The Interior DIYer
Architecture

One Room Challenge Spring 2020 – Week Five

With all that has happened in America [and Canada, and around the world] this past week, the usual weekly link-up for the One Room Challenge won’t be happening this week out of respect of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’ll be sharing my Week Five progress quietly here on my blog, but I won’t be sharing anything on social media as it would feel flippant.

We’re also starting the conversation about race and colour with Cora. I’ll be honest that we’ve never consciously brought it up with her before, but after much reading this week I’m realizing that is not the right way to go about it. In my innocence, the colour of someones skin is not a factor for me [not in a I don’t see colour way], but again I’m realizing talking about it with Cora is a much bigger deal. I’m researching and educating myself as a white person as how to best bring this conversation into our home to make our three-year-old understand what’s happening in the world in a way that is appropriate for her right now.

Regarding this weeks progress with my ORC, above is where I left off last week, right as I was realizing I’d have to pull everything down and start over again. Why? Because …

  • The wood slats on the walls weren’t deep enough to sufficiently house insulation nor strong enough to hold drywall
  • There needed to be another layer between the brick and the insulation. Despite my best efforts to Google “should I put stuff on brick before I insulate my super old, wonkey house?” didn’t advise I need to put a Tyvek breathable barrier up first, as advised by Dad DIYer

So down everything came [as seen below] and I started over again. I wasn’t upset about having to start over as I prefer to do things the right way, even if it means taking longer. But I was mentally exhausted as just to get to this point took a lot of work.

There was a surprisingly large amount of work between then and where I am now. First of all, I had to rip the wooden supports off the wall. It was easy on the front wall, but the side wall proved tricky as the slats extended all the way up to the first floor. My reciprocating saw came in handy and with a dose of PMS last weekend, I blasted the supports off the wall.

Next I had to deal with what I now refer to as The Trench; the wooden floors you see are new [about 7 years old], and whoever put in the wood floors placed them ontop of the old wooden floors and butted them up against the original skirting boards. So when I removed the skirting boards [using brute force, rage, a giant crowbar and a reciprocating saw], there was a 4-inch gap around the room which was about 2 inches deep. It was all filled with solid plaster, so that had to all be dug out and despite wearing hardy gloves, I still have plaster under my nails.

Once the plaster and old skirting boards were cleared out, I reused the old wooden slats that were on the exterior walls and placed them in The Trench to level out the floor ahead of creating a stud wall for the exterior walls.

I applied the Tyvek using construction adhesive in three bands across the two exterior walls and used red Tuck Tape to help secure the seams. Over two nights I made the stud walls for both exterior walls and anchored them in place. I had done all the measuring and rough sketches for the design of the stud wall, which Dad DIYer perfected for how best to place the drywall in a way that wouldn’t have even occurred to me #InfantDIYer.

After finalizing the second stud wall last night [I’m thanking my habit of getting Cora used to loud noises when she was a baby as she slept through my excessive hammering and sawing], I had some energy left so I added one behemoth pack of insulation to the room before calling it a night.

Your eyes are not deceiving you. That window is crooked AF. The stud framing accentuates it.

It kind of looks like I’ve done nothing, but I’ve gotten so much done this past week. I’m quite proud of myself, if I’m allowed to be that honest. I’m especially proud that I didn’t fail miserably with constructing the stud walls and put them in place all by myself. Just me. MEEEEEEE! I feel I can actually claim the title of Interior DIYer now. I’ve been waiting so long to be able to work on projects like this.

My Week Five feeling summarized into one photo:

Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five
Week Six – Week Seven – Week Eight

Architecture

One Room Challenge Spring 2020 – Week Four!

It’s week four of my One Room Challenge and this week has strange feelings. It’s a feeling that starts off with look how much I’ve done! that quickly melts into holy shit, I’m half way through and I don’t even have drywall up yet, and then a ton of anxiety rises up inside of me when I realized I’ve gone one step forward and need to take two steps back. I’ll share what I got done this week, both good and bad …

I built up the courage to take off the window trim on the front wall of our front room. I found it easiest to remove the top corners first, followed by everything else. I also worked on removing the skirting board, but whoever installed the new wood floors butted the floors up against the skirting board [instead of taking off the skirting boards, putting down the flooring and then replacing the skirting boards], so the original skirting splintered and shattered as I tried to pry it off. There were many words uttered.

Last Sunday we hired a U-Haul trailer and collected some pieces for the front room. The most amazing piece being the secondhand tufted Victorian-style couch that I found on Kijiji. It. Is. Amazing:

We got a lot collected on Sunday including drywall, insulation, vapour barrier, tools and a few other essential ingredients. They all went into the back of our rented U-Haul – including the couch – and off we went.

I then built up the existing studs with leftover wood, insulated and tacked up the vapour barrier before realizing I need to rip it all off and start over again; the studs I magic-ed together won’t be secure enough so I’m going to build a new 2×4 frame to sit inside two exterior walls insulate and drywall. I had a sneaking feeling a few days ago that I’d need to start over … One step forward, two steps back, but at least I’ll be doing it properly?

Don’t bother getting me a glass. I’ll drink straight from the bottle, thank you very much.

Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five
Week Six – Week Seven – Week Eight

Dining room

Slow design – curtain rods

If your first reaction to reading the headline of this post was, “wow, it must be a slow news day if you’re writing about curtain rods”, then you wouldn’t be far off.

There are so many little projects I want to start on our house, but I never know where to start. I am not afraid to admit I don’t have a clear design plan yet for our home, and for some reason I feel guilty. Maybe from seeing bloggers move into a home and within a month, their whole house is redesigned. No thank you, that’s not me, and I’m learning it’s okay to be doing design slowly. One of those slow design decisions recently was looking for a beautiful set of curtain rods for our dining room.

By this point you will probably not be surprised to hear that I first looked for a long time for some curtain rods secondhand online. I searched and searched, but I gave up because the secondhand curtain rods I did find online were …

  • Cheap, low quality or made of plastic
  • Wildly overpriced [some people need their heads checked]
  • Didn’t fit our window dimensions
  • Couldn’t find more than one of the same style
  • Straight up fugly

I tried my best, I did. But I gave up and started looking online for some alternatives. If I was going to buy new curtain rods, I wanted them to be sleek and really lovely. I found the brass finish Umbra Cappa [which sounds like a fraternity from Monsters University] curtain rods from Home Depot at $30. I took a chance and ordered two rods; one for each window in our dining room.

We collected them from our local Home Depot and I immediately hung one set up by our basement door. I hung our IKEA curtains [I don’t think they sell them anymore so I won’t try and link to them] and I think they look so perfect. It’s a really subtle addition having brass curtain rods in our dining room, but a detail I completely love.

I will conclude this post with a quote from Robert:

“You’re going to hang curtains? But we already have blinds on the windows … Isn’t that enough?”

Bless.