Babyproofing, part 2

We've made a lot of progress on the baby-proofing front lately, as our little one has moved up to full-fledged mobile toddler. You may remember that last time, we put in a tension-mounted gate to separate the living room from the hallway, magnetic locks in the kitchen, and TV straps. The most important - and hardest - change to implement was the gate at the top of the stairs. Thanks to a recommendation, we went with the KidCo Angle Mount gate. Unlike the gate on our main floor, this one had to be attached to the wall (accidentally dislodging it on a level surface and falling to the ground is a big difference from accidentally dislodging it and plummeting down the stairs). It also couldn't have a threshold that we grown-ups could potentially trip over. This option seemed like the only one that we could use - especially since with the bannister and having to install into studs, we needed the option to install it at an angle (i.e. not perpendicular to the mounting walls).

This was definitely a two-person install so thank goodness grandpa and grandma were there to help watch the baby and assist. D had to be especially careful because one of the studs was also very close to wiring for our hall light. There was a lot of leveling and measuring and tweaking to get the sizing right. The gate width was just slightly too big at one setting and slightly too small at the other, so we had to try both more than once, and keep adjusting the bolt on the lock (4th picture) to see which fit was better.

It works, and after a week of struggling to get the hang of opening and closing it smoothly, I think I've got it (I sneak out in the morning while it's still dark, usually with things in my hands, so it was quite a challenge). It isn't as easy as our main floor gate that has an easy spring and automatically swings shut, but then again, it is a completely different design with a different purpose.

The annoyance for me is that when it is unlatched, it swings back and blocks the door to the nursery.

When it's closed, you can see that we installed it at an angle to get it under the bannister and into the corner stud on the other side. We installed it above the wood trim and made sure before we screwed it in that the cats can pass underneath (but the baby can't). We didn't want them having to jump a gate that was on the steps - they're pretty coordinated but I don't think they could handle that.

Now we can let her play upstairs while we get dressed and straighten up without fearing for her life. And if she should ever manage to figure out how to escape her crib, she can't get far. Huge sigh of relief.

Case of the Dysfunctional Toilet

Our upstairs toilet has had a lot of small problems over the last year and D has done a very good job playing plumber and making it work (he's pretty good as a plumber, too). A few months ago, he fixed the flusher by shortening the chain and he adjusted the fill valve so it took less water to fill the tank.

The latest problem in our toilet battle has been that the tank slowly leaked, so that it would be empty by the time we needed to flush (this was compounded by the fact that we don't use this bathroom very often).  So to be thorough, we went to Home Depot and bought a complete rebuild kit (which would require removing the screws to the tank and other scary things) and a smaller kit to replace just the flapper valve. We decided to try that first.

We* drained what little water remained in the tank and took out the valve (both the red plastic flapper and the actually gooey valve seal):

The seal was pretty misshapen, which made us hope that we had found the reason for the leaking water:

D peeled one side of the paper and got ready to squish the new seal into place:

 Then he put the rest of the flapper valve together and reattached the chain:

 We turned on the water, flush, and let the tank fill. Then waited and hoped that the water stayed in the tank (incidentally, the inside of our tank is gross and rust-colored...any ideas on how we should fix that, or if we should bother?):

Then, get this, it worked! For about two days. And then the water started leaking again. D decided that he might not have squished the seal into place squarely over the tube. Fortunately, Home Depot sells just the gray little seal without the rest of the kit. So we took everything apart again and D put in another seal. He felt more confident that he had lined up the edges of the tube with the seal.

And it worked. Temporarily. Again. For a few days, the water stayed in the tank where it belonged. Then, mysteriously, it started leaking out maybe 50% of the time (independent of how long the toilet sat between flushes--sometimes half a day, sometimes several days). And THEN, it started working consistently again. We have no idea what is going on with our mystery toilet. D thinks that maybe the valve seal is settling into place (it is gooey and malleable after all) and that explained the toilet's changing status.

It would appear that now, after about 6 weeks, we've got a consistently working toilet. But I don't trust it one bit and I know it is biding its time to start malfunctioning again (probably at a maximally-disruptive time, like during the holidays when we will have a lot of house guests). At least we have the rebuild kit in our garage, in case we need it. (By which time, I'm sure we will have lost it.)

*By "we," I mean D. I was there to give moral support, pass tools, and take pictures.

yet more house tour: the upstairs

The second floor--well, technically the 1.5 floor according to our paperwork--has our most dramatic change (the master bedroom) and also our biggest future remodeling projects (spare bedroom and bathroom). For obvious reasons, i.e. embarrassment, the two unfinished rooms haven't featured very prominently yet on the blog. But here they are in our "tell-all" house tour.  First, the pretty stuff.

Here's the hallway, before. It's painted a pale yellow with white trim:

Lightening up the hallway from yellow to white and putting in a new ceiling lamp really brightened the space. The gray lower half helped connect the upper and lower floors. We also changed out the hardware on the handrail and all our doorknobs so they were all brushed nickel.

The only thing left to do? Hang more pictures! The hallway still feels very sterile, in all white with mostly empty walls.

Now my favorite room, the master bedroom. Here is the before picture, with little-boy-blue walls and yellowy-white alcoves.

And the same angle, after.

Here's the room again, from the inside, looking out into the hallway:

And here it is, when we got done with it. I just refinished that trunk and will hopefully feature it in a separate post soon.

So what needs doing? Well it looks pretty polished, but there's a surprisingly long list:

• Refinish the legs on the upholstered chair (in progress--I was planning to paint them white but it turns out there is light-colored wood under the red stain)
• Cut wood, paint, sand, and install the under-window shelf
• Install a shelf or buy a table that will fit under the other window, to hold the fan (and the cat, when the fan isn't needed)
• Solve my nightstand dilemma (I want something more substantial but the drawer under the bed makes it hard)
• Hang pictures (this is a common theme...)
• Hang hooks for our bathrobes on the wall (they're going to go on the wall with the shower plumbing, so we're a little nervous about it) and a hook in the closet
• Find a throw blanket that actually matches the room (that purple one is a place-holder to keep the cat's claws off our chair)

Next up, the upstairs bathroom. This is the "before" picture and there is no after. We've been having some fun with the toilet lately (also a a separate upcoming post) but otherwise are ignoring this room for a while longer while we do little things around the house. At least we finally put up curtains and a shower curtain. Even installed a nice new low-flow shower head. We do have to use the room occasionally when guests stay over.

The plan is to install a new sink unit and medicine cabinet and paint. With tiles that are off-white, beige, and pink, we don't know what kind of wall color to go with. We'd like something bold but might have to settle on something boring and neutral. Please give us your suggestions.

 

Finally the 4th bedroom. Right now it's a holding area for our unwanted furniture. And also a refinishing area for the chair, which was too big to easily get downstairs. So it's not usually this bad--the drop clothes are temporary.

This is the last room on the priority list for now. It's nice to have a junk room while we get the other rooms in order.

Thus ends the house tour! I might show off the garage later but that doesn't really count as "house" anyway. I hope you've enjoyed the tour as much as I have! It's nice to see how much we accomplished in just a year. I'll be updating these tour posts as I finish some of the to-do lists, so you can check back in and see if I'm making progress.

And while I've been indulging in September's flashback posts, we've been busy around the house and the yard. So October will be blogging catch-up month, where I get to show you all the things we've been doing now that the temperature has cooled off a bit.

The Hallway!

It's about time to post pictures of our finished hallway. Today we finally touched up a few spots and screwed on an air conditioner intake vent but other than that, it's been done for a while.

You may remember that it started out entirely yellow, with cheapo light fixtures and separating drywall. Here's a picture of the corner between the bathroom and master bedroom. You can see the dark lines where the walls are separating.

So we spent one whole evening plastering up the drywall where we could reach it and another evening sanding and wiping the dust. We learned that you are supposed to prime over plaster to make the surface look the same as the wall, so even though we didn't prime everywhere, we did put it on over the edges we fixed. Here's the wall going down the stairs. You can (sort of) see the white along the edges.

We removed the fixtures to be able to paint the edges. We were planning to replace this directional light that shines down the stairs, but it looked complicated and is not in a standard electrical box, so we put it back when we finished. We did replace the little gold bubble light behind it though.

Because we were painting edges high up on the stairwell ceiling that we couldn't reach, we bought a wide variety of tools from Home Depot. We learned, after searching a few stores, that corner edging rollers are made from super cheap foam and padding and that high quality ones simply are not available. Surprisingly though, they did a better job than we expected.

 

You can see the gray we painted on the lower half of the hallway, as well as the Ikea coat hangers I mentioned here and the matching brushed nickel switch plates.

We ended up replacing all of the hardware that held on our handrail, since the old ones were in a dingy rusted brass and we went with nickel for everything else. We also added two more, so that the handrail is more secure.

And even though the color is all strange and you can't really tell that it's white, here's the upstairs view. You can see the new light, new thermostat, and (if you squint a little) our new door knobs. In keeping with my apparent obsession with replacing random brass-colored hardware with nickel, we replaced all our door knobs too (which ended up being quite a project, since the new ones didn't fit neatly into the holes left by the old ones).

