The reveal… aka how to strip wallpaper

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

As neat as it would have been to find an old newspaper hidden in the wall–as we’ve heard other renovators have–that was not the case for us.

The answer to last week’s guessing game, if you haven’t already guessed from the title of this post, is that the “antique newspaper” is wallpaper that graced the walls in the basement.

I work in communications. I appreciate good journalism. However, graphics of old newspapers pasted onto my wall are not good journalism.

While the wallpaper trend in decor shows no signs of going away, this particular pattern is not in keeping with our decor vision for the basement. The newspaper wallpaper was going away.

In my experience, removing wallpaper goes one of two ways. You either spend hours and hours scraping with a trowel only to have it come off in teeny tiny chips approximately the size of your smallest fingernail, or you smoothly peel the paper away a few minutes after you spritzed it with hot water.

Over the years, I’ve tried a variety of scrapers and scorers, tools and techniques, chemicals and solutions. I’ve suffered burns from heavy steamers and patched pock-marked walls when the wallpaper peeled away the paper on the drywall.

You never know how your paper is going to come off until you start trying to remove it. Fortunately for me, our newspaper wallpaper came off very easily. Fortunately for you, I’m going to share my method.

Unfortunately for some of you likely, this is not a tutorial of how to remove stubborn wallpaper. This is how to remove wallpaper that’s a single layer, has been installed correctly and isn’t sticking like bubblegum to the wall.

If your wallpaper has an attachment disorder, you have my sympathies. My best advice is to keep going and remember you can fix the divots and tears afterwards. Drywall compound is your friend.

Here is my very simple chemical-free method for stripping wallpaper. First, assemble your tools.

There is nothing fancy here. You need a scraper or trowel, a bucket and a sponge. Optional equipment is a spray bottle and gloves. If you’re working in a nicely finished area as opposed to a gutted basement, you’ll likely also want a tarp or a sheet to protect your floors.

Fill your bucket and spray bottle with hot water. You don’t need to boil the kettle. I find hot tap water works just fine. Just make sure to run the water for a few minutes until you have truly hot water.

Here’s what I started with. Just a small wall covered with wallpaper.

The easiest method I’ve found for removing wallpaper is a two-step approach.

Start by soaking your paper using either your sponge or the spray bottle. Just like drywall compound is your friend after the wallpaper is removed, water is your friend during the removal. Start at the top of the wall and work your way down. The water will drip and run down the wall, but making sure the paper is fully saturated will make your life easier in a few minutes.

Once you’ve completely soaked the wallpaper from top to bottom, find a seam and use your trowel or your fingernails to grab an edge. Peel back the paper.

You can let the water soak in for a little while, but I usually find at this stage I can go right from soaking to peeling without delay.

You’ll likely notice that when you peel off the paper you are only removing the outer layer, the one with the pattern printed on it. There is still a second layer that is stuck to the wall. Do not despair. Remember this is a two-step process.

Once you’ve removed the outer layer, your next job is to–surprise!–tackle the inner layer. This is the part of the paper that’s actually adhered to the wall. The patterned side of wallpaper often has a glossy or smooth finish on it that prevents the water from fully soaking into the paper and reaching the glue that’s holding the paper on the wall. By removing the outer layer first, you can then fully soak the inner layer and (hopefully) easily loosen the glue.

The left shows one panel of the outer layer removed. The right shows the inner layer after I’ve spritzed it with my spray bottle of hot water.

Again, you want to saturate the paper that’s on the wall. Don’t be shy with your spray bottle. Just like before, start at the top and work your way down. I usually find it helpful to let the paper sit for a few minutes to let the water fully absorb. Then, go to work with your scraper.

Catch an edge on the wallpaper. This time, instead of pulling the paper off by hand, let your trowel do the work.

Scrape with your trowel. I usually try to keep my trowel at a fairly shallow angle–less than 45 degrees off the wall. This allows me to easily get under the paper and scrape it smoothly off the wall.

If the water has done its work, the paper should scrape off the wall fairly easily.

Apply more water as you need to to keep the paper peeling off easily. I like to spray a large area so that it can soak while I’m working on another section.

Halfway there

Once you have scraped all of the paper, wipe the wall with your wet sponge. You’ll find small shreds of paper and a film of glue left behind. The remaining pieces of paper will usually come off with a few swipes of your sponge. Go over the wall a couple of times to remove as much of the glue as possible. Before you paint, you may want to consider washing the wall with TSP, just to make sure there’s no residue.

At this point, you should have a nice clean wallpaper-less wall.

The after.

And a pile of paper on the floor.

I get a lot of satisfaction from seeing the wallpaper on the floor instead of on the wall.

Even if your wallpaper came off with minimal effort, you may have a few spots on the wall that need smoothing out afterwards with drywall compound. In my experience, wallpaper can hide a lot of lumps and bumps. Remember, drywall compound is your friend.

Now, some of you may be wondering why I’m spending time stripping wallpaper when we don’t even have walls in the rest of the basement. Shouldn’t I be hanging drywall instead of flitting around with a spray bottle? The answer is probably yes, but I do have two good reasons for focusing on the wallpaper now:

Instant gratification: I spent 30 minutes stripping this wall. It was quick, it’s done, and I can now check it off the to-do list. If I spent 30 minutes working with the drywall, I would not get nearly as much done and I would have much less sense of satisfaction.
Efficiency: Once we finish installing the new drywall, the next step is taping and pasting all of the seams. I can easily patch any areas on the wallpaper wall at the same time. The end result will be a nice smooth finish on all the walls, old and new.

So, here concludes my method for stripping wallpaper. Anyone else have a method they’d like to share? Or any tips? A lot of people have horror stories of stripping stubborn wallpaper. Feel free to share your saga in the comments. We will commiserate with you.

Progress

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Greenboard and cement board in the bathroom

Greenboard and cement board are up in the basement bathroom

I’m a little bit excited to finally be at the drywall stage in the basement reno. It’s going to be a huge job though, so we’ve decided to break it into smaller projects to make it more manageable. We started with the bathroom.

We used cement board in the shower and then moisture resistant greenboard on the ceiling and the rest of the walls. We’ve also patched the floor where Matt broke up the concrete for the drains and put the new concrete pan in the shower.

Our new shower comes with a storage niche as well as a bench

Next step is taping all of the joints, and then we’ll move on to tile. It’s amazing what a difference the drywall makes. The room is already starting to feel more finished.

Things I love:

the niche
the bench
the precision cutting we were able to do around the electrical and plumbing–less pasting for us!

Hopefully the progress continues this weekend.

What are your plans?

Wiring woes

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

As you saw yesterday, work on the basement continues. In the meantime, I’m going back a few weeks to talk about some of the problems we encountered with the electrical.

Fried junction box in the basement ceiling. In case you were wondering, no, the inside should not be black like that.

We ended up discovering a total of 10 junction boxes in the basement ceiling, hidden behind the drywall. This is a big no-no. Junction boxes themselves are okay. But covering them over with drywall is not. You’re supposed to put a cover on them so that they are accessible.

The conversation during demo went something like this:

“I found another one.”
“Seriously? Crap!”
“Do you want to just pull the whole ceiling down?”
“We probably should. Who knows how many there are up there.”

One of my goals in hiring a professional electrician was to eliminate as many junction boxes as possible, because I didn’t want the covers polka-dotting our nice new ceiling. In the end, our electrician was able to get rid of all but two–much better than I’d hoped for.

The other unsettling moment during demo was when we’d open a wall or part of the ceiling and find a loose wire. The ends were usually cut. They weren’t capped or taped at all, and we had no idea where they went and whether or not they were live.

This was the moment when Matt would reach for his tester and point it at the offending wire. If the tester chirped, that meant the wire was live. It turned out that most of the wires were dead, completely disconnected at both ends. No one had ever bothered to remove them, so they just sat there behind the drywall waiting to scare future renovators.

Matt made it his mission to eliminate all of this useless wiring, and he spent a lot of time tracing wires through the ceiling and along the walls so that he could pull them out.

Pile of some of the old wires Matt pulled out in the basement.

We did as much of the wiring work ourselves as we could, but having the help of a skilled professional was absolutely necessary for fixing all of the problems. Electrical is not always straight-forward, and it can be dangerous if it’s not right.

I’m all about DIY, but only if I know what I’m doing. Thanks to our electrician, all of the problems have been fixed, the panel is organized and labelled, circuits have been tidied up and new outlets and lights have been added where we wanted them. Most important of all it’s done right and it’s safe.

