I meant to start this thread a few months ago but as life would have it, I've been th busy doing the work and too scatterbrained to download photos from my phone to document it. But finally I wrangled my phone into submission and so here goes...
We bought this house in the spring. It's a 1925 Craftsman style house in a nice neighborhood in Washington DC. It's one of those houses that is much bigger than it looks. The first and second floor are 2100 sq. feet, and there is a full unfinished basement as well as an attic that would easily make a good sized office were it finished. But we're downsizing so no plans to do that.
The first order of business was to clean up the basement. It was like something out of Silence of the Lambs when we bought the house as the previous owner, an elderly gentleman who had lived there for over 50 years, had clearly never cleaned it once. After much wetvacing, sweeping, mopping, and general clean up I got to this point:
Not too shabby, but since the laundry is down there and there are three rooms off of this main room, it needed to be a little brighter. So I trotted off to HD, rented a spayer and bought a five gallon can of Zinsser 1-2-3 primer and proceeded to spray the ceiling. Pretty uneventful except for almost passing out from the fumes despite a quality respirator and a couple of big fans. With that out of the way I thought I should give the walls a good coat of Drylok. There are no moisture problems to speak of but it always seemed to me if you're going to paint a basement wall you better use something like Drylok because if you don't and you're wrong, it's a mess. But then I read that one should NOT waterproof terra cotta foundation block because it traps moisture in the material and can cause it to deteriorate. So much for that plan. I'll come back to it later and investigate coatings that are breathable, if such an animal exists.
So the next month or two was occupied with putting on a new roof and putting up a fence around the property to keep in our dogs. And lo and behold, we found out that the previous owner had quite a green thumb. Went from this sight in March with no fence:
To this in June:
My brother and law and I were going to tackle the fence but when I did the math on doing it myself vs. hiring a local fence company, it made sense to have someone else do it. My material cost was over 2/3 their bid so I moved on to the big issue. The kitchen:
Do not be deceived by the high quality picture (from the online tour when the house was for sale). The cabinets date from the 70's and have been resurfaced with speckle paint. The bottoms of some of the draws were sagging and literally worn through. The base cabinets had no bottom shelves...the floor was the bottom shelf. The formica counter was so worn, nicked, and stained that even after half a can of Comet it still looked dirty. By the way white formica is just a plain bad idea in a kitchen. You can see ever last crumb. What were they thinking?
Well the kitchen is small, and oddly enough the largest room in the house is the dining room. It's enormous for a house this size:
We spend 80% of our time in the kitchen and family room so...the plan was hatched to take the kitchen, an ajoining breakfast room, and the dining room and turn it into one big L-shaped open space.
The details of that journey will begin with my next post. But here is a little teaser:
We bought this house in the spring. It's a 1925 Craftsman style house in a nice neighborhood in Washington DC. It's one of those houses that is much bigger than it looks. The first and second floor are 2100 sq. feet, and there is a full unfinished basement as well as an attic that would easily make a good sized office were it finished. But we're downsizing so no plans to do that.
The first order of business was to clean up the basement. It was like something out of Silence of the Lambs when we bought the house as the previous owner, an elderly gentleman who had lived there for over 50 years, had clearly never cleaned it once. After much wetvacing, sweeping, mopping, and general clean up I got to this point:
Not too shabby, but since the laundry is down there and there are three rooms off of this main room, it needed to be a little brighter. So I trotted off to HD, rented a spayer and bought a five gallon can of Zinsser 1-2-3 primer and proceeded to spray the ceiling. Pretty uneventful except for almost passing out from the fumes despite a quality respirator and a couple of big fans. With that out of the way I thought I should give the walls a good coat of Drylok. There are no moisture problems to speak of but it always seemed to me if you're going to paint a basement wall you better use something like Drylok because if you don't and you're wrong, it's a mess. But then I read that one should NOT waterproof terra cotta foundation block because it traps moisture in the material and can cause it to deteriorate. So much for that plan. I'll come back to it later and investigate coatings that are breathable, if such an animal exists.
So the next month or two was occupied with putting on a new roof and putting up a fence around the property to keep in our dogs. And lo and behold, we found out that the previous owner had quite a green thumb. Went from this sight in March with no fence:
To this in June:
My brother and law and I were going to tackle the fence but when I did the math on doing it myself vs. hiring a local fence company, it made sense to have someone else do it. My material cost was over 2/3 their bid so I moved on to the big issue. The kitchen:
Do not be deceived by the high quality picture (from the online tour when the house was for sale). The cabinets date from the 70's and have been resurfaced with speckle paint. The bottoms of some of the draws were sagging and literally worn through. The base cabinets had no bottom shelves...the floor was the bottom shelf. The formica counter was so worn, nicked, and stained that even after half a can of Comet it still looked dirty. By the way white formica is just a plain bad idea in a kitchen. You can see ever last crumb. What were they thinking?
Well the kitchen is small, and oddly enough the largest room in the house is the dining room. It's enormous for a house this size:
We spend 80% of our time in the kitchen and family room so...the plan was hatched to take the kitchen, an ajoining breakfast room, and the dining room and turn it into one big L-shaped open space.
The details of that journey will begin with my next post. But here is a little teaser: