House Crashing: A Family-Friendly Whole House Renovation

We’ve shared this glorious back porch on Instagram twice (during the holidays, seen below, and last summer, seen here), which belongs to our good friends Carey & Jordan. And based on the reaction to just this view alone from you guys, we figured we should do a good old fashioned House Crash so we can show you guys more of their beautiful home. They’ve also got some really great tips about what wears well with kids and dogs (and what they wouldn’t do again), which was especially helpful since we’re currently mulling over some bathroom renos. But enough jabbering, let’s get on with the tour!

similar storm door / similar black sconces / string lights

Carey & Jordan used to live right behind us (Carey was actually one of the first neighbors to come introduce herself with a giant plate of cookies, which we basically inhaled while laying hardwood floors upstairs). But they recently moved to another house in our neighborhood because of their family of five needing a little more space. Jordan runs a renovation company here in Richmond called Spruce RVA, so it’s no surprise that their own house went through quite the transformation. For instance, here’s what that back porch area looked like when they bought it. Now scroll back up for the after. I’ll wait.

AMAZING, AMIRIGHT? Sorry for the caps lock, but IT’S SO GOOD. We took these pics back before all the leaves left us in the fall (come baaaaack leaves) so I’m thrilled to finally get this post together. Makes me all breathy and drooly all over again. Attractive visual, eh? That old garage that you see above was converted into a downstairs master bedroom since they often have both sets of their parents staying with them, so they needed more bedrooms. And the reason they didn’t mind losing that garage is because Jordan is awesome, and he knew he and his crew could design and construct a new detached garage nearby – with a second floor office for Jordan’s business.

At first glance, the exterior of the house (besides the new garage) doesn’t seem wildly different from how it looked when they purchased it.

But upon closer inspection, you’ll notice the little details they added to amp up it’s original charm. They built out the columns to be a bit chunkier than the original ones. They added some dentil molding along the roofline (I KNOW I’M SHOUTING AGAIN BUT I CAN’T EVEN HANDLE HOW GOOD THAT DENTIL MOLDING LOOKS). They also swapped the double doors for a single door with sidelights. Another neighbor of ours always complains about her solid double-doors making her foyer dark, so this is a great solution to let in more light.

And no, Carey doesn’t decorate with pumpkins year round, they’re just further evidence that these photos were from October. Nothing like getting into the Halloween spirit on the last day of February! UGH, BUT LOOK AT THE BLUE CEILING. AND THE BLUESTONE PATH.

similar black planters / door knocker / similar lantern sconces

The porch ceiling is Crystal Springs by Benjamin Moore, and the door is Poppy by Ben Moore by the way. The white siding is just the stock white that comes with Hardiplank (Arctic White).

The detached garage also acts as a nice anchor to their outdoor patio area, which is what you see when you stand at that pretty back door I’m always Instagramming. Jordan is a trained landscape architect and Carey studied urban planning, so we love that they thought to carve out some space within the paver patio for greenery.

string lights / similar black sconce / similar lantern sconces

Since the back door is the family’s most used entrance, it opens into a spacious mudroom with a nook for each of their three elementary-aged kids. Picture this loaded with a lot more boots and scarves in the winter, except that it has been so unseasonably warm lately here in Richmond, it probably looks like this again.

rug / round baskets / hooks / rectangle baskets

The mudroom leads into the open kitchen & family room (that red door is also Poppy by Ben Moore). The previous owners had already put the family room addition on the house, so Carey and Jordan’s main challenge here was to update the kitchen to be more functional for their family.

stools / rug  / faucet / pendants / dishwasher / sink

One of the coolest things was that they wanted to reuse all of the original cabinetry, but reconfigure some things a little. Well, they found the contact info for the original cabinet maker in one of the drawers, so they hired him to help match some new stuff with the old stuff he built decades ago! It looks so great and you’d never guess some is new but most of it is old!

Here are some of the before/progress photos that that Carey sent us. They were pretty happy with the overall layout, but just wanted to make the stove and the island area work a little more seamlessly.

