painting the fourth floor

painting has come to represent the near-end of any given project. notice the smiles. everybody is happy to be at this point. and the apartment is really starting to feel good, and come together.

this is the new wall, with one of the two french doors hung. you can't see it very well, but on the left side of the picture you can make out a

frosted window we hung, to let a little more light in from the bedroom window to the rest of the apartment.

fireplace discovery and cool light.

so, while replacing/tearing out the old baseboard, i accidentally broke the cover that someone had fashioned before we came along. after some on the spot deciding, the fisher's decided to go ahead an uncover it. it's pretty neat, and has potential to become a nice feature with a little tlc.

and here's the new dining light the fisher's installed above their table.

4th floor mayhem

we just came through a big push on the fourth floor. here's some pics that capture the general feeling of those weeks. most of the fisher's apartment was piled in their kitchen area so we could refinish some parts of the floor that hadn't been done earlier.

cindy caught drinking paint.

it's the ones you least expect.

installing the fourth floor kitchen floor

not really pics of the process, but more of the finished floor. it really came out nice, and looks like it's been there for years. fits right in.

work wound

thabo used his eye to pry some nails out of an old board. this is what happened.

first blue crabs cooked in our apartment

in some ways, this is what it's all about. blue crabs from brooklyn chinatown, cooked up by our friend jonny. you may remember him from earlier posts where he was caught painting our front door a controversial color.

tearing out the fourth floor bedroom wall

i've decided not to comment on the ridiculous amount of time that's passed since i last posted to this blog, in the hopes that it's gone unnoticed. here's some pics of the 3rd floor bedroom wall coming down. we took it out after we took the closet out, to make room for a new wall. the new wall will (does) allow for a larger bedroom and french doors. dust, dust, dust. yes, that's the fisher's bed under the plastic sheet.

tearing out the closet

fourth floor closet being torn out. we did this in one night, and it really felt like the four of us were a well-oiled machine. we quickly took down the plaster and lathe, cut the studs out, bundled and bagged everything, and started a fire line down the stairs to get rid of the trash. i don't know if it's getting easier, but we certainly know our way around demolition in this house at this point...

preparing to tear some stuff up on the fourth floor

thabo and melissa are jumping into final renovations on their apartment, and here we are covering their stuff up and preparing to demo a closet and wall. the bottom pic shows the closet on the right side of the picture. it will soon no longer exist.

crown moulding

putting some of that crown moulding up (with the help of my dad's borrowed nail gun). i look happy in the bottom pic, but i'm pretty sure that's delerium from making so many wrong angled cuts...

trim in the third floor apartment

here's what the apartment looks like without crown moulding, but with pretty much everything else finished.

3rd floor trim and shelf

putting up crown moulding in the third floor apartment. it's amazing what touch-up paint and caulk can do at this stage; they can really make things look finished. in the pic is a shelf we hung in the kitchen, too.

some thoughts on the project.

no pics this time, just a quick post to say that life is moving forward at ourbrooklynhome. we're in kind of a transition phase, i think. we're all still settling in/getting used to having our own apartments, and cindy and i are setting up house for the first time ever by ourselves (this place was our second communal home since being married). the third floor apartment is 99% complete, and i will post pictures of it soon to prove it. it feels very nice, we love it. this weekend we ordered take out and watched a movie in our living room...it felt so normal and special and celebratory to be doing something like that in our own clean space!

spending the last month or so working on our own apartment has been an interesting experience. i feel really lucky that we got to design our own space, and pick out furniture and fixtures, etc., that we picked because we like them, they represent some expression of our personalities. at the same time, i've felt sort of overloaded by spending time and attention on material things; especially when outfitting the apartment with chairs, curtains, etc. i realized i've never spent this much time or energy on thinking about my shelter/housing before, at least not all at once the way we have over the past few months. i think a lot of this has to do with feeling shell-shocked from multiple trips to ikea. those of you who have been there, you know the exhaustion that no amount of cheap swedish meatballs can assuage. still, thumbs up for ikea.

we're gearing up for some demo work on the fourth floor in august. more on that as it develops. i'm recommitting to posting more frequently too.

new countertop

we installed butcher-block counter top in the third floor. we likey.

