About ten months ago, I was trying to figure out the best way to insulate the ceiling of our upstairs sleeping porch.
Our upstairs sleeping porch was once just a porch, so it has no attic space. After tearing down the old dropped ceiling and pulled out the old insulation, all that’s left between our heads and the elements are the joists, beadboard roof sheathing, 2″ foam insulation, and the roof membrane.
I just can’t figure out the best way to insulate this space before putting in the new ceiling. That’s my dilemma. So to my partners in renovation and other skilled experts: how would you fill this with insulation and a ceiling?
In that post, I was mulling three similar options for insulating the space that involved some combination of either rigid foamboard or normal fiberglass. I was constrained by the shallow depth of the joists and also the fact that I didn’t know if I should leave space for air to circulate.
On that count, our house is a little unconventional compared to a typical single family home because the vent soffits on the outside don’t actually connect to this space, and this space doesn’t connect to the attic space. So the typical practice of having a soffit vent under the roofline that feeds cooler air into the attic and then vents out at the highest point to let hot air escape isn’t really applicable here.
I had a few people recommend spray foam insulation, so I called a local group (Northern VA Spray Foam, I think) and got the most helpful guy on the phone. After describing my situation and the limited square footage, he was honest enough to tell me he’d be charging me way too much money to bring his $100,000 spray truck out here just to insulate this one room. He let me know about some incredibly useful home kits that I could buy and use to do the same thing myself at a fraction of the cost. (He would’ve charged me somewhere close to $1500-2000, possibly more, I can’t recall.)
I found the Touch’N'Seal closed cell polyurethane kits from Conservation Mart online. At about $600, I could cut the price in half or more by doing it myself. I ordered the 600 sf kit and it arrived the day we left for Charlottesville.
Before I could insulate, I needed to do some prep work.
I scraped the beadboard paneling to provide a nice uniform surface for the foam. A lot of the paint (multiple coats, of course!) looked like they’d been facing the sun and not the interior for years. Cracked, peeling, baked-looking. I didn’t scrape everything down to bare wood but used the Bahco carbide scraper to get the worst of the cracked stuff off. Then I went over the surface with the wire brush to get it as dust free as possible. That took 2-3 grueling hours on Sunday night, culminating in total exhaustion and the sleep of babes.
Yesterday, I rushed home after work so I could do the actual spraying before the sun went down. Before I could start, I had to unwire the single, sad light bulb in the center of the room and pull the wiring out of the joists and then do the same thing for the vent fan in the bathroom. (For some reason, whomever installed the exhaust fan decided to run the electrical out from the attic through the brick back of the house, into the porch, and then back through the brick to wire the fan in, instead of going straight down inside the brick wall to the fan. Classic.)
Then I covered the new closets, the Ikea wardrobes, and the desk still sitting on the porch with plastic. After that, you hook up the gun and hoses to the cans, purge the system to get the stuff flowing, and then put a nozzle on the gun and go to town. Thankfully, the makers of Touch’N'Seal have a bevy of instructional videos available online to teach you how to spray and handle the kit. (Once again, what would we do without the internet and youtube?)
It was off to the races after that.
I started at one end, worked my way all the way across the porch, and then went back over to fill in any gaps and just coat the space with additional thickness until I ran out of foam. I wanted to fill the entire space between the beadboard and the future ceiling for maximum insulation, though it ended up only about 2/3 full. I’m glad I ordered the double-size kit for 600 sf — otherwise it would have been a really thin coating.
Best part of the job? Space suit!!!
And just so you don’t worry, Rachel wasn’t standing in the porch taking these with no mask (or space suit!) on. She was in the bedroom, shooting through the window. Just in case. 
It was far more tiring than I ever thought it would be, and took probably an hour and a half from the time I first started spraying. I had to keep my neck and head craned upwards the whole time, and the goggles were constantly getting fogged up and covered in spray, making it impossible to see. And it was hot. When I unzipped the suit, my t-shirt was drenched from the neck almost all the way down.
But I finished the insulation and it looked great this morning.
Rachel also took some video of me during the spraying.
