How To (Partially) Deconstruct a Sunroom

Remember our post about how to recycle just about anything?  We said it then and we'll say it again:  the most important first step to recycling is deconstruction, not demolition.   So what's the difference?  Demolition is destruction of a structure using means such as a sledgehammer.

Reuters

Deconstruction is the careful dismantling of a structure by the same means that it was constructed: with screwdrivers, hammers and the occasional pry-bar.  The purpose is to keep materials intact for future reuse and recycling.

That being said, we've been working on deconstructing the home-made solarium that is taking up space off the back of our house.

Here's how we've done it so far:

Step 1:  Remove furniture, bubble wrap, plastic, carpet, plexiglass, fake wood paneling, curtains, interior gutters, hooks, string, etc.

Step 2:  Attempt to figure out exactly how the structure is constructed.

Step 3:  Have a visit with a kitty (stray or otherwise).

Step 4:  Remove glass panes.

Step 5:  Check to see if glass is tempered.

Step 6:  Assess the damage (and stop the bleeding, if necessary).

Step 7:  Take some artsy photos.

  Step 8:  Clean up the mess.

Step 9:  Repeat steps 3 through 8 as desired.

Step 10:  Remove any unwanted/extremely dangerous spiked bushes.

Step 11:  Continue to remove support pieces as desired and enjoy the view.

Step 12:  Sort wood.  Determine what you can or want to reuse, sort the rest by recycling center standards.  Some centers may not accept wood with paint or nails.

Step 13:  Carry on as desired.  We decided to leave the base and roof of our sunroom as a work area for other house projects.  For now.

The deck will give us a good place to work on sanding and painting projects outside of the house and the cover will offer protection.  Having the windows and many of the support beams out, however, makes the area a hundred times cooler and much nicer to look at.

On a serious note, do check to see if glass is tempered before moving it around.  From experience (we lost two out of nine panes) we recommend wearing gloves, long sleeves and eye protection for moving any type of glass, but our injuries (we just had a few scratches) would have been far worse had the glass not been tempered.

In case you're wondering, the cost of this deconstruction project was a full $0.  Our big savings was not having to rent a dumpster as we had originally planned.  Once everything is down and sorted we'll take a trip in our car or borrow a neighbor's truck to bring the wood in for recycling.  Anything that we have thrown out fit in our trash can for weekly pickup.  Anything that we can't recycle we plan to put on craigslist.org or freecycle.org and hope for some takers.

We hope you enjoyed our tutorial!

Closet Preview + Something Unexpected

We're planning on finishing our bedroom closet this weekend (finally!) and I am so excited to have a closet again that I thought I'd share a little sneak peek!  Here's a reminder of the ugly fake wood paneling that was:

Yep, I went and got into the Picnik photo editor again.  Here is what the closet looks like right now:

And here is the something unexpected.  I was about to paint the shelves the same color that we used in the rest of the closet when I was suddenly struck by a moment of inspiration: why not mix it up a little?  We happen to have just received a few little paint samples of some various shades of greens and blues.  So on a whim, I grabbed one of the samples that had the most paint left in it and got to painting:

So the creamy, dreamy colors of our brand new closet are now:

The first is Martha Stewart's Whetstone Gray and the second is Behr's Southern Breeze but it is actually color matched in Martha Stewart paint.  I love the combination and can't wait to see how it will look when the whole closet is together!

Here is something else that's unexpected:

We got a tip while we were at the Benjamin Moore paint store last week that you can store your paintbrushes and rollers in the refrigerator (wrapped in plastic, of course) if you are continuing to use the same paint instead of washing them between every use.  I was getting sick of washing my rollers, so I decided to get it a try.  As far as I could tell a refrigerated roller worked just as well as a clean one, although I might not try it for extended periods of time or if I was painting something that I wanted to look really perfect.  But, especially if you just need to set your brush down to grab some lunch, it's a great tip!  - Caroline

A Few New Things

This past weekend we may have gone on a bit of a shopping spree.  Among lots of goodies from the likes of Home Depot (you'll be seeing some of those fun things soon) we got a few beautiful additions to our home that we wanted to share.

First of all, we were tipped off that Pottery Barn gives out free color sample wheels each season.  The samples are all of the Benjamin Moore colors that Pottery Barn uses in their displays throughout the season.  Unfortunately they were out of their happy spring and summer colors, but were were able to pick up their new fall and winter colors.  We hope they will provide some inspiration in the months of decorating ahead of us and like we said, they were free!

