Category Archive: Our Bungalow

Bungalow New Years Love

January 13, 2009

I can’t believe another year has passed! MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY 2009 EVERYONE!

Christmas 2008

Christmas 2008

I also can’t believe the entire month of December somehow flew by without a single blog entry. All I can say is life has been crazy! (In a good way.) We have been crazy busy with our business…which is never a bad thing, but even less so when everyone else is talking about recession and lay-offs and such. Unfortunately those 11pm work nights for most of December also meant our house process just about came to a screeching halt. (That, and as Patrick noted in the previous blog entry, we were also out of town for a little bit.) Thankfully we were able to push ourselves to work a little bit more on paint removal in the dining room. We had a deadline to meet – the Westview book was being republished in time to make it back for Christmas and we wanted to update one of our detail fireplace pictures with a dining room shot…

Stripped wood in the dining room

Stripped wood in the dining room

…so at least from that angle it looks decent. And as we enter 2009 the business workload hasn’t slowed down, so we’ll just have to discipline ourselves to not entirely abandon all of our unfinished house projects. Actually that makes me laugh…unfinished projects…you get so used to them you don’t even notice anymore. We’ve had comments from people that we have “cool” kitchen crown molding and then we have to explain that it wasn’t actually meant to be unpainted, but was rather just another unfinished project, haha.

There are times where I feel that we’re not getting anything done on the house. The first few months so much happened and things seem to progress so slowly now. I suppose I need to remind myself that the first few months of work consisted of bringing the house up from a non-inhabitable space to an inhabitable space. Thankfully our house is very much livable now and we’re just working on the aesthetical items. As I was scanning through the folders of photos documenting our house process in 2008 I was actually excited to realize that perhaps we got more done than I thought. We painted the bedroom, worked on dining room paint removal off and on throughout the year, had the attic insulated, finished the interior of the bathroom built-in, had the brick foundation re-pointed and partially rebuilt, and tore out our shameful broken concrete front path and replaced it with a beautiful historic brick path.

In addition to reviewing our own house progress many things have happened in Westview in 2008, and we’re excited to be able to say we’ve been part of it. We’ve been active with our neighborhood association, the Westview Community Organization, and the Neighborhood Planning Unit (the official citizen advisory council to the City of Atlanta), as well as meetings with City Council Members, the Bureau of Planning, participating in the Atlanta Home Show, and the list goes on. Of course as many things in life the good also comes with some bad mixed in. We experienced a tornado narrowly passing our neighborhood (thankfully!) only to cause much damage downtown. We’ve witnessed the City of Atlanta spiral into a financial disaster, closing Fire Station #7 in neighboring West End, cutting city services and increasing our water fees. We were there to see mortgage fraud mastermind Kevin Wiggins get sentenced to 8 years in prison for leaving our neighborhoods devastated in the early 2000s.

But like a sprout pushing its way through the soil in spring Westview is up for an exciting year. I think 2009 will be big for Westview. I can feel it. Sometimes change is so gradual you don’t see it. But this feels like change. We’re gaining more and more homeowners who are also busy fixing up their homes. We have a new homeowner on our street working on the house, and another house under contract a few doors down from us. And we see new faces appearing at the Westview Community Organization meetings or emailing us saying “Hey, I’m a new neighbor…”. Hopefully all these new neighbors coming to Westview and working on their houses will inspire us to work extra hard in 2009. You know, ‘keeping up with the Jones‘…

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Miscellaneous Outstanding Projects

November 11, 2008

Every homeowner will know these projects- the miscellaneous projects that aren’t big or too difficult, but there’s about a million of them and you just need to 1) remember that the project is outstanding, and 2) have the time and energy to take the 5-10 minutes to carry them out. They’re small enough where they don’t really interfere with your everyday life, but just annoying enough to get annoyed about.

Well we finally tackled one of these miscellaneous mini-projects – the drawer dividers! Back when we were looking for them it took us a minute to find suitable drawer dividers that would fit the size of our drawer. There were some that were plastic and could be extended to whatever size the drawer was, but we weren’t too crazy about those. Leave it up to Ikea to get what you need – we spotted some decent ones that happened to match our drawer color pretty closely. And when combining three of them they filled the drawer space pretty well. Only when we got them we couldn’t be bothered to cut the dividers to match our needs…so ever since we got them however many months (years?) ago the cutlery compartments looked fine, but the back space was totally wasted and the extra items we had in the drawer were sticking up and got caught just about every time you opened it. Well they will not get stuck any more! We took the 5 minutes to cut the divider into a better size and voila everything is great.

Yay for miscellaneous annoying project getting completed.

