Our new old yellow brick interior wall

Our house is an 1889 yellow brick Victorian.  Outside, the brick is painted (we posted about that here), but we've long entertained the idea of exposing some of the brick walls inside.  This idea seemed especially plausible in the kitchen, where a large part of the space was once a back porch and two of the walls were formerly exterior walls albeit clad over in the 1940's with wire and plaster.  However, when we started gutting the kitchen prior to the renovation, we discovered that the brick was not in the greatest shape under its mask of plaster.  In one place, the column of brick holding up the laminated beam that supports the second story of the house was in dire need of repair (read about that epic saga here).  We were concerned that pulling the wire mesh and plaster from the other wall could weaken the mortar and damage its structural integrity.

So, not wanting to give up on the rich texture a brick wall can give, but not wanting to harm the house, we looked for alternatives.   At first, we had thought we might cover up our original brick column (now reinforced with concrete), but ultimately we decided we loved it--it had history, and instead of disguising it behind soulless drywall, we would use it as reference and try to match it.

Call me crazy, but I think the patina on our original brick wall is beautiful

The brick has a gorgeous patina of age typical of yellow brick houses, and is now more gray than yellow.  In fact, the brick and concrete column has shifted its role from something to be disguised to becoming the basis for our whole kitchen colour palette.  Now, every new material entering the kitchen has to get vetted up against the brick wall before it gets the okay. 

There are many options for cladding your walls on the market:  brick or stone veneers sliced from the real thing, flexible panels cast in foam or vinyl from real stone (the outside of Centro Restaurant on Yonge St. North of Eglinton in Toronto is clad in this product, and it did turn our heads at first, but it didn't really suit our house), or gypsum products, also typically cast from the real thing.

stone veneer on Centro Restaurant exterior

  We wanted a product that we could easily install on our own, and one that we could customize after the fact to match our existing brick.  In the end, we settled on a product from a local Toronto company called Soho Brick.  They have taken casts of century old brick walls, which they use to mold thin "brick" veneers from gypsum and pigment, and then mount them onto a flexible mesh backing.  The bricks are lightweight and very easy to cut (or break for that matter).

A panel of the brick veneer on mesh backing from Soho Brick

One of the veneers -- front, back,

and side

At first we were put off by the bright clear colouring that seemed to scream fake, but the Soho brick people showed us how readily the bricks absorbed any patina you can concoct, and we, or at least I, was sold.  I am a visual artist, and I knew I could make these bricks look the way we wanted.  N remained slightly skeptical but agreed to put his faith in me.

Once we got our brick home, we promptly stacked it up in what will be the future dining room and let it sit there collecting dust and forming an awkward immovable obstacle for a good year.  Fellow renovators, please let this be a cautionary tale.  Do not purchase a product until you plan to use it.  This is a lesson we have yet to learn.  Our house is full of supplies for upcoming projects.  But we did get started on the brick wall this past summer, and finished up, well, just a couple of days before hosting Christmas celebrations.  I know.

Here is a much abridged description of our brick veneer installation:

Individual bricks

Since we were trying to approximate the look of our existing brick wall, we made a couple of changes to the installation process. First, the spacing of the bricks on their mesh panels wasn't quite tight enough, so we decided to remove the bricks from the mesh backing and apply them individually.  This made the job a little more labour intensive, but gave us much more control over the final result.

It's a start!

We used a laser level to mark guidelines at appropriate intervals around the room. Then I began the slow process of applying the veneers.  Because the existing wall was quite irregular, I coated both the brick and the wall with mastic adhesive using a toothed trowel.

Corner pieces for corners

One of our walls (the same wall that once was an exterior brick wall, but is now a brick wall covered in wire mesh and plaster, and recovered in fake brick)  included an outside corner which required special corner pieces.

The faux (fake is such an ugly word, don't you think?) brick wall, pre-mortar

If you've ever pulled down the interior walls of a double brick house, you'll have noticed that the inside layer of brick will have a piece of wood replacing a course of bricks every so often. This wood would act as a nailing strip for supports for the lathe and plaster walls.  I thought we could incorporate this feature into our brick wall to act as a nailing strip for hanging art.  We happened to have a couple of the original roughsawn

The added nailing strip, cut from an original stud, complete with Thanksgiving turkey

With the bricks adhered with mastic to the wall, our next step was mortar.  We wanted to try to match the original mortar joints as closely as possible.

