A BASEMENT BEFORE TO MAKE YOU CRINGE

I've alluded to changes and projects quite a bit here so it's well past time I fill you in on exactly what's happening. Mr. Much More Patient is starting his own business and needs an office here. So, we're making an office.

We already have a den/office type of room, but we both very much like using that room (which started as the original first-floor master bedroom) as a den and since Mr. MMP will require a fairly large desk, most of the things that make the den the cozy spot we like would have to go away. Similarly, the guest bedroom isn't really big enough for both a bed and a desk setup. So that means the office is heading underground to the finished half of the basement.

I'm certain I've written about the basement here before and I may have even written up grand plans for sprucing that space up, but for the first time things are actually happening down there.

This is the epitome of a "warts and all" before picture. The terrible red wall is my doing. But you can also see the pink vinyl floor. Behind the curtained wall is a storage are that actually works pretty well but needs some cleaning out.

Half of the basement was finished by a previous owner. Everything was clearly done as cheaply as possible. Fiberboard was used instead of drywall and furring strips were put over seams instead of taping and mudding. A cheap and exceptionally ugly pink and blue vinyl floor was glued to the concrete. The trim was just flat pine boards straight from the lumber yard. Three lights run down the middle of the room. I'm sad to say that when the current owners took over (um, that would be me), the atrocities got worse. Let's just say there were some bad paint color choices involved. In my defense, it was literally the first room I'd ever painted in my life and after years in beige apartments I was desperate for color. Hey, at least I did it in the basement and not the living room.

There is a shining star though, and that's the fireplace that extends from the one upstairs. A previous owner had the flue for it closed off so it no longer functions, but last year we removed the really ugly insert from it so at least it looks ok.

Time is of the essence with this project (and painting is underway) so I'm going into this with far less of a plan than I usually approach these projects with. And the budget is small so we're tackling the necessities and the cosmetics more than anything. Lighting upgrades, more insulation and even another heat vent (there is one that comes in the room but it's inadequate for the size of the space) would be very practical upgrades, but they are both time consuming and expensive so none of those is happening. Instead, we're working with what we have for the most part.

The fireplace is a nice focal point and the wicker chairs came with the place and I love them, but I'll need to make new cushions for them.

That starts with paint. We're painting everything—ceiling, walls, trim—the same color (Benjamin Moore Mascarpone, which is the trim color in the majority of the house and also the wall color in the living room) to both lighten it up down there and hopefully visually raise the height of the ceiling. I might have picked a different color but we had a lot of Mascarpone around so we went with that. I'll pick up new fixtures for the ceiling, hopefully ones that put out a bit more light than what's there.

This corner will be the office space. The wood box on the wall hides the electrical panel and the tall wood box to the right covers a sump pump.

The stairs are across from the wall above. Yes, I painted it blue and red. Don't judge. Actually, do judge. I deserve it.  On the far left of the photo you can see the doors that lead to the unfinished portion of the basement.

We absolutely must do something about the floor and not just because it's ugly. It is also very cold, so we need to cover it with something maybe layer area rugs on top of that. Unfortunately since it's a larger space, there is no truly inexpensive solution. We're still weighing the options for that.

I made a trip to Ikea to pick up a desk and a Besta credenza a couple weekends ago and we have plenty of other furniture for the rest of the room.

Here's a better view of the larger space. 

The lighting is just three ceiling lights, all of which will be replaced. About a year ago I got a quote of about $1,100 to add more lights to the room, so rather than do that, we'll supplement the lighting with strategically placed lamps. The bump outs on the right for the air ducts are really low. At 5 feet 2 inches tall, that's not an issue for me, but Mr. Much More Patient has to duck a little to get under them. Hopefully painting everything the same color will make that less noticeable.

I'll show you our progress as it happens. No matter what, I think it can only get better.

Do you have a finished area in your basement? If so, do you really use it?

THIS GARDEN'S NOT FINISHED, IT'S JUST GETTING STARTED ... AGAIN

I've mentioned before that the idea that a garden is ever "finished" is a fallacy. Because it is constantly growing and changing, gardens are in a state of evolution at all times. It's not like redoing a room in your house where you paint the walls, get new furniture and then stage it perfectly to take a bunch of photos because it's finished.

It's a lesson I wish I would have learned many years ago when I think I was rushing to get the garden finished. I think I made some poor design choices because of that rush, but even if I hadn't, I'm sure there would be decisions I regretted.

The circle garden from a few years ago before the chive hedge was complete and when I actually tended it a bit more.

And that's where I am now with the oval garden. You can always tell when I'm sick of an area of the garden, or at least when it's not holding my attention, because it will be the most unkempt area of the yard. And for a couple years now, that's what the oval garden (which I often call the circle garden because it has a better ring to it even though it is certainly not a circle) has been. I just haven't loved it enough to do any more than the basics, and it shows.

I'm embarrassed to show you this photo of what the circle garden looked like this weekend before I started ripping plants out of it. What a mess.

What really kicked my butt in gear was a really inspiring conversation I had with my friend Linda (who blogs at Each Little World) and her husband Mark when they stopped to see the garden in early July. They rattled off some ideas that finally got the creative juices flowing.

I've been thinking about the oval garden since then and have now committed to a complete redo next spring. First of all, I should mention, the oval garden was the first garden I made from complete scratch in my life. We had owned the house a couple years and I had reshaped and completely emptied the garden off the patio but I was anxious to get stuck into a project that was all mine. So I turned a derelict vegetable patch with random shrubs thrown in, into an oval garden. At this time I didn't have a real handle on my own garden style, and I was just getting my feet wet at learning about plants in general. In other words, I was pretty much winging it.

What has become most clear was the biggest mistake I made when I first designed it. I went with the oval shape for a handful of reasons, including that it was the most effective way to deal with the sort of rectangular leftovers of the garden that had been and because the space seemed to lend itself to something that length but didn't have room for the width that would be needed to make a circle. But I also was afraid of getting too formal and somehow I thought an oval was less formal than a circle.

This photo from Google gives the best view of the circle garden. Judging from how sparse the western most section is, I think this photo is from about two years ago when I combatted a horrible weed problem there. Just looking at those curvy paths makes me cringe. 

That's really flawed thinking of course. By it's very nature, a garden that is edged in cobblestones with center feature and self contained is going to be a more formal look. I tried to fight formality even more by dividing it into three sections of different sizes with curvy paths. Because a 6-foot long curvy path is super informal, right? And then I got greedy with planting space and made the paths very narrow, just 16 inches, because apparently at some point I thought I wouldn't have enough space for plants in my yard. Clearly I was wrong about that. Basically I did everything I could to fight formality.

Over the years I've come to terms with my divided loyalties to different gardening styles. I love a flowy, cottage-style garden, but gosh darn it, I like formal and structured too. And even though it seems odd to consider those two styles in the same place, I've also reached a point where I'm comfortable gardening for myself and have decided that if I love it, then that's what matter. It's funny: I've preached this approach dozens of times on this blog, but it has taken me a while to feel comfortable with that in my own garden.

So this fall and next spring I will be correcting some of the wrongs I made originally in the oval garden. First off, I'm going to embrace the formal nature of it, but I will be embracing some of the planting styles and choices I admire in other gardens. What exactly that will look like, I'm not sure, but here's a list of what's happening.

This is literally a picture of the quick sketch I was working that gives you an idea of what I was thinking for the paths on the redesigned "circle" garden. I'd adjust the angle of that X so that the path in the lower left would lead somewhat naturally off the patio. 

• The overall shape, center circle and exterior cobblestones will remain unchanged.
• The curvy paths will go, replaced by a much more formal X-shaped design for the paths. They will also get a bit wide to make them more comfortable to walk on and more in proportion with the garden. 
• The pea gravel used for the paths is going. I've decided I detest pea gravel. A lot of people love it and good for them, but I prefer the sharper edged gray gravel I used on the path to the garage.  Or I might consider something like a decomposed granite for the paths. 
• The chive hedge stays. I love that chive hedge even though it's a little quirky. I'll replant it to match the new paths so that each segment is outlined in chives. 
• The plan now is for the center obelisk to stay, along with the clematis that grows up it. The 'William Baffin' rose that also grows there could stay or go. 
• The rhubarb will probably stay only because I can't think of a better place for it and it's quite happy there.

Quirky as it may be, I love this chive hedge and it's staying.

I started the process of clearing out plants over the weekend. The sedum 'Autumn Joy', which I planted three of when I first made the garden and divided them over time was moved to a sunny corner of back/side yard garden. Amazingly there were at least 15 plants there. A few of the grasses were moved to the end of the driveway near the address sign to help ground that. I need to find homes for a few hydrangeas, a hosta and a handful of other plants, including a baptisia that will not appreciate the move at all. Everything else is either an annual or a plant deemed not worth saving. 

Once I get the plants attended to, I'll work on ripping up the paths and repositioning them. I'd like to get all of the structural parts finished this fall so that all that is left for spring is planting. As for the the planting plan, that's up in the air. My best garden inspiration tends to happen in the middle of winter so I'm not overly concerned about that bit yet. I do know that I'd like it to be very colorful, which will help carry the garden until mid-summer when things really start blooming in my yard.

It's sort of odd to be tackling an area of my garden for the second time, but I look at how much different my perspective and knowledge is this time and I'm really looking forward to the process and the result.

 Have you ever looked bad at a decision you made in your garden and wondered what you were thinking? Please tell me you have!

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: WEEK SIX (AKA THE END)

Thanks for your patience on this. I got behind on all the last minute details and just couldn't finish this up in time to join the first wave of "big reveals" Thursday morning.

If you're wondering what all this is about, I joined the One Room Challenge, hosted semi-annually by Linda at Calling it Home and attempted to renovate our downstairs bathroom in just six weeks. It was the first room we planned to renovate when we bought the house and it turned out to be pretty much the last room we touched, mostly because it was just daunting.

And here's where it ended up.

To fully appreciate how far it has come, you have to remember what it looked like before. Highlights, or rather lowlights, include highly textured walls, pickled pink wood, a pink counter, weird shower insert, rope sink, shiny gold (not in a good way) hardware and, of course, a boob light.

By taking out the shower insert and tiling the shower up the ceiling and using a very low threshold shower pan, the room feels twice as big. 

Unfortunately the vanity top is not finished. If you recall, it was cut incorrectly and is too small for the vanity and the sink hole wasn't cut correctly. We've been waiting for another carrara marble remnant to become available but no luck so far.

The fabric for the roman blind was not what I intended to use originally but that didn't seem quite right. I ended up looking for something with a hand-printed look and in the middle of a mad internet search I found just that in Australia and just a few days later, freshly printed fabric from halfway around the world was on my doorstep. Like I do about once a year, I pulled out the sewing machine, tried to remember how to work it and sewed that baby up, saving somewhere in the neighborhood of $130, which was the going price I found to have someone make a custom roman blind. I was fairly impressed with myself, particularly given that I literally sewed THROUGH my finger when I took a machine sewing class in summer school in 7th grade.

To find out more specifics about how this project all went, check out previous weeks here:

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5

SOURCES 
(Some affiliate links may be used)

Floor tile: Fluid marmara marble 6x18 honed

Wall tile: Daltile Rittenhouse Square 3x6 in Kohler White (K101)

Wall accent tile: Bardiglio marble piano tile (discontinued but this is similar)

Shower base: Kohler Ballast

Heated floor

Marble sealer

Trim and ceiling paint: BM White Heron

Wall paint: BM Pebble Beach

Vanity: My design, semi-DIY constructed

Vanity paint: BM Hale Navy

Drawer pulls

Mirror

Vanity light: Fiona Big Sconce custom painted

Spray paint : Montana Gold in navy (for vanity sconce)

Ceiling light

Shower light/fan combo

Towel bar, robe hook, toilet paper holder

Door knobs

Faucet

Toilet

Shower faucets

Handshower

Showerhead

Art

Roman shade: DIY with this fabric

Vanity tray

Guest towels

Please take a moment to check out all of the other guest participants in the One Room Challenge as well as the featured bloggers.

Thanks for following along!

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: WEEK 5

When I thought about joining the One Room Challenge I thought six weeks was a tight timeline, but not so bad. Yet here we are in Week 5 and I think it's safe to say five weeks have never flown by so quickly. Catch up on Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4 if you missed any of the scintillating action.

I get obsessed with details when it comes to renovation projects. For me, the devil really is in the details. They are the little things that make me really love a room. So I thought I'd share a few of the details going into our bathroom renovation today. Links to sources are at the bottom. Some of them may be affiliate links; thanks for your support!

I knew I wanted the light over the mirror to match somewhat closely the navy of the vanity (Benjamin Moore Hale Navy). It was available in blue or black and I figured I'd give the blue a try, because I'd have to paint the black one for sure. As you can see below, it came a beautiful blue, but not one that would work with the Hale Navy (kindly ignore my painting sweatshirt), so I spray painted it with my new favorite spray paint (available in so many great colors): Montana Gold in the navy color.

For the ceiling light I opted for another mother of pearl fixture. With mother of pearl lights in the hallway outside the bathroom, the nearby office and the mother of pearl backsplash in the kitchen, I figured I might as well extend what seems to have become a theme.

When we did the big renovation several years ago we started switching all the doorknobs in the house to glass. Some of them are knobs I salvaged from my grandmother's house, which was built around the same time as ours and was torn down several years ago (it was on the verge of falling over a bluff into the lake). I was able to find new versions in the same style as the original knobs, so they are mixed throughout the house. This is a modern day one, but I do love them.

I got a little splurge happy when I bought lucent and chrome accessories for the bathroom to complement the glass doorknobs. I got a robe hook, towel bar and toilet paper holder all for a price I regret, especially since I've since learned you can find them elsewhere for much less.

We had the electrician move the outlet down to tuck around the corner of the vanity, and it was money well spent.

Mr. Much More Patient picked out the faucet and requested the heated floor. Who am I to argue with two small requests?

 Instead of a big handle, we had a fixed knob put on the shower door to avoid encroaching on the small amount of room. It works great and I like the clean look.

The shower fixtures are pretty simple. I love the cross handles so whether they go with anything else or not, I got them.

And lastly, how good is that shower seat? It's either a very small seat or a little bit larger shaving ledge, but either way, I love how the floor tile looks on it and I think it does a great job tying it all in together.

The big reveal is next week, ready or not!

SOURCES

Vanity light
Mirror
Spray paint
Ceiling light
Glass doorknobs
Lucite bathroom accessories
Faucet
Showerhead
Handshower
Shower valve trims

Don't forget to check out the progress at all of the guest participants in the One Room Challenge and the featured bloggers as well. 

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: WEEK 4

If you're wondering what all this bathroom talk is in the middle of high gardening season, I'm participating in the One Room Challenge, a quest to renovate one room in six weeks. Start from the beginning of this journey here.

We all know that every renovation has its stumbling blocks and this one is no exception. But it is interesting that in this case most of those hiccups are focused on a very specific area and it has gone from bad to you-gotta-just-laugh.

I knew from the start that we were going to have to get a custom vanity. I wanted a rectangular vanity, not the stair-stepped design of the old one, so it had to be about 18 inches deep at most, and off-the-shelf options for vanities like that are quite limited. We needed a little bit of storage but not a ton because there is a pretty big linen closet in this room as well.

I based my design for the vanity on the inspiration vanity coupled with a few others that I found along the way that I liked features on. In the end, I designed a 39-by-18-inch vanity with faux bamboo legs, a fixed panel on top and one large drawer cut around the plumbing with a lot of room under the drawer to keep it from taking up a lot of visible "space" in the room and show off the floor.

The unfinished vanity hanging out in the basement waiting for some paint love.

Of course I ended up designing a very expensive vanity. The woodworker I've used in the past for the kitchen cabinets, banquette and built-ins in the master bedroom quoted me a price that was higher than I had budgetted and with the tile adding up to more than anticipated, it was more than I wanted to spend. A big part of the cost was wrapped up in the legs, which we couldn't find pre-made anywhere but I wasn't willing to give up.

Somewhere along the line Mr. Much More Patient also fell in love with the vanity design and in order to make it happen he offered to help build it along with a co-worker who did some woodworking on the side. We found a wood turner through the wood supply store (a place that has all kinds of gorgeous wood for custom woodworking projects) and had the legs made a much better price than we anticipated. And the vanity was underway.

Unfortunately there was some miscommunication because Mr. MMP didn't realize that my design was drawn (on graph paper) to a specific size, and at some point there were some liberties taken with the design size. This wouldn't have been a big deal except that I didn't know that it had grown in size when I ordered the marble vanity top. You can see where this is going right?

Although the marble top is sitting on top of the vanity, it's not attached and what you can't see is that it's too small  for the vanity. 

As if that weren't bad enough, the top was cut a quarter-inch smaller than I had ordered it. Normally this wouldn't have been a big deal, but with the combination of the slightly too big vanity, even after we modified everything we could to make it fit, the top is just too small. Oh, and when we went to mount the sink we found out they also cut the sink hole incorrectly.

No problem: Have the countertop people make a new counter, right? Not so easy, actually. Of course they used a remnant piece (this is the same thing we ran into with our vanity upstairs so I was prepared this time) and there are no more remnant pieces. In fact, the next chance for a remnant piece is from a kitchen installation they are doing May 6, which you'll note is well after this challenge is finished. It's all a little frustrating given that we had this vanity in production MONTHS ago in preparation to do this bathroom.

Mr. Much More Patient has a lot of jobs. One of them is holding pull options up to the drawer.

So that's the big hangup. The good news is that the vanity has been painted: Benjamin Moore's Hale Navy, which was the color I had painted the old vanity a couple years ago. It is awaiting some drawer hardware, which we were still deciding on.

This is a fairly horrible photo of the mirror, but it's hard to get a good angle on the whole program. The faucet is just sitting there in the hole until we get the counter sorted.

We've also hung the mirror and I love it enough to make this vanity issue fall into the background a little. I wanted something a little different to make a bit of a statement on the wall and I think this scalloped number does just that. It has a bronze/copper finish on it that I also think brings a little warmth to this room, which overall has a very cool color palette to it. I like clean, crisp bathrooms but "hospital" isn't the feel I'm going for. I know the mixing of metallic finishes will drive some folks nuts, but I don't mind a little of it.

Let's hope this vanity is the main hiccup we run into. It's a biggie, and I'm disappointed that it means we won't be officially finished in six weeks but there's nothing to be done with it.

If you want to catch up on what we've done in this room so far check out these posts:
Week 1 - The before + the design
Week 2 - Floor tile
Week 3 - Wall tile

Don't forget to check in with the other guest participants in the One Room Challenge as well as the featured bloggers.

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: WEEK 2

Welcome to the second week of my personal One Room Challenge, where I attempt to renovate one room in six weeks. See Week 1 here.

Some affiliate links may be used. I very much appreciate your support of this blog. 

It was a big week in the bathroom progress and, not surprisingly, we ran into more than a few hurdles in the process. This is no surprise: This old house is anything but square and level. This caused a rather significant issue when the contractor was setting the shower pan because they had to futz around with it for quite some time. We went with a low-profile plain shower pan. There is only about an inch difference in height between it and the finished floor so it's very unobtrusive and I didn't feel like fussing with a custom mudded and tiled shower pan.

Then it came time to level the floor, which was out a full two inches from one end of the bathroom to the other, just 9 feet away. Our poor tile guy (the husband of one of my best friends, who has done all of the tile work in our house) spent seven hours just leveling the floor and incorporating the heated floor cables (an add-on that I couldn't have cared less about but Mr. Much More Patient really wanted). He was here until 11:30 one night!

To accommodate the amount we had to bring the floor up to level it, we fashioned a ramp to meet up with the hallway.

Leveling the floor meant we had a decision to make about how to make the transition to the hallway, because of course the "high" side of the floor was the end by the hallway. We decided to create a mini ramp with two pieces of tile.

The floor in progress. It took much longer to level it than it did to tile it.

And then the floor tile went in. Bestill my heart. I was very selective about how the pieces should be laid out (although a couple snuck in places I wouldn't have chosen, but it's fine). Originally I was planning a herring bone layout in this room, but I was afraid that the striped marble tiles in the small room would be way too busy in a traditional herringbone layout. So I decided to have them set in the same pattern but perpendicular and parallel to the walls, rather than angled to the walls. Somehow it calmed the design to me.

I sealed all the tiles ahead of time with the sealer our tile guy recommends and I'll give the entire floor another coat after the grout is completely dry.

I can't tell you how much I love this floor. When I found the tile I knew right away that I'd do whatever it took to have it and although I've had a little pushback on it from some people, I think it's fabulous.

Yes, I love it. 

What is most amazing thus far in this renovation is the difference that pulling out the shower insert made. I thought this was a small bathroom. Suddenly with a full height ceiling in the shower and the additional 6 inches we gained width wise (enough to accommodate a 66-inch by 36-inch shower base), the room looks huge. Even without anything on the walls in the shower, it looks so much bigger. I never expected that.

The room looks so much bigger with the shower insert removed.

We'll see what surprises the coming week brings.

Check out the official One Room Challenge featured designers here and all of my fellow guest participants here.

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: WEEK ONE

Are you familiar with the One Room Challenge? Every spring and fall, a group of bloggers each choose one room in their house to renovate in six weeks and once a week post an update of what's happening. The selected bloggers work with brands who provide some support. I'm not doing that.

But I am going to play along as a guest participant and do my own private One Room Challenge and link up other bloggers doing it on their own. If you know me and my habit of not really finishing projects, you know this is possibly insane. On the other hand, maybe having a real deadline will make this happen.

And the project I'm choosing is one I've already mentioned: the downstairs bathroom. To refresh your memory about this room, let me sum up its history. When we looked at the house before we bought it, both Mr. Much More Patient and I said that renovating the bathroom was at the top of the list. Fourteen years and a massive renovation later, the bathroom is the only room in the house that remains untouched. I did paint the pickled pink vanity a couple years ago, but I had no desire to put any other effort into fixing up this room because I knew that no amount of lipstick could pretty up this pig.

Here's the kind of ugly we're talking about. Pickled pink paneled wainscoting and ceiling, more of that horrific wall texture (and if you thought it was bad in the rest of the house, you have no idea how gross it is in a bathroom from a dust/mildew perspective), vinyl floor, pink laminate counter, rope sink, fake gold shower door, plastic shower insert, boob light, ugly lights and more.

One benefit of waiting to redo the bathroom is that we now have a second bathroom upstairs, so the pressure is off as far as showers and running water goes.

Since this is our downstairs bathroom, it serves as our main guest bathroom and of course we use it occasionally as well. Because of that I wanted it to be a little exciting and I wanted to do a few of the things I didn't do in the upstairs bathroom. For instance, I want marble. No, it's not particularly practical, but I've done practical everywhere else in the house and now I just want some pretty, even if it's at the expensive of practical.

So here's the plan.

Go to this post for more details on each element, but I think it's pretty much self explanatory. Bright, light, and everything that the current bathroom is not is pretty much what I'm going for.

So off we go. And why waste time, because this has already happened.

Come back next week for an update on this space, and in the meantime, check out the bloggers officially participating in the One Room Challenge and all of the other folks playing along as guest participants.