Our trip to Pottery Barn was followed by a quick stop at Restoration Hardware.  We had no plans to buy anything, but it is just such a fun place to look around.  And dream.  But alas, we couldn't resist when we saw that they had cast metal letters on sale.  We splurged on this nine inch bronze finish "H" for $30 (originally $39).  It is a beautiful addition to our home and something we will have for a very long time.

How about that fan, huh?  That was the last fun thing that we picked up.  We weren't looking for one, but when we saw that Target had all of their fans on sale we thought it might be handy to have for next year.  We initially picked up your standard cheapo plastic fan for about $13, but on the way out we just happened to cross paths with a stack of these amazing Hunter fans!  This one was a full 50% off at just $25!  What a steal. We haven't even used it yet but we are loving the addition to our home!

We have a little decorating philosophy that in a house full of sensible (even if beautiful) wares, it is good to have just a couple of really interesting, high quality, luxurious items.  Its fun to own even just one thing from a place like Restoration Hardware or another store or designer that you really love, even if you can't afford to (or don't choose to) shop there regularly.  It's fun to have something that we feel is worthy of staying in our home for years and maybe even be passed down to our future children and grandchildren.

By the way, what do think of the photos?  They are kind of making us want to go back and redo all of the photos on all of our previous posts.  We've been using Google's Picassa photo editing software (you can get it for free here) but we just recently discovered all the fun things you can do with Picassa's free linkup to Picnik (you can also use Picnik for free here).  We might just have to do a post about editing pictures sometime soon!

A Toilet Post

So what?  Sometimes you just have to do a post about the toilet.  Remember our awesome shag carpet toilet from back when we bought the house?

The toilet was promptly de-shagged after we moved in but for quite some time it still sported a very old-people padded toilet seat.  How much more awesome does it get?

Recently we finally sprung for a $7 Bemis molded wood toilet seat from Home Depot.  Hey big spender.  So here you go: shiny, clean, and much less creepy.

Of course, our toilet overhaul couldn't end there.  The throne is rather old and we were feeling like we were literally flushing money down the toilet with each tip of the handle.  So we decided to invest another $20 into the pot for a HydroRight Dual-Flush kit, also from Home Depot.

 

The kit installed really easily despite the slightly less-than-thorough directions.  We set both the low flush and the high flush settings to use the least possible amount of water and so far so good.  Fancy.

When we went to put the lid back on the toilet, we made a little discovery about just how old our toilet really is.  Check out the stamp on the underside of the lid:

The previous owners must have installed it right after they moved in.  But it's still chugging [kind of a gross image - sorry], so we'll stick with it for now.  Especially now that it's a little bit friendlier to the earth.

Late Summer Harvest

Recently our plums and figs have started to ripen!  Our regular purple plums came and went a few weeks ago but these golden plums are just perfect right now.  And they are absolutely delicious.

The figs just ripened up out of nowhere in the last couple weeks, too.  We'd never eaten figs fresh off the tree and actually had to do a little bit of research. 

It turns out that figs can be eaten whole, skins and all, but they are a little bit tricky.  Primarily, the sap of the fig tree is apparently a proteolytic enzyme, which destroys proteins in human skin.  When figs are not fully ripe they ooze a milky white sap from the tip when picked.  If it touches your skin it can irritate or even burn.  When eaten, the sap in the skin can make your mouth itchy, numb or sore.  The effects are reduced the riper the fig is.  We have also been cutting our figs into smaller pieces to reduce the contact our lips and mouth have with the skin.  While we've fortunately not experienced it first hand, we've heard that spiders and ants will climb inside the fig as well so cutting it up is a good way to check for critters.  Another fun fact:  Figs are not a fruit, but a infructescence, which is basically a cluster of flowers.

Here is our harvest from just one day last week:

Bonus:  our neighbor doesn't like figs but she loves those golden plums so we were lucky enough to be able to trade for some fresh eggs from her chickens!  They made a delicious breakfast this weekend.

A Little Budget Update

We've had money on the mind for the last week or so.  Dawn and Jeremy of Bungalowcious recently disclosed their whopping $257,000 renovation bill for their 1914 bungalow here in Portland (see what they spent it on here).  Their house is in a great neighborhood very close to where we looked at some houses in our hunt and if we're not careful we could easily end up in the same position:  owners of an incredibly beautiful old house that isn't worth the money we put into it.

We'll get into our thoughts on a reasonable overall budget for our fixer-upper soon, but for now we wanted to share an update to our original budget post since our finances have shifted around a bit since we bought the house.

Remember our original goal for how our finances would look after buying the house?