Things I learned
The warnings from the manufacturers about this stuff making a mess and taping over anything you don’t want covered in excess spray are legit. I ran out of plastic after I covered the closets and the wardrobes, and didn’t do anything for the floor since it’s going to be covered over soon. (It’s already covered in paint and drywall compound.) When I got done, there was tons of excess spray on the tops of the walls and some on the windows. Fortunately, the walls scraped clean easily with a paint scraper after it cured. And I’m not worried about the windows — glass always easily scrapes clean — but it’s also on the wood frames and sashes that I haven’t painted yet. I scraped some of it off last night but the nooks and crannies are more difficult to get clean. Means that I’ll be spending a couple unnecessary hours cleaning the windows.
It’s also all over the floor. Though the floor will get replaced, it makes for a tacky mess walking around out there. I’m either going to pull the linoleum up or take a pass at scraping it lightly to get the worst of it off. But this stuff is messy, no doubt. If you’re working in a finished room with these kits, you’ll need to seriously cover every square inch of anything you don’t want to ruin or clean later.
Messy foam flying through the air, sticking to bathroom window.
The cans were covered in the foam afterward. Extrapolate this look to the entire floor and that’s about what the floor looks like today.
Now that this insulation is done, though, I’ve finished the last major thing that’s my responsibility on the porch, other than a few details. I’m going to get an electrician in here ASAP to run new wiring and add several boxes for new ceiling fixtures. And then I’m probably going to pay someone to drywall the ceiling (I hate ceilings) or possibly install beadboard. And then the carpet.
The finish line is in sight!
It’s so gratifying to finally put the last finishing touch on a project. Perhaps that’s because it happens so infrequently around here — the nursery is still only about 90 percent done, with a handful of little things still outstanding.
But the kitchen window shelf project officially wrapped up Friday afternoon after I picked up the glass shelves in NoMa during the day and installed them in the kitchen window after work before rushing back out to meet Rachel and half a dozen friends down at the Petworth Community Market to hang out and stock up on fresh fruit, veggies and bread.
If you want to read the whole story, here’s the three posts that chronicle this entire story from beginning to end. What do do with this old leftover kitchen window? The first post where I tried to decide what to do with the window and solicited comments from readers for some guidance. A year later, turning an old window into something new, and A year later, turning an old window into something new (part two): the nuts and bolts of the entire project from beginning to here.
Here’s how the window looked after the kitchen was done and we moved into the house.
And once we decorated a little bit and tried to hide how ugly the window really was. Yes, that’s a red dish towel draped over the ugly sill.
And once I knocked out the remaining glass and the sash and prepped the entire area for the work. You can see the same red dish towel on the counter to the left, actually. Ha.
You can read the details of how I removed the sash and old window, stripped all the paint off of the old frame, extended the sill and built the interior frame to cover up those unsightly grooves in the side to transform it into a nice looking empty window opening in those previous 3 posts, but here are a few pictures from the process.
So that brings us to the shelves. I got the floating shelf mounts for the glass shelves online a few weeks ago and already had them mounted to the inside edge. We opted to raise the first shelf up high enough so that we could put flowers or something tall on the new expanded sill, and then split the remaining difference in half for the higher shelf.
The brackets were in place and waiting for the glass for a couple of weeks while I got it ordered and picked up from Herson Glass here in DC on Florida Ave. (They did great work at a good price. Recommend.)
So Friday afternoon, I just had to slide the shelves in and screw the mounting screws down onto the shelf. The screws are flat and tipped with rubber so as not to scratch or damage the glass.
Once the shelves were in, I pulled out a few of my favorite Belgian beer glasses to line up on the top shelf. And with that, this project was a wrap!
And a before/after
What do you think? Best use of the space in this old window frame? Think we should have done something else?
Honey needs some closet space!
For a year and a half, Rachel’s been using these sad Ikea wardrobes in the sleeping porch for her closet. And the closet in the 2nd bedroom, when not under construction. And I should mention, this porch is blazing hot all summer long and freezing in the winter. I’ve had the one closet in our bedroom since it’s on my side of the bed, and since everything I own fits in it.
Looking back at my list of projects for the upstairs sleeping porch, I’ve wrapped up the first two out of seven items there: building Rachel two new closets on the sleeping porch. Fortunately, though, none of the other items will take me anywhere near the hours required for these first two tasks.
