Which one? Which one?

I've been looking at upholstery fabrics for my living room. Because, hey! If I can tear out walls, refinish a piano, and do electrical wiring, then surely I can reupholster my furniture, right? That, and Bruce worked in an upholstery shop for a while...

Here is my living room (and my kids) in its natural state. 
Just a little messy. Although the books piled up everywhere
are not normal. One day I will build those shelves
and put the books back where they belong. 
Why do I get myself into these big, hairy projects?
(Answer: I can't seem to help myself.)

When I asked Bruce if he thought we could reupholster the couches he said we could, and it would be fun to work together on it. When I asked what kinds of colors to look for he surprised me by saying, "Couches should be brown." He didn't elaborate, so I don't know why he thinks that, or if that's really what he thinks vs. that being a thought of the moment. We have never, except for an old hand-me-down when we were newlyweds, had a brown couch.

But, if he wanted brown, I could look for brown. And I did. And I didn't find many that I loved; they were OK, but they were so...brown! (Blues were drawing my attention, though.)

And then I saw this fabulous, multi-colored elephant fabric:

This one I love! (Now you think There's no accounting for taste...)

So I tried it with several colors: browns, golds, blues, greens, and even plummy-purples. I had a hard time finding browns that I really liked, but I found a couple that were OK.

I also found this "Aegean Blue" color that I liked pretty well.

But all of this fabric will be for a very large, squashy-style sofa set, and I was afraid that either the blue or the brown on every piece would be overwhelming. (Obviously I'm not going to do an entire couch—let alone three big pieces—in the elephants; that might be a bit much.) But what if I did one piece in a contrasting color? Aha! Blue couches and a brown chair, or the other way around? Hm. So on Friday I emailed the swatch pics to Bruce, and he liked what I came up with. He said, "Order it." Which did not solve the blue/brown question. My kids and I finally decided brown couch, brown love-seat, blue chair.

Even at a low, low price-tag of $600 to reupholster a couch, a love-seat, a chair, an ottoman, make a cornice-board, and get fabric for curtains, that was a little nerve-wracking, so I looked at more swatches first. And I came up with two sets that I liked.

1.

The west wall is the wall behind the curtains. The rest of the walls will be a lighter variation of the curtain color.

This first set was my favorite, for color. I felt like the dark brown really made the colors in the elephant fabric pop.


2.

Oooh! But I like this, too. It makes everything just a little brighter. And the texture of the brown kind of makes me think of elephant skin, which is a fun elephant element. (Not that I'm trying to make my living room into an elephant...)

Another thing is that the colors are deceptive when viewed on the computer. If the picture is at the top or bottom of the screen it looks darker than if it's at eye level. If the room is dark the pictures look different than they do when the room is light. How could I decide?

I put it on facebook for a vote, and I also asked all my kids as they wandered through the room. Out of fourteen votes cast (fifteen if you count my vote) only three were for the lighter fabric. Michael—who voted on facebook before he talked to me about it—chose for the lighter one on the facebook poll, but in person he told me he liked the darker color better; he just liked the elephant-hide texture of the lighter fabric. But the real vote that decided me was cast by Bruce: he likes the darker color—partially because we have cream colored carpet in the living room and he likes the idea of the high contrast.

So I held my breath and pushed the "order" button. I've never spent so much on fabric all at once. Of course, I've never bought fifty yards of fabric all at once either. Anyway, I put in the order, and then I instantly wondered if I should have chosen the other brown, and kept waffling all day long. >sigh<

Well, if I hate any—or all—of it, I can return it for a refund. There is that. But I hope that we love it!

Cliff Hanger

The shelf remodel project continues.

As you will recall, in last week's (two weeks ago?) episode, I had torn out a lot of sheetrock, some 2x4 studs, and the hallway shelves, finishing here:

Here's what's happened in the intervening time:

First I took out more sheetrock...

...exposing some wiring.

If you look in the right corner you'll see some big, thick red and white wires; they are the wiring to the thermostat. (This makes me think that those little-bitty blue and white wires I found a week or so ago are not for the ceiling heat. Hm.) Right next to the red and white wires you can see a big, hefty, black wire. That is important later on in this saga.

In any case, all the demolition in the hallway is done.

Now for the living room:

Look! A "before" picture!

I am going to tear out some of this wall too. So I drew it in, scored it, and then used a drywall saw to make my nice, clean line. And then the crowbar comes into play.

