pocket door

one of the things we decided to do to help save space, was to install a pocket door in the bathroom. here's some pics of it partially completed. turned out to have some serious issues because our house sagged a bit in the last hundred years, and the walls/floors/ceilings aren't plumb. in some places they REALLY aren't plumb. which made for some creative construction techniques. in the end, it looks like it's going to work out great. we stained the door too; i'll post some pictures of the finished product eventually.

grout on...

cindy and melissa grouting away. while they were working on this, i overheard a conversation between them that started with, "which do you like better, lowes or home depot?"

bathroom floor

last weekend we pushed through on sunday evening and got the bathroom floor tiled too. that felt good, since we realized that we need to up the progress if we're planning on trying to stick to our timeline. we used larger size tiles for the floor. had some issues lining things up, but eventually it came together pretty well.

melissa grouting away...

more tilin'

here's the kitchen countertop, with the backsplash tile on (we used the nails for temporary spacers). this is kind of a unique counter/kitchen; since it's a pretty tight, galley style kitchen, we used shallow cabinets in front of the chimney (where the exposed brick is), and normal depth cabinets by the stove and sink. thanks to my mom and dad, we found a smaller size used sink for $15 at the habitat store in lancaster, pa. that goes in the hole you see in the pic.

last weekend, we tiled the kitchen countertop. bought a tile saw, tile, mortar, grout, and got to work. thabo had done this before, so he led the way. it was a lot of fun, actually, and one of those empowering moments that happens in this project, when i realize that i'm diving in to a project i've never done before, and feeling like it's going to work out. cindy did a bunch of tiling, and then she and melissa did the grouting. we're waiting on some bullnose tile for the corners to finish it up.

cabinet wrestling.

working on the duplex kitchen

here's a bunch of pics from the past weekend. putting in the new cabinets (they're not blue, that's just a protective sticker on the fronts). getting them level was a chore, since the floor is sort of bowl-shaped. we painted the pipes next to the brick, too. then came a 3/4" plywood layer for the countertop, the first layer that will hopefully end with nice looking tile. more on that as it progresses. hopefully we'll get that done this week.

2008, kitchen, ikea fiasco

okay, 2008, we're back at! no more time off for the holidays, now we have to finish this project that we call home. we decided to try and get the kitchen done, since we're using it, and it would be really nice to have a finished kitchen to use for the next few months, while we work on the rest of the apartment. we ordered ikea cabinets in november, they came in early december, and this weekend we started to put them together....only to quickly learn that they sent us three wrong ones! argh.

the first pic is thabo pretending to read the instructions that come with the cabinets. don't be fooled. behind him is the temporary kitchen we'd set up with old cabinets. the new ones are skinnier, to allow more space in an already tight galley kitchen.

so, not to be swayed, and with a weekend ahead of us, thabo and i decided the best option would be to get out to the ikea store as early as possible, since we couldn't get anyone from ikea to answer our calls on friday night. next morning we got up early and took the FREE IKEA BUS from port authority station directly to ikea in new jersey. no kidding, they provide a free bus to and fro for cheap-minded-but-design-oriented people like us to buy their products and whisk them (and us) back to nyc.

here's thabo expressing his feelings of wonder and amazement at standing in a bus line on saturday morning in port authority (which is quite possibly one of the ugliest structures in new york). note the glazed look in his eye...

the bottom pic shows him much happier, comfortably seated on a free bus ride. ikea is directly across the freeway from newark airport, which led to a lot of conversation between us as to whether it would be possible to utilize the ikea bus as free airport shuttle of sorts.

anyway, i forgot to take pictures of ikea and the outside of the bus, so you'll just have to dream... we got the cabinets but forgot to buy the shelves that go in them. dang. thankfully, once i got ikea on the phone to discuss the wrong order, they credited us for the cabinets they sent, and told us to just keep them. so now we have three cabinets we can put somewhere else. nice ending to ikea saga.

drywallin'

some more pics of the drywalling that happened over the past few days, and our friend gary. i took a few days off from work to work with gary, and we listened to a ton of music while working. lots of conversation about bands, music styles, faith, new york, friends, life, love, and drywall.
thanks, gary! you are one of a kind.

insulation, gary, progress!

so we did some soundproofing by insulating some of the walls before drywalling them, then we commenced hanging drywall like crazy. the amazing gary arrived with his smile and drywall tools from seattle, and brought tons of good energy and laughter to the house for the past week. he slept on a futon in the middle of this mess, and covered his bed with a plastic dropcloth during the day to keep it clean, that's how freakin' cool gary is.

the picture at the bottom is of gary wondering why he got himself into this mess in the first place...

building new things, finally.

so, we finally made it to the point where we aren't just tearing our house apart and stirring up plaster dust. new walls! it felt good to be building again, and to watch our plan take shape. this was part of a big push over the past two weeks, in which we got a TON done, compared to the progress we've made lately. my good friend gary was coming in for a visit from the northwest, and had agreed to do some drywall, so we were frantically trying to get some walls ready for him to work on. long days of working, lots of home depot runs, and plenty of christmas music (including aimee mann, blind boys of alabama, amy grant, over the rhine, sufjan stevens, and much, much, much more).

o' dusty christmas tree, reminder of normalcy...

photo courtesy lowell brown.

a fisher kind of christmas...

working on the floor.

here's the fun we had a few weeks ago, working on the subfloor under the new bathroom. each time we took up a layer, we'd find more problems. this is probably (hopefully) the worst corner/floor in the house, due to past water damage and roaches and general nastiness. we tried to clean it up as much as possible, reinforce everything, and lay fresh flooring.