They moved the island overhang to the far side of the island in order to seat more people and make better flow to the fridge, and they traded their dark counters for a lighter granite (super durable and not too expensive – it’s really close to the stuff we had in our first kitchen!). They also lightened things up by swapping the black appliances for stainless steel. Jordan doesn’t like to send a lot of stuff to the dump, so he sold some of the old stuff that they replaced (old appliances, some old windows, etc) so others can use them instead of trashing them.

stools / pendants / mixer / flour & sugar jars

It was so smart of them to make that a lovely little accent with some tile laid in a herringbone pattern over the stove. And yes, that awesome original cabinet maker made that amazing hood for them! Those thick corbels look like one of those giant blocks of cheese THAT I WANT TO EAT. I WANT TO BITE THEM. I CAN’T STOP.

stove / kettle / mixer / knives / cabinet knobs

The bright and cheery kitchen also leads to the nearby dining room, which is painted with a moody greeny-teal color above the wainscotting (Rookwood Sash by Sherwin Williams). The hutch is a cool secondhand find from a local place called Epoch.

similar china cabinet / rug / cabinet pulls / cabinet knobs / microwave

Carey used an eclectic mix of furniture in the dining room, which simultaneously seems grown-up, but not too serious – and works for her three young kids. When I asked her about how the rug held up with kids and food she said it’s been great. It’s wool and has that faded weathered look so that helps.

rug / table / end chairs / white chairs / similar gourd lamps / similar chandelier / gold mirror / sideboard

I love how the bamboo frame of the mirror over the sideboard ties into the lattice on that chair in the corner. It’s all a mixture of stuff that she either bought secondhand or found in accessible stores like Pottery Barn, Target, and even PB Teen, yet it all totally goes together without looking too matchy.

rug / end chair / similar corner chair / acrylic table / similar gourd lamp/ gold mirror

Beyond the dining room is a more formal living room that I like to call Carey’s “White Rabbit” because she pulled this room out of a friggin’ hat. It essentially only had legos on the floor right after they moved in (I don’t have a before picture but you guys can picture that, right?!), and then I visited a little while later and boom, it looked like this.

acrylic console / gold lamp / gold mirror / rug / similar pink chair/ stick accent table / gold frames

She said she literally didn’t buy a single thing except for the woven ottoman under the acrylic console, and the rest of the stuff was all things she already had (in the attic, or borrowed from other rooms that didn’t need them as much). She just dragged them all in here, moved stuff around a while, and it worked. Gotta love an almost free makeover.

As part of the make-it-work effort, Carey repainted this old dresser, which works so nicely with the gold accents around the room (she forgets the paint color, but September Skies by Sherwin Williams would be similar). Girl committed to not spending a lot on this room and using her wits and what she had around, and I LOVE that about her.

similar dresser / similar hardware / gold mirror

Also you’ve probably noticed all of the live plants around the house. Carey is the plant whisperer. And I am very very jealous. She makes me LOL when she calls me and says “I went to the greenhouse and the guy there introduced me to my new favorite plant!” Although now that I think about it I’m kinda like that with paint brushes. Also: they built these built-ins and are gradually filling them up with books. Standing ovation. Love the brass pulls that tie into the little wood table-turned-plant-stand.

plant stand table / brass knobs / similar frames

I also love that Carey and Jordan are brave. They could have painted their bathrooms, but they opted to try some fun wallpaper in there instead. They’re a smart place to dip your toe into the wallpaper waters because it’s much cheaper than doing a big bedroom or living room – and small rooms like these are great candidates for doing something a little different. This is their downstairs powder room, right off the main foyer.

wallpaper / toilet / buffalo print / similar foyer rug

Upstairs the hall bath, which is shared by two of their kids, sports this fun graphic chevron wallpaper, which strikes a nice balance of formal and playful. I also asked how the wallpaper is holding up in the bathrooms. Carey says it has held up perfectly (no peeling from hot showers or kids spilling on it or scratching it). She said the only issue has been that she’s scared to hang pictures on it because it means making a hole that will always be there – ha! But it’s pretty great on its own. She also mentioned that the dark granite counter in here works so well with kids (it was a remnant so she saved a ton of money that way).

wallpaper / floor tile / hardware / mirror

One tip Carey has for anyone else redoing their home is that although she was warned that marble can stain and be high maintenance, she thought it wouldn’t be too bad in the bathroom on the floor (nobody even has shoes on in there!), but if she could do it all again she’d go with something else. Turns out toothpaste spills and any other liquid that gets on the floor can soak in and stain or leave a mark, which she doesn’t love. Good to know!

Off of their oldest daughter’s room is an ensuite bathroom since it was the original master bedroom. For that room they chose this happy cherry wallpaper and the counter in here is a Cambria quartz remnant so it holds up super well (no staining issues like the marble floor tile) and again by finding it as a remnant at a local stone yard, she saved a lot of money.

wallpaper / similar hardware / faucet / similar mirror /

Perhaps my favorite room in her entire house is their new master (remember, this is where the garage used to be). They were able to carve out this beautiful nook for a big soaker tub along with a nice bright walk-in shower that’s off to the right. ALSO THAT BASKETWEAVE ACCENT TILE. HUBBA HUBBA. (*wolf whistle*)

cast iron soaker tub / basketweave accent tile / main floor tile / similar vanity / tub faucet 

John was talking to Jordan and fishing around for some reassurance that maybe a bath tub wasn’t really that useful (podcast listeners know we’ve been wrestling with the tub-or-no-tub debate for our own master bathroom reno) and John thought he’d get a helpful answer when he asked “So do you guys actually use that very much?” Jordan said “Oh yeah! Carey uses it just about every day!” Nice try, Johnny boy (insert laughing face emoji next to a bath tub emoji here). I’m back on the I-want-one train btw.