Warm and toasty… and teal?

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

What do you think of our new colour scheme in the basement?

It’s a little bit smurf, a little bit cotton candy.

Matt was hoping for blue. I’d say he got his wish.

Last week, we had spray foam insulation applied to all of the exterior walls.

As you’ll recall, the original plans for the basement reno were mostly cosmetic (replace carpet, remove paneling, relocate cabinetry, leave all the drywall in place and just patch and paint). Simple, easy, quick!

However, we’ve had a few surprises in the form of inadequate insulation and improper wiring. Our solution was to remove the drywall and the existing R7 insulation from all of the exterior walls and start fresh.

The old insulation was actually stamped R7. I don’t think I’d admit it if I was that inadequate.

However, we couldn’t just simply put the new insulation into the old walls because all of the studs were laid flat on the concrete. This meant we only had 1 1/2 inches for insulation. We had to fur out all of the existing studs with new 2x4s.

We screwed new 2x4s onto the existing studs.

The count was close to 100 studs for the whole basement. Each one had to be plumbed (make sure it’s perfectly vertical) and then toenailed (screwed on an angle) with three inch screws to the old studs. It took two people to do each stud (one to hold and one to screw), so this stage has taken us a little while to complete. Matt and I found it took us about two hours to do a wall.

It would have been easier to put the new studs flat onto the old studs, but we wanted the higher R factor that additional depth allowed us. We ended up with 5 inches of space and we had the option of R20 or R27 for the insulation. R20 application meant we’d have 3 1/4 inches of foam and R27 would be 4 1/2 inches. We chose to go with R20 because there was nearly a $1,000 price difference for just 7 more R factors, which wasn’t worth it for us. R20 is still a really good rating.

I’ve never done spray foam before (and to be clear we couldn’t find a DIY option for spray foam, so we hired an insulation contractor to do the work for us), but we chose this option over the traditional batts for a couple of reasons:

Traditional insulation requires tar paper (or some other membrane) between the concrete and the studs, and there was no way we could do this and still leave the existing studs in place. We then would have to run a plastic vapor barrier over the insulation before we put up the drywall.
We found about 6 mice (all dead) and numerous rodent highways in the old insulation.

Spray foam is tar paper, insulation and vapor barrier all in one. Plus it’s more rodent resistant, which is comforting given our discoveries.

The spray foam covers the wall space between each stud as well as the joist headers at the top of the walls. In the main room and long room the ceilings are all open so the sprayers had easy access (click here if you need a refresher on the floor plan for the basement). In the office we left the ceiling in place, so Matt cut back about 12 inches of drywall off the ceiling on the two exterior walls so that the sprayers would be able to access the joist headers and we’d have a good seal all the way around.

Spray foam insulation in the joist headers

These joist headers (which were completely uninsulated before) can be the source of a lot of drafts

To prepare for the spray foam we made sure all of the electrical and plumbing work that we wanted to do was completed in advance. Spray foam fills all of the nooks and crannies and hardens very quickly. It’s great for efficiency, but you can’t really change your mind and say, “Oh I really wish that plug was over here” after it’s all done.

Electrical outlets encased in spray foam insulation

This is the corner in Matt’s office where the desk is going to go. From left to right we have a double box for electrical outlets, a plastic conduit that will eventually house the internet wire (we’ll use the string to pull the wire through the pipe) and a phone jack.

The spray foam crew took a full day to do the whole basement. While the spray is being applied, it is toxic, so the crew wore respirators and my Dad (who was on-site supervising) couldn’t stay in the house. When we got home from work that night there was a slight odor, but we opened the windows and it dissipated quickly.

Insulation is a major step in putting the basement back together. As much as we love the teal, we’re anxious to move on to drywall… Or maybe just anxious about drywall. This next stage is going to be a biggie. We’ll keep you posted on how we make out!

How to install a pot light

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

The original lighting in what will be the TV area of the basement consisted of four pot lights, two ceiling fixtures mounted on the walls and one ceiling fan recessed into the ceiling so that it didn’t decapitate anyone. These three different sets of lights were controlled by three different switches in two different locations.

The original lighting in the basement.

