The 12 Days of Rehab

I can't believe we settled on our property less than two weeks ago--sometimes it seems like it was two days ago, and sometimes it feels more like two years.

After the first few days of dumpster filling, we got to work rebuilding.  At some point, I will post an entire entry with befores and afters of all of our rooms, but for now, I just want to focus on the fresh and new (and shove the old and dirty back into the dumpster where it belongs).

So after several buckets of primer and paint, some new trim, and our stuff moved in, here are the three rooms we have finished.

The living room:

We already owned the couch, the rug, and the two wicker chairs (they got a new coat of slate blue paint--in their previous lives, one was a vintage white chair, and the other was a new brown one). The bookcase, the lamps, and the little blue table in front of the window were donated by our friends Martin and Jennie.  I got the military trunk on Craigslist for $50. We splurged on the framed Life magazine cover ($70) and the two chippy chairs ($30 each).  The blinds cost a total of $120 for six windows at Home Depot. All of the accessories (pillows, quilts, books, etc.) were culled from collections in our house, including framed photos by Doug. The floats hanging in the corner were $2 at a yard sale.

The dining room:

Doug got these shots of me posing with my adorable 22-year-old daughter Christine, who came down for the day to provide entertainment while we assembled a futon.  She also brought along the muscle to help Doug move in the boxes, which were pretty heavy.

The cottage-style futon was our huge splurge in this room.  It sells for $799 at LL Bean, which I brought down to $399 with rewards cards and coupons.  The slipcover and bolster pillows were another $250.  I already had the vintage kitchen table.  I bought the four chairs on Craiglist for $60 and spray painted them assorted pastel colors. I got the rug on Overstock.com for $120.   The blinds came to $100.  We already had all of the accessories.  For the floor, we simply (well, maybe not so simply) removed all of the nails and staples after we pulled up the carpet and then painted it with dark blue-grey porch paint.  Doug gets big points for repairing and adding trim to make the whole room look better.

The bathroom:

This was our cheapest upgrade, and we will do more later.  I painted the walls and ceiling, pulled up dirty linoleum, and painted the floor the same grey as the dining room.  We bought the sailboat wall plaques at a yard sale for $2 each and the shower curtain at Good Will for $4.  At Bed Bath & Beyond, we bought a toilet paper holder and floor-to-ceiling shower caddy for $20 each. We already had all of the towels and other accessories. It's not shown in the picture, but I also painted a hideous gold mirror and hung a blue ticking curtain over the vanity opening to replace gaping drawers.

After my hero Doug went home in his pickup truck, Christine and I stayed for a couple more hours.  We went to Walmart and bought some playing cards and board games.  We came back and ate lunch at the dining room table and then played a game on the trunk in the living room.

Now, it's truly a second home.

That Sinking Feeling

Doug and I pride ourselves on our ability to reuse, repurpose, and recycle, so when we bought our little beach cottage, our plan was to work with the kitchen as it was:

We knew it was bad--crooked cabinet doors, rotten wood, loose floor tiles, a vintage fridge that was rusting inside, drawers that were basically just boxes shoved into openings with no runners or stops....  The only thing good in the entire room was a brand-new miniature four-burner gas stove.

But we were still determined.  We had good-quality primer and paint from Sherwin Williams, and Doug is an awesome craftsman whose years as a research machinist taught him how to fix just about anything.

Our determination literally went down the drain, however, the day I cleaned the sink.

Or tried to.

I encountered a bumpy, rubbery surface every time I scrubbed.  Doug checked it out and solved the mystery. The previous owner had painted it.  Not with special sink spray paint.  Oh no.

HE PAINTED IT WITH LATEX AND A BRUSH!

So we started looking for a replacement sink and learned that size matters.  It wasn't possible to get one that would fit in the existing opening.

After a day or two of talking, we realized that the previous owner's idiocy was our wake-up call.  This kitchen was not salvageable, and there was still a dumpster in our front yard.  An hour later, most of the old kitchen was in the dumpster, and now the room looks like this:

Ironically enough, the sink is still there, as we needed a place to wash paint brushes while we worked on the other rooms. It's actually kind of nice because we don't have to worry about being neat.

