Here’s the year 1 roundup, and stating of intentions of goals for year 1. (I mark years according to when we closed on the house, not calendar years.)

So let’s recap my stated year 2 goals first:

– finish garage (and by extension, basement reorganization)

You guys, I FINISHED THE CELLAR SHELVING WOOOOOOOOOOO.

It was not a whole lot of fun, but I did it.

So the last pieces that needed to be done were:
– flip shelving to cut through braces on the bottom
– reattach new bracing to the back
– cut down plywood to make a new top shelf
– move everything to its new position
– get all scrap lumber to appropriate (reuse, burn, dump) piles

When last I wrote about this project, here’s where I left the shelving.

So, next step, flipping it forward to cut off the bottom part, then re-attaching bracing to the back. Luckily I found some leftover pressure treated 2×2 wood that suited this part quite nicely. Unluckily, I was using these 3″ trim nails with a special star bit head and I stripped, like, three bits before I got the knack of it, sigh.

Then it got flipped right side up (okay actually let’s all be honest here: it went up and down like five times while I was doing this part because I waffled a lot on the best way to do it and spent a lot of time swearing and thinking about giving up).

I also put the last piece of back bracing on – the top shelf support against the cellar wall in the below picture.

Then, I marked up and trimmed down the plywood that had previously been on top of the shelving, in the very safest manner possible, obviously.

(still amazed there were no power tool mishaps)

(though this was the stage at which the following conversation took place)

THEN I FINALLY TURNED IT TO WHERE IT WOULD GO!

This was the moment I finally thought “oh, wow, actually this was all worth it after all.”

While turning it I discovered a whole lot of instabilities that I hadn’t before, so after putting it into this position I spent some time putting screws ev-e-ry-where.

Then, I cleaned up some of the things you can see here in the foreground and moved over the project table to its final location.

Then I moved the leftover printer table that was getting thrown away (well, not like to the dump but it was up for the taking) to its ultimate location to begin life as a seed starting table, about which more next week.

Then I dealt with the scrap lumber, ugh.

Then I added in the organizing bins and lo, they fit perfectly, and put the first project (a coffee table that broke during the move & needs to be refinished anyway) on the big project table.

So, let’s do a before & after, shall we?

aahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so much better.

This is not my very least favorite project (that’s still the root cellar ceiling, that was the WORST, which I guess I didn’t blog about?) but it’s probably a top 5 and that makes two out of the top 5 in the basement, UGH.

It’s also STILL NOT DONE. Honestly “finish it for the blog post” was the only reason it’s as far as it got this week, it fucking sucked.

Why did it suck, you ask?

Well. Scale is tough in photographs, so I measured. This shelving is 48″ deep by 9.5′ long. So really big. And it is simultaneously very flimsy and very sturdily constructed, in the worst possible combination.

My goal was to cut it down the middle, reattach bracing on the back, and then turn it to a different wall.

It’s so long that I measured my depth (actually a little less than half, at 20″) at various points and then snapped a line with chalk. Because it’s a horizontal surface in a dark corner, and because I had to sort of crawl under rickety nail-filled boards to do so, that took longer than it sounds like. Plus, there was so much dust and paint flakes and sawdust on the shelves the chalk didn’t take very well.

Then I cut down the middle, and discovered that there was a lot more bracing than I thought, and the bracing was too thick for the circular saw, so I had to go back over my lines again with a little jigsaw, and holy shit was it angry with me. Even after that, I’d miss pieces and have to bodily wrench the shelves apart, and then parts I didn’t want to come apart would come off, complete with rusty nails, and it’s a miracle I haven’t cut off a finger or needed a new tetanus booster yet.

The last picture is the current state of affairs, but of course there’s a TON of bracing underneath that is extra deep. It’s actually cut from the top but still not going anywhere.

So on Monday the next step is going to be to move more things out of the way, tip it forward, and cut from the bottom. Then keep it tipped on its face to re-attach the bracing, and while I am hoping to reuse pieces of lumber from the back that is feeling less and less realistic because of the ways it came apart. I may have to go out and buy some 2×2 pieces to replace them and just put the others in the burn pile.

It would’ve been faster to just build new shelving from scrap. This had better be really useful.

I think I am maybe beginning to understand that basement organization is an ongoing home ownership problem that has no beginning and no end.

Previously, it was kind of a mess but I had started anyway.

Also, we added shelving to the root cellar.

I’ve made good progress in distributing the crap that you can see in this picture, taken almost exactly a year ago.

Slightly closer picture & different angle but you’ll have to trust me – all that crap is gone! The shelving behind our lawn furniture is also mostly empty.