We decided to keep just the pot lights, so Matt took apart the ceiling fan, and my Dad pulled out one of the wall-mounted ceiling fixtures while I dealt with the other one. We removed the boxes and wires running to each of the lights as well as the switches that controlled the ceiling fan and the pot lights. Then we reconnected the pot lights into the switch that originally controlled the ceiling fixtures.

Everything was working well, but we felt we needed a little more light, so we decided to add an extra pot light in the middle of the ceiling.

Apologies for the quality of the following photos. So many circuits are off in the basement due to the electrical work that we don’t have very many lights. We have construction lights set up, but they’re a little harsh. I played around with some new actions in Photoshop, but I can’t tell whether they made things better or worse.

Our original four pot lights

Electrical work can be intimidating, but installing a pot light is a very straight forward job that can be completed in about a half an hour, even by those of us that are not licensed electricians. We did have a lot of other issues with the electrical in the basement, and for those we hired a professional electrician.

Here’s my pot light installation method, complete with lots of photos (of varying quality). Note that in the tutorial I’ve assumed that the wire that is going to be feeding your new pot light is already in place.

1) Turn off the electricity to your light. In this house, none of the circuits are labelled, so our usual method of finding the right one is to turn on the light (or plug something in) and have one of us watch it while the other person flips the breakers until we find the right one. Then we label it!

2) Determine where you want your new light. I used the oh so scientific method of tying a piece of twine to each of the existing pot lights. Where it crossed was the centre.

3) Now onto your light.

Some pot lights can be installed in a finished (drywalled) ceiling. However, this type of pot light has to be installed where the ceiling is open.

4) Pop the cover off the wiring box to reveal the wires.

Preparing your pot light for installation.

Cover on (left). Cover off (right). I also cut off the push-in connectors because I’m used to twisting the wires together instead.

5) Now attach the pot light to the joist. For my light, this meant adjusting the brackets, or bar hangers, so that they were the right length to span between the joists and then nailing the bracket into the joist.

Installing a pot light bracket onto the joist.

For reference, holding the light in place while taking a picture is not the easiest. A third hand, or better yet a second pair, would be helpful.

6) Take a break because your husband has arrived home, and he brought dinner.

Pot light housing installed. Time for dinner.

7) If necessary, trim your feed wire to the required length and strip back the casing to reveal the individual wires. The easiest way to do this is to use your side cutters to snip a little split in the casing, just enough so that you can access the ground wire (the copper one). Grab the ground wire with your pliers and pull to rip the casing. You want to remove the casing for about 6 inches so that you can access the black, white and copper wire. Once your casing is ripped back far enough, clip it off with your side cutters. Strip about a 1/2 inch or so of the plastic coating off of the tips of the black and the white wires. I usually do this with a knife, as though I’m peeling a vegetable.

Remove the casing from the wires by pulling on the ground wire. For reference, the ground wire is pointing up to the right, the black and white wires are pointing down to the left and the empty casing is pointing down in the centre.

8) Knock out one of the round metal covers (coincidentally called knock-outs) on the pot light housing. I used my awl to bend it up and then wiggled it back and forth until it snapped out. The wire isn’t supposed to float loose in the hole, but the pot light didn’t come with any clamps or conduit, so I pulled one off of an old electrical box and put it in the hole.

From left to right, removing the knock-out, the clamp that will hold the wire in place and the clamp installed.

9) Insert your feed wire into the pot light and clamp it in place.

Sorry for the slightly blurry photo. The plastic casing should be just inside the pot light housing.

10) Connect your feed wire to the wire in the pot light: black to black, white to white, ground to ground. Twist them together with your pliers and cap them with marretts.

You don’t have to get fancy with different coloured marretts. These are simply the two I had on hand that fit the wires properly.

11) Once everything is securely connected, tuck your wires back into the housing, put in a light bulb and flip the circuit back on to test your light.

It works!

12) Put the cover back over the wiring area. Make sure the light is positioned where you want it on the hanger bars. There’s a screw that you tighten into the bar to lock the light in place. Stand back and admire your handiwork.

Let there be light!

The five pot lights look great, and throw a sufficient amount of light. I initially thought we might need some wall sconces or extra lamps, but I think the pot lights will work well for us.

Oh and you might want to take down your measuring twine, unless you really like it as a decorative element.

