The Grass is Always Greener

We have a  problem here on Makeoverhill. Our teeny backyard is too shady for grass. We planned to build a deck this year but decided it wasn't in the budget.

Instead, K did some research and found a grass mixture called Shady Nooks by Jonathan Green. According to the package it is "especially made to survive in damp soil, or in dry poor soils, in areas of heavy shade." The garden store said it should work really well and recommended some fertilizer from the same company.

K was busy last week. He not only prepped and seeded the yard, he made a new spot for our grill and mulched the flower beds. I plan to do some planting in the next week and the stone walls need some work. We're also going to paint our unfinished picnic table. All that shade left it soggy and a little moldy at the end of last summer.  After that, we'll just have to wait and see what happens. I hope I'll be able to post pictures of a lush green lawn sometime soon!

-E

Radiator Love

Have I mentioned that I love our steam heat?  The radiators heat up quickly and our smaller rooms stay toasty warm long after the heat turns off.  When we lived in Massachusetts, we had forced air which I hated. The apartment was so dry and the rooms never reached a comfortable in-between temperature.

Of course, steam heat isn't prefect. It requires some tinkering and fills the house with clangs, whistles, and other noises. Our system seemed so loud this winter that I kept making K check the cellar for explosions and intruders. The radiators in our house are flaking and rusty and it's impossible to clean around them. Also, exposed radiators get so hot that they could burn your skin. So, we decided to make some improvements...

First, we had a plumber service both systems. He cleaned the boilers, checked everything, and added a new steam valve to every radiator in the house. It was pricey but I'm really glad we had a professional come in. The radiators have been super quiet and we have a better understanding of the system. He said our boilers were great but they had not been serviced in a while.


We also shopped around for radiator covers. Custom covers are pretty expensive, about $300 per radiator. We found a few on Craigslist but none that would fit really well. So, K decided to make some. He's made two so far and already learned a lot. His first attempt was the kitchen radiator He used pine for the bottom, oak for the top, and an aluminum radiator screen for the front. All of the supplies were around $125.

I think it looks amazing but K wishes he did some things differently. Before starting the cover for the living room radiator, he borrowed my dad's Kreg Jig. A Kreg Jig is a tool that easily makes pocket holes when joining two pieces of wood (so says The Google). K really likes how the living room cover came out and kind of wants to redo the kitchen one No, right? It looks fine. The living room radiator does look really, really nice. We have three more radiators upstairs and five in P's apartment. This will definitely be a slow project since the materials aren't cheap, but I think the covers make a huge difference.

~E

Spring is in the Air

We did our taxes pretty early so we could move ahead with our big tax-return-funded back yard project. Overhill has a pretty skinny driveway. Passengers need to exit the car before it pulls in next to the house. There was also a lot of damaged concrete near the garage.

We also wanted to solve the problem of shuffling cars. Right before the Superbowl, K heard a commercial for garage door openers, "get it free if the Patriots win!" Of course, you all know how that turned out...We found ourselves with a new (paid for) garage door opener and a garage without power. K and my dad ran power to the garage and we had part of the driveway and a little bit of the backyard redone with stamped concrete.

Once we clean the garage out, two people can park there while another parks in off to the side. We are so excited about how nice the driveway came out and can't wait to start having backyard barbecues.

With the nice weather, we have been able to work on other outdoor projects like mulching, raking, and a little planting.  I'm also excited every time something starts to shoot up from the garden, I can't wait to see what kind of flowers we have. Click more to see some other pictures around the yard. Happy Spring!

Living Room/ Dining Room Reveal

I am happy to say that we are almost running out of projects. Almost. My in-laws visited last weekend and got straight to work. My mother-in-law and father made a phenomenal crown molding team, while my father-in-law got to work on the backyard. My job was very important, I painted the molding before the work crew arrived and I fed everyone. There's a lot involved with crown molding.  I tried to pay attention, but I still don't think I could explain it to you. Something about coping. I hope K took notes. I can tell you that the weekend was full of crazy phrases from my dad, like "Glue and paint make it what it ain't."

We now have a beautiful living room/dining room that looks and feels finished.

Thanks for helping, everyone! Come back any time.

-E

Kitchen Teaser

Sorry about the accidental blog hiatus. To be fair, I rang in the new year with pneumonia. (I'm not sure what P's excuse is, though.) I'm super excited to show you some pictures of the kitchen. It's finally starting to feel like a real kitchen. I spent much of today organizing and scraping paint of the floor.


Here's  the old kitchen. Cute, but not very functional. I could barely reach the first shelf in the cabinet over the sink. The drawers were shallow and the counter and backsplash were pretty ugly.  Plus, that space under the window was the only counter space in the entire kitchen. I really loved the sink but it ended up being too scratched and chipped to salvage.

We added open shelving over the sink. Everything is within reach and looks so nice out on display.

We still have some counter space next to the sink but added more next to the stove. All of the cabinets are from Ikea and the counter top is from Lumber Liquidators. Definitely a more practical work space

It's a tiny kitchen, but we were able to fit this piece of furniture from the dining room in our old apartment. It adds some counter and storage space. Plus, it matches the rest of the kitchen cabinets.

We're really in the home stretch. We have to add some trim to both kitchens and lots of crown molding to our side of the house. It's really coming together and as P just pointed out to me, we have only been living in Overhill for two months.

-E

Bedroom Makeoverhill #1

First things first: I am a terrible blogger. You were warned, gentle reader, that I was going to be bad at this - though I don't think either of us expected me to fail this badly. For a person who rocks an awful lot of deadlines in his professional life, I seem to disregard them completely in my blogging life. Yin and yang? Anyhill (see what I did there?), I suppose I am back in the blogging saddle.