Marked, cut, and the first hole is knocked out.

And there goes the drywall.

After many, many hours, and several large bags of trash, here is what we have:

from the living room side

from the hallway side
The outlet in the middle of everything is slightly problematic.

That was enough for one day. Then I had to do some thinking, and figure out the rewiring of the outlet. After talking to Bruce, and talking to the nice man at the hardware store, I was pretty sure I could move that outlet to a better spot. So, last Saturday, off goes the power and out come the wall studs.

Lindsey is holding the wire which is now dead. And now I have to hurry because we can't turn the power back on until that is safely connected to something. And Kaylie is having a party in four hours. (Unfortunately I didn't finish until after the party started, but it all went OK anyway.)

Ryan helped me to frame in the opening on the living room side. He was a willing helper, which was good, because I can't hammer nails or drive screws in straight to save my life.

And here is the re-routing of the outlet:

on the hallway side
This day I learned all about junction boxes and splicing wire.

There's the outlet, in its new spot.

Here you can see Kaylie's friends playing video games, looking from the hallway side of the world. (I don't seem to have a pic from the living room side, but it's pretty much the same as a few pictures up—aside from the outlet.)

Since Saturday we've had a few people come over to the house for little things, and they are all so impressed with how open the entryway looks now. And it does! It's cool enough to almost tempt me to leave it like this. Well, with drywall and paint...

But that is not the plan. It was never the plan.

Anyway, I'd spent a week of demolition, hauling, and rebuilding, I just kind of sat around all day Monday. I read. I watched movies. I hung out with my kids. Partly because I wanted a break, and partly because I was working out another brain puzzle: What should I do with my wonky light switches?

In the left-hand picture you see the switches on the wall that I see
every time I come in the living room door. In the right-hand picture you see their wiring.

The switch for the entry hall makes sense. That is a light that shines right inside the front door, and gives light to the stairs that lead to the basement.

The outside light switch (on the right) makes marginal sense; since these are the only switches right inside the door, it's pretty much where you'd expect it to be. Sadly, the outside switch is the one that I automatically want to flip to turn on the living room light. Even after more than a year. (The living room light switch is just around the corner from this set of switches. If you really want to, you can probably see it in one of the earlier pictures.)

The middle switch for the kitchen hall light makes no sense whatsoever. The kitchen hall light is about five feet away from the entry hall light, and it has a switch on that end of the world too, so it works both from the kitchen side and from the entry side. This seems unnecessary. In fact, it is unnecessary because I only ever turn it on from the kitchen side.

My big plan is to 1. move the living room light switch around the corner, making it the switch I automatically want to turn on when I come into the house. 2. Move the outside light switch over one space, so it takes the place of the redundant kitchen hall switch. 3. Get rid of the kitchen hall switch that's in the entry, and only have that light wired to the switch that's near the kitchen.

So a couple days ago I shut off the power to those switches (also killing my living room light), and pulled the switches out to see what things looked like in there. I had talked to the nice man at the hardware store, and I was pretty sure I could do this. Then I pulled the kitchen hall light down and had a look in there. I disconnected the wires from the light fixture, connected the ones I thought were right, and then turned on the breaker.

No sparks!

No tripping the breaker!

No light.

I rearranged the wiring and tried it again. Now the light would turn on, but neither of the switches would turn it off. I tried again. And again, and again. For three hours! Up and down the step-ladder, working above my head, going to and from the breaker box. I did trip the breaker a couple of times. I did get light a few times, but couldn't turn it off again with either switch. At this point I was wishing I had taken a picture of the wiring before I took it all apart. At this point I would have been ecstatic just to have all the switches working the way they originally did.

Oh, man! I opened up a big can of worms!

Finally I just splayed all the wires away from each other, walked away, and tried not to kick the cat, who was innocent of all of this, for the rest of the day.

Then I called our good friend Daniel Ray, who is good at this stuff, and he came over that evening. He said he's never seen a light wired this way, but he could probably figure it out. Unfortunately his time was limited; he had a meeting to go to. But at least he got the wires safely put away (even though the kitchen hall light wasn't working) so that we could use the living room light again.

And there we sit. I can't close in the wiring until this is fixed somehow.

What will happen in the next episode? Will Loralee get the kitchen hall light to work again? If she does, will she still try to rewire the switches?

