Out With the Old, In With the New

Most of our windows are original to the house, only 2 on the second floor - 1 on the main floor and the basement windows were replaced when we bought the house (out of 15 windows).  And I absolutely love the look and feel of the wooden frames and details...

haha, I promise you that I wasn't angry in this picture, just chilly!

...but our heating bills did not love the wooden windows.  The breeze that came through the windows would cause wisps of hair to move around my face as I sat on the couch.  There was major leakage happening.  There was also the safety factor to consider - the windows no longer stayed open on their own (potential for fingers, hands or head injuries should they shut on anyone) and there were no locks on them.  So, since the government was offering money back for updated windows we did what we could and replaced the 4 windows on the main floor.

It was important to me that the new windows look identical to the original ones (minus the fact that they would be made of vinyl instead of wood).  So we took the necessary dimensions, headed to Canada Windows and Doors (after months of shopping around and several out-of-this-world quotes) and Darryl scored us a pretty nice discount.  He is a great negotiator - I get too embarrassed, or afraid of insulting the seller so I'm not too assertive in that department. 

The after pictures really don't look too different from the befores, you'll just have to trust me that it was worth every penny.

Before...

After...

We still haven't taken the stickers off ... it's on the to-do list ;)  So is the caulking on the outside, we've got to get around to that soon. 

I was so so happy when we picked the windows up.  They turned out just as I had hoped - they open only one third of the way, just like the originals did, and they still have the 3 panel detail in the top part!

So hopefully this winter we'll be able the reap the benefits of a less-breezy main floor, and our heating bill should be a bit lower too.

Tomorrow I'll start to show you the flooring changes we made in the living/dining room!

Have you had to replace any windows yet? 

Unexpected Findings

I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!  Fall is definitely in the air, hey?  I had some dance lessons which I love, a post-Thanksgiving breakfast with Darryl's family, a tea date with a friend and got a second coat of primer on the walls downstairs!  On the way home from breakfast on Saturday we saw a sign, as we often do this time of year, pointing in the direction of a "rummage and bake sale"...how could we say no?  Don't you love when pleasant, unexpected things happen?  We had a quick browse around and came across these babies which, for $5 each, just had to come home with us!

For months now I've been on the prowl for a coffee table to turn into a seating bench (gotta love pinterest inspirations!), checking thrift stores and every garage sale I came across, but nothing was quite right.  I hadn't thought about doing 2 separate seating bench/stools with side tables...but why not??  It would make for more flexible seating arrangements too!

Sometimes, when you least expect it, things just seem to fall into place.  So I've got some plans for these guys that I hope to share with you soon!  Just waiting on my fabric to be delivered...

In other weekend updates, the ceiling in our loft upstairs has officially begun to crumble.  Here's what it looked like just before we moved in...you can see a slight crack to the left of Darryl's head.

Over the last 2 years the crack became more and more prominent and we knew it was only a matter of time before  we'd have to tackle it.  We just didn't think gravity would get to the demo phase before we did.


Last night we were watching TV and heard a crash from the attic.  We went up to check it out and saw this...(excuse the mess, this has become our dumping ground for everything that should be on the main floor right now)

Three hours later we heard an even louder crash and went up to find this....

Looks like this project has just jumped a few spots on our to-do list  :S  I guess on the bright side, demo will be pretty easy!

Did you come across any exciting finds this weekend??

All Walled Up

Getting drywall up is such a satisfying feeling!  I makes everything look like a liveable space again.  We were so lucky to have a family member who had a drywall lift for doing the ceiling.  Darryl's back was greatful.  Let's take a look at the progress

The guys got this room done in one day and left the kitchen for another day.  Some time later, I can't remember now, we did the mudding (a terrible job to give a detail-oriented person, in my opinion haha) and Darryl's dad came over to start a coat of primer!

