The Little Man Cave

By now you probably think there is no stone left unturned and that my statement that the Ugly Duckling is basically livable (except for the gross kitchen and missing hvac system) is a major exaggeration. There are indeed areas in our house that only need touch-ups!

Case in point: The Little Man's Cave

[Before]

His room, the second largest after the master bedroom, only needs a thorough cleaning and a fresh coat of paint. Scratch that. It only needed a major cleaning and the little Man insisted on painting it his favorite color: green.

This weekend, after some prep work and painting the ceiling on Saturday, the little man and I went over to the Ugly Duckling to get started on his room. Anything we do in there won't affect any other area we're working on and/or are doing some form of construction so it's a great place to start.

Little Man choose Glidden's "New Grass Green" for his walls. It's a bright cheery Granny Smith apple-green but it's not too overwhelming and it pops beautifully against Behr's Ultra Pure White on ceiling and trim work. We will add some navy stripes to his closet wall as an extra special feature (and so he doesn't feel like he's stuck in a green box)

[Little Man painting away]

With my trusted little helper by my side we actually managed to give all 3 walls a nice coat of paint. It's a great color but the starker contrast between ceiling and wall color does make the lowered ceiling more obvious [when the Ugly Duckling was upgraded to central heat and air, the owner unfortunately lowered the ceiling to make room for the necessary duct work, rather than running it through the attic or crawl space]. I do plan on painting the narrow part of wall above the window to match the trim and might try to bring the walls "down" by adding not too wide crown molding. Maybe the window treatment will ease the effect as well - we'll see!

[More green on the wall]

And again, here's the mood board for the room so you know where we are going with this. We have plans that include built-in book shelves and a daybed/couch for sleep-over guests in the Little Man's Cave. So stay tuned - there's more to come!

[created on polyvore.com]

Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes

For the past week there's been a lot of demolition going on at our Ugly Duckling. The dumpster in front of the house is 2/3 full with debris of all kinds: wooden boards, tile, cement board, drywall - you name it, it's in there, and to our surprise we're getting ready to kick off the "put things back together" phase. Let's hear it for Sam and his demolition skills! Frankly, without him we'd be chipping away at the parts that aren't staying until Christmas ... or longer.

We've been doing a whole lot, especially over the past weekend, so I have a few posts saved up and ready to go. [Actually, I have more posts or items to post about than days in a week, kind of, and am slightly confused on how to go about posting them. Any ideas?]. I guess I'll tackle it one day at a time, even if that means that this blog is no longer progressing in real time. That, of course, renders that progress ticker box to the right pretty useless too.


Anyways, to make a long story short, I think a few Before and In-Progress shots are in order, so here you go. Please excuse the quality - we're still without electricity at the Ugly Duckling and the weather has been all gloom and doom down here in NE Florida.

Entry Hall
Once upon a time our house had an entry hall. In order to offer a sufficient number of rooms to work as a rental apartment, however, the walls to the stairs and the livingroom were sealed and a closet built into the space. Voila - A teeny cramped bedroom! You can easily tell which part doesn't belong (and was consequentely busted out] if you look at the base molding ...

Some scoring, punching, ripping and cutting later we reconnected both halves of the house and turned our Ugly Duckling from a Duplex to a Single-Family home

Together with the newly opened wall to the livingroom for which we are hoping to score a mad deal on a French Door at some point, this small change had a major impact on the flow and feel of the entire house. All of the sudden, the layout of rooms started to make sense and the added light is just amazing. I think even the Ugly Duckling is happy about it. It certainly feels that way! One day we'd love to restore the old staircase, newel post, spindels and handrailing, but until then this would do ... or would have until our contractor had an idea that tickled hubby's favor. So while I was gone to Orlando he did this

That's right, he busted out some more wall following the angle of the handrail. Before punching out the first piece our munchkin must have cautinoned him with a comment along the lines of "Maybe we should wait until Mommy comes home?" but he sure loved helping tear out some wall. He gets this glint in his eyes when he tells the story.

So, there you have it. Our progress in the entry hall. It's turning out -exactly- like we planned it and it's looking even better than we imagined!

Mystery solved!

Matt and Heather aka "The Perrys on Perry", nailed it on the head - hidden away under layers of paint and caulked into the wall for safekeeping we discovered the original set of pocket doors between our living and dining room! Christmas in February! Not too many original features survived the Ugly Duckling's long history as rental property so this discovery has us all giddy and excited!

A narrow piece of wood covered the opening at the top. It came out quickly tapping it lightly with a hammer. Original tracks are still in there. So was a lot of dust and a few smaller chunks of plaster.

Here's the hubby chipping away at half-inch think caulk and layers of paint. I took it from there - the sweet advantage of only working part-time, heh. And after 2 more hours (and many many decades) I managed to wrangle the left door out of its pocket.

