My arms are sore

Saturday night we went bowling with some friends from church. We had a great time even with some minor inconveniences along the way. We were hoping to get to the house some this weekend, but it just didn't happen. Sunday was a church picnic (BBQ...yum!) and Sunday afternoon we went and saw Ratatouille. Very cute movie with some laugh-out-loud scenes, and a great message about being true to yourself.

We did make it to the house on Monday night since we don't have band this week. We spent Monday night demolishing the bathroom. That was a lot of fun. We took off the sliding shower doors, took off all of the mirrors except the medicine cabinet (it's set into the wall), took off various other attachments (toilet paper holder, towel racks, etc.) and I started in on the linoleum. I stopped because I wanted to get some pictures before I pulled all of it out. There are four layers of linoleum in the second floor bathroom, and the bottom layer is my favorite. I'm guessing it was put down in the 1920's or so (could have been earlier--I'm not sure how to date linoleum) and it is SOOO beautiful. I have pictures but they haven't made it off of the camera onto the computer yet. I'd love to keep it but it's not in very good condition. I'll have to settle with saving scraps of it for a true "scrapbook" to tell the story of our house.

On Tuesday we went to a fireworks show down at the Arch which was a lot of fun, and really beautiful. I didn't take the camera but took some pictures with my cell phone (I'm getting pretty savvy with this technology stuff) and a couple of them turned out pretty well. We walked most of the way downtown which was great exercise, and prevented us from having to deal with the traffic jam after the fireworks show.

Pretty much all day yesterday was spent at the house. We (read: Mark) tore out some more baseboards and finished taking down the dropped ceiling in the middle bedroom. We also found out that a couple of our walls have been drywalled over the plaster. That's usually a bad sign, since it means there was a problem that led to needing the drywall (usually to hold up the plaster). We (I actually did help on this one) pulled all of the drywall off of one wall and the wall doesn't look to be in terrible shape (i.e., it didn't fall down when we removed the plaster). The opposite wall, on the other hand, is not going to have the drywall removed until we are ready for the whole wall to come down. Mark started to pull off the drywall and the plaster was falling in huge chunks, so we're going to wait on that one. In the meantime, I took down the dropped ceiling in the bathroom. We also removed most of another closet, including the HVAC ductwork that wasn't hooked up (which ran to all three of the bedrooms), and the green and brown shag carpet that was in the bottom of the closet. We've been finding lots of little "treasures" along the way that I am keeping as well. One of them is an advertisement card for blinds that may well be as old as the house!

Last night we climbed up on the roof of our little house and watched the fireworks display downtown. It really was a great view although much more impressive up close. Happy independence day, USA!

Living the American dream

We've finally caved and become a two-car household. So now we have two cars and two houses...I'd say that about covers the standard "American dream", right? I will say however, that one of our houses is not particularly livable, and the second car is only going to be driven a couple of days a week for no more than 7 miles each way. :) Do note, that I did not say this is our American dream. I would be much happier with only one car (I do like having the two houses--mostly because I like doing demolition and that's generally not a good idea in a house that you live in).

We bought a 1992 Nissan Sentra this past weekend for Mark to drive to work. Most days we can still carpool, but there are a couple of days that he doesn't go in until noon or 1pm, which makes it a little difficult to get both of us to work with one car. It's still doable, but it involves a lot of driving back and forth across St Louis for one of us. Amazingly enough, the car passed both safety and emissions inspections, and we'll get the license plates today (Mark got temporary tags for it on Tuesday).

Tonight is a birthday dinner for a friend and then "Grease" at the Muny. Hopefully it manages not to rain all evening. We've had pretty consistent rain for the past few days, but it's supposed to clear up tonight. As a consequence of lots of sunshine followed by lots of rain, we have a squash plant that is overtaking our garden. I think the only harvest we'll have this year is a lot of squash and a couple of watermelons!

Apparently we should have gone to Juilliard

**I apologize in advance for the spots on the pictures. For some reason the camera lens seems to be dirty...**

Tonight is our second concert with the University City community band (7pm, across from St Louis Bread Co/Panera on Delmar!). Last night we were asked to be put on the sub list for the St Louis Wind Symphony, which is apparently a professional-level ensemble although they don't get paid. Not bad for two weeks worth of playing, especially as rusty as we both are.

Speaking of rusty...
This is why we think our baseboards are either original or pretty close. These are square nails, and they are in every piece of baseboard we have pulled off minus one. I need to double-check the nails the next time I'm at the house--I may be able to get a little more information from our nails based on this site.

I'll let some of the pictures speak for themselves:
During (you already saw "before")...

After...

During...
After...

Mark removing baseboards very carefully:

Mark removing a section of the wall that had been drywalled (not so very carefully):

Like the purple??
Keep in mind that you don't see any pictures of me working because I am the one taking the pictures. I am working too. Really. :) Just ask the electrician who came last Friday, who had to help me break into the house by holding a ladder so I could shimmy up onto the roof and climb in a window. I now have my own set of keys, thank you very much. And we have an electrician. :)

**Call me whatever kind of music geek you like, but I just found a little slice of heaven on the internet. In the process of looking up Juilliard (to make sure I spelled it right), I came across this. Is it possible to be in love with a website? They've combined really old documents, music, and technology. I am overwhelmed with emotion.**

We are busy bees!

