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The Man Cave

Today is the last post in my house tour series. If you’ve been following along, you know that we sold the house shortly after I started this series. We’ve since packed everything up and moved to El Paso, Texas where my husband began a new ministry as a full-time Army chaplain.

So, some of you may be wondering why am I bothering to finish showing you the house we left behind. After all, in just about a week, all the paperwork will be signed and it won’t belong to us anymore.

It is because God has done amazing things for us in that house, and I want to write it all down and keep a record of it so my kids can look back and see His hand when they can’t remember much about it because they were too little. I want to take a moment to reflect on the work we did over five years, some of it slow and tedious, some of it exciting, but all of it a testimony to God’s provision for us. It’s my way of marking the path, of setting up a stone of remembrance. Because we think we will remember. But we easily forget.

This last portion of the house tour brings us to the part of our home renovation that, collectively, is the biggest reminder to me that God cares about me, even the little things about me that wouldn’t matter to anyone else but my Abba, like what kind of flooring I like and whether or not my bathroom has a sink.

This is the part of the house that reminds me that He is in the little things just as much as the big things.

It is also the main reason we bought it. Sure, we loved the view, but most of the house was cheap and unimpressive. But then we saw this:

Glorious, isn’t it? This looks like an unfinished basement, but in actuality, it was considered a crawlspace. A 500 sq. foot crawlspace with 9 foot ceilings, electrical outlets, and plumbing for a bathroom. Yeah. That.

Because this space was unfinished, the square footage was not figured into the price of the house or our property taxes. The previous owners had used the space for storage and a (rumored) marijuana growing operation in the back corner.

We knew we could finish this space and add all that square footage to the value of our home. Besides, Jeff needed an office/library, and this was perfect.

There was just one problem. The room had no interior access. You had to go around to the back of the house in order to get in. One of our first projects was to build a staircase from the rec room (which we used as a fourth bedroom) into that unused space.

Here are my girls in the rec room before Jeff and a contractor blasted through the foundation with jackhammers and added the staircase.

And this is the staircase after all the dirty work was done.

The picture is taken from the rec room looking down into the last level of the house, which is the space we added. But just a note while we’re here: we needed the rec room to be a bedroom because we have a slew of children. I took you on a tour of this room in this post. Check it out!

But since we’re talking about our office space today, let me get back to business.

We purchased an exterior door for a whopping $40 at the building recycle store so that the room could be locked from the inside in case a future owner ever wanted to use the space as a studio apartment. The small area to the right of the staircase became an extra storage room that we used to house a large, commercial freezer I bought on craigslist for $100.

It’s hiding there behind those bi-fold doors that we also got on the cheap.

After the staircase was in, Jeff and his crew of helpers added two windows and finished the ceiling and walls.

It was a mess, but at least we could get into the room! Slowly, it started to come together.

But we still had to do the floors. We really wanted hardwoods throughout the house, but we couldn’t afford it. Especially when we both fell in love with Tigerwood (Tigerwood, the exotic flooring, not Tiger Woods, the creepy golfer).

Tigerwood was not in our budget. Neither is Tiger Woods, but I don’t really want him in my house anyway.

So, we looked at flooring and calculated flooring costs and went back to thinking about flooring some more. Meanwhile, I had an “I wonder…” moment and typed “Tigerwood flooring” into the craigslist search engine. Sure enough. Some builder had leftover flooring from a home remodel. It was enough to cover our entire downstairs, and he was selling it for a fraction of the cost. Plus, he delivered.

Jeff, who had never installed flooring before, spent quite a bit of time on his knees putting the stuff in. But oh, are those floors gorgeous.

Okay, so they are prettier when they are clean but I was busy moving. Still, they are beautiful, especially when at one point, it looked like this:

This is a picture of the room in progress. Right about this time, we were deciding where to put walls. Most of the studs were in good places, but some were not. For one thing, we wanted to expand the bathroom. We wanted a full bathroom because it increased the usefulness of the room. That way, it could be a master bedroom, a studio apartment, or even a guest room.

But, we were totally out of money for this renovation. To top it all off, the twins had arrived and life was crazy.

See?

But, God knew our needs. The crazy contractor (you know, the one who knocked my wall down?) found a bathtub at a garage sale for $10. It was in perfect condition and was just the size we needed. I surfed craigslist while nursing twins and found a pedestal sink for $25. We even came upon a box full of tile at a building recycle store in Seattle for just pennies a tile.

And that is how God gave us a bathroom that went from this:

…to this.

This is why I have to remember. God is so good.

But that’s not all He did.

The “crawlspace” was so large, we even had room to build a storage room off to the right of the bathroom and a small closet to the left.

As you can see, the closet door is on the left, the storage door is on the right, and the bathroom is in the middle. And all three rooms have those gorgeous (cheap) knotty alder doors and inexpensive trim we rustled up in our wanderings.

The storage room is actually large enough to be a bedroom or a kitchenette if someone wanted to put in another window. I wanted to put in another window but my bank account had other ideas. That wall on the left, where the ledge is, is the front of the house. Shoot. We should have put a window there.

But even without a window, this room was a godsend for us. We stored everything in here, including the twins when some relatives came to visit and those boys wouldn’t go to sleep because they could see me in the same room with them and they thought that if they could see me, they must need to be nursing.

Most of the time, however, this room was packed full of all the stuff a house of seven needs.

In fact, prior to the move, we had another shelving unit on the left wall and all those books were in the main part of the room along with a bazillion of their closest friends. Did I mention the movers counted 177 boxes of books? I’m sure they loved us for that.

But we needed all those books because biblical studies are Jeff’s passion, and this was his sanctuary (aka, Man Cave). This is where he would come to prepare lesson plans and grade papers and hide from the five children.

It was perfect for him.

He even had his own little covered landing because it rains a lot in Washington and a man never knows when he might need to step outside and shine his green laser at the night sky.

Here is the Man Cave again, from the outside.

It is amazing to me what God did for us in providing a house with all this extra room. We have been blessed to live and work in this place. It took five years to make it beautiful, but what a beautiful home it came to be.

I was thinking about this during our last week at home. The sky was grey, and I went out on the back deck to sip some tea and reminisce. The tears began to creep into the corners of my eyes, so I looked up to blink them back and saw this:

There was a rainbow in the sky above our house, just for me.

It has been a great five years.

Special thanks to all our our wonderful friends and family, especially Jeff’s parents, John and Lois, who spent countess hours at our house painting and beautifying. I could not begin to list all the people who donated their time or expertise over the years, who charged us much less than they should have or who conveniently “forgot” to charge us anything at all. To all the friends and neighbors who have made our house feel like home, we are so thankful for you!

Cabinet Transformations: A House Tour Detour

*Have you been following along with the house tour? If not, you can start the tour here.

Recently, my husband gave me that look and said, “Hey, you wanna come with me to Home Depot?”

My heart skipped a beat. He still knows just how to make me woozy after all these years.

Even though it was a date, he wandered over to lumber while I dawdled around the paint aisle to see if I needed to buy paint for, you know, something.

That’s when I saw it. A display of this product:

The beginning of my undoing

“Does that stuff really work?” I asked the saleslady. I was thinking of my dull, golden oak kitchen cabinets, these ones, behind this shameless picture of my adorable twins.

The sales clerk had wonderful things to say about the product, but at nearly $80 a box, I wasn’t willing to take the gamble on a product that might not work.

Well, Home Depot loves me almost as much as I love them, and while I was pondering whether or not a kitchen transformation was worth $80, they dropped the price. $39.99, baby. That’s a deal.

I quickly ordered two kits in Espresso. I wasn’t sure if one kit would be enough, and I didn’t want to pay full price for a second kit if I needed it later. In other words, I was too lazy to figure the square footage of my cabinets and decided to play it safe.

When the product arrived, I watched the DVD tutorial that came with the kit. The Barbie and Ken homeowners in the video assured me that this was a simple project I could do in a weekend. Let me assure you. Unless your “kitchen” consists of a microwave stand and a cupboard for Cheetos, this project will take longer than a weekend.Much longer.Had I know that at the beginning, I might not have had that slight mental breakdown around Day 4.But I’m getting ahead of myself.The first thing I did, as per Barbie and Ken’s instructions, was to clean my cabinets thoroughly. I wasn’t sure how clean they had to be so I baptized those bad boys in an ammonia solution I cooked up and applied out on the deck so I wouldn’t pass out from the fumes. It is very likely I didn’t need to work that hard. But I’m an overachiever.

I let the cabinets dry overnight and then went to work on the first step of the kit, the deglosser. This is a watery solution that strips the finish off the cabinets. It is the reason Rustoleum can make the claim that if you use this kit, you won’t have to sand your cabinets. Let me just tell you a secret. You still do. It’s just you don’t have to do it with sandpaper. You get to scrub the solution onto your cabinets using a green scrubby. This sounds easy, and in one sense, it is, especially if you have bionic arms. But my, oh my, if you don’t have bionic arms, your hands will hurt by the end. Furthermore, whatever you do, don’t forget about those four doors you left drying in the tub because when you find them after you think you’re done “deglossing,” you will cry.Fortunately, Rustoleum is very generous with the deglosser. You will have plenty to last for days and days and days and…In fact, the two large bottles I found when I opened the kit should have been a clue that I was going to be “deglossing” for a good long time.
Still deglossing…It took me two days to do this part of the process. Barbie made it look so easy. This is what I looked like:
I don’t think I brushed my hair for two days. Nor did I clean my house:If you look closely, you’ll see Paul is on the floor with his shirt on backwards.
Here I am, thinking of what I’m going to do the next time my husband sweet-talks me into going to Home Depot. When at last the deglossing is done, I moved on to the second step, which is applying the Bond Coat, or cabinet color. The Bond Coat is like a cross between a paint and a stain. It allows the wood grain to show through, but it doesn’t penetrate the wood the way a stain does.
This was definitely the most fun part of the process for me. Once you begin painting the cabinets, it starts to feel like you’re actually getting somewhere, and you’ll be so happy, you might even manage to put on mascara for the first time all week.
But somewhere along the way, you’ll realize that you have to do two coats.That’s all those cabinets…times two.It will begin to feel like this project is never going to end.
Note to husbands and small children: Now is not a good time to ask “What’s for dinner?” Just don’t do it.Because even though it looks like I was sitting around eating bon bons for four days, I was actually quite busy. In between slapping on layers of Bond Coat, I spray painted the old hinges so they’d blend in with the cabinets.

Does this seem like a cheap short-cut to buying new hinges?

Not at all. There are several reasons why it’s okay to spray paint hardware without feeling the least bit guilty about it.

First of all, if you own an older home (and trust me, anything that predates my high school graduation is considered an older home), it might be difficult to match the hinges on your cabinets. If you can’t find matching hinges, you’ll have to putty the old holes and drill new ones to accommodate the update hardware.

That sounds an awful lot like the kind of work I don’t like.

Second, if you get a high-quality spray paint it will be very durable. I prefer Rustoleum to Krylon for anything that gets handled, like hardware. I really like their Metallic Finish series because it has a texture to it that hides imperfections like rust or general griminess.

Third, if you’re trying to redo your kitchen on a budget, buying new hinges is an added expense. Sure, it’s nice to have all-new stuff, but if you can salvage what you have, this is one area you can skimp and save a few dollars without giving up much in the quality of the final product.

I also chose to add crown molding to the tops of the cabinets and above the pantry door. The Cabinet Transformations product will stick to fiberboard or engineered wood which is a great thing because that is so much cheaper than real wood trim.

I bought the length of trim I needed, watched a few YouTube videos on how to install crown molding, had my husband help me when I couldn’t figure out how to unlock his miter saw, watched more YouTube videos because the first video neglected to tell me that I needed to cut crown molding upside down so I totally ruined it, bought more trim because of said mistake with cutting, and finally, had my husband help nail up the final product.

While I was rockin’ the power tools, I used the table saw to cut wainscoting to classy-up the island, which looked like it used to have a wall attached to it.

Because it did.

The wainscoting and trim made the island look more substantial and less like it was once attached to a wall, especially after the Bond Coat was applied.

Here is the island, in process.

After the trim was on, I was able to complete the last step of the Cabinet Transformation process, the protective polyurethane coat. The kit included a decorative glaze, but because I was using the Espresso color, I felt the decorative glaze was an unnecessary step, and by that point in the project, I was ready to eliminate all unnecessary steps.

