We’re back in Arizona, having left a whole slew of unfinished to-do items at the house. But we did accomplish a thing or two that make us proud enough to warrant some before/afters:

One of my favorite things about the finished product is how many of the furnishings were given to us by family (THANK YOU!!). We barely had to buy a thing, and many of the pieces are sentimental as well as unique. My Godmother Kris gave us my grandmother’s old glider rocker and coffee table (seen in the first photo), my Aunt Nancy gave us a old iron sewing machine base that we’re using as a desk in the reading room and a sweet wicker hanging chair (my cousin Chris had the coolest bedroom back in the day) which Andrew is going to hang in his own special corner of the attic bedroom (in-process photos forthcoming), and my sister gave us a lamp and a few pieces of furniture as well.

My parents have managed to hold onto tons of amazing furniture and artwork during all their various moves, for which I’m eternally grateful. Pieces from them include six framed prints, two lamps, a set of amazing blue dishes, a complete bedroom set, a huge old upholstered chair, and my Grandma Marion’s (other) dining set (we have one here in Tucson), which you can see in the last photo of the dining area. I love the sturdy build of it paired with the sweet little painted flowers. I think it makes the default oak cabinets feel like they belong. And though baby blue is not my favorite color in the world, I went with an “if you can’t beat it, join it” approach to the countertop to see if I couldn’t get it to blend in to the room (as opposed to stick out like a sore thumb against macaroni and cheese yellow as seen in the before shot!). The color, in case you are as addicted to paint colors as I am, is Ozone by Behr. A few other kitchen details: the pendant light you see was $8 from the Habitat ReStore. We got a matching chandelier (identical but larger) for the dining area, also for $8. And when we go back, we’ll hit the ReStore for some replacement cabinet doors for those two open cabinets. That place is amazing if you are trying to save money and don’t have too rigid an idea of what you are looking for.

Soon we’ll post a more extensive slideshow of photos, so please check back!

‘Round these parts, where the mozzies are fierce, we’re painting to prepare for family day. Here’s Bonnie Jean looking forward to a bright future… in CRAZYTOWN!

Will you be in Madison tomorrow today between 3PM and 6PM? Give us an RSVP if you’d like to stop by as we say ‘hi’ and ‘THANK YOU!’ to family and friends with cookout at the house before heading back to Arizona.

As we inherited this crazy bathroom, the back wall of the shower was completely ungrouted, the left wall was sloppily grouted in blue and unsealed, and the right wall was partially and randomly grouted in 2 different colors of grout, also unsealed. The right wall is where I’d been removing the grout with the oscillating tool, getting covered in blue dust and often nicking the tiles in the process.

Well last night I decided to just dive in and try grouting for myself.

The result is the back wall, grouted in tan:

I’m pretty pleased with my efforts.

But the more time we spent working on and thinking about how to improve this tile, the more we realized the installation is pretty bad all around. So we’re onto plan B—or is it C? D?—which is painting over the whole thing with an epoxy-based product that will seal the whole thing and—bonus!—not require sanding the tile face.

And I think we can get that done before we leave in a few days.

More photos to come.

Feat. DJ Drew on the miter saw.

Just picked up a bookcase from Craigslist. Mom & Dad’s Envoy is definitely going to come in handy over the next few days. I even managed to parallel park it on Franklin Street.

Look who has already tested it out:

While Andrew spent the morning hard at work making the upstairs bedroom ready for the carpet installation, I drove to Pewaukee to feed Milo and Chloe (Milo is ours, Chloe is Mom’s) and pick up a monstrous antique chair that I still cannot believe I maneuvered up the basement stairs and into the car by myself.

The chair is for the reading room, which is by far the most finished-feeling room now. I did a bit of work sitting in the comfy chair with a cup of tea next to me on a table (not the floor, or a stepladder, or an overturned bucket).

So I’ve been holding out on posting until we have something really satisfying to show, but Maddy said it is time for a post. And I can’t say no to Maddy. So here’s a bit of this and that from the last week or so.

The last few days have been dusty, dirty, fume-y grunt work. I’ve been grinding the blue grout out from the tub surround using a specialized attachment on our oscillating tool. Same tool we used to score the vinyl and plywood flooring in the kitchen, different attachment.

I tackle this job for two hours at a time, and end up covered in this blue dust. I wear a respirator, safety glasses, a handkerchief covering every inch of my hair, wrist guards for support, and thick suede work gloves.