And now Doug can design us a new, albeit tiny, kitchen with beadboard walls, a farmhouse table for a countertop, and a vintage porcelain sink that's actually still porcelain.

One thing is for sure--we won't design it with the fridge placed in front of the window.

Dumpster Day

Every junker/thrifter/DIYer knows what dumpster diving is, and most of us have done it at least once.

But this morning, Doug and I were on the other side of a dumpster--tossing things in.

We had settlement on our little beach cottage on Monday afternoon and headed down to the property as soon as the papers were signed--my little Honda loaded with cleaning supplies.

We knew the place was a mess, but we didn't realize just how MUCH of a mess until we dug in.  By the end of the day on Monday, we had a mountain of trash in our yard:

It was truly disgusting--moldy orange tweed carpet, box springs with stuffing spilling out, stained mattresses, bags of bedding with mouse droppings in the folds.... Yuck.

The previous owners even left their used toothbrushes hanging on the bathroom wall. There was fertilizer in the kitchen cabinets and a car jack under the bed.  

You would have thought these people ducked out in the middle of the night to evade the police.

But this morning, we finished gutting and started refurbishing.

Here is Doug, happy at the full dumpster on Day 2:

One of the items that made its way into the dumpster was this lovely kitchen cabinet.  The doors are held in place with duct tape because in true junker style, I asked Doug to remove the white porcelain knobs before we tossed the cabinet.  You never know when you might need some nice knobs.

With the carpet removed (and about 1,000 rusty staples pulled from the subfloor), this is what our future dining room looks like now:

It's on our painting agenda for Friday and Saturday.  I'm already envisioning our Union Jack table in there.

The dumpster leaves tomorrow, and we'll be glad to see it go.  But I totally understand how author Mary Kay Andrews felt when she bought her fixer-upper on Tybee Island in Georgia.  All she wanted for her birthday was a dumpster.

Mine was a housewarming present.  Welcome to Kitts Hummock.

The Thrill of the Hunt

Yesterday Doug and I went to one of our favorite Mexican restaurants for lunch.  We like it because we both love Mexican food and their food is good, but it doesn't hurt that the place is close to two Good Will stores that we don't get to visit very often.

As we were pulling into the parking lot of the first one, I said to Doug, "You know, one of my favorite things about shopping at Good Will is that you truly never know what you're going to find. I love that moment of excitement when we first walk in and start looking around."

Well, that moment happened literally a moment after we entered the store, when Doug spotted a vintage green glass carboy. For $3....

We also found a few things for the beach house, including a little wooden table, a quilt, two pots, a Pyrex mixing bowl, an almost new bagel toaster, and a red metal toolbox.

We actually would have gone home happy even if we had left the second GW empty-handed.

But we didn't.

Almost as soon as we got to store #2, Doug saw a nice braided rug (I am a sucker for nice braided rugs) and called me over to take a look.  The colors weren't quite right for the beach shack, but my mind immediately started wheeling and dealing between our current house and the beach place, and I was pretty sure I could figure out a switch that would work.

We paid for the rug ($15) and put it in the car--we were taking no chances on losing it.

Then the unthinkable happened.  I saw its big sister.  For $30.  And I saw that the tag had L.L. Bean Home on it.  And it was 100 percent wool.  We hoisted it into a shopping cart and awkwardly made our way through the store.

This is what it looks like in the living room of our real house:

The small one fits nicely in my sewing room, but since my 22-year-old daughter, Christine, is staying there for a few more days, I passed on taking a picture.  You probably wouldn't be able to see the rug anyway.

The best part of the day was sitting on the couch and admiring the rug after everything was in place.  Well, at least that was the best part until I measured the rugs and looked them up on L.L. Bean's website.

The smaller one (7x9) retails for $599, and the larger one (8x11) goes for $799.

We paid $45 for the pair.