Unlike the rest of the trim work in the Ugly Duckling, the pocket doors aren't covered in layer upon layer of paint which makes us believe they were retired fairly early on in the history of the house. Thank God, because I doubt the doors and their original hardware would have survived in place and unpainted for that long.

Close up of the beautiful hardware

So, now our livingroom looks like this

Pardon the dust, we have a teeny bit of construction going on at the moment and I didn't get around to mopping the floors ... yet :) The current weather isn't helping at all - gloomy skies make for gloomy pictures.

To the right you can see where we re-opened the now archway, future french doors to the entry hall. On the left is our humongous bricked in fireplace (we have plans for that), straight ahead you can see a pocket door peeking out from its pocket (it's still a little shy and doesn't want to come out all the way but who can blame it? I'd be shy if I'd been caulked into a wall for decades) and beyond that the dining room (filled with old kitchen cabinets). You even get a glimpse of the breezeway to the kitchen in the farthest right corner of the dining room.

Can you guess?

Prize Question: Why did this door frame cause 4 adults to squeal and grin like little schoolkids hearing the sound of the approaching ice cream truck?

The first one to come up with the correct answer will be rewarded with a small treat from Springfield's own Willie Wonka "Sweet Pete" !

Good luck :o)

Showing some claw

Clawfoot tub that is!

[source: cabinetstogo.com]

When we drove down to Orlando last weekend to tour IKEA and Cabinets-To-Go to help us come to a final decision for our kitchen, we managed to score a fantastic deal on a tub for our master bathroom. Not that we went there with the expressed purpose of buying a bathroom fixture but the deal was just too good to pass up.

Cabinets-to-go usually offers an acrylic clawfoot tub with vintage-style telephone faucet for under $1000 - a real steal, if you ask me! These babies usually don't come cheap at all. Last weekend (and from what I understand it's a promotion that's still going) they offered their tubs at - hold on tight - 50% off.

So for just a little over $500 and very reasonable shipping charges to have the tub delivered, we scored this beautiful beautiful clawfoot tub and faucet for our Master Bathroom.

A pile of tile

Thanks to a combination of early release Wednesday, homework and too much construction dust for our munchkin to hang around safely, I'm home earlier and didn't get to spend as much time at the Ugly Duckling as yesterday but that means between loads of laundry and wrestling with the vacuum cleaner I get to update you today on our progress.

[Brace yourself for some really gross Before pictures, folks]

So, our masterplan of house domination includes converting the upstairs kitchen into a dressing area and master bathroom. With half the plumbing already in place and adjoining the largest of the three upstair's bedrooms it's just meant to be, right?

The only obstacle? A dirty ugly kitchen with blah cabinets, gunky tile and other unmentionables. It simply had to go, and go it did. Thanks to Sam's berseker-style demolition skills our upstairs kitchen went from this

Before

[Saving grace of the room: lots of light, lots of usable space, view of backyard]

to this

In Progress

Looking better already, if you ask me!

And here is the mood board for our master bathroom so you know what we're shooting for in this space

Design Plan

Day 1

Just so you know, I -do- plan on taking my camera along to snap Before, In-Progress and After pictures, it's simply that over the excitement of getting started I flat out forgot today. [And my grin right now is probably just as sheepish as that statement sounds].

So what did we do? Mrs G and Sam rocked the demo of the upstairs kitchen aka the future master bath room. Sam destroying the upstairs tile really spurred me on - nothing keeps you going like the sweet sound of demolition. I piddled around - I swept the library, took off an ugly 70s door in the hallway and another one on the pantry in the kitchen, took out shelves, cleaned up the lilies in the front yard [which, miraculously, seem to be alive underneath all that dead stuff on top] and then decided to get started on tearing out the gross linoleum floor in the downstairs kitchen.

[Look! It's a gross Before-picture! Taken from the breezeway looking into the kitchen with the open door toward the now bathroom, soon-to-be mudroom-laundry area. Yes, that is a dryer vent sticking out from the wall to the right - nevermind that code doesn't allow an appliance butting up against the electric panel behind the open door. That, too, shall change. And no, it wasn't the kitchen that made us fall in love with the Ugly Duckling ... heh]

I'm now convinced that for the simple thought of gluing linoleum to wood floors you either spend 100-200 years longer in purgatory or go straight to hell. As rewarding as it is to rip it out, it's a real pain in the behind and it's not as if you could buy a stripping agent or other chemical concoction that will help you get rid of it. Oh no. No such thing. It all boils down to elbow grease. Lots of it. Oh, it comes up nice and in big chunks along the outer perimeter but once you get near the areas with foot traffic, like in the middle of the room and in the little breezeway, it STICKS like nobody's business and chips off in quarter sized chips.

I'll be back tomorrow, better armed, and show it who's the boss. Muhahaha ... just wait and see!