So how did we do?  We've adjusted some of our categories and taken a different approach to tracking our general spending, but as a whole we are actually fairly close to our goal budget.  Here's the budget breakdown we've been working with for the last two months:

The important thing, of course, is that our housing expenses are right on track.  This category actually includes our mortgage and all the things bundled in with it (hazard insurance, mortgage insurance, taxes) as well as all of our utilities (electric, gas, water and trash).  The standard expectation for housing expenses is usually something like 35%, but considering we are at the bottom of our income potential we feel pretty comfortable with 42% for now.  We took out the "debt payoff" category because obviously a very large percentage of our income is going to debt payoff on our house alone.  We have no credit card debt, so our student loans have the highest interest rate of all that we owe.  For now we are putting about 5% of our income toward paying off our student loans, and as we reach a more comfortable level of savings we plan to increase those payments.  When we bought the house, almost our entire savings went to the down-payment and initial costs of the house (mostly the sewer replacement and our new washer and dryer).  Ever since, we have been putting as much as possible into our accounts to try to get back up to a reasonable emergency fund (we're shooting for a year's worth of mortgage and bills).  As we get closer to that goal we'll probably cut back to saving about 10% of our income.  The other bills category covers monthly expenses outside of our housing.  It includes cable, internet, netflix, our cellphones and our car payment.

In the interest of full disclosure, 14% has not been fully covering all of our spending.  What we insist that it covers is our day to day expenses (food, entertainment, gas, etc).  We also try to make it cover smaller home improvement needs like paint and screws.  Large purchases have to come, at least in part, out of our savings because 14% of our income simply won't cover them.  For example, you may (or may not) have noticed that car insurance was not covered in any of the categories above.  This is because, to save money, we pay our premium in full every six months.  While the total is less than it would be if we were paying it monthly, it is a bit of money to come up with all at once when you're on such a tight budget.  Recently we've also taken money for plane tickets back east for Christmas and reservations for our upcoming anniversary weekend out of savings.  These types of expenses are only occasional and amount to far less than what we've been putting into savings on a regular basis.

We also have a separate savings account to pay for home improvements.  For now we are not contributing to it regularly, but if we have any extra money lying around (for example the nice check we got back from our deposit to our apartment building) it goes into that account to pay for any large purchases for the house.

So here's the thing.  It has been pretty much exactly two months since we bought our house and the above was our budget during that time.  The way that we have been saving so much has been that my (Caroline here) entire paycheck and a portion of Matt's has been deposited directly into our savings account so that we would never have the opportunity to spend it.  Yesterday, however, was my last day at work.  So goodbye to my paycheck.  Additionally, our health insurance was through my job.  So now that it will have to be through Matt's his paycheck is going to be considerably smaller.  So goodbye to the portion of his check that was going into savings.  So what does that leave going into our savings account?  Nada.  Zilch.  Zero big ones.  Especially if we hope to ever get anything done on the house (and probably even if we don't) there is really no way that we can see to spend less than what we have been spending (we're also losing our free coffee and occasionally free food from Starbucks so add that to our expenses).  I'll be starting a new (modestly paying) job at the end of September, but in the meantime, with our severely reduced income, this is about what our budget is going to look like:

No savings there.  Since we can't do anything about our housing bills (other than doing our best to reduce our use of resources, which we will) our housing will be a whopping 58% of our income!  Ouch.  We figure since we can't spend much less day to day than we already are we'll just have to do our best for now to keep our savings as low as possible and try not to take much out of savings over the next few weeks.

Beginning in October I'll be receiving a stipend for a Graduate Assistantship from Portland State University.  It won't be as much as I was making at Starbucks, but it's something.  Of course, once again it will all be going straight into savings.  Considering Matt's income will still be reduced due to health insurance, here's what we estimate our budget will look like at that point: 

Not bad for two full time students.  Speaking of which, since we will both be in school in the fall, all of our student loans will be deferred.  It is tempting to put some extra money into the house or to hurry up and pay off the rest of our car just to have one less bill coming in, but we have to remember that our student loans are our highest interest debt.  For as long as we have them we'll keep paying the minimum payments on our mortgage and car and put as much money into the student loans as possible.  Our graduate loans are the first priority since they are more than a full percentage point higher than my undergraduate loans.

In December Matt will finish his Master's Program and (finger's crossed) should get some sort of a raise at work.  At that point everything will change once again.  Once we get that savings account up to a good emergency cushion we'll be able to readjust and consider putting more into the house or saving for other things we want to do (vacations!).  But for now it's just lots of creative ways to save around here.  Maybe there will have to be a post on that soon!