Here’s the blue grout in full effect:

And I hear you thinking, “is she going to tell us about that fish tile?”

Yes. The fish tile. We hate it even more than you do! We’re looking into methods to paint over tile. There isn’t a ton of the fishes, so it shouldn’t take too long, but it is a several step process: sanding the tile face, painting it with an oil-based paint, sealing with a urethane finish. Here’s the best source I’ve found so far: How to: DIY Paint Ceramic Tile | Apartment Therapy.

As for the grout, we are going to re-grout with tan, in case white won’t fully cover up the blue that’s leftover here and there, as it is impossible to get it all out without damaging the tiles (due to the sloppy application of said blue grout).

And Andrew’s recent dirty work has been patching and sanding the drywall. Drywall dust is a favorite around here. It’s fun to breathe, fun to wipe and re-wipe off of every single surface… Anyway sheetrock muddin’ doesn’t really make for fun photos. So here are some bits he has had to patch in the flooring in the kitchen:

He uses a two-part epoxy from JB Weld that can be sanded and stained. It rivals the floor stripper in the fumes department.

We’ve also made a trip—and plan to make another—to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store. That place is amazing. We got four light fixtures, a chest of drawers, a small table, two doorknobs, and a great mid-century lamp for under $100.

Here’s the chest of drawers with my Grandma Marion’s lamp on top:

Even having that one little corner feel close to a real home makes a difference.

Andrew has also been demolishing the useless parts of the staircase surroundings that like to attack tall people’s heads. The ceiling was so low in service of this really weird closet in the attic bedroom:

We forgot to photograph it when it was fully intact, but it was what you see just with more paneling as a back wall.

Here it is from the other side:

And now with the closet gone:

Good ol’ Stanley FuBar is in the shot.

The plan for this area is to put in a balustrade. Habit Re-Store has entire bundles of those materials for around $20.

And lastly, though the colors never translate well in photos, I’ll share a picture from all the painting I’ve been doing:

That is the front room looking into the living room. The front room is going to be an office/reading room. The color is Manuscript by Behr. The color in the living room is Mojito by Behr. That stripe of Kelly green you see is going going gone. Where the previous owner painted dark, we are painting light, and where it was white, we are painting dark. So double coats are required, even with Behr paint and primer in one.

Home Depot is coming on Friday to install carpet in the attic bedroom, and we’ll be be bringing some furniture back from my parents’ house tomorrow. So photos of all that, soon. I can’t wait to sleep in a real bed in a carpeted room. Not that an air mattress on drop cloths over a plywood floor isn’t luxurious in it’s own special way. But a bed that can’t be popped by cat claws and therefore doesn’t need to be disassembled every night might be a bit of a time saver. Meanwhile, this guy has to be locked in the bathroom every night. See that accusatory stare?

Because by the time we clean up all our tools and find something to eat and inflate our air mattress, I’m too tired!

But I want to take a second to show these off:

There are hardwood floors under the horrid linoleum floors in the kitchen, too! So we’re tearing out the peel’n’stick tile plus plywood flooring on top. The plywood, thankfully, is only nailed down. So it’s a matter of brute force, not weird chemicals. Recommended tools: a handheld oscillating tool with saw blade to score sections of the bad flooring; a pry bar and mallet to loosen edges and nails; a Stanley Fubar to pull out large sections; brute force, and yelling.

This section of the floors have the same varnish the front reading room had, which gave us just as much trouble to remove as the carpet adhesive. So we’re just going to sand the roughest sections with handheld random orbital sanders and paint them. We’re going to paint them dark brown, with the idea that we’ll eventually strip and oil these, too, and dark brown paint in the grooves will be easier to deal with than any other color. Hopefully that will look decent and somewhat in keeping with the original character of the house. And there won’t be a learning curve as there would have been had we installed another kind of laminate or linoleum, as we’ve never laid our own flooring before.

And one more thing:

Here’s our cat Milo trying to make nice with my mom’s cat, Chloe. Milo is staying with my parents, while the tougher cat, Paisley, is staying with us here. As is Coriander, who really digs laying in the grass and taking walks along the bike path.

Our first days on this remodel have been almost entirely taken up with refinishing the abused and neglected hardwood floors. (That and shopping for supplies. Already too many trips to hardware stores to recall.)

Here is how they started. Bad Floors!

Basically they were covered in a thick layer of carpet glue.

Wanting to find a non-toxic, non-miserable method, we first tried this tile steamer technique:

And it was too slow-going. This little area took more than 10 minutes, and the little brush on the end of the steamer wand was shot.

