Bye Bye Bye to 80s Tile - Bathroom Renovation Part 1

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If you saw my upstairs house tour, you know there was one room, in particular, that needed some serious help. The upstairs bathroom, while technically functional, had been renovated (maybe in the 80s or 90s?) in a way that made it totally stand out from the rest of the house. From the fat upper trim to the pink-and-cream tile everywhere, we were determined to tackle this early on so that we could enjoy the bathroom.

Here is what we were working with at first:

For some reason, this tile simply looks dirty to me. Even after I'd given it a good old fashioned scrubbing, it had a grungy, grime-covered look to me. Not exactly what you want to see in a bathroom, where you're supposed to be getting clean.

On top of just being dirty looking, awfully colored tile, it was put everywhere. Even the countertop was tiled, which is one of my pet peeves in homes because it is so dang difficult to clean, and it's really easy to stain tile grout with makeup. They also brought this tile all the way around the walls of the room.

So, stage one of this bathroom remodel was to get rid of everything bad in the room, i.e. wall tile.

First, I removed the medicine cabinet/mirror that was hung above the sink. This was pretty simple - just a process of removing all visible screws and pulling the medicine cabinet out of the wall to reveal the lathe behind it.

The next step was to remove the trim. It had been caulked on top, so I used a box cutter to score a line in the caulk. This loosens the grip there so that the trim can be pulled off more easily.

Then, I used a chisel and hammer to get underneath the trim from above until it was a bit removed from the wall.

Occasionally, switching to a bar helped me get more leverage against the wall.

Once there was a visible gap between the trim and wall, I pulled it off with my gloves on.

We weren't sure if we were going to re-use this trim or not, so we wanted to keep it intact and orderly - just in case. I used a permanent marker to write the location of each piece on the back, to avoid confusion later on if we decided to use them.

Once the trim was off, we also removed the light plates so that we could get to the tile underneath them. Then, we got to work on the tile, itself.

We used a chisel and hammer (and occasionally the bar) to remove the tile from the wall. The chisel was placed at a very slight angle, almost flat against the wall, and pushed up against the side or top of a piece of tile. We hit the end of the chisel with a hammer until the tile pieces came loose.

Note: If you are doing this, wear gloves! Chipped tile can be very sharp, and it's easy to get cuts all over your hands, so wear some leather work gloves for protection.

The first wall (above) was fairly easy to remove the tile from. Pieces fell off easily, and some even fell off in pairs.

As we worked our way around the room, however, we ran into some problems. Whoever did this bathroom remodel (clearly quite a while ago) had done each wall a little differently.

In some areas, the "1980s remodelers" put a piece of drywall up against the plaster wall and glued the tile to the drywall. Where this was the case, the tile was ripping the drywall, but this wasn't much of an issue - we simply removed the drywall piece along with the tile, revealing the smooth, intact plaster wall behind it (see photo above).

In other places, the "1980s remodelers" skipped the drywall and simply glued the tile directly to the plaster. Where this was the case, removing the tile caused the plaster to rip and crumble, revealing the lathe behind it (see photo below, and my terrified face).

So, we ended up with a mostly clean break where there had been drywall, but one wall looked awful and would clearly need to be repaired (hmm... guess which wall?).

We considered doing this ourselves, but ended up calling someone to come help us hang and screw in the drywall. After completely botching the removal, it seemed wise to get a little help. He hung the drywall and then mudded and sanded around them to make the patching look smooth.

Next, we got started on installing what would be covering up those walls. 

What do you think it was?!

My American Four Square - Upstairs House Tour

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I totally fell off the face of the earth for the last week due to a bathroom renovation that is driving me nuts and eating up a lot of my time.

Forgive me. Pictures coming soon. That makes up for my absence, right?

Now, picking up where the downstairs house tour left off... [If you missed it, click here to read it!]

As you head upstairs, the staircase turns inward and there is a beautiful stained glass window. The clear shape in the middle of this window mimics the mirror above the fireplace.

Stained glass window in stairwell

To the left, at the top of the stairs, is what we are currently using as a master bedroom.

Master bedroom

The floors in the bedrooms upstairs are in pretty poor condition because they haven't been refinished as recently as the downstairs floors. I have mixed feelings on this - it does give the upstairs a nice patina and historic look, but it isn't the most comfortable on bare feet, so we will probably cover any issues with rugs and eventually refinish it.

