Anchoring Down on the Homefront

In the process of fixing up our first home. Located in the city of Long Beach, CA, this colonial craftsman was built in 1921 and very little has been done since to maintain it proper. As I attempt to tackle projects DIY style I've realized there's an endless amount of overly boring tutorials, an overwhelming amount of inspiration, and what seems to be (in my opinion) a shortage of sites where the kind of projects and designs I like can coexist together in an affordable fashion. (Apparently I have expensive taste.) Not to mention, I'm really interested in the historical aspects of old homes, but much of what I read puts me to sleep. Ultimately, I want to create the kind of website I wish I could find. I hope it helps others who may be finding themselves in a similar situation - fixing up an old house, limited on budget but not imagination. We're making do with the resources we have, but I don't believe that means the style should have to suffer. I'd also like to document the journey in general and share what I learn on the history front, in what will hopefully be an entertaining manner - at the very least keep you awake. Why call it Homefront Anchor you ask? To simply pay homage to the port city that I call my home. Welcome aboard!

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 I realize I've been posting a number of photos showing the house in a state of disaster - a world of before with nothing after. The intent is not to make you feel hopeless like when you watch a marathon of The Walking Dead, I'm just trying to get it together over here. I promise I'll make it up to you dear readers. In the meantime, here's a teaser of some pantry goodness to come. 

 The first is a piece gifted to us by our friend Paul Rentler. You know those people who seem to be good at almost every creative endeavor they step foot in? He's like that. Art, music, photography, design - I'm like dude, do you think you could save some of that talent for the rest of us common folk? Anyway, I like to refer to this piece as our pantry mascot. Every time I look at this thing it makes me smile.

 The second is fabric I picked up to make some curtains. I know chevron stripes are all the rage and while I don't normally gravitate towards design trends, this actually works really well for the room. Also, have any of you stepped foot into a JoAnn's Fabric store? Holy smokes, their selection is a trip to bummer land. Between being sick and unwilling to drive anywhere further where cooler fabrics surely awaited, I literally dug around JoAnn's for over an hour until I found this. In my state of desperation, this was a win in my book. Also, on sale for $1.99 a yard? Baby, I'll jump on the chevron train and go where it takes me. I'll even send you a postcard!

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 I only have a few "progress" shots of the pantry and here they are.

Hardie board was laid, then tile. (Found this tile at Lowe's, it was relatively inexpensive.) Charcoal colored grout anyone? Get stoked, I love the way it looks. 

We painted the back wall a citron color and months later I painted the ceiling gray. I was overwhelmed with various life events over the summer and decided to sum my feelings up while working on the ceiling. Have no fear readers, I got over being "over it" at some point.

Side note - can you see how I didn't tape off the citron portion of the wall? A steady hand and angled brush is totally your friend. I used to use that damn blue tape for all my house painting projects and but without fail, there was always at least one area that bled through - which I'm sure I don't have to tell you, defeats the purpose of taping up to begin with. (Fun fact: My friend Rhonda taught me the magic of using an angled brush, she rules. Check her out here and if you dig what you see, buy some art for YOUR pantry aka laundry room makeover!)

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The pantry aka laundry room. You can see what we started with and what was (necessarily) destroyed. Pantry destruction party ya'll!

This room taught us the following:

1) The walls in this house are very thin and very fragile - seeing all that exposed wood was quite an eye opener to that fact.

2) Some of the worst "work" done by the previous caretakers of this house happened where? Anyone? Anyone? Yes! This room right here.

3) Duct tape does not belong on walls, or on windows. Ever.

4) Fun with painting! This room was once painted orange. Then a dusty blue. And then various shades of white. The final white was high gloss (to match the rest of the house). The dude didn't even bother to cover the stackable washer/dryer set - there were paint splatters on those too. Lazy prep = not cool. (Those were negotiated out of the sale in case you're curious.) 

5) Please see my Hiring A Contractor 101 post. The bad experiences we had with that contractor con man were directly related to this room. I can't even type the full story without feeling angry again so I'll spare us all. 

 We learned some very tough lessons throughout this ordeal and lost a chunk of change that we couldn't afford to lose. While infuriated initially, the more people I meet and talk to about this home ownership stuff, the more I realize that the mistakes we made are quite common, and in comparison to others, our financial loss was actually pretty minimal. Still doesn't make it okay, but it does soften the blow. With that in mind, we move forward, chalking it up to an expensive lesson we wish we hadn't learned the hard way - but at least we learned. Sometimes knowing what NOT to do can help you just as much (if not more) than knowing exactly what to do anyways.

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Are you losing your mind and stressed out with renovating and restoring your home? Put your 13 year old to work. That's what we did with ours and she painted most of the great room by herself. She rules.

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When taking ownership of our home, one of the major things we knew we'd need to eventually do was completely replace the electrical, as the home had all original 1921 knob and tube wiring. When you'd flip on the lights, you'd hear a slight buzzing noise and many of the rooms only had one outlet each. The inside of our closet had a wire hanging down from the ceiling with a light bulb attached that practically hit you in the head when you walked in. (Why I don't have a "before" picture of that is beyond me.)  Any additional wiring that had been added was spliced and literally taped off and hanging in the attic or under the house. I didn't see it myself, but those who did described it to me as a nest of wires just waiting to ignite. Awesome.  While in escrow I had a dream that the hallway sconce caught the house on fire and needless to say, that was a bit unsettling. Now that I'm typing this, I'm wondering how the place never burned down in real life.

Timing being everything, a deal popped up on Angie's List advertising exactly what we needed, at a price that wasn't AS mind boggling as a job like this would have been otherwise, so we jumped on it.

From start to finish, the entire process took about a month. It was kind of crazy when it was going on because they had to drill out sections of the walls, and due to the age of the home, some parts of the wall would just start crumbling as the cuts were being made. All of the old wires, outlets, switches, etc were ripped out and replaced with brand-spanking-new-up-to-code electrical goodness. I'll post mostly "before and in progress" pics, because who really cares about looking at new outlets. Not very exciting. Revisiting these photos almost a year later is a nice reminder of how much was accomplished though. I've gotten really good at only seeing what still needs to be done and am trying to get better at appreciating how far things have come.

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 I grew up in Las Vegas, home of the popcorn (aka acoustic) ceilings. One of the houses I lived in not only had popcorn ceilings, but popcorn ceilings with GOLD GLITTER mixed in. Don't even try to top that. At some point when I was a kid I probably thought that having gold glitter on the ceiling was not only awesome but normal - go ahead and add that to your laundry list of why children should not be raised in Las Vegas.

 When house shopping I made it clear that I loathed popcorn ceilings and if any of the places we looked at had them, it was something that would have to be removed prior to even moving in. Of course leave it to us to purchase a house where the ceilings had the most smothered on popcorn you've ever seen in your life. Some of it was cracked and so caked together that you could actually pull chunks of it off. One of our first priorities was to get someone in to scrape and smooth the ceilings.

 The contractor handy con man we hired talked as if he had done stuff like this hundreds of times but the way he went about scraping the ceilings should have been one of our first red flags that if he wasn't high, he was more than willing to be so. The popcorn wasn't tested for asbestos (huge no no) and in the front rooms it was scraped on to the floor where it sat for a couple of days before it was disposed of. (If I knew then what I know now I would have fired him for that alone.) My hubby ended up taking over and scraping the bedroom ceilings.

  It's a wet, nasty, messy job and don't let youtube fool you into thinking it's not that big of a deal by watching videos posted on there where it always scrapes off easily. In our house, some areas scraped off easy like cottage cheese and in other spots getting it off was like pure manual labor. Removing that gunk from the ceilings will probably go down as one of my least favorite projects and I have multiple regrets about the execution, but that said, I'm happy that shit is off. A couple weeks after ours was removed I was at Lowe's where I watched a couple buy multiple cans of the popcorn spray. All I could think was, "you are ruining some future homeowners life".

 If you have popcorn ceilings and are thinking about removing them, please don't try the DIY style unless you've had it tested for asbestos. Also, it's probably worth it regardless to hire a person/company that specializes in the removal of acoustic ceilings. If you are fine with keeping them but are looking to add some pizazz, you can always figure out a way to throw some gold glitter up there. Of course if you're into that you may as well just buy an old house in Vegas where someone has already done the work for you. ;)

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 Here's something odd that was just discovered recently. While the house itself is basically pretty level, this is not the case with some of the window and door frames. Is it like this with other Craftsman homes? Or did the builders working on our interior trim back in 1921 just decide to celebrate happy hour early while putting up the finishing touches?

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Hiring a contractor 101.

 Buying any home can be a roller coaster of a process, but buying a fixer upper is a whole different beast. We got our house on the cheap (for Long Beach at least) knowing full well that X amount of money and work would need to be put into it. Some aspects have worked out according to plan (if not better). Others, not so much. We've learned some hard lessons along the way, not to mention lost a couple grand in the process.

 Have no fear, you can learn from our mistakes, and all for free!!! Here's what I wish someone had told me.

 I don't care how dialed in you are to your community, people in your neighborhood, etc. Don't rely strictly on the word of mouth of only a handful of people in regards to hiring someone to work on your house. Especially when it's a friend of a friend. We thought we were doing right by ourselves checking references but it wasn't enough. At all. Self employed contractors can be mysterious people - don't be afraid to investigate the hell out of them.

 Don't ever pay by the hour. What sounds like a win win deal at first will end up dragging out. The best and the worst contractors are both relying on the fact that you hired them because chances are, you don't know how to do the project yourself. If you are paying them by the hour you essentially have no way of knowing if you are being taken advantage of time wise until it's too late. Always have a contractor quote you by the job, period. And then get multiple quotes to compare.

 Get a written estimate AND timeline regarding the work that's going to be done. The estimate part might sound like common sense but the timeline is just as important. Things are going to come up and potentially make the job take longer (you should probably count on that) but you'll be less caught off guard and have a better understanding of the overall project if you know what is supposed to be happening day to day. 

 Angie's List, Angie's List, Angie's List. Shall I repeat that? The beauty of Angie's List is that there's a small membership fee to join but all the people who are a part of it are people such as yourself - so the reviews are essentially unbiased. We've dealt with a handful of people we found off of that site and by far those people/companies were hands down the most professional. Word of mouth is a powerful thing. Smart consumers (damn I hate that word and can't believe I just used it) and smart contractors are aware of it too. If they know they're being talked about on Angie's List and it's important to them to have a good reputation, they're going to do a good job and stand by their work.

 Licensed and bonded. NO EXCEPTIONS.

 Always keep wine/beer handy. Not for the contractors, for you. You'll need nightcaps daily after dealing with these people, no matter how rad they are.

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 I always thought it would be neat to come across forgotten "treasures" in an old house from the lives of past owners. I'd unveil something hidden worth money, or just something cool to clean up and make it awesome. Yeah, that was the plan. Instead, everything uncovered seems to be so random. 

Digging in the garden one afternoon, I dug up a painted ceramic bird. I took a photo of it and put it in the sink, thinking I'd wash it off later to see if it was actually cool. Later came and went and the bird was no where to be found. I asked my daughter if she had seen it and she responded "yeah, I saw it in the sink and figured you didn't want it, so I threw it away". 

I like how it never occurred to her that if I didn't want, it I would have thrown it away myself. You know, in the trash - not the kitchen sink.

RIP lil birdie.