Winter Month Projects

Here we are just days away from the start of a new year. The holidays kept us really busy. We chose to make most of our outdoor decorations, so in addition to the normal decorating mayhem, parties, and time spent with family and friends, the season really flew by.

Now we find ourselves in front of those long winter months and wishing for spring. I'm not sure I've ever found myself on March 21st saying "Wow, where did winter go"? The next 90 days are traditionally a let down for many. Cold temperatures and a lot of time spent indoors can lead to a pretty depressing time of year. We don't have to fall into that trap though! Winter can be a great time to get some projects done around the home. When that warmer weather hits, you don't want to be stuck inside getting things done. It will be great to have some of those indoor projects completed so that you can enjoy the outdoors getting the yard in shape and ready for spring and summer or just relaxing. It's also a fantastic way to make the shorter days of winter pass faster. Here are some ideas for how to make sure you're taking advantage of the winter months to free up your time for those spring activities:

 

 

Painting

Winter is a great time to get some painting done around the house. Maybe you have that guest bedroom that you've been meaning to paint or you just want to start off the new year with a new look to your living room, dining room, or kitchen. One thing is for sure, you won't be missing out on a warm sunny day while stuck inside with a paint brush in your hand!

 

 



Clean the Attic
Anyone with an attic knows one thing for sure about warm weather. It's hot as H-E-Double Hockey Sticks up there! Who wants to clean the attic while constantly wiping the sweat away? We have realized the blessing and curse of having an easy access walk up attic. It's a great place to store things away and it's way too easy to just carry things to the top of the steps and drop it. We've been here less than a year and already it's difficult to walk around up there. Winter is a great time to get up there and get things organized. We're going to do this and finally go through items in anticipation of having a yard sale in the spring.

Washing Windows
Whoa Helen! No, not the outside and not like that! Nice house coat though! Washing windows is about as fun as fun as paying taxes, but it's necessary and the colder months bring a great opportunity to take down those window treatments for a good cleaning and to wipe away the grime from the windows. Get them clean and ready to look at that beautiful snow when it finally starts to fall.

Pre-Spring Cleaning
Ugh, I've never understood the whole spring cleaning phenomenon. Just what I want to be doing when the weather changes and everyone else is outside enjoying the sunshine. This is a great time to move furniture and lay waste to those winter dust bunnies and get the house sparkling clean. I prefer to start in early March when the weather is still roaring like a lion so that when it's slipping out like a lamb, I'm ready to throw those windows open and enjoy it!

So there you have it. Some ideas to beat the winter doldrums while knocking out some of those projects you've been putting off. Staying busy and getting things done will have those cold gray days zipping by. Best of all, when everyone else is using up the first warm weekends of spring working around the house, you'll be outdoors having some play time!

Wine, a Wall, and a Problem

So I made an attempt at being crafty this weekend.  We've been searching for something to hang on a bare wall in the breakfast area.  We've stuck with pretty much a cocktail theme in that space which houses our glass racks, a counter height table, wine fridge, and our wine rack.  Perfectly appropriate for a breakfast room right?  I mean, what's breakfast without a refreshing mimosa anyway.

With the holidays approaching along with our annual Christmas party, we needed to find something for that space and the thought of a wine cork wreath came to mind.  Without a lot of time left, I ventured out into the interwebs in hopes of finding what I was looking for and sure enough, there it was....for $200!  Seriously, for wine corks?  Convinced someone must have bumped their head to want that kind of money for what surely was a simple project, I decided that this had to be something I could make myself.  Now that it's done, yes, it was definitely DIY-doable.  Would I charge $200 for one? Hell yes! It took the better part of the day to make it, not the hour or so I had envisioned when I started.  I'm really happy with the results though and below are the steps I took:

What you'll need:

• Hot glue gun
• Lots of glue sticks (I started with a bag of 100 and came close to using them all)
• Foam wreath form (I used a 16 inch form but it all depends what size wreath you want)
• Old steak knife (For cutting corks)
• Wine corks (I had 3 apothecary jars full from about 5 years of wine "tasting")
• Flat head screw
• Small circle of twine
• Newspaper to cover your workspace to prevent glue from getting on the table

I waited until the end to put the screw in the back of the wreath form for hanging, but I'd probably do it at the beginning if I did this again.  It was more difficult to handle the wreath afterward while twisting the screw into the form.  I just tied a small loop of twine, wrapped it around the head of the screw and then twisted the screw into the wreath form until it was flush.  I then dabbed a bit of hot glue around it for extra support.

With the wreath form flat on my work surface, I just started gluing the corks around the circumference of the form on the outside and then along the inside.  I just ran a stream of the hot glue along the length of the cork and then held it into place for about 10 seconds. In each instance of circling the wreath, I had a gap to fill once I got all the way around it.  This is when the old steak knife came in handy as I just cut a cork to fit to fill in that gap.  This is the base of the wreath, so it's not going to be visible once you're done.

 I used the poly corks for this step since they typically aren't as authentic looking as the actual corks

Once I had this step done, I came up over the edges of the outside and inside of the form and then applied several almost in a tire spoke position to lend support for easier stacking once I started to arrange the corks in random positions.

The corks in the spoke positions really help when you start to stack and arrange the rest of them

Next, just start randomly arranging the corks.  I did some sticking straight out, some laying sideways, diagonal, etc.  You just have to play with it.  Glue one down, then play with the next.  I strongly suggest trying different positions cork by cork before applying glue to see exactly how you want it to lay against the others.  You want to make sure that you're not leaving gaps where the wreath form shows through.

This really messed up my desire to color in the lines having to arrange everything so random!

