We’re selling!

Yes, yes, yes! We are selling our house! We are on to our next adventure, so it’s time to say goodbye 😓

But turn that frown upside down, because we are back in it with a new project, which you can follow at Springs Road. That also means you can buy our house lol. So please buy our house. It’s a great house 😄

Here’s a little video I put together as a walk through, so take a peek and here’s the links to Zillow and Realtor! Please note that our listing is technically only a 2 bedroom, but we used the upstairs loft as a bedroom as well, and we consider it a 3, with the possibility of it being 4. The upstairs is so large that it would be perfect for that lake house vacation home with as many bunk beds as you could fit up there! And remember, this property is part of the Hazel Park Association, with a private beach and docks for your summertime toys.

Updated pictures of our place

Carpet installed

The installers came yesterday and put in the carpet upstairs. Damn, it looks fine. Here’s a few before/after shots.

Very happy I went with the cheap stuff from Home Depot.

Getting ready to put together the spare bedroom and office/music room now 🙂

Don’t chute!

Finished the basement portion yesterday. All I have to do now is figure out how the door will work upstairs in the bathroom. And get a rolling cart to catch the clothes.

Back to trimming the upstairs!

Welcoming the ADD

So while the upstairs is getting ready for carpet, the one thing I wanted to try and start was installing the trim. I want to get the ceiling trim up before the install, and wait till after the carpet is in to do the baseboards. So yesterday I thought, “well it’s too cold to cut and rip trim pieces in the garage, and I don’t want to get the upstairs dusty again just after painting…” So I figured I should bring trim in from the garage and take it to the basement. I mean it’s dirty down there already, so what the heck.

Well, the problem is that my home project ADD kicked in pretty hard the first few boards I took downstairs because I couldn’t ignore the hanging ductwork that will eventually be a baller laundry chute just hanging there staring at me. Mocking me.

“Finish me” it said. “You won’t do it” it laughed.

Shut up you stupid laundry chute. Shut. Up.

So 4 hours later, I ran out of nails and was defeated once again.

Until we meet again, sir chute… Well played.

Attic Redesign

Here’s the upstairs attic conversion I put together in Sketchup. I’ll have my office and music room on the one side, and a living space/bedroom on the other.

We hope to eventually create some built-in shelves and cubbies for the bed and might even make it all as one piece. One thing I really want are those wall sconces on each side of the bed. We’ve already got the awesome chair from the 70′s in the florida room, just waiting to have a home.

On the other side of the staircase I’ll have my office/home studio. I can’t wait to finally have a space to work in and write music again. I’ll try to keep it as organized as possible… we’ll see how that goes. I might build shadow boxes for the guitars cause the drywall up there is pretty shoddy. You can see nasty seams even after spending a ton of time trying to even them out. Oh yeah, ordered a massive “fuf” from amazon. It’s basically a big bean bag, but filled with memory foam or something like that. Can’t wait to relax in that beast.

 

Home Depot came the other day to measure for carpet, and we should have it installed in the next few weeks! We decided on Disco: Sandcastle. It’s a cheap in-stock carpet. Hopefully it’ll work out and I can disagree with that one 1 star review… Here’s hoping!

 

Painted, ready for trim

Got another coat of paint on the walls and I’m calling that done, and two more coats on the handrail and window trim.

Just a quick post to let you know I’m still alive.

We are heading to Home Depot at some point this week to take a look at carpet samples. I’d like to get some cheap in-sock stuff. Anyone have opinions on bottom line carpet?

Upstairs update!

Making some great progress upstairs in the last few weeks. We created a deadline for his weekend because we are getting ready for both my bachelor party, and Lydia’s bachelorette party. I’m heading to Tionesta to have a camp weekend and Lydia is having her’s here at the house, so we wanted to get the upstairs at least habitable for the amount of people coming and potentially staying over.

This turned out to be a great motivator, as we’ve been pretty lazy about working on the house for the last few months. OK, really lazy and lots of months.

We’ve actually been in for a year now, and still have things left over from our initial push that are just sitting in limbo. Like the kitchen kick plates, and the sill plate in the bathroom. or the laundry chute. or the bathroom vanity cabinet. you get it, haha

Either way though, I’m really happy because the upstairs is actually ready for this weekend! It took a lot longer than anticipated to do the ceiling in shiplap, but I love the way it turned out. What really took the most time, was whitewashing every board individually before installing it. We did this so that the natural gaps in the wood would show whitewashed wood through instead of the natural yellow of the hemlock. By the way, having access to Amish wood is badass. I feel like I talk about it too much, but it really is awesome. Can’t beat the prices.

Here’s some progress pictures of the space:

Gotta get another coat of paint on, carpet down, and trim up, and I’ll have my office and music studio back!!!!!! Booyah!

 

Work Weekend in Tionesta

My uncle has been building a cabin up in Tionesta, PA (which is near the Allegheny National Forest) …

… near his brothers place, and I’ve been up a few times to help him out during the build. A few weeks ago we went up for the weekend and spent some time digging ditches for electrical and drainage, and some other odds and ends. Here’s a video I put together:

Upstairs update: handrail pt. 1

The awesome weather over the last week or so has put me back in gear with home projects. We started caulking all the trim, put in the garbage disposal, and started the biggest project: getting the upstairs done.

A few things about the upstairs. First off, it was very unsafe. During the demo of the house, I was upstairs at one point and just about fell into the dining room. The floorboards up there were really just tongue and groove flooring set on top the floor joists, so we put another subfloor down over top the existing floor to strengthen everything up.

I also expanded the attic space access area by about two feet so we could either put a chair there or my drumset once the office/studio area is complete.

The biggest update though is the stairway and hand rail. I was able to grab some really awesome old French doors off of craigslist for a cool 40 bucks a while back and had this idea of using them as inserts for the railing. The length turned out to be perfect. I also grabbed some rough cut hemlock from the Amish on the cheap and have been air drying it for this project.

Here’s where I’m at with it right now:

You might have noticed one of the desks I worked on over the winter in the background. Here’s that bad boy:

And here’s the other one I have set up in the dining room as my office until we get this project complete:

They are made of live edge cherry slabs that I sanded and clear coated and the legs are 1″x3″ steel tubing that I welded into trapezoids.

Any finishing ideas for the bare wood sections of handrail?