How We Started Our Historic Home Renovation - The Powder Room
I give tours of my new-old house all the time. In fact besides the fact that it makes me clean my house – I LOVE giving tours of my home! Potential clients, neighbors, and visiting friends and family – all get the opportunity to see what we created during our 12 months of blood sweat and tears.
One of the favorite rooms was actually a “happy accident”. Like many people who purchase a home with the intention of making some significant changes, my husband and I actually came to the house a few hours after our closing at the lawyer’s office and looked for something simple that we could do on our own before my contractor showed up the following morning.
The renovation plans included changing this hall closet underneath our front stairs into a powder room. There was an existing large wood shelf on the wall that we decided was something we could easily take down with the couple hours we had left in our day.
Well – more than couple hours later –we had finally managed to remove the shelf (as it turns out it was attached to the original brick outer wall) AND we had exposed the “beautiful” brick wall behind the plaster.
That little episode would repeat itself OVER AND OVER again as we started with little projects that exploded into full-scale endeavors that would blow up our budget yet one more time. But this small area of exposed brick has become a focal point of this marvelous little gem.
Once our friends got a glimpse of the natural brick wall they asked us why we didn’t just take down all the plaster and expose larger areas of brick. But the funny thing with brick that not many people think about is the idea that exposed brick was not meant to be exposed! Take a look at the quality of the brick we uncovered – it is uneven and the mortar is not done to the level that you would see on a brick fireplace for instance. Our contractors had to chisel and jack-hammer out the old mortar and repoint the entire brick wall surface - a dirty job that required a skilled mason. Like many other new things I would learn very quickly – I was not in Kansas anymore – we were in a whole new realm! Stay tuned there’s plenty more to come!
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