Build closet on the south wall.Build second closet on the north wall.- Pull out the existing electrical on the ceiling.
- Insulate the ceiling with spray-foam insulation.
- Install new electrical with upgraded lighting.
- Build insulated interior hatch for attic access.
- Put down carpet on the floor.
Other than a few finishing touches, the closets are built and ready to go upstairs. (Closet project: Part One, Part Two.) I raced home yesterday so I could get to work with the loud chop saw and the nail gun for a few hours before it got too late — technically you’re not allowed to do construction past 7 p.m., I think, though I usually go a little later than that.
After staying up into the wee hours of Wednesday morning pre-painting all the trim (including the uncut pieces) and the closet doors themselves, all I really had left to do was to install all the trim and put the doors in. But with two closets and trim around the opening on the outside and the inside, that’s a lot of measuring and cutting. I think I nailed the final piece at 9 p.m. last night and had a well deserved beer and late dinner and collapsed in a heap on the couch.
Here’s the progress of transformation. First, the bigger closet on the full south wall.
I really like how it turned out, though the ugly bare ceiling and the sloppy, dirty linoleum floor still make it look like lipstick on a pig. I hope to have the ceiling insulated and finished (either drywall or beadboard, not sure at this point) in just about two weeks.
The baseboard and trim at the bottom will soon wrap all the way around the back wall too — I’ll put that in when I get around to finally casing and trimming out the windows on the back wall. (An item I forgot on my original list of tasks for the porch. D’oh!) And of course, there’s no shelving in either closet yet. Rather than having to buy a bunch of wood and make shelves like I did for the nursery closet, we’re probably going to opt for those modular wire frame shelves that attach to the walls and can be configured in all sorts of patterns for maximum flexibility. We’ve still got some planning to do on that count.
The closet on the other wall is finished too. But before I could even start building that one, I had to do some prep work to the wall separating our house from the neighbors. Unlike the rest of the house (and even the first floor of these old sleeping porches), the houses here are not separated by a brick party wall, but just a thin layer of drywall or plywood.
You might remember that we discovered this during demo day shortly after we bought the house on the wall behind the closet pictured above. Not too long after we moved in while the wall was still exposed, he came over and told me he could see into our porch! So I built a new wall between us and used some homasote board beneath the drywall for soundproofing.
It was the same story here. There was 1/2″ plywood covering up what turned out just to be some shared studs: plywood on our side, and drywall on theirs.
The plywood was a bear to get off. I had to use the circular saw (after drilling some holes to look in and make sure there was no electrical, insulation or fire block) to cut the plywood down as much as possible to make it easier to pry off. And even then, it was still sweaty hard work.
Once I got the plywood off, I discovered that my neighbors’ back porch is raised up in the room, like you have to step up from their bedroom. I can’t for the life of me figure out why, unless their entire house is just a bit higher than ours, though I don’t think it is. Our street is pretty level. Weird. The space below does have the wiring and fixtures for the floor below, though.
A lot of that pile of dirt was sawdust from cutting the plywood, but most of it came out of the cavities between the studs. Including…
Yep, about 15 mouse skeletons. Some featuring mummified leathery skin! Yummy! Not sure how they got into the cavities, but once they did, I guess they couldn’t escape. I also saw evidence of fire damage in the space between their floor and ceiling up against the back wall just below the dead mice.
This time, I filled the gaps between the shared studs with Roxul Safe’n'Sound batts, which is the same stuff I used in the walls between the nursery and second bedroom. This meant that I didn’t have to waste a valuable half inch of closet depth with the homasote board. Then I covered up the studs with new 1/2″ drywall and finished it out.
Because of where the door enters this room from our bedroom, this closet has limited depth. It’s about 20 percent shallower than the opposite closet, and as a result, probably isn’t deep enough for hanging clothes and will just have shelves. I framed this closet the weekend after I did the other one, and was finishing both at the same time. I made it a little taller, though I decide not to go all the way to the ceiling with it. It’s so shallow that you wouldn’t be able to use the higher shelves anyway.