The original lime mortar, pale and soft, note inscribed convex 'u' detail

We set about educating ourselves about the differences between mortar historically, and mortar today.  Mortar plays a crucial structural role in the life of masonry buildings,  but today, most masonry is decorative, not structural, and the traditional art of the mason is almost lost.  Old lime based mortar, although soft, had an ability to absorb water and mend tiny fissures to maintain its structure.  Modern mortar, with portland cement as a main component is brittle and dark and can actually damage soft clay bricks because of its inflexibility.  This is why repointing a brick house, if not done correctly and by someone knowledgeable about traditional mortars, can actually damage the structure. Nonetheless, despite the fascinating information we were gleaning about mortar types and properties, what we were really after was a way of duplicating the look of our original mortar joints.    After much searching for an appropriate pointing tool to duplicate that line in our original mortar, we found the website of  Dr. Gerard Lynch, a master bricklayer, historic brickwork consultant, and lecturer in the UK.  He also makes traditional and custom jointing tools. A few emails, photos, and a money order later, we had purchased our very own custom jointing tool.

Our custom jointing tool inscribed with its maker's initials, GL

Dr. Lynch, who goes by the moniker of Red Mason (I believe he was a redhead in his youth) had informed us that our mortar joints had been ruled and tooled after the fact with that detail in order to give our irregular clay bricks a more even appearance.  The tool he sent us does not produce the convex bead, but a concave groove--he did warn us that a clay impression of the wall would be better than photos at conveying the tool needed, but the ruled detail looks very similar the original from any distance.

more of our mortaring arsenal, minus the mortar bag

Mortaring was a messy business.  We used a mortar bag, which is like a giant cake icing bag, and N tried several different ratios of cement, sand, lime, and water before striking on the perfect consistency and colour (lime lightens the mortar considerably). 

the perfect mortar consistency for good flow is quite stiff as shown here

Achieving the right consistency for the mortar to flow freely from the bag is tricky and counterintuitive.  You'd think, as we did at first, that mortar should be wetter to flow better, but the opposite was actually true.

wet mortar above, dry mortar, already tooled and ruled, below

Despite the labour and mess, the project was becoming more and more satisfying.  But there was still the pressing issue of colour.

The original brick right, orangey fake on the left

Could I ever make that orange brick veneer match our original wall?

A trial patina concocted from leftover house paint very diluted with water

Here are two details of the wall as it is today under two different lighting conditions, and with some of our original house trim, stripped, restained, and tacked up. I think I'll go a little farther with the grey patina in places. I stopped just before Christmas because of time, not a sense of completion, and haven't resumed my efforts, yet.

warm light...

cool light, but neither quite accurate

Another view, more confusing lighting, facing the French doors

And here's the facing wall, the once exterior wall, looking a little as it might've if we'd torn off all the plaster, I've already toned down the orange tone, but haven't applied any grey patina of age just yet:

We liked it so much (and had so much brick leftover from our original purchase) that we repeated the brick wall detail in the new half bath downstairs.  Final pictures of that room next post, promise.  I'll post final brick wall photos when the entire kitchen is finished. We can hardly believe it, but it appears that we're on the final stretch.  Our cabinetmaker tells us that installation of our cabinets should begin in mid-February.  Yesterday I tagged a slab of marble for the island counter (I'll post about that, too).  I'm about to order our sinks and prep sink faucet.  It's all beginning to come together. We are excited.

Organization for a New Year of Renovation

This was a low-glamour project, but so satisfying.   While struggling for the billionth time to find some job-specific tool we knew we possessed but couldn't locate in the ongoing renovation upheaval of our home, something snapped and we knew we needed to get organized.   And so we decided to channel our inner grade nine shop teacher and turn the outside (and out-of-sight) wall of our basement bathroom into a tool wall.

The new tongue and groove wall during construction

The dry run

A place for everything (note hacked IKEA plant stand for safe chisel storage)

A little visual punning: cans for cans

We used outdoor light fixtures from Union Lighting in Toronto (under $20 ea)

Once the wall was organized there was no stopping our quest for order.  We decided to put a bank of drawers across the corridor from the tool wall.  We purchased IKEA base cabinets: four drawers per cabinet--3 shallow, one deep, Harlig drawer fronts (plus added soft close mechanism which is non standard only for Harlig), a Numerar countertop, card bin pulls from Lee Valley tools.  Et voilà:
 

 

Our bank of drawers  (the pink glow on the walls is F&B floor paint primer leftover from the floor) 

labels!

