 inches deep. I wear size 12 shoes, and putting my shoes in there was a pain in the butt. Not only that, but any shirts that hung we on one of three rods that ran perpendicular to the closet opening which made it weird to look for that long lost Cosby sweater in the back.

So I got to smash it apart and throw the whole thing away. As usual this meant a huge mess and since I’m paranoid about that level of dirt in the air, I had both doors sealed up like a bio medical lab. So getting bags of trash in and out plus ladders, compressor, etc was a chore. But you have to do what you have to do right?

Anyway, the original closet has been replaced by one of Christina’s design that I had the pleasure of constructing. If you can’t picture it with the framing, there will be an upper and lower closet with little “wings” off the side (you can see the header of the bottom closet, but you can’t see the studs running to the back wall to make the separate between the two boxes). The left side boxes in the radiator pipes for the third floor, and the right side will be open inside for shelves, TV equipment…whatever. Pretty decent use of symmetry and space if you ask me….

The other task for this room is getting more than the current number of working receptacles since keeping only ONE for a room this day and ages is not only against code, it’s pretty lame. The challenge was in the party wall opposite the closet, since there was no way I was going to grind into brick again for two boxes and the channel needed. Not going to happen in the room next to my daughter’s crib, and since brick dust goes EVERYWHERE and takes eons to get rid of; I elected to just frame a wall against the brick/plaster that’s there.

So in the end I got to build a closet and a wall plus add four new recessed lights and relocate the existing overhead fixture (still to do because I keep forgetting). I hope to get the new receptacles in next weekend, and then hopefully get our man Jose to sheetrock and paint the room by the later half of Feb. Like I said before, it’s just time…and when you get about 4 hours over the entire weekend to get anything done between naptime, and bedtime, it’s all a shell game.