We didn’t run it all the way to the back wall because of the windows, and also to leave room for a tall storage piece that we have that goes in the space, wrapped in plastic in the below picture. Here it is, from beginning to end.
And a little wider shot of the porch so you can get a sense of the space. The door to our bedroom is right next to the closet.
There’s a few things left to do. Some of the trim still needs to be painted, and I need to fill all of the brad holes with putty and then touch them up with paint.
Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to start and finish insulating the ceiling. The kit I bought came last week and is ready to go.
Which means I’ll have another excuse to wear my awesome space suit again.
And miles to go before I sleep.
Yep, the due date is just six weeks from today. June 20, if you don’t know already. I’ve benched Rachel. She’s having Braxton-Hicks contractions with any significant exertion, so she’s outta the game. She’s been sticking to organizing and nesting for the most part. And there’s plenty of that to do, believe me.
But she’s looking good! Cutest little pregnant lady of all time if you ask me. She looks just about the same to me, with a big basketball hiding under her shirt — a basketball that sometimes punches back at you through her belly.
I’ve been eyeing the due date (probably more like a week before the due date) as the next big deadline on the horizon to try and get certain projects done. The last big deadline in my head like this was my family’s visit back in late October for the Marine Corps Marathon and finishing the 2nd bedroom renovations. I was shooting for end of 2011 for a few things, but that became pretty unrealistic with all the holiday breaks.
But all along, I’ve had this list in my head of things I really want to get done before June 20, when I hope to ramp things down significantly and take it easy and relax together as much as possible. As in, not rushing home from work to start a project and go til midnight 3 nights a week.
This list that I started putting together about 6 weeks ago is now hilarious. It’s been sitting in my drafts for about six weeks, and this same list you see below initially had this message above it: ”If I’m going to make it to everything on this list, I’ve got only 12-14 Saturdays left to make all this happen.”
Ha. Well, cut those Saturdays down to “5″, cross depressingly few things off of the list, and then you about have the state of things. That’s been my rule of thumb: everything takes twice as long, and is four times as complicated as you think it will be.
Rachel would tell you that many of these things aren’t must-do before the baby gets here, and she’s probably right. Certainly things that are outside, downstairs or non-dust generating can theoretically be done after the baby arrives, though I mostly want to make the best use of all this free time I have right now, that I won’t have again in enormous blocks like this again for years, if ever.
I want to relax (as much as that’s possible!) once we have the baby in our house and take a home renovation sabbatical. (I guess that means that this home renovation blog will turn into a ‘baby pictures’ blog for awhile. You’ve been warned!)
But however the list turns out, we’ll be thrilled if we get nothing but the nursery (obviously) and the upstairs rear sleeping porch totally finished. That will at least mean that all urgent upstairs tasks are finished, and Rachel can unpack and settle into the new sleeping porch room with closets and we’ll have our stuff and the baby room organized and ready for life. So I guess this is really a list of all the things that make up the last of Phase I of Our Old Rowhouse renovations, whether or not they happen in the next 6 weeks. (If you’re betting, I’d take the “under” on that one.)
On to the mammoth list. Links to blog posts about the unfortunately short list of completed projects.
| Status | Project |
| Attic | |
| Done | New cellulose insulation for the attic |
| Done | Install new sheathing over front floor of attic.
|
| Halfway | Consolidate, organize and then move basement stuff up to new attic storage. |
| Upstairs sleeping porch | |
| Yeah, that’s not going to happen anytime soon. Probably when we hit lotto and add master bathroom in porch. | Pull up old floor, shim, level and install new plywood subflooring. |
| I’ve got the spray foam, hoping to do this Sunday or the following weekend. | Insulate porch ceiling with spray-in foam. |
| Finished – save for interior, shelves, etc. | Build new closet on the southern end of porch. |
| Finished – save for interior, shelves, etc. | Build new closet on the northern end of the porch. |
| Contractor. | Electrical for new lighting, switches, etc. on porch. |
| Install new ceiling (beadboard or drywall?)
|
|
| Case and trim windows.
|
|
| Back yard | |
| Grade out the yard, remove any concrete remnants, try to level things out as best as we can.
|
|
| Get estimates on a new fence, get at least the northern fence installed (so we can build raised beds — also, our neighbors have been so kind not to complain about the fence being gone for so many months.) | |
| Build raised beds, fill with soil, plant garden. | |
| Get DDOE contractors out to install new permeable pavers. (Part of DC’s RiverSmart program. We get at least half the cost paid for by the city to replace impervious surface. |
So, think I’m crazy or what? I should probably make a chart like this of all the things we’ve completed in the last year and a half at some point — that would probably be a boost, right?
