Amanda's House

One of my sisters, Amanda, had such a great time working on my house last summer that she decided to take advantage to of new home buyer's tax credit and buy a house in Oak Cliff too!
(I Heart Obama. Thanks for the money!! So glad I voted for you)
Anyway, we found it by driving around the neighborhoods we were considering and taking down info on all the houses for sale. This one was hideously ugly and unkept, but we thought it looked like it had potential under all the bushes. Turns out it's a 1920s house with an 85 year old woman living in it who is super smart and had taken impeccable care of the interior. Her carpenter lived across the street for many years, so she had walls moved to improve the layout and had hidden storage put in everywhere there was an unused space. Every inch of that house is utilized to it's fullest extent. If you don't know, old houses are notorious for tiny closets and tiny amounts of storage space, so this is AWESOME. There's even a skylight in the kitchen! It had been on the market for a long while and I'm guessing no one had looked at it seriously because of how overgrown and ugly the exterior was and how the gramdma decor was inside. Thanks to the lack of vision of all the other potential buyers and the work of her awesome realtor, Amanda got it for a GREAT price (about $30,000 less than mine!).We tore out a lot of bushes. There was a stack by the street at least 20 ft long, 5 ft height and 4 ft deep by the time we were done, and there's still more to take out. You used to not be able to see chairs on the porch for how overgrown it was, but look how cute her porch is coming along now! I LOVE her adorable chairs and how big her porch is. It's like a second living room and we've had some nice times there already, but what I'm most excited about is how she's painting the place. Of course, there isn't much else that needs to be done but paint!!I dropped by the other day and snapped some photos. Amanda's trusty sidekick Turkey helped. Here he is in the living room which is being painted a rich version of bright robins egg blue. You can see the colour better in this next shot of the beautiful hinge on her front door
I love the beautiful historic details like this hinge all over her house.



The blinds are closed, and in retrospect I should have ope ned them to get a better shot of her bedroom here, but I didn't. Anyway, in the bedroom we were inspired by images of beautiful painted ceilings in India... so we made the ceilings the colourful in the room almost like there's a canopy of sky coloured fabric over the room. The crown molding is painted a shiny chocolate brown, and the walls will eventually be chalk white. She's experimenting with putting green around the windows or golden brown around the closet, or both. I love Amanda's sense of boldness and adventure with colour. She's really creating a lively sense of space.
You can see here how the ceiling is actually two different blues. She said to me "when you look at the sky it's darker in the center and gets lighter towards the horizon, so I want to recreate that" and sure enough the room looks like it's one colour but it's actually two that are visually fading into each other creating more depth that you'd otherwise feel.

Here's that lovely green around the windows in her office . She kept the old fashioned curtains and window shades, and this room has that lovely old circular ceiling pattern that no one does any more but is infinitely superior to "popcorn" of whatever bumpy stuff they do now. I like the shapes and colours going on here.Really now. How is this at all practical? How does this even happen?

As I said, there was a really smart older woman living in the house and I guess she found she could compensate for a lack of height and strength with hooks pulleys and ropes, or maybe she was just a bit too scientific and inventor-ish and liked to piddle with gadgets, but whatever the reason Amanda had taken at least a hundred hooks out of the house from on doors and under shelves and along window sills - some of them connected to chains or ropes and actual pulleys and used for who knows what- when she opened up a cabinet and found this nest. It's a perfect example of the hook insanity of the house and it's a great point of comparison between her 80 year old house and my 80 year old house. Both of our houses were the same in terms of having overgrown unkept yards, but the interiors were vastly different. Mine was neglected for many years and therefore needs to be cleaned annd fixed up and have things added to bring it to a nice level of livability. Amanda's house had been almost over worked on the interior. More than anything needed clearing out to make it livable, and it's amazing how much better one can breathe in a house that been uncluttered of all it's wayward doodads.I'm looking forward to seeing the finished house so much.
Keep up the great work and inspired vision, Amanda.

Leaf by Leaf

It's deep into summertime, and the living is not exactly easy, but I forget about it all for a few minutes when I step out onto my porch. Every morning the first thing I do is wake up the dogs, or get woken up by one of the dogs, and take the pack outside. I sit on the edge of the porch and watch them run around. Inevitably I spend a few minutes scratching and petting each one. Toby comes up with the most absurdly cute ways to beg me to scratch his butt. Then I walk around and check all the plants, seeing the new leaf here and the flower buds there while my mind comes out of it's fog. I prune a few leaves off a bush, take off the spent buds, weave a long tendril of vine into the fence... During the day I sit out there at least a couple times, eating lunch or just hanging out with the dogs. At night after the sun goes down I water all the plants and enjoy the quiet night air. It's my happy place.

