We Love Cliff May!! (he designed our house)

2011-11-19T10:20:00.001-08:00

Here are some pictures of Liam's new room. We'll have furniture in there ASAP!!!! Here's a photo of the little guy:

It's been a while

2011-11-19T10:17:00.000-08:00

We've obviously fallen behind on our updating because we decided to have a baby! We had a mad rush to finish up the master bedroom and bathroom before he was born and are now putting the finishing touches on his room and the guest room (now that he's 6 months old!).

Here are some pics of the master bathroom. We're still missing doors and window trim, but it's pretty close.

Here are some photos of the master bedroom before we moved a bunch of furniture in. We replaced the sliders (that never slid) with awning windows, made the bathroom bigger by taking out one of the closets, replacing it with what was a hall closet I think, and we rebuilt the floor-to-ceiling windows and put in a new door from TruStile.

And there's a picture from our entryway. I'll post pics of the empty but nearly complete nursery shortly!

Master Bedroom

2009-09-23T17:38:00.000-07:00

It's been gutted (almost) and the framing's almost done although I didn't get a picture of that yet. We're putting in our awning windows this weekend or next and really soon, we'll be rebuilding those floor to ceiling windows so they'll look very similar, but they'll be insulated so they won't ice over in the winter! We've got so many projects going on right now and I want them all done before it gets cold!

New Mantle!

2009-04-19T18:28:00.000-07:00

We just finished the mantle for the fireplace, we're both excited to have something more than a brick ledge for a mantle. The mantle was made from baltic birch plywood and hangs off the existing brick ledge.

The mantle before...

And after...

Concrete Countertops (and running water)

2009-01-25T20:07:00.001-08:00

We installed the two largest pieces of concrete countertops today and hooked up our new faucet and sink drain!

We're very excited. We can now fill up containers taller than 4 inches without using the bathtub and within the next week we hope to have the dishwasher hooked up as well.

The concrete countertops turned out very well. Zack wasn't too excited about the front edges, but I don't mind them. I think it looks just like a concrete countertop should. The edge around the sink will need an aluminum closure strip to hide that edge and to provide an easy joint to caulk.

Kitchen Still Moving Slowly

2008-12-08T13:18:00.000-08:00

We have pendants (but only two lightbulbs)! For the first time, we both really like the kitchen because it's starting to actually look like one!

We will be pouring the concrete countertops next weekend. The island countertop will be laminate with the exposed plywood edges. We're using this laminate:

And someday, we hope to have this Electrolux range:

The Story of the Floor

2008-09-04T18:56:00.001-07:00

We have a beautiful living room and kitchen -and corner bedroom- which are not quite yet done (ceiling, in particular) but we love them. The floors are natural and they have a water-based polyurethane on them which I highly recommend. However, I must tell you though you would never know, that these floors were stained Minwax Jacobean three times before they got to stay natural. The first time, we hadn't done a good job sanding and the stain didn't adhere so we sanded it off. The second time we stained it, the first coat of Super Fast Drying Minwax Polyurethane didn't dry for a week. It turns out we maybe didn't wipe up all of the stain very well and the polyurethane wasn't sticking to it. So we sanded it off and did it again but took hours to carefully wipe up all of the excess stain immediately so that there was no residue at all on the floors when we put down Minwax Fast Drying Polyurethane. Three days later it was wet so we took it off again, afraid if it wasn't adhering to our floor that it wouldn't last. We're happy now and will never use Minwax again.

Here's a shot of our fireplace. It still needs a mantle and wood around the base of the hearth, but it looks so much better than it used to. I put a before picture up just to compare.

And just for fun, we got some cool new dining room chairs...

And having nothing to do with our house...

2008-07-24T13:26:00.000-07:00

I bought a bike! I hope to replace my usual red speedy ride with this new red one for my 2.5 mile daily commute.

(And no that is not my white picket fence.)

Summer Progress

2008-07-24T07:41:00.000-07:00

I guess it's been a while since I've updated, but we've been very busy and we just have so much going on, it goes so slowly. The date is 8-6-08 for the purchasing of the cabinets and living room furniture!!! So the floors need to be refinished the weekend before that so everything else has to be done this weekend in order for that to happen. We still have to finish putting up the ceiling, install the new wood floor, sand some mud, paint the windows and structure, paint all of the walls and the ceiling touch up coat among a few other things. So here's the photos from the last couple of weeks.

We poured a concrete hearth

We started installing new wood floor for the kitchen

We started painting

2008-05-27T18:11:00.000-07:00

So we have installed some of our ceiling which looks GREAT! We've installed our window, our new exhaust fan and the drywall! We got a lot done this month. It's finally starting to show!

Lazy Dog Days

2008-05-12T20:07:00.000-07:00

Been doing a lot of small things around the house. After this weekend, there should be great progress to show. This weekend, we're installing some ceiling and we're replacing the kitchen window so it will be an operable awning window and we will have cross-ventilation for the first time!!

