History of the House--New Stairs

This is another post about past projects we have completed on the house. 

One of the strange things about the house when we bought it was that there was no access to the basement inside the house.  You had to go outside onto the deck, down the stairs, and through a strange little door to get into the basement.  This blows me away.  There is no evidence that I can find that you have ever been able to access the basement inside the house.  So for 80+ years you had to go outside to go downstairs/upstairs.  When we bought the house, the couple that lived there had their son and daughter-in-law and baby living in the basement.  There is no bathroom down there or water or anything.  Just crazy. 

Sorry--I'm not very good with Paint.  You can kind-of see the red arrow showing the back door and the entrance to the basement.  Also I have no idea what the sign on the basement door says, obviously something the boys put up. 

 

When we first moved in we had all three boys in the one bedroom.  A very SMALL bedroom (81/2 by 11 1/2).  A set of bunk beds and a crib was pretty tight in there.  We wanted to get the two older boys into the basement as soon as possible.  Interior stairs were needed.  We actually did move them down before we got the stairs in and they spent a couple of months going outside to come in for breakfast. 

My mom and dad came out the summer of 98 and helped us build some stairs.  I don't have any pictures, which is a shame because it was quite the project.  First of all, there was a concrete wall right where we needed to put the stairs.  My Dad and Rusty spend two straight days cutting a 6 by 4 foot opening in the wall.  They rented concrete cutters from Home Depot and wore down I don't know how many blades cutting.  The dust was everywhere.  Finally they were able to get it cut and push the slab backwards into the dirt, where it remains to this day.  They then built a set of stairs that go down the back porch, turn, and go into the basement.  They are very sturdy and we have used them to this day. 



Not sure when this picture was taken but you can see the stairs going down.  The concreate slab was across the area where the wall/beadbard stops and was up to the hight of the beadboard.  If you duck your head and go under the board that goes under the window and continues on to the wall, you will come out of that strange little add-on door. 

This is the stairs as they are today, we got rid of that strange door on the back and put in a regular door (many years later).  Functional but the back area still needs a lot of work. 

The cement slab was right at the interior corner of the stairway, where the beadboard stops.



More of the stairs going down.  We eventually built that little alcove area at the bottom, too.  Used to be that the basement was just open, no door there or anything.  There is a funky piece of insulation covering the plastic from our waterproofing project (more on that later).  Our whole back porch needs to be re-built and when that happens we will finish off this area too.

As you may have noticed, adding the stairs did interesting things to our laundry area. 



Laundry area in about 1999.  Also note where our electrical panel is.

 

Laundry area today.  You see I got a new dryer!

 

It's true, to do the laundry you have to stand on the stairs.  I find it not too bad, you can go down a couple of steps and you don't have to bend over to empty the dryer.  However, it is not the ideal.  But we make do with what we have, right?  We recently came up with a new idea for the laundry that we hope to be able to do next year.  The other problem is that now our electrical panel hangs over what is about a 15 foot drop. 

When you need to flip a breaker or anything, you have to climb on the dryer and skooch over.  Servicing the dryer is also no fun.  I will be glad to have these problems solved eventually. 

So that is the stairs!  I wish we had more pictures of the process but oh well. 

History of the House--the Beginning

Since this blog is about documenting the work we have/are doing on our house (mainly for my own benefit, so I don't forget myself), I am going to spend some posts going over the past projects we have finished. 

We bought the house in February of 1997, after an awful 6 months of closing.  We had so many problems and several times we thought the whole thing was going to fall through.  Looking back, I wonder if the Lord wasn't warning us off, but whether we were supposed to be here or not, we pushed through until we finally got the house.



Our house, Christmas 2002

 So when we moved in, we had three young boys, 7-year-old son #1, 5-year-old son #2, and 1 1/2-year-old son #3.  Pretty much we spent the next several years parenting and getting by, not really doing much on the house.  Surprisingly we took very few pictures of the house too, so I don't have much in the "before" category.  But the exterior of the house stayed pretty much like this, just getting shabbier, until we started the Great Repainting Project in 2006, which continues to this day (more posts on that later).

 

Here we are with Sons 2 and 3 (I think #1 was at Scout Camp), in 2007.  You can see not much has changed. 

Here is the view of the back of the house.  We have quite a large yard, which is the main reason we wanted the house.  It has been really nice over the years to have a place for soccer, kickball, etc.  


I think this is the summer of 98. 

The main thing about our house is even though it is almost 100 years old, it is nothing fancy.  So I try to honor the history it has, but I don't feel bound by it.  If modern things work better, then I have no problem using them.  This is definitely a renovation, not a restoration.

The back yard looking from the deck.  That section of fence with the lattice on top needs to be replaced, it is  on the list for this year.  The deck will eventually be torn down to be replaced by a patio.