Remember what the house looked like before I bought it?
It may not be perfect yet, probably about a third or halfway to my final visualized goal for it, but I'm so proud of how far we've come together.
That bush in the middle still looks scraggly, but what you can't see is all the gorgeous purple flowers all over it and the long graceful trunk it has now. It's become an ornamental tree, whereas before it was a huge round messy shrub. I've thought about taking it out, but those purple blooms are so nice in the summer. The vines are still there too, and in a way I hate their inherent messiness too, but they can't be got rid of without poisoning the ground, and that won't fly. The honeysuckle on the right was a massive mound on the fence about a foot and a half deep and 6 feet wide, weighting down the fence and full of old dead sections. So, this past winter I cut it all off leaving only the large core stems. As it grew back out I wound the pieces into the fence. Every morning I wound the next few inches into place. You'd be shocked how fast vines grow!! They're starting to turn that old chain link fence into a green flowering fence. I kind of like it.
The garden next to the house has slowly transformed too.

I've turned the bushes I kept into topiary bushes, sculpting them into cubes and spheres. I cleared off all the lower branches on the big bush next to the door and have worked the top into a cool round shape, opening up the space so I can eventually plant flowers underneath it while also improving safety because now no-one can hide behind it! (keeping a dark hiding spot next to the door? really? that's asking for trouble.) The yellow climbing rose is climbing up the white post on the porch and there's a number of great flowers in pots. Marco and I got that big pot on the left at a mexican bazaar on Jefferson St. for $7!

There are not a lot of flowers in the garden yet. My mom gave me gorgeous red easter lillies that have already bloomed and some flowers she calls Painted Dancing Ladies that will come up in the fall. My Aunt Kathy gave me some lillies too that will bloom next year. Hopefully people I love will keep giving me perrinials to slowly fill my garden with plants I won't have to repurchase flowers every year and will be reminded constantly of the people and places I love.

We've put a fountain on the corner too! (you can kind-of see it in this shot. Better pictures soon) I found it in a cool junk shop near my house that was going out of business, so I got it for a great deal that included delivery. (thanks Joe!) It's entirely cast iron, which means neither myself, the dogs, nor the December ice storms will be able to damage it. I painted it with two layers of Rustoleum spray paint to protect against rust and seal up any that had started, then brushed on exterior paint in a brick red to incorporate it into the current aesthetic. The dogs love to play in it when they get hot! Hopefully we'll get a pump soon and have it flowing, but it's still gorgeous just as pools of water now.

And along the fence line that's covering with honeysuckle, the caladium bulbs I planted months ago are popping up. Caladiums always remind me of my mother because she always planted them in the garden when I was growing up. Soon there will be a row of green red and white leaves fluttering in the wind all along the fence. I'm not sure what happened to the giant purple iris bulbs. You win some you lose some.

blossoming

My friend Kim is a high school English teacher and she pointed out the other day that her career has a clear set path that comes with a consistent schedule and easily understood progression. My career, if you can call it that, has no clear path. It must be innovatively pulled together along the way, gathering information, cultivating skills, and making shit up as you go along. Much like the renovation of my house. I've been focusing a lot on that part of my life this last week by sewing and making plans and trying to make money, and will be back at work on the kitchen putting in tile and painting as soon as possible. Until then I'm cultivating my garden. Unlike construction supplies time and water don't cost much, but when lovingly and attentively applied to a garden they yield very rewarding results. Like me, most people can't afford to re-sod the yard in St. Augustine grass and have landscapers plant an instantly lush garden, and most of us don't have a corporate ladder set out for us and will never climb into plush corporate careers with pre-established perks but careful nurturing of what you naturally have can, over time, blossom into something much more lovely and entirely your own.
Or at least that's the plan.
It's working in the garden. Time will tell if it works out in life too!

It's Thursday, and we're building a sink.

Tiny puppy Lady on the front porch about 4 months and 80 pounds ago.

