Laundry, old school style

Full confession here, I kind of love clothes lines. We had one at our apartment before our last house and I was the only that ever used it, but there's something fun about hanging laundry on the line. And no matter what the bottle says, fresh air really is a smell, and it doesn't smell like anything that comes in a bottle. So I was pretty excited when we moved into this place and it had the original poles still kicking around. But they were pretty sad looking:

 No one likes to look at all that rust, so we decided to do something about it. We taped everything up to protect the concrete.

And got out the good old Rustoleum and went to work.

Then we covered it with a coat of oil paint left over from the floor at our old place. We were a little worried about the shiny oil paint, but the grey brown color toned things down a lot from the pure black spray paint and made them blend in more, which I like.

And here it is in action! 

New doors

In our quest to restore some late 60's charm to the house, we decided the new 6 panel doors just weren't going to cut it. They are plain jane, kinda ugly, and for the most part really poorly installed (to see what we mean, check out the difference in the gap inside the trim in the picture below). In addition to that, as the summer has gone on and the humidity has gone up, some of them don't shut quite right. So out with the old and in with the new!

Now, if this were a traditional 60's home, it would have flat panel doors in a warm gold. We wanted to bring back some of that feel, but update a bit, so we tested out quite a few colors.

After looking at them in all sorts of different lights, against the floor, and with the rest of the trim color (since we weren't painting it all) we decided to go with a deeper brown called espresso. 

In prep for staining, we taped up the knob and the hinges. 

We started with a pre-stain treatment. Now, since these doors are oak, we didn't technically have to do that, but it does help even the color out and since the edges of the door are pine, we thought it would be worth the extra step. 

Once that had set for about 15 minutes, we gave it a light sand and then it was time to get started. First we mixed the stain and strained it to make sure there wasn't any particulate. 

We started out brushing, but switched to using a cotton cloth after the first coat. It did the same job and it was a lot easier. Plus you don't have to clean out cotton rags. 

Then we waited 24 hours, flipped it over, and stained the other side. 

When we got done, the door looked a little, well, strippy, because of the way the paneling was laid out. I didn't mind, but Matt was a little leery of the look. Luckily, it grew on him. 

The last step was poly. We chose flat so that it wouldn't be too glossy and brushed it on. After 24 hours, we flipped it over and did the other side. Then we sanded it lightly, and repeated the process to give each side a total of two coats. 

Now we were really careful to make sure the poly didn't pool anywhere, but when we did the first coat on the second side somehow we missed wiping up the edges. So we tried to clean it up with sanding, but that just wore down the stain, so we had to restain a bit. It came out ok, and luckily it's on the back of the door, so you only see it if you are in the room and the door is closed. On the up side, we learned a lot.

And here's the finished product:

I think it looks really nice with the color we picked. Now we just have 5 more doors and 3 sets of closet doors to go!

Down with blue! (again)

Now here's the thing, I like blue. I really do. It's a nice color. But we have SOOOOO much of it. And so many different shades. We'd already gotten rid of the giant blue wall, so once all the trip was up, it was time to get rid of it in the guest bed. 

So Matt dutifully caulked all the edges of the trim and any other gaps and replaced all the outlets from their ugly almond to lovely bright white. 

And then up went the primer and it already looked so much better. 

 Next step was picking paint colors. We knew we wanted to keep the wood around the window (to accent the new doors, more on that later) and we wanted to try something new with the trim color. Instead of doing traditional white, we decided to choose a color family and paint the trim the darkest color, the wall a medium, and the ceiling almost white, but tinted in that family too. Radical, I know.

We weren't sure we'd like it, so we got a bunch of color swatches and tested them out every which way. 

We finally settled on the darkest color for the trim, the second darkest color on the walls, and the very lightest color on the trim. Then we just had to get painting.

Guest bedroom, the closet casing

So as I said previously, we decided to redo the casing in the closet so we could change the dimensions. But like most projects, we ran into some interesting issues. First of all, the old casing was basically set right on the rough opening, so we couldn't make it any taller without completely redoing the header, which we really didn't want to do. So, we decided we'd just move it in a bit to make it the right size for the new sliding door rails and up as high as we could and deal with cutting the doors down when we came to it. 