Friday was our first show at the Muny, Oklahoma!. It was such a fun show and both Mark and I had a great time. We got season tickets this year, so we've got Friday night dates almost all summer. :)

Saturday was ALL DAY at the house. Whew. Hard, hard work, but it's so much fun to see the changes and to make all of the little discoveries along the way. I have some pics from Saturday but they haven't made it onto the computer yet.

On Saturday, we pulled down the rest of the dropped ceilings from the front two bedrooms--yucky, nasty work as plaster falls on our heads. We are wearing dust masks designed for drywall and plaster work to try to keep as much debris out of our lungs as possible. Basically we have areas where the plaster ceiling has collapsed onto the dropped ceiling below, so as Mark is pulling the ceiling tiles out and handing them to me they are covered with very heavy, crumbly, OLD plaster--complete with horsehair. The horsehair is an additive to give the plaster more substance, and is even used today when people are trying to repair or replicate old plaster. I'll post some pics of the holes in the ceiling a bit later.

We also finished pulling out the closets in the front bedroom--that was actually fun! The walls were made of normal 2x4 studs, but instead of actual wood of some kind for the walls they had nailed luan (a very thin plywood) to the studs. The best way to take it off? Kick and punch it off!! Seriously!! You stand inside the closet and kick off the luan panels. Ahh...stress relief. We really should have gotten some pictures of me doing that, but I think Mark was a little more concerned with where the luan was flying to across the room than taking pictures. ;) However, here is a picture of the closets before I attacked them:

After kicking out the walls, we removed the studs which were framing out the closets and it was a lot like cutting down trees--take a few screws and bolts out and watch to see which way the whole contraption was going to fall. It really was a riot--we had a great time tearing out those closets. The rest of the day Saturday was spent removing baseboards as carefully as possible. We'd like to try to keep as much of the original woodwork as possible, especially because we now think it may be VERY original...as in say 1890 or so. I'll post some pics as to why we think it's so old.

Upstairs we go

This is the enclosed exterior stairwell going upstairs (as well as downstairs into the basement). Like the orange shag and faux wood paneling??

This is the upstairs landing. You're looking at what used to be a window (the white rectangle), which is now the back of a closet. But the most important thing to notice is this:
This is a close-up view of what used to be the exterior wall. Look very closely, and you will see that someone has painted the bricks red AND painted in black lines over the mortar. The entire wall, two stories worth, is painted this way. Someone had a lot of time on his hands.

This is the view from the back bedroom looking towards the front of the house.

I really didn't think it was possible to have too many mirrors, but this bathroom has the mirror wall hanging that you can see, a mirrored medicine cabinet that you can't see, the mirrored tiles over the shower wall (they go all the way around the shower) AND a small mirror stuck to the wall hanging mirror.

I'm going to wait to show you the front bedroom until I can give you some "before demo" and "after demo" pics--we've already demolished the closets that were in there. But here's a pic of the back of the house:
You can see the enclosed exterior stairwell and the back addition pretty well here. I think I'll spare you all pictures of the basement, but you are going to see pictures of the TEAL ceiling. *sigh* I really don't know what someone was thinking. And in response to some of the comments, no, we are not keeping the pink wall--especially since you can see through the paint to the tree wallpaper behind it! If you look closely at the picture of the mirrored wall you can see it.

A few more

This is the kitchen, more or less. The old, scary stove is already gone. Don't be impressed by the brick wall--it's not real, although it does hurt if you scrape your knuckles across it.


This is the other wall of the kitchen, where they have changed an exterior window into a pantry, complete with hooks for mugs. The door is formerly an exterior door which now leads to the enclosed staircase to the upstairs. Notice the transom window above the door. While there's been some odd stuff done to this house, they've actually left a lot of the original features (like the transoms) which will be great to incorporate into the new plans.

This is the first floor bathroom, which if you look at the layout of the house was obviously added well after the house was built. Notice that the door can't even open all of the way since it hits the toilet. Also notice that we actually have a chandelier in the bathroom, as well as a sparkly butterfly motif. Classic. :)

This is the addition, tacked on to the back off the house. Obviously added much later as it is over a crawl space (not the basement) and has modern wiring. Again, fake brick wall but lots of cabinet space. This will become the mud room/laundry room in the current plan.

A few select pics

I know this is going to make all of you want to run over to visit, but you're just going to have to be patient. ;) As promised, I have (finally!) managed to get a few pics of the new house on here. All of these pics were taken the weekend after we closed, so a few things have already changed.

This is the house. It is actually two stories, both with ten-foot ceilings, but it looks like a midget in between the two giants next door. Both of those are vacant, by the way, so you might be looking at our next projects.

The infamous wall of mirrors. When we bought this house I thought we had managed to get into our first house ever without any pink--not so. This "hole" was covered by a very large mirror when we viewed the house. Basically we have a 10' x 15' wall of 12" x 12" mirrors, minus a few in the middle.
The ever-appealing faux wood beams. Seriously, they're U-shaped pieces of styrofoam glued to the ceiling. This is the living room ceiling, minus the two beams Mark already pulled off. We have these attractive beams in the living room, dining room, and kitchen.

You're now viewing two of my favorite pieces in the house...the chandelier in the dining room and an example of our windows. If I had to guess, the windows are original and they are beautiful! Well, they will be once we get them refinished. They have the old chain and weights down the sides and they are between 7' and 8' tall. I cleaned up the chandelier and it is now so sparkly. I love it! To be continued...