So there you have it. A lot of rooms, nooks, and crannies in Carey and Jordan’s lovely home. They’re super inspiring renovators and awesome friends and neighbors, so we’re so grateful they let us slip through and take these pics while our kids ran amok in the backyard (they left some pretty epic chalk drawings behind since we were there a lot longer than we thought! ha!).

If you want to see more of our House Crashing adventures, you can check out the whole collection of ’em here.

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The Incredible Collapsing Office: Hinged, Space-saving Linnmon/Alex Desk

I’ve been nursing the idea for months and I finally made it a reality last week. I’ve been using it every day since and it’s even more convenient and useful than I’d hoped. I’ve never seen a similar design for furniture before and I think a lot of people will find it useful.

Ikea Items Used:
Solid Wood (Pine) LINNMON desk (120cm x 60cm)
Red ALEX storage unit and table legs

I love my desk. I’ve had it for a few years now and done some good work at it. The only problem is that I love space too. In fact, I love space a little more than I love my desk. So when I realized that 2/3 of the volume my desk takes up is gorgeous empty space, I knew something had to change. The space under the desk is basically cut off from use because the table top area is permanently in place.

I had the idea of cutting the wooden top section in 3 pieces and using hinges to allow it to fold up onto itself. I was hesitant to cut the wood and interrupt the lovely grain I had painstakingly varnished years before, but I thought the trade off for more usable space would be worth it. So after months of hemming and hawing, I finally got to sawing. I invited my friend Stephen The Carpenter over and we got to work. The first task was careful measurement. I knew I couldn’t go back once I cut my desk in pieces, so we followed the old craftsman’s adage of measure twice, cut once, (more on this later)

For my design to work, the middle section of the desk had to equal the height of the desk’s legs. If the middle section was too long the legs wouldn’t sit right on the storage unit, if it was too short they just wouldn’t fit. We cut the sections to measurements we thought were correct but we got it wrong! Disaster!

Thankfully, we had erred on the side of cutting too little off the desk. If we had cut too much on the first go, we wouldn’t have been able to salvage the project. We started over, and this time we nailed the measurements. What tripped us up in the first place was failing to account for the extra length from the hinges. These hinges were crucial to my design because they allowed the desk to be quickly transformed from its original design to a standing unit with 1/3 the footprint of a normal desk.Once we had the desk section cut to the right size, we attached the hinges so the top section folded the right way.

We reattached the legs and fastened the desk to the storage unit with a set of brackets that matched the hinges. I bought plain brassy-looking hinges, brackets, and screws from a local hardware store for under €20. I think they match the wood nicely.

Finally, my vision was a reality. I have the desk I need for work AND about 2 cubic meters of extra space in my room whenever I’m not working. Ok, so I had to compromise a little, my desk is now about 15cm shorter than it used to be. We had to lose this to make the top of the desk equal the length of the legs. So I have less space to actually work on. But to be honest, this doesn’t bother me. there’s still plenty of space for a laptop, journal and any other bits and pieces I use. For me, the extra space is cheap at the price!

Here’s how it goes:

~ by Sam Logan

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Looking Back (and Forward!) on the Bedroom

First off, thank you guys for all of the feedback on my kitchen renovation post last week! I’ve read all the comments but am still working my way through responding, so bear with me if you’re waiting on a response! I love how much people care about this stuff, and I genuinely appreciate having so much helpful feedback as I pull this plan together. It challenges me to keep playing around and refining and trying different options, and that’s very helpful at this stage! I’m sure I’ll be changing things up until the moment I actually do them (and then probably after—let’s be honest here), so we’re totally still in the playing around phase. Fun times!

ANYWAY. I’ve been working on finishing my bedroom. We know this, right? I’m sitting in it right now (what’s a desk?) and there’s still a fairly long hit-list of little things to wrap up, but even now it’s functional and comfortable and I just love it! It’s a wonderful room. But even though I know exactly how it all went down, I’ve still been thinking a lot about what the hell took so long. It feels like I’ve been working forever on this room. Just a few weeks ago I was standing around, surveying the mess, and genuinely wondering if this bedroom would ever be a space I could actually to sleep in. It’s always darkest before the dawn, I guess.

