Preston - Pronto!

The husband and I have begun working on a few projects that are taking a bit longer while not giving much of 'meat' for daily updates. What with work being ca-ray-ay-zee going on two weeks now and the Little Man taking Karate lessons twice a week, Cub Scouts and my Vampire Diary quality time on Thursday nights, I'm a little hardpressed to find some spare time.

Sure, I can find some time to dabble with projects around the house but obviously not enough time to download pictures, upload them to blogspot and post about it. Booo :o(

But don't fear! DIY woman is here!
And projects are continuing at the Ugly Duckling!

Case in point: the master bathroom.

After finishing walls, updating electricity, updating plumbing, painting, trim out, installing doorframes, a vanity, a claw-foot bath tub and a toilet, I have now added *drum roll*

Accessories!

I shopped around online before settling on Moen's "Preston" series in chrome for our bathroom. It' s simple, yet softly curved lines mimic our vintage style faucets and the price could hardly be beat. In case you hadn't noticed, we are very budget conscious. I'd bought Moen in the past and we like the quality. Thanks to Amazon Prime, our packages arrived within three days of ordering, free of charge. Joy!

I'd ordered a double towel rod, a single towel ring and a toilet tissue holder which I installed with the Little Man's help.

We gathered our tools




measured, leveled and installed the mounting brackets. For the toilet tissue holder we had to adjust the screw placement or else we'd have permanentely screwed a drawer closed. We'd deliberated over whether to buy one of those freestanding and magazine hoding toilet tissue stands but in the end I felt a regular holder screwed into the side of the vanity made more sense. All I could think of was ending up doing business with the holder waaaay out of reach ... oy!


After installing the mounting brackets, all you had to do was slide the fixture base over it and screw it tight.

Pretty, no? And functional to boot! And so civilized!

The double towel trod was a little trickier to install and definitely called for a second pair of hands which is where the Little Man came in. While I held the pieces together, he leveled and marked - DIY kid in action! I love the look and how it's keeping our towels in handy-dandy reach when stepping out of the tub.


There you have it: Our Master Bathroom in its current state. Still pretty bare but we're getting there. We have begun using it on a more consistent basis ever since installing the accessories which - all together - make it feel so much more complete. The towels courtesy of my Mom are probably not going to stay in this bath room. We're generally aiming for a softer vintage look (hard to tell from that stark, crisp black and white contrast, hm?) but I wanted towels on the rods when taking the picture. Yaaaaah, staging ... kind of hard with no window treatments, no rug and no art. We'll get there. Really. Some day soon. And I promise you'll hear all about it.

Masterbath: Fixing some more fixtures

The Master Bathroom Saga continues!

The husband got to spend some time alone at home over the past week and decided to tackle some of those manly jobs from the project bin: he installed the commode aka toilet aka the crapper in our Master bathroom.

Olin, our favorite plumber, told us he was confident we could do that on our own (*gasp!*) and after much googling for information and tutorials on the intarwebs, the husband decided to give it a go. If we got stuck, we had Olin on speed dial. Just in case.

You know, old house and all.

Thanks to our completely updated plumbing, things went pleasantly smoothly. Since we started with a piece of pvc piping sticking out of wall (water supply) and floor (waste pipe), the first order of business were installing faucets and supply lines (wall) and a flange (floor). Husband was a bit concerned about drilling into the tiles to anchor the flange but he found comfort in knowing that the actual toilet would hide any cracks and that it's easy to fix a broken mosaic tile (you just pop'em out and replace them).

[In Progress: Flange and water supply installed]

I was there for the part that revolved in installing the actual bowl. First, the husband stuck the wax ring into place and while he lifted the bowl, I was his guide to make sure he set it down right on top of the wax ring so that the screws slid right through the openings.

[In progress: Just like that we have a toilet bowl!]

Ours is a regular Joe kind of toilet, a two piece commode with an elongated bowl. I just can't get excited over toilets (Designer? One piece? Electric? Light show? Puuuu-lease ...) - as long as it's white, clean and flushes I'm a-okay.

[In progress: Getting the tank on]

After carefully tightening the screws that hold the bowl to the flange (and thus to the floor), husband installed the tank. It felt a bit wobbly at first and it turned out that our anxiety over losing our toilet bowl and/or tank to a crank due to over-tightening the screws lead to a not so sufficient seal, a slightly wobbly tank and after a couple of hours to a minor leak.

Luckily we discovered the leak before it could cause any more trouble than a wet towel from mopping up the small puddle that had collected next to our toilet. We tightened the screws, the tank stopped wobbling and just like that! no more leaking.


Here's the husband checking the seal making sure that no un-authorized drop could sneak by. Yes, we do DIY barefoot, in shorts and with sharp cutting devices next to our bare limps. Do as I say, not do as I do. Shoo-bi-doo :o) But look, we do wear knee pads!

One step closer to a fully fixture-ized master bath!

Stay tuned - we'll be tackling the vanity venture next!

In Transit

Work on our master bathroom has finally begun in earnest. We have a 4 week plan and are still hopeful to finish it (mostly) in time for my parents' arrival on August 8. You know, so we have 2 full bathrooms and a half bathroom to share between 4 adults and two kids for 3 weeks.

Before I show you what's been going on in the room itself, I thought I'd share the fixtures that the husband and I settled on. Sounds good?

Rather than go for two smaller vessel sinks we decided to go big(ger) and create a focal point with one single, larger vessel sink in the center of the vintage dresser. I mean, if I can't share with my husband, there's definitely something foul in the state of Denma-... I mean, our marriage. Yes, I know, HGTV always runneth over with praise over his and her sinks, but personally we think it'll be a better use of the space visually than creating a rather crammed and awkward double sink setting. We also don't mind sharing, really. We've done so for the past 8 years now with no detrimental effects to our sanity, and are looking forward to the next 8.

[source: Amazon.com]

Here's our pretty vessel sink. It's oval, measures 15" across and 23" wide, taking up half of the surface of the vintage dresser we found for it. After browsing various places, both online as well as real retail stores, we scored this steal of a deal on Amazon.com.

Next is the faucet. This one was much harder to find. Since our clawfoot tub came complete with a vintage looking chrome faucet, we had to try and match at least the finish if not the vintage looks. There are very very few vessel sink faucets that can be called "vintage looking" that are also within our budget. Sure, I could splurge on a $500 faucet but who's going to buy an almost 8-year-old firstborn, hmmm?

[source: Amazon.com]

Again, Amazon.com came to the rescue! It meets all our criteria and the reviews were all positive, so it went into the shopping cart.

So far, so good. After shopping and paying for these babies last Thursday, I received the shipping confirmation Friday morning! They are scheduled for arrival on Monday, so stay tuned!

Update:
Guess what just arrived? My sink is here :o) Woot!

Knobs and pulls, oh my!

I finally decided to face my worst fears and install our kitchen cabinet pulls and knobs.

Yes, it took as this long to scrounge together all my courage and drill into our beautiful brand-new cabinet doors. Here's our inspiration picture of an early 1920s kitchen (5 years later than the building date of our Ugly Duckling but closer than anything else I could find so far)

[source: antiquehomestyle.com]

We loved the clean lines, the shaker style cabinets and open shelves. So when it was time to buy knobs and pulls we were happy to see that our own preferences matched right up with our inspiration picture: knobs and pulls! In the picture it looks like a chrome or nickel finish but we wanted a bit more contrast, especially considering all the black we were introducing through the appliances and went with the oh so hip oil-rubbed bronze.

[Knobs and gadgets]

I scored a super great deal on both types of cabinet handles at the "Knob Shop" on Ebay, and then found slightly larger pulls for a steal at Target. See? [Yes, that's $1.98 for 2 bin pulls]

[Lucky find at Target]

I also got those two nifty gadgets that'd help us position the handles consistently. They run at about $3 each and I guess you could whip up a template yourself but especially for the knobs this worked really well and kept us from having to finish one project (create jig/template) before even beginning the one we'd actually wanted to work on (install knobs).

Step 1: Grab a roll of simple painter's tape (save the frog tape for the really big projects) and tape over the spot where you'll be drilling. It doesn't have to be perfect; just approximate the area. As long as the mark for your drill point will be on the tape, you're golden. The tape will do two things: it'll make it harder for your drill to wander and the cuts will be cleaner.

Step 2: x marks the spot. You can either built your own template or buy one of those nifty and not too expensive gadgets to make sure all of your handles will be installed in the same spot on each door. Pick a spot, mark the tape.

Step 3: Drill, baby, drill! Take a deep breath and bring on the drill. Slow and steady wins the race; just aim for your mark while keeping the drill nice and straight and drill that dreaded hole. Frankly, it was only scary the first time. Once I saw the method was working, my confidence went through the roof.

