Category Archive: Before and After

Bathroom Procrastination

So there are some areas of the bathroom that we have procrastinated on. Painting the wall above the medicine cabinet by the sconce being one of them. When we painted the bathroom the sconce was already on the wall, and doing a proper painting job would involve switching off the electric circuit, removing the sconce from the wall and painting everything then. This weekend we finally got around to the semi-involved project.

Patrick removes the sconce from the wall.

Bathroom sconce

The “paintless” area.

Painting the bathroom

Patrick painting.

Painting the bathroom

Voila, we finally have paint above our medicine cabinet! In between the last photo and this photo there was once again a struggle. We appear to be having problems reinstalling items (see kitchen butler’s pantry doors). Putting the sconce back on the wall made me feel like I was on some endurance TV show…how long can you hold up the sconce while your significant other is attempting to align the holes before you want to drop the damn thing. I’m happy to announce I passed my 30-45 minute sconce endurance test. :)

Painted bathroom

Next procrastination bathroom project: painting the wall behind the toilet. Our current excuse can always be that due to Atlanta’s current drought we’d be wasting water if we were to drain the toilet tank to remove it and paint behind it. ;-)

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And Here We Thought We Were Done With Plumbing…

So here we thought we were done with plumbing. Since our house had been stripped of all its copper plumbing before we bought it we had to replace the whole system. Then take the whole plumber nightmare (after nightmare, after nightmare, …) into account and well…let’s just say we were very much over plumbing and plumbers. Apparently fate decided we weren’t quite entirely done with it just yet.

While we were on vacation I went online to pay out water bill. I was a bit shocked that the bill was about $30 more expensive than our highest bill – and we had been out of town and not using the water for half of that period! The city had recently come by and replaced the old water meters with some new digital ones. Patrick and I had heard from other people who had theirs replaced that the water bill became more expensive afterwards.

When we got back from vacation Patrick mowed the lawn and had trouble at one spot next to the house where it was still very wet. We didn’t think much of it. It had been pouring a couple of days earlier so it probably just hadn’t dried yet. Only the wet spot stayed even after days of no rain. By Sunday we were starting to get into panic mode – it had to be a water pipe leak. We found a place online (based on Kudzu recommendations) who also happened to be open Sundays. We called and scheduled an appointment for Monday. Monday a guy came and gave us an estimated cost – ahhh, you gotta love those unexpected high bills. (I guess that privacy fence I so desperately want will have to hold off a bit longer.) The plumbers were scheduled for “sometime Tuesday” (but couldn’t specify when).

The two-men plumbing crew rang our door bell about half an hour before our alarm clock was due to go off. We showed them the area and they got their tools ready. Before we knew it our yard looked like this…

Plumbing pipe replacement

Plumbing pipe replacement

…and exactly 2 hours later the guys were all packed up and driving off…. :)

Plumbing pipe replacement

Plumbing pipe replacement

Instead of running the pipes through the yard to the back of the house like it was before we followed their suggestion to bring it in at the front of the house and run it along inside the crawl space instead. I’m not sure how much other people pay to have their pipes replaced, but I definitely can’t complain about the 2-hour turn-around time and the fact that they were able to come out a day after quoting us a price.

Hopefully our plumbing woes will be over for a while now. Really the only original plumbing feature now left in the house is the sewage pipe back to the street. But I won’t talk about that too loudly…I don’t want the sewage pipe to get any ideas after all. ;-)

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More Progress

Exterior:

Our little “garden bed” by the stairs had been overtaken by weeds (all that rain doesn’t only help the wanted plants after all!). A short while ago we had to remove the lavenders because they were drowning in that location. Lavender likes a dry, sunny location and based on the flooding in that area the earth was generally very moist. At first it flourished, then it wasn’t doing to well, so we moved it. In place the weeds grew ever so quickly…

Fountain grass

Since we knew better than to place dry-loving plants back into that spot we went on a hunt for moist-loving plants. We found a variety of Hostas and covered the general area with mulch…in hopes to keep some of those weeds from coming back so quickly.

Fountain grass

In the meanwhile we have also harvested our first batch of home grown veggies- all of two squashes and one green bell pepper! We proudly cooked a veggie pasta dish for one of our friends (with the aide of a store bough red bell pepper and zucchini).

Harvesting

Another area we tackled was by the shed. While purchasing the Hostas Patrick discovered another ornamental grass that he had to have.

Daylilly

So we moved what we assume to be wildly growing lilies (they never bloomed this year, so we’re not 100% sure) and extended the rose bed. In the fall (or spring?) I’d like to plant a few more roses to fill the open spaces.

