Joe and Jamie’s Blog

Jamie’s sister Casey and her husband Andrew just recently moved into their new house. The guy before them left it very dirty so we all pitched in to clean up. All week long Jamie and I kept going back to help unpack and paint. The house looks so good now that it is painted and clean. Casey and Andrew are very happy.

Here are some of the shots of what it looks like now. I’m killing myself for always forgetting the before pictures.

This is the kitchen. It’s hard to tell but it’s not white but a very, very light green.

Here’s the living room, it really looks great with the yellow and fresh white on the trim and windows.

Casey and Jamie enjoying a drink after all their hard work.

Their dog Webber and I just hanging around…

Today we almost finished the project. Just a few odds and ends left.’

We have to just patch the drywall where the shelf used to be and buy the new dresser so we can bust up the old one.

For those of you who missed the first post on this, either click here to read it, or simply look at the previous post.

Here is the new wall/banister that we built in replace of the old shelf. Now I can’t push Jamie down the stairs over the edge, only the traditional way.

We used 2×4’s for the frame and just screwed and glued it together with liquid nails. Glue has become far greater than nails and screws lately, so it was the best bet along the drywall side since there wasn’t a stud where we where mounting it. The shelf that used to be there was a foot deep so we did have a stud to screw that into on the drywall side. It was pretty cheap to buy and was put together quicker than the trick to and back from Home Depot. Surprisingly they were open normal hours for a holiday.

Look how nicely the dresser’s fit in there. You can see to the left of it the hole in the drywall we have to repair. I’m saving that excitement for next weekend. Mounted the trusty fire extinguisher on the post. Every house should have one on each floor. You never know what may happen. Circuits can short, candles can burn, etc, etc.

You can see that we moved all of Jamie’s pig stuff to the shelf at the top of the stairs. She loves pigs so naturally we are up to our necks in pig stuff. Then there is my DVD collection, somewhere around 350, that shelf is only about 1/3 of them.

Look how nicely everything fit outside the room. There is plenty of walking space, every dresser drawer can open all the way without hitting anything now, and remember, all this was crammed inside the room!

I bought 2 foot long brackets that came with a hook on the end of them. From there I just cut a pole to size and screwed it to the bracket to keep it from sliding. Now I have a very sturdy clothing rack that not only looks nice, but won’t fall over on me every week. Its even longer than that cheap piece of crap too. It doesn’t block the outcoves at all. That small dresser is the one that is leaving shortly, just have to wait to get to a store to get the new one that will be in the room.

Look at all the space gained inside the room. That TV stand was used to hold the photo printer outside the room. It is temporary until my 50″ plasma gets fixed and I buy a nice new TV stand. This old one does the job for now. We can now access the laundry very easily. No more scraping it along the side of the dresser to get it out. The dresser we had there was so old and horrible. I was able to bust the thing up outside with no tools or effort. The top broke off while I was carrying it downstairs. We’re both glad to see it go. I have more space by my desk now that the DVD shelf and little glass stand are gone. Have more room to put useless crap, but hey, it’s room that I didn’t have before.

Now to you guys it may not seem like a lot more room was gained,  but if you were here you would be shocked like we were when we stepped back. Don’t mind Jamie, she’s just studying for a biology test. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. We work the same but at the end of the day I sit back and relax while she studies all night long about bones, muscles, systems, blah, blah, blah. Glad I learn a lot on the job so school is very easy. It’s much better to get paid to learn things.

So once again I sit back and relax and enjoy some Molson Tripple X.

After a few weeks of Jamie getting on my case about moving the attic redesign project I finally got off my keester and did some work.

Here’s some back story:

Jamie and I live at home with my parents. Yeah go ahead and laugh, but we are saving a lot of money in the long run while we both go to school. It also allows us to get into a better financial situation so that when we do move out it is to a nice area and not the ghetto. We have the entire third floor of the house to ourselves. It’s the attic, but completely finished and not like 3 foot ceilings or anything. The room is big enough for two people easily, just running out of room for dressers and desks. The outside of the room used to be a computer/workspace for my father, but we moved his computer stuff into the basement since he has a laptop now that he uses in the living room. We are going to move half the dressers outside the room, leaving more space for us to move around and allow us to get a bigger bed. Two people sleeping on a twin is NOT FUN AT ALL. Outside the room has two parts, divided by the stairs to the rest of the house. The other side not directly outside the room is smaller due to 2 slopes of the room. We are going to put storage bins and hang our jackets over there to utilize that space.

Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the before, but some of these pictures will show you what the layout was and where things were. I’ll explain along the way.

Here is our room currently. There are 4 dressers, 2 computer desks, a DVD shelf and a stand with photos and nick-nacks. Talk about cramped. On both sides of the room there are what we call outcoves (not sure if thats a p.c. term). Those are full of our storage bins and laundry, but we can barely get at them because of dressers in the way.

Here is a picture of the outcoves outside the room. They are a great use of space since the slope of the roof makes it impossible for the walls of the room to meet the outer walls. You would have to be 1 foot tall to fit in those, we have to crawl, but hey, storage bins fit great!

This is the spot outside the room next to the door. It used to be my father’s computer desk. I am going to make a clothing rack there now because closet space is very limited as well.

This shot is outside the room from the angle of the doorway. The dresser to the left is our new 5th one, but that was not always there. That was put there after some of today’s demolition of a fixed shelf I did. This is where I wish I had the before picture, but its not hard to imagine a shelf I guess. You can see the crappy clothing rack I have now; damn thing falls over like once a week.

Here is the left side of the upstairs outside the room. It’s the part where you have to cross the stairs to get to with the double sloped roof. You can see the desk I removed as well as all the pieces of the shelf (too lazy to bring them downstairs at midnight).

Here’s a closeup of the old shelf. My father builds things to last so it was pretty tough getting it apart.

This is where the old shelf was. It was also good to have there so you couldn’t fall right off and down the stairs. We are going to put in a small wall or backer of some sort behind the dresser to secure it or us from falling. You can see the old spot on the wall on the right where the shelf started and went across to the gray poll on the left.

Here’s a front shot of the new dresser and where the shelf used to be. See what I mean how you can just fall off down the stairs!

Now it’s time to kick back and relax with my Molson Canadian and trusty Peak bottle opener, courtesy of 107.1 The Peak (one of the radio stations I do work for). It’s the last one, so I bought myself some Molson XXX for next. If you can’t tell I am a fan of Canadian beer. Well that and Heineken.

Tomorrow I’m off to Home Depot to get some wood to create the backing to that empty spot as well as pick out paint colors with Jamie. She wants to go with a blue, chocolate brown, and some tanish color. It sounds bad, but it looks good.