I sort-of can’t believe this is my house
Mar 9, 2012 What's Going On
When I last wrote about my house we had finally, after five years, started renovating the last unused floor, the second floor (or, in Brooklyn brownstone parlance, the parlour floor). And by “we” I mean “the people we hired,” lest you get the mistaken impression that we can do anything more complicated than hanging up pictures.
Well, it’s almost done. The three rooms themselves are pretty much done. There’s still a lot of work to come in the hallway, and a couple of minor things we’ll have to take care of at some point in the rooms, but for the purposes of arranging furniture and decorating, done-a-rooney!
Tags: Brooklyn, brownstone, renovation
Dust in my eyes…and throat
Feb 9, 2012 What's Going On
My entire house is coated in a layer of dust – super thick on the bottom two floors, thinner but still gross on the top two. And this dust is different than the dust that’s usually present due to my lackluster housekeeping skills. No, this is construction dust, from a week of renovation work on our brownstone.
We’ve been here for five years, but still had an entire floor that we couldn’t use, except for storage (as long as you didn’t mind what was being stored getting covered in rubble and overrun by mice).
Why couldn’t we use it all this time? Well, it had no electricity or heat, one corner had bad water damage, and the ceilings were falling down in two out of the three rooms. There were large holes in the walls from when we’d had new plumbing put into the rest of the house. One of the rooms has a carpet so disgusting I felt bad for the mice. The other two rooms have linoleum glued over the original wood floors, and in some places contact paper had been put over the linoleum. WTF? And to top it off, the entry doors to the main room are huge and heavy and close to falling off. They’re probably just waiting for an orphan holding a puppy to stand under them.
This is what the second floor looked like just a few short months ago:
There used to be a wall there. It held up the house. We stopped them halfway through tearing down a doorway that we kinda wanted to use.
To put a cherry on top of the whole mess, different workers from the first stage of our renovation five years ago ripped out a wall by mistake. We came home one day and it was gone. The fact that it was a load-bearing wall meant that the back of the house has been held up since that day by some 2x4s.
If this wreck of a floor had been on the top or bottom of the house, we could’ve just ignored it. But, it’s the second floor, so we had to pass by it every day, dozens of times.
My husband started going through the massive piles of disorganized stuff a few months ago. It all started out neat and organized when we moved here, but after five years of frantically pawing through boxes trying to find something it was a disaster. He managed to get three rooms full of stuff down to just this. It still looks like a lot, but it fits in about a third of the biggest room (and all that stuff from the bike forward belongs to the workers).
Well, late last week the workers descended upon that floor and got down to business. If you’ve ever been through any kind of renovation, you know how messy things can get. You can tape up plastic sheets, but it won’t matter. This stuff gets everywhere. Someone other than me would probably go crazy trying to keep up with the mess, but I take a much more Zen approach: I accept that it is there, and when the work is completely done, and the dust settles, I will start cleaning.
Nobody else is home during the work but me, so I’ve been the one breathing most of the stuff in. I didn’t realize how it was affecting me until I went for a jog. I’d planned on going three miles, but after a mile I was coughing like a pack-a-day smoker.
So far, a truck load of crap has been taken out, the old carpet has been gotten rid of [I discovered this morning that it's still there - I must've just been wishing hard that it was gone], and the missing wall has been turned into a load-bearing archway connecting the two rooms. One ceiling was torn down and replaced, the another repaired. Now they’re working on filling in the numerous holes that dot the walls and the hallway.
I can’t wait until this is done, for so many reasons. A more energetic, practical person would’ve just unpacked everything years ago and then adjusted as more rooms became available. But being neither energetic nor practical, I’ve just been waiting. For years. Telling myself that it would be stupid to organize everything and decorate when we’ve only been living in 3/4 of the house. Now that the day is approaching when I can actually set that floor up, I’m salivating!
My piano. Jake’s drum set. A place for the kids to do homework that’s not our dining room table. Some place to set up Rock Band where it won’t be in our way. And apparently a pool table, according to The Ass, but I’m not really on board with that one yet.
But regardless, I will no longer have to apologize for my house. Playdates can come over without being lectured about the dangers of that floor. When I have parties I won’t have to tape up the stairway so that nobody wanders upstairs and sees the disaster.
I can get organized. And finally, after all these years, we can settle in. Better late than never, right?
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: brownstone, cleaning, renovation
Today’s Agenda: hoarders edition
Jan 6, 2012 Today's Agenda
So until very recently our parlour floor looked like this:
And this:
And this:
Believe it or not there’s a piano in that last picture. Buried under crap.
So why was an entire floor of our house like that? Because it has no electricity, part of the ceiling is caving in, and it’s missing part of a wall. It was unusable, so since we bought this house five years ago we’ve used it as storage. Sure, it started out very organized. And was reorganized a couple of times over the years. But it soon returns to a disastrous state, as we move things around and rummage through boxes looking for something we haven’t needed in several years.
But my husband, to his credit, has spent an enormous amount of time over the past few months, going through all of that stuff. And he’s hauling a bunch of it off to the Salvation Army tomorrow.
To his complete discredit, he wants to get rid of a bunch of stuff I want. I don’t really care at this point if he doesn’t get why I want to keep it. I’ve given up on him understanding my emotional attachment to physical things, especially clothes I don’t fit into yet while I’m working hard to lose weight. I’ve basically given up giving him crap for a bunch of stuff that he does that I don’t like. I don’t get why he has to sit on the couch for hours on end, hogging the good TV, playing mind-numbingly boring video games. But I don’t say anything (much).
So, being me, I will probably dig my heels in on keeping way more of the stuff than he wants me to keep. I’ve already gone through the stuff in the past and weeded out most of what I don’t want. But regardless, he’s hauling stuff away in less than 24 hours. And since I only have about 2.5 hours of daylight left (remember, no electricity on that floor!) I need to get to work.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: brownstone, renovation, The Ass
Today’s Agenda: flammable edition
Oct 11, 2011 Today's Agenda
So the caulking is done. Some of it is pretty, some of it looks like it was done by a five-year-old with motor skill issues. But it’s done. And after spending ninety minutes last night in an enclosed space with massive amounts of silicone, I can no longer claim that I’ve never gotten high.
I then scrubbed my hands raw with rubbing alcohol and nail polish remover trying to get the silicone off. I’m pretty sure if I held my hands within a foot of an open flame right now they would combust. I woke up with two new mosquito bites on my fingers and I swear I could hear tiny hiccupping noises.
But at least the kids are back at school, after the long weekend. This week is looking easy, and I’m very thankful for that (and since I make my own schedule, I’m giving myself a pat on the back as well). I’ve gotten so good lately at saying no to things that will not benefit me in any way that I’m no longer on the verge of a panic attack every time I see a computer.
So here’s to saying no – it feels great.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: renovation, working from home
My two Sundays, or how I flooded my moldy bathroom
Oct 10, 2011 What's Going On
So yesterday was kind of split down the middle in terms of how I like to spend a Sunday. I had nowhere to go, nothing I absolutely had to do, and my husband took the kids to Coney Island right after lunch, leaving me with an empty house. I popped a bag of popcorn, grabbed a Diet Dr Pepper and my Kindle, and settled in on the couch to read the last four chapters of a really good book. Then I reached for my laptop and wrote about the book. Then I just leaned back right where I was and took a little nap. I don’t think I moved from the couch for about four hours. It was heavenly.
When my family got home a bit after six I decided that it was time to do the job I’d been dreading for months, re-caulking the upstairs bathroom. This is our only bathroom with a tub or shower, so the timing has to be just right: the next day nobody can bathe, and this being a holiday weekend it was perfect. My husband could go shower at his work gym, and the kids – who have no school today – could just be a little stinky. We aren’t going anywhere, it doesn’t matter. I can just send them into another room when the smell becomes unbearable.
Of course, while I was doing the caulk – which at this point was black with mold in many spots – I might as well clean the grout, too, which hadn’t been deep-cleaned in the five years since it was put in, and the ceiling, which had started developing mold about a year ago. If there’s one thing I know about mold it’s that it keeps coming back if you don’t get it all, so I thought I would just take care of everything at once.
