Guest Bed inspiration

For ages now H has been hankering after a traditional chesterfield sofa, ala this

source

Although I love the history of this sofa, to me it always gives a 'mens smoking club' kinda feel.... especially in dark leather.  So, I got to work using my wifely charms to convince H that our mid-century house needed a more modern approach to be play nicely with its surroundings.

My proposed version was a chesterfield in fabric, ideally something like this.

source

After days of scouring the local furniture shops/the interweb for a new (or new to us) chesterfield that would suit both of us by being:

• Practical (I'm honestly not so sure about those deep tufts I'm worried they will be dust/stuff collectors and hard to clean when something gets spilt on it)
• Comfortable for lying down while watching TV (H)
• Aesthetically pleasing in its own right as well as in our space (me)
• Leather (H)
• Not Leather (me)
• Small enough to fit our room
• Not crazy expensive (hello, have you seen sofa prices these days, nutso!)

... we weirdly enough ended up both falling for a totally other style, yup, you could say another style had us at hello!

While the fat lady hasn't sung yet on the great sofa debate (aka we haven't bought anything due to el budgeto being strapped from the basement reno), and because we do both love the tufted look, I think I have found a new place to bring it into our home... 

In our spare bedroom.... what, you didn't see that coming?!

Well, while hanging out with my bloggy friends lazing about when I should have being doing something productive, I  found this tutorial on making a button tufted headboard.  And, wouldn't you know it, I happen to have a perfect candidate for this treatment.

Do you remember this bed? It's kinda like the more formal cousin of the one in the tutorial (we also have that bed's fraternal twin hidden in our basement I think!!)

Anyways, I digress...  I'll let you in on a secret, I've never been a fan of the headboard fabric and, even though everyone else who's 'met' our bed seems to disagree with me (I'm assuming that they are just being polite), have been plotting its makeover since the day I bought it years ago.  I find the fabric kinda too outdated for me and generally not a "wow" enough statement.  Now to decide the colour scheme for that room, and then find the fabric.... lucky for me I like fabric shopping,

The Calm Before the Storm

So, with the plans under official review, I thought it best to first revel in the beauty of our existing basement.  The biggest changes to come in our basement reno are going to be...

1. The full overhaul of the English Pub-esque living room, which is complete with:

•  burgundy carpet (which shows every spec of dust and dirt!)
•  3 walls of textured stucco
•  a feature wall of wood panelling (of course!).

Don't believe me??  The feast your eyes on this...

Need a closeup to really experience the textured awesomness of those walls?? OK, why not?!

Yummy, a bit like merangue no?! 


2.  The removal of the wall seperating the laundry room (soon to be kitchen) and the hallway (the panelling in the below pic is hte 'feature wall' of the living room!)...

3. The enlargement of the current laundry room's nook into a the new kitchen and the indoor "shed"

The shed is accessible from inside the carport, behind the wall with the shelves on it.

As a reminder here is the current basement floorplan, and the new suite floorplan.

A Planning We Will Go

To get to the stage where we had our final concept, we played around with our options online.  Through a blog I read I learnt of the free tool FloorPlanner.  I'm warning you now that this thing is totally addictive- just ask my big bro and his wife ;). 

The web based tool is super easy to use, and with the 2D and 3D options we were able to really "see" what the effects of removing the wall from the new kitchen would accomplish.

As the tool is to scale, I was able to use large printouts of the drawings as the official plans for the City, saving us  hundreds in architect/design fees, woop woop!!

Another benefit of doing the plans for the City, is that we needed to do plans for the upstairs as well (we need to prove our suite will be less than 50% of our houses square footage).

So, here's a peek at our upstairs floorplan

And the official plans for our lower renovation- including the location of the 3 required parking spaces and fire separation line separating the suite space from our space downstairs.

What were my learning's from doing and submitting the plans myself?

1. Plans must be 4ft:1inch scale-  I added little 4ft markers on each plan to ensure they were blown up correctly (not just a pretty face eh!)
2. The walls should not be black- the planners were not keen on this as it was hard to see the line for the fire separation
3. Get the plans printed up in advance- getting the quality high enough to print on such a large scale was a bit tough with the free version of Floorplanner, and I ended up down to the wire
4. Be prepared to go one or two time to get the plans reviewed, as a DIY-er there are lots of rules and requirements that I was unaware of

It was not the easiest of challenges that I set myself, but the money we were able to save, and the participation in the discussions with the planners and inspectors was invaluable, so next time I'd to it again.  Hanging them on the wall and seeing the impressed look on our contractors face at their professionalism was also a nice bonus!

Doing the Splits

As newbie home renovators H and I decided early on to do the basement reno the "official way", aka. get permits and City inspectors involved.  Because we won't be living in this new space ourselves, and have been renters before, we wanted to make sure that everything was done properly so there would be no unexpected surpirses/issues lurking behind the walls due to our lack of knowledge on the big things ie. plumbing and electrical.

 Before making that decision though, being the planning list maker that I am, I researched the requirements of our local city hall, had Papa Waffles chat to the peeps at City Hall (we are in the District of North van) about our plans to ensure we were not going to get any big surprises (aka $$$ expensive extra requirements). 

 The next step was getting the inspectors in for a pre-inspection- and that's when the drama ensued.  Eventhough the person at City Hall confirmed that we would be ok with sharing an electrical panel in the tenant's space... the inspector said otherwise.... aaaaaaarrrrrggggg hello expensive eletricrician's bill to split our electrics into two panels on opposite sides of our basement!!  According to the inspector this is because they deemed it not a financial strain on us, the homeowners, well I don't know what planet they live on  because to us electrical bill going from 5k to 10k, for a space we are not even going to be living in ourselves, I consider a financial strain. So I protested the decision.... but no dice, a split panel it was :(   That my friends is why one needs to allow for a healthy contingency budget, 'cuz no matter how carefully you plan, there is always something that will bite you in the bum!