Numero deuce: Makeoverhilling is hard work, y'all. Especially around holiday times. To anyone looking to move: do it in August. Sure, you'll probably get heat stroke and some serious moving chafe, but at least you won't have to move, unpack, reacquaint yourself with your new surroundings, learn (the hard way) the dark path from bed to turlet, AND shop for your second cousin's Christmas toe-socks while consuming 4 times your normal daily calories. That has been me all month along: Sluggo-shoppo-unpacko-wrappo-eato-sickopotamus. Welcome to my watering hole.

In between my bouts of shopping and wrapping (shrapping, I guess), I did manage to log some good hours of Makeoverhilling. What I learned from my last apartment (and from reading lots of shelter blogs) is that people tend to put off designing/decorating their bedroom until the end of the move-in process. I have certainly been guilty of it in the past, my logic being: "I'm (presumably) the only person that will really see and enjoy this space, so I should focus my efforts on the more public spaces of my home." Logical, right? Wrong. This time around, it went something like: "P, you're going to be at this a while, so make yourself a happy place, a retreat, and you'll at least have one night spot that'll be the first and last thing you see on either side of your wonky sleep times. Also, you can't camp out on E and K's sofa, so man up and get a bed." Essentially, I took a "Treat Yo'self" attitude towards Makeoverhilling.

So, with my crazy self-talk permission, I decided to tackle my bedroom.

I had a whole folder on my desktop of bedroom ideas and stuff I wanted to buy: the perfect cobalt blue trellis rug, the perfect black iron bed, the perfect black spindle chair, the perfect yellow bedside lamp. All of it went out the e-window. The lamp? Backordered til January. The bed? Out of stock with no expected restock date. The rug? Kind of expensive, even for a "Treat Yo'self." The spindle chair? Without the related lines of the bed, it would be as out of place as me at a football game. The best laid plans...am I right?

What did I have to start with? White dressers (2), white nightstands (2), a fun woven coverlet in the brightest yellow ever (an impulse buy from CB2 for the "guest room" (read: air mattress in the living room) at my old place),  a nifty pendant light that I could certainly use (I love a good pendant or chandelier in the bedroom), and a mattress (no bed frame or headboard, though). And a wall color. I had committed to a wall color: Valspar's "Winter In Paris" with their "Swiss Coffee" as a trim. France and Sweden (and Providence). How to make this stuff work?

2 words: Dash & Albert. 2 more words: striped rug. 2 more words: Tequila Sunrise. It had my pale blue AND the bright yellow. It also had some red, orange, chartreuse, and white. If anyone out there has seen "The Big Lebowski," you will know what I mean when I say that this was the rug that would "tie the room together." This was a rug to wake up to. It's not for everyone, but it's for me. My retreat is candy-colored. Deal with it.

I can fall asleep looking at this. Proof that I can sleep anywhere and under just about any conditions.

Once that was decided, it became incredibly easy to source the rest of the stuff. The white bed is actually a sort of geometric canopy situation that I found at Ikea. With a little editing (aka selective ignorance of the assembly instructions), I left off the top members and ended up with a lovely white fourposter number. Not content with the amputee stump look of the top of the posts, I went in search of finials that could be painted white to match the rest of the bed. What I found at The Home Depot was so much better: unfinished furniture feet. Sure, they're a little overscale, and they don't match the bed, but I think they're perfect. They bring a touch of masculinity to the space, too. A little natural wood really got it away from Lisa Frank territory (not that there's anything wrong with that).

If this bed ever lands upside down, it'll feel right at home on its feet.

Dear Target: I love you.

 Milk (glass knobs): It does a body (-conscious blogger's dresser) good.

Other bedroom additions were: antique blue milk glass knobs for the top drawers on everything, a white Jonathan Adler-esque lamp for the one nightstand (Ha! One Night Stand! Get it???), a yellow mini-trash-can, a yellow "Keep Calm..." print in a natural wood frame, and a white cardboard deer bust. It's "Skittles meets Scandinavian." Skittdinavian.

Keep calm and refrain from telling me that this poster is "soooooo 2009."

This picture is rubbish. Pictured: rubbish.

 All in all, the bedroom turned out swell. I've tastefully cropped the TV out of there, but I'm totally one of those people that watches TV in bed. I like TV. Sue me. On second thought, don't sue me. Instead picture me asleep under my retina-searing yellow coverlet, drooling on my pillow, my TV on (at a very low volume), dreaming my fuschia-unicorn-laden Lisa Frank dreams. Don't you feel superior to me now?

"Magical." - Drew Barrymore

Blog out.
P

Upstairs Bathroom

Remember that beautiful wallpaper? Here it is in all its peeling glory. Note the shower rod attached to the window frame. It was very uneven, creating a pie-shaped showering space.

That problem was easily fixed. We installed the rod above the window and bought an extra-long shower curtain. The curtain took forever to arrive so showering was pretty tricky for a bit.

But the wallpaper... I spent days and days working to remove it without making any progress. I tried DIFF, scraping, vinegar, and that Paper Tiger. The flowered paper peeled off fairly easily only to reveal a second layer in a lovely shade of peach.


Eventually, K sanded away the visible glue and gave the bathroom several coats of soft gloss paint. I was skeptical at first but it really turned out well. None of the walls at Makeoverhill are very smooth anyway. Also, when they took the piece of wall out in the kitchen after the pipe incident we noticed that they had full-on painted over wallpaper a few paint layers down.

Click below to a peak at the finished product. It was difficult to photograph such a tiny space. I think I could have gotten an excellent angle if I removed the bathroom door, but I didn't feel like going to the trouble.