The Eastern Parkway Project: Reflections on our Home Renovation

The Eastern Parkway Project Blog Has Moved

2008-06-15T16:55:00.003-04:00

The Eastern Parkway Project blog has a new home at http://theeasternparkwayproject.wordpress.com/

Please visit us there for the latest posts about our renovation journey.

The Floor Refinishing Fiasco

2008-05-24T07:00:00.014-04:00

So, quite some time has passed since my last post. I was waiting for the complete resolution of one of our renovation disasters before I could share the tale. If you’ve been following this blog, you know the apartment we purchased hadn’t received the TLC it deserved and on top of that we had some heavy plastering and painting done prior to moving in. That combination left us with some pretty unappealing hardwood floors.

So before we moved in we decided to have the floors in our living room, dining room and hallway refinished. I called two floor refinishing companies. Both took time to come out to see the floors; however, one never followed up to provide an estimate and the other refused to provide references because he thought they were useless (I wonder what he was trying to hide.)

After searching extensively online, I found a company that offered the exact service we were looking for so I called to get more information. The woman I spoke with was very friendly and even provided references when I asked for them. My husband called the references and received glowing reviews. Based on that and receiving an estimate that matched our budget and a delivery time frame that fit our tight schedule, we set up an appointment for Monday, September 24.

The week prior to our appointment, my husband, my father and I worked nearly around the clock to get as much painting done as possible—tackling the living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway. (See A Dash of Color for the painting story.)

On Sunday evening, we crammed everything that had been in the living and dining room into the kitchen and sealed off the doorways to block out the dust that would be created during the job. Sunday evening while reviewing the flooring company paperwork again I noticed that their sanding machines required a 220v electrical outlet. While we had had the electrical system in our apartment upgraded, the job did not include the installation of a 220v outlet--we didn’t have the need for one.

Concerned this detail would prevent the workers from completing the job, I called the flooring company Monday morning. The representative assured me they could get around this issue by tapping into our apartment’s circuit breaker box for power.

Relieved that the job could go on, my husband met the workers from the flooring company Monday morning. They created sample patches on the floor of the three stains we would be choosing from. Strangely, on the floor, the colors all looked the same. We picked Minwax Early American—a darker tone than the existing stain that would complement our rich wall colors.

My husband watched the workers set up the floor sander and get started. Confident everything was ok, he left the apartment. You may be thinking, “Why would you leave workers alone in your home?” Well, there are only six rooms in our tiny apartment. Three of them were stuffed with furniture, two were being worked on, and all six were off of the hallway, which would also be refinished, so there was nowhere for dear hubby to go to escape the massive sawdust clouds.

About two hours after he left, my husband received a call from a neighbor informing him that there was a serious problem. Apparently the workers determined they were not getting enough power from the circuit breaker box in our apartment, so without our knowledge or approval they found the building’s super and asked for access to the building’s circuit breaker box for more power—and our always accommodating super obliged. But by tapping into the circuit breaker box, the flooring workers blew a fuse that knocked out power in an entire line of apartments in our building.

Fortunately, power was not lost in our apartment and the flooring workers were able to complete the sanding and come in the next day to apply the polyurethane to finish the job. Boy, did our floors look great!!!

But that’s not the end of the story.

An electrician had to be called to replace the blown fuse. In addition, our next door neighbor who works from home lost the work she had been doing on her computer when the power went out.

Days later we received an email from the co-op board informing us that the cost of the fuse replacement would be taken out of the $1,000 security deposit we provided when we started our renovation work. In addition, our security deposit would also be used to cover the cost of replacing our neighbor’s fried computer modem and $500 worth of work she estimated was lost because of the power outage.

We, of course, thought this was unfair, because it was our contractor, not us, who caused the damage. After several months of going back and forth with the co-op board, the flooring company and our attorney, I was able to get the flooring company to pay for the cost of the fuse replacement and the board not to garnish our security deposit to pay for our neighbor's lost work.