There’s this yet-unnamed phenomenon that I’ve experienced with each room in my house, where it feels like the renovated space betrays the wild and wooly and exceedingly messy process of getting it there. What’s that thing they say, about the start of a relationship being the most exciting part? That’s how I feel about rooms in my house, I think. Every un-renovated space feels like some sexy stranger, like an acquaintance I can’t wait to get to know better. I see all of the good—the possibilities! the potential!—and very little of the bad. But then I really dive in. And if I’ve done my job well, by the time I’m done I’ve spent so long overturning each stone, investigating every flaw, pouring some level of TLC into every single feature, that it all becomes old hat. That old romantic spark gets replaced with familiarity, and by the end it all feels kind of ordinary.

Not to be too self-congratulatory, but I think maybe that’s how it should feel. Despite the many, many hours of work that I’ve put into this space, even I forget what it really took when I look around the almost-complete room. I sit there trying to reconstruct the whole long process and all the moving parts in my mind to justify the amount of time I feel I’ve spent on it, because it kind of looks like I just painted the walls, ceiling, and trim and put up a new light fixture, and it’s hard to not feel like something is terribly wrong if it really takes me almost four years to get around to that relatively small amount of work.

But that’s the illusion, not the reality. Cognitively, I know this. I was there! I did the work! And even though that feeling can almost be deflating, I try to look at it as an indicator of success in this mission of restora-vating an old house. The room doesn’t look or feel like it underwent a big renovation—rather, it pretty much just looks how I think it should. It doesn’t look like it endured years of neglect and mistreatment only to be revived and altered by some lunatic blogger guy. It kind of just looks like it’s been nicely maintained over the years, and just got a fresh paint job. When you work really hard on something, I think there’s a natural inclination to want that work to be evident in the final result, but I’ve learned that the best kind of work when it comes to old houses is the kind that you hardly notice when all is said and done.

So what am I going on about? Well, let’s take a trip. Through TIME.

It’s May 31, 2013, and I had just done a final walk-through and signed the most daunting set of papers I’ve ever signed because they granted me the legal ownership of an entire fucking house. I’m 23 and have no idea what the hell I’ve just done, but it’s all very exciting. Here’s the bedroom, which at this point is the most bedroom-y room of the second floor apartment. The same second floor apartment that’s had its electrical panel disconnected, so there are no working lights or outlets. The best thing about the second floor is that its attending hot water heater in the basement works, which is more than I can say for the first floor. It still has no working toilet—that doesn’t get fixed until a few days later.

The grainy-ness of this photo isn’t helping my case, but right off the bat the bedroom had some issues beyond a light and easy refresh. The walls had been painted many, many times over possibly multiple layers of old wallpaper, which was now separating from the original plaster beneath, and would fall off in small chips or larger pieces with little provocation. That cheap little sconce next to the closet door was the only light source in the room, the baseboards sustained a tangle of old phone lines and jacks, and I think the entire room had 3 electrical outlets. Which actually isn’t bad, considering some of my other rooms.

Every part of this room needed some attention that wasn’t necessarily immediately obvious from a quick glance, but became more evident upon closer inspection. It looks like the whole wallpaper-separating-from-the-plaster thing had been a long-term problem, “fixed” with generous smearings of caulk and, in many places, some combination of caulk, masking tape, joint compound, and what appears to be cement.

Oh hi, Max and Mekko! By late October of that year, Max had hosted one of his friends for a weekend and they went rogue and started stripping the paint and wallpaper off the original plaster. I’d been good about just leaving everything alone up until this point, but seeing them making such a big mess armed with only a couple spackle knives immediately weakened my resolve and I joined in the fun. “Don’t start this unless you intend to finish it!” I remember telling him and the friend, which even I can admit is pretty rich coming from me.

Naturally that friend, that night, and the booze involved with it came and went, and left a little less than half the room stripped down to the plaster. And that’s how it sat for the next several months, because my house-related work was still reserved for more pressing projects and Max was over it.

By March of 2014, I’d had enough of the half-stripped walls and resolved to make some progress on the bedroom again.