After just two full weekends and a few odd nights here and there, the new sleeping porch closets are about 75 percent done. When we last left this project, I had framed and drywalled the first closet, but hadn’t put in any trim or doors yet.
We were out of town this past weekend on a long-awaited and once-postponed Babymoon — sort of like a honeymoon before the baby arrives (and free time and ample sleep cease to exist.) So I didn’t work this last weekend, but I made tons of progress the previous weekend and here and there at night during the week before we left.
Hanging the doors was certainly the most challenging part of this project and something I’d never tried to do before. I was more than a little nervous about it, just because it’s so difficult to get the finished opening perfectly square. And if you get it wrong, you have to go back and undo your work and potentially start from scratch.
Fortunately, there is a little more wiggle room when installing bi-fold doors rather than the typical interior side-hung doors. I thought about doing this bigger closet with two normal interior doors, but with the precision required for hanging combined with how much more room they take up when open, I decided against it.
Having never installed doors like this before, I wasn’t totally sure of the precise size for the finished opening for the doors. And at the time, I didn’t actually have the doors in my possession to measure and work backwards. On a friend’s recommendation, I left 3/4″ for the (jamb) trim and 1/4″ for shim space on the rough opening, which added up to 2″ on each side. (If you’re using me for a tutorial, you might want to do a little more looking, because I was totally flying by the seat of my pants.)
I started with the side pieces of trim. I put in an 8d nail up at the top and one at the bottom just to hold the piece in place while I shimmed and leveled them. I measured on each side of the jamb from the wall to make sure they were level outside to inside edge (front to back). I used a 4-foot level to level them top to bottom, inserting and nailing down shims along the way. And then I measured across the opening to the far wall to doublecheck the level from front to back. Once this was level, I moved to the top piece and repeated.
(I’d also finished the mud on this closet before the trim went in.)
Of course, the top just needs to be level and square, but the distance to the ground increases left to right because of the gentle slope of the sleeping porch. It runs down about 1/2 to 1 inch across the full depth of the porch — formerly to let rain or water run off back when this was open to the elements in 1920. But well within reason to hang the door without too much of a gap.
I repeated the process on the other side and got everything nice and square, but I think I must have added a little too much for the opening. After I had both side pieces of trim on and hung the doors, the opening was still about an inch too big, leaving a big gap between the doors when closed, so I just slapped one more 3/4″ jamb up on one side on top of the one that was already there. Once they’re covered with casing trim, no one will know!
After that, I set the nails so the holes can be filled and painted over.
Then I put up the track, the lower pivot points, and hung the doors. As I thought it would be, once the opening was square and finished, actually hanging the doors was relatively quick and easy. With the extra jamb on one side, the opening was just right. Though the right-hand door gets raised up farther on its pivot since the floor is lower on that side. This keeps the top of the doors level and square, which is much more noticeable than leaving a gap at the bottom edge.
And voila! New closet doors!
(You can see the second piece of trim on the right side of the frame — it’s extra thick with two pieces there.)
I went ahead and started cutting the casing that I’m going to use to put around the doors. I tacked it up into place just long enough to show Rachel what it’s going to look like when finished and take a picture — it’s easier to finish priming and painting without the trim there so there aren’t any edges to worry about. But this gives a better sense of what it’s going to look like when finished. The only thing missing in that photo is the bigger piece of casing that will go level across the very top edge like a piece of crown moulding.
Wondering why this closet isn’t any taller? The roof access is unfortunately above everything here, so a closet all the way to the ceiling would cover it up. Though even if the closet was full height, it isn’t quite deep enough to make those higher shelves reachable and usable. This gives us space on top we can use. (Rachel is envisioning some sort of matching containers to go up there, I think.) I’ve cut some sanded plywood that sits on top of the framing — no drywall on top.
