Kitchen plans

Last night we picked colors and materials for our kitchen re-do, and the next step is to schedule meetings with contractors for estimates.  We waffled on this project for a year, and it’s true that once my husband finishes his degree program in two years we may be moving to an entirely different city, but our cabinetry sucks (it’s el cheapo quality), the laminate is on the wrong kind of wood next to the sink so it’s swollen from moisture, the layout isn’t great and the lighting is awkward.  Also, we don’t have room to store things the way we want to.  So we are going ahead with a re-do.  If we do move, maybe it will raise the price we can get for the house when we sell it.

We’re moving the door from the dining room over a bit, which will allow some storage changes in both the kitchen and the dining room.  We’re adding a pass-through, putting a “peninsula” in, moving the fridge to a different wall, and adding more cabinetry.  We’re scootching the stove over a bit, so we can have countertop on both sides of the stove.  We’re adding manufactured quartz counters around the sink and stove, and butcher block on the peninsula.  We’re raising the microwave oven off the counter, putting cork-backed linoleum on the floor, and re-doing all the lighting with LED’s.  The door to the basement will be re-hung to open from the other side of the frame.  The walls will be painted my favorite color, yellow, with blue-gray baseboards and door trim.  The quartz counters have been chosen so they won’t show coffee splashes:

We’re keeping all our major appliances, since we have bought them all since we moved in.  The original stove had burners that didn’t light and seemed to take an hour to boil water for pasta, so we replaced that first, with almost the same model my parents have.  Then we replaced the aged dishwasher after the original kept getting “errors” and quitting mid-cycle.  Most recently we replaced the refrigerator, which failed to keep ice cream bars frozen, to my intense disappointment one day.  It is really hard to buy a decent-sized fridge without an automatic ice maker and water filter option, but we found one.

Yes, we know it will be a major pain to be without a kitchen from when we take the old stuff apart to when we get the new one completed.  But we are willing to go through the suffering.  Yes, we know these things typically take longer than planned.  We have a budget and we are willing to deal with the mess.  Still, wish us luck!  I’m sure we will need it!

The Reveal

For a few years I watched a lot of TLC’s Trading Spaces, with host Paige Davis.  Each show featured neighbor couples trading houses for a couple of days, and with the aid of a designer and a carpenter (such as Ty Pennington) completely re-doing a room in their neighbors’ home.  At the end of the show, the homeowners would return to their own houses, and there would be a big moment when they had to uncover their eyes in the refinished room.  Eyes would bug out, some people cried, some were horrified but most were delighted.

A high point for me happened when one of my students was on Trading Spaces: Family (where families with kids are the participants, as opposed to couples) hosted by Joe Farrell.  I still have that episode on VHS, I believe.

Well, now that we have our first guest staying in our new guest room, I am ready to reveal to you the redesigned room.  This is the room that used to be intensely blue, the one where I scraped the popcorn ceiling over the summer.

We planned the room around the quilt my grandmother quilted, so the color of the walls actually comes from a color in tiny details in the dark green bits in the quilt.  You can’t see that color in the quilt in these photos.  However, the color also provides a link to the bedding, which is from IKEA (as is the EXPEDIT room dividing bookcase.)  We moved the futon up from the basement, where it has been replaced by beanbags.

Here we go:

So, I still need to hem the curtains, and hang artwork (some of which still needs to be framed), but there you go!  Revealed!

PS: the things on the windowsill are veggie seeds being started indoors.

Curtains, DIY

I spent last weekend sewing.  My sewing machine hasn’t seen this much use since the summer the National Constitution Center opened.  That year my dance group was performing as part of the opening festivities around July 4 and we needed to be in authentic colonial garb.  You can see another of our historical-interpretation performances here and here.  In a hurry, I made my own colonial-style ladies’ jacket (I already had a shift, skirt, and apron, but I’d been wearing them with a more modern lace-up vest with grommets—uncool for colonial re-enacting).  I’m wearing the colonial jacket in the second video linked above ,but I’m not in the first video.

