One Room Challenge

One of the blogs I follow, My Notting Hill, is participating in a One Room Challenge. Twenty bloggers each pick one room in their homes to transform over the course of six weeks. I thought I'd play along to give myself some motivation to push through the bathroom renovation and finally get something done. So here's what I'm starting with:

This is currently what you see from the hallway. It's where the vanity will go. 

 This is opposite the vanity. I think I will be installing Ikea cabinets here, or perhaps a piece of furniture like a buffet or console.

This is the shower side.

This is the toilet side, though clearly lacking a toilet.

I'll try and update every Sunday on the progress I made the previous week. A lot of the work that needs to be done is obvious, like finishing the tile and installing a toilet and sink. But there is a bit of decorator-y kind of stuff I want to get done, too. We'll see how far I get in 6 weeks!

Once upon a(n embarrassingly long) time ago, I started tiling the floor of our hall bathroom. Two years later, it still sat undone, yet ridiculously close to completion. I only had a small area just inside the doorway left to do, which required a few cuts.

I don't know why I found cutting the mosaics so intimidating, but it was enough of a problem for me to stall out on this project for two years. I ended up just popping the tiles off the sheets and holding each individual tile in my hand (you could use pliers if you're into "safety" or whatever) and grinding it against the side of the spinning saw blade. The cuts aren't perfect, but they'll do. I only had about 20 tiles that needed to be cut, so it didn't take too long. 

Now that the floor is laid and cleaned up, I can grout! Hopefully it'll get done faster than the tiling did.

*As a small defense, tiling is not something you can do for 5 minutes here or there when you've got a small break. With mortar, you've got to have a block of time to devote to tiling, and that just doesn't happen. Ever.

Kitchen planning: Inspiration

I'm pretty obsessive thorough with my research, and as a result, I think I've seen just about every kitchen picture ever published on the internet. Here are some that I really love. 

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I guess my tastes run pretty traditional but not overly fussy. Homey and comfortable. Grandma's kitchen without the red gingham. Streamlined farmhouse? Updated shaker? Country without the kitsch? I think I have a clear idea of the direction I'm heading with it, I just don't have the right descriptive words for it.

More junk for the house

I am so glad I took a risk and bid, sight unseen, on a classroom full of chalkboards. They're 3/8" thick, silky smooth, heavy as hell, and positively gorgeous. We had one casualty when removing them from the walls, but we still have plenty for our project (and we took the larger broken chunks for practice runs, so it's not all lost). 

Removal was a lot easier than I expected. Some of the boards had been adhered with mastic and some with plaster. After we removed the quarter-round molding, the slates with mastic just leaned out - the mastic had long since deteriorated beyond usefulness. The ones with plaster required a tiny bit of prying around the edges. We got all 12 panels down in about an hour and a half. I spent the rest of the afternoon removing wood trim while Tom enlisted some help carrying the slate down to the vehicle. We were unfortunately not able to bring all the trim with us, but I think we'll be able to use what we brought home. 

One of the chalkboards held a sweet message from a former graduate:

Behind the trim I found the signature of a construction worker, along with the place and date:

Clyde Wamsley 

Cleves (OH) Dec 30, 1941 

The drive home was stressful, but we made it with everything intact. So now we've got about 1,000 pounds of slate sitting outside in a borrowed trailer. Tom is supposed to be getting some help bringing it inside this afternoon. Now I just need to get my rear in gear and get some stuff done downstairs so I can actually use some of the crap treasures I've accumulated!

Kitchen planning: The window seat

Like a lot of old houses, our windows are very low, which makes kitchen planning difficult. In the area that was originally the kitchen (the in-law suite in our current plan), there are 3 windows and 4 doors, making an efficient modern kitchen layout all but impossible. I might want my kitchen to look old, but it's got to work! 

Moving the kitchen to what was originally the dining room helped alleviate some of this problem - the dining room has a bank of three windows that is high enough to accommodate modern cabinets. That's where we've placed the sink in our plan. But there is another window near the corner that drops to about 18" from the floor like the rest of the windows in the house. I decided to place an L-shaped window seat there instead of standard cabinets. I hate corner cabinets, so I'm actually thankful for the low window height. Like the rest of my ideas, I always think it's a little unorthodox until I start doing research and find out it's not an original idea after all. 

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Our window seat is between the sink and range in prime prep location, but I'm imagining a few little helpers standing on the window seat to help with cleaning extra cake batter off the mixing bowls and spoons (don't worry - there will be a 30" cabinet between the seat and the stovetop, safely out of reach of little hands). Construction will be similar to the built-ins in the girls' bedroom - over-the-fridge cabinets outfitted with ikea drawers to maximize storage potential. 

If I discover that I really need more counter space in that area, I've toyed with the idea of adding drop-leaf countertops on the ends of the cabinets. When not in use, they'd lay against the cabinet side neatly out of the way. Again, apparently there's nothing new under the sun. My novel idea has been done!

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Fortunately, that's an easy thing to retrofit, so I'm going to wait to find out if it's necessary. I've already made this into a 10-year project, so what's a little more time?

Kitchen planning: Lighting

The plan for the kitchen lighting has admittedly been a difficult one. I started with one basic premise: no recessed lights. You wouldn't believe the amount of pushback those three words can cause. Apparently not many people go this route for their kitchen renovations and information on lighting a kitchen without recessed cans was hard to come by. I finally found some general lighting guidelines that might help:

30 lumens per square foot for ambient lighting

75 lumens per square foot for task lighting

50 lumens per square foot for lighting at table

So for my kitchen, which is roughly 230 square feet, I figured on 4 general lighting fixtures (100 watts each), one central light over the table/island, and wall sconces by the windows, along with under-cabinet lights wherever possible (plus the vent hood will have its own lights). This will provide plenty of light from different directions, minimizing problematic shadows and providing flexibility for different situations. Having survived just fine for several years with nothing but a desk lamp for lighting in my kitchen, I am of the mind that this is probably way overkill, but I'd rather have the ability to turn on fewer lights than to need more. Once I had the quantity sorted, I spent some time with the floor plan to locate just where they'd go. 

Now that I had the quantity and location nailed down, I could do the sourcing. To Craigslist!

I found a matching pair of Art Deco skyscraper shades for $60. 

They coordinated well with another group of lights I bought previously (also off Craigslist - are you sensing a theme?) for the living room, these Rejuvenation fixtures:

Retail price: $445(!) I paid $200 for 4 Art Deco fixtures with shades, one spare shade, plus one schoolhouse light with its fixture!

A little bit of research showed that the smaller shades are fairly easy to find, so I was ok with trying to source 2 more later. Unfortunately, one of them broke on its way into the house, so I have to find 3 more. 

I am still not sure what specific chandelier or sconces or undercabinet lighting I will use. What I do know is that the sconces will be mounted on the window trim between windows. There's about 7" of space between each window, the perfect amount of room for a light. Can't picture a sconce on the window trim? Here's an example:

Gardenweb user aokat15

Since they are supposed to serve as task lighting for the sink and countertop, mine will probably be something with a metal shade to direct light downward rather than out. But at least the locations are set, so I can wire up the boxes and wait for the Craigslist gods to send me a sign.

Kitchen planning: countertops

In a world where I don't have to worry about things as bourgeois as money, my ideal countertop would be soapstone. It's matte, silky smooth, heat-tolerant, chemically non-reactive, and positively gorgeous. But we're not quite in that world, so the dollar signs matter.

I got the idea to use the slate from an old pool table while perusing Craigslist one evening. I saw pool tables being offered for $100-150 each. Since slate has a lot of the same properties as soapstone, I was intrigued at the idea of getting the soapstone look for a fraction of the price. A few searches later, I discovered that I was not the first to have thought of this idea. Here are a couple of reclaimed pool tables used as countertops:

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I'd probably need about 3 pool tables for my kitchen countertops, but I was worried about matching colors. Pool table slate can come in gray, green, purple, or black, and there's no way to know what you're getting unless the felt is already off the table. And relying on a Craigslist photo for an accurate color depiction? Yeah, right.

But then I saw old chalkboard slate being offered for $25 each for a 4'x5' board and the frugal hamsters in my brain started on their wheels. Thanks to Google, I was able to find a couple of examples of people repurposing chalkboards for countertops, too. Basically they treated the chalkboards as giant tiles, mortaring them to a cement-board substrate. The picture isn't great, but this was a DIY installation:

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This one looks to be a professional installation, but the countertops still began as chalkboards:

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Less than $100 for countertops sounded pretty appealing. But then a miracle happened. I found an auction for a school that is being demolished. They were auctioning off the contents of entire rooms at a time. And as luck would have it, those classrooms had giant expanses of chalkboard.

There's an additional chalkboard not pictured that is included

I took a gamble that it was slate and not a modern chalkboard substitute. I bid - and won! - an auction for about 40 linear feet of chalkboard. For less than $50. Yes, fabrication will take time and a little more money (since the chalkboard will have to rest on cement board and not the cabinets directly), but it's DIY-able and I think it will be worth the hassle. (Did I mention that these chalkboards are still attached to the classroom walls, and we are responsible for their removal? More on that later!) And since I'm getting way more material than I can use in my kitchen, there's always the possibility of recouping some of that money on Craigslist.

The main concern is, of course, how it will perform as a countertop. There isn't a whole lot of information about the long-term longevity of thin sheets of slate in that situation (though thicker slate slabs have been used as worktops for centuries), so it's a little bit of a gamble. The owner of that DIY installation above says that she still loves her counters two years later, so there's hope. Even if they only last 5 years, that still gives us five years to save for the soapstone I really want.

Exit question: I already know I'm off my rocker. The question is, how far?