We managed to hang a few pictures but haven't yet figured out what's going upstairs. We know we want to hang a lot though, because white really isn't our thing and it looks pretty sterile right now. Hopefully lots of colorful paintings and photographs will solve that problem.

Today we also tried to fill in our sparse lawn with more grass seed and spent the afternoon aerating and seeding. I have some before pictures but I'll wait to post them until I have (I hope!) some nice "after" ones too. We also set an ambitious plan for painting the master bedroom and should be done with that by next weekend.

Time for Round Two!

The holiday's are over and D is days away from finishing his thesis, so home improvement is back on the to-do list. This spring, we turn our attention to the upstairs. Now, those of you who have seen our home have noted that readers who have not had the pleasure may not even realize we have an upstairs to begin with. That was at least partially deliberate (very astute readers might have wondered about the extra bedroom I mentioned in this post). You see, we don't like to acknowledge that we have so much space. And since we have a Cape Cod-style house with a door to the stairs, we like to keep it closed and pretend it's a coat closet. But the time has come to recognize that behind the door are two more bedrooms and a full bath.

So we are going to finally begin work on the upstairs, specifically on the hallway and the future master bedroom. We're limited because we don't want to do any major painting until the windows are installed (probably early March) but there are small projects to keep us busy until then.

Here are some pictures and plans for what's going to keep us busy for the next month or two:

First, the hallway. The door on the left leads to the living room (here's an old picture for orientation of where the door is from the living room side)

You can see that thanks to some woodwork trim, there's a neat upper edge that divides the lower level from the upper level, which is very convenient when it comes to painting--they can be different colors and be painted at different times (which is good considering the upper half is going to take lots of fancy ladder configurations to get the ceiling and walls above the stairs). This month we're focusing on the lower half.

We're painting it Knitting Needle, the same color as the living room and painting all the trim white (it's all that pale yellow the previous owners seemed to love). We're also hanging new hooks from that band of wood above the light switches. We removed some pretty ugly ones but want to continue to use it for storage. We bought

3 sets of 3 Bjarnum hooks from Ikea that we think will look nice either in use or closed. Here they are in both positions:

Project two is the walk-in closet (not original to the house, obviously, since they didn't own so much junk in the 1950s):

Since the structure is all Closet Maid, I can make a lot of changes without having to totally start over. I'm planning to move the wire shelf down, since I am not 6'5'' like the previous people apparently were, and I might swap out the inefficient shoe cubby with something that will hold more. You can see the air-conditioning duct (the silver thing) that runs through the closet, so I can't mess with that much. Also since the closet is so big, I want to paint it. I'm leaning towards a silvery blue and hoping to find one of those really cheap cans of paint at Home Depot that was mixed and then returned. It's a closet, so I'm not that picky. Now's the time, since once it's full of clothes it will be impossible to empty out.

And finally the bedroom. You can see from the color that it was a little boy's room before. Though we're not going to do anything until the windows are installed, we're planning ahead and trying to decide how we want to decorate.

It may not be clear from the pictures but we have two dormer windows that bring a lot of light into the room. Each window also has a tiny shelf ( a little too narrow to sit on) and also "attic" doors on each side for storage. We like that the sloping ceilings end fairly high up, so the room is open and airy instead of claustrophobic, like a few Cape Cods we've seen.

Right now, we're planning to paint the walls a pale sage green and use blues and grays as the accent colors. We want our furniture to be shades of black and white stain and paint (D is a proponent of mismatched, eclective furniture though I tend to prefer buying in sets). We want a lot of storage and so have been looking everywhere for various storage beds (alternatively known as captain's beds). We've found a few good solutions by Pottery Barn, Gothic Cabinet Craft, and Blu Dot but Ikea beat them all out in price and customizability (that's not a word, but you know what I mean).The Ikea Mandal is really cheap and we can paint it whatever color we want. We bought one this weekend and I'm considering if it would be possible to stack two of them, for added storage space and height. Structurally, it does not seem impossible, though I can't find evidence of anyone else doing it...

The headboard (sold separately) is pretty cool and we might decide to buy it and install it somewhere else, but it doesn't quite do it for me as a headboard.

Other ideas for the bedroom: painting the ceiling a soft gray instead of bright white; installing a ceiling fan; installing wall lamps on each side of the bed; finding a headboard we like; turning one of the dormer cubbies into a little vanity area for me; finding plush, gorgeous rugs; finding the perfect floating nightstands that have a drawer (Most are just shelves. The drawers on the bed necessitate having a nightstand attached to the wall, so it doesn't block the drawers from opening).

And that's what's going on with us. As always, suggestions are always welcome. We really have no idea what we're doing, we just pretend like we do.