House Hijinks

Progress on the New Bath, a photo by Athens Nikita on Flickr.

So, what've we been up to the in the 'Fonte? Quite a bit, actually.

There's been a lot happening in town lately, which I'll briefly touch on another time.

However, at our house we've suffered some catastrophes and entered unwittingly into several unplanned projects. But we also had projects slated for the summer -- like an additional bath with a tub for our new tenant in the other half of the house.

Yesterday Herman came over and helped Chris kick that project off -- what you're looking at in this photo is the first stages of what hopefully will be a rapidly unfolding laundry/bath addition where the commercial space used to be.

So far it's just spec'd out and framed, but baby steps, folks. Baby steps.

Small Improvements

Given the theme of this blog, and the fact that for about the first year all we did was various forms of construction projects, I shouldn't be surprised when people ask me what's up with the house at the moment. The short answer: very little. We're well into the "enjoy the house" phase, and are currently putting our money and time into other things.

However, occasionally we do small projects when we can see the opportunity to make a big improvement in a short time. A few weeks ago, the front porch light seemingly burned out. This coincided with my blowing a fuse during band practice, and so it could have been a fairly serious problem -- but when Chris hauled the fixture down and discovered that it was simply a shoddy fixture, it was time to go shopping for a new one. At the same time, I decided to replace the contractors' special sconces/lanterns around the back doors, too. Why not? I hate those things -- they work, but they're cheap and ugly, and I am way over cheap and ugly.

At the same time, we decided to take advantage of the lack of a front porch fixture to remedy a basic problem with it -- it's all white! Technically, I suppose that's fine, but being from the south a white porch ceiling is something of an abomination. The proper color is something called "haint blue" -- supposedly it wards off evil spirits if you happen to be from one of the cultures (they are numerous in the south) that believes in it. Personally, I'm not all that superstitious, but I like the way the blue reminds me of the sky, cools the space in the summer, and brings a little color in in the winter -- a major consideration in a place where winter is twice as long as it was down south.

So today Chris and I spent about 6 hours painting the ceiling blue. (Photo at left: pre-painting prep.) We did this on Sunday, because it's one of the few days where we can steal away a few hours and because the local construction nannies don't work on Sunday. I was lucky this morning to find a whole suite of matching lanterns at Lowe's -- they averaged about $40 a fixture. SCORE! (Incidentally, for those who like me are cheap, both Lowe's and Home Depot appear to be having sales on lighting at the moment.)

So, new photos forthcoming once I can manage to get them to upload (damn Flickr!). Not only does it make the house look a tad more southern, but it makes it look great.

The Long and Winding Road to a Reasonable Number of Bathrooms.

new bathroom II
Originally uploaded by Athens Nikita

This is a small, but momentous project which is now at the verge of being done (Done! Done! Imagine chortling and rubbing of hands).

Originally, this big old house had roughly 7 bedrooms and 3 baths -- two on the 231 side (one shower-only on the second floor, one shower-only in the basement) and one miserable, tiny, awful, closet-sized bathroom on the second floor of 233. This, to put it gently, was not ideal. 

Not only did it suck attempting to share one godawful bathroom, but it also made having guests over kind of challenging. In fact, on multiple occasions I've had to guide guests to the second-floor bathroom because the process for getting to it from the first floor requires a Sherpa.

So we upgraded the existing bathroom by combining the bathroom and adjoining tiny bedroom. And then we got started on converting the under-stair closet into a second powder room.

We quickly discovered that we had underbudgeted a bit, and we also discovered that our under-stair closet was originally a staircase to the basement!

The process, which started in mid-November, went something like this:

1. Hire a local contractor to reconfigure the space for our purposes -- this meant ultimately, a lot of complicated work to reconfigure the plumbing and bring plumbing for the first time in history into the "old" (pre-1885) part of the house. And it also meant rebuilding the wall and floor structures to create a box that slopes down to about 6' in height at the back. This ultimately cost about $1,100.

2. Assess and repair plaster/wallpaper wall. We started with the idea of stripping the wallpaper and repairing the wall. But the wall was exceptionally damaged. And in step 3, you'll see why else the original walls weren't really going to get conservator-type treatment. So, ultimately, we did what we had to do, systems-wise, and skim-coated everything. Cost: $200.

3. Call in the electrician to consider fixtures and whatnot. Since the electrician is Chris, this ended up being free. But since the electrician is Chris, this also means that we now have four separately-switched fixtures, including a can fan. And as a bonus, we got a hallway accent light to light up this gloomy alcove. Fixtures and stuff cost about $350.

4. Call back the contractor -- have him install tile floor and grout. Cost: about $350. Have him install sink and toilet and faucet -- about $150 for the toilet, $200 for the sink (special low-profile corner sink), $120 for the faucet.  

5. Paint it! Maybe $60.

6. Install beadboard -- $180.

7. Er, put up the stuff that's still not up. In this case, piddling stuff like towel bars and that last fixture. Fixtures and stuff: $20.

So...let's see...roughly 15 man hours and $2730 later, we now have two bathrooms.  Come visit!