So good-bye, decorative glaze. I’ll save you for another day.

The poly coat was tricky. I wasn’t a big fan of the polyurethane included in the kit. It dried super, super fast which made it difficult to get a nice finish on large, flat surfaces, like the ends of cabinets or the pantry door. I ended up sanding and applying a second coat to some places that I just couldn’t get right.

Additionally, the kit comes with plenty of product except for the poly. I had to buy more. Unfortunately, Rustoleum doesn’t sell their polyurethane in the store! I had to purchase a different brand and hope the finish matched. Fortunately, the new polyurethane was much easier to work with!

If I could do things over again, I would have ditched the polyurethane from the kit and finished the entire project with a different brand.

But, it all worked out okay in the end. Here is the island, completed.

We added stainless steal cabinet pulls that I purchased from Overstock.com for a fraction of the cost of buying the exact same thing from a box store.

Even with a coupon, the cabinet pulls cost almost as one of the Cabinet Transformations kits, but it added so much to the final look of the kitchen, I was glad we did it. I’ve already shown you the before and after pictures of this room, but here are a few in case you missed it:

Above is the before, and here is the after:

Now. I complained a lot about the work involved with this transformation. It certainly would have been easier with a Fairy Godmother or a magic wand for help.

But I love, love, love the end results. Every realtor who has come into our home has commented on the cabinets. It looks and feels like a whole new kitchen. Sure, it took a lot of effort, but every good thing takes effort, right?

In fact, I loved the results so much, I ended up using the second kit to do the cabinets in our master bathroom, which I’ll show you during the next part of our tour!

So even though it was a lot of work, I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

How about you? Are you ready to tackle a kitchen transformation of your own? If you need a little motivation, check out the side-by-side shot one more time!

*I was not paid for any portion of this review, or supplied with product, although that would have been super-awesome.

In a People House

One of my favorite books when I was a kid was In a People House. It starts like this: “Come inside, Mr. Bird,” said the mouse, “I’ll show you what there is in a people house.”

Together, mouse and bird explore the wonders of a people house. They open every door and peek in every room because all the people are out for the day and no one had security systems back when this book was written.

The opening line was the highlight of the book, which quickly disintegrated into a litany of sight words for emergent readers, including bureau drawers and baked beans.

It was not exactly Dr. Seuss.

But I read it over and over again because I loved the idea of being able to explore a house when all the people were away.

I still do.

Maybe that’s why I love Better Homes and Gardens magazines and Pinterest and taking walks at night when everyone’s windows are lit up and I can peek inside and see how they arrange their pictures above the fireplace.

There’s a word for that. It’s called nosy. Or, if you’re into psycho-babble, you might call it voyeurism, although I hate that word because it sounds like bon voyage! and I don’t understand what looking in people’s windows has to do with going on a cruise.

Anyway, my perfectly normal and not-crazy curiosity about people’s homes made me think that there might be some other perfectly normal and not-crazy people out there who also like to look in houses.

Like you.

And perhaps other perfectly normal and not-crazy people like you might like to look in a house like mine, especially since we’ve been hard at work renovating it and turning it into the house of our dreams just in time to sell it.

But we haven’t sold it yet! For now, it’s still ours, and you can take a look. In fact, you don’t even have to wait until it’s dark and the windows are lit up. You can come right in.

Our house looks like a two-story house from the outside, but in fact, it has four different levels.

When you walk through the front door, you enter the main living area: kitchen, dining room, and living room. That great room was one of the reasons we loved the space. We’re not formal dining room people, or formal living room people. Formal living rooms are places children hide when they feel the urge to eat an entire bottle of gummy vitamins in one sitting.

Not that I would know.

We wanted one great big room where the gummy vitamins remained in sight at all times.

Unfortunately, the builders of this house decided to break up the great room concept by putting a non-weight bearing 3/4-height wall right down the middle of the kitchen and living room.

You can see the pointless wall on the right. The island was attached to it, but was not nailed to the floor.

This is our house when we bought it.

I can just imagine the builders standing in this room and saying to each other, “You know what would make this house even better? A strange and completely pointless 3/4-height wall to divide the kitchen and the living room so children have a place to hide when they feel the need to eat an entire bottle of gummy vitamins all at once.”

And because their wives were not there to whap them on the heads, they did just that.

The previous owners did not know what to do with that pointless wall, so they used it as a growth chart and marked their kids’ height on it.

In Sharpie.

Classy.

Almost as classy as that gold ‘n brass light fixture which nobody seemed to hate as much as me. Am I a lighting snob?

The rest of the room had a lot of potential, but it was dated and cheap (sounding like a snob again…) as you can see from the pictures below.

The living room side. The sight of that faux-granite and gold fireplace gives me shivers.

An ugly front door (it looked worse close up) and steps leading up to the bedrooms

Every time I visited the house before we moved in, I would speak to that room in Veggie Tale and say, “We’re going to knock your wall down!”

However, we were not intending to knock it down right away because other house projects were more pressing and we had a limited budget. But I happened to mention my vision of a wall-less room to an eccentric handyman who was working for us until my blood pressure forced us to let him go because eccentric is another word for crazy and crazy people do strange things to your house when they own power tools and copies of your house keys.

Case in point: I pulled in the driveway one day, walked in the front door, and found the entire room was white with drywall dust. The wall that I had hated was gone–overnight! Wires dangled from the ceiling and a very large man was up on a very small step stool with a can of spray texture in his hand, looking as guilty as a handyman who had just knocked down my wall without asking.

“Greg!” I said in a way that may or may not have been louder than I intended. “What have you done?”

“I–I–” he stammered. “I know you didn’t want to knock the wall down yet, but I had to do it!”

Turns out, Greg is an insomniac, and instead of taking Melatonin like normal people, he gets up in the night, drives to other people’s homes with a sledge hammer, and takes out the walls that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

I almost went into labor.

We had already spent that year’s “fix up this dump” money and I was about to deliver twins right there in the middle of the drywall dust because I had no idea how much time or money it was going to cost to restore my kitchen/dinning room/living room to usable condition and did I mention I was due to have twins within a month?

So he didn’t charge me anything for it. All it cost me was four weeks of bed rest and twice-daily hugs from a blood pressure cuff.

Looking back, it was worth it, but if you had mentioned it to me at the time you might have seen why high blood pressure and pregnant women don’t miss.

But it was totally worth it. Having that wall down completely opened up the space and allowed my children to run daily laps around the kitchen island like they were training for some kind of spastic marathon.

So that was great.

After the wall came down, we worked hard to transform the room, but it was slow going because we had another room that took priority (you’ll see that another day).

In fact, we finally wrapped up our great room renovation just a couple weeks ago. Now, it looks like this:

Ahhhh! I love it so much! Indulge me while I show you many more pictures of the exact same room.

You will recall I transformed that awful fireplace surround a few months ago and told you all about it in this post.

So much better! Good-bye, faux granite!

Here’s one shot of the dining room table, which looks out onto the back deck.

Notice how we ditched that brass ‘n glass “chandelier” and replaced it with this one we got at an overstock store. I don’t remember the price tag but I remember it was under $50 and it was my husband’s birthday present to me.

He just didn’t know it when I bought it.

Also, I didn’t crop this shot so you could see that we have spent every spare cent on building materials and nothing on furniture. Only two of our dining room chairs match, and both of them have broken backs.

But I’m not really regretting the choice to focus on home improvements when the before and after shots look like this:

It hardly looks like the same room, does it? Of course, we put a lot into it. But the cabinets are actually the same (even the island!), and so is the flooring. We did replace the carpet, but the Pergo had to stay for budget reasons.

Tomorrow, I’m going to tell you how I refinished those dated golden oak builder grade cabinets to make them look classy and new. The best part? It cost less than $100, including hardware.

I’m totally serious.

I’m going to talk about the counter tops too, which are granite, and explain why we put them in and how we got them on the cheap. Or at least, cheap-er. Because that almost killed me.

So, I hope you’ll continue to join us for more of what’s inside our people house. There’s a lot more to see!

*If you’re just joining us on this house tour, be sure to check out yesterday’s post on the outside of the house!

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