4th floor tub

before i forget; we rented the duplex out! june 15th came and we successfully have renters in place. another reason why we've relaxed a bit.

but, not before we tackled the 4th floor tub. as you can see in the pics, the tub was in REALLY BAD CONDITION. yes, this was the tub our previous renters used. no, they never complained. and if anyone has been following this blog for a looong time, this is the same tub we tried to re-porceanalize. it didn't work at all. frankly, it was a bloody mess. so, we took it out and replaced it. of course, once we took the tub out, we found some gross pipes full of hair and gook, and a couple or disentegrated pipes.

no pics, here, but we did successfully install a new tub and retiled the area around the tub.

the fence

here's some pics of the fence thabo and his grandpa built, that effectively gives our new tenants a bit of private backyard space. it was a bit of a quick fix, but it does the job and didn't involve any plastic fencing.

a lull. catch up time...

so, this poor blog has been neglected for ages! no excuse, except to say that life in this house is constantly changing, and the past month or so has been one of change. as the pressure has decreased to get projects finished, other parts of our lives have pressed in, and on top of that, i think we've all just needed a minute to NOT think about house projects.

these pics are a bit dated now, but continue the progression. third floor apartment kitchen being installed, with paint done and cabinets being put in.

our friend greg stopped by to say hello from texas, and we promptly put him to work helping to move cabinets around. thanks, greg!

kitchen.

some pics of the third floor kitchen in various stages of completion. last night beth and cindy painted two walls of it an orange (terra-cotta?) color, to give the apartment a little separation and add some color. they also painted new drywall and old walls white in the rest of the apartment.

currently working on setting cabinets and installing butcher block counter tops.

and this weekend, we move stuff. lots of stuff.

kitchen cabinets.

we're supplementing the cabinets that were in the third floor apartment with a few more, to make an L shaped counter top that we can sit at. this is us, screwing an ikea shelf back together after taking it apart and cutting four inches off of it to make it fit under the counter top.

beth and cindy put all of the new stuff together (bottom two pics).

chimney

here's the chimney project in the third floor apartment. we took the plaster off and repointed the brick. this is jake and annie carefully filling the cracks with dyed mortar. and me, fixing a hole that was a stove pipe and mortaring too.

props go out to austin; no pics of him, but he painted a bunch of trim and helped us carry heavy ikea stuff in from the car.

the fireplace area of the chimney has to rebuilt, you can see in the pics. i'm hoping to build an arched opening, but have to put that off until i have time to focus on it. too much other stuff to do at the moment.

chelsea and sylvia

memorial day weekend, a bunch of friends stopped over and helped us work. i only have pics of two of them, chelsea and sylvia. anthony, and leigh anna did a bunch of work too.

i've said it before, but i'll say it again: this house project has really made all of us feel grateful and amazed at the outpouring of support and friendship from our community. it makes this place feel like so much more than just a house.

beth!

she's here all week, ladies and gentlemen!

beth is one of a kind, and she's spending a week with us, helping us work on the place. we heart her. she's helped out so much on our house that we will be forever in her debt. no amount of indigo girls and Rent viewings can ever really pay back all of her hard work...

3rd floor floor

here's some pics showing part of the process of refinishing the floor in the third floor apartment. i will remember this project as the one that almost broke me; i WAY underestimated how much work this floor needed. it was in pretty bad shape and needed a lot of boards replaced and a million small nails pulled. we worked a long time on this floor before we were able to stain and polyurethane it. now, it's looking really nice. we immediately covered it with paper and started working on other projects, so no pics of the finished product yet.

duplex 99% done and ready to rent.

some pics that we posted on craigslist of the duplex apartment. it's looking really good, and we're hoping to have a renter soon to make it their home. this weekend, we move out of this space and into our own apartments!