McBerkoBlog

We figure we'll be busy enough for a while with our new project, our best yet! Ruth Ann McBerkowitz was born 9/4/09 at 9:12 a.m., 6 lbs 12 oz.

The nursery has come a long way , but it's finally ready for a baby. There are a few minor things left to do (let me know if you see a small white wood table lamp base anywhere), but it's close enough to done that we'd be good to go if the baby decides to show up early. Color in first pic looks slightly closer to real color than the other two, on my monitor anyway.

Some furniture just doesn't work in the new old house, so we've craiglisted some items. Our fabulous previous bedroom set, Bill-made, just sold to an NC State student whom I'd like to think will take great care of it and keep it forever and ever. He didn't have room for the matching armoire, however. We have that plus our former dining room shelving unit on craigslist. If anyone's interested in these, let us know!

Still needs a stone top, but the rest of this cabinet is done. Love it!

Bill rocks. I last posted about our closet in May ( here ), before we diverted all attention to getting walls and ceilings up in the other areas. Now that those are ready for decorating, Bill's back to the closet to turn it from a room into a functional closet. Immediately inside the door, there are shoe shelves along the bottom and larger shelves along the top. The very top shelf goes all around the room, with tons more shelves on the back wall and a place for laundry baskets underneath. On the long wall, the first hanging area will have double rods, the one towards the back just a single rod. Can't wait until Bill gets this all painted and finished off (no more painting for me!) and we can move all our clothes in. Our bed and dresser will be delivered tomorrow and Saturday, so once this closet is done, our bedroom will be fully livable.

Another room complete! This bathroom was not in good shape (love the vinyl parquet floors!), and we didn't think the hose attached to the faucet was a good shower. :) Amazingly, the original clawfoot tub cleaned up (it's practically Dad and Eric kitchen clean), but everything else is new. New and not yucky.

Crossing one more room off the list! Well... OK, not quite done like a Scrum "done done", but all the construction, trim, painting, etc. is done. Now for the fun stuff, getting all the furniture and decorations in place. I almost forgot how ugly this room was at the beginning, and this was one of the nicer rooms! Two doorways (why?), no doors, trim partially painted, and the infamous mirrors hung in a row high on one wall.

Save for a weekend in Asheville celebrating our 10th anniversary, work continues slowly but steadily. Bill built a cabinet for the upstairs hall bath, which should be finished today. We put up towel bars, picture frames, etc., so only need the shower curtain (on order) to be 100% FINISHED with that room. Bill also made a built-in cabinet for the end of the upstairs hall. Pic below shows me priming the basic structure yesterday (side note: no hassling me about not being on a ladder at 8 mos pregnant, I am fine!). Those top three shelves will have glass doors, and lights over each shelf. Bottom area will have solid wood doors. For the open counter area in between, we're hoping to find some remnant granite or other stone. I can't wait to see it finished - only a few months ago, this area looked like this . Speaking of... break time's over; time to go paint the first coat of white on that cabinet and surrounding trim...

The original clawfoot tub now has a new faucet and a shower!, which gives us a full working bath upstairs. We first thought the tub would require professional reglazing, but it turns out that some sanding/painting on the outside and a serious cleaning on the inside was all it needed. Shower conversion kit arrived last week and Bill set about the super-fun task of removing all the old parts and hooking everything up. Boy, does he love plumbing! Old faucet and previous "shower", a short length of garden hose with a plastic sprayer on the end: New faucet (which is so bright and shiny, pic doesn't do it justice, love it): Ready for shower curtains and final touches: It did take 5 trips to Lowes and 3 trips to Home Depot IN TWO DAYS (damn those old, non-standard plumbing sizes), but it works! In other news, I think the second color on the hallway is going to work (first one = too beige), so Bill will start on trim this week.

Do you know what this picture means?: That's right - there is now A/C (and heat) in our second floor! HVAC guys were here Wed-Fri installing a heat pump/A/C unit in the attic. We were really pleased with them, less so with the (expensive) electrician who had to hook everything up. Bonus: upgrading from the standard unit to the energy efficient one cost $1,200 extra but qualifies for a $1,500 tax credit . Thanks for paying part of the A/C, government!

We were all excited this week to finish the nursery. After finishing the final coat on the trim, we removed the blue painters tape from the walls. Sheets of the wall paint came off with the tape. In all the years we've been painting, I've never seen that before. Maybe related to the humidity when we were painting? The trim itself is fine, but we've got a LOT of touch-ups to do this weekend. Hopefully scraping, sanding, and touch-up paint will do the trick.

Bill's been plugging away on the nursery while I've been alternately sick and out of town. Last weekend, he added a ton of shelves to the closet so there's more storage in this small room. We're sure an older baby will see it as an exciting ladder, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. The top shelf you see in the picture that wraps across the corner has a matching second shelf above it. Bill also finished painting the walls this week, a very pale lavender (slightly less pale than the pic, but barely so). It's a bit lighter than I was shooting for, but will do - very calm. Bill's finishing up the trim on baseboards, door, and closet door today, then hopefully we can get all that trim and the shelves painted this weekend. Much closer to a room! Final step will be the trim on the windows, but we'll have to find replacement window weights first. (If anyone has suggestions about good sources for those, let us know!)

Visitors no longer have to relive college apartment life by crashing on a mattress on the floor! We had a bed frame when this mattress was in our previous house, but ditched it in the move since the plastic feet on the metal frame were broken and would have destroyed the wood floors. This new bed was delivered yesterday. Cheapo from Overstock, but was just what I was looking for - old fashioned looking metal bed. Now if only we could find a bed for our own bedroom. We might end up moving into this one for a while. Unlike ours, it has a TV, a closet, a ceiling fan, and now a bed off the floor. Exciting day ahead of us - finish sanding and priming the nursery. (Sanding, most hated part of project; priming, looks like a room again.) Possibly the same for the hall, which we finished mudding last night around 10. Thrilling life, I know!

This 5'6" x 13' area was an odd storage area off the upstairs hallway. It appears to have been an open porch/balcony at one point, with sides walled off long ago. Under these boards we found the original exterior siding along two walls, and tons of dirt, birds' nests, and general black guck in the ceiling. Eric drew the lucky straw for the ceiling demo - fun day for him with all that raining down on him for a few hours. Old door was walled off, new door added to open from (what will be) the master bathroom. Paint the trim, add shelves and rods, and we'll have ourselves a closet.

This may not be the most exciting thing to you, but there's a DOOR on our upstairs bathroom!! Yay! That's the clawfoot tub inside the door - moving it is what allowed Bill to put the door back on. The tub is just wide enough that it can't fit through the door frame, so the door has been off this room since we started work on it several months ago. Some paint on the trim around the door (inside the bath), hooking up the clawfoot tub shower conversion kit, and we'll have a full working bath on this floor!

If you've been following this blog, you've seen some before and during pics of the 2nd floor hall bath. Here are some pics a bit closer to done - floor tile is in, trim is up, sink and toilet are installed. Bill started sanding and spray painting the exterior of the old clawfoot tub yesterday, so hopefully we'll get that into the bathroom soon(ish). That will allow us to put the door back on (tub is too big to fit through the doorway), and we'll be back to a full working bathroom! PS, When I took the pics for this post, I took a close-up of the tile. Once I downloaded the pic, I realized how crazy dirty that floor is, so you'll have to zoom and/or squint instead. I'm happy we found this tile though. I thought vintage-style tile would be expensive and have to be ordered online somewhere, but this white and black pinwheel tile was pretty cheap and came from Lowes. Luck!

This was the room with two doorways and no doors. The room had (destroyed) plaster underneath drywall with caulked seams (why bother with that pesky mudding/taping/sanding process!), and trim that was partially primed (got bored while painting so just stopped?). After Dad and Eric ripped everything out, we redid the electrical and insulation, framed in a new closet, and started on drywall. Now that we have so many rooms in progress, it will take a while longer to finish everything, but hopefully it won't be too long before this looks more like a finished room. Not that it's a big rush - we have until approximately 9/10 to finish this project. :)

Been a while since the last post, busy few weeks. We finally moved, and now own only one house - hooray! Dad and Eric were in town for over a week, first helping us move, then working tirelessly every day on house projects. Three new areas are now demo'd - the baby's room, the upstairs hallway, and the upstairs storage area that will become the walk-in closet for the master bedroom. They're also partially reconstructed - re-insulated, new electrical, and partially drywalled. Thank goodness Dad and Eric were here, because it would have taken us a full month to do that much work! They toughed it out through the demo of plaster walls in the bedroom, much easier than expected except for how heavy all that plaster is. They thought pulling the billion staples from the old ceiling tiles was the worst project (agreed, that sucks), until Eric started demo on the ceiling in the closet and got covered with dirt, birds' nests (again???), pine needles, and all sorts of other nasty g

Downstairs, the air return is moved from the middle of the entryway floor (weird!) to under the staircase. Upstairs, a weird area was patched with reclaimed heart pine.

The floors were refinished last week, and they look great! We left both the oak downstairs and the heart pine upstairs unstained. The pine especially is fabulous, better than I expected! Some before and after shots in this and the next few posts.