As the incident happened just a week before we moved it, our first couple of months living in the building were a little awkward. Luckily, any bad feelings have dissipated and we are now all living in co-op harmony…and we still think our floors look fabulous.

See for yourself:

Before

After

When Life Gives You Lemons (Or Seafoam Green Bathroom Fixtures)

2008-02-19T06:16:00.010-05:00

When we first saw the bathroom in the place that is now our home, we were stunned...and not in a good way. After viewing the pictures below, you'll probably wonder why we went forward with the purchase.

(That's just dirt in there.)

Because we hated the color of the bathroom fixures so much we immediately determined that we would be performing a gut renovation on the room, so the hole in the wall and the dirty toilet were a non-issue.

Since the building was completed in 1915 and still had its original pipes, it was recommended that we replace those as part of the renovation. Our plumber told us he could do this, retile the room and install new fixtures for a mere $18,000. After reassessing the kitchen and discovering that the gas range didn't work, the refrigerator was on its last leg, and there was way too little cabinet or countertop space, we determined that the kitchen would take priority given our limited renovation funds. (See Cooking Up A New Kitchen and Now We're Cooking With Gas)

But we still had to do something about the bathroom. Luckily, during the final walkthrough the day we closed, we discovered that the previous owners had come in the night before and thoroughly cleaned the bathroom. And boy did those bathroom fixtures glisten! Suddenly, that unusual green wasn't as unsightly as we once thought. And after doing some research on bathroom design we learned that sink style and the use of vibrant color were all the rage at some point (most likely the 1950s) as illustrated in the Kohler ad below.

So here's what we did to try to make the room welcoming and complementary to the rich colors of the rest of our apartment.

Repaired the gaping hole in the wall and installed a mirrored medicine cabinet
Painted the yellow walls white
Replaced the wooden toilet seat with a darker brown one (because, honestly, where would we find a toilet seat cover the exact green of the toilet bowl.)
Stripped the white window and door moldings and repainted them a dark brown
Installed new towel bars
Removed rust from existing shower curtain rod and painted it silver
Purchased towels and bathroom accessories to build on the green and dark brown color scheme
Made a window shade to pick up the green in the bathroom, and also bring in some of the rich colors (reds and golds) from the rest of the house. I also made a matching hand towel. (The hand towel project finally gave me a chance to prove to my husband that I can sew. He'd been in doubt because I never completed the skirt I started nearly five years ago after receiving a sewing machine for Christmas.)

So here are the results:

We'd eventually like to repaint the walls to warm up the room even more. If anyone has any color suggestions, please share them by clicking the comments link below.

Now We're Cooking With Gas

2008-01-28T19:51:00.000-05:00

If you've been following our blog you are well aware of the many problems we've encountered renovating our kitchen. First, the kitchen cabinet company shipped the wrong sink base cabinet, which delayed the installation of all our kitchen cabinets for three weeks (see Delivery Day). Then the company we hired to install our countertop and tile floor and backsplash botched the countertop fabrication and then refused to finish the job (see Counterop Catastrophe). Well, I'm happy to say that after months of eating microwaved frozen dinners our kitchen is 90% done. (It will be a few months before my father can visit to help us complete the remaining 10%, but I couldn't wait that long to show off our new kitchen.)

Here's what we've accomplished over these challenging months:

Stripped kitchen of existing cabinets and appliances. Pulled up linoleum tile floor and plywood subfloor. (see Cooking Up A New Kitchen)
New electrical wiring and outlets installed (see Our New Home)
Plaster walls repaired after electrical work (see If These Walls Could Talk)
Hot and cold water pipes and waste drain moved from center of kitchen wall to corner
Patched approximately 2 foot by 2 1/2 foot hole in kitchen floor where dumbwaiter had been located
Converted pantry into space for refrigerator with custom bookshelf on top
Walls and ceiling primed and painted
Kitchen cabinets installed
Quartz countertop and undermount sink installed
Tile floor installed
Ceiling fan light and undercabinet lighting installed
Removed existing base and shoe molding. Primed, painted and installed new base and shoe molding.
Window and door moldings patched, primed and painted
New refrigerator, range and microwave installed

The only thing left to complete is the backsplash. The tile guy we hired only completed half a wall before walking off the job. I purchased a manual tile cutter in hopes of finishing the job. In the process I discovered some pieces could only be cut using a wet saw, which was too heavy for me to lug home from Home Depot by myself. In addition, I learned that the wall along the hallway is not level and needs to be smoothed out by someone with more experience working with plaster than I have before the tiles can be applied. (That's where my father comes in.)

But that's just cosmetic work. What really matters is that the sink is finally connected, which means we no longer have to wash our dishes in the bathroom sink. And all of our appliances are hooked up, so we're finally able to enjoy home-cooked meals.

The following pictures illustrate the kitchen transformation:

Kitchen Before
(Note: The before pictures don't capture the excessive levels of

grime that covered the cabinets, appliances and window.)

Kitchen After

Two Rooms Down...

2008-01-27T08:47:00.000-05:00

After five months of working on our apartment, we've finished the main living areas--the living room and dining room. Actually the work in these rooms was completed a month or so ago. It's taken me that long to find a new place to store the work tools and materials that had been housed in these rooms (they have a new home in our long hallway) and get the rooms photo ready.

Here's what was done in both rooms:

Removed miles and miles of telephone and security alarm wiring from around the living room baseboards and windows
New electrical wiring and outlets installed (see Our New Home)
Plaster walls repaired after electrical work (see If These Walls Could Talk)
Walls were primed and painted (see A Dash of Color)
Window and door moldings and additional wood work were repaired, primed and painted
Wood floors were refinished
A new ceiling fan and sconces were installed in the living room and a new chandelier was installed in the dining room
Custom wood window blinds were installed in both rooms

There are a few finishing touches I'd eventually like to add, like some area rugs and perhaps a nice floor plant, but here are the results of our hard labor:

Living Room Before

Living Room After

(Note: The wall color is not as orange in person. It's browner, more like a deep russett.)

Dining Room Before

Dining Room After

The Power Suit

2008-01-25T06:32:00.000-05:00

Since we closed on our apartment on August 2007, we’ve had myriad problems with contractors—Bestwall Plastering’s shoddy plastering work (If These Walls Could Talk), Park Slope Kitchen Gallery’s cabinet order error (Delivery Day), a major mishap with the floor refinishing company (fodder for a future blog entry) and a failed kitchen countertop fabrication by Lifestyle Marble and Granite (Countertop Catastrophe). But the contractor who seemed to be the most frustrating in terns of getting the job done was the first contractor we hired--the electrician who handled the electrical upgrade of our apartment.

These challenges were particularly difficult for my husband. He shares the story of how he dealt with the dawdling electrician in the following entry:

I’d had enough. I was tired of all the contractors screwing us around. I was tired of work not getting done. I was tired and sick, which, as you know, is usually phrased in reverse.

So when my wife told me the electrician was finally coming to finish up the job, he bore the brunt of my tiredness. He had, in my opinion, been doing his best Stepin Fetchit when it came to putting the finishing touches on our house. The electricians started in August, and it was December—DECEMBER! And they still hadn’t finished. He would speak with my wife, say he was coming on a certain day, and then not show up. Or show up late. Or show up but not have the necessary tools, so he’d leave on an errand that should take 20 minutes, but not come back for two hours.

This time I wasn’t having it. But there was something else going on, too. I had grown
so tired of the unfinished state of the apartment that I wasn’t pulling my weight with the renovations either. I knew it. My wife knew it. I had joked with friends and family about it. I was tired of that, too! I needed a solution.

Lately, at work, I had been dressing up. I did it to change how I felt about myself and how others would view me. Instead of my standard casual dress, I was all about sports coats and ties. It had worked. More and more, people were viewing me as someone in charge. So I decided to try something.