I stripped naked (didn’t want to get bleach on my clothes), put on a shower cap (or on my hair) and safety glasses (or my eyes), grabbed the bleach and a sponge, and balanced myself on the side of the tub, holding onto the shower rod for dear life (since the moldy part of the ceiling is over the tub I can’t reach it with a ladder). How I didn’t fall is really a mystery, since I’m the clumsiest person on the planet. An hour later, the ceiling was free of mold, and I moved onto the grout, which took just as long but did not involve me almost falling and breaking my neck. Plus I got to use a fun little gadget.
Then I had to remove the old caulk and let the space dry overnight. Now, I’m not going to go into the completely convoluted way our bathtub is set up, except to say that our architect made a monumental mistake (which I apparently OKd, not knowing what I was OKing), necessitating a fake-Corian deck around the top of the tub to prevent shower water from running onto the floor instead of into the tub and down the drain. This is not an easy space to caulk, and there’s a couple inches of empty space between the deck and parts of the tub. Caulk had to be removed from the top of the deck where it meets the wall, and the bottom of the deck where it meets the tub. And last night I discovered that the space between had become filled with black mold. I’d had so much trouble keeping the caulk clean these last few months because the mold was coming up from underneath!
So, I was doing my best to clean that space out (a space I couldn’t see, by the way). I was flushing it with hot water as carefully as I could and jamming a sponge in there, but I realized after a few minutes that I was flooding the bathroom floor: with the caulk gone we were back to our original problem of the water not flowing into the tub. I reached for the handle to turn the water off, and heard my husband screaming “Stop! Stop!” and running up the stairs. The water from the bathroom floor was flooding the room below, a storage room that would someday also be a bathroom, but for now only had pipes and a bunch of our crap in it. Our wet crap, thanks to me.
About fifteen towels later, I threw in the proverbial towel and just went to bed, bathroom a disaster and mold still probably thriving under the deck. Today not only will I have to caulk the tub and clean the bathroom, but also go through that storage room to see what was damaged. Fun way to spend a holiday.
Some day we have to get that tub replaced, but it’s a monumental job. It’s not a standard sized tub (unusually wide and deep), so if we don’t find another one the same size the fixtures won’t be in the right place. The entire thing is framed in tile, and attached to tile shower walls, and we’re told it will be difficult to rip out part of the tile and then get new tile to match up again. And, you know, we don’t have the money. There are about seventy other much more pressing things that need to be done the next time we do have the money, like getting electricity on the second floor or replacing some windows that are falling apart.
For now, I’m just going to seal the mold in as well as I can and hope it takes a while to creep back out. Lovely.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: bathroom, cleaning, renovation
From junk heap to beautiful backyard
May 12, 2011 What's Going On
This is the story of how our backyard went from being a disaster to being a beautiful oasis of grass and bricks in just two short weeks. Five years and two weeks.
When we moved in to our brownstone the backyard was a complete mess. It had a hideous plastic and wood “shelter” built on to the back of the house that contained two hornets’ nests. There was a cracked and ugly cement patio, a mess of wires covering the back wall, and ugly weeds and bushes everywhere. The ground was littered with glass, metal and rocks, and it wasn’t just on the surface either: decades of abuse had filled the dirt with layers of garbage. It wasn’t just ugly, it was unusable. and dangerous.
For the first couple of years we didn’t care much. We were only living in the top half of our house, so we never came into contact with the backyard, except out of the windows. As our renovation progressed more junk got put back there: wood, pipes, two big radiators that no longer worked, a bathtub, and other contractor junk.
Eventually my husband started tackling the backyard. He had a plan: he would dig down a couple of feet and “sift” the metal, glass and rocks out of the dirt using a big wood-and-chicken-wire contraption he built. Some weekends the kids would help him. I begged him to just hire someone and get it done quickly, but honestly I think he was enjoying taking things into his own hands.
He dug for two summers. As much time as he spent on it, he seemed to be making little progress. He did find some interesting things though: old bottles and coins, a pipe, and most impressively, an almost-intact toilet buried in the back next to a tree.
I’m not positive what pushed him over the edge this year, but I suspect it was visiting a friend’s renovated house. He decided to give up on his little project, and hired the same guys who had done his friend’s backyard. They got to work two weeks ago today.
The first step was to break apart the old cement patio. The crazy thing is, they found a layer of blue stone under it, which my next door neighbor’s husband happily took off our hands. After that mess was cleared out, the bricks and sand and cement mix started coming in.
And kept coming.