It’s tempting for me to think of this as a project that got way too spread out over way too much time, which maybe is the case, but it’s not like I was sitting around in between! This is 10 months into home ownership, and I’d renovated the kitchen, the laundry room, and had just wrapped up work on the little office. We’d had the roof replaced (which ended up being very time-consuming on my part due to the issues with the box gutters—trying to fix them myself and then dealing with 3 or 4 roofing contractors to finally get it resolved), some necessary plumbing/heating work including a boiler replacement, and the two electrical panels upgraded to one large one. We’d worked to restore the original single-family layout of the house, opening up blocked doorways and demolishing non-original walls. I’d demo’d the fixtures and cabinets out of the upstairs kitchen, done some major clean-up work in the backyard, stripped wallpaper from the hallway walls, demo’d out the living room and dining room ceilings, removed a non-original closet from the dining room, moved a bunch of radiators around, built a fence, planted a garden, watched all the asphalt get removed from the backyard and a large shallow pond develop in its stead, done most of the demo in the downstairs bathroom, replaced the countertops from the earlier kitchen renovation, did round 1 of restoration on the front doors, and saw Beyonce in concert. All of this felt like such a slow slog at the time, but going over my photos and writing it down here actually makes me feel pretty good about the pace. We were also splitting time between Brooklyn and Kingston at this point, so it was a pretty busy period in my life.

ANYWAY. Stripping the walls was basically a two-part process that entailed an initial scraping and then going back with a vinegar-water mixture to get that sticky brown paper underlayment stuff off the plaster. Messy but not particularly difficult.

During the great radiator shuffle/exposed pipe removal effort, these exposed heat pipes in the living room—which ran right in front of the window moldings!—got removed and exchanged for new Pex lines that run up the wall that divides the living room from the hall and across along the ceiling joists. The bedroom radiator’s location didn’t change but that’s the kind of “invisible” work that affected more than one space, including the bedroom. This was done while the living room ceiling was completely demo’d.

Also while the ceilings downstairs were removed, it was a good time to run some new electrical to the bedroom. We added two outlets, a cable jack, a central ceiling fixture with a light switch next to the door (how fancy and modern!), and replaced the wiring that powered the existing outlets, including one line that ran through an unsightly conduit on the exterior of the house from the basement to the second floor. That conduit got removed this past summer, so I’m giving myself a retroactive pat on the back for good planning.

The electrical is actually my biggest regret about the bedroom. This house was built before electricity, but when electrical outlets were originally added, they put them in the baseboards rather than on the walls. I had thought that this no longer satisfied modern electrical code, and I think in some places maybe it doesn’t, but my electrician assured me that it actually was permissible here if it was something I wanted to do for consistency. I opted to go with the modern convention—placing them on the wall, about a foot from the floor—and now I really wish I hadn’t! I love the baseboard outlets in old houses and, as long as I’m legally allowed, would like to stick with that and relocate outlets to the baseboards where possible moving forward. In most cases it’s very easy to do myself, so not a huge deal.

God, that dog color-coordinated really well into that phase of the bedroom. Maybe I shoulda left it!

Then, once again, the bedroom sat totally on the back burner while other projects both in and out of my own house took over my life. If you’ve ever retrofitted old plaster walls with new electrical, you know it’s difficult/impossible to get the box installed very cleanly without the surrounding plaster sustaining some damage. So there I slept, in this room with the mostly raw plaster walls, portions of it crumbling and creating a small but very noticeably endless supply of dust (terrific for allergies!), one of those small plastic utility lights mounted to the new ceiling box with a single exposed bulb. Talk about a retreat!

So anyway. That went on for about 2 and a half years.

The bedroom still didn’t feel all that pressing until it just got totally blown up this summer, when I up and decided to add an additional window to the room. It’s a decision I stand by, but also one that I didn’t totally appreciate the ramifications of until the room had been reduced to THIS mess:

If you’ve been following along in recent weeks and months, you know the rest. I installed the window, sheathed and re-sided that elevation of the house, insulated the wall, put up new drywall, patched in some of the hardwood flooring, replicated the original window casing to trim out the new window, repaired and skim-coated the three remaining walls, restored the original window in the photo above, spent hours prepping all of the original moldings for caulk and paint, and—finally—got to the point of actually PAINTING.

And it’s still not done! But now the list feels much more manageable and less pressing. The doors need to be painted and the hardware restored. Two windows need to be restored. One window just needs paint. The other window just needs a sash lock. The dresser needs new knobs. The bed needs a mattress (hey, a full-size mattress fits on a queen size frame, just not very nicely!). I have to patch and paint the hole in the wall where the sconce was, because now the electric has been completely and safely removed. I need to figure out window treatments and get them ordered and installed, and then spend the next few years moving furniture around and in and out until it stops feeling like a nice thrift store display up in here.

So. Ya know. Still some doing.

And THAT, my friends, is why this shit takes forever! But progress still feels good.

Looking Back (and Forward!) on the Bedroom published first on manhattan-nest.com