So, what’s next?

That shelving is going away this weekend! I’ll do a combination of things to it: cut it up for scrap/burn pile; cut it up to transform into new, more useful, more sturdy shelving; and cut it up to set aside as useful scraps for other potential future projects.

Eventually, I want a project corner: somewhere I can do woodworking, painting, cellar-type things on a usable flat surface with tools to hand. (All of our tools are stored on shelving that is just to the right of this photo. That shelving is deeply meh but is just fine for now.)

First step will be to take the quite nice plywood top off the left side of that shelving and – in a perfect coincidence – fit it without cutting or modification to some hardware my dad gave me to create a work table.

Then, tackle the rest of it. Photos forthcoming!

Most of what I’ve been doing around the house doesn’t qualify as blogworthy: slowly but surely going through piles of stuff to sort it into keep, throw away, donate. I returned from a recent visit to my parents’ house with five stuffed full tupperware of random things from my childhood. Those were in addition to the 5-7 last remaining boxes of random crap hanging around the house. Some of it I do want to keep; some of it I’m content to shove back in the box and think about in a few more years; some of it is going right out the door.

But, it’s boring.

So here, have some brief updates on the very slow project of getting the wallpaper down in the dining room. I’m not putting any kind of urgency behind this project; rather, “dining room” is a line on my to do list each day, and all I have to do is make SOME kind of forward progress. Some days that’s 10 minutes just tugging at the top layer of wallpaper. Some days that’s firing up the actual steamer. Baby steps. I still don’t know what to do with the wainscoting, though I have many awesome ideas now, so there’s no rush just yet. If I had a clear mental image of the final product I’d be moving much faster.

Before, during, & continuation of one corner.

So close. SOOOOO CLOOOOOSE.

Previously, we were plastering and sanding forever, and I skimcoated one wall.

My in-laws came to visit again last weekend, and huge progress was made!

So here’s the before:

It looked like that for a couple of weeks, as we added & sanded layers of plaster in an agonizingly slow process.

Then: primer!

Aaaaaaaand…paint!

Not only paint, but TRIM!

Then we cleaned up all the random extra things in the space. It was glorious. The room is now mostly empty, mostly clean, and alllllmost done!

Remaining:
– paint the trim
– flooring (carpet + some tile around the door)
– one last light by the door (you can see it above M’s head in the last picture)
– covers for the recessed lights
– furniture!
– longer-term: build a (dry) bar in the corner where the green wall meets the blue wall (summer)
– longer-term: work in crawlspace underneath, to include insulating the floor joists (summer)

As I type this, the man cave is making giant leaps forward, but it’s not ready for primetime yet. So we’ll have to recap that next week, or possibly the week after.

This week, I am seeking your advice & thoughts on the dining room. It’s going next.

Previously, we pulled up the carpet, replaced the light fixture, patched the holes in the ceiling, and pulled down some of the wallpaper, but that’s it so far. The bulk of it needs to be done still.

Here’s what it looks like right now.

The fourth wall is almost entirely french doors.

My husband wants badly to keep the stenciling underneath the wallpaper, but I strongly suspect that won’t be possible. In the small amount we’ve already pulled off, it’s clearly pretty badly damaged, both by holes and by plaster near the ceiling. Odds are there are other bad parts on the rest of the wall that just can’t be saved – or would require extensive cleaning and inpainting to look decent, and that is soooooooo not in the budget. If the budget extends to art conservation, that will go toward the mud room mural.

So, what to do?

For a long time, my best idea was arts & crafts wainscoting. In this scenario, we’d make custom wainscoting out of maple lengths all around and either a) paint it or b) stain the wood and paint the wall behind.

Here’s the style I’m talking about, in a few variations.

I think I need to start sketching this out, maybe? What about one of these art deco fans in the middle of the larger wainscoting from my first idea?

The man cave has one wall that we did not take apart. It’s the wall that goes back to the house.

Problem the second: it was textured like a 1980s ceiling.

Options for what to do, in order of time + effort:
a) leave it entirely alone and just paint over it.
b) patch the holes
c) skimcoat the entire wall with mud

If you’ve been following any of my house posts, you know which one I chose.

Previously, in the attic: we ripped up many of the floorboards to get at the second floor ceilings for electrical work. It was godawful work and it left the attic floor full of holes and looking awful.

It made the attic a weird and dangerous place to be in.

On top of that, as attics do, it had become a sort of dumping ground for extra stuff.

When my parents came up last weekend, the attic was the project I wanted to tackle.

My dad and I re-matched the boards to their holes in a jigsaw puzzle that I have to admit I kind of enjoyed.