reconstruction of a porch

Before we bore witness to any of the hideous interior design choices made by previous owners of our home, we experienced the enclosed front porch. This presumed "smoking room" had it all: weird stencils, a corny limerick above the door, a former parlor entry repurposed as a plant stand. 

Did i mention stencils?

The above and below photos depict a confounded Mrs. Rockey and our optimistic friend who helped us purchase this blessed beast. 

Thanks, Phil... I think.

If you missed the deconstruction of this enclosed porch or simply need to refresh your memory, you can READ ALL ABOUT IT RIGHT HERE. After being ripped wide open last Summer, the porch has been undergoing a slow transformation into one of our favorite features of our new home.

After purchasing a new bench swing for their backyard, my folks allowed us to take this decrepit piece off their hands. With a bucket of clearance rack stain from menards, and some scraps of lumber for the arm rests, we gave this old relic from my childhood a second life. MJ even crafted a couple of darling pillow cases to repurpose some old INHABIT pillows donated years ago by brother Jere.

After having some aluminum siding repaired...

(oooh baby. what happened to that decorative shelving unit?)

we pulled up the carpet (yes carpet), and painted the entire exterior of the house. That you can read all about RIGHT HERE. We ran the wiring for an exterior lamp and VOILA!

Hot cha cha. Our lovely neighbors gifted to us the old milk jug which we painted and repurposed as an umbrella holder. We suspect that we could also comfortably fit at least ten ferrel cats in that thing. Time will tell. The front door was still a piece of garbage, but brace yourselves for the big reveal at the end of the post.

Last Fall, after scouring craigslist for months, MJ found a couple of metal porch chairs (a bouncer and a rocker) for sale in Knightstown. I made the nearly two-hour round trip to claim those babies and returned home in one piece before dinner. For some reason, i took that photo of the sun setting on my drive home. Don't do as i do, kids.

We sanded the crap out of those chairs, primed them, and there they sat on our front porch all winter long. As the ice thawed and Spring began creeping up on us, we used some leftover paint from our clawfoot tub renovation to finish the porch chairs...

That table used to belong to a starbucks coffee that i was fired from years ago. 

I win.

Now about that door.

We installed a new front door, gave it a paint job and some dandy hardware, and...

BOOM.

Again, this big front porch has easily become one of our favorite features of the home. Hopefully, before too long, we'll have some tasty reveals of the family bathroom that has been nearing completion for a year and a half now.

Yikes.

As you were.

april, fools

Been awhile!

Happy new year, btw.

Now, let's get down to brass TicTacs(R).

Did we throw in the towel and abandon this oversized project that we took on almost two years ago? Did we cut our losses and chalk it up as a lesson learned? Did we decide to return to a new construction home in which we would no longer need concern ourselves with an endless list of home repair projects?

NEVER.

Not when the opportunity to destroy something else lies around every corner. Take the multiple sets of concrete steps to nowhere for instance. These dudes have been begging to be put out of their misery since we acquired this blessed beast of a home. 

After a few humiliating attempts at breaking down these slabs of concrete with sledgehammers and masonite drill bits, we decided to rent a jackhammer. 

Grrrrrowl. Amiright?

 What resulted was a Saturday spent cutting up concrete and cleaning up the yard on the  sunset-facing side of the house.

A big thanks to Dave and Vaughn for helping us pile and haul debris to the street for distribution. There are still plenty of jagged chunks of concrete available. Feel free to help yourself to as many as you can pile into the trunk of your fancy automobile.

Act now. 

Supplies are fairly limited.

Coming soon... 

RECONSTRUCTION OF A PORCH!!!

Alright, you can go about your day now.

Thank you for your time.

songs from the fire bowl

Another year has come and gone and i've once again recorded a collection of songs to give away to family and friends. 

The songs in this collection have been with me for about as long as I can remember. I’ve been singing their lyrics at Camp Olivet since I was a fetus in sneakers. It was at Olivet that I first began strumming the guitar to their often mislabeled chords. These songs and the meaning that they hold have evolved with me over the years. Today, some of the lyrics make me roll my eyes with their horrible theology. Some of them send a shiver up and down my spine. Some of them are simply beautiful meditations on the character of God and his kingdom.

As a child, my cousins and I wrote verses for “Humble Yourself” to sing one Sunday morning. Those new verses found their way into the Camp Olivet songbook and have been synonymous with the tune ever since. At some point during my early adolescence it became expected of me to sing “Keep It On Going” every day at camp until my voice was no more. Now an adult with children of my own, I have returned to Camp Olivet to play my guitar and sing these songs. The sessions are loud, often goofy and sometimes surprisingly moving.