Step 4: Admire the hole you drilled without breaking the cabinet door.

Step 5: Peel off the painter's tape and screw in your handle. Voila! All done! Step back and admire your handiwork.

[Tada - New and improved. Now -with- handles!]

The handles are a smash hit and both my men were very excited about them. Best compliment? Little Man's very enthusiastic "See, Mami, you can do a man's job too!". Sometimes I really wonder what goes on in his head ...

Gettin' the handle on

Remember my gushing about those beautiful vintage brass hand rasil brackets from Van Dyke's (here and here)?

Yeah?

(best Agnes impression) They're so fluffy I'm gonna die!

No, really! They are! Look!

They are even prettier close up than they were in the catalogue picture. They're heavy and solid, too. And for $12 a pop, you really can't complain.

And here is one installed with the old handrail.

And here's our stair case in all its beat up, splotchy glory.

At one point we want to restore the railing leading down to its old beauty, just like railing of the cantilever balcony you can spy in the upper left corner. Until then I'll continue to gush about those pretty pretty brackets, alright?

Next step - can you guess it? Paint!

World's smallest powder room

"A Bathroom so teeny, so tiny,
with just enough room for your hiney"

That'd be our downstairs powder room for you. Well, okay, it's not -that- tiny but it is fairly small and frankly, it's impossible to take pictures of it. I might have to put a ladder in front of the bathroom window and scale it to take better pictures of it.

Breaking through the downstairs walls to open up livingroom and staircase and all the other demolition there was slowly a reluctance to break more stuff building up in me. yes, we could have ripped the existing door out and moved it a foot down the wall but no. Enough dust and debris. Our budget was also grateful that we didn't insist on this change.

This kicked off the quest for a small corner sink which I found at Vintage Tub & Bath along with a beautiful vintage-looking faucet. Here it is finally installed

[World's smallest sink]

[Pretty faucet]

[Happy together]

I'm not too crazy about the exposed plumbing underneath the sink so I'm pondering options on how to make it less obvious. I'm sure I can come up with something. Other than that it really is the cutest sink EVER!

Right around the corner is the toilet centered on the wall opposite the window. The window is fantastic since it lets in a great amount of light which really brightens the room. Removing the big honking cabinet above the toilet opened up a huge amount of space and now nobody will have to worry about ending up dead, buried underneath a heavy cabinet, with their pants down.

So what are our plans for this downstairs powder room for now? Nothing outrageous for the time being - since it features the same beige-y speckled tile like the upstairs bathroom we are going to paint the walls "Cloudy Morning" as well. This very light, cool blue-grey works so well with the tile and will tie in with our downstairs color scheme just fine. No need to play paint roulette again. We need a mirror and are thinking about installing a glass shelf above the toilet. Some art, fresh towels and a basket full of toilet tissue and we're all set.

More on that later once we enter the decorating stage for real.

Tank the tank

After discovering the soggy moldy mess underneath the tile floor in the upstairs kitchen caused by a leak of an old water heater I was even more convinced that any kind of large amount of water upstairs in a wooden house is just so not a good idea.

No, I don't go ga-ga over the idea of having laundry upstairs. It can leak. Massive amounts of water at once. Nuh-uh - don't want.

Not to mention that water heaters take up a huge amount of space and that often in those historic homes they have been squooshed into whatever corner was available no matter how it looks. We've even seen them perched 8 feet high on a couple of boards above the refrigerator - so not a good idea on many different levels.

When our contractor - without any prompting of my own - suggested to go tankless, I was all for it. No danger of a massive 120 gallon leakage? Sign me up! Saving money on our electric bill and a smaller carbon foot print are great additional perks. So here I proudly present to you

[The tank!]

It's about the size of a manila folder and fit to deal with 3 bathrooms, a kitchen and a washer. I love how little space it uses. You know, compared to this guy here

[For Sale: 2007 Lowboy Whirlpool 40 Gallon Electric Water Heater]

It's here!

Just a few days ago I posted about my great find for a tiny corner sink and a pretty faucet to go with it for our little downstairs half bath [read full entry here] at Vintage Tub & Bath. Within a week after submitting my order online the sink arrived, safely packaged in layers of foamy cushions in a box within a bigger box, and the faucet followed shortly there after.

I doubt this will be my last order from them; this was one of the smoothest shopping experiences ever (and shipping is free!)

