Old houses NEVER have mice in them. Of course not, how would they get in? Certainly not through the 8.3 billion little cracks and crevices throughout the house. And then were would they live? Definitely not in cozy little nests in your walls. Nope, never.

We had a few mice keeping residence in our upstairs bathroom before we gutted it. We’d hear them twittering behind the wall, and they would occasionally make an appearance in the kitchen hoping to nibble on any Kibbles n’ Bits the dogs didn’t scarf down. I, being a big animal sympathizer, did not want to kill them. We went through a pile of no-kill traps, each failing miserably in it’s own way. Eventually we gutted the bathroom and this major disruption to their peaceful existence seems to have driven them elsewhere because we haven’t seen them since.

If they do come back, I’m trying this cheap and easy DIY trap idea found at Instructables:

Anything rigged up using a toilet paper roll is worth a shot, right?  Once the mouse is trapped in the garbage can, you can check out how cute it is before driving it out to the country to start a new life far, far away from your house.

Visit the Instructables website for full instructions: DIY No-Kill Mousetrap

Note to those thinking of buying a fixer-upper: it takes a toll on your outward appearance.

I was the proud owner of some really beautiful shapely fingernails for about 24 hours. My sister-in-law’s bachelorette party was on Saturday, and we hit a local spa for some serious pampering. (Soooo much fun, so very needed.) I decided on a manicure, which in hindsight was a really dumb idea because the next day I was up on a ladder painting and guess what? The $20 manicure did not make it. Not only did I get paint all over, I also jammed my thumb into the ladder and broke the nail off at a funny angle. Pffft. I was sorta hoping I’d get to enjoy cute nails for at least a day or two.

I was never a high maintenance “all done up” type person, but I used to at least TRY every once in a while. After we started the house, my little beauty routines started falling by the wayside one by one. You can almost always find paint on me somewhere, often in my hair or on my feet. My clothes often have drywall marks on them from where I bumped into something inadvertantly on my way out the door.

It’s gotten to the point where outsiders have noticed our lack of effort, which is pretty embarrassing. Time to get back to regular showers and cleaner clothes, before we become the neighborhood crazies who smell and collect old newspapers….

Has anyone else’s personal hygiene taken a nosedive?

Judging by the deafening silence over here at Fixer-Upper, you probably think we’re whiling away the summer hours making s’mores and drinking cold beers out on the porch. I won’t lie – we’ve had a few s’mores. But we’ve been working HARD on the house lately. Harder than we’ve ever worked, perhaps…. or at least more consistently. The lack of posting isn’t due to lack of progress. I just don’t have the brain cells left to type these days.

Some of you might recall the floors throughout most of our upstairs are, well, unsightly. They are wide pieces of pine (I think) with various holes, gouges, paint spatters, etc covering them. Some were painted, some were not. None (save for the master bedroom, which has parquet flooring in it) were worthy of any Herculean efforts to bring them back to life.

Here’s the craft room floor, one of the better ones:

It doesn’t look so bad – but there are a few holes drilled for some old heating system or piping, lots and lots of nail holes and glue, and other various smudges that won’t disappear with a quick sanding. After refinishing all of the downstairs hardwoods, we know what a project that can be. And those weren’t painted. So…. despite my general aversion to the stuff (because we have dogs, and dogs and soft fibers don’t mix) we decided to carpet the floors. Everything other than the master bedroom, which as I mentioned before has parquet in it.

I shopped around for carpet, everywhere from Home Depot to Bill’s Carpet Ranch. Home Depot gave me a ridiculously expensive quote for $8k. And that was during some big sale where installation was $100 for the entire upstairs. So that $8k was for the carpet alone, and not even a high-end one! That was my first inquiry, and I nearly lost my mind when I heard the price tag. I thought we’d have to live with cruddy floors for the rest of our lives, or sell off a few vital organs to get Berber. But then I discovered that the small-town carpet stores (like Bill’s) have remnants for great prices (like $150-$300 for a 12×15) and they understand that you’d like to keep your liver, at least for a little while.

If money were no object, I would go with one single nice-and-fluffy carpet throughout the entire upstairs. Well actually, if money were no object I’d go with some gorgeous dark hardwoods and antique persian area rugs. But I digress. Money IS an object for us, as it is with most people, so we have different variations on beige in each room. And I’m ok with that. It adds texture and depth, and gives each room it’s own personality. In fact, one single giant piece of carpet really wouldn’t fit our decor. We’re pretty eclectic, yes?

So we’ve been diligently carpeting for the past week or so. 3 rooms are now soft and squishy under my feet. It makes the rooms look really nice and comfy-cozy.