I’ve found new life in these songs. I have accepted that like anyone who has a history with Camp Olivet, for better or worse, these songs are a part of me.

thanks (but no thanks)

Enjoy another heaping helping of tasty tracks during your holiday feasting.

Yummy.

beyond the gallons of grey

Behold! Our blessed beast, the new home that our little family has been breathing new life into over the past year and some change, has been given a new face! After a few minor setbacks, including but not limited to being bamboozled by a dude who was supposed to repair some aluminum siding for us, we have given a fresh coat of paint to every last inch of dirty, white, badly painted/stenciled siding.

After much deliberation over the color that would adorn our home, MJ and i settled on Sherwin-Williams' Summit Gray. Early on, Baby Jane was very vocal about painting the house pink, a suggestion that i was not entirely opposed to for fairly obvious Dylan/The Band-related reasons. However, the pink suggestion was not going to garner a unanimous vote. When all was said and done, we decided on a color inspired by a lesser-known music icon.

After researching and purchasing a paint-sprayer, we spent the better part of a week cleaning and painting the exterior walls of our house.

Here's your's truly getting awfully friendly with a ladder and some power lines. Look at that sad, unsuspecting stencil below the second-floor window.

Now, let's take a counter-clockwise tour around the house and view the rest of the freshness...

west side

back yard

Coming soon...

WINDOW TRANSPLANT!

making things out of stuff is nice

Dudes and ladies. Sometimes if feels really good to buckle down and just build things. MJ and i started with a dream. That dream included some sort of magazine rack style bookshelves for the kids to display some of the many books in their vast collection of literature. After months of talking about it and looking at gobs of picture on the interwebs, i took the proverbial bull by the horns and wrestled to the cold, dirty ground. In other words, i saw something that i thought would work and made a plan to replicate it with my bare hands.

A few ten-foot one-by-fours and a fistful of dowel rods later we had this elegant piece of functional art lying prostrate before us. She was ready to begin life anew. And so, the Jane gals honored our new creation's humble willingness to serve by decorating her in layers of fresh primer and white paint...

Look at those ladies go.

At long last, our dream is realized!

Now our beloved hand-forged book-shelving unit hovers proudly between the still-purple north window and entry door to the kids' room. Hooray for making things. Let's do it again real soon, shall we?

deconstruction of a porch

A handful of years ago, old man Hensley and myself were ramblin' on and on about front porches. At the time, MJ and i were living in the house on harvest moon which was seriously lacking in the front porch department. In fact, most every house in that ol' neighborhood was lacking any real sit-and-spin-while-sippin-on-sweet-tea type of front porch. I talking about the kind of front porch from which you say howdy to your neighbors. Old man Hensley and i had a theory that most folks living in such neighborhoods preferred to drive their cars into their garages, disappear inside and spend their afternoons hiding from one another behind privacy fences. In all honesty, there were seasons in which MJ and i needed to do just that. But when those seasons came to an end, we often found in difficult to engage with or even get a simple greeting from those dwelling within our immediate vicinity. 

I ramble on with this boring account simply to punctuate how important it became that we have a big front porch attached to whatever house in which we eventually decided to move. Our blessed beast that we purchased a year ago did indeed have a sizable front porch, but it just so happened to be enclosed with windows, a door, and a general vibe of unwelcomeness. Seeing as how our home presently has no garage or outdoor storage of any sort, the enclosed front porch served as a handy locale to store unused scraps of drywall, unmotorized people-moving devices, and future bathroom amenities. However, we always knew that time was short for that enclosure and that one day we would have a big open front porch from which we could wave to our neighbors and shout good-natured insults back and forth.

Then, one day, MJ says something like, "Why don't you go ahead and make yourself useful by taking busting the hell out of our front porch." I know that doesn't sound like her, but that's the way i like to remember it. And so we went to work. We ripped out everything that wasn't part of the original porch structure and broke it down for heavy trash pickup which the city of Greenwood has every last friday of the month.

Yowzers.

Here's a side view before...

and after.

Clearly, we've still got a long way to go, but we're a half a step closer to transforming this beast into the home we envisioned that it could be when we first walked into it a little over a year ago.

Good night, old man Hensley, wherever you are.

