It's a Winter Wonderland

In case you don't know, the southern part of New Jersey doesn't seem to get a whole lot of snow. We're fairly close to the ocean, so the humidity is usually available, but since we are so close to the ocean I think the temperature of the air doesn't quite reach freezing as often as it does a bit further inland. In either case, since we are both winter sports enthusiasts, we love the stuff. And we woke up to a nice treat this morning.

Our Most Recent "Project"

Ok, so it wasn't really a project, more a creation.





Yep, that's a baby you see. The due date is currently June 17, 2009. If I wasn't busy with the house before, I certainly will be between now and then! The baby (and Dee) are healthy and doing very well. And apparently the baby is already starting to get alot of exercise, albeit in the middle of the night. We're totally excited and can't wait to meet "Baby A&D".


More on the house to come soon!

Demolition/Framing (MMR 10)

We can't seem to find all of our pictures (whoops) of the bathroom demolition, which chronicle the delicate task of removing the powder pink and baby blue tiles, so until we can dig them up, I'll just give you a peak at what the area looks like after we've done some new framing and are removing a wall from the master bedroom to expose our work.


You can see the void where the old bathroom and master closet where through the old master closet doorway. To the right is going to be the new entrance to the master bathroom.














Here we've removed the part of the wall that is now the entryway to the master bathroom and master closet, and framed in the wall where the old master closet doorway was.














After careful consideration of how beat up the old plaster wall was, and the fact that I was going to basically have to skim coat the whole thing with spackle, I decided the fastest and easiest solution would be to remove the rest of the plaster wall and just install some new drywall.

Master Bathroom Remodel (The Master Plan)

Before I start flooding you with pictures of the work that we did with the remodel (if that's the right word), I thought it'd be beneficial to provide an explanation of the plan that we had come up with. As I'm sure Ive said before, our home was built in the 50's and NEVER touched (as far as we could tell). OK, so maybe the upstairs was finished in the 70's, but we'd like to forget that ever happened.

On the first floor, there are two bedrooms with a shared bathroom in between that is entered from the hallway. We weren't keen on sharing our bathroom with everyone who entered the house, mostly because that would mean we'd need to keep it looking really tidy...all of the time. We decided that the space would be best used to create a master bathroom, and then add a powder room on the hallway for company. We did so by removing a few small closets, and re purposing the second first floor bedroom into an office/nursery. Here is a visual explanation of the changes that we made (not to scale, but you get the gist of it):

Old Floor Plan















New Floor Plan















We only have one picture of what the first floor bathroom looked like when we bought the house: