2016 ... In the Rear-View

It seems appropriate, on this last day of 2016, to look back and remind myself of things that happened during the year.  Truthfully, I did this about a month ago when I was writing our annual Christmas letter.  I enjoy sifting through our calendar, condensing an entire year's worth of days and happenings into a single page to include in our Christmas cards.

This is what I wrote (with some additions and edits, because I always do that whenever I revisit anything that I write.)

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Welcome to our annual recap, where we try to remember and

relate to you some of the things that happened around here in 2016.

We did a fair bit of traveling in 2016, with Connie making more trips than Steve did this year.  Connie’s travel always has a plant theme, mostly related to her work with and love of roses.  This year, she had various trips around the country to rose speaking engagements, board meetings for the Heritage Rose Foundation, and some just-for-fun-trips.  One of those fun trips was a long weekend with her mom in April to Charleston, South Carolina, with the Southern Garden History Society. 

Mrs. Whaley's Garden in Charleston

In August, we had long-weekend working vacation at a greyhound conference in Wheeling, West Virginia ... the same conference that we attended in 2015.  We again shared a cabin with our friends Kim, Andy, Gale, and Chris.  The highlight of the trip was a visit to the racetrack to watch the greyhounds run and an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the racing operations with the track veterinarian!

Petting pups at a greyhound farm.

Our annual Thanksgiving week getaway this year was a trip to Las Vegas with our friends, Andy and Kim.  The weather was a little chilly, but perfect for visiting the desert and seeing the sights.  We went hiking in Red Rock Canyon to see petroglyphs, saw a couple of awesome shows (Cirque du Soleil’s Mystère and impressionist Terry Fator from America’s Got Talent), and spent time with Vegas friends and visited the Ethel M Cactus Garden decorated for Christmas.  The death-defying part of our trip was the “Slotzilla” zip line.  You launch from 10 stories up (114 feet) and fly face first all the way down Fremont Street (1,750 feet).  It was terrifying and amazingly fun at the same time!

Pausing for a photo while hiking at Red Rock Canyon.

The nervous smile of one who has survived what felt like a near-death experience.

  

July saw the passing of Maggie, our oldest cat, at age 15.   She was our miracle kitty that spent her life surviving and thriving with one should-have-been-terminal condition after another.  She ruled our household with her velvet paws, greeted all houseguests and insisted that they pet her, and was a huge presence in our lives.  She is greatly missed.

Maggie was just as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside.

Renovation projects continue as usual and there is never a shortage of items to take care of here at The Manor.  There’s always something to repair or restore when one lives in an old house!  Projects included continuing to transform one of our outbuildings into a studio, repairing the concrete fence around our front yard, and refining and expanding our gardens. 

The concrete fence around the front is an important feature of our property.  About 1/3 of it is now repaired and repainted.

The neglected, weed-filled Rose Field is well on its way to being beautiful again, as we clear weeds, redesign beds, and replant roses.

We hope that you have a very Merry Christmas, and we wish you health, happiness and the very best in 2017.

Winnie, Ruby, and me, captured by my trail camera, while on a walk back by our barn.

With love,

Steve and Connie

(and Alice, Dorothy, Ruby, and Winnie … the furry members of our family)

New Master Bedroom Closets!

The inside parts of our new master bedroom walk-in closets are finished!  As with most projects around here, this one took longer than we expected.  This is behind us now, and I am thrilled to show you how it all came together.  (settle in, because this post is a long one.)

Here is a quick review to remind you where this project started and how it proceeded.  The area that became our new closets looked like this before construction started ... typical 1960s, the era of the addition to our house where our master bedroom is located.  We hired Peter Csemez, a contractor friend, to do the heavy-lifting portion of the project, in the interest of getting the dirty parts done and over with quickly.

The wall with the old closet doors was demolished, and a new wall was built that approximately follows the line of the fringe on the rug.

We gave up 28 inches of floor space, and we gained two 5 1/2-foot by 4 1/2-foot walk-in closets.

The dotted lines in the drawing represent the configuration of the old closets.

The new bedroom floorplan looks like this:

The project began with a bit of demolition and a lot of dust.  First the doors were removed (to be reused). 

Then the old closet walls came down.  The 2x4 lying on the floor is the bottom plate of the new wall.

The new closet wall looks like a wall of built-in cupboards, using the old closet doors and one more door that we robbed from our hall bathroom.  (the bathroom door was replaced with a similar one that we found at the Habitat ReStore in Richmond.)

Photoshop facsimile of the new wall.  The inner doors operate, and the outer doors are stationary.

The framing part of this job was more complicated than we thought it would be ... of course it was ... almost everything in old house renovation is like that.

... and here we are, new wall in place with trim and doors and it looks great!  After this point, the contractor's part of the project was finished, and it was time for me to do my part. 

Peter's drywall guy did a great job on the inside of the closets.  He had to patch the walls and ceiling where the old closet walls were, and add sheetrock to the new wall.  After he finished, the walls were smooth and ready for paint.

The first step was to roll on a coat of primer.  I always use Valspar Bonding Primer, because I can never be sure exactly what is on these old walls ... this primer covers stains and sticks to almost anything.

I didn't want to lose the electrical outlet that was on the old closet wall, so I had Peter relocate it into The Husband's closet.

Cats and painting don't mix well.  Dorothy was keeping her distance, watching from a few feet away.

To be certain she stayed safely away from the paint, I set a cat trap of newspaper on the corner of our bed ... this works every time!

One of the objectives of this project was to reuse as many materials as possible.  All of the trim and doors were salvaged.  Even the paint for the inside walls was a gallon of paint that I had stashed away ... Benjamin Moore 'Gossamer Blue' that I bought last year for our hall bath (and had yet to use).

The new pale blue is perfect!

For light fixtures, I bought an inexpensive set of two flush-mount lights at Lowes for $21-and-change.  They are white with alabaster-looking glass.

The next day, it was time to make these new little rooms function as closets.  I love ClosetMaid's system of adjustable closet fittings.  It all starts with a hanging rail mounted at the ceiling, screwed firmly into the wall's framework.  In the case of our back closet wall, which is the former back wall of this old brick house of ours, I used masonry screws to secure the rail.  Next came the vertical supports ... leveled and screwed to the wall.  (I reused all of the parts from our old closets.  I only had to buy one hanging rail, four vertical supports, and 14 shelf brackets.) 

The hanging rail on the left wall is level ... the ceiling isn't, tho.

Here is the shelving, finished in both closets!  The back walls are set up for double-hanging clothes ... one shelf 40 inches off the floor and one at 80 inches.  The side walls have space for a hamper and shelves for folded clothes.

The next things to address were the holes in the flooring where the former closet walls used to be.  The Husband asked if he could help, so I had him even up and cut the edges of this hole.  Here he is using a chisel to get the last little bits out of the corner.

The piece of reclaimed flooring that I had on hand isn't an exact match, but it will be pretty close once I stain and varnish it.  (our floor is heartpine and the patch flooring is antique yellow pine.)  The black pieces in the patch are what the replacement flooring looked like before I scraped and sanded it.  I can't tell you how many trips I made up and down the two flights of stairs between our bedroom and the miter saw in our basement for me to cut these pieces of flooring.  Each piece had to be scribed to fit and cut at least two times. 

If this was a more visible area of the house, I would have done this job more correctly by removing part of the original floor and weaving the patch in so it's not so obvious.  This is a closet, however, and I made the conscious decision to patch it the easiest way possible and move on.  These pieces are just sitting in place for now ... the subfloor and the old flooring aren't level, and it's going to take a LOT of time for me to shim each piece of the patch flooring to bring it even with the old flooring. At least this big hole is sort of patched for now, so The Husband won't hurt himself if he steps on it.

Are you ready for the reveal?  I spent most of the morning yesterday sorting through my clothes and putting them into my new closet.  Summer clothes on the top rail, winter on the bottom .... no more changing things out for each season.  The few dresses, suits, and other long items that I have are in the closet in my sewing room.  They have always been there ... I wear them so rarely, and I couldn't justify including them in the new closet design.  They're fine where they are.

My shelves for folding clothes will hold jeans, work pants, sweatshirts, sweaters, etc.  I still have more sweaters and hoodies in my armoire to sort through and put in here.  (I've been pretty ruthless with my initial sorting, and I took 35 shirts and sweaters to Goodwill yesterday afternoon.)  I still have too much stuff, so I will do another round of purging later.

I keep a very tidy closet ... with like things grouped together, arranged by color.  This makes it so much easier to find stuff. 

The piece of old flooring I had was only enough to patch the major hole in the floor of The Husband's closet.  I have to scrounge another piece to do mine ... this hole is out of the traffic path and isn't a huge trip hazard like the other one was, so it can wait.

Alice was hiding under the clothes as I was working, till I chased her out.

Then she and Dorothy lounged on the bed and monitored my progress.  That pile of clothes on the right was the beginning of the heap that went to Goodwill. 

There you have it, Folks ... the inside of our new closets ... finished and in use.  Our bedroom used to look like this:

And this is what you see as you walk into our bedroom now!

I still have quite a bit of work ahead of me, to finish the moldings and doors on the outside of the new closet wall.  Everything is functional the way it is, so I can wait till later to caulk and prime and paint, and to cut and reinstall the radiator cover.  I don't want to wait too long, though.  My resolution this year is to do whatever I can to see all of my projects through to the end and actually FINISH WHAT I START.  The inside of these closets tested my resolve, especially as I whined about having to carefully cut in the blue paint at the ceiling and baseboard and around the doors, and as I was making so many trips up and down the stairs fitting flooring into the hole in The Husband's closet floor.

These new closets are already a huge improvement in the way we live in this old house of ours.  I still can't believe how much style and function we have gained, and I find myself standing and staring a them ... what a difference!

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The contractor who worked on this project for us is:

Peter Csemez

Homebrite Renovations

540-295-1337

(If you are in northern/central Virginia and are looking for a contractor, this one comes highly recommended ... by us!)

Feeling Blue ... In a Good Way

It's been a long, hard, three-day project, but the painting of the ceiling of our front porch is finished!  Those of you who speculated that I would be painting it blue were absolutely correct (you know me so well.)  I again consulted my trusty Farrow and Ball brochure color and decided that "Parma Gray" was the paint color closest to the color of the summer sky ... and it coordinates really well with our front door, which I painted last week using the color of F&B's "Oval Room Blue".

Why did this seemingly simple paint project take three days, you ask?  When we rebuilt our porch in 2005, the only parts of the existing porch that we could save were the roof itself and the floor framing (neither of which were original to our 1848 house) .  Rotten beams and joists were replaced or reinforced.  Trim and beadboard overhead (which were old but , again, not original) were replaced with Azek (pvc board). 

Azek is supposed to take paint very well, but it must be cleaned to remove any dirt or greasy film.  My painter recommended that I use denatured alcohol to scrub the ceiling down thoroughly.  Working overhead scrubbing the ceiling was exhausting.  I worked in shifts and finished the job over the course of an entire day.

Here it is ... all clean and ready for paint.

(pay no attention to those spiderwebs in the doorway)

The manufacturer says that primer isn't necessary if Azek is painted with a quality acrylic paint, but I wasn't taking any chances.  I primed the ceiling with bonding primer ... rolling it on with a hot dog roller and following with a 4" brush to remove any roller marks and to work the primer into all of the grooves of the beadboard.

By the time I had spent an entire day scrubbing the ceiling, and the next afternoon applying primer, I assure you that my neck and shoulders were really, really sore.  I was on a roll, however, and I wasn't going to let pain get in the way of finishing this project in a timely manner.

Day Three was the pay off ... I finally was going to see some COLOR!

Just like I did with the primer, I applied the first coat of color with a roller and followed behind with a brush.  When painting things like beadboard (or siding) it's important to work in long sections from one end of the ceiling (or wall) to the other, to keep a wet edge and avoid lap marks.

I applied the second coat of color with a 3" brush ... no roller this time.  I wanted the look of a hand-brushed finish, which brings out the subtle satin sheen of the paint I chose.

It feels wonderful to step outside onto the porch and see this new ceiling color.  There is still a LOT of work to be done before I can say that our porch is finished ... so I'm breaking this job into small, easily accomplished mini projects so I can wallow in a rewarding feeling of instant gratification after I complete each one. 

In some of the photos above, you see glimpses of one of my most important tools for working on any project up high ... my little rolling scaffolding. 

I bought this scaffolding at the beginning of the renovation of our house in 2003, and it has been one of the best purchases EVER.  Any time I have to work on a ceiling or high up on walls, this gives me a large, safe platform from which to work.  Without this, I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been to paint the porch ceiling.

Project Checklist:

Front door?  One more coat of paint to go, after I remove the hardware and caulk the cracks.

Ceiling?  Finished!!

Next?  Crown molding.  Going shopping for that later today.