So we tried a non-toxic citrus solvent:

But we didn’t have any luck with that, either, despite trying to let it sit for an hour as some sources advise.

So we got some conventional floor stripper and some really thick gloves.

Ew check out that sludge:

Andrew devised a system of using kitty litter on the sludge to make it easier to scoop up and dispose of and also to keep it from re-adhering to the floor as it dried.

The stripper + mineral spirits + kitty littler system seemed to be working really well when we compared the stripped area to the non-stripped area:

Yet a day-and-a-half of soaking and scraping sludge proved insufficient. We rented a heavy-duty floor sander to see if the remaining smattering of adhesive could be tackled by high-grit sanding pads, but no dice. So we went over the whole thing a second time. And I can’t quite overstate how gross it was working with the chemicals. If they splattered our skin it burned, and despite wearing masks our mouths started to go numb.

But after the second striping, the sander worked without problems:

And then we were finally ready for Tung Oil, which both stains and seals wood. It’s completely natural, and smells like hazelnuts—a welcome change.

It requires 5-7 coats on the first day, with 40 minutes between coats for curing. I suppose there are many ways to pass those forty minute stretches (cleaning, organizing tools, blogging, fixing leaks, making to-do lists), but we especially recommend Chinese food and Game of Thrones:

We made it to Madison, Wisconsin safe and sound and have been sleeping on an air mattress in the semi-finished attic bedroom of our new house for two nights. But here’s the story of how we got here, highlights and hiccups included.

Here’s how we left our dining room window in Tucson, after attempting to fix it before Monsoon season hit and running out of time:

That project set is back a day. Rather than leaving Sunday, June 23rd, we left Monday the 24th. Here’s us in front of our house, all packed up and ready to go:

Here’s our cargo bins melting from the exhaust, luckily noticed at a truck stop in Bowie, Arizona:

The Ace we backtracked 30 minutes to get to:

Andrew hard at work attaching our makeshift exhaust extension:

To build this yourself, you will need:

• Flexible alluminum tubing (such as that used to vent your dryer)
• Metal hose clamp
• Wire
• Heat-resistant tape

And Voilà!

Time to hit the road, looking like proud hillbillies:

We took a very rural route, avoiding Oklahoma altogether. One of the most memorable stops was Las Vegas, New Mexico where we got cappuccinos from a mother and daughter run coffee shop and took a moment to photograph the town square:

And then we were off again!

One of the last towns in New Mexico we passed through was Springer. We didn’t see a single person, and pretty much the only sound we could hear was one dog barking, perhaps because we were walking Coriander around. The textures in this town amazed me, as did the massive size of some of the streets.

This old stone livery stable floored me, too. It was currently being used only for storage, it seemed, as it was filled floor to ceiling with stuff: furniture, tools, etc.

We sort of loved rural Kansas. We drove through lots of little towns that at first glance were identical. The highway speed limit would slow from 65 mph to 45 mph, there would be some very tall silos on the north side of the street labeled as per each town’s grain co-op, and on the right we’d pass Main Street and often a public place like a swimming pool. At one point in rural Kansas we passed a family who’d pulled off to retrieve their baby goat who’d gotten loose. Dad chased after the goat while Mom stood holding the little boy’s hand, baby sporting nothing but a diaper and cowboy boots.

And about halfway through Kansas, we were pretty out of sorts and in need of tons of hugs. Luckily, Kansas provides:

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is actually pronounced something like hyoo-go-ton. But even if you know this to be the case, please don’t burst my bubble about Hug-o-Ton.

Also memorable was Dubuque, which I never realized had so much personality. Imagine Milwaukee or Pittsburgh shrunk way down and placed along the Mississippi. We didn’t stop there, so it was hard to capture it. But here’s a cool bridge on the way out:

So this put us into Wisconsin right in the Southwest corner of the state. It was very rural all the way until Madison. There was so much green around us we barely knew what to do. We cruised through Madison and stumbled out of the car at my parents’ house in Pewaukee. My mom was a sport about us showing up close to midnight. She practically met me at the door with a glass of Wollersheim Blushing Rose.

And one of these for Andrew:

We’re on day four of the house remodel. More on that in the next post featuring plenty of photos. Meanwhile I’ll leave you with a photo of our lunch fare as it has looked pretty much every day since we got here, save for the times my best friend Jackie has picked me up and treated me to other local deliciousness like The Weary Traveler and La Brioche True Food.