By the way, did you catch that I'm going to be unemployed for the next six weeks!?  I'll be spending that time doing lots of work around here so there will be lots of posts to come!!   - Caroline

A Closet Story

This weekend we started working on the closet in the room that we plan to use as our bedroom.  The closet is full of dark paneling that makes it very dark and ugly:

Isn't it just a great view (and don't you just love the lime green painted wallpaper)?

So far we haven't done much more than a little planning and some demolition (we'll be sure to post pictures when it's done) but in the process we made a little discovery.

The closet in this bedroom backs up to the closet in the front bedroom and we knew that there was not a plaster wall between them but that in some places, that least, the paneling was the only separation.  With a closer look, however, we discovered that a lot of the wall is in fact plaster and that it is really only a relatively small section of the wall that is not.  Around the same time we noticed that one of the door frames to the closet (see above photo) didn't seem to be of the same quality as the other.  With a closer look we could tell that the entire door frame is actually a complete replica!  Then we went and checked out the other closet and discovered (we're not sure how we didn't notice before) that the entire wall that the closet is in is actually drywall - not plaster.  We started pulling off the wallpaper in the back of the front bedroom closet (yes you read that right) and sure enough the old door frame to the original closet was still there.

What all that means is that these two bedrooms each originally had a small closet which were positioned side-by-side.  The previous owners combined the two closets to make one large closet for the back bedroom and decreased the size of the front bedroom to create a new full-size closet for that bedroom as well.  Here are some images we drew up using Sweet Home 3D:

The two north bedrooms originally:

The two north bedrooms now:

Closet view in the back bedroom originally:

Closet view in the back bedroom now (same as the second picture at the top of the post):

The closet view in the front bedroom originally:

Closet view in the front bedroom now (you can see how much smaller the room is with the added closet space):

While we're very interested in restoring the house to its original state, the extra closet space is a really big bonus for us and for resale value.  These are the only two full size closets in the house, so to restore these closets to their original state would be to remove a huge portion of our main level storage space (outside of the attic and basement).  So the plan is to just go ahead with our closet update and keep everything as is.  Although we do plan to at some point improve both of the door frames that the previous owners added so that they look like they were always there.

On that note, today we contacted a specialist in old house renovation who recently moved to Portland!  She works on old homes alongside owners to help them restore the house to its original glory.  We are meeting with her soon to see if she can help us with some of our bigger, more daunting projects.  We'll keep you posted!

Love List and Pinterest

We just created a Pinterest account!  If you don't know, Pinterest.com is a site that allows you to gather images from anywhere online all in one place.  This is really helpful for any kind of interest that requires inspiration.  It would have been really helpful when we were planning our wedding but it will be great for compiling inspiration for our home.  We're just starting it up but you can check out what we've gathered so far at www.pinterest.com/twoseekhome.

One of the boards that we started on Pinterest is our Love List.  This is a collection of products and items that we love from various sources.  It is not an advertisement or endorsement for anything, just a little bit of inspiration.  Some of them are things we might actually purchase, some are things we wish we could afford and some are just things we really really like.  We wanted to share some things that we've added to our Love List so far.  Hope you find them as beautiful and inspiring as we do!

Scott Lifshutz watercolor Pillow from West Elm

Locally made reclaimed Fissure Table from EcoPDX

Swiss Family Robinson Coasters from Coasting Along

Bungalow Fan by Casablanca Fan Company

Shallow Left Center Print by Don Hamerman at 20X200

Check out our entire Love List and watch for new things we love here:  www.pinterest.com/twoseekhome/love-list

Kitchen Colors

As of now our kitchen still looks something like this:

No paint yet.  But we've been thinking about colors so that when we're ready to paint we'll have an idea of what we're going with.  Remember our post on Purple In The Kitchen?  Well sure enough, here's the pallet we're settled on for right now:

What do you think?   Here's the palette from Behr, including a color that approximately matches those (grimy old) counter tiles:

The white, "moon rise" will be the cabinet color, but we're not quite sure about the other colors.  The kitchen is divided into two sections, the main area and a sort of nook area that leads to the basement door.  We were thinking about doing the main section in "delicious berry" and the other area in the "gray timber wolf."  Behr.com has a tool that allows you to upload a picture and paint the walls to get an idea of what different colors would look like.  Here's what we did to the photo at the top of this post:

So what if we switched the colors?  Well, it would look something like this:

Not great images, but it gives you the idea.  So which do you like better?