SF Cribs: The places behind the clothes - Page 117

New around here. My wife and I bought an old equipment barn a few years back and renovated it. We used to do condos during the bubble; we like to think of this as our masterpiece. The upstairs is now a 3 BR rambler and the downstairs is an entertaining space with a loft / lodge feel including a grand piano and a Hearthstone woodstove opposite an outdoor fireplace. All work done by owners.

I've been working out of town. It's good to be home.

Kitchen island is IKEA cabinetry wrapped in knotty pine and stained. Stove is an AGA 36".

Tall cabinets are IKEA with customized crown molding.

Living room. Floor is #2 & #3 grade American Walnut. I am never doing a solid hardwood floor again.

The living room space was originally a mechanic's shop adjacent to a garage.

New Year's Eve at the kitchen island. We burned through the wine glasses. :) 

Thanks.

Rambler = all rooms on one floor. The upstairs has 3 bedrooms, a second small kitchen (soon to be a bar), bath, laundry, and an 800 sf living room / family room. It's literally a seperate house upstairs.

Some weird hippie types had it before us and kind of jacked up the upstairs when they built it -- they were using the downstairs to store RV's to pay the mortgage -- but we more or less fixed it. We're about to start a major reno on the upstairs, probably in 2014. 

The corner opposite the piano. Hearthstone Heritage woodstove. In order to meet code we had to go all Cindy Lou Who on the stovepipe.

There's an outdoor fireplace on the opposite side of the wall.

The exterior. The top door opens into the self-contained upstairs -- separate kitchen, bedrooms, etc. --  which is where we mostly live.

Thanks, everyone. We're on Puget Sound near Tacoma, WA.

The most rewarding thing is that the prior owners had screwed it up so badly that we got it for nothing. It was on the market for 500 days and it was a divorce property on top of that.

We'd built a nice nest egg from renovating and flipping properties during the boom, and we got out of the market in '07 before it got really bad -- we were actually hunkered down in a 1-bedroom rental when we found the place, watching the market tank month after month and contemplating our next move -- we were able to pay cash for the house and the renovations. Of course, it helped that we swung our own hammers for most of it. 

I put 6000 nails in that goddamn floor. All by hand. I contemplated selling the place as-is halfway through. Never again.

We brought in contractors who needed the work when we had something really tricky. For instance, the dining room has 8" mahogany crown connecting flat-texture drywall to an 11' T&G ceiling; we'd bought the crown on CL and had 9' of overage so we only had one shot at it. After I wrapped the beams the corners got kinda weird:

I'm good, but I'm not crazy. The guy who did this was Rain Man with a FesTool saw.

All said and done, though, I couldn't be happier. All we pay now is taxes and insurance, and we don't have kids, so we were able to effectively retire in our 30's. The ultimate in sweat equity. I'm in the Army Reserve, which covers our benefits, and I pick up a private security contracting gig here and there. Other than that our time is our own. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by StephenHero 

Walnut is one of the few woods where the inferior grades are aesthetically superior. The more variation the better, particularly if you get it in a wide plank. I would almost exclusively prefer it for all flooring. The only exceptions would be areas with high exposure to moisture and use over really old substrate, because it's slightly more prone to warping and porosity which could be problems way down the line as the substrate shifts. But the lower grades are just really gorgeous.

I love the look of character-grade walnut. And we did this build with cash, so we used whatever wood we could get. The log wall behind the piano is cedar; the baseboards and trim are hem fir, the front door is clear cedar, and the beams are wrapped in reclaimed knotty pine stained multiple times. The crown is mahogany, the faux ceiling beams are cedar, the window wraps are hem fir with knotty pine sills, and the ceilings are yellow pine. The cabinetry is a discontinued mahogany-look from IKEA. The variegation in the American Walnut ties it all together and gave us the wiggle room to wheel and deal on our architectural wood. And character-grade walnut is relatively unknown so we were able to pick it up for next to nothing; everyone was doing hand-scraped hardwood back then. If we'd done the whole build in matching wood it would've cost us a fortune. As it is, it makes it kind of rustic and homey; we wanted the kind of place where you don't mind setting down a wine glass without a coaster.