The day the electrician was to arrive, I put on my suit. I hadn’t planned to wear a suit that day. Heck, I wasn’t even going to work. But the electrician didn’t know that.

The electrician was supposed to arrive by 9 am. At 8:06, I called him.

“You are coming to my house today at what time?” I inquired.
“Maybe around 10,” he said.
“I need you here at 9,” I replied.
“OK,” he said.
“Not a moment later,” I said, and before he could respond, I hung up.

At 9:02, he hadn’t arrived, so I called him again.

“Where are you?” I said, dispensing with all niceties.
“I’m on my way.”
“You were supposed to be here at 9. It’s 9:03. Where are you?”

He told me the street he was on. I asked him for the cross streets. He told me.
“So you should be here in five minutes,” I said.

And he was.

Once he arrived, it was more of the same. But it had to be done. This was someone who had proved he viewed coddling and being nice and accommodating as a pathway to extending the job ad infinitum. Like I said at the start, however, I’d had enough of that. He was going to finish today.

I told the electrician his first task. I hovered over him as he worked. When he finished, I gave him his second job. Then his third. Then his fourth. And you know what? Within an hour or so, he had completed all the work. It was tiring for me to watch over him, but after four months. we at last had all our outlets covered, all extraneous wires snipped, etc. When he finally left, I took off my suit, and enjoyed the rest of the day knowing the job was done and I was back on the road to becoming an active contributor to our home renovation.

Counterop Catastrophe

2007-12-17T07:06:00.000-05:00

The kitchen cabinet installation was pretty uneventful, outside of the workers showing up late both days and the company trying to charge us $200 more than the original quote. (Luckily, I saved the email with the original estimate.)

After finally getting our cabinets installed, the next step was the countertop. From the first day we visited Park Slope Kitchen Gallery, my husband and I fell in love with the Silestone Mahogany countertop. We'd planned to order our countertop from Park Slope Kitchen Gallery, but after the cabinet mix up, things began to get a little sketchy. Since the cabinet installers had charged us for the day of work lost because the wrong cabinet was delivered, we thought it only fair that Park Slope Kitchen Gallery reimburse us for that expense. They agreed to do so, however, instead of giving us the money they wanted to give us a discount on the countertop. This would have been fine but the numbers didn't add up.

Prior to ordering the cabinets, we were quoted a price of $2000 for the countertop. Now that we were ready to order, they were saying the countertop would be $2800 but they would only charge us the 'at cost' price of $2200. Now we did make a modification to the countertop layout by moving the sink from the middle of the countertop to the corner, but that didn't seem to merit a 40% increase in price. I decided to get quotes from other countertop retailers and fabricators. All delivered retail cost quotes between $2100 and $2500, much lower than the retail cost cited by Park Slope Kitchen Gallery. (I later learned that the design change caused by moving the sink should have only increased the cost an average of $150.)

After a measurement appointment and a glowing reference check, we decided to go with Lifestyle Marble and Granite. Since the company also handled tile installation, we also hired them to install our tile floor and backsplash.

Two weeks later, Dave, the company's owner arrived with our new countertop. My husband took the day off to oversee the installation. He emailed a picture of the installed countertop to me at work. Boy did it look beautiful against our golden brown cabinets. Yet there was one thing that stood out to me in the picture. See if you notice it.

Yup. The overhang over the corner cabinet is way too small. While the countertop extended beyond the cabinets on the left and right 1 1/4", it only extended 3/4" over the corner cabinet. Unfortunately, my husband didn't notice this while Dave was there. (The area was blocked most of the afternoon as Dave worked on the backsplash.) Dave called in sick the next day so we had to wait until the following day to talk to him. When we asked him about the issue, he admitted that it was his error. He agreed to order a new countertop and correct the error, free of charge. In the meantime, Dave would install the tile floor. Content that the issue had been resolved, my husband and I went off to work.

As soon as I got to work I received a phone call from my father, who was visiting at the time, informing me that Dave didn't want to complete our job anymore. (Something about losing too much money.) He had packed up his tile saw and other tools and would remove the flawed countertop and return our deposit the next day.

