The Little White Bungalow Redux

Uh Oh, No Power

Yesterday here in NC we had some very high winds, I think some as high as 55 mph.  We also lost our power!  Yes, it's an inconvenience, but really it's no big deal, RIGHT? I mean no TV, no computer, no lights, no big deal. Well I forgot about a few differences we have in our new house out here in the "country." 

1. Our house is all electric, heater, hot water, everything.
2. The well is electric, GULP.
3. Thankfully our stove is propane (but not the oven!)
4. Our electric service is provided by a small co-op. They do not have an emergency outage number listed in the phone book.  After some frantic searching I was able to find a 24 hour number in the handbook we received when we signed up.

So, it got really cold and really dry (like no water) around here pretty quickly.  Luckily they were able to get the power back on right before it got dark.  Next time we'll definitely be a little better prepared!

The Little White Bungalow.... Country Style?

Hey, we don't live in the Little White Bungalow anymore!  I think I mentioned a while back that we were sort of casually looking for a new place (for many reasons), but were having a hard time envisioning life somewhere else.  Well, we actually found the right place to make it worthwhile!

Although we miss the Little White Bungalow very much, we've found there are lots of benefits to living on 5 acres out in the middle of nowhere, especially when you've just left an urban setting, where if both you and your neighbor stuck a hand out of the window as far as you could, they might actually touch!

That's right, we've moved from the city to the country.  You can look out any direction from our house and you will not see any indication of human life besides our own.  There are many good things about the country like peace, quiet, lots of wildlife, trees and open spaces, and there are some bad things too, like satellite internet, snakes, satellite TV, lizards, no garbage pickup, bugs, and getting your water from a well.  Fortunately none of these things are deal breakers, although no garbage pickup is a pretty big bummer when you have a 14 month old.  I'm getting over it though, and definitely looking forward to cooler weather so everything won't smell so godawful.

Anyway, if you're at all familiar with this houseblog you know that we worked for just about 4 years on the Little White Bungalow and pretty much ended up touching every aspect of the house.  All of the archives that describe this process are still here, basically anything prior to July 2007 is the old house. And the archives will stay up because I've gotten lots of positive feedback from folks in the trenches that have actually found them helpful.  We're really glad we did all the work, it was satisfying on so many levels, but in the end it really simplified the house selling process and we were able to get back all the money we had spent on renovations and then some.

So about this blog, I'd like to continue it even though we don't live in the Little White Bungalow anymore.  To us the Little White Bungalow became more of a concept over time instead of just a place or thing, so I think we'll stick with the name in the title, it fits and it represents home to us.  Our topics may be different than the typical home renovation blog mainly because our house is only 7 years old and it's a log cabin... yes... a log cabin. 

Although we don't have to do a total renovation here there is still lots to be done, mainly in our basement, and I imagine that will be the topic of many upcoming posts.  We also have lots of work to do outside, so much so that we actually bought a tractor, and we have some horses and will soon have some chickens living with us so that should be interesting. In fact one of the main reasons we chose to move out to the country is that we want to do a little farming.  You know the whole homesteading, organic farm, live off the land thing.  We're also looking for ways to be as energy efficient as possible, we hope to install solar and have many other projects floating around in our heads. The reality is we've accepted that no matter where we live, we'll be home improvement enthusiasts whether we like it or not.

Hopefully there are some other rural/farm/ranch/log home type home renovation bloggers out there and you can throw some helpful hints our way, I think we're really going to need them!

Well that's all for now, I'll leave you with some photos of a typical day here on the "farm."

Observations

I really need to know if it's just me or not, but whenever you have someone in doing work on your house do they clean up, or leave a mess? And.. as they get towards the end of the job does the quality of their work kind of drop off?

Every person that has worked on our house in the last year has started off great, but by the time they leave I'm seriously doubting their work.  The latest example of this was the guys who just painted our house.  I know last week I was raving about them, but they totally had me fooled.  For the first week they were here they did excellent work, very neat, caulked very thoroughly, excellent prep etc.  At some point it was decided they were going to be done let's say on a Wednesday.  On Wednesday they were done, but they weren't "done" if you know what I mean.  They didn't prep the porch floor well and only put on one coat of paint (on the porch floor), since they left I discovered they missed putting the finish coat on a door and on some windows.  They also forgot to scrape and clean some of the windows.  I'm pretty disappointed. Also they left a huge mess, they didn't lay down tarps before they scraped and power washed the house (can you say LEAD PAINT people!!!!).  It nearly killed me when I saw that, but they said they would rake up as much as they could and then I planned on bringing in some new topsoil, plants and mulch.  Did they do that?  NO! We're going to call and fill them in on all the issues but please, why do a great job in the beginning and then ruin your reputation by letting things slide at the end?

This really is just the tip of the iceberg, before the painters we had drywallers that called ten minutes before they were going to get started leaving me no time to prep and get ready for what I knew was going to be a huge mess. I only agreed because I was desperate to get the work done and we would have had to wait a month if I said no. Let's just say that the highlight of the clean up was when I ended up having to wipe down over 300 individual books by hand. JOY! Or the attic insulators that left huge piles of yucky insulation in the muddy puddles in front of our house.  Or the granite installers who didn't warn me that they were going to have to cut holes for the sink in our new granite countertop while in the kitchen.  That was great, they filled our whole house with sooty black dust that I was cleaning up for months.

So, has anyone else have this problem? If so how do you handle it?

Ants...Everywhere

Remember how I was waxing poetic about our bug free home and how wonderful it was.  Well, we have a problem.  It seems when the painters were here they somehow unleashed the entire sugar ant population of the southeast US on our kitchen. It must of happened when they opened the kitchen window for the first time in like 30 years. It's disgusting.  I've had them before but never like this. I'm not quite sure what to do.  Anyone have any suggestions on how to get rid of them? I've tried the little ant motels but they don't seem to be working. 

Trying to Save a Little Energy

One of the home improvements we've made in the past year was sealing our crawl space and blowing in over 12 inches of new insulation in the attic. D also did some air sealing in the house, insulating and blocking any holes in the attic plus caulking all of the floor vents and switch plates.  Because we've had such a weird winter (warm through January and then unseasonably cold in Feb) it's been tough to compare apples to apples with previous utility bills. Also, with the baby we've kept the house warmer, and run the washer, dryer and dishwasher a lot more than we used to.  BUT, I can say overall that since installing the new heater and duct work in 2005, replacing all of our kitchen appliances (during the kitchen renovation), buying a new front load washer and dryer, changing all our light bulbs to the energy saving fluorescents, plus adding all of the insulation and sealed crawlspace this year our heating bills are extremely reasonable compared to some of our neighbors with similar size/age houses. Our most expensive utility bill for either heating or cooling has never gone over $150 and here in NC we have months of scorching, humid heat in the summer.

To have the insulation blown in the attic and have the crawl space sealed (a thankless job that took 3 guys, 3 days of crawling around in a creepy crawly space with 3 ft of head room) it cost us around $1600. My guess is that it'll probably take 4 or 5 years for it to pay for itself.  Is it worth it?  Well, aside from the savings on our utility bills there are some other great benefits I've noticed.  The floors have been much warmer this winter and the house feels much tighter overall. It could just be my imagination but the house also seems to smell better and stay cleaner longer. Another added benefit is we have hardly any bugs in the house anymore, the camel cricket, cockroach and spider population under the house seemed to disappear overnight. Here are some pictures of the crawlspace post-sealing.

Unfortunately we have discovered one problem. Typically when you purchase a new heating and cooling system for an older home they sell you a little larger system than you would need for a newer house of similar square footage.  The reason being that most old houses are really leaky so you'll need a little larger than normal system to heat and cool your home.  Now that our house isn't so leaky anymore our system is larger than what we need for our house.  This creates a problem, when your system is over sized for your house it runs for too short a time and the house heats up or cools off too quickly instead of staying a consistent temperature. We find the house seems to go from extreme to extreme most of the time.  Great huh.  Sometimes it seems like you just can't win!

The Little White Bungalow is Green!

The Little White Bungalow has been transformed, what was once a boring but cute white bungalow with navy blue shutters has now been returned to her original 1920's glory.

Before

After

I love how you can really see the exposed rafter tails, it's crazy how many little details I'd missed until the house was painted.  Our painters were excellent, we found them after they painted this house around the corner (one we looked at with the intention of possibly buying). Last night we were discussing how the inside of the house feels different with the new outside colors, it's kind of like  having a whole new house.

When the painters took down the storm windows it transformed the look of the house so much we decided to just leave them off.  The old storms never worked right anyway. Interestingly enough it seems to be a trend in our neighborhood, I've noticed quite a few recently painted houses that have left their windows unencumbered once painted.  Now you can really see the 4 over 1 windows and the old wavy glass. I hadn't realized how the dingy old storms and screens had darkened the inside of the house, now everything seems so clean and bright.

Painting the house was one of the final 2 projects we had on the list for the LWB.  The final project is to have a cement floor laid in our screened in porch.  Calls have been made, I'm just hoping someone calls me back.

Bungalowin' Babystyle

So we've been cheating on the Little White Bungalow, we've looked at the Little Red Log Cabin, and the Medium Green Bungalow but none can hold a flame to our beloved LWB.  How could we even consider leaving the LWB? Unfortunately after three years and a lot of hard work we are butting up against a real deal breaker...a serious lack of storage and space.

Our bungalow was built as housing for mill workers, it had no bathroom and was originally heated by wood fired stoves.  The people that lived here back in the day probably had a Sunday outfit, one pair of shoes a few shirts and pants and if it was a woman maybe a dress or two. That translates into a need for one closet, maybe two. People just didn't own a lot of stuff back then, especially people working long hours for low pay in a cotton mill. So unfortunately for us that means our almost 1400 square foot bungalow has 2 real closets, and they're tiny.  Let me illustrate. This closet is mine, the previous owners did a brilliant job of maximizing storage in this tiny closet, 2 rows to hang clothes and top to bottom shelves in the back.  This frightening mess is D's closet.  I think the picture says it all, it's the bigger of the two but hopeless.  There is a third closet  in the LWB, it's in the blue bedroom, in reality it's only half a closet though, because the other half is shared with the bathroom on the other side of the wall.  There was absolutely no storage in our bathroom when we moved in and no space to create any, so, we just knocked a hole in the wall.  Hey, guess where we store all our linens?  Over the washer/dryer on the enclosed/backporch/pantry/laudry room, what's wrong with that you ask?  How'd you like pull out what you thought was a fresh, clean set of sheets for your bed.  You unfold them and start to put them on the bed when you notice little brown flecks of mouse poop everywhere and a giant brown stain in the middle of the sheet. What a pleasure to realize that a family of mice has been using your clean sheets as a nice warm nest all winter.  YUCK!!!

Lack of space has always been a challenge for us here but we were always able to stay on top of it with lots of trips to Goodwill and by frequently putting out lots of free stuff curbside for the legions of trash pickers in our neighborhood (us included, hello backporch door!).  That was until we had this happy little baby.  We have more baby s_i_ (not just the poopy kind) in our house than I know what to do with.  Honestly, I have been very conscious since the beginning about what we bought and what people gave us for the baby, and compared to some I'm sure we have a minimal amount of stuff....but holy smokes!  The plastic!  Toys, bottles, strollers, swings, etc!  What do you other old house people do with kid stuff?  And it's not just the space issues, have you ever tried baby proofing a house that has a piece of furniture with a sharp edge on every inch of wall space PLUS hardwood floors.  Can you say giant goose egg! And there's no room to crawl and play, our tiny living room looks like a day care center all of the time because there's no place to store the toys. This is what our living room used to look like, and here it is now. Don't you just love the layered rug look? 

Anyway, it's really not that bad, but some days it's really frustrating.  We can make it work now but as the babe gets bigger (and at the rate he's growing it won't be long) we'll need to think long and hard about where we're going to live.  It's so ironic that the minute you get your house just the way you always wanted it you find it's time to move.  All I know is that if we do sell the LWB someone is going to get a peach of a house with a lot of loving care put into her restoration!

The Squirrel

On Friday I was sitting on the couch in the living room when I heard the screen door open.  My initial reaction was "great, D's home early!"  I waited and waited but the door never opened.  I peaked through the curtain on the front door window and was greeted with the view of a furry belly.  A squirrel was splayed across the screen door. I opened the door and he quickly scurried away.  Later, I left to go the the grocery store. Just when I got to the car the squirrel ran out from behind the mailbox and scooted up the screen door.  He climbed all the way to the top of the door and balanced himself on the top. It almost seemed like he was trying to find a way into the house. I called D and left a message to warn him, I didn't want him to come home, open the screen door and have a squirrel drop on his head.

All morning I've been hearing little scratches and knocks, it appears the squirrel has definitely taken up residence on our porch.  Right now he's hanging out on one of the pillars under a bush.  D thought I was crazy until I captured this picture of him by the mailbox. I think he's a baby.  In a way I want to feed him or encourage him to stay around, he seems sort of lonely!  I know it would probably be a mistake but he's hard to resist.

Update:
It now appears that he is hanging off the pillar by his front paws.  I went around the corner and discovered he's sitting in a little nest he created.  See if you can find him in the pictures below.

Extreme Fireplace Makeover

When we realized we were really going to have a baby we weren't sure where to put the nursery.  Our house has 2 bedrooms and one weird room we refer to as the parlour, it's 10x10, has 3 doors to different rooms, no closet and a fireplace.  If we used the 2nd bedroom we would no longer have a guestroom, but the parlour is just such a strange room it's hard to envision as a nursery.  Thankfully the previous owners of our house had the parlour set up as a nursery when we bought the house and their vision saved us.  The only thing holding us back was the truly ugly fireplace.

Fireplace interpretation by previous owner.

We were using this room as a den, the plywood cover had been removed from the fireplace.

This is the rest of the room.

When we moved into the house we discovered the fireplace was decidedly ugly once we removed the plywood covering the previous owners had installed.  We painted the mantle with the giant cut out and lived with the cheesey fake brick. Redoing the fireplace was definitely on our list of things to do, but with everything else we needed to do it was a low priority....that is until it came time to create a nursery.  It very quickly rose to the top of the list.

When we remodeled the kitchen we bought antique majolica tile from Uraguay on e-bay.  The tiles we chose were part of an old fireplace surround, we used the field tiles for our kitchen backsplash, and planned to use the rest to cover the fake brick on the parlour fireplace.

With the tile in hand and ready to install we headed out to Home Depot one yucky winter Saturday morning.  We did the actual fireplace/mantel design totally on the fly in the lumber aisle.  The way we came up with the design is so sketchy I'm shocked it turned out as good as it did.  So, if you have a fireplace you'd like to reface this is how we did it.

off comes the mantle and surround, it's now living in our backyard as a plantstand.

The fun of owning an old house, this stuff was all trapped behind the mantle.

This is the fireplace sans mantle/surround.  Both of our fireplaces were originally chimneys only, when it was built the house had wood stoves and the black circle you see is where the flue was connected.  At some point in the house's history someone opened up the chimneys to create fireplaces. Our house actually has 3 chimneys for the 3 original woodburning stoves.

tile installed - we were short 2 tiles so the top looks kind of funny.

the face of the fireplace involved layering wood.  First D installed 2 1x8's on either side.

The fake beadboard paneling was left over from the kitchen remodel, it was a last minute addition.  Around the the tile we used decorative molding with carved corner pieces.

On top of the 1x8's D installed 4x4 fence posts to give the surround more depth.  They were a pain to paint, you need to let the dry out before you paint them and they require lots of priming. 

D put in another 1x8 across the front of the surround and a 1x8 across the top to form the mantle.

This is the finished product after a lot of caulk, primer and paint.

When we bought the house we were told both fireplaces were working, we've never used either, but honestly after our redo I'd be hesitant to actually use it.  When working with molding like crown molding, or when doing a project like this we've started using Loctite adhesive, the stuff is amazing, you don't have to use as many nails, and it's helpful when your working with really warped or unlevel surfaces (like every surface in our 86 year old house).  I know some purists are probably gagging on their coffee right now, but what can I say, it works for us!

The Little White Bungalow One Year Later

1. We finished the kitchen, unfortunately as you can see it didn't take long for clutter to take over.

Before

After
2.We redid the fireplace in the parlour.

3. We had the crawlspace under our house sealed.

4. We bought a new couch.

5.We installed a new window in the bathroom and a new closet door.

6. Lucy (aka Lil Half Dead) passed away at the age of 16.

7.We created a nursery.

8. For this little guy who is almost 6 months old.

Boy times flies!