Monday, April 18, 2011

newly purchased old house + 9 days + lots of help = great looking apartment + sore muscles + exhaustion + smiles

On March 25, 2011 David purchased his first house, located at 1-3 Morrison Ave in Somerville. On March 26 David, his parents, Christine and I packed up his stuff from his old apartment and piled everything into the living and dining room of 3 Morrison. Filled with delicious pastries from Lyndell's Bakery, we spent the weekend stripping wallpaper, and literally chipping paint from what became known as the "Barney Room" - as you can see in the pictures, it was painted a blinding mixture of purple and green colors seen most commonly in a children's candy box (like Nerds maybe?). David's new roommate John moved in the night of the 26th, armed with an air mattress as tall as I am and a bag of clothes. John, and David's co-worker Kim, were there for a day to attack the resilient walls layered with paint and paper.
After a week "off" at work, David, his parents and I returned on April 1 to attack the house again. Christine, there to help again for the weekend, came with the much welcomed addition of Grandpa John (my mom's dad) who proceeded to work the entire week with Susan, David and me. Harvie had to return to VT to teach for Mon-Fri, and we had my dad there to transport much needed items from the St. Jay house for Christine and me, and help with the house, for most of Thursday and all of Friday. We worked on the house non-stop from about 9am to 2am (I "quit" early (meaning maybe 11:30) a few nights to do some work on my computer) for 9 days, but got a TON of stuff done, and the house is looking great! At the end of the week Christine moved in to the bedroom on the 2nd floor, and this coming week the last roommate, Jerome, will be moving in. Here are a few stories and pictures from the renovation week:
The "Barney Room"
This room, like most of the third floor, had a wonderful two layers of carpet. Layer 1, a nice dark purple to match the blinding wall paint. Layer 2, a beautiful brown shag to remind of us of changing decorating trends. The base layer was luckily a nice, non-leaded (we checked) maroon paint on wide floor boards.

Successful removal of both carpet layers made the room look remotely better...

This room was one of the two worst rooms to fix. In hindsight, we would have saved a lot of time by knocking all the walls down and putting up drywall. When we started though we didn't anticipate how long it would take to chisel off the layers of paint and wallpaper. Lesson: if it seems hard, put up drywall.

I barely recognize myself wearing Davids pants. My work pants were plastered with paint chips and sticky wallpaper... thankfully a belt seems to fix some of Davids smaller fitting pants. This picture shows the plaster walls, which were oddly covered in green stuff we assumed to be some kind of sizing, b/c it was water soluble and definitely not paint.
After many hours of work, we present to you the new and improved Barney Room! A soft blue for the walls, fresh brown paint on the floors, and some of Grandpa John's light yellow paint for the closet!
Another view of the new and improved Barney Room. The cardboard hole in the wall is an access panel that we created. It was later replaced with a wooden panel by Harvie.
The Bathroom

Lucky for us, the bathroom didn't need any renovations. However, 4 hours and two people were required to clean the bathroom. David is skeptical as to whether a cleaning of this nature was really required, but I promise you that the more dirt and grime we removed, the more dirt and grime we found. It was a filthy mess. I scrubbed most of the tile grout with my index finger and a scotch brite, not realizing we had a scrub brush that would have made my life easier. Needless to say, my forearm was in agony when I went to bed that night.

The "Room with No Heat"


At the beginning, this room seemed like it would be a lot easier than the Barney Room. However, we couldn't have been more wrong. Below a layer of wallpaper and paint was this annoying green paint that would half chip off. This means that when the wallpaper was removed, half of the paint went with the wallpaper and the other half stayed. The question became, do we remove the rest or leave it? Unfortunately, leaving it would have resulted in uneven walls, or walls that required a lot of spackle. So, we chipped away, for hours, and hours. My hands are still recovering.

The rectangular hole in the wall is where we redirected heat from the next bedroom over to this room, so that it would no longer be "the room with no heat". Grandpa John executed most of this project, after much discussion with David about the design of the redirect. You will also notice that there is drywall on one of the walls. This was put up by Harvie and David after we took down a shelf to reveal a large 1ft x 6ft hole in the plaster.

David finishing the drywall.

Dad and I painting the "room that had no heat". Dad unleashed his expert edging skills, and dug around for some late night energy and we finished off this room around 1am with David and Susan.

The "Blue Room"

This room is now David's room, and required the least amount of work to repaint. Lucky for us, the room did not contain any wallpaper. It did have quite a few cracks in the plaster though which required much repair. I performed my first real spackling job on a corner in this room! Thanks to Susan for the expert instruction.

The "Living Room"

This room was literally a piece of cake, and was a much needed easy job at the end of the week. There was only one layer of wallpaper, and no paint. The paper came off easily, and with the teamwork of David, Susan, Dad and me we had the room all stripped by mid-morning on Friday.

We painted this room "melted butter" - yum! We were a little worried by how bold and yellowy it looked when we started to paint, but when it was all done we thought it looked pretty good. We didn't do anything to the floors in this room other than clean them up. One wall in the living room received the drywall treatment.

The Kitchen (it's in there somewhere, I think...)

Grandpa John installed the dishwasher, which arrived courtesy of craigslist fully NON-functioning. False advertising by the seller, but luckily an easy part to replace. Grandpa also boxed off the piping under the sink, which had previously been exposed to all the lower cabinets. With a fresh coat of white paint, they are all looking pretty good now!


We stripped the walls in the kitchen that would be more difficult to work on once people had moved their stuff in. We thought the kitchen would be SUPER easy, as it seemed to have only two layers of wallpaper that were easy to peel off. We were wrong, though it didn't turn out to be too hard. There were MANY layers of wallpaper, on top of MANY layers of paint. We left the paint, removed the wallpaper.


I'm working real hard in this picture, aren't I...


We painted the kitchen a color called "Sagey" which seemed to match well with the existing counter tops.
The Pantry


The pantry requires a before (left, obviously) picture, even if it is a little blurry. The entire pantry was PINK, and had peeling linoleum flooring and less than usable cabinets. Grandpa John, with the help of my dad on the floor, tore everything out and leveled the existing shelves. Harvie then spent an entire day installing new shelvings below a counter top generously donated by Grandpa John. After a day's work fitting all the pieces together, Harvie sat down to dinner and looked at my grandfather's chop saw and said "we had a chop saw??? do you know how much time that would have saved???" David responded with a "oh, yeah, oops...". Even if it took a bit more time, the pantry turned out beautifully!

In case you need more "before" pictures, visit: https://picasaweb.google.com/dhp.porter/3Morrison#
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