We were completely surprised... and highly annoyed. Dave's decision not to complete the work meant we'd have to start from scratch to find another countertop fabricator and tile installer. It also meant we'd have more weeks of frozen dinners ahead of us.

Delivery Day

2007-12-12T23:38:00.000-05:00

We waited patiently for five weeks for our new kitchen cabinets to arrive. When the delivery day came, we were very excited. To recount the events of the day, I'm turning the keyboard over to my husband who was home to accept the delivery.

Thanks to my beloved wife for letting me handle this one.

I took off three weeks from work from mid-September until early October. We had arranged for the kitchen cabinets to be delivered the last Friday in September; installation was scheduled for the Monday. My wife and I couldn’t help but dream that the end of our renovation work was near, at least as far as the kitchen was concerned. Once the cabinets were installed, getting the countertop and flooring would be a snap. We were so cute in our naivete, weren’t we?

Even after the debacle with the walls (see If These Walls Could Talk—and likely future blogs), I had few fears. Our dealings with Park Slope Kitchen Gallery had been great. The saleswoman was topnotch and gave both of us great confidence that this job would go smoothly. The only potential pitfall was that this was supposed to be a curbside delivery, meaning the delivery people wouldn’t carry the cabinets up to the apartment. But I knew the $20 bills in my wallet would solve that issue. Besides, if they didn't, I figured that with enough time I could carry the cabinets myself.

The delivery guys arrived about 20 minutes late, and when I went to greet them—an older guy and young guy—at their truck, the older man looked at me and said ‘It’s just you?’ I nodded, and he said, ‘This is supposed to be curbside.’ I told him about my twenties, and he and his younger partner agreed to help. Thank goodness they did. I thought the dozens of boxes in the truck were for multiple deliveries. Nope. They were just for us.

The first box was huge. 37 inches by 37 inches by 37 inches. I don’t know what it weighed, but even though the young guy and I each grabbed an end, we struggled carrying it upstairs. The front door to our apartment is only 28 inches wide, but I wasn’t too worried. After all, the saleswoman from the cabinet place had been to our home and took extensive and meticulous measurements, so she wouldn’t have ordered something that wouldn’t fit inside, right? I left it, knowing I’d be able to take it out of the box and get it in that way.
Unloading everything took about a half hour. A second box also wouldn’t fit, but I made the same assumption about it as the other box, so again I wasn’t too concerned. I offered a $20 bill to both delivery guys, but the older guy (who had stayed with the truck) told me to just give it to the young guy. They left, I unwrapped the second large box, and successfully maneuvered the contents through the doorway.

Then I went for the first box, the 37-inch one. Unwrapped it. "Oh no,' I said. (Those aren’t the actual words, but this is a family blog.) Inside was a solid piece that was nearly as big as the box it came in. I didn’t even try to get it through the doorway. I could feel my blood pressure rising.

I called the saleswoman and she eventually determined that the company had delivered the wrong piece. We were supposed to have received only the front piece and bottom of this corner piece, but they had delivered the entire corner cabinet. She told me they’d be able to pick it up the next day, but getting the correct piece would take two weeks.

I had really liked this saleswoman, a very together young woman. Though her news was extremely aggravating, there was nothing to do except say OK. But I couldn’t leave this huge cabinet in the hallway. My wife and I had just had a run-in with one of our new neighbors over another construction issue (see future blogs, certainly), and I was really trying to upset her even more. So I had to move the box, somehow.

There was no way I could pick it up—I couldn’t even get my arms around it. But I could slide it. Down the flight of stairs, through the landing, down the next flight, and then push it under the stairs where our fellow tenants keep their baby strollers. I measured the first flight of stairs. It was 37-1/4 inches wide, same as the second set of stairs. Like Theo Huxtable might say, ‘No problem.’

