Bathroom Trim: Painting Around the Toilet

February 2013

A couple weeks after we finished the fireplace I started working on a list of things to do before September.  One of the rooms that needed the most work was our bathroom.  This was remodeled in 2006 by the previous owner and since moving in we hadn't done much to it. To start, it looks like a lovely bathroom, while not my style I appreciate that they made some good updates.   However, living with it for close to three years had really changed my opinion.  It was not my taste and many of the materials chosen have not held up very well to the daily abuse a single bathroom gets.

Back in 2010, we changed out the double hung vinyl window to a vinyl casement with frosted glass.  The main need for the change was this window opened directly to our patio and if the window was open, it was not discreet (this is a polite way to put it).  The new window opens towards the side yard and allows people to be on the patio and not looking directly in.  Also, the frosted glass allows us to avoid having to hang a curtain in a damp location. When we installed this window we did not patch or paint any of the wood trim that was mangled putting this in. I have carefully tried to cover this up with flowers or other bathroom accessories but it was pretty embarrassing.

Using a house guest due in two weeks to spur me on, I decided to patch and repair the window trim and then paint all the trim a fresh coat of semi-gloss white.   Over the course of several nights I came home and patched and sanded.  I figured this was the best time since Josh was away on a business trip so the bathroom got a lot less use then it would.  This had been the hold up for years.  Between two showers, numerous bathroom trips there never seemed to be a time for get in there and allow paint to dry.  

It ended up taking three coats of paint, which I applied mostly on my hands and knees.  I got up close and personal with our toilet and got to remind myself why this was the most poorly designed bathrooms I know.  There is literally about 18 inches of space around each item in the room which creates these wonderful thin slivers of useless space where hair can hide in nice balls and where I now needed to wedge myself to paint. There was a moment when I had to rest my cheek on the side of the toliet as I reached to get the back corner.  It was graphic (no picture, thank goodness).  The good news the bathroom is about 32 sqft so it didn't take long to do a coat, the bad news I got paint all over myself.

Josh came home to freshly painted trim and a cleaned up window and was dutifully impressed.  I was proud. 

But, the rest of the room now looked all the more worn for the new glossy trim.  We both agreed we really needed to paint the walls and clean up the grout as soon as possible.  I made an appointment for a tile cleaner and figured we would start there.

Not Your Grandma's Fireplace

January 2013

After I made the big jump to paint the brick it was a smooth sailing to completion.  The fireplace surround that started this entire project was finally ready to be installed. For those who are interested, the surround is made by Pleasant Hearth and my mom purchased it on Amazon where it shipped free.  It has a craftsman feel to it and the arch top doors reminded me of our own hobbit door not so far away. There are several other designs that seem to work well for older style homes.

The install of the piece was really easy.  It pretty much has six toggle bolts that you tighten into the sides and top of your fireplace opening.  No seriously, that was it. According to the directions it might have been more complicated if our opening was taller, or if we lacked a metal brick ledge.  But for once, in the history of the house, we appeared to have something 'typical.' Once, it came out of the box it took only a few moments to unpack, install the provided insulation into the back and read the instructions. Just because I like to make double sure of things I decided to go online and read up a bit.  Most reviewers were positive, a few mentioned it you were using this to act as a damper you probably needed to add some additional sealing and insulation.   I went ahead and purchased the other items they recommended. 

Josh cleaned the interior of the brick opening (Gus of course had to help).  He then applied a sticky back insulation roll, roughly about 2" thick around three sides of the opening.  This is supposed to help with the inevitable air gap where the surround meets the brick.  Sorry for the lack of pictures but since it was a two man job we were lacking apposable thumbs.  The next step after the surround installed was to use heat resistant silicone to fill in all the gaps around the top and edges where our surround sat flush to the brick but left openings where the indented mortar lines were. 

This was honestly the worst part, I hate silicone.  Its not easy to work with, it sticks to everything, and it doesn't wipe off you or other objects with water.  Once every mortar hole was filled with silicone we installed the door handles.  Finally, I got my decorating cap back on and put back all my fireplace chitz.

The run down is this.  Three weeks of work, one new surround, one gallon of masonry primer, reused stain, paint, and poly.  It cost roughly $300 and made a huge difference to our little family room.