That said, many of these rooms have wonderful natural light. This part of the city is on a hill, so we are able to get extra light on this side of the house because all of the houses East of us are on lower ground. The natural light is what I love most about this room. It wakes me up softly every morning and makes it easier to get out of bed because there is no avoiding the fact that the day has begun!

There is also a door to the third floor from this bedroom. The door is around the bend to the left, by the window that faces East, and it leads up a stairwell to a well-lit and fairly large third floor that is currently empty.

Office #1

Across from the master bedroom is what my husband is using as his office. It's also on the side of the house with gorgeous natural light, so it will be a great space for him to work in (he works remotely, so he's in there all day). This room has a neat shape, and is very bright and spacious.

Office #2

Next to my husband's office is what is currently my office. It already looks significantly different than it does in this picture (posts coming soon), after a curtain change and a serious case of paint. In this picture, the walls are covered in a textured wallpaper that gives this room more of a beige look which I didn't care for... but the texture of the wallpaper ended up looking very cool painted! ;-)

Guest Room

Across from my office is the guest room. This is a view of the corner where the door to the hallway and door to the closet are. This room was pretty dark, due to some black out curtains, but we have swapped them out to give the room a brighter feel. Still awaiting furniture, which we are retrieving from Chicago this weekend.

And finally... drumroll please... the upstairs bathroom. This has been the bane of my existence for the past week because we are renovating it. The previous owners started the project, but now we are picking up the baton. It looks like one of the owners renovated it quite a while ago and it ended up having a very dated feel due to the wall tile, among other things. 

Stay tuned for a more updated (but still era friendly) bathroom post! 

^Go ahead and wave goodbye to that wall tile because it's not invited to stick around.

:)

My American Foursquare - Empty House Tour, Downstairs Edition

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If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you know that my husband and I just spent the last two days moving into a new house! Let the party begin.

One of the things we wanted while looking at homes was something with true character and style on its own - we didn't want a cookie cutter house that we would have to FORCE into having personality. It's totally a personal choice, but for us, it was extremely important to find something that felt significant and had a story behind it.

Here were our priorities when it came to picking a house:

• LOCATION! We wanted to buy somewhere within walking distance to yoga, restaurants, stores, and parks, because we like to live an active and on-foot lifestyle - Major check! Yoga is not even a full block away. I could do a whole post on things I can walk to from my new house, but I'll spare you... for now
• History! We wanted something that was older and very sturdy. - Check! Our new home was built in 1910 and it is considered an "American Four Square" style. It's a 4 bedroom, 3-story house in an historic neighborhood that we love. 
• Original, heavy wood doors - Check!
• Original woodwork, meaning trim, stairway, and built ins are original and have not been painted - Check! I am amazed that in over 100 years no one painted the trim or ripped out the built-in pantry. Thanks to everyone who ever owned this house.
• No carpet anywhere. We just don't like it, it's ugly, and it collects a lot of allergens. If there was carpet, we wanted something with wood underneath it so we could rip it out - Check! No carpet anywhere in this baby.
• Updated kitchen, meaning all or most appliances were stainless, adequate storage, and a dishwasher - Check! Everything but the stove was stainless, and we have already ordered a new stove to replace the white one.
• At least three bedrooms, preferably four (because we want a master, guest room, and at least one office but preferably two offices so that we can each have one) - Check! We have four bedrooms in this house, plus a large third story that will be another room or office once we spruce it up.
• A garage (these are especially hard to find in the neighborhood we looked in, because most of the houses were built before people even had cars!) - Check!

When we found this house, we pretty much knew instantly. We walked through it with smiles on our faces and just had that feeling you have when you find "the one." <--Yeah, it really feels like that, but I'm clearly a little bit dramatic! We put an offer in, and the next day, it was ours. Less than 24 hours on the market.

As I mentioned in my About page (which desperately needs an update), my inspiration to start a blog was YoungHouseLove - clearly a house-related blog, just based on the name. So, I started this blog with a focus on food, fitness, and home. But, I was living in small Chicago apartments and I couldn't do much with them, so the focus re-routed and the 'home' part got a little bit lost. I am so excited to have a place that is mine now, so that I can create an environment that is peaceful and unique and share it with my blog readers. Thanks for being along for the ride!

For now, here are a few sneak peaks of some of the features of this house we are so excited about. 

Original entryway.