And kept coming.
The raised garden beds were the first to go in. We had them bury some containers in there so that we could grow vegetables without our dirt getting mixed in with the completely leaded Brooklyn dirt, and we’ll be putting in a bunch of flowers too.
Days of leveling and brick-laying followed.
Finally our lawn was pieced together. That was the day I almost cried. And in the three days that we’ve had grass I’ve turned into one of those lawn-obsessed people. Thank goodness it’s behind the house, so I only have to chase my own children off of it (I’m not being mean, we have to water it three times a day and treat it very gently for a few weeks, until the roots take hold in our dirt).
The very last thing left to do is to put a big awning on the back of the house over the patio (our backyard gets sun pretty much all day), and that should be done tomorrow, so basically it’s finished. I keep glancing out of the window expecting to see the hideous mess that I’d been looking at for so long, but instead I see a gorgeous space that I’ve been looking forward to for years.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: backyard, gardening, Love Your Veggies, renovation
Two tiny apartments, two completely different approaches
May 11, 2011 What's Going On
My husband would argue that we have too much space. I would argue that we should have more children to fill that space. Eventually I expect to be found by police, strangled to death, with a crumpled mortgage statement protruding from my mouth. But whichever one of us is right, we’re very lucky that we have a house in a city full of apartments.
Nobody I know, though, has an apartment as small as either one of these. These two guys live in teeny teeny tiny apartments. While the first guy takes a “You just don’t need a lot of stuff to be happy!” approach, the second guy obviously does not want to give up his giant CD collection, books, and a certain level of comfort and flexibility. For crying out loud, he’s managed to cram a soaker bath tub and a guest bed into a 330 square foot apartment! And while a flat-panel TV is good enough for the first guy, the second guy has one of those plus a huge screen that comes down from the ceiling, turning his one-room apartment into a screening room.
The first video is a little slow and long, but the second one is not to be missed. He’s dubbed his apartment the “Domestic Transformer” and it totally is.
So what can small apartment dwellers, who don’t have tons of money to make custom-built everything, take away from this? Be super neat, with a place for absolutely everything. Buy furniture that acts as hidden storage. Have multiple uses for things. Look at how boats and RVs are designed. And above all, don’t have a spouse or children – they just take up too much space.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: renovation
I’ve been everywhere but here
Mar 16, 2010 What's Going On
It’s after one a.m. and I really wish I was in bed right now, but I’m not remotely tired. My body thinks it’s midnight, which is about two hours earlier than I’ve been going to bed lately, so I’m kind-of screwed. Especially since I can’t laze around in bed tomorrow morning until it’s time to throw on a coat and take the kids to school. (The Ass was still home this morning when we left for school, and I think he was surprised and appalled that I threw a coat over my pajamas to walk the kids to school.)
I spoke with Jake’s teacher last week and she mentioned that he’s been driving her crazy lately, talking all the time in class and just having a ton of extra energy. We go through something like this every year around this time, when the weather starts to get better. Last year it manifested itself in hitting a bunch of kids, a week-long reign of terror that landed Jake in so much trouble he didn’t see his favorite electronic things for over a month. So, while talking a lot is definitely an improvement over hitting, I’m trying to do something to take care of the problem instead of waiting it out and crossing my fingers. I’ll be taking the kids to the playground for half an hour before school, so that Jake can run off some of that extra spring-time energy. I really hate the idea, and I’m almost hoping that it doesn’t work, because if it does I’ll be stuck doing it until June. But I have the feeling it’s going to work.
Anyway, I should be asleep. But I wanted to point out a few posts I wrote on other sites recently. First up, I was on brownstoner.com last week, talking about some things that had to be done on the garden floor of our house before we could use it. Remember, my brownstoner posts are lagging a few months behind reality, so they don’t know about the new kitchen yet (shhh!).
Next up, I was on the NYC Moms Blog today, talking about the pitfalls of telling the truth when someone asks you for advice. And I think I forgot to point out my last NYC Moms Blog post, about a girl who was arrested for doodling on her desk. Insanity.
OK, I’m going to bed, hopefully I’ll be able to get enough sleep before hitting the playground.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information. Amy also blogs at Filming In Brooklyn, Behind the Screen, and the NYC Moms Blog.
Tags: renovation
