Budget Home Theater – Cameras are rolling…but not a lot of action {ORC Fall 2018: Week 3}
The title is a little misleading. Things are definitely moving along, but not without a few more CUT! Reshoot!s than expected. (I promise to work on my film puns for next week.) On the plus side, if you’ve been following along in my IG stories, I think we’ve finally got it to stop raining in the house. Follow me on IG if you want to join in on some movie posters polling questions this Friday too!
If you’ve landed here from the One Room Challenge, Welcome! We’ve just purchased an 80’s contemporary home in Upstate NY that just needs a little TLC to bring her back to her former glory.
Let’s start with the water issues. Last week we scrapped off the loose stuff covering the cinder block walls. We applied waterproofing masonry paint. We filled in the horizontal gaps we could see with cement we had lying around the house.
Then it rained again. Inside and out.
On the plus side, because of the dark color of the paint, it was really easy to see where the walls were weeping. We scrapped again, consulted the internet, and ran out to get waterproof cement (the darker gray patches in the photo below). I asked Tom if he thought we messed up by using the regular cement (lighter gray patches) in the first place, but we did have decent sized gaps and he felt it was correct to fill those holes with that first.
While we were waiting for all of this to dry, it was time to inspect where all of this water was coming from. It was clearly concentrated on this one area of the wall.
A little backstory on the house: we purchased this house this past summer from an elderly couple who had bought it in the mid-80s and did some tremendous additions to a much smaller house before moving in. This house has some amazing quirkiness to it (I can’t wait to share it all with you!) but as they got older they spent more and more time at their vacation homes and less time here, and had been trying to sell the house for several years. They definitely let it go into a bit a disrepair, which is understandable on many levels. Our inspection brought up rotting siding issues, and among other things, most of the problems were probably due to ice damns forming on the roof line. So we hired a handyman and a gutter company to remove the dry rotted wood, add in additional layers of protection beneath the new siding, and to add in gutters where there weren’t any and to CLEAN OUT THE GUTTERS THAT WERE THERE. Folks, so many problems can be avoided by cleaning out your gutters (or getting the covers that eliminate the need to clean).
So we noticed this when we looked outside. See the gutters running down on either side of the windows? This is essentially our eat-in kitchen area and directly above the area of the basement that was getting wet. Well, a quick peek under the deck showed us that the gutters stopped about a foot away from the house.
Another quick trip to Lowes for some downspout extenders (not sponsored(yet! Hi Lowes 😉)), some muddy bellies from crawling under the deck and I *think* we have really fixed the water issue. We haven’t had a really heavy rainfall since, so time will tell. I’ve even painted a second coat over all of our cement and fingers crossed, we are basically done painting.
Not pictured, Theodore taking a turn with downspout arms running up to strangers and yelling “DESTROY, DESTROY”.
In other news – half of our sectional arrived! After too many attempts to purchase used leather couches on craigslist/letgo/FB marketplace, we found this couch online. Tom researches the hell out of purchases and felt it was a great deal, and the same price we were seeing used sectionals listed at. Unfortunately, part of the couch arrived damaged to the shipping company so we have to wait for the loveseat to arrive, hopefully before this challenge ends. It’s not exactly what I would put in my living room, but I’m happy to report it is super comfortable and it’s exactly what we were hoping for this space.
This post is getting long, but we need a little help on two decisions if we are going to finish this on time:
1) We’ve narrowed down a few movie poster pics we want to purchase to hang on the walls. All of the movies have some sort of connection to us, some stronger than others, but they go in two different directions aesthetically speaking. I’ll be posting the options on IG on Friday – please help us vote!!
2) We are trying to salvage and make use of an old dining room table as a counter down here. Problem is, it has seen better days, and we are taking an unconventional route and taking it apart and pushing the halved sides against the wall. My mother bought this set in the 90’s at an auction for $300. It was her set until 2007 when I moved to Brooklyn and I took over the table itself, the chairs, and the large buffet (the small buffet still lives at her house). Refinishing it is the obvious answer (there is years of water damage to the veneer on top), but I’m scared to tackle that. Painting it could be an option too, but I think the prep work will be as much as refinishing it, and more permanent, so again, scared. I kind of want to go the easy route and get a black table cloth and gathered skirt, that kinda screams movie theater to me, but is that lame? Also, those legs are kinda cool, do I want to cover them up? All suggestions are welcome, especially links to any tutorials.
PHEW. Points to anyone still here. Now go check out Week 3 for the Featured Participants and Guest Participants! See you next week.