When I got home from work Tuesday I found a box hidden under my front door mat on the porch (thanks to Wes, my great UPS guy) and inside I found TILE!!!!!!!!!!!
SOMEBODY aka MICHAL BOOTH sent me all the tile I need for the kitchen sink! eeeeeee!!!!!!!Marco arranged for his uncle to come back again today, so we went to home depot last night and bought a 12 ft. long 4"x4" square wooden post that we had cut into four 3' sections. These will be the dramatic big legs of my new freestanding sink. They got going on it early this morning using pieces from the scrap pile for the cross braces. We save any good wood in a scrap pile to reuse. Recycle, reduce, reuse, people!
(it's cheap too)The wood scrap pile outside the kitchen door, with a large yellow level on it right now. A level is critical in building stuff correctly, especially shelves and cabinets but probably shouldn't be left on the scrap pile, Marco.Marco's Uncle gets to work in the tiny square of yard at he head of the driveway, outside the kitchen door.Ta Da! Doesn't look like much. I know. Just wait until I get it all outfitted though with paint and tile and cabinet doors!
I think this next pic gives a slightly better view of the scene.

I LOVE my big porcelein sink I found at Orr Reed for $55. It's just one big basin that works perfectly with my wall mounted faucet and the fact that we wash all our dishes by hand. Now we need to put the bead board on the back wall (a long flat board with decorative grooved stripes across it), tile the counter top, add cabinet doors, and add fun details like paint and cool hinges. I think I'll paint the floor under the sink a tan colour to match the tile beter until we get real tile to re-do the kitchen floor. Right now we just primed the boards white.


In other news, my yellow Graham Thomas climbing rose is opening up it's first bloom. I've had it for a couple months and this is the first one. I'm so excited!

You can see it on the right in front of the white post. See how nicely it coordinates with the yellow antique door and our yellow dog, Lady Bear.

Lady is happy because she just dug a very big hole in the corner near the rose bush and feels invigorated by doing muddy doggy things. She tries very hard to be good and we try hard to teach her right from wrong but at the end of the day she always comes up with some way to remind us she may be a big dog but she's just a giant puppy.


Speaking of our giant puppy, have you noticed that many of my pictures are not so great? This is because I have no camera. My iphone camera is dead, my normal digital camera is old and beaten up and won't work anymore, and Marco has neither as well. So I borrowed my sister's digital camera and Lady Bear thought the cushy case was the perfect thing to chew, stole it out of my purse, and chomped down on the LCD screen. It shows a lovely modern art sort of streak of colours now. sigh. The camera still works but I have no idea what I'm shooting, so right now I'm using it as a point and shoot. I literally point it towards the item and click off a half dozen-ish photos and hope one is good. It does however turn out some very freestyle artistic slightly off photos, like the one of Marco's uncle on this post, that I rather like, so this isn't exactly a bad experience to be having. I'm learning a new mode of photo taking. Meanwhile, Marco's upgrading to an iphone 4 in about a month and I'll get one in September, so watch out! this blog is going to get EVEN BETTER in a couple months. I'm talking lots of better photos AND video! ...and don't worry, I'm going to fix my sister's camera for her too.

Highlights

My first set of power tools, a fantastic 25th birthday gift from my parents.

It's been close to a year since I got the keys to my house and walked in as the owner for the first time. I was so thrilled! There was SO MUCH to do! After that first day of yard work - chronicled in one of my first blog posts- there have been a lot of adventures, some planned and some suprises, and many wonderful friends and family along the way.

Here's Kate and John. My first visitors! Kate's was one of my very best friends for a few years growing up, and we've kept in touch off and on over the years. Weddings, home improvement, and long trips in the car all have one thing in common: they have a way of proving who your real friends are and revealing the true character of the people around you. Kate and John came by the second day, when we were cleaning the upstairs apartment and went straight to making themselves useful. I will never forget Kate enthusiastically scrubbing my bathtub after about a year of not seeing each other. That's a friend! And John and I going across the street to borrow a wrench from the neighbors. I tried my way in crappy spanish for a minute before John broke in with perfect spanish. John, where the hell did that come from?! Apparently he speaks fluently and didn't want to be rude and interrupt my attempt at the language. It was so funny, even Juan and Lupe were a bit shocked.

