Renovating Our Tiny Bathroom

Right, so I’m mostly going to ignore the fact that I haven’t posted anything since the spring. (Hey, I’ve been busy.) I suspect I’ll just take the summer off from the blog from now on. May as well work on the house while the weather is warm.

So when I left things, I’d explained that we couldn’t officially move in to the master bedroom until we tackled the mini en suite bathroom. Here’s why:

Gross, no? Since the winterization people didn’t get into the house until after the pipes had already frozen and cracked, the antifreeze just leaked out onto the already skeezy-looking linoleum floor, staining it a lovely shade of purple. Despite having two other toilets with cracked tanks, this one survived – although the plumbing itself wasn’t up to code (vent? we don’t need no stinking vents…). So we had the plumber help us get things functional.

He removed the toilet to make sure everything was vented and seated properly, then plopped it back down again. He re-plumbed the lines and drains to the tub and sink, replacing the cracked copper pipe with new braided stainless steel lines. A big improvement, since it meant we now had a functional bathroom to use, but it didn’t do anything for visual appeal.

We didn’t want to do a complete bathroom remodel for several reasons – and they all pretty much stem from size. This bathroom is tiny, barely big enough for a tub, sink, toilet and one person. I think it was added to the house during its bed-and-breakfast days, and the objective was economy of space & money: carve out a functional bathroom for the lowest cost with minimal impact to the adjacent bedroom. The result was pretty awkward.

We determined that our ultimate goal was to rework this space entirely, tearing down walls and converting the entire bedroom/bathroom space into a nice master suite: big bathroom, walk-in closet and laundry. Awesome. But we want to do things right, not cheap – so we decided to wait on the whole remodel until we could afford it. In the meantime, we just needed to make this space less gross. That meant a little DIY plumbing to spruce things up – I’ll show details in my next post.

Hijacked Blog! (And how working outside is awesome)

Hullo! I’ve just hijacked this blog and added myself as a contributor.  I’m The Wife. I see your regular writer is working on a really lovely post about our itty-bitty bathroom, but in the meanwhile, I had some cents I wanted to add.

All summer, folks have been asking us “how is work coming on the house?” and I’m flummoxed about how to answer them. The answer is usually, “Oh, well, y’know, the weather’s been so beautiful we’ve mostly been working on the yard.” Which just doesn’t sound so impressive when you’re working on a house that has holes in the floors/walls/ceilings, cracks in the walls/ceilings/toilets, and is still missing some rather vital windows/paint/plumbing. But we’ve been busy. So this is a post all about what we’ve really been doing this summer.

In March, I planted my seedlings indoors. There was no actual space for a vegetable garden, but I was sure that just as soon as the glaciers melted, I could find some cranny somewhere to plant my peas and squashes. Then Dustin came to my rescue and promised to build me some garden boxes to put in the front yard. We picked up lumber at the local hardware store, and before you know it (well, actually it was July…) I had a beautiful garden box! (Don’t let the simplicity of this declaration fool you: accomplishing this fine box required three weeks of measuring, shopping, sawing, painting, assembling, digging, and installing.)

My poor seedlings were suffocating in their itty-bitty pots, so I planted them that fine first week of July (along with some half-dead petunias I picked up cheap at Lowes) and by September 19th, I had harvested my very first zucchini. The swiss chard faired a little better – I got four one-pound bunches of it before the deer chewed the plants down to nubs. Now, on October 3, I’ve almost got enough regrown to get one more bunch before it freezes. My basil has gone wild, and I’ve already got big plans for next year when there’ll be a matching box on the other side.

(Alas, I took this picture on October 20, so the garden inside the box is a bit past prime. The deer ate all the rest of the chard, the basil got pulled up and taken inside for pesto two days ago before the first heavy frost, and said frost killed off most of the zucchini leaves. Oh well - you get the idea.)

In order to install the box, we had to clear out the existing vegetation. That included a load of daffodils (easy to relocate), an ancient rose plant (less easy to relocate), some kind of flowering bush (there was a LOT of hacking with a shovel before it got moved to the back yard, more or less still alive), and approximately one zillion rocks. That left a big gaping maw under the deck which we’ve since covered with criss-cross lattice.

(The Zillion Rocks (and the neighbor's garbage can). Right after we repair the retaining wall, I'm gonna turn this into a rock garden. Really.)