And almost as good as finding out the rug prices was the compliment I got from Christine when she got home later in the evening and saw the rug. When she was a teenager, she used to say really bad things about my GW shopping addiction and the things I bought.

All she said last night was, "Mom, that rug looks beautiful."

Never Spray Paint a Lampshade

Like most DIY bloggers, I love to show off my successful projects, so I guess it's only fair that I also admit my failures.

Yesterday, Doug and I found a really cool old glass lamp in a thrift store for $3:

The top had a vintage-looking green ceramic knob, which reminded me of my vintage green table:

The shade was fabric with eight panels.  I immediately had visions of alternating pastels to match my four wood chairs--two each of lavender, light blue, yellow, and pink. Here is the before--I was so excited that I already had started taping it off with frog tape when I remembered to snap the picture:

And I was really proud of how well my taping worked:

Until I plugged the lamp in and turned it on:

The pink, blue, and lavender were OK--the light kind of flowed through them. But for some reason, the yellow didn't "take" evenly, and it looks all splotchy when the light shines through it.  I tried retaping and repainting just the two yellow panels, but it didn't get any better.

Doug thinks we can somehow rescue it with stencils or a backing to block the light from showing the imperfections.

I think it's time to move on and look for another shade.

Breaking Up Isn't Hard to Do

Breaking up isn't so bad when the divorce involves a set of ho-hum furniture.

I was recently looking for four chairs to paint in cottage pastels and use with a vintage kitchen table in the dining area of our "beach shack." My friend Carrie alerted me to a set of four chairs and a table on Craigslist for $60.  The chairs were cool with a criss-cross back, and they were really solid and sturdy.  So Doug and I bought the set, figuring that the chairs were probably worth $15 each, and we could always resell the table.  Here's what it looked like on the Craigslist ad (one chair wasn't in the picture):

I've since painted the chairs (one each yellow, light blue, pale pink, and lavendar), but I haven't taken good photos yet, so they'll be the subject of another post later.

In the meantime, we posted the table on Craigslist but didn't get any takers--July 4th probably isn't the best time to sell used furniture.  But that turned out to be a good thing because I saw this great table redo by Ashley on her blog, Domestic Imperfection, and realized our table had a Union Jack wood-grain pattern on the top just like Ashley's coffee table.

So we sanded down the top completely and roughed up the legs.  Then Doug taped off the design, and we applied mahogany stain for the "red" and walnut stain for the "blue," leaving the taped part for the "white."

 

Doug then added a piece of quarter-round molding to make the edges of the table sturdier, and I painted the molding, the legs, and the apron with some watered-down blue paint:

Finally, I finished the top with several coats of my leftover floor urethane.

Now, all we need is some chairs to go with it :-)

Cottage Bedroom

I saw these Pottery Barn pillows ($5 for both of them) at a yard sale a few weeks ago.  I didn't need them--or know what I was going to do with them--but who can pass up PB pillows for $2.50 each?  So I bought them.

The backs are flowered and fasten with fabric ties:

And now I know what I'm going to do with them.  They'll be perfect for our bed at the beach "cottage" when we get it done.

So I used them as inspiration for a quilt and hunted through my fabric supply for pieces that would go with them.  I cut out 42 11-inch squares a couple of weeks ago and decided to sew today, since it was too hot to do anything else.

Here's the finished product set up on our bed at home just for the photo shoot:

 I put a light blue and white striped border around three sides:

and a yellow check piece at the top, with the blue and white backing sheet rolled over to make a finished edge, and I tied the layers together with blue yarn that I already had:

The only thing I bought, besides the 2 pillows, was the batting for the quilt, which was $11.49 with my 50% coupon for JoAnn Fabric.

We measured the space for the bed when we went back to visit our little place now that we have a signed contract in place, and we discovered that there is room for only a double bed.  But with these ice blue flannel sheets I just ordered on sale at LL Bean, I think it will be really cozy:

We have lots of painting to do first, as this is what the bedroom looks like now:

Gross.  But I can't wait to get started.