ETA: The final, final step in installing pot lights is installing the trim, which I did after our ceiling was drywalled. I’ve posted my instructions of how to install pot light trim.

Reflections on a DIY lifestyle

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Last week two of the blogs I read regularly did posts on the theme of DIYing vs. Living In Your Home & Enjoying It (that’s Young House Love’s title. DIY Diva had her own reflections). Reading their posts got me thinking about my philosophy and how we live in our house.

Matt and Dad dig out an old window well while our mason works at bricking up another old window

It’s been just about two months since we moved into the farm. Our major motivation for moving to the country is to enjoy a slower pace and really savour life, but I feel like we really haven’t taken much time to sit down and enjoy being here. We have moments–Saturday afternoons before dump runs tend to be a time you’ll catch us sitting outside for a few minutes… usually just on the ground or a rock, usually with the kitties around us.

Matt on a kitty break. Notice the work gloves are still on.

As much as I love DIY, it can be a tough lifestyle at times.

Last week was a bit rough in spots. We had a couple of late nights working on the house, a couple of evenings out for other stuff (the rest of your life and work continue even when you’re mid-reno) and a couple of last minute shopping sprees/construction blitzes to prepare for trades who were coming the next day.

We tend to sacrifice sleep to get it all done and there are lots of mornings that we are dragging and some days where we feel a bit droopy.

Cuts and scrapes, bumps and bruises are all part of DIY

I can’t imagine not working on our house myself and making it what I want with my own two hands. But there comes a point in every project where I just want it to be done. We’re not there yet. It usually hits sometime around the drywall stage.

A big project, like the basement reno we’re in the midst of now, causes a lot of chaos. Everything that would normally be in the basement is in the living room. The kitchen island is covered with tools and materials and manuals and notes for trades. There’s a fine skim of dust everywhere, both upstairs and down.

The yearning to have a clean and organized house and be able to sit down for an evening without feeling guilty is powerful motivation at this stage of a project.

The partially gutted basement

We do try to keep a balance. We’ve learned we don’t always have to be working on the house. Yes, taking a night off makes me feel slightly guilty and pushes the finish line a little farther away. However, hanging out with friends, sitting on the couch watching TV or just taking a walk rejuvenate me so that I’m more motivated when we get back to work.

Also, we tend to only take on one big project a year, so we have lots of time off to recuperate and relax in between–and forget!

Vistas like this just outside the front door can make us shift our focus pretty quickly from DIYing to relaxing.

This basement project is not our first DIY reno, but this is my first time blogging about it, and I’m finding the blog is very motivating as well. Keeping a record of our progress and posting pictures of what we’re working towards help to keep me moving. I know at the end it will be beautiful and completely worth it.

As well, knowing that we have all of you out there supporting us, reading updates and looking forward to seeing the finished product means a lot. People have been promised an invitation to play games and watch movies in our fun basement hangout. We have to deliver!

Now it’s your turn. Whether you’re a DIYer or not, how do you stay motivated?

Psycho shower

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

In previous posts I mentioned that our basement bathroom is deserving of its own feature. Well, here it is. The promised post on our basement bathroom.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Hey, that looks pretty good. Shower, toilet, vanity, sink, mirror, light. All of the parts seem to there.

Let’s look a bit closer, shall we?

Psycho shower! No, this is not a crime scene. We have some issues with iron in our water.

Psycho shower on a grody platform (and yes, some demo has taken place between the first two photos and this photo)

Decent sink, but ugly faucets and some spray issues

Decent sink, but ugly faucet and some spray issues

Off-centre light (and random vent… don’t know what it’s covering yet)

Exhaust fan issues (we haven’t touched this yet. This is actually how it was when we bought it.)

Cushy toilet seat with colourful hunting scene on the lid

Lovely, isn’t it?

We knew from the first time we saw it that we would be tearing out the basement bathroom entirely. Here’s the vision for what it will be.

Decidedly not psycho shower. Source: Aubrey + Lindsay’s Blog

While most of the key features of the bathroom are in place, the one thing that we’re missing is storage, so the reno will have to include space for extra soap, toilet paper, towels and all of the other stuff that is part of a bathroom. Something like this will be perfect.

Source: Houzz

Here’s the floor plan before.

Source: floorplanner.com

And after.