Now my pins…they have NEVER seen so much use.  I spent way more time pinning than I did sewing, and I used a LOT of pins!

Anyway, the weekend’s first projects were hemming pants so I won’t step on and consequently wear out the ends of the legs, and hemming my colonial skirt so (a) I don’t trip on it in performances and (b) I don’t have to roll the waist into a big lump around my middle.  Perhaps you who haven’t met me are now figuring out that I am short.  Yep!  And while I know I won’t be one of the cool kids now that I won’t wear out the end of my pants legs, that is OK seeing as I am not a kid, and I am a science nerd, so I am not expected to look cool.  Professional, that’s the word the school administration and the union both use when talking about how teachers dress.  We don’t have to wear ties, but we have to look professional!

The much bigger (and more time-consuming) project was the curtains of the title above, which I started making a little under a year ago for my office.  I went curtain-shopping, and the curtains you can buy in Bed Bath and Beyond are generally ugly or in unsuitable colors to go in a yellow-painted room, and the ones you can buy at Target generally have only low odd numbers of curtains available.  You can buy one, or three, but not four (the right amount for two windows).  At least, this is true of the curtains available in the store.  Online, there may be more options, but you have to buy them without touching them or seeing the colors in person.  With two stores struck out, I didn’t have the enthusiasm to continue my search at K-Mart or WalMart.

So, my only option was to go the do-it-yourself route.  I measured my windows (happily, both are the same size even if they are at different heights), bought café rods and put them up, and planned my project.   I needed to allow a one-inch space for the curtain rod, I wanted some extra fabric at the top, I wanted the hems just above the stool (the part most people call the sill, but which our buyer’s agent explained to us isn’t when he was helping us buy our house), and I wanted the curtains to look full even when all the way closed.  I also wanted  reasonable light-blockage, just in case.

I chose two fabrics and bought enough of each for two curtains, so I could make them striped.  I bought enough of the lightest muslin I could find to make four curtains.  That would be the liner that would help block more light, or that I could close separately for privacy while still letting some light in.  First, I cut the front fabrics to the appropriate lengths, and sewed them together in four-stripe panels.  I decided which end was the top end and made sure I had two sets with the greenish fabric in the center of the window, and the blue and white print on the outside edges.

Then I waited about 10 or 11 months before doing anything more.  The panels were flung over the rods in the meantime, looking unfinished and tacky.

The next step was to attach the liner at the top (leaving it unattached at the bottom).  This would enable me to hang both the curtain and liner as one piece, but they would still hand as separate pieces.  I had a very long piece of muslin, so I attached the front panels one at a time onto ironed segments of my liner, cut it at the appropriate length, and then pinned the next one on.  I folded back and pinned the edges, for finishing in the next step.  Then, an easy straight seam on each.  Heck, all the seams in this project were easy, straight seams.  Yay!

Next, finishing the edges.  the liners got wide edge-hems, and the curtains got narrow ones.

Here is the double line of stitching to create the tube to stick the curtain rod through:

And then, hemming the curtain fronts with a 1.5-inch hem, and the liners with a 2-inch hem, so they wouldn’t show under the fronts.

Installation involved sticking the large end of the rod through both curtains, before inserting the smaller end into the larger end, putting up the rod, and re-distributing the fabric.

Extra muslin and some binder clips are acting as curtain ties until I decide curtain ties are a project worth working on!

How to remove “popcorn” ceiling

When we first looked at the house we now live in, we looked up at the ceiling and were a little taken aback by the sparkles.  There are little flakes of glitter embedded in that popcorn-looking texture coating that can be blown onto ceilings to hide flaws.  And this stuff was in the living room, dining room, stairwell, upstairs hallway, and two of the upstairs bedrooms.  Happily, it was not in the master bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, or the basement.