Before 2010:

2012:

2013:

Brick: To Paint? Or Not To Paint?

January 2013

After I finished staining the mantel I spent the week applying the poly protective coats.  It took three coats that I applied with a foam brush.  By Thursday, I knew I could no longer ignore the lower portion of our fireplace.  This was my dilemma: I love brick, heck I am from Virginia.  Our clay soil means we are the biggest producers and users of brick in the US (I just made this fact up, but it could be true).    Our brick had problems- big problems. One, it was not the nicest brick, just kinda of a boring 'I am brown' brick, not that I was going to hold it against it.  Worst, the mortar was pink, yes, pink.  Urgh I hated that mortar.  On top of all of that: the brick was covered with 80 years of soot and general dirty house funk.  Just to remind you what the brick was looking like:      

I had some choices.  I could clean the brick. There were several methods I found online that were home made and involved a lot of elbow grease.  There were also several expensive solutions I could purchase where I slathered some goopy gel on the brick wait a day and then according to the pictures have an amazing before and after moment.  The problem was none of these options would help my pink mortar.  This meant I would have to pay someone to come and repoint my fireplace with more attractive mortar- namely any other sensible color such as gray or tan. Read between the lines: very expensive for little change.

The other option was to paint the brick and mortar and be done with the darn thing.  Gulp.  This was tough, there was no going back, once painted brick would be painted forever. There is no stripper for brick. I liked our rustic living room and painting brick felt modern and cold to me.  The problem was I didn't really want to spend any more money of this fireplace. I looked online and searched painted brick fireplaces. Honestly they did make a huge difference to rooms. Rooms that felt old and tired looked fresh and bright.

On a Saturday, I decided to do a quick clean to brick to see if it made a difference. I cleaned the brick and cleaned and it looked exactly the same: sooty sad brown.  I made the decision- we were painting. 

The next step was what to paint the brick?  We could go with the same brown as the chimney breast or the standard bone white of all of our trim and ceilings.  Josh and I decided since our new surround was dark brown we should paint the brick Bone White to stand out.   I bought masonry primer and with way more confidence then I felt I started painting the bricks. 

It was pretty quick work, one coat of primer on Saturday night, then two coats of bone white acrinamel the next day. Getting in the cracks and mortar lines took a long time.  Luckily, small detailed oriented projects are my jam. The best part was since it was January and I had my Downton Abbey to replay over and over.  I had to make sure I had memorized every scathing Maggie Smith reproach.

By the end of the weekend the fireplace looked like this:

Regret it- no, Love it- maybe not totally?

The Fireplace Shake Up

January 2013

Josh and I did some traveling for the holidays and enjoyed relaxing around the house.  We were able to catch up with friends and finally watch some of our favorite tv shows.  But, after two months off I was itching for another project.  I don't know what it is about the holidays but I got the urge to strip some woodwork again.   For Christmas, we had asked my parents for a new fireplace surround.  For those of you who don't remember it looked like this in 2010:

Then in 2012 it looked like this:

Our chimney lacks a damper so we knew we lost a fair amount of our heating through our rattling unsealed brass fireplace surround.  Combine that with its poorly working accordion doors and general sooty appearance and we were ready to break up. As a side rant, do accordion doors work on anything?  Seriously, every house I have ever lived in had some janky accordion closet door that you fought with until you pulled it off it's track.  Poor design.

Our new surround came, looking all fancy and oil rub bronze, but alas there was a good number of things wrong with the fireplace.  The mantel has always made me feel a little let down.  We have a pretty big mantel, which I love, but it lacked the character that I had hoped for.  Taking a cue from our dining room built-in, I thought about stripping the top half.  It would tie the dining room and family room together and hopefully showcase another awesome piece of 80 year old wood that was hiding behind layers and layers of paint.