I had almost all of this done the weekend before we went to Charlottesville and I’ve made more progress since then on this closet and the second one, so look for that in the next post.
As well as some amazing things I found in the opposite wall. Curious?
You might remember the plan for a radiator box I had jotted down in my trusty home journal a few months ago and posted to Flickr. (Can’t remember if I blogged about it here.) I uploaded this photo back in February, though I think I drafted it down a few months before.
We have 6 radiators in the house and we’re planning to cover all of them — either with standalone boxes, or with boxes that are part of a larger built-in, like a bookshelf.
After making a monstrous run to Home Depot for bulky supplies with a ZipTruck one night last week, including the wood for this project, I finally found the time to start this first one — after finishing the bulk of the work on the first of two closets on the sleeping porch upstairs.
I’m intending to build a few of these boxes for the house, but for my first try for the one we need ASAP for the nursery, I thought I’d keep it simple. So I bought some sanded birch plywood to use for the front, top and sides, cove moulding for the inside of the openings, and used some leftover top-of-baseboard moulding in spots. I thought about going in either direction on the spectrum for the main box, using either MDF or trying to find some solid wood. I opted to go middle of the road with the nicer sanded birch plywood and see how it turns out.
I did a little drywall work on the first closet after work Friday — more to come on that project later this week — and when I got up early Saturday morning, I had a goal of finishing the first closet and trying to knock out the radiator box. By the time I got the doors hung on the first closet, it was about 7 or 8 p.m., but I decided to get started on the box. To make this box, I really only needed my chop saw for the moulding, the jig saw for all other cuts on the plywood, a drill for driving and countersinking the screws, and a brad nailer for attaching the trim/moulding. (I don’t have a table saw.)
It didn’t take me nearly as long as I thought it would. When I stopped for dinner around 9, I had the sides of the box cut and assembled already.
I built this first one almost exactly like my rough draft, with one small change to the moulding: I put the baseboard cap moulding upside down flush with the top edge of the lid, rather than making the lid a little oversized and tucking the moulding underneath the lid — which you can see in the drawing above. That leaves one less exposed rough cut on the plywood to cover with veneer or something else, like the side joints.
I stayed up late sawing and mitering in the basement — thankfully where the sound doesn’t carry to the neighbors’ houses. After just about 3 hours or so, I had this nearly finished box to put into the nursery.
You can see that I scribed out the sides with the jigsaw to match the baseboard profile, so the whole thing will fit flush against the wall. I put two narrow 1-by braces on the back so that it’s not possible for a kid to pull the radiator box away from the wall and have it topple over on ‘em.
I made the top a removable lid, though I hid the seam with the cap moulding.
I countersunk all the screws, so I need to fill those holes before I prime and paint it. As well as filling just a few gaps in the trim here and there.
The last thing to do is to choose the screening we want to use to fill the openings. Then it’ll just be a matter of snipping it to size and then stapling it or screwing it in on the inside of the box. Until then, the box is in the nursery and in business. Turned out pretty good, eh?
Surprisingly simple to make, even for this non-carpenter.
When we bought this house, the front yard hadn’t exactly been cared for in a long time.
A chain-link fence was installed some years back, as well as on the neighbors’ houses on either side of ours. I can’t pretend I really know what life was like on our street during the rough and tumble previous few decades when all three of these houses were occupied by the same families, but we didn’t really see the utility of a fence on a yard that was too small for kids or a dog to run around in securely. And if someone was going to break in, was a 4-foot chain-link fence going to stop them? I guess it would keep strangers from sleeping or peeing in your yard, perhaps, but that’s about it. (Most public peeing takes place in the alleys these days. Our city is a difference place in 2012!)
In any case, we decided to yank the fence out, open up our front yard, tear out almost everything including the overgrown ivy, and fill it full of plants just about a year ago, a process we chronicled in a few posts.
Just a few weeks of work resulted in a huge difference in the curb appeal of the house. Along the way we discovered a neglected hydrangea and a hosta buried in the yard that we didn’t know about. The rest of it, outside of the massive annoying tree in the corner, we put in ourselves. And we had a great looking yard all spring and summer long. Once the fall came and everything died back a bit, Rachel planted 160 bulbs in the ground so we’d get an early splash of color in the last days of winter.