Do you have any idea how hard it is to paint lattice? What a pain. We’ve painted three sheets to date, which collectively took up about 5 weekends of work days. As of yesterday, we have two sheets hung, which covers almost all of the front side of the house. Here’s the rest:

(We'll get one more sheet hung before it snows, I bet.)

While I was moving plants to make way for my box, I also took a big pair of scissors to the lilac bushes around the house which, while absolutely wonderful plants (according to me), had taken over the yard. One, which was blocking my stained glass windows, got sawed down to stubs. It has recovered just fine. Not sure if it’ll flower next spring, though.

(See? Look how happy it is three months later. Clearly my photography skills need work, though.)

(And this is what became of the rest of the lilac bush. Also, the two trees that were growing in the front planters. Getting rid of this much tree leftovers is harder than you'd think.)

While in painting mode, Dustin completely repainted the front porch and stairs, which hadn’t fared so well through the winter. He even added the gritty stuff to help the mailman not fall on his nose.

(The cat, appreciating the nice new gritty-painted porch.)

In less-grand-but-also-important accomplishment news:

I pulled six million dandelions out of the lawn by hand because we don’t want to kill the clover with spray,

Dustin seeded a new lawn in the gaping holes left by the evacuation of six million dandelions,

I planted my Mystery Wedding Fruit tree (and then caged it in because the deer out here are vicious),

(I hope the cage will also protect it a bit from this winter's glaciers.)

(Also we planted this grape vine, a raspberry, some strawberries, and various flowers. Yes, I know that looks like a rose and not a grape - the rose mysteriously showed up at the beginning of August. The grape is cowering below it.)

Dustin scooped all the dirt off the brick patio in the side, revealing some rather odd lumps. We’re going to have to relay most of this eventually,

(And all the dirt he scraped up went into my garden box out front - handy!)

I hung a laundry line,

(Hey, it's the best I can do for now.)

We got a boundary survey done to figure out which of the two crumbling retaining walls was our problem. Turns out it’s the one below the rock-garden-to-be (see rather uninformative picture above).

Also this summer we took trips to Yellowstone, Denver, and Texas. Considering that, I’ve got to say that we’re pretty much amazing for getting so much done. And now we have an incredible Indian Summer, so any new progress for the next month will hopefully continue to involve plants and all other manner of wonderful outdoor things. The holey/cracked/leaky/ugly inside projects can wait until it snows.

Shiny (Happy) Floors

My glorious return to blogging is looking good – two posts in the same week! Aside from house work, my work work has been out of control lately. Good thing we’re finally hiring more help. I’m waaaay behind on my laundry.

So, a lot of blogging catch-up to do. Last time I documented any house progress, we were still holed up in the attic. At that point, we were just happy to get the holes in our basement (mostly) sealed up with real windows. Alas, we don’t spend much time in the musty moldy basement, so we thought we’d work on more habitable parts of the house.

Our goal had always been to move into a second-floor bedroom. We’ve always suspected that the front bedroom – immediately at the top of the stairs – was probably the master bedroom. Or, perhaps more accurately, the gentleman’s bedroom. The stained glass above the picture window seems a little girly (see the blog header above), but I don’t suppose Victorian design sense and gender paradigms were the same as they are now. Besides, it’s connected to the office by a small pocket door. Sounds circa 1899 manly to me.

The last remaining factor preventing us from moving down there were the floors. The hardwood itself (fir, actually, for you purists) was in decent shape, but it hadn’t been treated well over the past few years. The last owner of the house had work crews tromping around in muddy work boots, and they didn’t have time to clean up after themselves before their boss went to jail. After the foreclosure, real estate agents likewise showed the house to clients in wet, snowy shoes. By the time we moved in, the finish on the floors was a mild disaster.

Our contractor buffed and re-oiled them, which is good enough for a now. It took a couple of weeks before he got around to everything, but at least we could move some furniture around in the meantime.

This is a lousy photo of our new master bedroom as we moved furniture in. Not exciting. Here, let’s look at the finished product:

A little better. The demon cat in the middle of the bed certainly helps.

But we had one last thing to do before we could officially move out of the attic: the bathroom.

Spring Is Here – The Glaciers Have Receded!

So much for getting back into the blogging habit. I blame, uh, time gnomes.