[sink-in-a-box]

It's the smallest sink I have ever seen and so far, not many seem to be able to stop themselves from squeaking "It's so cute!" in the highest pitch they are capable. See for yourself. That's my (size 7) foot in the picture, for comparison (a quarter would have been a bit too small).

My only worry was that the faucet might be too big. It is solid and sturdy - not a flimsy bit of a fixture - and since its mate, the sink, was over at the Ugly Duckling already I had to wait until the next morning for a quick dry fit.

[Together for the first time]

[Love the hot-cold label! And it looks like a big happy smile to boot :o)]

So, there. Fixture dilemma downstairs bath solved! Great new shopping venue confirmed and one step closer to completion. Now, if we could only close up those walls for good ...

Housewarming gifts

I know! We haven't moved in yet, but we already received our first housewarming gift from our neighbor across the street: an antique cast-iron pedestal sink!

[Before: dirty but not bad]

I'd originally planned to re-use most of the fixtures already present in the existing upstairs bathroom; they were dirty but functioning and not too old. The water closet is a Kohler, the vanity a standard blue or orange box stock vanity. Armed with paint I went to town:

• removed gobs of old caulk and re-caulked the bath tub
• spray painted the bath tub fixtures a nifty Oil Rubbed Bronze color

[fixtures sanded, then primed and spray painted]

• replaced the cheap-o shower head with a rainfall shower head
• spray painted the frame of the mirror cabinet Oil Rubbed Bronze color
• ordered a curved shower rod with liner and hooks (we're going to re-use our existing fabric shower curtain that is pin-striped in blue, taupe, brown and white)
• bought a replacement towel rod
  
• painted the whole room in "Cloudy Day" grey
• painted the built-in closet white
• painted the trim and the ceiling in Behr Ultra "Pure White"

[vanity with a coat of automobile primer and orb spray paint]

I also gave the existing vanity a fresh new coat of white paint and in a moment of craziness spray painted the entire cultured marble top, faucets and all, with ORB spray paint as well. It really turned out pretty cool. Then our neighbor asked me if I had any use for this sink :o)

[Introducing: The Sink]

It's perfect! It's in great shape and really only needs a thorough cleaning, like the rest of the bathroom. It's amazing how the pedestal sink opens up the space. Luckily we have a humongous built-in closet in the room and can easily live without the storage space a vanity provides.

[Looking good there!]

Today the curved shower rod I ordered from Overstock arrived in the mail which means we're one step closer to a finished bathroom.

Maybe I should drag my steam cleaner out to the ugly Duckling tomorrow and rather than paint some more trim, spent a few hours cleaning this room to within an inch of its life... Well, I better wait until the electrician is done. I don't know how it escaped us but there is NOT. A. SINGLE. OUTLET in this bathroom. Not one. So we're adding one ...and I guess that means I'll have to touch up some paint where they bust through the wall.

Look what I got!

At the beginning the Ugly Duckling had 2 full baths, one downstairs and one upstairs. In favor of a useful laundry-mudroom the downstairs bathroom had to lose its bath tub and be demoted to a powder room aka half bath with just a sink and a toilet (bringing us with the addition of the master bath to a total of 2 full baths and 1 half bath). The somewhat funky door placement (and a lack of desire to bust open yet another wall if we could help it) made a corner wall-mount sink the most sensible choice for our little powder room.

Enter "Vintage Tub & Bath", a recent favorite online store of mine!

Prices are -very- reasonable compared to other reproduction fixtures for bathrooms and kitchens, not to mention that they sell ranges and refrigerators featuring the antique look (wish I could afford those!) but with all of the modern conveniences, and those hard to come by clawfooted shower sets.

So currently on their way to the Ugly Duckling are this ittibitty corner sink
(minus the quirky faucet)
[Source: Vintage Tub & Bath]

and this pretty Kohler faucet

[Source: Vintage Tub & Bath]

for a very reasonable price including free shipping! Within a day I received my shipping notification and the faucet is due today (and the sink will be delivered Monday).

Bathroom Dreams - the sequel

I try to be over at the Ugly Duckling every day except for Mondays. Mondays I really, really need to catch up on laundry and other assorted household chores that pile up over the weekend with amazing regularity (I can't -wait- to have a dishwasher! I'll have a life again once I don't have to do all our dishes by hand anymore!).