Tune in next time...

Polly wanna... ?

I've heard that parrots—pet parrots—when they are lonely or distressed will pull their own feathers out, sometimes all of their feathers.





This is what I did to my front hallway last Saturday:

Yes, when Bruce is away for long stretches of time I start to tear my house apart. Of course, I had been planning to do this ever since we moved in, and chances are that I would have started it all by myself even if Bruce was around. And then I would have wanted him to help me finish the whole project. But since he's not here, I will have to repair the damage myself.

So the plan—part of it—is to expand the hallway bookshelves. These shelves used to be a pantry (with lame-O bi-fold doors), but I had other things in mind for them.

Here you can see that I am, indeed, really bad at before and after pics. This picture is after I had already removed most of the books so I could start on the current project.

When we moved in one of the first things I did was have Michael remove the bi-fold doors so I could put books on those shelves. Unfortunately, since it was  a closet, there are spaces on the sides where books are stacked, but nearly impossible to get at. So the other day we removed the books, and all the junk (including my wrapping-paper boxes) that was under the bottom shelf, and then I removed all the moldings from around the doorway.

Once the moldings were gone I took a hammer and pounded a hole in the wall to see what I would find in there. I knew there'd be a wire because that's where the doorbell box is (to the top left of the closet/shelves).

Can you see the wire inside the hole?

What I didn't expect was to find three wires in there. The brown one is the doorbell; I'm guessing the blue/white ones are for the heating in the ceiling. (Who was the brilliant person that came up with electric, radiant ceiling heaters? Heat rises!) I will have to figure out how to work around those wires. Hm.

Well, after I'd moved all the books, and I'd torn out the moldings, and I had punched a hole in the wall, and I found I was presented with a new puzzle, I needed a break. So I went into the living room where all my books are in totes or in stacks, and I saw our World Book Encyclopedia set. We bought it from the library when they were tired of it, and it's a pretty cool set; beautiful...except for the ubiquitously ugly library stickers.

What do I keep saying about before and after photos?

In my tired and slightly frustrated state of mind I thought, "I wonder if I can remove those stickers. An unsuccessful attempt to take them off couldn't make the books any uglier." Which goes to show you that I was not thinking clearly, because it certainly could have made them look worse. Fortunately they came off pretty easily with a little help from a rag soaked in Goo-Gone. And they really do look a lot nicer. (But, apparently, I didn't take an "after" picture yet, so you will be dying in suspense until later.)

Well, here is the progress on the wall/shelf project:

removing the drywall

All of the outside drywall is gone now, and Ryan did a little cleanup for me. Notice that there are two wall studs right next to each other on the left side (actually on the right side, too) of the opening. I will have to figure out how to remove most of the exposed wood you see. How to get it out without landing it all on my head? Hmm. Time to go remove more stickers from books.

Now most of the inside drywall is gone, and so is one of those 2x4 studs.

With all the studs removed, and all the drywall torn out, I could finally start taking out the shelves and wall cleats. I still have to figure out what to do with some scary-ugly nails that are hanging down from that top board...

And here is where I finished up this afternoon:

Phase One is finished! No shelves! Clean! Ready for a little more demolition...

If you give a mouse a cookie...

There is a cute, little children's book called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. The basic plot is that a boy gives a cookie to a mouse, who then wants a glass of milk, and a straw, and a nap, and a bedtime story, and a bunch of other stuff which eventually leads to him wanting another cookie. This is why we set traps for mice instead of giving them cookies.


That said, here is what happens when Loralee wants to get the piano tuned:

First, she decides that the piano needs to be refinished, and so does the piano bench.

It doesn't make sense to bang the piano around after it's tuned, so she has to refinish it before the tuning. It looks spectacular when it's all done.

Then, since the piano is pulled away from the wall, and she has been wanting to repaint the great room anyway, she tapes everything up so she can paint. After all, we wouldn't want to move the big, heavy piano back into place, then pull it out again to paint, and then put it back again, would we? No way!

Taping the beautiful fireplace mantel was tricky!

But before Loralee can paint, she needs to replace the outlet behind the piano. ALL of the outlets in her house are loose—cords just fall right out of them. Also they are ugly. So she has to replace at least the outlet behind the piano. And all of the other outlets in the room (ten, in total).

old outlet; new outlet

It makes no sense to paint and then make holes in the walls so she decides to remove the phone jacks and the cable TV (coaxial) jacks from the walls before she paints. When the jacks are all removed she has to repair the holes they left in the walls.

