My Denver Bungalow

Let me start by saying I ADORE THIS HOUSE.

Almost four years ago I determined it was time to sell our Denver square (only ten blocks down the road from this house) because it was too big and fussy not really our deal. We'd renovated as much of it as we could afford, and because the neighborhood is stupid-popular now, it sold in three days. Huzzah!

Enter the bungalow.

Hold up, rewind. I live in Japan now and I'm renting out this house for the duration. Ideally I will live in it again someday and pick up where I left off with renovations. The sooner the better.

Anyway. This little bungalow. It just felt right. From the minute I walked in. It's small, about 1200 square feet, and it has character. Nothing mind-blowing, just subtle and comfortable and happy and it didn't stretch the budget. Crazy, right?

Stuff I wanted and got with this house:

+ solid 1920s build
+ small, compact space
+ dated kitchen I could renovate
+ dirtscaped backyard I could landscape
+ two-car garage
+ great hilltop location (with no 24-hour hipster yoga studio in my alley!)
+ major remodel potential – plans below

Stuff I didn't even know I wanted but got with this house:

+ insane rental income
+ a garden shed!
+ new roof (replaced as part of the sale)
+ good neighbors who aren't all up in my face and don't have shouty children

Stuff I wanted but didn't get with this house:

+ an entry of some kind
+ normal sized bedrooms
+ established trees/shade

Still, I had work to do. My husband had taken a job in Beijing but I wasn't about to go live there – are you kidding? I can't even drink the water in China without developing intestinal mayhem. I visited him, that was all the China I could handle. I wanted to fixate on the house anyway and then on the Vail studio loft and it all worked out perfectly. I took a boatload of mostly low quality iPhone photos while I was doing the work and since I can't multitask for shit, I'm going to write about it now just for posterity, and very much after the fact. I hope there's no rule against that in the blogger bible I have no intention of ever reading.

ANYWAY. Off the bat I refinished the original floors from that standard golden oak to a dark grayish-brown. I painted all the interior things white, of course.

Next up we planned a low-maintenance, low-water back yard with a landscape architect friend. The house being so small, I wanted to add serious livable outdoor space back there. It went from all dirt to all this:

Not everything went so well. The house had pathetic water pressure, which turned out to be very costly to repair and required digging up the entire front yard. And half the street. THEN the kickass new water pressure made the old water heater explode and flood the basement.

But I don't want to talk about that.

Eventually I got back to the fun stuff, namely the kitchen overhaul. I overshared about that here.

Someday I'll decide on that backsplash. Maybe.

A note about the spartan state of the house in these photos: These are the shots I use to advertise it as a rental. They work.

Here's the rest of the house. Not much to it!

The small awkward bedroom off the living area with a door to the bathroom.

Tiny Ikea bathroom renovated not-so-well by the previous owner. But it's cute and it works for now. (You're welcome for not taking a photo of the bathroom with the toilet seat up. I hate that! But probably because I'm mental.)

Small bedroom/office off the kitchen at the back of the house, overlooking the back yard. Yes, that's a $40 tanker desk and my ONLY killer craigslist find. Sorry but I'm not one of those bloggers.

A small part of the basement was also refinished by the previous owner. Again, it works for now.

I GOT PLANS! Of course I have plans. Because I need to obsess over stuff constantly.

+ vault ceilings in the living area, add skylights
+ install small, stand-alone Scandinavian woodburning stove
+ partially enclose porch with nano windows to create quasi-entry
+ utilize the back half of the attic for a sleeping loft/bedroom
+ renovate the existing bathroom
+ excavate basement and create a real laundry room, full bathroom, TV area, and bedroom
+ replace fence, update garage, plant more trees

You know, nothing much. And by the time I get all of that done, it'll be time to renovate the kitchen again.

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Serial Killer Basement

That's what I've been calling it for the last few years. Why are basements so scary? And so grungy? Here are some before pictures of mine for your viewing pleasure. You're so lucky.

The bigger problem was the stale smell that always, I mean always, wafted from the depths of our house. There's only so long you can live in an old house and blame everything on its oldness. No, this was something ... else. I was the only one who was, according to others, being overly sensitive to it. First we called Monster Vac who promptly sucked fifty some years of muck, filth, and rodent corpses from the vents. That helped. But that smell of murk lingered.

Yes. We could have spent the money elsewhere like on, say, widening doorways on the main level or heightening the hobbit doors upstairs. Yes. It would have probably helped the resale value of the house more than what I chose to do. Yes to all of that. But I couldn't take it anymore. I was starting to think the house needed this. Who knows what's happened over the years in here? I decided it needed an exorcism, and it needed me to perform it.

Someone had installed carpet in the basement. That's right. Sort of a thick brown green plush number. Not hideous, but not exactly stylin' either. The 90s version of shag. I have no idea how long it had been there. Or who had installed it. Didn't want to know. It didn't seem that old. Had I known that it, and it alone was causing those funk daddy fumes all along I would have readily ripped it out myself. But I was afraid. Afraid of what? Of what I would find under it. Turned out to be just an innocently uneven concrete floor. No dead bodies. No map of satanic ritual. No tunnel to the old headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan downtown. Four fucking years we lived with that smell. I'm getting to be a real pussy when it comes to the unknown. What happened to my fearlessness? Old house ownership is what happened. And I watch too many slasher movies.

Sunday Girl

Sunday nights. Hate or love? Both. Hate that I'm thinking about work tomorrow, and the work week is about to begin, and I have all these dumbass meaningless work things to do when I get to the office at the crack of dawn. But love that I'm still home, and the lazy weekend lingers with late dinner and extra wine. Hell yes. Love that. So I inevitably stay up too late trying to savor what's left of the day. Which only exacerbates my grumpy zombie nature on Monday.

Not that this weekend was lazy. In fact, I should explain my blog absence since Monday. (As if I'm a consistent blogger?!) Been sick, so there's that. Also been working on the basement. Very challenging. Because wow, that is one raw space. About as rough as it gets. As in, parts of the floor are actually dirt. You could park a car in some of the foundation cracks. I won't describe the spiders and other insect colonies down there. It was the smell, however, that weird staleness coming from the depths, that finally made us (well, me) do something about it. After four years. Of that questionable smell of basement seep.

Two more weekends and the basement will be presentable. Maybe.

Note to self. And to readers, if I ever indeed get some. Wear gloves when using expanding foam in a can. That shit does not come off.

Pimping the List

I don't work on Fridays so it's officially my weekend. Here's what I'm up to. Well, in theory anyway. I'm always optimistic about getting it all done, but I never do.

+ organize this drawer in the tanker (see picture)
+ shop for Ray Bans
+ go to Apple store about refurbished Macbook (even though I hate all the hipsters there)
+ catch up on blogs
+ read Lonny magazine
+ hang mirror in entry
+ watch some episodes of Weeds
+ watch Hobo with a Shotgun
+ clean the fridge
+ take photos of house with new camera
+ go see Brighton Rock or Bellflower
+ go to dog training class to observe with Monika and her dog Sam
+ make Jamie Oliver's bolognese
+ decide on and possibly buy paint for the basement

How realistic does your list look this weekend?

This Is Not My Basement

I was going to start in about my latest project. That being the transformation of my scary serial killer basement into a nice clean and tidy storage space and/or cheerful laundry room. However, while downloading pictures I found one my boy took of a building down on Platte Street. His dissertation research involves wandering around ghetto parts of the city taking photos. So here's that instead. My basement endeavor shall remain a mystery for the moment. Happy long weekend.

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