With some effort I slid the box to the stairs then guided it to the bottom of the first flight. Once on the landing, I pulled it to the other set of stairs. That’s when I hit a roadblock. This stairwell was 37-1/4 inches wide, but an overhang that I hadn’t previously noticed jutted out 3 inches. I struggled with the box for about 30 minutes—hopping over it several times to alternately push and pull it—and was really frustrated and exhausted. But I realized that unless I could lift it over my shoulders, moving the box past the overhang was impossible. And that was out of the question.
It was about 5 p.m., and someone was coming home from work. But the box was on the landing, and since I couldn’t pull it down or carry it back up, there was no way around it. I could hear the footsteps coming closer. I absolutely panicked. For any of you familiar with the Incredible Hulk, you know what happened to me. I had an adrenaline surge that made me stronger than I’ve ever been.

I pushed the giant box to the edge of the stairs leading back up to our apartment. I then reached over the box, grabbed the far end, shifted my weight and voila, the box was in the air—by just a few inches, but that was enough. I carried it up the stairs, not believing what I was doing. When I reached the top, the surge fled and my arms almost literally crumbled. They were shaking and my biceps and triceps felt like they had been blown up for three or four days afterward. I pushed the box to our door, and since it wasn’t blocking anything, I left a note on it explaining what happened.

The next day, luckily, a friend of one of the other tenants helped me carry the box to the first floor where it sat underneath the stairs, beside the strollers. I left another note, and no one ever said a word about it. But the same day, the saleswoman called to let me know they wouldn’t be able to pick up the box until Monday. I guess I was still channeling the Hulk and became enraged. I told her I would take the box outside and leave it on the street. She seemed a little caught off guard and told me to go ahead if that’s what I had to do. (We later learned from the cabinet store manager that she had originally ordered the wrong piece, and some of the other deals she made with us came off a little shady. Renovation Rule #1: Contractors and salespeople may be friendly, but they are not your friends!)

Since the box would be there until Monday, we decided to keep our cabinet installation appointment for that day and the following in hopes that the workers would be able to take the cabinet apart and bring it into the apartment.

That didn't work and since this was the corner piece of all the base cabinets, they couldn't install any of the cabinets. The installers charged us a fee for not being able to work that day and we had to reschedule the installation. We discovered that because of shipment schedules, we actually wouldn't get our new sink base for three weeks and the lead cabinet installer, whom we had done so much research on, would not be available then. Eager to move the process along, we agreed to have the installation handled by the guy's right-hand man. Meanwhile, we would have to live in our apartment with 25 boxes of cabinets until the new installation date arrived nearly a month later.

The cabinet company didn’t actually take the giant box away until Tuesday, but by then I had calmed down. Three weeks later, the correct piece was delivered, also to curbside. It was a little thing. I carried it inside, proudly, with one hand.

Cooking Up A New Kitchen

2007-12-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

The kitchen has been the most stressful and challenging part of making our new co-op apartment a home. When we purchased the apartment, the kitchen looked like this:

Not the worse looking kitchen on the block, but the stove didn't work, there weren't enough cabinets (those that were there had a grimy film on them) and the refrigerator smelled like something three-times worse than spoiled milk. So we decided the refrigerator, stove and cabinets had to go, all to be replaced with items of our choosing.

While we were at it, we pulled up the linoleum tile floor and found an unsettling surprise in one corner--a huge, perfectly rectangular hole about two feet by two-and-a-half feet that when you looked down it seemed to have no bottom. Mind you this was where the heavy refrigerator had been located. We later learned that this hole was part of a dumb waiter system that had been removed years ago.

Once we cleared everything out of the kitchen, we proceeded to paint the room a cheery golden yellow (Benjamin Moore Dorset Gold to be exact). In the photo below you can see the beginning of the painting process and the place where the dumb waiter used to be, now covered by a sturdy wood board. Thankfully, our new kitchen design doesn't require us to put anything extremely heavy in the spot where the dumb waiter used to be.

We turned to Park Slope Kitchen Gallery for assistance in designing our new kitchen. We were moving from an apartment with a larger galley kitchen with lots of cabinets so we needed to create as much storage space as possible, especially since we had sacrificed the kitchen pantry to house the refrigerator so that we would be able to have more counter space.