Josh bought me a heat gun for Christmas and it was all I could do not to remove our stockings and garland and go to town.  I waited, and was excited to get moving.   I started one weekend in the corner and by the end of the day I had stripped the top of the mantel.  I learned alot, mostly, that I am not a huge fan of heat guns. Holding the heat gun and a scrapper is exhausting work.  The place immediately smelled of burning paint which no one in the house was thrilled with.  A side note, I was sure there was probably one coat of lead paint wedged in there so I was wearing a mask and googles. While it was faster then stripper, I found it much more work and potentially more toxic for my family.  After finishing the top I decided to use gel stripper the crown moulding portion. 

This of course doubled the time of the project.  It took three passes to get the mantel completely paint free and each coat took about 24 hours to work.  It was slow, but I got back in my rythmn of coming home each day and scrapping off some paint and then applying more stripper to another section and covering with with plastic wrap.   I was laborious but I think it only took me a full week.   Also based on another awesome blog I read I used stainless pot scrubbers dipped in mineral spirits to remove all the paint that was trapped in the grain.  In the past, I had used a brillo sponge, this was much better and held up great!

Once I sanded the mantel down I went ahead and started applying stain. By now I was pretty good with staining and busted out our old Gunstock stain and my trusty staining clothes.  It went pretty quickly, I did one coat a night with a steel wood sand in between.  It ended up taking 4 coats to completely cover the areas.  There was some paint I could not get out of the tight crown moulding.  I cheated and took a stain colored sharpie (yes they make these) and colored all the paint bits brown and then stained overtop.  It feels cheap and wrong, but honestly, you would never know, and it saved me breaking down to get dental tools out.

At the end of two weeks this is what I had to show:

Happy Christmas 2012

December 2012

Happy Christmas.... in April.  One day this blog will catch up and I won't be posting these in the off-season. Every Christmas I like to document our decorations and general festiveness.  This was our second big Christmas in the house and we made some additions.  Unfortunately, we did not celebrate in the house as both Josh and I were visiting family but I still really enjoyed the decorating.

The mantel got it's fresh cedar garland and poinsettas, I hung our christmas artwork above and broke out our christmas gnomes.   Add some new awesome personalized stockings made by Josh's aunt Connie and it was starting to look legit.

The snow village was back out and wood bead garlands on the chandlier.  We added some small Christmas trees to the hutch and added an Elf on the Shelf to our liquor selection.

We tried a new tree this year, we moved away from our Noble Fir and tried a Blue Spruce.  We loved it, it dropped less needles, it is more open and allowed us to get all of our big ornaments up.  I will give it negative points for the fact that you now can see the wires for our lights, but still I think this might be a new tradition.  My favorite addition this year- this awesome moss covered reindeer I got on a whim at Target- so awesome-sauce. 

Outside, we lit our Mountain Oak, added candles in the windows and even hung icicle lights from our porch gutters.  Add to that my new wreath and we felt our halls were decked!  We spent a wonderful weekend up at our friends beach house in Rockaway and got our Christmas sweaters out- Gus joined in as well.

Merry Christmas!

 and of course, just to prove I am not a true blogger my centerpiece says happy fall.... I can't help it gourds never die.

Battening Down the Porch

October 2012

You have probably seen most of this post in the earlier photos but here is some more back story.  Once we had finished the beds and laying out our paths we still need to install them.  The concrete pieces were all different heights and so we needed to use mortar to set them level and flush to one another. 

This is a backbreaking process which we did in the rain.  Which is most likely why we did not photograph any of it.  First we had to dig out some areas as well as raise some other areas to get the stones to line up.  If we had actually used pavers this would not have been a problem.  With nice normal stones we could have laid a nice level bed of sand and simply tapped them into level.  But that would be easy and where is the fun in that.  Instead, our reused concrete bits required a fair bit of wrestling.  To say we got them all level would be a complete lie, this no ADA accessible pathway.  But for all intensive purposes it is perfect, it's a pathway of stones that you can walk on. 

Once the pieces were level we used mortar to set them.  This required roughly 12 bags bought at Lowes and simply mixed with water.  We chose to mix one to two bags at a time in our wheelbarrow with shovels and trowels. It was a bit of an inexact science, some mixes being more of a slurry and some being closer to sludge but in the end it didn't make a big difference.  If you are thinking of doing something similar I suggest more of the sludge consistency.  This helped us level some of the stones.  We spent the entire morning on our hands and knees shoveling and eventually grabbing handfuls of the mortar and placing it under each individual stone.

