I left my hairdryer out and he built me a vanity.

So I may not be the girliest person in the world (if you haven't figured it out yet Nicole is writing this post not Mike) but I am so excited to have a designated area to get ready in the morning and have all of my personal bathroom items where Mike can't hide them on me. It turned out so beautiful and completed with all salvaged pieces. The actual vanity I wanted to have a lot of drawer space but still be able to fit my legs underneath so I could sit near the counter top. We had a really difficult time finding this size cabinet, until Mike went wandering in our neighbors trash and found a discarded remnant of a kitchen cabinet that fit perfectly. All we had to do was strip it of the 50's era yellow paint and stain it to match our pocket door. The marble top was found at a local salvage yard and we had it cut to match the style of our sink top. We added hardware to tie in the look with the rest of the bathroom and added the same mirror that is above our sink. My favorite part is the top drawer that Mike put in small dividers for all my jewelry since I have been using the same crappy jewelry case since college. I have officially moved up in the world.

The background to this story shouldn't be lost, we almost made this area a closet but instead knocked out a portion of the dormer for a medium sized closet to gain space and not lose the vanity. This whole project stemmed from Mike's pure hatred for my hairdryer. Which now has a home underneath the vanity where he will never have to see it.

The Front Porch is Complete!

OK not really, but I finished doing the plans in CAD. Once the vanity for the bathroom is done, I plan to start building the columns / railings in the basement.

So - while we've made some progress on the vanity for the bathroom (pictures soon), and intend to do a few more before-and-after posts (just need to pick up our dirty socks and take some "afters"!), computer-modeled progress is the only progress that we have to show right now.

It did take quite a bit of measuring in the cold to get all of the dimensions that I needed to model the facade of the house - At least I was able to reference the pitch of the roof / upstairs window placement from the CAD model I had previously done of our bedroom; no standing on the roof required.

As a reminder of what the porch looks like now, you can look here, or here.

Looking Back

So, my favorite column in Hot Rod Magazine, "Looking Back", is the column in which they dig through obscure photos in the Hot Rod archives to uncover some gem of a snapshot-in-time  that carries some relevance; a photo worth a thousand words.

You can see where the built-in used to be, on the right wall.
Also note the faux box beams, ceiling tiles, linolium floor
and pine paneling. Our attic bedroom looked like a basement
rec-room from the 60's.

And here's the opposite wall, where I moved the built-in to.
Why? Because I find it necessary to do things the hard way. 

 Lately I've been trying to dig through all of our renovation photos to put together our own home-blog version of "looking back", since we skipped the documentation of so many important moments - (in favor of planning a wedding - priorities!)

What I've found in doing so, is that we have a thousand photos worth one word; naivete. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but I do have a few photos to prove that it all worked out. So, for our "Looking Back" entry (Part One), let's look at the built-in dresser that i mish-mash-dissassembled-reassembled with a custom built TV cabinet of my own creation on the other side of the room. In "repurposing" the 1960's built-in, i essentially built a custom cabinet around some marginally-crafted pine drawers...let's take a look back.

The panel to the left of the drawers is actually
a hidden laundry hamper (see above)

Hallway

So this is one of those projects that nobody will ever notice that we did, but it was really bugging us that it was unfinished. The previous owner decided to try some "modern accent walls" which is great but not really in the small hallway with a lot of corners in a historic bungalow. So, it the result was that it looked like they just forgot to paint a few walls.

Anyhow, this whole project started when I decided to repaint the inside of our hallway cabinet / pantry, which needed some tlc after years of use. Since I had the correct color out, it snowballed into painting the rest of the lower hallway which then lead me up the stairs since we wanted to paint that area the same color as well. It wound up taking almost the whole day to "paint the pantry" but we ended up with a much more cohesive hallway.

One Man's Trash...