Moving on… Progress on the inside of the house has moved along quite well over the winter, though the outside is begging for attention now. Spring is here! The clearest sign: the glaciers on my lawn have receded. Since the snow began falling in earnest at the end of October, our yard has had a perpetual snow cover. I hadn’t seen my grass until just a few weeks ago.

(EDIT: My wife suggests I clarify this photo is not of our glaciers in their full glory. This is what was left by the time I got my camera out there a few weeks ago. When I say that I didn’t see my lawn, I meant it. We didn’t see *any* of our grass for nearly five months.)

Since then we’ve had a pretty good spring: warm weather, rain showers and a lot of flowers popping up – including these small blue flowers right in our front yard:

I remember seeing them last year, when we were still ogling the house and hoping we could actually buy the place. I had no idea what they were, and had totally forgotten about them until I saw them popping out of the lawn last week. Turns out that they’re called glory-of-the-snow. If I’m right, that means someone took the time to plant a lot of tiny bulbs in our lawn. Good choice. They’re a heck of a lot prettier than our grass.

Back From the Noveling Wasteland

Right, so my one-month break turned into a two-and-a-half-month break. Oops. My novel-writing experience was mildly successful: my concept is solid, but I’ve only got about 25,000 words, which was half the NaNoWriMo goal. I’d like to think that I’ll keep working at it over the next few months, but… er, I have my doubts. I love what I’ve got so far, but recently house stuff has seemed a lot more important on my to-do list.

Speaking of which… progress! The last couple of months have been huge for our house, which was really poor timing for this whole house blog thing. Adding to my troubles is my lack of a camera. It went out snow shoveling with us one evening and hasn’t been seen since. If you happen to see it wandering lost around town, please tell him to come home. His family misses him.

In the meantime, I’m stuck taking pictures with my Blackberry. A little rough around the edges, but it’ll do. For example:

Our basement is finished! Our contractor successfully re-excavated our old recessed windows in the basement, reconstructed the stone retaining wall and installed new windows. It made a huge difference. We’ve got natural lighting all over in the basement, and it looks great from outside the house. And, as an added bonus, we don’t have any more giant gaping holes in our house.

New Victorian on Deadwood’s Main Street

I was out running errands this morning and spotted this new house being built on Upper Main. They’ve been working on it for several weeks, and it’s coming right along. I like it.

First off, I like the architecture. It looks to be a kind of Queen Anne style, which means it’ll fit right in with the other houses in the neighborhood. Secondly, it’s filling in a vacant lot near the center of town. It’s nice to see lots like this turn from parking or empty grass into something useful.

It’s definitely going to be a bit tight (I think you could reach out a window and touch the Saint Ambrose rectory next door), but there’s something satisfying about dense neighborhoods. What was that again…? Oh yeah – being able to walk everywhere. Ahh…

Great Progress – Just In Time for NaNoWriMo

November is going to be a bit of a blog wasteland, as I’ve decided to dive into NaNoWriMo this year. Aside from being fun to say, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is exactly what it sounds like – a national program designed to get people to write a 50,000-word novel in the span of 30 days. Of course, in accepting the challenge, NaNoWriMo participants wave au revoir to most of their other responsibilities – friends, family, pets, laundry, bathing, and probably also blogs.

Which is too bad, because our contractors have been making great progress over the past couple of weeks. Our recessed basement windows are moving right along:

The view from the basement windows is even better. The rock walls look really nice. We’ve managed to re-use most of the stone we found – including some really nice hand-cut sandstone blocks – but we needed to add a lot of limestone.

Not quite done yet, but darn close. Tomorrow, or maybe Tuesday. The weather is still holding out, amazingly. I’m sure we’ve had one, but I can’t remember a warmer autumn.

They’ve also installed the basement window under our rear porch. Most recently, this was a plywood plant with a vent for the Jenn-Air cooktop in the kitchen. Ew. It’s nice to have a window here again.

They’ve also cleaned up the utility room under the addition on the southwest side of the house: replaced the flimsy plywood door with one that actually latches, fixed the moldy wallboard and added some insulation.

And inside:

The interior is also going well. We should be able to move furniture and start unpacking boxes in another week or two, which means that we’ll have a real live house before too much longer.

Got Any Gwapes (Jelly)?

Among the activities that have been distracting me from regular blog posts: making our own jelly.