Our front yard now has Nandinas, an Azalea, Lilies of the Valley, Helleborus, a Hydrangea, Tulips, and a bunch of other stuff I can’t remember. The Nandinas and the Helleborus all came from Rachel’s parents’ house in Atlanta, though the Nandinas actually traveled with us on the plane as a tiny sprout in a plastic bag in our carry-on bag.
As we prepare to get our hands dirty again and switch out some of the flowers for spring, I thought I’d just look back at the front garden through photos from the last year and a half and see how much things have changed.
When we moved in.
Tearing out the fence, and then a shot of the front yard after the fence is gone and the soil turned over somewhat.
Ready for planting
The first round of plants in the ground.
And then two months later after everything has bloomed and grown a bit. Note the change to the lattice and the front joist under the porch from the above picture. This was after the layers of paint were stripped off of the steps and concrete pedestal, and the joists and lattice repainted.
Of course, winter came and everything retreats into the ground or simply dies for the season, or permanently. But by mid- to late-winter, you could see the bulbs starting to poke through the mulch in the top right photo.
Which turned into a host of tulips and other flowers.
Coming up this spring, I’ll be replacing the old rotten porch railing and balusters with brand new ones, freshly painted. Which will really be the final project in the attempt to transform the front of the house.
So what’s next in the garden? You’ll have to ask our resident master gardener about that one, but we’re going to replace some of the annuals with new things for the spring. Coming soon.
I don’t have a long step-by-step story about this one yet, because I’m going to break my own blogging rules and publish photos of a half-finished project and let the cat out of the bag before I’m done. Here’s the progress on the closet I spent the weekend building in the sleeping porch upstairs, which connects to our master bedroom.
I got it all framed on Saturday — even with a 4-hour break in the middle of the day thrown in hanging outside in the great weather with friends whose spouses/girlfriends were at Rachel’s baby shower — and then drywalled the outside and half of the inside with the leftover panel and a half I found in the basement from a recent project.
I bought all the sticks a few weeks ago when I was last at Home Depot with a truck and had everything ready to go Friday so I could get going Saturday morning bright and early. I still need to drywall half of the inside, install and shim the trim for the inside finished frame, hang the bi-fold doors, put a plywood top on the thing, and case the door frame with trim. I’m also going to put a piece of trim across the top edge to hide the rough drywall edge and the plywood. I think I’ll be able to get to all of that this weekend and be ready for paint by next Monday.
This will finally give Rachel proper closets after using cheap Ikea wardrobes for the last year and a half that didn’t make the best use of the space We’ll also get some additional storage for other things — there’s only one non-bedroom closet upstairs and just one in our bedroom — as well as space for her sewing projects. We’re going to set up our desk in here, as well as her sewing table and dressing table.
Which all means that this terrific but under-utilized space in our house will soon become much more useful. This is the last big project I’m hoping to finish before the baby gets here in June. Here’s the quick list of what I need to do in this porch area over the next 8 weeks or less. (Yikes! 8 weeks? Is that all????)
- Build closet on the south wall. Halfway done here! I should have this finished by next weekend.
- Build second closet on the north wall. This closet won’t be as deep and likely not for hanging clothes; more of a general storage closet. It also can’t run the full depth of the porch because of the windows on the porch at that end.
- Pull out the existing electrical on the ceiling. That won’t take long. It’s one bulb, hastily mounted to the ceiling joist. TIP: It’s always good to put some things on your checklist that take 10 minutes or less.
- Insulate the ceiling with spray-foam insulation. On the recommendation of some spray-foam pros I called, I’m about to buy a kit I can use at home to do the whole thing myself. I found out that it’s really not worth the cost to bring in pros for such a small space. After this, the room will not only be bearable during the summer, but actually as cool as the rest of the house.
- Install new electrical with upgraded lighting. There’s only one little dinky lightbulb right now that the wall switch doesn’t even control. And only two sockets in the entire space. When I finished the sleeping porch downstairs, I ran a spare hot wire up that we can use to add a socket on the north end of the porch. We’re going to have at least three overhead fixtures to light things up nice and bright.