(family photo by the one and only Katie Basbagill)

closets are nice

I don't mean to brag, but as far back as i can remember, closets have been something that have been present in my life. There was a brief period in college when i lived in a makeshift room added on to a less-than-sound house in muncie, indiana in which i did not have a closet. None of this is a euphemism for anything. This is just closet-talk, man. But i digress. Anywho, you learn to take a thing like a closet for granted. After living out of a dresser and laundry baskets during the past year, one might imagine how stoked MJ and i were at the prospect of finally having our own closet in which to hang clothing once again. You know that thing that they say about the little things? Well, i'm not going to argue with whoever they are that say that, because, hey... closets are nice. Am i right? You don't have to answer that. I've now learned to never take a closet for granted again.

Our master bedroom (formerly the "green room") came equipped with a useless secondary furnace housed within its closet. In the previous photo featuring me in a dust mask you can see the return vent that was connected immediately to the unit behind the closet wall. You may notice in the photo directly above that the aforementioned return vent was removed (along with that hunk of scrap metal) and replaced with drywall. Nice patch, eh?

Now we're starting to see less and less of that pea puke green and more and more woodgrain. With a fresh coat of paint on the wall you'd never know there was once a return vent in the mix. It's not black magic, kids. It's just a little elbow grease and mostly raw talent. Now, let's open up that closet and take a look inside. Shall we?

Sadly, i haven't been able to dig up any shots of the crumbling disgusting plaster that once covered the inside of the closet. However, you can see from the "before" photo that i masterly removed said plaster revealing the lath beneath and a glimmer of the someday-bathroom on the other side of the wall. Notice the fresh gypsum in the "after" shot. Tasty, right?

Now, if you'll allow me to give you a peak at the inside of the closet. Again, i'm disappointed to say that there are no photos of the preexisting furnace. Still, if you look at the next "before" shot, you can see the supply and return ducts which we put through ceilings and floors to connect everything in the attic to our single furnace living in the basement. The ductwork fit just snug between that there ol' coal chimney and the closet wall. In order to squeeze everything between the floor joists, we even had to manufacture our own pieces out of scrap sheet metal. Mr. Mike once again helped us out with figuring out that piece of the puzzle.  

I then built a wall with some two-by-fours and gypsum board to cover the monstrosity and patched the floor with some salvaged floor planks.

After refinishing the floors, more paint, putting up some baseboards, etcetera, our brand new closet was finally ready to move in to...

Huzzah!

A few brackets, hand-cut shelves, and steel rods later, we had a place to hang clothes. In the next shot you can really see that new wall (baseboard and all) that hides the new ductwork...

On the other wall directly across there's a little nook in which we hung some hand-cut shelves for our footwear to lounge upon.

Say it with me, people:

Closets are nice.

an able door

When we purchased our blessed beast, the door that you see before you was pea puke green and hung at the top of the staircase. The entire second floor had been converted in to and used as an apartment for quite some time before the house went into foreclosure and this door had closed off the upstairs from the downstairs. Restoring the house to a single unit, we knew we were going to remove the doorway. The doorway to our master bedroom, on the other hand, had no door of which to speak. Clearly, the solution was simple: Move the top-of-the-stairs door to the master bedroom.

Only a couple of problems stood in the way to making our solution a reality. 

First, the door was about an inch and a half too wide for the existing doorway to the bedroom. A capable circular saw took care of that problem. Second, there was a big ol' hole above the doorknob where once lived a deadbolt lock. A jigsaw, a scrap of wood, a couple of screws and few globs of wood putty later, it was if said hole had never existed. Never before had two problems relating to a door been so creatively solved.

We finished the job with a coat of espresso minwax ala the floors and a couple of coats of poly. We reused original hardware and hung that sucker in the doorway as if it had been there its whole lifetime.

Boom-shaka-laka.

Door. 

Coming soon...

Closets.

That's right...

Closets.

the purple room, part deux

Last week, you were treated to a peek at the renovation of our master bedroom/former "green room". Now, let us revisit the "purple room" of which we took at peek at earlier in the year. 

Here's the jane gals with our buddy phil who helped us purchase this blessed beast we now call home. This was pretty much how the room looked when we were first wooed by her majesty. The only trace of any color other than purple was the battered plaster hanging from the ceiling. We suspect that there once resided a deeply devoted fan of prince in this room. We respect that. However, the purple had to go. And go far far far far far away.