Shed foundation planting

Interior:

In the meanwhile we’ve also gotten around to a little bit more interior work…

The kitchen built-in started looking out something like this…

Butler's Pantry Door

…progressed with the comfort of the dining room floor, starting out with the scraper/razor blade, getting frustrated and moving to the heat gun (which is dangerous in itself because it can make the glass break, but broken glass is easier to replace than damaged wood)…

Butler's Pantry Door

…and ending with something like this (for the moment).

Butler's Pantry Door

We then worked a little bit more on the dining room door. This is where we had left off January 6th. Wow, look at that floor too! Not quite refinished yet.

Dining room door

And this is where we got rid of the majority of the remaining paint. We are still struggling to find the best solution of getting the paint off the detail work – anybody have any suggestions? Pleeeeaaaase? :)

Dining room door

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Productive Weekend

So you know how it goes…it’s the weekend, it’s been a busy week and all you want to do is kick back, watch a movie, go out for a few drinks and food or hang out with friends. While those weekends are ever so fun they don’t get too much accomplished around the house. This weekend I felt like we were really productive and got a number of things from the to-do list accomplished (and still managed to have a few beers at a friend’s party!).

Exterior – Fence Removal:

Though the vines looked nice and grown-in and green on the fence the whole thing just isn’t part of our long-term landscaping plan. Plus part of the bushy greenery consisted of poison ivy! So the decision was made to get rid of the rusty chicken-wire fence.

Garden fence before

The view after the fence has been removed. Or at least the majority of it – we left a small part that was covered with the poison ivy which we have to kill before removing.

Removed garden fence

Patrick proudly displaying the “lovely” removed chicken wire fence.

Removed garden fence

Exterior – Flower Bed:

The front of our house has been looking a bit bland. We love our hedge that separates the street/sidewalk from our lot because it’s makes a natural fence, but the sight right by the house has just been lacking. Not to mention it has the remains of a holly bush trunk that must be as old as the house! I can’t stand that big ugly thing, not to mention I’m not a big fan of scratchy bushes either. So this picture shows the left side of the house and what we started with.

Before foundation plants

This picture is what we ended up with some 24 hours later. So much nicer! It already helps the ambiance of the front of the house.

After foundation plants

Awwwww, how nice. I know this is probably nothing for the average gardener, but like I keep pointing out – we’re newbie’s! So we’re kind of proud of our first nice looking flower bed. I think our previous problem has been that we would go to the store, fall in love with what ever plant and then get home not being sure where to plant it. A week would pass and we would start stressing out about needing to put the plant in the ground. That’s when plants have ended up in places that may not be the most ideal for them or where I later decide that the location would be more optimal for something else in the future. With this project I have really wanted a hedge by the front of the house. So we got these Japanese Boxwoods to make up the background and then some little cute annuals to add color in the foreground. Additionally we came across this neat looking “Asparagus Fern” that adds a little bit of variety (though it may not survive the winter).

Foundation plants

Interior Projects:

Additionally we accomplished some interior work…the kind that’s not so exciting though (which is probably why we’ve been procrastinating!): hanging up blinds. We now have blinds over the six windows in the office. Which also means the boxes aren’t lying on the floor anymore and we don’t have to climb over them to reach the phone. We scraped paint off some of those office windows – too bad a ton of paint is also still on the outside part of the windows.

Another thing was unpacking our toiletries. We’ve still had them filled in boxes inside our bathroom built-in. Since we’re not sure when we’ll get to finishing it off we decided that we may as well unpack our items and not live out of those boxes anymore. Since all of this is pretty boring I’ll spare you photos of which shampoo’s I store in there. :)

I want to say there may have been a few more things we checked off the list, but I can’t remember them now. Oh well.

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Shower Curtain

Unfortunately the window in our bathroom was placed in such a way that it has made it somewhat hard to place a shower into the bathtub because half the window would be in the shower. To prevent too much water from splashing onto the wooden window molding Patrick and I thought it would be a good idea to buy one of those curved shower rods in hopes of blocking some of the wood with the shower curtain. Even though the rod has been sitting in our closet for months we have now been able to hang it up because we wanted to paint the walls before putting up this permanent fixture. Up until now we have used our cheap plastic rod that is expandable. We’ve had it dangling on top of the tiles and the window crown molding so it wouldn’t damage the drywall and paint from fastening it onto the wall, and every time we hung our towels up (since we don’t have towel racks yet!) the rod was threatening to collapse on us. We finally put up our pretty curved (“for extra elbow room”) shower rod yesterday!

Ohhhhh, fancy! Look at that!

Shower curtain rod

Finally a shower rod that won’t fall on us. We also had to buy an extra long shower curtain liner because we’ve had to place the shower rod higher than the average shower curtain height due to the window being half-way in the shower. Not a problem with a 10-foot ceiling.

Shower curtain rod

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