Once we had set all the stones we reused some existing pea gravel we had on site to fill in the gaps and create a level surface between the stones. We waited about 24 hours before fully walking on the surface and sweeping the excess pea gravel off.  When we were done I have to say it looked pretty darn good.  When you consider the concrete was free and the bags of mortar are about 6-8 dollars it was pretty cheap. We used some existing pea gravel, but if we had to buy it I would say it was about a yard which is about $80 plus delivery.

It was starting to get cold and rainy in Portland and we had run out of good working days to keep going.  I took advantage of some falls sales and grabbed some hydrangeas at 30% off.  I planted three white lamb hydrangeas along the beds and purchased a large Limelight for the corner under the kitchen window.  Honestly, I cannot wait to see them bloom, because buying twiggy dormant plants took some imaging. A few plants that were not successful in other parts of the yard also found their way over to the corner to provide a little bit of evergreen color. 

The last step before we could call it good for the year was to install some doors on either side of the porch.  The doors to the driveway were a definite need as this was the last step to enclosing the backyard and allowing Gus to use his dog door again.  Our friend Gordon, a la dishwasher, staircase beadboard fame, made us some doors and we put them in late October. They look a bit silly since they have their screening and nothing else does.  But it made the project feel more finished! As the rains kept coming we battened down the hatches on the back porch with promises of more work next spring.

A Cap, A Wall, An Arbor, A Path, and Back Pain

September 2012

To start off, I have explain that for about three months I did not take one picture of any of the work we did.  It was kind of like I blacked out.  Now I find that I only have pictures of our current progress which means there will be several entries and weeks of efforts shown in each picture.  They were also taken in wet, gray, sad Portland winter.  I apologize and promise to never do this again.

Since Josh had worked hard for weeks putting up the beds, I took on filling the beds with dirt-oooo so much dirt. I think it was about 3-4 yards of topsoil even with the 2 yards of native soil we already had on site. I put the first two yards in, then promptly hurt my back and actually had to ask Josh to finish up for me.  Fail.

While this was going on we had to tackle the area between the porch and the garage.  We needed to put up a fence to keep the dog in the back yard. At first we had designed a nice open railed fence to connect from the end of the raised bed to the garage.  However, we soon realized that this would mean anytime we mowed our lawn we would have to take the mower through the porch to get to the backyard.  Which was not going to work with our outdoor cozy room feeling.  I searched around and then my parents bought us an arbor/gate from Plow and Hearth for my birthday.  Yay!

Do I think we could have built an arbor/gate? Yes. Did I want to try and build one-- not really.  I put the arbor together- not so bad.  And we set it tight to garage giving us a kind of hidden path/entry into the backyard.  Our favorite cedar tree lent a secret garden air.  I liked it.  However, we now had about 3 feet from the raised bed to the arbor.  It seemed silly to design and make a fence that would only be 3 feet long.  We instead decided to build a wall, similar to the raised bed to wrap around the tree and connect to the arbor.  It's pretty formidable but would look a little less chaotic. Josh was now an expert and quickly built this and started working on the cap while I started brainstorming our path ideas. 

We had kept out some of the best concrete pieces from our depave to use as pavers.  I thought we should build a little path from the arbor out to the yard, then use the same pathway to connect the porch doors to the driveway, and then another pathway from the porch to the garage.  I am pretty honest about the fact that I am average at a lot of things.  I am a solid B at a variety of hobbies, tasks, mental capabilities.  There is one real thing I excel at: puzzles.  Honestly, tetris is my jam.  So I spent two whole days arranging the pavers (concrete chunks) to: fit close together, use a variety of sizes, keep straight edges were we needed them (along the driveway, the fence line, and the garage) and allow organic edges where it was not required.  It had to look thoughtful and at the same time random. It was on.  This is, of course, where I hurt my back.  Lifting, at times 60 lbs concrete pieces over and over again was a recipe for pain.  After I laid out the pieces they stayed that way for a few weeks before I could muster up the courage to mortar them in.

The good news was it was laid out and Josh had finished the cap, wall, and even built the half wall to close in the small area up against the house.  The space was really starting to look finished.