Farewell, Bungalow

Yes, I sold it ages I go. Yes, I'm only now getting around to putting the photos up. No, I don't want to hear your guff.

Curb appeal:



Living room:





Dining room:



Upstairs bathroom:



Backyard:



Kitchen:





Downstairs bathroom:





Master bedroom:



I still miss the skylight and seven foot high shower spray in the old upstairs bathroom. Maybe I'll keep writing entries, even though I don't live in a bungalow anymore. Hell, maybe I'll just write about the puppy!

RanchFever, Kitchen Edition

The kitchen is almost done, and while I haven't taken photos since the cool stuff (floor, counters, sink, etc.) came in, I feel compelled to post photos of the kitchen from a few weeks ago, so that the eventual unveiling will be even more fantastic:



Here we see Michael (look at the birdie!) installing the last of the cabinets, the one for the sink, which he had to MacGyver a heating vent/duct thingie into. There was so much MacGyvering going on with these cabinets, in fact, that I was afraid he'd come home one day with a sun-streaked mullet. Fortunately, there was no bi-level action, and I learned an important lesson. The guys who install cabinets for a living definitely earn their pay.

This was taken from the back foyer looking in. Note lovely blue accent wall, cool artichoke lamp and stylin' reeded glass panel which Michael installed to make the entryway brighter.




This is the peninsula, which I have christened Monster Island. Also note Michael's rump in the left side of the frame. Heh. Rump. Anyway, that's the electric cooktop (with big, burly knobs that are easy to grab onto when you're covered in marinara sauce and trying to keep the quinoa from boiling over AGAIN) which also required massive rejiggering of cabinets to make fit. Michael cut those holes out of the wall that separates the kitchen from the gloomy hallway to let in more light and have another opportunity to use, yes, reeded glass blocks. We still have to figure out a way to cement those in there without risk of one of us pushing a glass block through accidentally and crippling the cat.

Much more has been done since I took these photos, and I'm hoping to take more this weekend during Paintapalooza. Stay tuned!

RanchFever, The Bathroom Edition

I finally got a chance to take photos in the new house that Michael's been laboring on for months now. Obviously, the stars of the show are the completely gutted and remodelled kitchen and bathroom—you don't think I'd leave my Dream Bath behind without something better, did you?



The vanity is actually a stand-alone piece of furniture that we picked up at a discount because it had a few nicks in the the top. We used a wood-colored pen, covered the top with glass, and installed the sinks (Kohler Chord vessel sinks, single-hole version) on top of that. Sounds easy, but it wasn't. A lot of careful hole-drilling and plumbing went into this set-up.

The faucets were a bit of an ordeal. I was set on using a more delicate gooseneck faucet, namely, the Elba from La Toscana, which is pretty much a bargain-basement version of the various > $300 versions from Porcher and Grohe. However, no one had it in stock, the wait time kept growing longer and longer, and I finally decided that it was just a lavatory faucet (two of them, actually), not a husband (heh) and the Danze Sonora, while more beefy than my preferred selections, would do just fine.

And now, the shower:



As on the vanity backsplash/shelf, note glass mosaic tile. I think I need an inervention, as I keep indulging in more and more high-end versions of this stuff. The American Olean green blend is more expensive that the Hakatai Carter blend I used in the last bathroom, but it's also more transparent and provides a much more interesting sense of depth. Per the suggestion of the designer we consulted, we decided to have the standard white subway tile laid vertically. It reminds me of bamboo, strangely enough.

Michael's got the glass shower doors ready to install. I'm really glad I'm not the one who has to drill through that tile, frankly.

Okay, time to sell the house now.

Downstairs bathroom remodel is officially finito!



The new vanity and medicine cabinet, scandalously cheap at Lowes:



And the new, refinished tub (worth the $875, IMO) with the very klassy shower curtain Evil Amy gave me for x-mas:



Big ups to Michael for spending the majority of Monday getting the thing hooked up with the new faucet and plumbing.

I saved all my receipts for the express purpose of figuring out how much this cost and posting the result. My only regret is that I didn't take photos of the intact "Before" to contrast with the "After".

Clean Slate

The tub's out, the toilet's still providing extra seating in the dining room (I'm not sure whether to be pleasantly surprised or find it hilarious that the cleaning ladies dusted it), but at least everything's painted:



Silent Bob likes the new Marmorette:



Beige. Just like her personality.

Bonfire of the Vanities

It's really too bad that Portland has one of those pesky no-burn restrictions, because good lord, would I love to torch this sucker and dance with abandon around the wild, flickering flames:





That ugly-ass POS motorscooter took me hours to remove, mainly because the man who installed it, bless his heart, attached it to the studs with 3" screws. My neck still hurts from wedging myself under that damn thing with an battery-operated screwdriver, which was thankfully designed with a light to illuminate your work. (Note to Stockholm: I'd like to officially nominate whoever came up with that little improvement for a Nobel Prize of some sort.)

Probably the worst part of this little endeavor (worse than the sore shoulders) is the aftermath:



This is what's fallen through the partially open bottom of the vanity over the fifteen or so years that it's been crouching in that spot. I have NO IDEA where that toilet brush came from, and that oversize Barbie futon is certainly not my brand of maxi-pad. Ew.

Even worse, though:



The p-trap, or whatever the hell that thing is called. It's hard to tell from the photo, but it looks like someone washed their irish wolfhound and then expressed its anal glands into that thing. Smells like it too. Canine anal juice and rotten eggs blenderized with dry cleaning fluid might be a better description of the stench.

Anyway, the grossest part is probably over. Next up on the agenda: moving the light fixture receptacle. Which is going to be a whole ton of fun with old plaster and lathe walls and wiring that dates back to the Eisenhower administration. Wish me luck.