Is another man's wife's makeup vanity. So, we'd been looking for a cabinet to modify into a makeup vanity for the master bath for a while. I was sort of starting to think that I was just going to have to make something from scratch. I knew I could build something from scratch, but didn't really want to spend the time that I knew it would take to do it right. Let's face it, I'm not a cabinet maker. (Though I've found that I am a pretty good cabinet modifier.)

Anyhow, just as I was ready to start planning a custom cabinet, this little stack of drawers (minus the top drawer) showed up in the ally. The house on the corner just sold and apparently the basement was stuffed with junk that the new owner wanted to get rid of. I know this was in the basement because it smelled like a damp basement, I mean really smelled. So, I threw this smelly thing into the back of the van and got to work measuring. The smell has since abated.

I wound up cutting part of the top drawer section off, both because it was missing the drawer, and because I wanted to achieve a lower overall height. Next, I cut the back 4" off to achieve the proper depth.  After doing this, I had to reinforce the whole back since I had cut out so much of the structure of the cabinet.

Plans this week are to strip the whole thing and get a few coats of shellac on it over the long weekend. The pictures below show the whole thing mocked up to check how everything fits. When it's finished, the baseboard will continue around the bottom of the cabinet and the top will be white marble (another salvage yard purchase, though I have to have the marble cut to the right size and have the edge finished) The Drawers are a little wider than I would have made them if I had started from scratch, but there's still room to fit a small vanity-bench to the left of the drawers if you were to slide it in length-wise.

In the end, I know this will look better than something I could have built with so little time and money invested. Under all of that paint is a really well made, solid oak cabinet with dove-tail drawers. It's probably as old or older than our 82 year old house and should look right at home. I can't wait to start stripping it...  

Period-Correct Faucet is "Correct"

While flipping through a book I got from the library last night, I came across a period illustration of the faucet I just restored. The book, The Vintage House Book, dates the ad to 1931, one year after our house was built. So when selecting the sink and faucet, I chose the correctly-dated faucet within a year. Not bad if I do say so myself.

Main Floor Bathroom Restoration

Well, it took longer than expected (of course), but the main floor bath is complete. The centerpiece is our restored 1920's Kohler sink with original Kohler faucet and legs - very appropriate for a Wisconsin Bungalow. I found it at the salvage yard a few months back and was interested in buying just the faucet. When I asked about it, I was told that I could have the sink, faucet and legs for $40! So, I took the whole thing home and had to convince Nicole why I thought it was a good idea to restore a 80+ year old sink. She caved and told me the cost of the restoration would be part of my Christmas present. So, Merry Christmas to to me!

The restoration of the sink entailed removing the faucet, valves, drain, etc. to have the basin reglazed. In doing so, I sheared the end off of a threaded rod, essentially destroying a key component of the faucet. I thought I was going to have to cut my losses and buy a "modern" faucet, but figured I'd at least try to locate the part. After some searching on the interwebs, I found a place in the suburbs that specializes in plumbing supply.

When I went in and explained what I was trying to do, they gave me a hard time (in a friendly kind of way) telling me that they sell new faucets, but humored me and pulled out a really old, dusty book of Kohler parts diagrams and looked up the part. They soon found that they actually had four in stock (despite the part being discontinued). They also located all of the seals and other wear items that I would need to put it back together.

Other components of the bathroom restoration:

Skim coated / repainted all of the plaster walls
Installed a reproduction 1930's porcelain light from Rejuvination
Installed a 1930's vintage glass towel bar from the Detroit Antique Mall
Installed a nickel plated shower rod from Restoration Hardware
Stripped the paint off of the door (we still have to polyurethane it in the spring)
Cleaned, stripped and polished all of the various hinges and hardware in the bathroom
Replaced the modern light switch with a vintage original (salvaged from the old garage before it was torn down)

All told, it took a little over a month and was aggrevating having the house torn apart again so soon after the (almost) completion of the master bedroom, but we're thrilled with the results. Here's a quick mash-up of before and after: