Sorry

I am the worst. I went off and fixed up a whole other house and haven't been keeping up with the upkeep. So here are pics:

I bought a lakehouse. Inside, it looked like this:

But, outside?


This is what sold me:


There were a lot of things that needed to be addressed right away:

Nasty vinyl and carpet in the kitchen/dining area:


WHY?:


The kitchen sink drain sprung a major leak:


Well, the faucet was atrocious anyway:


Same with the bathroom faucet - they just stuck the handle on and called it a day (missing several pieces and held together with krazy glue of all things)


This toilet seat was a breeding ground for bacteria - it had to go:


I bought some cute knobs for cheap!:


Already looking better by adding more white to the orangey oak cabinets and replacing the brass hardware:


The vanity was missing the door pull completely, so I picked up a sleek brass one (again for cheap). So simple, yet functional:
I forgot that I also had to fix a leak beneath the sink here, which turned out to be a job for professionals. They had to cut into the wall to fit the proper pipes and vents and while they were at it I REPLACED THE VANITY TOP WITH PURE WHITE (formerly a cream color).

The suite (the more white I can add in there, the better):

Not only did I have to replace the broken kitchen faucet, I had to replace the sink itself because the DRAIN WOULD NOT COME OFF THE SINK. I even got my strong neighbor to try his hand at it and it would not budge. So the whole thing had to come out, but the good news it was replaced with this beauty:

Ever the multi-tasker, when I got to a point where I could get no further with plumbing, I tackled the many forms of wallpaper in the house:


In the pantry:

In the dining room:


Along the borders of the great room (made the room feel so short!):




And the master bedroom border of tacky roses:


Then I fixed up the master bedroom for a calming retreat (not my color choice, but it will have to do for now):


Excuse the photo quality - my camera broke at one point and all I had was my phone:

I installed a plate rack in the dining room:


I ripped up the carpet (filthy, disgusting, FLEA-RIDDEN carpet) in the dining room and went to town prepping the subfloor for paint (to seal in the stains, odors, gunk that was living in there until I can afford hardwood):


A dirty job, as evidenced by SOCKS:


The nasty (held down with PEANUT BUTTER?!?) blue vinyl in the kitchen came up and the subfloor was prepped for a nice, bright (CLEAN) white:




Camera phone view (most recent) trying to work with the navy blue countertops and still brighten up the kitchen:


The finished dining room floor, painted with chocolate brown floor paint to flow with the dark wood veneers in the rest of the great room (otherwise if I painted the dining room white, it would chop the great room in half visually):


The workshop in the basement:


My first foray into woodworking, with the help of my stepdad:

If you can believe it, this is the only thing between you and iminent death at the bottom of the basement steps (sharply steep and hard concrete at the bottom) and the previous owners had not screwed this into a stud!

Also? Gotta have birdfeeders:

Between the 3 homes, I barely have enough time and money to eat, but those birds are not gonna starve on my watch!

Little extras:

Someplace to put towels and tp: Someplace to sit:


Something to watch (Ikea TV Stand, put together by myself in a matter of minutes):

In truth, there's so much more to tell, so much more to see, but I felt bad neglecting to update and this is what you get. A tease. Hopefully I will find sometime to truly update and explain some of the step by step that went into each improvement. Also? Hopefully I will have 1 less houses and 2 really nice HOMES by the end of this year.

Is this thing finally on again????

It figures that I would be interrupted when I was most motivated to start this thing. I feel like I have to start all over again, but let me push on through.... where was I?

Oh yes, the DC Coop Apartment. I'm sorry that I never took any before before pictures, when I moved in it was basically a blank slate. A few white boxes for rooms and that was it. The kitchen and bath were in livable, but sorry states. It always seemed so hard for me to get any work done there since it is in such an old building and the rest of the place is in just as bad, if not worse, shape. So I settled.

I painted. I moved things around. I got comfortable. That's why all of the before pictures are not that accurate, because before before bareley exists for me anymore. Now it's like, before I had two homes, or even before I had three....

So. Pictures?



I have changed the faucet in my bathroom twice, once when I took out the vanity (from a single door to a double door - more storage in a 1 br apt. is priceless!) and then again to upgrade it to a single handle. That was my first foray into plumbing. I also changed the light fixture and medicine cabinet. Before was the original cabinet - you know the single mirror, mounted in the wall. Well, inside the wall the cabinet was leveled with razor blades. Like, a thousand of them. This was all pre-digital camera, but I wish I had thought to take a picture! It was kind of scary at the time, I just wanted to dispose of them without thinking about why. Why razor blades???? Then, I helped my best friend/neighbor change her mother's medicine cabinet and it had the exact same deal inside the wall. Leveled with a thousand razor blades. So creepy, but at least it wasn't just me! I guess that's just how they did things back in the day? Changing the cabinet meant that the overhead single bulb light fixture was not going to cut it, so I had to go in there and play with cloth wiring. I was definitely freaked out about the whole experience, because I seem to have blocked most of it from my memory.



Then there was the kitchen.... Oh, again I don't know where to start. There was the time I pulled up a tile (one of those laminate sticky ones) because a corner of it was bunched up. Then I gave up. I moved the refrigerator from its ridiculous location at the back of the kitchen wedged between the counter, the sink, and a window. Only after I did several tests for the gross-out factor. I wasn't sure what I was going to find back there, the parts of the kitchen I could see were pretty gruesome, who knew what I would find lurking behind, nay, under the fridge???? Not more razorblades?! Actually, nothing. It was just one big dustbunny and that was about it. I was so shocked, it helped propel me into plumbing.