You can blame my wife. A few years ago, we went for a walk along Rapid Creek near Canyon Lake in Rapid City, and she pointed out some wild grapes growing along the banks. Until then, I’d never given wild grapes any thought. I knew Black Hills gold jewelry traditionally has a grape leaf design, and it supposedly came from the 1876 gold rush (that’s partly true, as it turns out). But I’d never seen grapes growing anywhere, and I figured they weren’t well-suited to growing in the South Dakota climate anyway.

That’s true – there are very few varieties of domesticated grapes that grow very well here, and they’re not real good for wine – but Vitis riparia will grow just about anywhere. Last year we went to a wedding along Rapid Creek near Hisega and found a whole treasure trove. Gobs and gobs of grapes growing right along the creek. After the ceremony we nabbed as many as we could, then combined them with some Valiant grapes we planted in our garden and made jelly. It turned out beautifully, so we decided to make another batch this year.

Unfortunately, no Valiant vines this year  (they’re all producing wonderfully, no doubt, at our house in the soulless American subdivision we don’t live in anymore). That meant we needed an entire batch of wild grapes. No problem. We figured Spearfish Canyon would be the best place to go hunting, and we were right. Wild grapes seem to love rocky protected canyons, as close to the water as they can safely grow. We found several huge patches, visible right from the highway. A few of them were male plants (no fruit!), but we did find some good, productive vines.

We went back a second time, but still only ended up with slightly less than four pounds of fruit. We figured we’d need close to six pounds for our jelly, so we added a few Concord grapes to make up the difference. I kept that to a minimum. Store-bought Concords were definitely not the point.

First step was to get the grapes off the stems. The least-fun part of the process. We watched some Raising Hope (my new favorite show) as a consolation prize.

Then it was time to mash the grapes. Much more fun with bare feet, I suspect.

Once mashed up, we cooked everything and strained out the juice with cheesecloth. Our fingers were purple for the next 24 hours.

We added the Sure-Jell and sugar, then ladled everything out into jars. Canning seems complicated, so we decided to seal everything up with wax. And viola! Homemade wild grape jelly! Add in the cost of the cheesecloth, wax and jars and… well, it was probably more expensive than just buying some jelly from the store. Oh well – once again, not the point.

We used the low-sugar recipe, so it’s a bit more tart than the last batch. All the same, good stuff. Now, all I need to do is find a good spot in our yard to plant some nice Valiant grapes next spring.

Blogging In the Gutter

In addition to reclaiming our recessed basement windows, our contractors also got us some new gutters. I know – probably the most boring item on our list. It doesn’t even make for an exciting picture.

Boring, yes, but also important. After an amazingly beautiful fall, winter is finally catching up with us. There’s steady rain in the forecast tonight and tomorrow, with temperatures in the 40s, followed by colder air and our first good shot of snow sometime early next week. Makes me hope they’ve gotten our basement windows figured out today, or I’m predicting a soggy cellar in our future.

Rock ‘n Hole: Excavating Our Basement Windows

We closed on our house almost exactly five months ago, so the fact that we’re still mostly confined to the attic and the kitchen (with the rest of the house still a construction zone) is a little disheartening. Then again, we’ve got a lot done -  new plumbing, new heating, repaired windows, replaced siding, repaired electrical, new roof, new porches and fresh paint, all done. (Well, mostly done.) It’s an encouraging list.

Last week they started on our last big project: the foundation. When we moved in to the house, a portion of the basement had caved in around what was once a recessed window. At some point in the past, the rock wall that held up the earth around the window probably failed, and instead of repairing it someone simply filled it in with ready-mix concrete. Unfortunately, they left the window exactly where it was, and the glass and wood eventually gave way. Dirt, rock and concrete came in, popping the whole window frame out, and taking a bit of the rock foundation along with it.

We decided to excavate things back out and restore the egress window to the way it was (or as close as we could get, anyway), along with a neighboring window that hadn’t yet given way. Our contractor got a small excavator in and started digging holes.

We got mostly concrete and junk, but many of the original stones are still there. A few of them are nice cut sandstone block, and it’s beautiful.

We intend to re-use as many as possible, but we’ll definitely need more than we have – and cut sandstone block is hard to come by these days. We’re pretty much stuck with limestone rock to finish off the rest of the retaining walls.