Well, we don’t like the “popcorn” ceiling effect, nor are we fond of the sparkles.  So as we re-shape the rooms of the house (not literally re-shaping) to our liking, the ceiling texture is going.

Last summer my diligent and strong husband scraped the “popcorn” coating off the room that used to be our pink-painted guest bedroom, painted the ceiling white and the walls yellow, made the floor nicer, and then I moved all my office stuff into it.  Then we took all of his computer and game and stereo and TV equipment and paraphernalia from “the blue room” and moved it to the finished basement.

So this summer I am transforming “the blue room” into a new guest bedroom.

Step one: remove all the furniture.  Check.

Step two: put a tarp on the floor to catch most of the stuff I’ll be removing from the ceiling.  Check.

Step three: dress sensibly for the work at hand:  goggles, face mask to keep out particulates (no fumes or asbestos here, so a particulate mask is fine), hat, work shirt, bandanna so my hair is not really gross afterward.  Check.

Step four: start scraping.
ummm….OK, this was arduous, awkward, painful, and exhausting.  I managed to work for about 45 minutes, almost finishing the part where the ceiling is bent against the roof.  You can’t tell from the photo below, but in the right-hand corner I did not scrape all the way down to the underlying surface.  There is still a layer of plaster-like stuff that I just could not muster the energy to do.  I showered and fell asleep.  My arms were soooo tired!

Day 2:
Step five: go to Home Depot for a better scraper than my little flexible spatula.  This was the best move I made in this whole process.  I found a tool specifically made for scraping “popcorn” texture off ceilings.  It has a handle you can attach a pole to, and you can attach a bag to collect the scrapings.  On the box, the manufacturer recommended also buying a solution to spray on the ceiling before scraping, to make it easier.

Unfortunately, no solution was available for sale.  I asked one of the helpful Home Depot employees, and he said if it isn’t there, we don’t have any.  He also said his nephew just sprayed water on a “popcorn” ceiling before scraping it, while he personally had simply covered one up with eighth-inch wallboard.  Well, I am not about to try installing wallboard on a ceiling, so I bought the big scraper, an additional (stiffer) small scraper for the edges and a wire brush for intractable bits, and came home to scrape.

Here’s my stuff: on the far right is my little flexible scraper that I wasn’t having fun with on day one.

Step six: get the ceiling wet.  Check.
For this, I used a pressure-sprayer that I had originally gotten for garden use.  It’s useful for cleaning bugs and spiderwebs out of my potted plants before bringing them in for the winter.  And it is also useful for spraying water on a “popcorn” ceiling.  It worked great!

Step seven: install bag and pole on big scraper, and scrape.  Check.
The fun part of this is that even with the bag on, there is still a way for goopy plaster ceiling texture to fall on your head.  Or goggles.  Or arms.  Which it did.  Plus, that bag gets pretty heavy pretty quickly, so this is easier than day one, but still not a piece of cake.  And, due to the ceiling not being a planar surface and the saturation of the texture material being variable, there is still the necessity of getting up close and personal with the little scrapers.

Step eight: Get on the ladder, scrape by hand, get off the ladder and move it over half a meter, then repeat.  Check.
Steps seven and eight got repeated several times, as I didn’t know how much of the ceiling was reasonable to soak at once.  When there was about a quarter of the room still to go, I called it quits for the day.  I was messy (pardon the fuzzy photo, I was having some difficulty figuring out the auto-shoot) and tired.  But look how far I got!

So, today, Sunday, was day 3.  I repeated steps seven and eight three more times after moving my tarp (it is not quite the size of the room, just a little smaller), and finished!  Yay!

This week I’ll wipe down the ceiling with a wet sponge to get any dust I left behind, patch the holes and cracks in the ceiling, prepare the walls for painting, paint the ceiling, and put the light back up before finally painting the walls.  After that’s all done, I can think about the floor!  And after that, furniture!