You have to wait for photos, though. We’ve had to clear out every room one by one, moving EVERYTHING multiple times like musical chairs. The upstairs looks like a refugee camp at the moment. Clothing, bedding, and mattresses are strewn willy-nilly. We’re close to putting it all back together, so we’ll have some Afters soon.

Blame it on all the doll houses I had growing up… I have a real thing for teeny tiny versions of regular sized objects. Case in point: my cat-sized dogs. So these mini-tools from Atwood Knife and Tool totally make me want to whip out the credit card. I mean, how cool would one look dangling from my keychain?

It screams “I’m rushing home right now to fix things” and reminds me of my favorite non-power-tool, the cat paw. Even the names are cool – this one is called “Mini Son of Pry Thing”.

I’m bookmarking it – they’d make great stocking stuffers :)

Thanks to Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools ( great blog, bookmark that too!) for the find.

I can’t walk down the street without critiquing the entire neighborhood while simultaneously taking mental notes on the features we want to emulate. So I spend a good portion of our TV time flipping between remodeling shows on HGTV and TLC – especially now that Grey’s and The Office aren’t in season.

Some of those shows are good, some are decent background noise, and some are downright annoying. When Lisa LaPorta tells a homeowner to PAINT OVER WALLPAPER so they can sell their house quicker, I get violent. Please, people, do not do this. It looks crappy and it takes forever to remove the wallpaper once you’ve slathered latex all over it. And please, HGTV – stop pairing little Lisa up with 8ft tall carpenters. It makes them all look freakish.

Anyway….

We happened to stay up past our bedtime last night, and caught a promo for a new show on Bravo called “Flipping Out”. It’s a reality show featuring an OCD real estate investor named Jeff Lewis and his wacky band of employees – including a personal assistant who is a dead ringer for Elaine Benes and two “house assistants” whose responsibilities include organizing his refrigerator foods so that the labels face forward and taking his cat to yoga classes.It’s a little contrived – the zany workers, the super OCD moments – but we both thought it was hysterical. Watching other people have meltdowns over rehab projects is just plain entertaining. On top of that, he doesn’t just flip houses. He makes them absolutely gorgeous, totally top-notch, and then he flips them. So it won’t be one of those shows where you’re cringing as they PAINT WALLPAPER or slap some new kitchen cabinets in and call it a remodel. Thank you, Bravo, for rising above the madness and delivering something house-related and completely enjoyable to watch.

What we watched was a “sneak peek” – the premiere episode is on Bravo this Tuesday, July 31st at 10. Set the Tivo! If you can’t wait that long, watch it online here: http://video.bravotv.com/player/?id=124124

I fell off the radar last week, and for that I apologize. I have a good excuse – I’ve been spending all my spare time sanding drywall and painting our two spare bedrooms, which up until a few weeks ago were not at all conducive to sleeping or any other type of human habitation.

I wrote about the first bedroom here. It got a partial facelift, needing only a new ceiling and some patching at the top of the walls. Only. I say that like it was a small job. Ha! It’s looking good though.

As soon as we finished that, we moved on to the second spare bedroom. It’s a little smaller than the first but it needed much more work. There was nothing about this room that was working for me. It had a dirty old berber rug with no carpet pad, and it was painted super-shiny tan (what’s with the high-gloss in a bedroom?! Yuck.) from baseboard to drop-ceiling. (We took the drop-ceilings out when we had a dumpster a few months back – hence the top-o-room pink wallpaper peeking out.) Best of all, the paint was over about a dozen layers of wallpaper, all of which were peeling.

The ceiling looks kind of cool in these pictures, but when you see it up close you realize that the tin is pieced together in random ways, totally mis-matched and probably thrown up there to hide something. It’s not an original tin ceiling installation, though the tin might be original to the house. What lurks beneath? We don’t know, because there is no way in hell we were going to take them down and find out.

The house has blown-in insulation in the attic. The attic does not have a floor, so that insulation is resting on top of this ceiling. See the problem?

I’d love to say we salvaged the tin, but we didn’t. We argued and debated about it for a few months and decided that the potential disasterous mess was just not worth it. The tin is rusted through in many parts, and we have already salvaged a good deal of it from other spots throughout the house. We have a pile of pretty stuff out in our shed just waiting to be reinvented into something cool. So that tin got left behind for some future DIY’er to discover decades from now.

We explored our options (see the wallpaper missing in places?) and decided that the best way to fix this room was to frame up a new ceiling and go over the walls with 3/8″ sheetrock. Gutting it wasn’t really necessary, but fixing what’s there wasn’t an option either. There are about 12 layers of wallpaper on it, with paint in between each layer. I swear! And the original walls must never have been painted because trying to remove the last layer of wallpaper requires scratching right into the plaster.  No good.

