It's the little things

I don't have much time to spend with my not quite as new anymore x-box, but when I played some in between classes this spring the downstairs tv being a little off was driving me crazy.

With the dog in the house the basement isn't really getting much use as our ready-space for the kids, so we brought the fancy TCL upstairs and put the older LG downstairs. I reconnected everything, but the placement of the basement tv was off. It was never quite straight, but it was a little too high on the wall too. It shouldn't have bothered me as much as it did since we weren't getting much use out of it anyway, but I guess my brain was looking for a distraction b/c I could not let it go.

So I re-hung it this weekend and I feel so much better. It's actually kind of worrying me how satisfied I feel just moving the tv down a few inches and reconnecting everything. I need to get out more.

Getting rid of (the same) paper blinds

When the paper blinds came down in the kitchen, they went right back up in the basement. They came in handy over the holidays giving our downstairs guests a little more privacy, but now that everyone is gone they've gotten really obnoxious to look at. With the hassle of having them up outweighing any benefits, it's time for them to go.

Painters tape and all.

Thankfully the basement door was a little easier to plan around, and a simple curtain rod with blackout curtains looks a lot better, while also helping insulate the door a little bit. I should have picked out wider panels though. Probably should have washed them too...

Not a great photo. Still looks better.

The original post-drywall white blinds got left up since they can be clipped up but brought down if needed without interfering with anything. Plus, they felt like they were really stuck on the frame to the point of not coming off w/o taking some paint with them, and I'd like to go a few weeks without having to touch anything up down here.

Things are slowly rounding into shape around here. Slowly.

Peel & stick vinyl on the fireplace

The wife is out of town and the kids spent last night at gramma and grampa’s, so to stave off the quiet of a baseball-less evening I spent last night putting some tile on the fireplace. 

I liked that there was still light when I started on this.

Do vinyl times need to acclimate to their environment? I don’t think so. But these have been in the house since my Columbus Day off anyway so I assumed they would be fine. And the first one went up no problem. The first one, at least.

Okay, I can imagine this looking okay.

With some grid lines down I stuck some tiles on as a test and went upstairs to get a drink, only to hear a crashing sound while I was pouring something brown. Ooops. I had been using a grout float to put the tiles on firmly but that didn’t seem to be doing the trick. But a few dabs of additional glue, along with some thumb tacks to make sure they maintained surface connection, and they seem to be staying on the wall fine. I have read that this can degrade the adhesive already on, but some thumbtacks holding tiles in place after gluing seems to be giving it enough surface contact to form a strong enough bond. Fingers crossed. 

The point of no return.

Using larger tiles meant it was time to start cutting to fit remaining spaces pretty quickly, but it turned out that wasn’t so bad. These tiles scored and broke clean and easy! There was a lot of cutting though, and pretty soon I was starting to wonder if I shouldn’t have gone with more of an asymmetrical pattern. I did say “get some tile on the fireplace” though, so I wasn’t planning on finishing it in one night. 

Not finished but completely covered.

Planning or not though, that’s what happened. Maybe it was my delicious dinner (more on that later), or maybe it was the beers that kept finding their way downstairs, but once I got down to the bottom half I wasn’t stopping before everything was tiled. I don’t think the drinking hurt my spacing; all in all I don’t think it looks half bad. 

Unfortunately that means now I have to grout. I hate grout. 

clean corners, messy schedules

Have I mentioned that fall is a busy time for us? The boy is in two park district classes on-top of getting the kids to swim class each week. I’m taking a class AND teaching a class, on-top of working the normal full-time schedule…getting sick kind of throws a wrench into all of that. At least it didn’t happen while the wife was at her office’s yearly convention (I don’t know how I’m going to make it through that week on my own). So I haven’t had the time I would like to have had to keep working on things around the house. Throw in a couple of visitors and typical fall events and that time shrinks even more. 

Not that I can complain about having apples to make apple cake with. Let’s clear that up right now; apple cake is not the issue. However, I will complain about having to sit in on an 8 PM class at work tonite, even if it means I could go in a little later than usual to make up for it. So I snuck some time to work on something before going to actual work today. 

The fireplace has become a project I wish I had known what to do with while I was initially messing with the basement. It would have been a lot easier to do this additional taping and mudding with everything else, but oh well. At least I figured things out at some point. I took a fever-addled pass at smoothing out the mud and priming everything last weekend so this morning all I wanted to do was get a coat of paint on. This will likely all get covered in tile eventually anyway, but paint will give it something else to adhere to other than paper so it’s worth the effort. 

Mudded and primed, all with a tiny tiny brush.

A quick piece of advice: don’t take a two month break in-between painting projects and just assume you have a clean roller around you can use. Then you’ll have to go to the store while you’re sick, forget to get a new roller, and end up painting something with just your 1.5 inch short brush b/c it’s the only one clean and you can’t be bothered to get anything else. Sigh.

So much nicer.

My favorite part of this has been getting a good transition from the wall to the fireplace in this corner. Taking the paneling down made a bad transition from brick to wood even worse, with painted/unpainted brick and some bad caulk that I didn’t know what to do with, so I covered it in molding until I had a plan for the entire fireplace. Smoothing out some of the earlier mud has been icing on the cake, so to speak. And now we have what’s basically a blank slate to work with.

Still drying, but not looking terrible.

Part of me wants to go big and just tile the whole thing shiny black but I don’t think the wife would go for that. It might be hard to match a mantel to as well, which I think is going to be a whole other challenge. For now the matching paint will do until we get the tiles. I actually don’t think it looks terrible, which is good b/c it’s looking like at least a month before I get some time together to take next steps. Just one more reason to look forward to the holidays and time off.   

Don't worry, it's just the face to match the voices in your head

I wasn't kidding about hearing the fireplace calling to me, and now I'm starting to think I see a face.

Maybe it's time to move those paintings. And get to work renovating it.

Is it screaming at me? I think it's screaming at me.

Yeah, I have a feeling I'll find some drywalling time this weekend.

HO-LEE COW!

Sorry about the yelling but it’s kind of warranted. 

I was googling our address to try to find a good picture of the front of the house to look at how the house numbers are set up right now (writing that down just struck me as very strange; I can find literally anything as long as I’m comfortable sharing it with google). I found something even better.

A bunch of the recent listing photos came up, but so did a picture that matches the color scheme you see if you get the google earth view of the address. It’s probably from when the previous owner bought from whomever he bought from. Well of course I’m going to click on that.

Yup, that's our basement two owners removed.

Wow. Just, wow. I like those chairs though.

I know I've mentioned how I kind of wondered what the previous owner was thinking with some of his design choices, but seeing the rest of the house I actually have to give him some credit. There were some pretty awful colors and tile in those photos. Without shots of the rest of the house it doesn't make sense to put the others up too, but that basement one just takes the cake. That’s a pretty big progression, from that, to what we moved into, to what it is now. Just crazy.

As a reminder, here it is after we moved in...

And here it is now.

The seller’s realtor tried to describe the house as it was when her client first bought it but I don’t think she quite did it justice. Jeez. FYI, I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since we sold and started looking. I see potential even under these old photos, but I’m not sure if that’s how much I like the house now biasing me or not.