Much larger shower (hopefully not on a platform), with a ledge at the one end for shampoo and soap. The other side of the ledge will be floor to ceiling storage. Source: floorplanner.com

Like in the rest of the basement, we’re not making major changes to the layout, but everything will be coming out and the walls will be opened up and the insulation will be upgraded. We’re probably going to reuse the vanity, albeit with a new faucet. There will be a new toilet, new floor, new lighting and lots of nice, clean, new tile.

After growing up in a house with only one bathroom, Matt now requires his own bathroom. So I will be the main user of the upstairs bath, and this one will be all his. Somehow it doesn’t seem entirely fair that he gets the nice new bathroom all to himself. Don’t you think?

For more inspiration images, including ideas for fixtures, see my basement bathroom board on Pinterest.

How to recover a chair seat

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

As part of preparing for the family dinner that we hosted on Good Friday, I had to put new cushions on our dining room chairs.

We had our dining room set refinished just before we moved into the farm, and since moving in the chairs have been naked.

Yikes, naked chair!

I know it’s not a hard core renovation, but it is DIY, so I’m posting a brief how-to. I should be clear though that this was my first true upholstery project, and I am sure I made a few mistakes along the way. There are lots of great tutorials online by people much more skilled than me. However, here’s the method that I used for our dining room chairs.

1) Remove the seat from the frame. In my case, this meant unscrewing the seat from four corner braces that were underneath.

Brace under the seat that holds the seat to the chair frame.

2) Cut your foam. My foam was 1 1/2 inches thick. I cut the foam about a 1/2 inch bigger all the way around than the seat (no measuring, I just eyeballed it). If you’re fancy or a professional, you’ll probably want to use a foam saw for this step, or even an electric knife. I didn’t have either of those things. I tried a utility knife but ended up having the best luck with my kitchen scissors. The edge wasn’t perfect, but it was smooth enough for me.

I allowed about a 1/2″ border all the way around.

3) Using the tips in this video, I tacked the foam to the top of the seat. I stapled about every 3 inches around the three outside edges. Again, if you’re fancy or a professional, you will likely use a pneumatic staple gun for this. I am neither of those things, so I used my manual staple gun that’s a hand-me-down from my father-in-law (pictured in the upper right below). It takes a bit more muscle, but you can do this project without fancy (or professional) tools.

Foam tacked in place

4) The next step is batting. Cut a square of batting that’s about 8 inches bigger all the way around than your seat. Lay the foam covered seat face down on the batting, fold the batting around your seat and staple it on the bottom. Make sure to pull the batting taunt. This is the moment to make a nice smooth surface for your fabric. Start on the straight edges in the middle and work your way out to the edges. Do the corners last. For the corners, I didn’t have a special technique. Usually, I just tried to smooth and squish the batting into position and then I stapled the heck out of it. Once you’ve stapled all the way around, trim off the excess batting.

Bottom of the chair with the batting stapled in place

5) Flip over your seat and admire the lovely cloud that is now your cushion. At this point, you’re ready for fabric.

Chair seat ready for fabric

6) The process for installing your fabric is the same as the batting. Make sure to allow yourself lots of extra fabric all the way around your cushion, start in the centre of the front edge and staple in place. Pull your fabric taunt as you go and make sure it’s square on your cushion–especially important if you’re using a plaid or striped fabric. I probably stapled every inch or so. For the most part, I used 5/16″ staples, but I switched to longer staples for the corners where I had to staple through a lot of batting and pleats of fabric. The corners are the spots where you’ll have to spend a bit of time figuring out exactly how you want your cushion to look. For me, because I had rounded corners at the front, the best solution seemed to be a double pleat. It took some time to get my fabric to lay exactly the way I wanted it. And then it took some more time to make sure the other corners all looked roughly the same as my first pleat.

Pleats on the front corner

At the back I did a simple single pleat that’s pretty much hidden by the chair frame.

Pleat on the back corner (ignore the wrinkle)

7) Once your cushion is complete, the next step is to reattach the seat to the frame. In my case, this meant rescrewing the seat to the corner braces. I ended up having to get longer screws for this because, with the batting and fabric, the old screws were too short.

