Rory and Guest Room

Dean and I are taking the winter off from renovations to ski and enjoy our new puppy, Rory. But I still cannot resist the urge to tackle a home project from time to time. Before the holidays, the dismal guest room was just begging to be updated.

Rory, our Wheaten Terrier, is 4.5 months old. He makes our home very cozy,

Before. The paint was chipping off of one wall, so I decided to strip the whole thing. This is mid-project.

The “before” photo is particularly gruesome because the guest room was a construction staging area during the bathroom renovation. In addition, one of the walls was water damaged from an old leak from our upstairs neighbor’s bathroom. The leak caused historic wallpaper and the 5 layers of paint on top of it to buckle and crack. I spent about 15 hours scraping the wallpaper off one wall to make it smooth. (BTW, I found that soapy water in a spray bottle worked just as well as pricey wallpaper solvent to loosen up the old paper).

My budget for the whole room was $750 and I didn’t quite make it. But I came close.

I have a hard time choosing my favorite elements: the dhurrie rug, red bed and light blue walls are all great.

I painted the walls light blue, using the leftover paint from our half-bath (Farrow & Ball’s Borrowed Light). I repainted all of the trim in the same white we have used throughout the house—Halo by C2 Paint. If you want to spruce up a room but don’t want to make huge changes, I recommend repainting the trim. It makes such a big difference and only takes a few hours. Cost for paint was $0 because we already had it on hand.

The white glass Ikea lights hung by the bed have an amazing glow.

I looked far and wide for an 8-foot square rug. It was important to find this size rug, as the guest room is 10’x11’ and a double bed and an antique armoire take up much of the square footage. The rug will only be visible in a limited area beside and at the foot of the bed, so it had to be the perfect fit. I found that Overstock.com has excellent rugs with the best selection of sizes. I choose and brown and ivory Moroccan wool dhurrie rug made by Safavieh and paid $269 with a coupon.

Winter cabbage, San Francisco books and quarters for the bus on the bedside table.

I bought an old pineapple post bed on craigslist for $50. The original bed seemed to have a varnish on it so I choose a paint-and-primer-in-one from Behr in the color Apple Polish. Cost for paint was $15.

The sheets and a comforter are also from Overstock. I picked the best-reviewed linens with the most reasonable prices. The Supima cotton ivory flannel sheets cost $53 and they are so cozy and rich-feeling. I highly recommend them. The zinnia fitted sheet that I used to cover the box spring was from Garnet Hill—I have had it for years. The blue blanket is also an old-but-loved linen that I bought at Selfridge’s department store in London. Total cost for linens, including down comforter: $98.

The bedside lights are two Ikea pendants from our storage room that were intended for the hallway, but did not work out. I had a lighting guy re-wire the pendants to plug into a socket and turn on with line-switches. It is nice to have hanging lights at the bedside because they do not take up space on the bedside table. Cost: $115.

A new mattress and box spring was $300. That included delivery and tax was waived.

The storage armoire and nightstand are antiques that I already owned. I also hung artwork that I already had—including a framed .25 cent buffalo target from a hunting store. Even less expensive, the artwork above the bed is a creased piece of white paper that Dean and I made after seeing Ed Ruscha’s work in the Museum of Modern Art New York.

The storage armoire is large but holds so much stuff--bed and bath linens for the whole house and other miscellany.

Hopefully this is a restorative and stylish retreat for our friends and family when they visit our city by the Bay. I still have a few more finishing touches to do, including searching craigslist for another bedside table. We hosted a non-stop stream of guests over the holidays and they all liked the room. I also slept in there once too, because it is too cozy to resist.

Total cost: $847.

A Winning Reno?

Andi entered our li'l ol' bathroom in This Old House's 2012 Reader Remodel Contest!

http://youroldhouse.thisoldhouse.com/thisoldhouse/submission.jsp?id=119124

Please rate away dear readers. Rate it like it's the desired score of your child's aptitude test. I don't know if this helps our chances of winning or anything, but, hey, what else have you got to do? I bet you expected a 1000+ word essay on hardwood floor refinshing or something, so you should have a few minutes extra to spare.

There seems to be no limit to how many times you can rate each reno, so attack it like a spam robot! (I have...)

#1 Bathroom Reno of 2011!

Apartment Therapy voted our li'l ol' bathroom reno as the #1 bathroom reno of 2011.

Check out the rankings here: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/sf/hot-posts/a-looker-of-a-loo-10-of-the-years-best-bathroom-rehabs-best-of-2011-163505?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+apartmenttherapy%2Fsf+%28San+Francisco%29.

We're Famous!

Check out our bathroom on Andi's favorite website Apartment Therapy!

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/sf/bathroom/before-after-andi-deans-master-bath-157131

Uptown Bathroom

Our bathroom renovation is done. I don't know how to express my relief. Last Sunday I saw friends for the first time in 5 weeks for reasons other than food delivery and showering at their apartment. 

Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here are the before, during, and after shots.

Before...

After!

We finished the bathroom on schedule at the end of August. We have been putting the "finishing touches" on it for the past few weeks. The quotes around "finishing touches" are ironic and meant to convey that sometimes a "finishing touch" can take 2.5 hours to execute. Like caulking around the floor line. Or hanging the shower curtain supports, or cleaning up the construction staging space, better known as our guest room.

We love the bathroom. I feel like a billionairess every night when I brush my teeth and apply moisturizer under its warm and well-placed lights. I call it the Uptown Bathroom because it is so sophisticated and timeless and luxurious.  (Though timeless is a dangerous adjective. The last time I heard someone say "timeless," she was lamenting the wide-brimmed asymmetrical sunhat she wore with her wedding dress in 1986.)

It is hard for me to pinpoint what I like most in our bathroom. Here are some of the most adored elements:

The charcoal tub. I sanded the exterior of the original cast-iron tub with fine sandpaper and applied Rustoleum, a very smelly-but-simple priming product. The Rustoleum was followed by flat gray paint called Dakon Gray by Philip's Perfect Colors and a flat finish varnish by Pratt & Lambert. I painted the feet a silver and coated those with a varnish as well. We had the white interior of the tub professionally refinished by Miracle Method. That is not a DIY project--their process was identical to painting a car.

The double sink. Having two sinks is pretty awesome. We don't have to share and we each get a medicine cabinet. That is cause for a baseline "hooray!" 

I had been eyeing the sink on the Restoration Hardware website for over a year. At my mom's suggestion, Dean and I drove one hour to Vacaville, CA, and checked out the Restoration Hardware outlet. Bingo!

The outlet has amazing medicine cabinets, sinks and hardware for 30% of the sticker price. The Robern medicine cabinets that we bought for $200 each are practically worth their own blog entry. They are so well-constructed and well-designed. They do not compare to any other medicine cabinet I have ever seen. Well worth the money.

The concession was that we had to mix metals in our bathroom to get the outlet deals. All hardware above the sinks is Satin Nickel (lights, medicine cabinets, and faucets). All other hardware in the bathroom is Polished Chrome (towel rack, shower system, sink base, and exposed plumbing below sink).  I think it works for one reason--we have grouped the metals in regions in the room. There is not obvious contrast between the nickel and the chrome because they are never within two feet of one another. Many designers are mixing metallics in their designs nowadays. Even so, it was a risk but I am happy with the finished product.

We had our own marble fabricated from an outfit called Marble City in San Carlos. They specialize in 1.25 inch marble which is the thickness we needed for a sink base that only had a frame, not a solid surface on which the marble could rest. On the marble lot we choose a giant slab of uncut and unpolished marble called Blue Sky. It looked very white with a few gray and blue accents before it got polished up. Low and behold, when that marble was sealed and delivered it looked much more detailed and colorful, primarily blue with dark gray detail, like a stormy sky. We were lucky the colors worked well in our bathroom because the finish definitely surprised us. Lesson learned--marble is accentuated when polished.

The lighting is great. It is so smart to position lights in the bathroom at eye-level. It makes you look so pretty when light floods your face from a horizontal direction. Plus, you should horde light bulbs that will soon be illegal with a really warm tone. We recycled the overhead light from the old bathroom to make up for my environmental naughtiness with the warm light bulbs.

The Italian porcelain floor is great. The herringbone pattern turned out beautifully. The subway tile walls are also lovely and inexpensive. Doing all of the tiling ourselves was not so lovely, but I must admit it was inexpensive. Dean will tell you those tales but I will announce that 3 out of my 10 fingers were worked raw one Sunday from tiling. I had a painful time washing my hands with soap afterward.

We also splurged on a new shower system which is beautiful. It is from an outfit called Sunrise  in Oakland, CA. I definitely recommend it.

Dean and I are breaking from renovations to ski all winter and also get a puppy. I am already scheming about our kitchen renovation and have a file folder of "inspiration clippings" for the project. Dean refuses to look at the file folder.

Messy Progress

We had a grueling weekend of two 13 hour days.

Day 1: Drywall. Our friend and construction volunteer Chris May stuck around for all of Saturday, taking one break to redeem a Groupon at Lombardi's on Polk, then pressing onward until the wee hours of the night. Shimming drywall, cutting drywall, hanging drywall. It was brutal.   The guys look happy here because they are done with the job.

Dean and Chris in front of the impeccably hung drywall.

Day two: Floor Tile. Chris was the smart one for declining day two. Dean and I are not so lucky. We patched floors. We screwed down Hardy Board until my thumb needed a massage. We mixed mortar. We fiddled around with a rented wet saw and realized it was broken. We took it back to the rental place. We started tiling around 3 PM.

I laid the tile while Dean operated the wet saw. Around 11 PM our work really started to decline in quality and the neighbors politely asked us to stop cutting tile in the garage. Dean had to finish up in the morning and we both felt like we had been hit by a truck.

We are happy with the result though. We picked a modern Italian porcelain tile and laid it in a traditional pattern--herringbone. It is a stylistic microcosm of our bathroom, which will be a mix of traditional and modern. Dean is grouting the floor as I write this and we patched the drywall with joint compound last night.

We are steeling ourselves for the final weekend--tiling the walls and painting.  Then we get our shower back--the ultimate reward.

Our modern herringbone floor.

Beginnings of a Bathroom

We have not quite finished our big summer project (house painting), but one should never rest on his laurels. Last weekend Dean and I demolished our bathroom. Our good friend Carter lent a hand. We cannot repay him with enough In and Out Burger—he was such a great help. Here is what happened in this order:



The bathroom before the demolition. The vinyl floor was curling and moldy, and the single sink was tucked

behind the bathtub, barely visible and too small for 2 people.



The bathroom on Friday evening, after the plumbers and electrician did their job.

• Our fantastic plumbers came over and moved the cast iron tub out of the bathroom, so I can restore it in the guest room. It took three strong men to move it.
• We tore out all the 100-year-old bead board that was globbed with paint and moldy in spots. It was two inches thick and made of Redwood. Much different than the bead board you buy at Home Depot today.
• Dean and Carter framed a new ceiling, which will allow us to have a bathroom fan and vent the new fixtures.
• We ripped out the linoleum floor and the vinyl floor underneath by chipping away at it with paint scrapers.

All of this happened in one day. It "freed up" Sunday for a big day at the San Francisco dump and Home Depot.

 

I made a childish calendar entitled “Dean and Andi’s 16 Days of Construction.” It helps us visualize how short but intense this bathroom renovation will be. It has been a good tool for retaining mental sanity already.

 

We do not have a shower and our friends have all been so kind to let us use their showers, and even feed us and give us a beer and some conversation after long days of construction. Thank you Jason & Colleen, Kyra, Andy, and Denis (and Chris & Susan this weekend)!

 

We are really excited about the finished product. It is something we have dreamed about since last July, when we wrote this blog. It is a good sign that 13 months later we choose the same bathtub, sink and cabinet that we dreamed about last July--maybe we will never grow tired of them.

 

We started on August 6 and are set to finish on August 22. More to come soon!