- Build insulated interior hatch for attic access. The previous owner had the roof access covered up entirely. I’m planning an interior hatch that will lock into place (for security) and be covered with insulation to fill this space and cut down on air flow — you can see slices of daylight around the edges of the covering hatch on the roof.
- Put down carpet on the floor. This will be a pretty temporary covering here, not a professional carpet install. The floor isn’t level and needs to be completely replaced with new floor sheathing and shimmed level at some point. I’d have liked to do this before building the closets but there just isn’t time and it’s not that crucial. It’ll likely happen when/if we get to realize our dream of a master bathroom at the south end of the sleeping porch. Until then, we’ll make do with some inexpensive carpet in here over the crap linoleum. Might be squares, might be proper carpet, we’ll see. (Cue Rachel saying, “oh yes, it will be proper carpet”)
Will we make the deadline? Time will tell. Let’s hope this baby doesn’t come three weeks early.
In our last post, I showed off the great Petworth map print that our friends Lilly and Colin bought for our house that we hung in the entryway.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t give a plug for the great local artist who produced it: Torie Partridge of Cherry Blossom Mural Works. She does all kinds of great graphic design work, from murals and home interiors to advertising and branding — and I think she’s one of the friendly faces serving you fine Scandinavian food and beer at local joint Domku. Check out her work on her website. (And go eat at Domku ASAP if you haven’t yet!)
If you love these Petworth map prints by Torie, signed and numbered prints are available for sale in Qualia Coffee at 3917 Georgia Avenue in Petworth, as well as Core Haus and maybe a few other places — and probably her website too. I also mentioned that she did the murals for the front windows of Annie’s Ace Hardware. Here are some photos of those windows, courtesy of our neighbor Kent at Park View, DC.
Amazing stuff.
When we were in Atlanta a few weeks ago and stumbled into some extra cash (long story,) Rachel made the fantastic decision to go ahead with something she’d been wanting to do for a while: She went to Joann’s and bought some picture frames for the house. Wait, let me rephrase that. She bought enough frames to wallpaper every inch of our first small DC apartment with picture frames.
Ever since we moved in, for whatever reason, we’ve been pretty slow to get pictures and painting and decorations up on the walls. There have been exceptions of course, as we hung a few pictures in our bedroom pretty quick and the odd picture here or there throughout the house, as well as the big photo I took in Bruges, Belgium that we put up in the living room as our housewarming gift to ourselves. But for the most part, we just haven’t done a good job of putting up family pictures and covering the walls.
So Rachel bought enough frames to fill an entire storage bin, with a handful more piled up on top and around the car on the way back from Atlanta. I have no idea how much money she spent on frames — probably for the best.
Sunday afternoon, we got to work on getting all the frames up in the house, mostly filling the stairway from bottom to top. We’ve always loved houses that have a wall that’s just jammed with family pictures, so that’s what we set out to do. We traced out the shape of all the frames and put them all up on the wall and moved ‘em around to see where things would fit best.
This is a great strategy for figuring out how to fit together a bunch of different sized frames on the wall. Once we got them all up and arranged in a good pattern, I got to work on hanging the frames. It’s a little more complicated to hang on this south wall, since it’s just plaster on brick. So I use a drill to make small pilot holes for nails, rather than trying to nail into the plaster and brick, which just results in bent nails and damaged plaster. The plaster and brick are also stout enough (unlike some drywall) that if you go in at a small angle, it’s more than strong enough to hold a large picture frame with a single small nail.
After about an hour or so, I had all of the frames hung on the wall. Including a few that we hung in the to-be-unveiled nursery and elsewhere, we counted up 27 or 28 frames or pictures that we put on the wall in one day. Wow.
Of course, now we need to figure out what pictures to put in the new frames. Until then, we’ll just have those beautiful smiling photo-frame models smiling back at us.
Oh, one last thing. Our good friends Lily and Colin gave us this great print by a local Petworth artist that we framed. (This same picture fills a front picture window at Annie’s Ace Hardware in the neighborhood.) Incidentally, we ended up hanging it on the very wall that Lilly scraped free of wallpaper all the way back on our workday with friends in 2010. Didn’t realize it until we put it up.
