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Steffi Strips!

Last Saturday it was snowing, so we decided to make an amateur video of Steffi stripping! ENJOY!

[jwplayer mediaid=”2615″]

Our trusted paint stripping technique starts with the heat gun to remove the easy stuff. We then use a chemical stripper to get rid of the hard parts and the detail. Lastly, we sand the remaining stain off with 180 grit sandpaper. It’s a pretty involved process (that looks easy in the video), but the results are worth all the effort.

The music is by Jack Tuttle. He has some wonderful MP3s on his website, and he even gives lessons if you are in the San Francisco area. His website is www.jacktuttle.com. Thanks Jack!

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Some Visible Progress

Lately Patrick and I have had the problem of project skipping. I’m sure everyone’s pretty familiar with this…you start one thing, get fed up or bored with it and move onto the next, etc. Since we were working for months on the kitchen built-in butler’s pantry and got stuck and fed up with it we started various other things. One of those projects has been removing paint from the built-in in the bathroom. Another one was the plan to paint our bedroom. Except for the kitchen and bathroom (which were the main rooms that were re-done) the rest of the house is still a sterile and dull white. We had received a $10 off coupon from Lowe’s, so we thought we’d take the opportunity to buy the paint. We went there on December 31st only to realize the coupon had expired on the 30th, haha. We wanted to proceed with the project anyway and went ahead and bought some paint.

Painting always seems like such a quick and easy thing to do, but it wasn’t until we got to doing it that we realized that it wasn’t so quick and easy after all. Moving all the heavy and bulky furniture, taping off corners, wiping the dust off the walls, making sure you don’t paint the ceiling…it all takes time. In the end it took us a week to finish it. We immediately got used to the painted room and realized how much it helps to make our house feel like a home. The white paint just has that generic renter’s feel, so adding the splash of color was definitely what the room needed. Plus painting it actually made us feel like we’re making progress! The project skipping of course isn’t helping with getting anything done. But the other thing is that the other projects are mostly paint removal, which is a very time consuming task. With the cases of the butler’s pantry and the bathroom built-in we’re just removing paint to put a fresh coast of paint back on, so to outsiders they probably don’t even know the difference or that we’ve been spending 3 months working on one piece of furniture! It’s a little frustrating, but hopefully in the end it’ll make all the difference. In the living and dining room, where we intend to remove the paint and stain the wood, people (and us too) will truly be able to tell that work has been done.

A last glance of the white walls, taped off with blue tape…

Painting bedroom

And then the painted room…

Painted bedroom

Painted bedroom

Painted bedroom

The wall above the bed is still a bit bare, but we’ll hang up photos soon. We just have so many we haven’t been able to decide what to put up yet!

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Kitchen Built-in Drawer Pulls

Last week we installed the drawer pulls on the new kitchen cabinets, so this week seemed the appropriate time to also install the drawer pulls on the old built-in. As with most things in this 90-year old house that included some (or a lot of?) prep work…

Step 1: Remove X layers of paint and sand it down.

Butler's Pantry Drawer

Step 2: Put on fresh paint.

Butler's Pantry Drawer

Step 3: Attach pulls and put drawers back in built-in – ahhhhh, isn’t it beautiful!

Butler's Pantry Drawer

I won’t show the rest of the built-in because we really haven’t made any other progress on it. As other old house homeowners will know these little project go one itty bitty step at a time. Next up should be the bottom doors. We’ve already removed paint a little while ago and sanded one of them the other day. We’ll see when we get them done and back on the built-in!

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Finally Some Bathroom Work

I feel like we finally made far enough progress with the bathroom to be able to show it. It’s been a slow process with all the prep work, but we’re very happy with how our results look.

Part of the prep work consisted of taking the paint off the detail work from the medicine cabinet mirror. (When we relocated the medicine cabinet the only original piece we kept was the actual mirror, hence why it needed the most prep work.) It took me a good 3 days to try and get in those grooves and everything. I was able to take the paint in the grooves off to a point that felt satisfying enough – it is a 90 year-old mirror after all, so if it shows a little sign of age it isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Medicine cabinet

The inside of the medicine cabinet all painted….