One thing we've done a LOT of in the past almost a year is paint. (I'm just going to say "a year" from now on, ok? It's easier, and we all recognize its only been 11 months. whatever) We even painted the stairwell and risers of the stairs. The stairwell was grungy and creepy at first. I wanted it to feel bright, sunny, and open, so I painted the walls "banana creme" in an egshell finish and the risers a very shiny robins egg blue with a hint of aqua. Now it looks like spring. Its hard to take a photo of it though. You can see a bit of it behind me in this next photo of me spray painting the door dark blue.

After we painted all the walls, we took on the floors. They were awful! Someone had put an opaque layer of black tar looking paint stuff over all the floors. It was chipping off in some places and looked dirty even after you swept and mopped. You can see it in the background of this adorable photo of Marco and Toby napping together in the midst of pamplets about historic paint colours and front doors. Marco was laying down to rest and Toby came up to snuggle with his head. We were all working really hard, even the doggy sidekick.
I knew I couldn't afford a few thousand dollars to get the floors professionally redone but I also couldn't live with them in that nasty condition, so I bought some citrisolve and got to stripping the floor.

Here's a photo of Marco stripping the floor because all the ones of me have my butt in the air looking terrible in ancient grey yoga pants. Anyway, the stuff paints onto the floor, sits for awhile, then gets scraped off in what looks like chunks of fungus. Then you wait for the whole floor to dry, sand to get it a little more smooth, and wipe the floor with mineral spirits to get the last residue out of the wood. Then you're ready for stain. This process revealed that someone had tried to sand the floor them selves with a band sander, which is totally the wrong tool. The unintentional butchering of the wood floor left deep gouges in the wood and scrape marks against the grain. Sanding against the grain looks fine at the time...until that stupid person stains it and those areas get darker than everything else. Some ignorant person had f-ed up the floor, stained it then seen how terribly they'd ruined it while sanding, then painted it over it with black tar looking stuff to cover it up. The floor after we stripped it showed all this original damage but still looked way better than the original nasty crap.

This is the correct type of sanding machine to use. You can rent it from Lowes or Home Depot. You go over the floor a number of diff times, each time with a finer sandpaper.

Here's the upstairs bedroom after stripping and sanding. Notice the nice seafoam green we painted the walls.

by the time we finished with the staining and sealing of the floors (including waiting a week for the way too thick stain upstairs to dry and sealing over it and later finding out the thickness really would make it chip off. You really should follow the instructions and do multiple light coats.) by that time my tenant downstairs had moved out and we got to repeat it all again on another 700 square feet!

I totally looked like a beetle in my gas mask, but take it from me, you don't want the headache and loss of smell that comes from inhaling this stuff for too long!
I decided to stain it really dark to disguise the past damage and slightly red brown to compliment the blues and greens I was painting the walls.

My dad using his awesome stain skills on the downstairs living room.

The thing about staining a floor is that the chemicals are highly flammable, meaning the whole house can explode so you have to turn off the pilot lights and the electricity, which means no AC or fans in August in Dallas, which means you've got to take a paleta break on the breezy front porch every time a Paletero comes by ringing the bells of his ice cream cart. Not so bad!

And here's the final result. It's so shiny you can see Toby's reflection!
THIS was one of my favorite projects! You can see the door frame showing the perimeter of a French door that was filled in to make an opening for a normal sized door. I wanted to restore it to the original floorplan because being able to see more of the tiny room from the living room and vice versa would make both rooms feel bigger. This was my favorite project because I got to destroy a wall by hand. Have you ever taken a sledge hammer and crow bar to a wall? You should. It feels great! By the way, please do not make comments about my skanky shorts. If you were taking out a wall in August in 100 degree heat with no AC going you'd be wearing as little as possible too.
Once we got the drywall off we found dove tailed ceder ship lap (These days people use beams of 2x4 wood about 18" apart with empty space between and only dry wall on top. Ship lap is called that because the pieces of wood in the wall overlap slightly like they would if you were building the sides of a ship, making a completely wood wall.) It was tough to take out but awesome to complete.
Here's my awesome sister Amanda taking out the ship lap. Bonus points if you find Toby in this picture. (he's behind the paint can wanting to come help, but we barricaded him out of the room because he kept running off with chunks of drywall to munch on)

Here's a shot of it all done, with the french door in the background that I ended up putting in the same doorway downstairs. The apartments are exactly the same floor plan, even with the same doorway that had to be opened up. I found the antique door at an architectural salvage warehouse, DHW, and it's perfect for my house scratches and all. It's now the door to our tiny bedroom because I use the actual bedroom as my sewing studio.