Now, we'd never cased a door before, but it went pretty smoothly for a bit. We cut the sides to the right size, got them up, and then all we had to do was the top. We got it cut to the perfect length, held it up, and then started scratching our heads. 

See, we had a couple things to worry about. First the wall was bowed, as you can see below. It sags into the closet by quite a bit. Now on the outside of the closet, this didn't matter too much, because we could just put up the trim and unless you were standing on a ladder looking down at it from the top, you'd never see the gap. 

 But inside the closet, was a different story. We had almost an inch of drywall sticking out which meant that unless we got trim made of silly putty, there was no way to put it up without it sticking out at a really odd angle. So we had to get creative.

 It's a bit hard to see in the pictures, so I put in some helpful blue arrows. Basically what we ended up doing was using some thin pieces of wood and some shims to build out the top of the casing so that it was flush with the drywall. Of course, this meant that once we were done the middle of the casing was thicker than both sides and the trim would need to bend a bit to sit flush, but once it gets painted and the doors go up, we're pretty sure no one will notice.

Here's a picture from the side, you can see the shims near the corner (they are the darker wood pieces). 

Then all that was left was to put up the trim!

The guest bed, crown molding, registers, and trim

We decided we wanted to spruce up the bedrooms a bit and Matt had the idea to add crown molding. Now, the ceiling in our rooms isn't super high, and the bedrooms aren't crazy big, so we didn't want to overwhelm the room, just add a little flair. So we went to Menards and had a look around and found some clamshell door stop that seemed like it would be a pretty good fit. It mirrored the new baseboard we put up without being too big. We we're sure out our baby trim would look, but we decided to try it out:

The colors make it a little hard to tell, but we thought it came out pretty great. Plus I got to work on my scarf cutting skills for the overlaps.

In addition, we put up new baseboards. While we were doing this, we put up the new register and replaced the vent. But when we went to put up the new register we noticed something: It wasn't as wide as the old one (in addition to being not as long, making it actually the correct size for the hole in the floor). So if we put it flush against the wall, you could see the gap in front, which made us sad

To correct for this, we cut a piece of wood to fit behind and bump it out a bit. Once it's painted, you'll never know the difference!

To put the new register up, we had to add a couple pieces inside the wall for the new screws (I forgot to take an after picture, but you can imagine. The only one I have will spoil the color surprise :) )

Lastly, once we took the baseboard off we realized something. In the places where we'd left the baseboard, there was now a bit of a lip because it protected the floor from the sanding job. Now, this wasn't an issue for putting down the baseboard because it just sat on the lip. 

But when we went to put up the quarter round, it was half on the lip and half off, making it look like there was a gap. So, we put our thinking caps on and our little dremel router to work. (We bought it for the hardwood floor and the splurged on a table saw instead, but it was only 30 bucks so we kept it)

It worked like a charm, you can see here on the top a routered piece compared to an unroutered one. The router gave us just enough space to fit over the lip without changing the appearance of the final look (as you can see in the second picture). 

The guest bedroom, destruction mode

Since Mom and Dad have helped us out so much with, well, pretty much everything, we thought we'd start our reno's in the guest room. They promptly dubbed it the Jimmamyville suite (its pronounced Jim- maim-y ville) for those of you wondering). In any case, we all know the first task of any good project is to rip everything apart. So we pulled off the vent covers,

The trim off the doors

And then we moved onto the closet:

Now we had planned to leave the casing up around the closet, but we measured everything up and realized that for the new closet doors we were planning, it was a little too wide (about 2 inches) and not tall enough (by about 2 inches). So we decided we'd take down the casing to see if we could bring it up to the specs we needed. 

And while we were at it, we decided we were going to completely redo the closet shelving as well. So all that had to go. 

And, just to make our lives even more fun, we decided to redo the baseboards and add crown molding. It was a tough decision on the baseboards, but after taking out the old registers and realizing that we could only get new ones in 24 inches instead of 25, we were going to have to recut and replace a good chunk of it anyway, so we figured we'd just go for it and replace the traditional stuff with clamshell to bring it back to the right era for the house.