Medicine cabinet

…and the exterior of the medicine cabinet all painted. Don’t pay too close attention to the missing blue paint between the medicine cabinet and the lights, teehee. We need to take off the light to do that and have been avoiding the work. (Same goes for behind the toilet and behind the sink, oopsies.)

Medicine cabinet

The other painting job we had worked on was the base molding. And finally after 4.5 months of living in the house we have a toilet paper holder and the hand and body towel bars! The body towel bar was tricky because the only space it would actually fit was above the toilet. Not the best place in the world, but pretty much our only option. Every now and then I still catch myself reaching for the toilet paper on the windowsill…only to realize that it’s not located there anymore!

Medicine cabinet

Unfortunately the other view is not quite as finished. We haven’t painted the door molding or the base molding because we want to finish removing the paint from the built-in before we get to putting it back on.

Linen closet

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In and Around the House

So there’s been a few happenings in the last week…

Oh my, look how much our lavender has grown since we planted it! Juuuust kidding. When we planted the three little lavender plants they were quite pathetic looking already, but at least they were green and alive looking (See photo). Within a week all three plants shriveled up even more and turned into brown leafed and dead looking plants. Maybe we were a little fast with our decision, but we decided to tear them out and replaced them with some grown plants that we purchased at a local garden center. The one on the left is called “sweet” lavender, the one on the right is called “hidcote” lavender. Peeking in on the left is also some “red fountain grass” that we planted.

Lavendar

Atlanta has had a drought (already, and it’s not even summer yet!) with some 10 inch rainwater deficit. We haven’t had a good downpour since we started planting. We knew that there was some flooding in the area by the back steps because when the laundry extension was built they did not bother to calculate in the drain run that was going along the house. So now the water accumulates in a giant puddle (actually it looks close to a pond with the weeds in there!), including in our new flower bed. Everywhere I have read about lavender it says that the plants like very rough conditions, which includes dry soil and full on sun. With the standing water after a downpour I’m a little scared the lavender won’t be very happy in that place – I guess we’ll have to see how it grows or doesn’t.

Puddle

On the other side of the stairs we recently dug up the lost drain that is now blocked by the laundry addition. With the soil gone, or perhaps we just haven’t paid as much attention before when it poured, there seems to be quite a lake. The itty bitty green plant in the middle is a “weigela carnaval” that we planted there in hopes for it to grow large and hide our monster of an A/C unit.

Weigela

While we’re busy enough trying to keep up with our own house and garden we have also had to tackle the neighbor’s yard. A while ago it started off with one kudzu plant starting to creep up the side of their house. It was actually quite crazy to watch because I was able to literally count it going up one brick a day. Eventually the lawn mowing service came out and cut it down. But since then they haven’t come back and the lonely kudzu plant amidst the grass has turned into some grass plants amidst a kudzu field. And those little buggers just loooove to grow onto our driveway. And over our backyard fence for that matter. Since they say kudzu grows up to a foot a day (!) I have been going out there every few days to cut the plants that started coming onto our side. It’s really quite annoying.

Kudzu

So the other day we had some excitement…we kept hearing helicopters over our house. Finally we were curious enough and walked outside to see 2 news choppers hovering right above our house. In the evening news we found out there had been some car chase that ended in a street a block over from our house.

Helicopter

The gas company has come out and made a mess of our street. They’re upgrading the gas lines in our neighborhood from 5 lbs. to 57 lbs. of pressure or something crazy like that. This is where they dug up the gas line coming to our house…a couple hours later it was all covered up with dirt again.

Gas line replacement

When they changed the pipes at the street they also had to come to the gas meters at the house to upgrade the pipes and some converter there. That included a bright yellow pipe that we weren’t very happy about. After complaining to the workers they told us they would come and paint the yellow pipe. We were about to give up hope when they started working further down the street, but to our surprise we found the pipe painted two days later.

Gas line replacement

And last, but not least, we have also done some work inside the house! We finally got around to painting the window in the bathroom and a couple of days later the wainscoting. The prep work probably took longer than the actual painting itself. All that caulking and nail hole filling and sanding and refilling nail holes and re-sanding takes up a lot of time. Now we just have to finish painting the base board, which we waited on because we hadn’t caulked that part. It definitely makes a difference in how the bathroom feels.

Bathroom painting

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