One of the most important things I learned along the way when mudding drywall:  whatever you do, do not put your nose up to the wall to inspect for imperfections!  Stand a couple feet away, just as you would if you were casually standing in the room.  Whatever you notice from there, fix.  Whatever you don't notice from there, move on to the first coat of primer.  The primer will really show you what imperfections will stand out once you paint, so do a little patch work if needed before the second coat of primer and you're good to go!  I wish someone had told me this before I started mudding because I was pulling my hair out at the sight of miniscule dings, dots and lines.  Do not obsess as much as you are tempted to or it will delay your progress significantly!  I speak from experience. 

You can see what the living/dining room looked like before here and here.

Next week, some much needed window improvements and floor updates!  Have a wonderful weekend!!

Do you have any other dyrwall/mudding tips?  We've got 2 other floors and a basement to work on so we'll definitely be doing more!

It's Gettin' Hot In Here...

...(not to worry, we did not take off all our clothes).  By the way, please don't use the dates that I'm posting as a reference for how long our projects took!  We demoed for what was way longer than we both anticipated.  With just two of us and sometimes Darryl's dad, it took a while to tear everything down, pack it up into bags or boxes to bring it out to the trailer, and then to drive it to the dump, unload it all and come back to do the next shipment.  Phew!  I'm writing this a little more than a year after we were even in the demo phase.  I cannot even describe the elation I felt when things were no longer coming down, but rather being put back together.  Wahoo!!!

Mhmm that's drywall all lined up and read to go!

I don't have much else to say about insulation and vapour barrier, other than that it is waaaaaaaay more fun than demo.  Mind you, I didn't do any of this room's insulation/vapour barrier, so Darryl may have a different opinion??  ha

Come back tomorrow to see what the living/dining room looks like all opened up and covered in drywall!

Taking Back Our Dining Room

I realize that demo definitely isn't the most fun or glamourous part of renos, but as this blog is serving as a bit of a diary for us to remember every little step of the way, I've got to get all my thoughts out.  More exciting and pretty stuff to come though, hang tight!

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, when we bought our house, the dining room's original entryways had been dyrwalled over to turn it into a bedroom.  In order to faciliate a duplex, they also had to find a place to put in a bathroom on the main floor.  I guess they did the best they could with the given space, but stradling a bathroom between a kitchen and a dining room was not our ideal layout.  It meant that we had an "L" shaped dining room...

Not the best picture, but it's really the closest one to showing the footprint of the dining room (where the boys are).  What they're about to take down is the shower part of the bathroom, that was never there when the house was originally built.

I have yet to come across an easy, straight forward, online floor planner, so I decided to just draw the main floor out quickly to give a better impression of the bathroom situation...

So we tore that whole bathroom out and relocated it to a different spot on the main floor, converting it to a powder room.  More on that in the coming weeks!

While I don't have after shots yet of a full on dining room, we've at least got the full shape and size back to work with.  Woot!  In the first picture from this post, you can see the dining room only had one of these two windows, the left side was part of the bathroom before, now we have both back.

And for a different perspective, looking from the kitchen into the bathroom before...

And during demo, now we can see the dining room...



So now that we had this gaping hole (where we knew our fridge would eventually go), we framed up a new wall...

So yay to gaining our whole dining room footprint back!  Check back tomorrow and Friday to see the walls going back up!  Then next week we'll take a look at the floors  :)

Do you have a favourite online floor planning site?  Any tips?

Demo Discoveries!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!  We had a lovely family dinner with lots of laughter, delicious food and great stories.  And are you loving my new header as much as I am?  When Britt offered to give me a hand adding a little oompf to my blog I was over the moon!  I couldn't believe how fast and helpful she was...thanks Britt!  Check out her pink peacock designs link on my sidebar as well :)

To help organize my thoughts I'm going to focus on the living/dining room first, so I'll take you from demo and soon to where we are today!  Then I'll show the kitchen afterwards.  Sometimes I'm a bit of a linear thinker.  From the minute we started tearing things down, I hoped and prayed that we would find some super cool time capsule from owners before us, or some love note that slipped behind a baseboard and was forgotten for decades.  And while we didn't find anything like that in the living room, there were still a few neat discoveries that told us a bit more about our house and what it was originally like. 