No more futile searching for the perfect drill bit

Tool wall and drawers were in place, but we had more organizing to do.  One small parts storage unit (steel case, clear bins) from an industrial supply store in Mississauga, plus several oddly satisfying hours of sorting and labelling our small parts, and:

Our very own home depot

   

Truth be told, "a place for everything and everything in its place" has not been a mantra of ours.  But for now at least we can face the new year fully confident that we can find any tool or small part we need for our future projects.  

We'll see how long order reigns.

Goodbye Ferns, Hello Winter Urns

tropical upright fern/winter urn

I bid a reluctant goodbye to my three tropical upright ferns that had performed so spectacularly all summer and fall.  I brought one of them inside, but their gigantism forced me to send the other two to the compost heap, where they look very forlorn.  Even a Victorian home can only handle so many ferns on stands. In their place are three berry laden Blue Princess Hollies, well insulated with extra soil and lots of cedar and dogwood boughs.  With luck they'll survive the winter and join the far less showy Blue Prince holly in the garden in the spring.  The lovely brown of the underside of the magnolia leaves makes a nice compliment to my rusty iron urns (rust initially from neglect, now turned purposeful strategy). 

Blue Princess holly, cedar boughs, red osier dogwood twigs, magnolia leaves

For the two concrete urns at the top of the stairs I impaled two moss balls on dogwood stakes and thrust them into into my existing pots of ivy with some white pine and salal.  For all of the violence of their making, they have a calm formal look and the moss balls echo the size and shape of the ball finials on the newel posts at the base of the stairs--another subconscious design coup (I'm that good).  So, that's the fun part of putting the garden to bed, done...now I really must get back to the real chores before the final deep freeze.

The impaled moss ball topiary (slightly askew from this angle)

The Half a Bath

A schematic rendering of our basement half-bath, by N using SketchUp

One of the reasons we've taken so long to get to the cabinet ordering stage is that in commandeering space for the kitchen, we eliminated a full main floor bathroom. Then, unwilling to live without a useable bathtub (our existing bathroom had a broken down jacuzzi that we use only for showers), we appropriated an upstairs bedroom for our new master bathroom (a process I plan to recap shortly). Now we have two upstairs bathrooms: the new one and the original, mostly redundant one (original to the time of purchase, but not to the house). But for now we have no main floor bathroom--nowhere to dash quickly when in midst of dinner preparations, or to offer to an unexpected guest. To solve this pressing need for an accessible and less personal bathroom, we had first planned to put a tiny powder room under the stairs in the front hall. But we eventually decided that to confiscate the only possible spot for a front hall closet would be foolish, and so we began to scout for territory elsewhere.

  
The basement, with its newly soaring ceiling of 6'4" (gained in the replacement of the sagging kitchen floor joists), became the obvious choice for a two-piece bathroom. The new half bath will be just down the stairs and to the left, beside the laundry room, and en route to the wine cellar. As with everything in an old house, this half bathroom presented some real technical hurdles for us to overcome. In particular, the toilet, being lower than our ancient sewer connection, requires a pump to propel the sewage up to the sewer line. Fascinating, eh? 

The Liberty "Low Pro System"

At the recommendation of our plumber, we chose a Liberty "low pro system". In a typical installation, you could set the "low-pro" directly on the concrete floor and build the finished floor up to meet it, but we couldn't afford any loss of height, so to set the pump reservoir  flush with the floor (pardon the pun), we had to excavate a 26" x 44" hole in the concrete floor of the basement to a depth of about 8". Then we levelled the pump and set it in concrete. And we did a beautiful job too, but you'll have to accept my word because the photos have gone astray. 

Toto Drake

We are getting the pump appropriate toilet, a Toto Drake (not nearly as sleek as the Toto Nexus we have upstairs), next week, and if the plumber can come by to install it, we should have a report on how our gravity defying system works very soon. We laboured hard to create a layout that would allow access to the pump in the future should anything go wrong.

The half bath plan, rendered in 3-d by N using SketchUp

You'll notice in the floor plan above that the area between the bathroom and the stairs, and into which we will put a removable pull-out pantry, is strategically located to provide a narrow access route that a plumber (or an unfortunate apprentice) could squeeze through to get to the pump in emergencies.

Fixtures and Finishes

In keeping with its humble location in the basement, we decided to clad the half-bath walls in tongue and groove boards, both for the slightly rustic yet still period feel, and also to avoid the drywall taping and sanding. We found these bargain boards in 6' foot lengths at the Home Depot.

