ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

I’ve talked about my father-in-law, who is awesome, but I wanted to stop and talk about my own father for a moment.  He’s amazingly handy and amazingly mechanical.  He can fix just about anything.  He restores antique gas engines, built a classic Shelby Cobra out of a rejiggered Ford Thunderbird, and he built most of the house I grew up in.  He’s got a giant tool shop that includes a lathe big enough to bore out the cylinder of a huge gas engine.

My father is a saint.  I’ve never heard him swear at a human being.  I hope I’m not ratting him out here….but he reserves the tiny bit of swearing that he does do for eloquent (but impassioned) outbursts aimed at inanimate objects he is working on in his shop.

I’m not as handy as he is, so I tend to have more things to swear at.

I’ve been waiting for the right moment to share this with you.  My pal Henry shared this MP3 with me seven or eight years ago, and it immediately found a place in my greatest hits.  This recording, which has been nicknamed “Daddy’s Curses”, has passed from underground tape collector to underground tape collector until it found a home on the internet.  It was supposedly made by a young child who surreptitiously recorded his father, Bruce, while he was working on restoring an antique piano.  I think everybody who is reading this can relate to this recording in some way.

Caution.  This recording is not safe for work without headphones. It may leave your ears burning, but remember…nobody was harmed in this recording except for an uncooperative antique piano.

LINK

Getting our bedroom to a point where we could move our things in and start sleeping in the space seemed to take forever.  However, once the walls were painted we were able to haul our bed into the room and finally stop sleeping on the floor.  This was an immediate solution to the stress I was feeling our first few weeks in the house.  It took some time to start arranging things in the room, but initially just the color we chose for the walls was relaxing enough to create a refuge.

I have always like Tiffany Box Blue as a color for walls– it is bright, cheery, and it really makes white pop against it.  I began a crazy hunt to figure out how to get my hands on some Tiffany Box Blue paint.  This is a tough task, because Tiffany’s has the rights over that specific color.  This means that no one can sell a true Tiffany Box Blue– even the Pantone color (called Tiffany Blue) is unavailable, which seems nuts, but is true.  I spent some time in several different paint aisles searching the blues.  The nearest match I found was Benjamin Moore’s color Scuba Green.  Yes, it has green in the name, but it is as close to Tiffany Box Blue and I could get.  This color is luminescent on the walls and at just the right time in the late afternoon our entire room seems to glow.  We love it.

The room is not finished, but I am going to show you where we are in the process of pulling it together so far.

After we painted the walls, we decided that the brassy wall sconce fixtures in the room were a bit too, well, brassy.  Silver and white look so nice with our Scuba Green walls and we found two discounted, brushed silver sconces on sale at our local hardware store.  It was quick and easy to swap these out and the silver looks much better.

I found a $35 dresser on Craigslist that looks good now and can be switched out later if I find something I prefer.  In our never-ending garage sale quest we scored a lovely, antique round mirror for $10.  I pulled these things into the room first and went from there.

Because white looks so nice against the Scuba Green walls, I grabbed a painting from our collection that we love by Merrliee Challis.  It looked great on the wall near the window and I was attracted to way the touch of red in this painting stood out in contrast to the wall color.  Below the painting I hung this small collection of metal box frames I picked up in Mexico years ago.  I lined the inside of them with red velvet and stitched some little milagros charms inside.

With this small arrangement on the wall I had suddenly decided on a vague color scheme for the room– white and Scuba Green with touches of red.

At another garage sale we picked up a $5 shelf that I hauled home and painted white, it fit nicely in the corner beneath the painting, etc.

Because the small metal box frames worked so well beneath Merrilee’s painting I decided to hang my collection of Mexican tin mirrors on another wall.  The bright silver stands out on the walls and reflects natural light from the window, which really helps to brighten up the room.

Looking at Merrilee’s painting and all the vein-y lines reminded me that Garth and I had picked up a couple of faux coral wall hooks and matching drawer pulls at a flea market last year (in anticipation of the home we knew we would be decorating).  I dug these out of a box and liked their vein-y quality hanging close to the painting.  They seemed like a perfect decorative way to organize some of my jewelry.  I screwed the two hooks on either side of the round mirror and mounted the small drawer pulls on an oval piece of wood (you can pick these up at most craft stores– though mine came from the thrift store) that I painted white.  Once all these things were up on the wall, everything felt like it was made to go in the space.