If I'm lucky I just get to do whatever I came to do (mostly paint) without much interruption aside from a lovely chat with whoever is working on our house that day. Other days questions I have never ever thought about before (or thought I'd ever have to have an answer for) get thrown at me requiring decisions to be made on the spot. Questions like ...

What kind of door do you want here? [A door ... What? There are different kinds of doors??]
Which way does this door open? [Uhhh, let me think about that for a moment]
What kind of flooring are you planning in this room? [Errr ... well, that one hasn't made my priority list yet. Let me think about that for a bit]
What are the measurements of your toilet? [Haha ... I have -never- bought a toilet before so I guess that means they don't come in one standard size?]
Does your vanity have drawers? How deep are they? [I think it will. Possibly. You know, we want to re-purpose an antique dresser soo ... you think you can wait for that a while? We haven't found that dresser yet ...]

Most of the time, I feel somewhat dumbfounded and stupid because I don't have the answers all worked out (in fact, I end up having more questions afterward) but I roll with the punches as much as I'm able. Dear husband will have to live with some of my ad-hoc decisions so I try to keep his preferences in mind as best as I can.

Aaaaanyways, Saturday, at the blue box, we picked out a toilet. An odd project, I'm telling you. I don't know about you but I really don't feel strongly about toilet design. Not at all. As long as it's clean and functioning I'm all set. Really.
I don't really have any preferences whatsoever in regard to one-piece, two-piece or many pieces. I have no opinion on whether elongated, oval or round are "It". Toilet seats I prefer simply clean and white - not too flimsy, not upholstered and not embroidered. Husband only had one request; he liked the elongated version a bit better.

That made things a lot easier although we didn't really waste all that much time going over the various options. Ruling out two designs left us with a handy dandy choice between 4 (I think) options and our budget limitations and a special sale in the toilet department helped the final decision along.

Tada! Our brandnew crapper for the master bath![Everybody say oooh and aaaahh now! It's nothing outrageous: just a plain AquaSource
High Efficiency Elongated Toilet aka the Flushmaster, if you believe the reviews]

We're also a little closer to a final decision for our vanity. You know, we have this grand idea of re-purposing an antique dresser with a pretty marble slab as the counter top and 2 vessel sinks. Now that we know that the space for the vanity isn't all that large and seeing that we have peacefully shared a miniature sink for the past 6 years with no counter space whatsoever, we're thinking about having just one larger (rectangular-ish) bowl center set on the counter, rather than 2., for a crisper, leaner look.

[Source: Signature Hardware]

Or this one

[Source: Kitchensource.com]

Or maybe this one

[Source: Vintage Tub & Bath]

Our current favorite is the vessel sink from Signature Hardware but I figure we'll give it a few more days before hitting the "add to your cart" button.

Let there be light!

After scoring a great deal on our appliance package for the Ugly Duckling's kitchen we celebrated with a ...ahem, quick trip to the blue box store next door. You know, to pick up a few little things we needed for projects that day and to browse the aisles for inspiration.

Not only did we find a water closet (aka "crapper" in plumber language) at a great price, we also picked up a set of 2 outdoor lights for our Ugly Duckling.

[Ugly Duckling with new porch lights]

Yeah, not like that was planned or on the project list for that weekend, but the price was good, the design is a classic carriage design in black and on top of that they are motion-activated for a first security feature at our house. We also love how it affords you helpful light without having to fumble for a light switch when you come home in the dark and are searching for the right key on your key chain.

[Close up!]

Back at the Ugly Duckling, the husband went right to work. Taking down the old outdoor lights (we had 2 jelly jar fixtures, one with shade and the other without) was easy and so was wiring and hanging the new ones. I think even the Ugly Duckling was happy about the sparkle the new lights added. Now we're on the hunt for a matching pendant light since there's another ceiling fixture on our porch.

[Ugly Duckling by night]

Bathroom Dreams

Work is progressing steadily and the first couple of orders are delivered to their final destination: the Ugly Duckling.
The arrival of my super special clawfoot tub was delayed by two days thanks to obviously atrocious weather up north. Instead of Wednesday, it arrived, finally, on Friday (2 weeks ago)!

[Not in an envelope but Fedex-ed all the same]

[First peek - look at those curves!]

[My, are you pretty!]

There she is, waiting for the plumber to rough in the lines for the funky telephone faucet and the drain sometime this week. It was well worth the wait - it's exactly what we wanted for our master bathroom and came at a spectacular price.

One step closer to an actual bathroom!