The dratted electrical panel, soon to be one of two in our house :(

The Basement it is a ch-ch-Changin!

Yes you read that right, after just 6 months of home ownership and we are making our first big stamp on the place.  What you ask is that change, why getting our basement in rental condition - yes siree we want to the uber cute Scott McG says 'take cheques to the bank'!

From the get go, one of the big selling features on our house was the 'easy' conversion to a basement income suite.  So we saved our pennies for the last few months, sorted out the master vision for the space, oh yeah.... and got permission from our city hall to get 'er done.

Before I get into what we are doing to the basement (yup we are already more than 1/2 way through the reno process!), let's take a peek at the plans shall we.
This, is what we inherited with the house.

As you can see we started out with some key features:

• seperate entrance (woop woop!)
• good sized rooms (okay the bathroom is suuuper pokey, but the others are good
• existing plumbing
• big windows (it is only 1/2 undergroud so it has good large middle of the wall windows- such a treat!)

But, we were missing one key feature.... a kitchen - yeah who'da thunk a tenant needed a kitchen?!  So, we put on our thinking caps and came up with the new vision for our basement suite... ta dah.... this is the space that a future tenant at Casa Waffles will be able to enjoy.

We did a lot of brainstorming, measuring, pondering etc on what we wanted for today and in the future as our family hopefully will expand one day... as well as taking a hard look at the limitations of our house -- such as no realistic place for upstairs laundry, boo!

what we ended up with are the following modifications:

 

1. Remove the wall seperating the current laundryroom and hallway to make room for a nice sized kitchen (thanks Bro Guy for that stellar suggestion!)
2. Enlarge the "nook" in the current laundry room to make space for laundry
3. create two entrances into new laundry room to make it a shared space
4. Add an extra doorway into the beedroom - allowing us the ability to convert the 1 bedroom suite into a bachelor should we need a bit more space in the future
5. Put in a kitchen in the existing laundry space
6. spiff up the existing bathroom - new sink and toilet (buh bye rusty/faded rose) for a bit of a short term lipstick makeover
7. Other stuff
1. new flooring throughout - luxury vinyl plank floors?- from these guys??
2. Painting throughout
3. new lighting
4. more stuff... I can't think of at the mo'

Phew, see... there's been lots of secret plotting going on around here.  But, I'll be filling you in on all the details starting with the plan creation process this weekend!

Posing a Design Dilemma to my Ranch Loving Friends

Our humble abode is being featured over at Retro Renovation this morning, where we have asked for suggestions on what to do about our wall-o-windows in our living room.

This is what it looked like on house inspection day (just looking at the old ruffly-thingy makes me wanna gag!)...... and below is a look at it post move in.

  Feel free to give your two cents as well, as all suggestions are welcome :) 

If You Don't Like it Then you Should Put Some Stain On It

Back in November H and I tackled one of the big f-uglies in the house.... the most beautiferous pink with purple ends brick on our fireplace.  Not only was the colour of the brick ugly, the area near the fire itself was crusted with ~50 years of soot that we couldn't budge no matter what we tried!  As a non pink loving gal living with a guy who, yup you guessed it, is also not into pink, the brick needed a disguise. 

We looking into new stone to cover the fireplace, but as it is a big fireplace (over 8ft tall and about 6ft around) it quickly added up to an expensive idea.  Being the house poor new homeowners that we are, we realised a quick bit of lipstick was the best we could do in the interim. I had been dreaming of a charcoal coloured fireplace for that space, but was worried that it would be too dominant and heavy in the space, so I then second guessed myself (naughty Sarah) and moved onto the plan of safe and predictable white.  But having seen a lot of painted fireplaces in the neighbourhood (I somehow think we were not the only ones who had fugly brick!)- I was not sold on how flat and lifeless painted brick looks, especially as we have so much brick to contend with, so I continued searching.  After some web searching, I came across the option of masonry stain, and figured that if it didn't work out as planned, then the paint solution was always in our back pocket and we were, worst case, out $30 for a can of stain.

Because the stain is semi-transparent, and we had pink brick and soot stains to hide, we decided to try out my initial charcoal idea. So, after a trip to our local Rona, we gathered our supplies and our courage, and started to paint on the stain -the whole time cringing on the inside because we had passed the point of no return.

The process when pretty quickly, especially because our pink brick already had black grout (pointing?) - yeah it was a special design I'm tellin' ya! 

our fireplace-pre stain

We just painted it on with small paint brushes the width of our bricks, being sure to cover the exposed sides of the bricks.  After about an hour and a half, we have the fireplace covered from head to toe in charcoal stain and....

partway through the staining process

We then let it dry over night and the next day with fresh eyes we critiqued our work and our colour choice, and we loved it.  The semi-transparent nature of the stain lets the variation in colour of the original bricks show through- the "grains" of the brick as well as the difference between the body and ends of the bricks, as well as a hint of the original pinky-ness. 

With the first layer done, we decided to risk a second coat to touch up any missed bits and to further reduce the pinky-ness and hide more of the sooty bit.

Two coats of masonry stain was, for us just, the right amount.  The finish is a bit shiny-er than our original brick was, but I'm pretty sure the average viewer wouldn't know the fugly-ness lurking beneath our lovely modern - but vintage appropriate fireplace.  Just in time to show it off for the holidays.

 

 

Edited to add:   Looking for more info on this?  Then go here  for a 10 month update with additional pictures!!