The good news is that on Saturday we got a Boston Terrier of questionable age named Midas. He's everything we wanted in a Boston: he's excited and energetic when it's time to go out and he's a power napper to rival our cats when we're just hanging out.

An Update at Long Last

2008-04-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

We've moved very slowly this winter, but we did get a new furnace; we wired, insulated and drywalled our living room and hallway; and just last weekend, we ripped out our kitchen cabinets. We'll take out the drywall and tile floor this weekend.

before after

So the kitchen isn't quite to the looking better stage yet, but it will be soon hopefully.

I was really hoping to find some old photographs or stashes of cold hard cash while we ripped out the cabinets, but we found something cool anyway. On the floor under the cabinets was a brochure from the builder of the home. It has yellowed and suffered a little bit of termite damage from the termite infestation years of long ago, but it's still mostly readable and very enjoyable as it advertises a "magazine cover home designed by Cliff May" built by Stanley Cowherd Company and "plastic topped mahogany cabinets" (I think ours got skimped on that part -- it was pretty ordinary masonite and plywood).

So it's 5 degrees outside and our furnace broke!! You have to admit, that's pretty amazing timing on it's part.

2008-01-19T21:19:00.001-08:00

We could get it fixed for more than we want to spend on an old bottom-of-the line furnace, but we thought it would be money better spent on getting a more efficient model. We'd really love a heat pump, but that just may be too pricey. Any ideas?

Oh, Wait! Our Living Room Ceiling is Gone!

2008-01-02T07:27:00.000-08:00

So I just created this post to tell the world that my husband had a good idea. Now, our living room ceiling is gone and we certainly didn't rip it out without thinking how on earth we were going to replace it. We were prepared to install drywall but we were afraid that with ceilings like we have that are so visible and get lots of light bouncing off of them that if we didn't do the drywall just right, it would be so obvious that we didn't know what we were doing. Since we're completely redoing the living room/kitchen this year, we can't really afford to hire it out. So, that's when my husband mentioned that we could cover the rafters in simple tongue and groove wood paneling and just paint it. Well, we're pros at woodworking and surprisingly, we've found that it's cheaper than hiring out the drywall work. I thought this was a very good solution. So many Cliff Mays have the exposed rafters and decking. We obviously can't have that as it isn't the way our house was designed, but this is the next best thing really. We plan to do it for all of our ceilings when the time comes.

Half of our living room ceiling is gone!!

2007-12-31T13:05:00.000-08:00

We tore down the drywall and Kimsul insulation in half of our living room this weekend! I can't express how refreshing it is to know it's out of the house and won't ever come back!! That insulation reeked and because it disintegrated as it fell to the ground, it transformed into a dust storm which overtook our house so the smell still lingers (as does the other half of the ceiling).

The tearing down was most definitely the easy part. It's the picking up the dusty trash and the vacuuming and the dragging of the contractor bags to the garage that kills. The insulating goes quickly too.

Laundry

2007-12-17T08:36:00.001-08:00

Who would have thought a laundry room would be so difficult? Considering that all of our return air runs around the space, the electrical panel is in there, the entire floor had to be replaced, the plumbing had to be done, the gas lines had to be removed from the old dryer, the furnace vent stack is in the corner and had to be replaced and framed around and all the ethernet was run from the bedrooms to the laundry room for us to put our hub in there and it has all new electrical, I'd say I'm pretty proud we got it done in 9 months. I can't believe it's been that long!! It's still not quite done, but will be in the next couple of days. We need to finish installing the base and need to create a dryer vent. We found out that there was none before, it was just vented with a flexible pipe to the crawlspace. Thankfully, I've got just the spot for the new vent. But as soon as that's done, we're in the laundry business!! When the final touches are done, we'll be 1/4 or 1/3 of the way through our remodel. Living room and kitchen are next!!

Progress photos

2007-11-08T07:55:00.000-08:00

I have all of the photos of our house before we bought it and what we've done since - through last week on Flikr. Please check it out. http://flickr.com/photos/19011594@N02/

Condensation

2007-10-26T08:09:00.000-07:00

So we have a problem. A huge problem. The 7 1/4" of space above our ceilings is wet, wet, wet and no amount of ventilation can fix it. I'm thinking we're going to have to rip down the wet, moldy drywall and have it filled with foam insulation. This is something unexpected. We originally thought a ridge vent would do it, but there's just not enough air movement, especially once we add any sort of insulation and I don't think it'll work. Otherwise, we demolished our kitchen island. I will post pictures soon.

The beginning

2007-07-24T07:44:00.000-07:00

Yes, my husband and I own the Cliff May rancho pictured on KCmodern.com's driving tour. This poor, 53-year-old beat-up beauty was forclosed and turned over to HUD. We fell in love when we didn't have much in our bank account and then found out that we didn't win the house after all because we had missed HUD's bidding period. I don't know whether we willed it to be so, but somehow we weren't all that surprised to find that the winning bidder's deal fell through. We were able to submit an offer afterward and won it!!! Since then, we've pretty much been broke. Thus begins the love/hate relationship that exists between us and our dwelling.