At this point I turned my attention to the window treatments.  Initially the windows had very long, sheer curtains that ended in lace.  We enjoyed the light filtered through the sheer curtains but weren’t found of the way the length disguised the interesting shape of our window.  I pulled these down and shortened them.  I also used this pattern to create a draped window with red trim.

For now, this is what has been achieved in the bedroom. Now for the bigger problem, which is what I am still hoping to tackle in the room.

I am sure you have been wondering about the completely bizarre, round, beige carpeted bed that sits in our room.  The bed was part of Garth’s dowry when we were married.  He acquired it in college when he was a swinging independent record store owner in Lincoln, Nebraska.  It was a charming asset when we first met, and though all of his old friends seem to expect his wife to give it the old heave-ho, I like the bed.  It is quirky and weird and Elvis has one in Graceland.  Above the mirrored section is a stereo and eight track player.  Hidden in the hood there used to be a t.v. set with a tiny, tiny screen that Garth has since replaced with a small flat screen (at the moment none of this technology is hooked up because neither one of us can stay awake to watch television when lying down).

I love the bed, but can’t stand the bedside tables that came with it– one is conveniently covered in mirror (the height of [sniffffffffffff] function in the 70’s), the other is just a small cylinder covered in matching beige carpet.  We need to locate two night stands that have storage to hold our bedside books, alarm and radio.  I have yet to stumble upon the right nightstand solution.

The next problem is that the bed HAS GOT to be reupholstered.  I have always liked the bed and hated the upholstery.  I haven’t settled on the right fabric yet (nor have I actually finished an upholstery job).  Here is where you can all help me out– you’ve seen our room and decorations, is there a great source for upholstery fabric somewhere that I haven’t found?  Do you have good suggestions for the bed overhaul?  Fabric choices?  Upholstery advice?  This is going to be a big job, but I think I can handle it after I have found a good source for fabric.  I would also love to hear any helpful tips or be pointed to good upholstery internet resources.  Thanks in advance for your help and sweet dreams!

Oh drywall, that most underappreciated of the construction arts.  It’s messy and finicky, but it’s got a (relatively) short learning curve.  HOWEVER, there is a huge gap between the skills of a drywall master and that of a novice.  Putting up drywall has left a mark on everyone who has done it, and everybody likes to share their hard-won knowledge.

Restoring a house in the year 2009 is a fascinating process.  Twitter (find me @extremecraft), which had always been a fun, nonessential communication tool, became my construction oracle when it came time to put up some drywall.  I’d put up a tweet about the part of the process that I was starting, and a flood of advice on dust masks, application tools and zen drywall technique would come pouring in.

Our wallpaper saga is well-known to readers of this blog.  When we started tearing down the wallpaper in the house, we found out why there was so damn much of it.  There was nothing underneath the drywall but redwood planks.  Victorian houses in our area were frequently constructed with big ol’ redwood beams that were then finished (inside and out) by the application of thick redwood planks.  The photo at the beginning of this post was taken from our wallpaper peeling party, and you can see the beautiful, exposed old-growth redwood in our dining room.  Every person we showed the wall to cooed about how beautiful the wood was, and told us that we should keep it the way it is.

That would be great…except that we don’t want to live in a cabin.  We’re considering leaving some “rustic” touches in our guest bedroom…but we’ll tell you more about that later.

Back to the drywall.  Both Claire and I have done our share of drywall sanding, but we’ve never masterminded a drywall project from start to finish.  We were starting with one huge advantage, though, which was the fact that we would be putting the sheet rock over a plank wall instead of a normal frame wall.  That meant the wall would be fairly forgiving, and that we could piece the drywall into any weird spots and use drywall mud to finish and smooth things out.

Rather than tackle everything by ourselves, we decided to reach into our (rapidly shrinking) piggy bank and pull out a bit of money to hire a handyman to help us with the dining room.  We found an experienced handyman with affordable rates from a Craigslist ad.  He touted his attention to detail and years of experience, so we invited him over to take a look.  He seemed confident that we could knock out the project in the course of a couple of evenings.

When we hopped in the handyman’s pickup truck to get the drywall and supplies, it became apparent that he had overstated his drywall experience.  I think he’d worked on plenty of drywall projects, but hadn’t really engineered any from start to finish.  Still, he was nice, had more experience than us, and would be a big help on this relatively small project.

I took down the 100-year old wooden molding.  This stuff is a work of art, so I was really careful not to splinter or break it.  As I started to scratch some of the white paint off, I saw that it had originally been painted a beautiful terra-cotta color with very subtle buffed gold accents.  Still, we had already planned the room’s color scheme, so we decided to leave the trim white.  We’ll be revealing more about our plans for the room VERY soon.

As anybody who’s done it knows, drywall is a huge mess.  Wear a mask.  The dust will get into places that will leave you scratching your (drywall dust-flecked) head.  As advertised, the drywall went up very quickly.  Our handyman was a little less deft with his application of the drywall mud.  I watched him apply a SUPER THICK layer of mud to the corners before he applied the drywall tape.  It only makes sense that you want a corner to be square, rather than a weird angle.  When I explained this to him, he seemed to get it and scraped some of the mud from the corners.  He was better at applying the mud to the seams and feathering the edges, but applying the mud still took more than double the time that putting the drywall up took.  The corners still wound up looking a little clumsy and thick.

Here is our hard-won drywall advice.  This is going to sound very un-D.I.Y. of me, but If you’re a novice and can afford it, HIRE A DRYWALL PRO!  If we had been less stingy, we would have paid less money to a professional, because they can do it in much less time, and with much better results.  We feel like we learned a lot from the process, and we feel like we could fumble our way through some more basic drywall projects with pretty good results, but we’re at least going to hire a professional to do the finishing work with the drywall mud for us when we do our kitchen.  We also need somebody to skim-coat the damaged places on our walls where we got overzealous with our wallpaper removal.

I’m looking forward to watching a pro fix up the corners and feather the seams with craftsmanship and precision.  I’ll be taking notes (and kicking myself for not hiring somebody sooner).

As I have mentioned several times before, since we took possession of our house my mania for home improvement has been directed at our walls.  All I can tell you is, if you ever decided to buy a house that is covered in wallpaper that you intend to remove, try EVERYTHING.  Our efforts removing the border around the room in our living room and parlor areas worked like a charm.  We sprayed some diluted fabric softener and it came down in long satisfying stretches.  What a delight!

In the kitchen, under the top layer of paper seems to require a chisel.  We have long since abandoned this peeling job as we have decided it will be best to simply drywall over the one hundred years of wallpaper firmly stuck to the redwood plank walls beneath.  The kitchen (temporarily, I keep telling myself) sits with half peeled fruit wallpaper and the exposed history of decorative papers beneath.  In several spots there are large swatches of redwood plank peeking through the entire mess.  Yes, sigh, the walls are still like this today.

In the front hallway, we sprayed our magic fabric softener.  Nothing.  We perforated the surface with a special tool and sprayed a store bought remover on the wall.  This was semi-effective in some places and completely useless in other spots– it was as if the wall paper had been applied in some areas with wallpaper paste and in others with superglue.  The walls under the paper have been drywalled, but were not primed before the paper went up so occasionally as we found a nice piece of wallpaper that seemed to be peeling up satisfactorily (in more than shredded inch-long bits) the paper would suddenly pull up the top layer of drywall.

Dammit.

This hallway caused plenty of cursing from the (otherwise) mild-mannered Garth.  He still walks through the hall, looks at some rough spots, and mutters angrily under his breath.  The hallway sat for weeks as I shamefully walked in and out the front door.  This challenge seemed impossible.  I started to spend two hours each day spraying and scraping, figuring that doing this a bit at a time might make it less painful.  I wasn’t getting very far.  People had mentioned renting a wallpaper steamer to us several times, but because Garth had tried to use one of our friend’s clothing steamers in the front hallway to no avail he scoffed at the idea.

Note to anyone pulling down wallpaper– a clothing steamer and a wallpaper steamer: NOT THE SAME THING.  I did a bit of research online and brought this argument to light one Friday.  That particular weekend we were suppose to be adding the finishing touches to the dining room (yes, we will be showing this very soon).  As I stood on a ladder painting the dining room, Garth proudly returned from a trip to the recycling center with a rented wallpaper steamer.  This was not what I was hoping to work on that day, but Garth set to work in the front hallway.  Although the steamer drips boiling hot water and it can be awkward to hold it on one area of the wall as you scrape at the area you just steamed, the entire front hallway, as well as the famous bookcase wallpaper, were removed in a matter of hours.

I had been averaging a square foot every two hours or so prior to this.  Thank you wallpaper steamer.  If you find that other methods are taking too much effort don’t hesitate to drop $30 or $40 for a twenty four hour rental of one of these babies.  If we had rented a steamer earlier, we might have saved tons of time.