A finished chair

As I said at the beginning, this is my first upholstery project (beyond sewing toss cushions for the couch), and my verdict is that this is a very easy DIY. You don’t need any sewing expertise, and you need very minimal equipment. My chairs are not perfect by any means, but I still think they look great, and I’m really pleased with the fabric I chose.

I picked a linen blend that looks very natural. It has a slightly rough texture that I think is appropriate for a farm setting.

Close up of the new fabric

We’ve had this dining set for five years (I’ll save the story of how it came to be ours for another post), and during all that time the cushions have been torn, mis-matched and not at all cushy. It’s so nice to walk through the dining room and see the chairs finally finished.

Dining room set with finished chairs

For a more comprehensive (and professional) tutorial, I recommend you check out this video which I mentioned in step 3. I used this as a reference when I was beginning my project. Jenny on Little Green Notebook also tackles a lot of upholstery projects and posts great step-by-step tutorials, including this one for chairs that are much more complicated than mine.

Demo done

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

Our Friday night looked something like this.

Matt declares victory over a pile of drywall and insulation.

The upside of schlepping 28 garbage bags of insulation up from the basement and out to the drive shed at 11:30 on a Friday night is that you don’t have to do it on Saturday. That means you have time to pull every nail, staple and screw out of the studs, rip up all of the carpet, load everything in to the truck and trailer and make it to the dump before it closes–with a half hour to spare.

Demo in the basement is pretty much done now. The next items on our to-do list include fixing up the electrical.

Does this look right to anyone? I think we may need professional help.

And beefing up the existing studs, which have been laid flat, leaving us only 1 1/2″ for insulation–not enough.

New lumber to fur out our existing studs.

Our formerly finished basement is now very much unfinished, but I’m actually really happy to see the clean slate. And I feel like we’re approaching the point where we finally start to put it all back together.

Hello clean slate (also known as Matt's office)

What did you do on your weekend? Productivity is satisfying, but I do hope someone out there got to sit and relax a bit.

Basement plans

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Julia at Home on 129 Acres

So I realized I talked a lot about what we have to do to the basement, but not a lot about what it will be.

The main words to describe this space are cozy, comfy and casual.

Sarah Richardson Sarah's House Season 1 basement

Not our basement. Inspiration picture from Sarah’s House Season 1

We’re starting with a pretty good space. We have great ceiling height, large rooms and really good bones. You’ve already seen a sneak peak of the room I’ve dubbed the long room and heard about some of our early demo work. Here are the other rooms that make up our basement.

The main room. Picture a large, comfy sectional couch where the wood stove is and a big TV on the wall opposite the staircase.

The other side of the main room in the basement. Not sure what the deal is with all of the cabinetry and the workstations. This has all been removed, but some of the cabinets will be reused in Matt’s office. Picture a ping pong table and games table in this space.

The basement bathroom, soon to be known as Matt’s bathroom. This project will get its own post.

Another view of the basement before. The laundry room is to the left and Matt’s soon-to-be office is through the doorway in the centre. The half wall has already been demolished and a new doorway to the office has been cut behind it.

The basement also includes our cold cellar and utility room, but we’re focusing our renovation on the actual living space.

Here’s a floor plan showing how the spaces fit together.

Basement floor plan before (Image courtesy of floorplanner.com)

And here’s the plan showing the changes I’d like to make.

Basement floor plan after. Just subtle changes (except for the aforementioned bathroom). Just moving some things around and dialing up the cozy factor. (Image courtesy of floorplanner.com)

In the end, the main spaces in the basement will be used for TV watching, games and hanging out.

Sarah Richardson is known for putting a full size table in her family rooms as a spot for games, work, crafts or dining.

I think that’s a great idea and we’ve got the space for one, so that’s on the list too.

Inspiration photo from Sarah’s House Season 1.

I’ve already made some fun board game-inspired artwork to go on the walls.

We found a ping pong table top in the barn, so we’ll be making a base for it and bringing it into the basement. There’s a dartboard in the office that we’ll be hanging up somewhere. We’re also storing my brother’s pool table for him and I’ve told him not to be surprised if it ends up in the long room while it’s here.

The basement was Matt’s main priority when we were house-hunting, so I’m excited to make it a nice space that’s special for him.

For more of our inspiration images, visit my Basement board on Pinterest.

And feel free to add your input in the comments. What makes up your perfect basement? Are you a rec room fan or a home theatre enthusiast?