Before:

Cutlery organization

After:

Cutlery organization

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Brick Path

November 3, 2008

We’ve been working on a pretty exciting project lately…our front path! Although we still have a ways to go as far as the exterior of the house goes I think the path has been one aesthetically unpleasing sight that really pulled the rest of the house down in curb appeal. The path seemed to consist of more grass/weed patches than concrete! It has really been quite an embarrassment. Well thankfully we finally got started on changing that!

Back in May we posted about luck coming our way when we ran into acquaintances who were participating in the Inman Park Tour of Homes where they had built a wine cellar out of old bricks (from an early 1900s building that was torn down somewhere along Peachtree Street) and were generous enough to give us their leftovers. Just what we had been hoping for!! They had been sitting in our back yard since then and we had been waiting for the street and sidewalk construction to be done before we’d get started on our walkway. (Because we knew they were going to raise the sidewalks to put in curbs so there was no point in guessing how high to build our walkway until the new sidewalk would be done.) We were debating about hiring the same guys that repointed our brick to build the path, but then ended up deciding that we’d give it a try ourselves.

Since half of the path was already in crumbles it wasn’t too hard to pull it up. When we talked to our brick repointing guy he was determined to use cement in some way or another. We were determined not to. So we got some metal edging pieces to hold the bricks in place instead. Here are some photos of how far we’ve made it. We’re not done all the way, but I wanted to share how far we’ve gotten because I think it looks 100 times better already (even not being done, haha).

Our “lovely” crumbled path:

Front path before

Front path before

Tearing out the concrete:

Tearing out front path

Tearing out front path

Putting down gravel so there will be good drainage:

Laying out front path

Gravel path

Landscaping fabric to (hopefully) prevent weeds from growing:

Front path landscape fabric

Putting down sand:

Front path sand

We’ve laid out some of the bricks and are sweeping sand between the cracks to keep the bricks from shifting around:

Front path brick and sand

Our progress up until now:

Front path brick

Front path brick

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Bay Window/Dining Room Paint Removal

October 27, 2008

Despite back-to-back wedding weekends we were able to get some more work done around the house. We’ve tried to get back to working more regularly on the dining room again. Mainly on weekdays for an hour or two after work and dinner. (We worked on it some more today and since I feel like I’m done for the day I thought I’d blog about the progress instead.) That translates to somewhere around three to five layers removed due to the time you have to wait between each chemical application. For now you can see the change because we were able to work on a large surface, but before long I won’t have any interesting photos to show since the miniature details won’t be noticeable on camera! (Just tedious work that doesn’t feel very accomplishing since it’s so hard to tell the difference!) The changes are looking pretty nice though. Ever so slowly the room is changing. At least we’re getting it down to a color and smoothness that’s pretty nice – but I’m scared of the process after that where we’ll presumably have to sand everything down (including all those tedious details!), which is going to be sooooo much more work.

Our friend came by the other day and commented “Shouldn’t you be done with this room by now?” I could have killed him, ha! So either we’re just incredibly slow and incompetent at doing this, or else he greatly underestimates the time it takes to remove all this paint and stain (which is the answer I’m rooting for).

Patrick is working on the area where we hadn’t unscrewed the hinges.

Dining room paint stripping

The hinge area now looks like the rest of the bay window seat.

Dining room paint stripping

Different stages of the removal process. On the “cleaner” area we first used the heat gun, then the chemical paint remover and plastic scraper, then the chemical stain remover and “scrubbed down” with Brillo pads. The other area has only had paint removed with the heat gun – and perhaps already a coat of paint remover.

Dining room paint stripping

Here we’ve gone through all three steps on the seating surface.

Dining room paint stripping

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Two-Year Housaversary

September 27, 2008

As I’m sitting here on this Saturday, the 27th of September 2008, in the middle of a financial crisis that is leaving citizens sitting at the curb of their foreclosed homes and ex-employees crying about how their fortune 500 company has fallen apart, biting our fingernails at who will win the presidential election, and Atlantans scrambling to find a gas station that has not sold out of gas, it is hard to believe that Patrick and I have a reason to celebrate. But there is. It is our two year “housaversary”!

And because I only have half an hour left in this day as I’m typing this (and because SNL is coming on now) I think I will simply quote myself from one year ago…

“Here I was hoping to break out some great blog about our one-year homeownership anniversary…and all I got was this crappy photo. :-P”

Only cross out the “one” and make it a “two”. :) Oh I’m so lazy.

So here is a toast to all of you homeowners! And here is a toast to our two-year house anniversary! And a toast to many more homeownership years!

2-Year Anniversary

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