The salesperson helped us come up with the following design:

After placing the cabinet order in mid-August, all we had to do was wait the five weeks for delivery before we could have kitchen of our dreams. (Actually, the kitchen of our dreams is larger than 80 square feet, and has shiny stainless steel Viking appliances and a generous, multifunctional island. This apartment kitchen design was about as dreamy as we could get in the limited space we had to work with.)

A Dash of Color

2007-12-02T20:26:00.000-05:00

Once the plastering was finished, it was on to painting. After years of living in rental apartments with sterile white walls, we were determined to fill our surroundings with rich color. So what if the dark tones would make our rooms seem smaller? Better cozy and colorful than big and bland.

Again we were under a time crunch. We had a little over a week to paint the living room, dining room and hallway before we were scheduled to have the wood floors in those rooms refinished. (The floor refinishing will be the subject of a future post.)

Between the two of us, my husband and I had minimal painting experience. My husband had never painted before. While in college I'd spent two summers painting industrial buildings at Kodak, but that didn't qualify me as an interior home painter. Again, we were fortunate to have the help of my father.

While we waited for my father's arrival, my husband and I decided to hone our painting skills by priming the living room. Why we decided to start with the largest room in the apartment, I don't know. After applying a coat of primer, we could still see the pencil marks the electrician had made and the patches made by the plasterer. We applied two more coats before we realized that the paint store had given us the wrong type of primer--one that wasn't known for its coverage ability. After purchasing what we thought was the right primer, we then discovered that we needed a tinted primer for the dark colors we'd chosen. So it was back to the paint store again.

Once my father arrived things began to go more smoothly. (That is after my father spent a couple of days smoothing out the patches Best Wall Plastering failed to finish properly. See If These Walls Could Talk.) In one week the three of us were able to paint the walls in the living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom. We were only able to prime the hallway before our deadline, which actually turned out to be a positive. I changed my mind about the wall color at the last minute and the walls would sustain many scrapes and scratches from the work to be done in the coming weeks.

So here are the results of our hard labor (I apologize for the poor picture quality. Blame the bad camera on the Treo 755. My good camera was packed away. I've included color swatches to provide a better idea of the color):

Living Room Before:

Living Room After:

Benjamin Moore Audubon Russet:

Dining Room Before:

Dining Room After:

Benjamin Moore Hot Apple Spice:

The Long Haul

2007-11-30T22:17:00.000-05:00

Our challenge with fixing the walls was compounded by the fact that we had to be out of our rental apartment by the end of August and the plaster work wouldn't be finished until the second week of September. Fortunately, we had friends who were able to sublet their studio apartment in Manhattan to us for September. (Many thanks to Kanika and Ali.)

We considered putting our belongings in public storage for the month but the thought of placing all of our worldly possessions in the hands of a stranger was absolutely terrifying. Instead, we opted to turn the two bedrooms in our new apartment into our own personal storage units.
So at the end of August the movers came to transfer our our precious goods.

It took the movers nearly 12 hours to move us to our new place, just three blocks down Eastern Parkway. While our rental apartment building had an elevator, it moved like molasses. And instead of being able to take our items out the front door of the building, the movers had to navigate the dark bowels of the building's basement to the moving truck that had to be parked on the street behind us. Once at our new building, the movers weren't able to find a parking space right in front so they had to leave the truck several doors down and use dollies to wheel everything to the building. Then they had to carry everything--including a full bedroom, dining room, living room and office worth of furniture and nearly 80 boxes-- up the building's front steps and one flight inside. (At least it wasn't raining.)

Our sofa wouldn't fit through the front door of our apartment, so we had to call a "couch doctor" to disassemble it. Unfortunately, the "doctor" wasn't making house calls that day; so we'd had to wait until the following week to put the sofa in its new home. There was no room in our building's tiny lobby to leave the sofa, so the movers took the sofa back to their headquarters.