My LEAST favorite project was a suprise.

There's sewage in the tub...suprise! There's sewage bubbling up in the flowerbed too...suprise!!!

There's was no budget for a plumber and even if I had one come and put it on my credit card I was not paying someone $100 per hour or whatever to dig a hole, so I started digging, eventually found the pipe, found the large collapsed holes in the old cast iron pipe, and found rubber things from Home Depot that would seal them off. With a lot of muscle, lots of questions answered by smart people like my dad, and a lot of perseverance, I ended up having fixed my own plumbing!

I look like complete crap in this photo because it's cold and raining and I've been digging in mud for a few hours. You can see one of the holes in the pipe on the left in that puddle in the hole. Never believe a home improvement DIY blog if the people's hair doesn't look like crap. If they don't look disheveled in some way then they are not actually working or they are at least not fully committing to their work.

I now know the layout of every Lowes and Home Depot in Dallas, can enumerate exactly which departmental differences make Lowes the superior home improvement store, and can have an intelligent conversation on topics such as the pitfalls of floor refinishing, the inner working of my cast iron plumbing system, and the benefits of having walls built of ship lap. A lovely couple lives in the upstairs apartment now and Marco, the three dogs, and I have moved into the downstairs apartment which has barely been fixed up at all. It starts again!

On a side note, you know those moments of realization, like the first time you were babysitting and the parents said "and they can't go swimming without an adult present" and you thought "who's the - oh. I'M the adult." Well, ya, I'M THE LANDLORD.

It seems sometimes like I've done a LOT of work and made a ton of progress. At other times it seems I have barely scraped the surface (floor refinishing pun intended). They're both true. I've done a TON of work, but the reality of how much more I want to do is enormous. So, I hope you'll join me on the rest of my adventures. New stuff gets destroyed and painted and reinvented every week. oh, and the beauty of being a landlord is that you never know when you'll be called to deal with something absurdly unexpected. Just last month a squirrel got stuck in the attic and chewed a hole through the dry wall into my tenant's bedroom, staring at them from it's perch next to the ceiling all night! And the universe chuckled at me and said "So, Tracy, go figure that out! Friends, I guarantee you, it's never boring around here, and if you hang around long enough I bet you learn a lot along the way. . . as I figure it all out myself.

Up next in the house: putting in a sink between the washer and dryer in the kitchen including doing plumbing, making cabinetry from scratch, and tile work.

IT WORKS! IT WORKS!

First we put in our shelves about a week ago so we could destroy the counter tops. There's a row of shelves next to the stove and a set in the window where the light will shimmer through my glass wares. (my glasses also happen to be the only ones of my dishes worth seeing all the time! Glimpse those shelf in the photo of the washers below)Then, of course, we ripped it all out! the old counter tops and sink were destroyed and Marco's brilliant Uncle Ilber came to work his magic. I was gone to my job at the boutique when it all happened, but magically when I returned there were pipes and electrics! That box has the water connectors in it and you can see the grey plug in the new electrical outlet next to it.

The next morning he returned to do some final connections and hook it all up and all of a sudden we have a working washer and dryer!!! You can see the piles of newly dried whites on the dryer.
I have never had so much fun doing laundry ever.

We immediately separated all our clothes into piles around the living room and began washing and haven't really stopped. We had almost everything in the house waiting to wash. It looks like tiny hills are all over the living room and the dogs LOVE jumping into the piles or taking naps in them. hehe. so cute! You can see where the sink will go in between the washer dryer. Hopefully I'll soon be able to scan in my drawings for the sink, counter, and cabinets beneath as well as a floor plan for how I want the kitchen to eventually look.

Sometimes it feels like things will never get done, then a big leap happens and it's like "wow! We did something cool! we're on our way!" This was a great jump forwards!!

NO MORE LAUNDRYMAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES!!

Now we just need to put the bead board across the back wall we just ripped off, install the sink, make a counter top around the sink which will be tiled, and build a cabinet underneath. Good thing Marco is actually a pretty skilled carpenter!
oh, and paint everything. That kitchen will look a lot better painted.
and organized too.
and eventually put tile on the floors....

KITCHEN DESTRUCTION! WOOHOO!