After we tried our hand at hanging drywall in the green room, we enlisted the help of mom & pop rockey, and again mr. helvie to put a fresh crown atop the purple prince's royal dome. This is shot of the room after the new drywall has been hung. I must say, it really felt like we knew what we were doing this time. After some heavy mudding and sanding, the ceiling was finished. We then repaired some of the bulging plaster walls by drilling holes and shooting liquid nails into the walls. After the liquid nails, we we screwed the plaster tight against the lath and let it dry. A mere hours later, boom-shaka-laka. Almost-like-new walls. The rest of the renovation (i.e. paint, floors, etc.) was pretty similar to the green room. So let's just skip to the "after" pictures...

Voila!

The kids have a new shiny room in which they sleep like darling babies.

I'd like to say that next week we will reveal the final upstairs room: the family bath. However, that will most likely be awhile. 

How about some refinished bedroom doors? 

You know you love pictures of doors.

Stay tuned for those doors.

there are people sleeping upstairs

When our tiny tribe first took a tour of our soon-to-be home/project one year ago, this is how our future master bedroom appeared. Everything but the carpet, ceiling accoutrements, and window panes were painted pea puke green. The ceiling was paved with tiles glued to lath. In the center of the ceiling was an unattractive, improperly installed ceiling fan. I'll spare the description of the non-functioning secondary furnace in the closet. Suffice it to say it no longer resides at this address and has most likely been torn limb from limb to create robots that will one day become sentient and return to our finally renovated home to exact their revenge. But i digress. Let me walk you briefly through the year-long process of transforming the affectionately named "green room" into a place that we can finally designate "mommy & daddy's room".

The first thing we had to do in this future sanctuary was to remove those unfortunate tiles. This proved a rather easy task as they were barely hanging on for dear life as it was. Eventually, we also got around to knocking down that ceiling fan that was merely bolted to a ceiling joist. I don't know if i've mentioned it before, but let me just get this out of the way now before we proceed any further: our home is FULL of things that were done less than properly. Ceiling fan installation should really be the least of our concerns. Remember that furnace in the bedroom closet that i mentioned earlier? Yeah, i know! Carbon monoxide, right? Oh well.

Once the ceiling was stripped to the bones, we were ready to learn how to hang drywall. Fortunately, we had a lift supplied by brother ben and the able hands of ben himself, brother jeremy, mister mike, and the affable ryan helvie (pictured above heavily critiquing our craftsmanship while MJ wonders to herself why i'm just turding around with my camera instead of making myself useful. jk, y'all). By the by, have i mentioned how incredible and generous our friends and family are? That's right; i just did.

Just look at that drywall glisten. Once we muddled our way through this room, we only got better at hanging that stuff throughout the remainder of the house. While the "green room" was the first room in which we hung drywall, it was the second that we finished with mud, tape and sandpaper. MJ and i discovered that we might just have a real knack for finishing drywall. Here's a shot of the finished ceiling, paint and all, with a new fan. We customized a discounted hunter fan by giving a paint job to the blades and fitting the lights with frosted white globes.

Also notice that the pea puke green is slowly dissolving beneath layers of paint primer. I believe the carpet has been ripped up and tossed out the windows by this point as well. Something is definitely taking shape. I haven't even mentioned all of backstage work. There are hours and hours of electric rewiring, insulation removal, and ductwork installation behind those walls and ceiling. 

Finally, we sanded down those floors to the grain. We stained them with minwax espresso and coated them with four rounds of polyurethane. The walls got a touch of grey as a final treatment and all of the trim painted white as snow.

Now, for the moment you've been holding your breath for...

Go ahead, breathe...

It's just one room in a whole house that needs a whole lot of love...

However, it is a HUGE victory for us...

So here it is...

TA-EFFING-DA!

If one looks rather closely, one will notice that the window sashes alone retain the pea puke green. We've been saving those for our final decision about keeping or replacing all of the original windows throughout the house. Also, the undepicted doors are presently being stripped and sanded to be refinished similar to the floors. However, i think you get the idea.

Here's a shot of the window across from our bed where our old library desk now has a functional place of residence in our home. The poor thing has been relegated to a closet for far too long. It's time for her to shine like the shiny diamond she was always meant to be.

Here we are.

One year later. 

We're finally upstairs.

It feels pretty great.

illustrations for life

 Our efforts in restoring our home continue to excite us and frustrate us simultaneously. I've been hoping to post some before/afters of the upstairs when we've reached the point of finally being able to use it as living space. It's definitely getting there, but difficulties with giant floor-sanding machines have left us in a holding pattern once more.

Drawing inspiration from newspapers continues to push me to seek the weird among the bizarre. No doubt, one day we will all find a home.

pet sounds

Tis the season for applying bunny ears to your canine pals. 

Enjoy this magic moment.