At the end of the day, both bedrooms were packed to the brim with furniture and boxes--including a box containing my husband's clothes that was supposed to have gone to the sublet. The movers were a little over zealous and swooped up boxes from the old place before we could mark them 'Do not take.' My husband ended up with only five pairs of underwear and a few shirts and pants for the month of September. Luckily, he decided to go shopping for more clothes shortly after we settled in.

The move was so arduous that the moving company's manager called us the next day to complain. He felt his guys deserved more money, despite the fact that we were given a flat rate quote for the move that was determined by our responses to an online questionnaire. The company never came out to survey the move location or items. I feared they would hold our sofa hostage unless we gave them more money. (We didn't and they didn't)

Watching the movers labor for nearly half-a-day, we knew it was a difficult move and tipped the movers generously. But that wasn't enough for Frank, the lead guy on the job. We found out Frank quit that day.

If These Walls Could Talk

2007-11-30T00:10:00.000-05:00

So you may be wondering what our "new" apartment looks like. If I showed you pictures of what the place looked like when we bought it, you might question our judgement. The apartment had not been updated in decades and had been empty for several months. These photos will make great befores for "Before and After" features in future posts.

Now for the story of how we tried to repair all the holes in the wall left by the electricians.... I'm extremely fortunate to have a father who is very handy. I can't remember a time during my childhood when my father hired someone to fix something around the house. He did and still does everything himself and he does it well. He generously agreed to help us fix up our place, starting with patching up all the holes and trenches in the walls (See Our New Home). However, after a week of working 12 hour days and not completing even one room we knew we had bitten off more than we could chew. It was time to call in the professionals.

Using ServiceMagic.com, an online contractor referral Web site, I found Bestwall Plastering, a company with 25 years of experience in plastering. Kieran, the company's owner, promptly came to give us an estimate for the work we needed to have done. Impressed by his knowledge, pictures of his work and the fact that he said he could finish the entire apartment in 9 days, we hired him. He worked diligently over those nine days, but those nine days weren't without trouble.

During our initial conversation during the estimate appointment, we informed Kieran that we wanted the walls repaired, finished, and ready to paint. Two days into the job, he claimed the contract stated that he was only supposed to fill the holes in the wall left by the electrician. He wanted nothing to do with the many cracks and other problems that were caused when the electricians made holes in the near 100-year-old plaster in our apartment. His unwillingness to honor our original request left us with these gems (click photos to enlarge them):

Not quite the work we expected from someone with 25 years of experience. (We've since learned to be more selective in the contractors that we hire, but that doesn't always prevent problems from occurring.) I won't go into the details of our attempts to fix these problems. They aren't pretty. However, we were able to move forward with our renovation work and have come to view this experience as a lesson learned.

Our New Home

2007-11-28T22:57:00.000-05:00

It's been nearly four months since my husband and I have had a home-cooked meal. It all started when we decided the purchase a co-op apartment on Brooklyn's beautiful Eastern Parkway. It's a great pre-war apartment with a lot of character. It's also an apartment in need of a lot of TLC--more than we ever anticipated when we first submitted our offer.

Our first surprise?

The apartment's electrical system still had the original cloth-covered wires from when the building was erected in 1915 and our co-op board required us to have the entire system upgraded. Soon after we closed, our lovely plaster walls went from blank canvases full of potential to walls full of holes and trenches.

We learned that, amazingly, electricians can come in and tear holes into your walls without having to fix the damage. You have to call a completely different contractor for that. The wall repair nightmare will be the subject of a future blog entry.

We thought we'd complete our renovations in about six weeks after closing, but four months later there is still plenty of work to be done. This is the reason we haven't had a home-cooked meal in a very long time. We have no kitchen--no sink, no stove. (OK, we do have a sink and stove, but they're in our dining room). We are fortunate to have a microwave and are very grateful to Kashi and Healthy Choice for their tasty frozen dinners. Stay tuned for a future post about why we've gone so long without a kitchen.