Home Renovation: A Total Tear-Up

 Faithful blog readers have noticed that my last post before April 2nd's post went up on Jan. 24. I rarely go this long without posting, and when I do people start emailing me to ask if everything's OK. Well, in mid-December '23 I started cleaning closets, and I went into closets all over the house. Horrible job, because this is an out of sight-out of mind family. I dealt with the accumulation of decades. Nine contractor bags of clothes just from my closet. I'd already dealt with Bill's clothes, but I got another five bags out of Liam's.  By mid-January, I was finally mentally ready to tackle the books, and it was even worse than I thought it would be, because books are heavier than clothes, shoes and junk. They're heavy enough as it is!

Friends rode in to save me, helping me sort and even hauling the books away to good homes--giveaways at the Ohio Natural Diversity Conference. I am SO grateful to Dave McShaffrey and Jason Larson for spearheading the Save Zick from Being Crushed by Books effort. I gave away at least 500 books--really good books! Beautiful books! and I hope they're helping naturalists all over Ohio before long. 

I piled stuff up in the garage for ReStore--two sofas. Ceiling fan. A dozen large boxes of stuff. I was in constant motion. I never dreamt how much work it would be to purge the house (even partially!) 

The impetus for all this was a much-needed renovation. I had to get rid of that old allergen-rich carpet, and luxury vinyl flooring seemed like just the thing. I had put it down in a bathroom some years ago and love it. I needed to get the house interior painted. To do both those things at the same time, I had to get all the excess stuff out of the way. Everything had to come up off the floors, off the walls, and out of those groaning bookshelves.

If anyone had told me how much effort it would require to work ahead of the two-man painting/flooring crew, I wouldn't have believed it. I walked into the project with the reality of the work involved hitting me harder every day. To be honest, the thing that had kept me from tackling this for so long was the books. And rightly so. If ever a job deserved to be put off, this was it. But I got it done. Well, I still have a mess of non-natural history books in the basement to box up and get to the public library. There's always, always more to do for a crew of one, cleaning up after a family.

Once the crew arrived on Valentine's Day, it was OK GO. It was all I could do to stay ahead of them, moving stuff, endlessly cleaning, cleaning, finding other places for things to go. 

Thank God Phoebe didn't want her beautiful bedroom renovated. She picked the four wall colors when she was a pre-teen and we think it's lovely. So that's where a lot of the furniture and paintings and knicknacks went. It was piled solid with everything.

Having one's kitchen in this shape is a real trial. Every time I thought we had reached maximum entropy, we went deeper. Say goodbye to that green linoleum! That ucky yellow foyer! Wait 'til you see what we did there!

 When I wasn't moving and cleaning and boxing stuff, I was running to Lowe's, looking for supplies I knew not what to call or how to find. It was a special kind of hell, but I knew it would be richly worth it in the end. 

I needed a new ceiling fan that wasn't hopelessly homely. I went to Lowe's with low expectations. But fans have come a long way! This fan looks just like a windmill. I LOVE my fan. So much. To be honest, I have never before seen a ceiling fan I considered beautiful or additive. Except for this one, which I fell in love with on the spot. It's the Harbor Breeze Henderson 60" ceiling fan. The blades match my wood-like flooring. I ordered the galvanized finish (instead of black or bronze) because it looks more like a real windmill. Hero is installing the blades here.

Walt (kneeling) and Hero wiring the fan. They do it all! This picture has a Renaissance quality to it--love their poses and the light.

The crew of two is terrific. Walt and Hero were here for five weeks--warp speed for all the painting, outlet replacing, fixing and flooring they had to do. Their trucks pulled up in the driveway before daylight each day and I got up, ready to work, too. That's all I did. They're here today in fact for a sixth week, finishing up on some electrical and window trim work. I'm washing screens and cleaning stinkbugs and ladybugs by the billion out of each window as they go. Lord. There's always more.

Enough about that. Here's how the living room looks now.

And I am so, so happy. Got myself that leather sofa I've been dreaming of, with a secure furry corner cover for Curtis to snuggle into. He loves it!!

Flooring is Toasted Barnboard by Nextfloor  (luxury vinyl). It was the only flooring that looked good with both the fireplace and the honey-orange hard maple kitchen cabinets and trim. 99% of vinyl and laminate flooring is way too gray for me. I'm a warm earthtone person.

The wall color is Elk Horn by Benjamin Moore. Trim is Northwoods Brown. I worked on colors for a couple of weeks, hauling home chips and sample cans. I used Benjamin Moore's virtual visualizer on their website--such fun to "paint" rooms all kinds of colors, to see what it would look like! I also sprang for a home interior color planner from Etsy. It's a PDF with suggestions of colors for different applications, helping you decide wall and trim colors that all harmonize together. The Manchester Tan/ Earthy Bohemian collections were my jams. The designer is a woman named Ilaria. I highly recommend her.

Interestingly, Elk Horn and Northwoods Brown were not even remotely in the color group. I had to deviate to get what I needed for the living room. But though I went through a ton of second guessing and apprehension, I'm delighted with my choices, and the house looks pulled together anyway. The key is not using too many different colors. Gone, at least for me, are the old days of painting each room a wildly different color. 

The stone fireplace was the inspiration for the new color. Paint and flooring revolved around it. I wanted colors that would set off and compliment the local sandstone it was built from. It really is the centerpiece of the house.

And I finally got a handle on those bookshelves. Still a bit yet to do. I'm trying to find someone local to clean my CD carousel changer. Electronics shops laugh at me because the machine is obsolete and they can't get parts. Dammit, I have 500 CD's I still love to play (after weeding), and I hope to find someone who will at least take a look at it. Until then, the CD's stay in boxes downstairs, and there are some empty shelves. It's incredible to me that there is any space on those shelves, considering how many books there were before the purge.

I sprang for a triple-thick tufted Ruggable where I do morning yoga, and where Curtis does his Doga.  It's the Rowan Teal Blue and Copper oriental style rug. I'm giving the names of the things I chose, because I figure some people might like them and want to know. 

I've made two reading nooks in the living room and it's really changed my life. I have always read in bed because I didn't have a place to do it in the living room. As a result I would read about three pages and it's lights out. The book would fall and I'd be out. Oh, it's so delicious to sink into a recliner or oversized sofa-chair with a good light and read a book NOT in bed! 

I never got a chance to sit in the Big Chair once Phoebe and Oscar got a load of it! It's a cuddle chair for them. They read there for hours in the few days they were home on spring break. There's little that warms my heart more than seeing my beloveds enjoying the new reading nook.

That's the living room. And this is the real renovation, no foolin'!

Next: Kitchen, foyer, studio...