I'm still compiling a blog post recapping some of the notable projects of the last 10 months, like when a pipe partially collapsed in the garden sending sewage bubbling up through my lovely yellow flowers and I couldn't afford a plumber so I dug it out and actually patched it myself (that's the image at the top of the page in the SALVAGE HOUSE banner). Oh, or all the fun times hand stripping, sanding and staining all the wood floors in the house! Good memories. But that will have to wait because the next project is in full swing. Mission: Kitchen!Here's an image of the kitchen before. (ok, it's actually the upstairs kitchen, not the downstairs, but they look exactly the same and it's the only photo I could come up with. whatever. Imagine the same thing but my neighbor's pink siding instead of a roof outside the window)
So what do you do when you need to put your huge wonderful Tromm washer and Dryer in your house? We need an exterior wall to make a vent, need to be near to plumbing, water pipes, and not block a window. . .Kitchen wins! Only problem is there are currently cabinets and counter tops in the way. Problem?! NO PROBLEM! A couple noisy hours with my trusty reciprocating saw, Marco with his circular saw, a lot of crow bar action and a broken hammer later -you have to get fierce with old wood!- I pry off a panel of wood and on the back side I find this:

Isn't it Cool!! It's a pencil drawing of Joseph Stalin, leader of the communist Soviet Union, complete with sickle and hammer. Is this a statement of communist support? and it doesn't just say "I support Stalin" It says "WE GO JOE." The connotation being that group is declaring it's overwhelming support of something, it's allegiance to a side, like "Texas goes RED" in an election. And it's not "stalin" it's "JOE" suggesting a certain familiarity and respect. "Good man. We supportcha!." So who drew it and why? and exactly when? Did this get taken to a rally? Was it drawn for an underground communist organization and eventually hidden in the side wall of my cabinet? This is one of the coolest parts of renovating an old house. You never know what snippets of the house's history you'll find, and it certainly reinforces the feeling that the property is so much more than me and my life. It's had many lives, and will hopefully have many more if I do my job right. This find reinforces my sentiments that I'm not THE owner, I'm the current steward of the house. I've made sure to let the house and those who still watch over it know that I may be ripping it up some right now, but it's like pruning a rose, you snip off a little so more will bloom. i got the feeling they were a little disturbed when I first started ripping it apart. A discussion of house ghosts another time. Soon it'll be time to return to the Texas History floor to compile a list of all the tenants of the house between 1926-1950 to search out what I can about their stories. But first things first...

You can half see the new shelves for glass wares in the window in this shot

To remove the sink, or not remove the sink, that is the question. We removed it.

My little sidekick wants to help! Sorry, my piglet, there's sharp power tools running in here.

Remember in Under the Tuscan Sun when she finds the faucet randomly in the middle of a wall? It starts dripping and eventually gushes as a metaphor of inspirational life force having returned, as in "her cup runneth over!" This is my tribute photo because I love that movie. Especially the clothes!!

So we ripped it all out, including some rotten boards behind the sink, and revealed a need for more boards to replace the subfloor, etc. (water damage) Some people would take a big truck to Lowes. We take our "mini truck." We certainly do get stares in the lumber dock and all the way home every time we do this! You have to take the headrests off and lean to the side a little once you get in the car, but it totally works. you'd be shocked what I've carried in my little Tiburon Azul de Espacio (little blue space shark, Lucky for short.) My mini cooper is the BEST.

Marco drinks the rest of the juice (!!!) while I photograph the car in the Lowes lumber dock.

As I type this, Marco and his construction genius uncle are in the kitchen putting new pipes and electrical in the walls to make the hookups for the washer and dryer. I went salvage shopping this morning before work and found the perfect giant porcelein sink tub thing.
So far the expenses read like this:
$44.00 for wood at Lowes (should have been well over $50 but the men in the lumber department like me. Some women put on a push up bra and go gold digging for a Lexus, I brush my hair a little and get exceptional service at Lowes. I'm probably the happier.)
$54.00 for a new porcelien sink from an old architectural salvage shop overlooking the Trinity River, Orr Reed. They have the best selection of sinks of all the Dallas salvage shops, and a ton of antique doors and windows.
... brings the total so far to $98.00. Sweet! Remember the overall budget goal is $300, not because that's what it should take but because that's all I can scrape up right now. Hopefully I sell something soon or have someone come get some alterations done so we can up this budget a little! Some tile would be nice. Anyone want to sponsor 3 or 4 square feet of black and white hexagon tiles for the counter around the sink? maybe just black to go with the washer dryer...