$20 Antique Door - Score!

A few weeks ago I went to Habitat ReStore in Kansas City for fun on a lunch break. I joke that casual trips to ReStore are "dangerous" because you will walk into the store with no intentions of buying and leave with an unplanned weekend project.

My last trip was a classic example. We quickly stumbled upon a pile of $20 two panel closet doors that perfectly match our house's style. I reluctantly texted B a picture (below), knowing this would pique her interest.

Fast forward 4 hours later, and we're rushing across town in our van to buy three of these doors for our upstairs closets. We could have bought more, but since these all required stripping and refinishing to match our house, I didn't want overcommit to stripping (see exterior house project).

Well, once I got to "stripping," things got really messy. I'll spare you the pictures, but it did take an entire bottle of this stuff to get about 6 layers of white paint off the doors.

The exciting/scary part of doing this is that you have no idea what wood type and finish you'll be left with. I was afraid it would be cheap pine and be a total waste of time. Thankfully, the wood was beautiful and stained up perfectly!

Total time was about 12 hours. I spent about an hour every weeknight for two weeks, and then finally hung the door this weekend.

Here's the skinny 24" closet door in all its restored glory

We kept the original doorknob and spray painted it oil rubbed bronze

The doors ended up being a beautiful pine. I love the thin grain on the frame. Also, we cut out the original panel trim and replaced them with a simple shaker style trim. This saved loads of stripping time.

I absolutely love the idea of restoring old things - the only risk is that sometimes you'll end up spending ridiculous amounts of time and $ to restore that cheap item you found. With this project, I probably spent $50 on this door, including some new materials, like trim, bondo, and fixing some door jamb hardware. The time was a little bit much, but it quickly became a labor of love, so I have no regrets (yet).

New doors like this cost about $240 each, so I think we did ok.

And just for reference, here's the before/after pic.

A New 1/2 Bath

Progress Party

I came home over lunch yesterday to check on progress, and couldn't believe the activity. In addition to the contractor, there was our wrecking crew (now acting as trim carpenters), the plumber and the electrician all working hard. It was a progress party! So the changes from the day are widespread and oh-so-satisfying.

First thing - see those glowy things at the top of this photo? That's right - we have lights in the kitchen for the first time in over two months!

Don't worry, these lights are just temporary. The real lights - surface mount schoolhouse fixtures - will be installed after everything is painted. But these are great in the meantime, so we can actually see our new room!

Moving along, we also have running water in the kitchen now. This was originally slated to happen last Friday, but our farmhouse sink required a special fixture to connect our garbage disposal, so we had to wait a bit longer. It's so nice to have it up and running, and washing my first load of dishes in the sink was wonderful - it's such a nice deep basin.

Garbage disposal! Our last one hadn't worked for about a year, so this is a pretty novel improvement for us.

We also have lots of nice, new oak trim installed. The trim guys have been working hard all this week, and expect to have everything wrapped up by the end of today. It really gives the room its shape and will be a great frame once it's all stained nice and dark, to match our home's original woodwork.

They used two of our original doors on the main floor - an old close door in the office became a closet door in the kitchen, and an old door adjoining the office to the kitchen is now our half bath door. They cut oak to fill in the opening from the old mortise, and used nice new, oversized hardware to cover old hardware holes.

Our dishwasher is installed - it was also waiting on the sink drain connector. And see the blue tape to the left, at the corner of the sink? The trim guys cut little wedges to fill gaps around the curve of the farmhouse sink. All they need is a little stain to feel right at home.

And the stove is next in line for appliance installation. The plumber ran the gas line today for the cooktop, and the electrician got the outlet all set up, so the wrecking crew guys should have it in place today.

Speaking of the electrician, he went to town with outlets everywhere. The ones in the kitchen and bathroom tile will have matching white ceramic switchplates to tie them in, and the rest will have bronze switchplates, which we have throughout our house.

So that's it for now. The trim guys should have everything wrapped up today, and then the hardwood guys come back tomorrow to put a final coat of polyurethane on the floors. Painting begins next week, and should be the beginning of the end for this project.

I'm in Love!

Look what arrived today! We've been getting mad deliveries from all the stuff I've ordered, but this is by far the one I've been most excited about. And it did not leave me disappointed - it's beautiful! All 180 pounds of it. Yikes!

Nino liked it too. Don't worry, he and I talked and he does not plan on making a habit of sitting in the sink once it's installed. 

In other news, the wrecking crew continues to make amazing progress. I'm thrilled to announce that demolition is complete, and the rebuilding stage has begun! They encountered one surprise though, and that is that *someone* (I suspect the same person who plumbed our bathroom drain with hose clamps) notched into about a half dozen of our ceiling joists, significantly weakening them.

That's not all! The notches caused the bathroom floor to sink, so they poured a concrete slab in the bathroom floor to bring it back to almost level (it was definitely still not level, just for the record). So, there's now a big hole in our bathroom floor/kitchen ceiling.

Our contractor assured us this is not a big deal to fix, so before they put up the new walls they need to reinforce a few ceiling joists, and replace some bathroom subfloor. I was very pleased to find the materials already here when I got home today - 2x8's for the joists and plywood for the subfloor . . .

 . . . as well as a big pile of studs! Proof that rebuilding has begun! And these guys aren't just laying around - check out the brand new stud wall already built in our office!

 

This is the framing for our new half bathroom, as well as the new smaller closet we're having built to replace the closet we knocked out to make the kitchen bigger. 

And see those metal slides in the middle of the photo? That is the first of three pocket door frames to be installed in the house! This one is to enter the half bath from the office. The others will be for entry to the bathroom from the upstairs hallway, and to the closet from the kitchen. All three frames appear to have been delivered today, so I suspect we'll see them in place in the very near future.

 

The crew working on our house has been really great about keeping original pieces that are reusable, so here you see two original doors as well as quite a bit of original oak trim. We'll reuse these two-panel oak doors for the half bath and closet downstairs, and the trim will be be reused throughout all the downstairs construction. 

So this is where we are - just three days in. We're very impressed with the pace of progress, and love this whole setup where we go to work and come home to find all kinds of surprises! So far all good, so hopefully it stays that way. As far as next steps, we have a plumber coming Monday, as well as our cabinet maker for final measurements, and then the electrician comes Wednesday. How's that for progress?

Now that demolition is finished, I'm ready to clean up the plaster dust that's settled throughout the house. And then I'll probably have some cereal for dinner. Because that's just what you eat at times like this. 

Wrigley was feeling left out after the whole Nino-in-the-sink thing, so here's his shining moment, sitting next to all the lumber piles. He's just one of the studs.