The South-West corner of the yard.  We have some veggies growing nicely in the beds and I see we need to do something about that old wading pool stuck in the corner.



More of the yard.  The whole back fence needs to be replaced.  The large pear tree (you can see the V of the trunk in front) is rotting and we are slowly taking it out. 

 The interior of the house is pretty small, we only have 1,082 sq ft. 


This is from one of the times we had the house appraised for refinancing.

In general, at this time the interior is pretty run-down.  Everything needs to be repainted.  At some point in the past, someone painted over all the stained trim.  We want to strip that off and take it back to the original.  We also want to restore the hardwood floors.  We currently have beige carpet on the floors, which has been here the whole time we have lived in the house and looks pretty bad now.  So we are hoping that can come up sometime soon. 


The front door looking into the living room.  You can see that all the trim has been painted with a high-gloss white that is now chipping.  You can also see the ugly carpet.

So that is where we started.  Sometimes I think we have come a long way, other times I think not so much.  More on past projects later.

Trash to Treasure!

I have been looking for a set of 3 drawer nightstands for a long time and have never been able to find anything at the kind of price I want --everyone wants more than $100 apiece!  So I was driving by Union Gospel Mission thrift store and saw this dresser in the parking lot and started thinking that, Hey I could make something out of that!  I got excited about it and came back the next week (after we got paid) and it was still there, at 1/2 price!  So I bought it. 



Original dresser.  I wish I had a better picture but it was raining and so it was in the garage, bad lighting and not much room to back up.

 

Rusty was pretty skeptical about it, but we decided to go ahead and go for it.  Plus we just bought a router (with table and bits) from a friend and were looking for a chance to try it out. 



On its back with the drawers out



Close up of the ugly drawers
 

 First we took the top off, all we had to do was unscrew it.  I had hoped it was solid wood, but turned out it was just laminate over pressboard.  Bummer.  But still usable.

 

 

Here we go with the trusty jigsaw!
 

And the next thing you know it was in two halves!  Rusty was still not a total believer at this point but was starting to get on board.

 

 

 

So we have a back, front, and one side, need to build a second side, top, and side front trim piece to hold in the drawers.

 

 

First thing we needed to do was to match the one trim piece left on the side.  We took all the other trim off, but this was part of the drawer frame so it couldn't come off.  This was where we got to try out the router. 

Its a little hard to see but it is a piece that is just has a curved cutout all around the face of it.  Luckily we had lots of scrap wood to practice on, because this part pretty much took us all day.

 

But when we finished, we had a pretty good match!

 

The drawers turned out to be amazingly easy. At first I thought we would have to run the fronts through the table saw and cut off all that carved stuff on the front to make them flat.

 

Hmm.. is that plastic I smell?
 

The next day we started the first pass and we both could smell melting plastic--turns out the drawer fronts were just plastic and they all just popped right off!

 

By this time Rusty was a believer

 

 

 

 

Naked drawers!

 

Next we added the sides.  We had some old plywood cabinet doors that we were able to cut down to fit.  We glued it up and used small blocks to screw it together.

Finally the top--we just cut down the old top from the original dresser, glued and screwed it back on.  Added a new board to the bottom front (the old one was just a large piece of the ornate trim, not re-usable) and Voila!

So I didn't take really any pictures of the painting process, I wish I had.  We decided to spray paint them white, which I'm not sure I would do again.  It took a LOT of spray paint.  We spent about as much in spray paint as we did on the dresser itself.  Mostly because it got cold and we were spraying in the garage (where it was colder than we realized) and we had a lot of problems with the paint cracking and then needing to be resanded and re-painted.

The knobs I got for .50 at the Restore.  None of them match, but they are all similar circles.  I spray painted them all a matte nickle.

The drawer fronts were from an idea off Pintrest (for once, one that actually worked).  It is the same paint with two different sheens.  The pin said to buy a can of matte and a can of high gloss in the same color, but I didn't want to spend $25 on that much paint.  So I bought a yellow matte and a green matte spray paint.  First I did 2 coats of the matte color (over a white primer).  Then I sprayed the fronts again with a clear high-gloss.  I charted out the diamond pattern on a piece of paper and used the blue painters tape to mask out the stripes.  Finally I sprayed it one more time with the matte.  I'm super happy how it turned out!

So all along, Rusty had been saying that he thought they were too big to fit beside our bed.  I measured it and thought it would be tight, but that it would work.  Well, he was right, there is not enough room for both of them. So after all that, we went back to the Restore, bought this small end kitchen cabinet, put a top on it and painted it. 




Restore nightstand.  I have to get some drawer screws long enough to put the knobs on.

So now we actually have THREE nightstands. This one from the Restore was so easy I wish we had done it that way from the first! Oh well, we learned a lot and had fun doing it.