The former owners of this house must have really liked TV. There were three sets of outlets just like these in the great room. There are two in the living room, two in the big basement room, and one in each bedroom. They loved them some TV!

Then, since Loralee doesn't like the light switches either, she has to replace those.

Loralee doesn't like the carpeted coving that goes up the wall, so she has to remove it before she can paint. Fortunately it comes off easily...and she found a quarter behind it! Then she must wash the walls that were covered by the coving. (You can see the coving in the phone-jack picture, above.)

Finally she can paint the room. Primer and two coats of paint do the trick. It looks awesome—so clean and fresh!

Now Loralee nails in some wooden base-boards up to replace the coving.

Looky-look!
No more phone or co-ax things in the wall, and no coving!

At last she can untape the room, uncover the fireplace, put wall plates on all the new outlets, and put the piano back where it belongs.

There's still a little bit of cleanup to do, but it looks pretty nice!

Loralee still wants to paint the doors in the great room, put up curtains, get the fancy clock repaired, and maybe refinish a few chairs. In the end, she remembers that she still wants to get the piano tuned.

Please don't set any traps to kill her.

On the Bench

And now the piano bench is finished!

It started out looking pretty terrible. After twenty-nine years of use that old vinyl just cracked apart at the seams, and the foam followed suit. And then there was the repair that extended the life of the bench by thirteen times its original lifetime—so far, but also made it two-toned. (Although you could argue that the combination of bare wood and lacquered wood did match the seat.)

 The first thing to do was remove all the staples on the underside of the seat. (Well, after I removed the seat and painted the rest of the bench.)

So the blackish-grayish stuff on the right (with the big white-ish splotch) is that nasty upholstery-pellon stuff that they put on the bottoms of couches—you know, the stuff that keeps all the change  and your cell phone from falling out the bottom. It is discolored from something (a few somethings) that spilled through the top of the bench. On the left is where I already removed lots of staples. I estimated that I removed 200 to 250 staples.

I am holding two of the staples. The one on your left broke off as I tried to pull it out; the one on the right is a whole staple. Probably 80 to 85% of the staples broke when I pulled them, leaving 1/8-inch or shorter staple stubble sticking out of the wood. :-/

This is an extreme close-up. The single arrow on the left points to some staple stubble that was too short for me to grab and pull out with the pliers. The double arrow points to two staples that need to be removed. In the end I had to pound my piano bench's remaining five-o-clock shadow (at least half of the broken staples) down into the wood.

 Removing the staples was a Big Deal! It took hours!

And here's the seat, all taken apart. The foam, permanently cracked and indented from the seams in the vinyl cover; the cover itself, split and stained; and the board which, for some unknown reason, has a groove routed out on one side. I'd guess that was probably a mistake that was easily hidden under foam and upholstery.

Once the ugly upholstery was removed I filled in the groove with wood-filler. When that was dried and sanded it was time to work on the seat for real. I had looked at some upholstery fabrics, and even ordered swatches, but Bruce reminded me of a leather skirt I'd bought at the D.I. while I was in school. It was too big for me, and I didn't really want a leather skirt, but it was a couple yards of 100% real leather for eight dollars, so I got it. And stashed it away until later, when I could forget I even had it. Anyway, I cut the bottom of the skirt off (about 25-inches) to use as a cover for my new, improved piano bench.

So here's the stuff for the bench: the skirt, the foam (which I had to piece together using hot glue), and the wooden seat.

And I always do forget before and after pictures, but here is the top of the skirt, cut apart  from the rest at the seamline (you can see the loose threads hanging off of it). There's enough left to make a teeny-tiny mini skirt. A really tiny one.

After I got the foam on and the leather stapled in place I had to cover the raw edges of the leather. Normally you would use that upholstery pellon, but I didn't have any. I used black taffeta, which I have in abundance. It's tough, it doesn't stretch, it is not at all see-thru (unlike the pellon), and it looks totally lovely:

The under-side of the seat; maybe the picture doesn't do it justice, because it really does look amazing.

And now the part you've been waiting for. (Admit it, you've been dying to see this!)

before                  and                    after

Before:

After:

This makes me very happy!

And Rachel approves, too. :-)