Above, you see an image of the foyer and original entryway of the home. I love the full size mirror and the gorgeous antique light fixture that hangs from the ceiling.

Original wood stairway with a stained glass window

Across from the entryway is the original wood stairway. I appreciate the quality and brightness of the wood, as well as the gorgeous stained glass window that lets light into the stairway (more pictures of that coming soon).

The front room

To the left of the foyer is the front room. You walk through original glass french doors into this sitting room, where we plan to place a tufted couch and chaise lounge. This room has so many great features, such as the antique fireplace, gorgeous wood mirror, rustic industrial light fixtures, and the original glass french doors.

Ethereal living room

Through the front room is the living room. My favorite thing, by far, about this room is the bay windows. The combination of soft light and flowy drapes gives this room an ethereal feel, and we intend to juxtapose that with some modern furniture.

Here, we are putting our mid century couch, coffee table, and credenza. We are planning to mount our 60" flat screen on the wall above the credenza. Fingers crossed an old house can handle that...

Dining room

To the right of the living room is the dining room. There is a nice spread of high windows to let in light, but my favorite part of this room is the light fixture the previous owner added. I think it is so unique in this house and really an interesting conversation piece.

You can see through a small door to the top right of this picture - that goes to a walk through coat room that exists between the foyer and the dining room. So, if you wanted, you could let your guests in the front door, bring them into the walk through coat room to hang coats up, and enter the dining room. That coat room also has the door to the basement.

The kitchen is behind the living room. I love the backsplash (it looks off in this picture, but is actually white) and how simple it is, and I have already had a lot of fun playing with displays on those shelves.

At first, we considered adding upper cabinets that were white with glass inlays (which would have been true to this era of house, and also would allow us to keep the current lower cabinets without finding a perfect match). That said, now that we have put things away, we may leave it as is. Feel free to weigh in...

The fridge is unpictured here, but it is stainless and matches the dishwasher. We have a lot of other stainless appliances (Vitamix, juicer, etc) that will sit out, so we want the stove to match. (Hint hint: we already bought it)

The built in pantry

The pantry is between the kitchen and dining room, and this is by far one of my favorite features of the house. I am in love with these built ins - they are just so beautiful to look at, and I love the hardware, too. To boot, it stores an amazing amount of stuff, and is what is enabling us to get by without upper cabinets in the kitchen. I have put all of our things away, and we still have empty cabinets.

There is a skylight in this room as well as a window on the wall, so this pantry has amazing natural light. Get ready for lots of food photography coming at you from that built in table on the right.

Also off of the kitchen is a half bathroom. It is fairly small and simple, but gets the job done. I love the combo of the red door and red lighting. Great job, previous owners. You made our job easy.

Note to my readers... what should I put on those shelves up there? I want something decorative and interesting, because I don't need it for storage.

And there you have it! 

I am half-assing it and starting with downstairs only, because it is taking me quite a while to sift through my photos and pick just one of each room. I certainly could work on this all day, but I really should get back to things like unpacking my house and making myself food and, oh yeah, work.

WHAT ABOUT  YOU?

• What do you do in parts of your home where you place design before function? What kind of display areas do you have?
• Have you ever lived in an historic home?
• What do you think of open display kitchen shelving instead of upper cabinets?

Sell My House: Master Bedroom Edition

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Taking care of the floors downstairs was pretty easy and simple. The floor was in decent condition - good enough to show that they are good quality floors and add some character to an otherwise underwhelming interior. 

But, then we got upstairs, and things got a little... hectic. 

This is a saga worthy carpet story (seriously, it was a soap opera at the time), so for now, I'll cover the first 'uh-oh' we endured upstairs, and get to the rest of it in my next house post. Like leaving you with a cliff hanger on Friday's 10am Soap Opera. No, I don't watch Soap Operas. Stop judging.

Anyway, we worked on the front and master bedroom first. While most of the house was covered in a beige colored carpet, this front room had been adorned with a crazy purple color. It was clearly done at a different time than the rest of the house, because it was glued down to the floor along with the carpet pad.  

When we tried to pull it up, it was so brittle that the carpet padding would break off in tiny pieces. Imagine trying to peel up an entire bedroom floor, crumble by crumble.

Underneath, the floor was covered in glue and would clearly need to be re-carpeted. We would probably not have been able to completely remove everything, and even if we had been able to, we would have severely damaged the floors and incurred a huge cost to change them (incurring a huge cost as you are selling the house = not the most thrilling prospect).

In the end, we chalked it up to a success. Let's be real, that color was not going to fly in the resale market... so we were going to need to remove the carpet, either way.

So, we ended up re-carpeting this room with a frisee in a neutral color that would complement the wood elsewhere, but would still be easy on the eye (but how hard is it to improve upon purple?).

Once we had done that, it was time to turn this place into a real bedroom. And that, my friends, is where the staging comes in.

I like that this room has super simple staging that is extremely neutral. If you turn a buyer off with some crazy furniture, you've pretty much defeated the purpose of staging a home.

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

• Have you ever staged a home for resale? Any tips/tricks to share?
• Have you ever dealt with stubborn carpet? How did you handle it?

Let's Talk About Desks, Baby

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I'm a desk person.

I spend an obscene amount of time doing the following activities: Writing Blog Posts, Writing an 80k Word Novel, Editing an 80k Word Novel, and Facebook Stalking My Friends... (kidding). 

In short, I spend a good amount of time at a desk - when I have one. Since graduating from college, however, I haven't had a proper desk in my room. So, when I moved into this new apartment, I was determined to make the whole desk thing happen. Put it on the NEED list instead of the WANT list, if you know what I'm saying.

We went on a craigslisting spree about a month ago, and this desk caught my attention big time. It used to belong to some railroading company (choo choo!). What's good: It's the right size, very simple and doesn't take up much visual space (important since it's going smack dab in the middle of a large living room - not in a den). The clean lines mesh perfectly with the rest of the Mid Century Modern furniture in the room.

The perfect desk set up item # 1: A comfortable chair. Seriously. This is very important, especially if you're like me and intend to spend a lot of time there! We've currently got one of the Setu Lounge chairs there, with a blue pillow, just in case your butt gets cold.

   
The perfect desk set up item # 2: Natural light. Some of us work at offices all day with artificial lighting beaming down from above. On a Sunday afternoon, as you sit in your chair with a big cup of tea, you want natural light. If you live in a city, you want to be able to look out the window and see your neighbor's cute red door and the vines growing up the side of the old brick building. Such is the romance of a good desk set up.

The perfect desk set up item # 4: An Orchid. I wanted some symbol of life to be sitting out. Something fresh and green. But, I'm not so good at watering things daily, and I desperately do not want to be stuck picking up dead flowers all the time. So, we opted for an Orchid. Actually, I mentioned it once and then Justin had it sent to me at work. 

Answer to the "Are there really blue orchids?" question (because I've been asked so many times already): No, there are not blue orchids by birth, so to speak. BUT, a certain type of nutrients can turn a white orchid blue. So it's a combination of being the right color to begin with (white) and having a certain reaction to the nutrients the florist feeds it. Boom, roasted.



The perfect desk set up item # 5: Candles. Because, natural light or not, candles are always there for you. Even when the power is out. They make everything smell good and I find candles to be surprisingly comforting. 

I gathered 4 or 5 candles of varying heights (only one of which is scented - beware of completing scents!) and placed them on a cute silver serving tray I snatched at a garage sale. That way, if I ever need more room on the desk, it's easy to move all the candles at once. Plus, just in case the candles spill, the desk is protected.

I also enjoy the notion that I can write a book or a letter by candlelight and connect in some odd way to those who wrote books and letters by candlelight before me. Earth to Ernest Hemingway, are you there? Come in, Ernest?

I'm sure you're wondering, "But what can you see from the desk, Carly?" Because you know I've thought about it, since this desk has become my oasis of sorts.

Well, part of the magic of this desk is that you can also see the T.V. Because it sits at an angle in the corner, facing the room, it has a pretty open view of the television. Once we mount the TV to the wall, it should be able to tilt and swivel, meaning the angle at which you watch can be adjusted. What does this mean for my desk oasis? That I can turn the TV so it's perfectly viewable from my seat. Meaning I can watch Nikita or Alias or Homeland (I'm a serious spy/CIA nerd, just read my book...).

Also "viewable" from my desk oasis is the wonderful, the fabulous, the infamous... color coded bookshelf. Roy G. Biv called. He said he wants his shelves back.

So what do you think? Does it look serene? Could you sit here sipping tea (or coffee) on a Sunday afternoon, typing away?

Where is your oasis in your home?