Stop Me Before I Demo Again

The new bathroom's been done, what, a month now? And I'm already ripping apart the downstairs bathroom. I've sent the leprotic tub out to Stanley Avenue to be sandblasted, refinished and painted, and you can see where I couldn't paint the walls years ago when the tub was in the way:



Yeah, I know. The colors are kinda Kuntry Kutesy. I messed up on that one, I'll admit it, so I'm repainting. The walls are going to be repainted two-tone beige (darker above the chair rail). I'm also removing the old vinyl tile:





It comes up pretty easily when the subfloor is wet from the effort of disconnecting and removing the tub (oops), but gets a bit harder as you get further away from the water spill. This is where you quickly reacquaint yourself with Mr. Heat Gun, who has more than earned his keep in the five years since I paid $20 for his valuable services.

I have a target of getting the floor up, the toilet temporarily removed, the vanity demo'ed, the light fixture moved, the woodwork sanded, and the walls painted by Thursday when the linoleum installer is coming. And did I mention Michael's out of town? Pray for me.

New Construction

New rowhouses, almost completed near Alberta in NoPo:





Pretty cool, huh? Turns out my former coworker's husband is working on it. Nice to see more modern residential design on the east side.

Money Shots

Well, here it is, the ne plus ultra, the Final Final, at least when it comes to this bathroom. All that's left is to cough up the dough for a decent set of towels and crud up the shower with all my girly potions and unguents.

Low perspective of the kneewall, looking in from the hall:



Pressed up against the terlet, looking out of the door:



A better shot of the shower:



Shower wall (notice how the tile follows the angle of the ceiling#8212;I'll bet there was much cussing over that):



The back wall of the shower, showing the niche:



Shower pan and angled seat-like thing where I hike up my legs to shave 'em:



Another one of the seat/ledge:



Vanity (an Ikea kitchen piece which everyone thought looked like ass until the cabinets went in):



Speshul terlet with softclose seat (below wall cabinet from Target's Isaac Mizrahi line of bathroom accessories):



Some interesting notes: The crown molding, which would have been impossible to miter together because of all the angles, was actually coped with a jigsaw and fitted together (a technique I'm totally psyched to teach myself). The privacy film on the windows (necessary due to the fact that my next door neighbor's teenage daughter's bedroom window is directly across and only about ten feet away from my bathroom window) came from Ikea, and wasn't too hard to install. The equivalent stuff from Home Depot cost 10X more and didn't obscure enough, uh, "detail". It is a clear glass walled shower, after all.

So there it is. The money shot. Now I have to decide whether or not it's worth continuing the blog, considering that I ain't doing anything like that again any time soon. I guess I could post photos of cool houses in Portland (or ones that put the "bung" in bungalow) and details of other projects I'm planning. I'll have to see if the ordeal of painting crappy kitchen cabinets is a worthy enough topic to blog about.

Not with a bang...

It's done. Final inspection has been passed, everything's working. It's actually been physically finished, intact, for weeks now, but I didn't want to post for fear of jinxing it.

Whenever I used to hear some over-bred suburban yuppie talk about how awful and stressful her latest kitchen remodel was, I would roll my eyes with derision. Talk about a first-world problem: "Wah! I couldn't fix Snotleigh and McTravesteigh mac and cheese for six whole weeks while the electricians rewired the entire house to accomodate the restaurant-quality twelve burner gas range I'll never use except to heat up jars chocolate sauce that I'll gobble down whole in the middle of the night in order to feed the growing sense of emptiness in my soul! Wah!"

Well, now I'm that whiny waste of skin. All in all, the project wasn't that bad. I got along with everyone involved (with one exception) and got a pretty sweet bathroom out of the deal. Christ, though, it took its toll. I've never been comfortable pigeonholing myself as an extrovert or an introvert—frankly, I swing back and forth between the two like a schizoprenic Courtney Love on a stripper pole. What I finally realized in a big way is that while I enjoy the company of others and can do well in social situations, I need time and space to recharge. In the mornings, when I running around getting ready for work, interruptions throw me off track and I start dreading the rest of the day. It's a trite Cathy-ism, but you really shouldn't try to talk to me before my first cup of coffee. I've managed to alienate just about every neighbor and coworker by snubbing them in the morning.

God, I hate Cathy.

Anyway, I had to be on. I had to be on and friendly and not growl at people starting at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning and lasting into the evening. It was the evening (going into late night) intrusions that finally broke me and turned me into a shreiking she-harpy Gorgon of Doom and killed my excitement and goodwill and happy-smiliness on this project. The lesson I learned is not to put up with anything that annoys me for even a day. Because first, I'm paying these folks to come and do a job for me, and I should be able to determine when that job gets done. I mean, I have to be here from 8 to 5 (although I do goof off in the office and, well, write in my blog so maybe that's a bad reason). Second, if I keep bending over backward to accomodate people, not only will they keep doing whatever it is that's annoying me, not realizing that I'm turning into a twitchy repressed freak, I'll eventually lose my shit all over them and that's not pretty.

I also learned a lot about where my limits are, how to take what I'm being offered, that Michael is a clever, supportive man, and that while tile guys are fairly high up in the construction food chain, they are shithouse-crazy oversharers and there's a reason why they do a job that requires them to be isolated from others.

Because I haven't wanted to jinx it, I haven't taken photos since I took the painters tape off the Frameless! Shower! Doors! I promise I will take photos this weekend and post them, because it really does look beautiful. Prettier than any other bathroom because I drew the plans and picked everything and suffered through, what? nine months? of construction. It was worth it.