Old windows have counterweights in them to keep the windows open.  The weights hang on a rope and after years of opening and closing, the rope often frays and the weights drop, leaving you with windows that can no longer stay open on their own.  After taking the trim off our windows we uncovered the weights (7lbs each!)

(I am determined to find a use for, or a way to display, these original cast iron weights, but I'm having trouble coming up with ideas so if anyone has seen something or just has an idea I'd be happy to hear!)

After taking down a wall in the dining room we uncovered original electrical boxes for wall sconces.  That little circle thing on the wall is the original box, the other one is hiding behind the door leaning on the wall.  So we updated the electrical so that we could bring the sconces back!   Who would hide a treasure like that!?

Taking off the baseboards uncovered some green shag carpet that was in the house I'm guessing in the 70s??

Yummy.

Of course there was knob and tube wiring which had been updated before we bought the house

We also uncovered 3 original doorways which had all been covered up in order to create separate living areas for the duplex.  The red lines outline the original doorways we found.  I was adamant that should we uncover any pocket doors we would keep and restore them.  Unfortunately there were none to be found  :(  This first one was the doorway into the front entrance from the living room.

Below, the green painter's tape shows the doorway that previous owners added in after closing the original ones off.  The red line shows the doorway from the dining room into the kitchen.

And then we found the doorway in between the living and dining rooms.  In the pic below, the door on the left is the door the other owners put in to turn the dining room into a bedroom.  The middle larger opening is the original opening, which had we found pocket doors (as neighbours on either side of us have) we would have restored it.  But there weren't any so we opted for a more open flow.  On the wall on the right you can also see both the sconce electrical boxes.

We were lucky to have a very generous friend offer to help one evening with the demo.  He definitely helped give us our second wind.  That thing they're knocking down is the shower/tub area of a bathroom that had been put in.  I'll have to draw up some floor plans to show you because it's a little hard to explain.  The bathroom straddled the kitchen and the dining room.  Awk-ward. 

Finally, the little black thing on the bottom of the staircase is the original telephone hook up, which I think is sooo so cute.  I can just picture the old fashioned phone and telephone table that would have sat in the entry way.  So romantic.

What I learned:  Even though I found out that I seriously dislike the demo phase, I LOVE discovering all of secrets an old house can hold.

Did your demo unveil anything interesting?  Any thoughts on how I can incorporate the cast iron weights into our home??

Happy Thanksgiving!

For all the Canadians out there, Thanksgiving weekend is here and I came across this wonderful idea from YHL.  I'm sure you all know them, but if not, check them out, you don't know what you're missing!  They're so thoughtful and creative with so many great ideas! 

So although we're starting a bit late, I thought it would be a really nice thing to try this year.  Each day we write something we're thankful for on a slip of paper and put it in a jar, not knowing what the other person writes.  When the month is done we'll read them together.  Afterwards I think I'll put all the papers aside for Christmas time.  Then I plan to put them in a clear glass ornament for the Christmas tree (yes my mind is there already), label the year on it, and that way each year we can reminisce about all the years we have collected!

I went to Michaels and picked up 3 fall coloured papers in green, orange and brown for a dollar each. 

When I got home I decided that I didn't want the papers to be very big so I decided on 1.5 x 3 inch rectangles. I measured out a grid and got to cutting with my super fancy scissors! Cutting is always more fun with patterned scissors. 

I grabbed a glass jar I had on hand (left over from my sister's wedding centre pieces, thanks K!), gave it a quick wash and a couple coats of Rustoleum's Frosted Glass spray paint.  I put some letter stickers on it saying "thanks".  Easy peasy!

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend if and however you celebrate it!

PS.  I hope to have a new header to share with you on Monday  :)

Do you have any special Thanksgiving traditions?  Any fun crafts?