This is the only room we’ll have to use this tactic for. I was skeptical, but now that we’re almost done I am glad we went that route. It looks great, and my big fear – removing the baseboards – turned out to be easier than expected.

Stay tuned for “after” photos!

We have been cranking through some of our more boring projects, hence my lack o’ interesting posts. I mean, how many times can I complain about drywall sanding before someone comes to the house and cuts my Road Runner cable just to shut me up?

As I mentioned in this post, we’ve been working on one of our spare bedrooms. Our house has 3 bedrooms and the “craft room” upstairs. We’ll call this Spare Bedroom #1. At about 10×12, it’s smaller than the master but bigger than the other spare bedroom.

It had a crumbling plaster ceiling, so that came out and a new sheet rock ceiling got put in. Also, the top foot or so of plaster had been destroyed by drop-ceiling framing (all those nails made the plaster disintegrate), so we went in and cut out the bad areas with a circular saw. This tactic actually worked fabulously.

Above, you can see how we cut out the bad bits. Below, the same area – now repaired and painted. It blends with the old stuff pretty well, although it is quite a bit smoother than the original plaster. But way up there at 10′, the difference would not be noticeable to your average human being.

I’d give you a full “after”, but we’ve got the room crammed with stuff because we immediately moved on to Spare Bedroom #2, formerly known as the room that held all our random crap. #2 needs a new ceiling and new walls so it had to get completely cleared out. Guess where everything went?

Too cute not to share….

We don’t have many social gatherings at our house – I think we forget it’s not a hellhole anymore! But if we did, I’d totally want to serve dessert using this cake server from Uncommon Goods :

Have a DIYer in need of a gift? You can buy it on sale for $9.95 here:  Uncommon Goods – Saw Cake Server

My entire reason for living is to check things off of to-do lists; I’m a David Allen groupie, and I recently stuck a mini whiteboard to my car’s dashboard so that I can write lists on the move. (I know, not the safest addition – but it beats searching for a pen and a slip of paper while driving.) I live for the exilhirating moment when I get to strike a nice thick line through a task. Even if that task is something inconsequential, like “write a blog post about your unhealthy addiction to list-making”.

Right now, we’re staring down a to-do list that’d make even the most seasoned fixer-upper twitch a little. It’s the “if we get these things done, the inside of our house will look like a normal house instead of a construction zone” list, THE LIST if you will, and it has a permanent home right next to the coffee maker. It has lots of scribbles and highlighter marks, and an ever-growing number of things checked off. After 2.5 years and more lists than I’ll ever be able to count, it amazes me that we’re finally whittling them down to something almost manageable.

Over time, I’ve gotten very good at tricking myself into starting things on THE LIST. If you’re thinking about buying a fixer-upper house, you’ve got to develop your own tricks for getting things done. Because at some point, the excitement will wear off and you’ll still have a whole bunch of things that need to get finished. Things that bore the crap out of you, or are a giant pain in the ass, or just plain make you want to poke your eyes out. (Rewiring electrical outlets comes to mind…)

ZenHabits just posted a new article about how to execute your to-do list, with some great ideas. You can read it here:
How to Actually Execute Your To-Do List: or, Why Writing It Down Doesn’t Actually Get It Done

Personally, I have problems starting a task. I get overwhelmed with the idea of having to do the whole thing all at once, or within some self-constructed timeframe. Once I’ve started, I am a productivity maniac.

The easiest way for me to get over the pre-start jitters is to tell myself I only have to work for a little while. I also use this trick to get myself to the gym, and it works wonders. I bargain with myself – “I’ll get my paint clothes on and get the trim on one window painted. After that I’m free to clock out.” By the time I’m dressed and painting, I realize I might as well keep going. Usually, the work isn’t half as bad as I’ve built it up to be in my head.

What mind games do you guys play to keep yourself moving?

I took a break from house projects this morning to run my first road race – a 15K called “The Boilermaker” in Utica, NY – with my friend Katherine. It’s the largest 15k in the nation, with over 12,000 runners this year. The race ends at the Matt’s Brewery. (That’s me on the left)

Not only did we finish without passing out or puking, we ran the entire thing (no walk breaks) and even sprinted over the finish line. Which is saying something, considering we started our “training” 3 weeks ago when Katherine suckered me into signing up. You’d be surprised how many people were on the side of the road with EMTs. It was actually kinda motivating, knowing you were at least doing better than that poor person passed out face down on someone’s front lawn.

What does this have to do with our house? Absolutely nothing. But much like a good house project it made me push to the point of exhaustion, feel a little nauseous, and walk around all day proud as a peacock having achieved something I never would have guessed I could do.