Tongue and Groove boards--great price for 6' lengths

N and my dad made a beautiful door using the same tongue in groove boards.  The 'z' support and general style is the same design as the original basement doors.

The lovely simple new door, and a glimpse at the tongue and groove paneling in the background

Two of our original cellar doors

The new door turned out beautifully and has stayed remarkably true despite the fairly wet wood. The hinges are from Lee Valley tools. We haven't yet decided whether we'll paint them or leave them black (but I'm leaning towards paint).

Most of the bathroom fixtures we chose are from Restoration Hardware, including the vanity:

The Weathered Oak Single Console Sink from Restoration Hardware

the faucet ( a less expensive alternative to the Waterworks Easton we have in the main bathroom):

The Bistro Faucet from Restoration Hardware

two sconces:

The 1920s Factory Sconce from Restoration Hardware

We are still looking for a mirror.  The small recessed cupboard over the toilet will have a door cut from the original door to the small pantry that was demolished in the kitchen renovation.

We are going to frame, or at least plaque-mount, a nautical chart of St Margaret's Bay, Nova Scotia, to hang on one wall. N and I visit Nova Scotia every summer and spend hours kayaking and boating in this little part of the world. We'd like to find a library lamp with a short extension to illuminate the chart.

Library Picture Light from Elte, also available in polished nickel

I did find one I love at ELTE in Toronto, but at almost $400 for a single sconce it may be a little much for a modest half bath.

Tongue and groove paneling carefully scribed to the brick veneer wall

We covered one of the bathroom walls in brick veneer, a process I'll write about in detail in a future post. I know that fake brick sounds like it might look contrived or, well, fake, but since being mortared and patinized with a dilute paint paint solution, it looks surprisingly good and understated. We love how it plays against the texture of the tongue in groove panelling and adds some warmth and a sense of age to the basement space. I installed the brick myself, and even I can't believe it's not the real thing.
 

Pietra/2  'fiora' from Casa Dolce Casa

The floor was tiled by our tile setter with tile left over from our kitchen floor. It's a gorgeous Italian porcelain tile from Casa Dolce Casa in the colour fiora. It's meant to mimic limestone, but I think it's beautiful in its own right, and it's indestructible.

We've made good and, for us, quick progress on the little half bath. We've filled all the holes with wood filler, shellacked the knots, primed with a shellac-based primer, sanded and painted.  We used Farrow and Ball's shaded white on the walls and pointing on the ceiling--the same colours we've been trying out in our kitchen while the renovation is in progress.  We're still looking for an appropriate door trim molding and baseboard, but I should have some photos of the nearly completed half bath in the next week or two.

The Cabinetry Bids Are In!

And after agonizing for several days, we have made our choice.  Next week we'll hand over our deposit and, with luck, our new kitchen will be installed early in the new year. It's taken so long to get to this point that we're astonished at how quickly things will move now that we've actually set the ball rolling.

Although we decided on the custom cabinetry route, we did seriously consider using IKEA cabinets, with some additional custom cabinets, especially after reading this excellent and informative post: "Why I Love IKEA Kitchens!" by Toronto interior designer Carol Reed, who offers up a wealth of design information on her blog.  Our temporary unfitted kitchen is all IKEA and we've grown to love the drawer hardware and spacious interiors. We have knocked down and set up our IKEA cabinets many times over the course of the renovation, and they are still going strong. In fact, we like them so much that we just purchased a bank of four IKEA base cabinets for our laundry/tool room.  In the end, though, it was apparent that our kitchen layout would require so much customization that IKEA would not necessarily be advantageous either economically or practically. 

Not to mention, we won't have to do nearly as much of this: 

N assembling base cabinets for the basement

So, fully custom it is. The small cabinetry company we've hired from Stratford, Ontario does beautiful work--as both their portfolio and extremely happy customers attest--and has the expertise to build and install the kitchen we've designed exactly as specified. The custom route is expensive, but possibly no moreso than the semi-custom options so widely available at the big box stores and larger kitchen cabinetry manufacturers, and we both the believe that the attention to detail will be worth it.  A kitchen is so seldom renovated that we plan to get it right this first and (we hope) only time. 

We had three very high quality bids from three small cabinetry shops. Although there was a bit of a price gap among the bids, price was not the determining factor in our decision. I believe that any of the three cabinetmakers could have built us a beautiful kitchen, and I wish we could've hired all three, but we chose the one that filled us with the most confidence because of excellent communication and amenability to our design requests. We designed the kitchen to have both face frame and frameless cabinets to get the look we want without compromising on space. Most of our base cabinets will have drawers and we believe that frameless constuction will make the best use of space. 