The kitchen sink. I have changed that faucet two times. Well I attempted to change the sprayer and the faucet a thousand times each.... When I think about all those years of "Chinese water torture*" of the dripping faucet (*to quote best friend). Yikes. That old sprayer was about to be the death of me too. Makes me shake my head and sigh.



Unfortunately, again, I can't say that I have any before pictures. Just the one of the old faucet on the floor. So let me tell you a little story (adapted/edited from an old blog entry circa 2006, before I even knew what a House Blog was):

++++

The clock was ticking, the kitchen faucet has been dripping steadily since 2003. Actually, it picked up the pace rather recently and there was a Coop Board notice about how the water bill was skyrocketing.

It couldn't be lil' ol' me and this faucet that's been dripping for THREE YEARS that I've been fully prepared to change if it weren't for the fact that my CORRODED PIPES have made it impossible to shut off the water flow coming into my apartment with the shut-off valves.....

Or could it?

Well, I had all my tools, I had the new faucet and sprayer hose, I had everything ready to go...



If only they would TURN OFF THE WATER to the whole building: on a day that I was home, or at least give enough notice so that I could actually BE home when they turned it off (they like to pull a sneak attack sometimes).

SO when I came home Sunday to see a notice that the water would be off in the entire building between the hours of 9 and 3 today (Monday) - FINALLY is all I could think.

8:48 AM. My alarm rings. I press snooze until 9:15.

There I was wondering if 6 hours is going to be enough time for me to change the kitchen faucet. I was seriously wondering if I could do it in that amount of time. Because my previous experience with that particular faucet and its useless, malfunctioning sprayer had been nothing but heartache.

So. I got up, instinctively brushed my teeth and... oh, wait. The water was still on.

Let's see if it just needs to run out of the line. Nope. Full-fledged. On.

Let me cut this short by saying that the water in the building was all the way on until exactly 1:45 p.m. While I was on the phone with my mother to be exact. (It's an old building, so I could actually hear it turn off). So much for 6 hours....

"Mom, the water was just turned off and it will only be off until 3... do you think it's feasible that I will be able to change th kitchen faucet in time before they turn the water back on??"

"Do you have a faucet?"

"YES. Mom, I've had this new faucet sitting here for 3 years now!"

"Oh, well by all means go ahead and try. just make sure to call the plumber in case it doesn't work".

Oh, yeah.... you mean that Coop Board-approved plumber that's been so nice to help me or even return a phone call at all in the last THREE YEARS?????????????????????

Whatever. I just went for it. No back-up plan. No emergency plumber. I didn't even think to keep a bucket nearby, just in case.

Nope. Went for it. 100%.

Much sweat, blood, skin, hair, and especially tears were shed.

I had all-out meltdowns, broke down crying, full-body heaves, was using saws and hammers and kitchen knives, everything you could think of just to remove those nasty old fixtures.

My arms were numb from all the blood draining out of my hands while holding them up under the sink. A wrench in one hand, pliers in the other.

Much debris fell into my tearful eyes.

I almost gave up. Several times.

But I didn't.

Little by little, corroded nuts and bolts began to move, with all of my chicken wing arm strength I pushed and pulled and gripped and hacked.

Miracle of all miracles (or was it just plain adrenaline?) when the water turned back on at 3pm (and, again, I could actually hear it as it turned on, my ear was practically on the pipe while I was struggling with the mummified sprayer contraption from days of yore), all of my waterlines were connected and holding water, no leaks.



The only thing left to remove/connect was that damn sprayer. Damned if I did, damned if I didn't. I was going to have to have the sprayer hooked up UNDER the sink, like a secret sprayer. And a hole in the sink where it should have been????

We can't have THAT.

So for 45 more minutes, I scraped, scrapped, hacked, pinched, gripped, slipped, skinned my fingers, bruised and battered my knuckles, took chunks out of precious hands (but didn't break a nail) inhaled what had to be toxic lead pipe dust, blinked away what had to be splinters from the fiberboard countertop that was eroding as a result of the damaged sprayer nozzle......... All of this, right? And the final frontier became me vs. the sprayer holder that Would. Not. Budge. This thing was sitting in the sprayer nozzle hole of the sink and refusing to move from either end. Looking like an ugly mushroom (and I hate mushrooms),



Cut to me, armed with a hack saw and taking no prisoners. I hacked that !%&%@ in 2. And when it finally dropped - OH, SWEET LIBERTY!!!!!!



I was SHAKING. My hands were literally shaking. I couldn't believe I was finally putting in a BRAND NEW SPRAYER NOZZLE that I'd been trying to replace since the first year that I moved in.......

Drop, flip, and SNAP. The new connector simply SNAPS into place. No more nuts and bolts and locking nuts that never budge and corroded pvc and and lead pipes and effing bullshit. It. Just. SNAPS.

++++

In my experience (now having changed a total of 6 faucets successfully on my own), there is always one piece that makes removing the old fixture seemingly impossible....

In this case, it was the sprayer nozzle receptacle.



But look at how pretty.....





And the best part? No more dripping faucet haunting my dreams.