A detail of our bathroom vanity showing the sleek, stainless Blum tandembox and face frame construction

The cabinetmaker we have hired can build both frameless and faceframe and seems to like the idea of blending the two in the same kitchen. So the base cabinets will be frameless boxes with full overlay shaker style doors, Blum softclose hardware, and Blum's stainless tandembox drawers. Maple dovetail drawers are available for the same price or possibly a little less, but we like a little high-tech along with our tradition. The upper cabinets, and part of the island cabinets, will be faceframe with inset, glass-paneled, shaker style doors. 

A detail of our temporary IKEA cabinets showing frameless cabinet boxes and full overlay doors
--details we will duplicate on our new base cabinets

We far prefer to work directly with the builder of our cabinets than to coordinate things through a third party, which would be the case with most larger firms. The cabinetmaker will be here next week to confirm measurements and then things will begin!  It's an exciting, nervewracking time.

Trick or Treat

Forty ghouls and goblins--a record for our neighbourhood!

1. Butterfly ballerina
2. Bat
3. Mad Hatter
4. Shark Victim
5. Baby Bumble Bee
6. Bumble Bee
7. Grim Reaper
8. Zombie
9. Storm Trooper
10. Ballerina
11. Pirate
12. Vampire (with Pirate Mom)
13. Lady Gaga
14. Jason
15. Storm Trooper
16. Zombie
17. Dinosaur
18. Cat
19. Witch
20. Ghoul #1
21. Ghoul #2
22. Ghoul #3
23. Nerd
24. Clown
25. Jack-o-lantern
26. Happy Gilmour
27. Rasta
28. Bert
29. An old lady
30. Vampire
31. Pirate
32. Scary thing
33. Princess #1
34. Princess #2
35. Everything ... ghoulish
36. Baseball player
37. Stepford wife
38. French maid
39. Dead WWII soldier
40. Jeannie

The Balletic Art of Drywall Taping

The rented drywall lift in action

Hanging sheets of drywall is not difficult, especially with the aid of a few tools easily rented or acquired from your local hardware store: a drywall lift; an electric drywall screwdriver with an integral bit that dimples the drywall just enough to ensure that the screw head is below the surface of the drywall, but not to rip the paper surface; a good long straight edge for cutting--a 4' drywall square works best; a foot jack for wedging the drywall up off the floor enough to firmly abut the piece above; a knife with lots of replacement blades, a rasp for filing ragged edges, and a level.  

DIY drywall toolkit part 1: drywall screwdriver, foot jack, t-square, knife and replacement blades, ear protection, rasp

Oh, and a rotozip type router is also invaluable for cutting around outlet boxes (always cut-counter clockwise or the cut can get away from you), as is a shop-vac style vaccuum that won't be harmed by the fine gypsum dust. And, now that I think about it, we also used two telescoping poles to help support the drywall at ceiling level, So, yes, it requires lots of tools, but hanging your own drywall is a feasible task for a homeowner. 

DIY drywall toolkit part 2: Rotozip, telescoping support poles, level

For our kitchen renovation, we decided to hang the drywall ourselves and then hire a professional to tape the seams.   But here's something we've learned: if you plan to hang your own drywall, be sure to do a good job--no small scraps of drywall, no ragged or uneven seams, no exposed screw heads, no broken paper--or you may have difficulty finding a professional taper to complete your job. All the tapers we've seen in action work with such balletic efficiently (some even work on stilts to avoid having to break their stride to move a ladder around the room!), that they resent any glaring errors of the prior boarding crew that might slow them down. They seem to have an instinctive idea of how long a room should take and how much trouble it should be. Ask for more, and they'll often turn your job down. Believe us, a good taper is a necessity. We've learned that taping is a fluid artform, not a job for plodding amateurs. Like beautiful calligraphy or sumi-e painting, excellent taping requires fluid motion and a deft hand. We've been amazed at how little sanding an expert taper will need to do after the fact. We tried taping a room--once. It was enough to make us recognize that book-learning can only go so far. Some things are better left to skilled professionals. 

With angles like these (and this isn't the half of it), this kitchen needed a professional taper

N, who is the perfectionist around here, is always pleased when the drywalling contractors comment on his excellent job hanging the drywall.