Just keep stacking and covering the wreath all the way around.  I suggest having some hanging off the sides to break up the uniformity of the base corks that just went around the form in a line in the beginning.  Let them hang into the middle, off the outer edges, etc.  Just keep going until you're happy with how it looks or you run out of corks!

Once I had mine done and let it sit for about 30 minutes, I went back and pulled off all of those annoying little glue strings that seem to get everywhere when you're using a hot glue gun.

I had some grapes that I had intended to use to embellish my wreath, but once I held them up to it, I didn't like how they covered so many of the corks, which I think is what makes the wreath so cool.  When applying the corks, I found myself remembering some of them specifically.  You could definitely see our progression from cheap bottles of Fish Eye to Rosemount to Coppola and Simi.  In order to keep from covering them up, I opted just to cut some artificial grape vine leaves we had and just arrange them sparingly at the top.  I also just used floral picks to put them into place vs. gluing them so that if I wanted to switch things up, it would be easy to pull the leaves out and replace them with something else at some point.

About 5-6 hours later, it was done!

Goodbye empty wall!

This made a great project for a rainy Sunday.  Well worth the time and effort.  As long as you have the corks on hand, I'd say I spent probably no more than $10 in supplies between the form and the extra glue sticks.  Now, I guess we had better get started on refilling those jars with corks!

Bye Bye Closet!

We started and finished our first demolition project a few weeks ago!  With the holidays approaching, we knew we needed to finally knock this one out. Our house was converted into apartments back in the 1940's, as were many in the neighborhood.  Many homeowners did this when family members were overseas during WWII as an extra source of income.  What is now our living room was previously used as a bedroom for the downstairs unit and what good is a bedroom without a closet?  It's amazing just how much room it took up in that space.  We made the best of it initially by making it a TV nook before we finished the TV room/den.  After that and buying new living room furniture, it just stuck out like a sore thumb!

Dressing it up was pretty much a lost cause.  It completely made arranging furniture impossible and we were forced to have the couch almost on top of the arm chairs due to how much room that thing took up.  It had to go!

With a little help from a friend who knows what he's doing when it comes to things like this, we prepped the room for the closet's demise.

The morning of...it had no idea what was coming

 

We just knew it was going to be a few sheets of drywall and a few 2x4's, but man little did we know that this thing must have served as some kind of safe room back in the day.  It was built above and beyond any building code that exists today!

 

 



That big electrical cable in the top right was not cute!

Luckily it was a dead line that used to feed power to the kitchen appliances for the upstairs unit

After a few hours, it was gone, but a lot left to do!

We spent the rest of that afternoon and the next day patching and sanding, trying to bring the walls and ceiling as level as we could with the areas that were outside of the closet.  We had to sand the floor that was under the closet walls since the floors had been redone recently.  Luckily when the floors were refinished, they left the natural color and didn't stain them, so all we really needed to do was sand, clean, and apply polyurethane.

Within a couple of days, we had the ceiling and walls painted, the furniture back in the room, and new window treatments put up. 

What a difference!

There's room to spread out the furniture now!

It really shows the difference when you look at before and after pictures side by side...

 

Glad to have this little project out of the way!

 

 

A Little Porch Chatter

What is more southern than sitting on the front porch on a warm day, sipping a favorite beverage, and watching your small portion of the world go by?  I've always loved being outdoors when the weather is nice. Our last apartment had two great balconies, but until we bought The Manor, I never appreciated what a street level porch could bring.

Our neighborhood is full of homes where the front porch plays a significant role in defining the house.  With most houses in Port Norfolk built in the early 1900's, you have to consider the fact that the comfort that air conditioning provides, and that most of us take for granted, didn't exist.  The front porch was a retreat from what had to be almost stifling heat inside a house with little to no insulation as the summer sun glared down. Porches were also very social places.  I find myself wondering quite often about the past families who have lived here and evenings that must have been spent outside after dinner over the past 113 years.  I picture them picking at a guitar or listening to their favorite radio program through an open window.  I think about a Dad sitting on the porch and greeting his daughter's most recent suitor as he climbed those front steps for the first time.  It was definitely an era that for many is something that simply doesn't exist any longer.

Even in its most barren state when we first looked at the house, we could picture what this porch could be. Huge ferns would have to hang between the front columns. A porch swing facing the north and a wicker settee at the other end.  Even then, we knew we wanted it to be welcoming, comfortable, and have an atmosphere that would almost draw you to it.  Our front porch has truly characterized our home and played a huge part in what made us fall in love with it.

It was just begging for some love!

While we may not lack the modern marvels of creature comforts as those did many years ago, we don't let that keep us inside.  We use our porch almost as a second living room.  Even on the warmest of days, we'll sit out there for hours at a time and when the evening breezes pick up from the riverfront just down the street, you can't find a better place to be.  Prior to this, we thought we knew what a great night was.  But I can tell you, it's hard to beat a breezy night, 30's and 40's big band and swing music, a deck of cards, and a bottle of wine.

How does it get any better than this?

The social aspect has played a big part in our love of the porch as well.  There simply isn't a better way to meet your new neighbors.  We've had simple conversations with people out walking their dogs, to saying hello to someone new and within ten minutes, they are sitting on the porch with us having conversations that last for hours. In addition, Port Norfolk hosts a unique event each year called a porch crawl.  It's somewhat of a progressive cocktail party from porch to porch among seven or eight houses.  We were thrilled to be part of it this year and it was truly one of the best times we've ever had.  Even as recently as this past weekend, we attended a porch party just down the street.  Neighbors gathered to share food, cocktails, and spend time on a huge wrap-around porch just getting to know one another. The front porch is truly a gathering spot.  It has done exactly what we wanted it to do, which is create an atmosphere where friends and family feel comfortable just stopping by.  It has also given us a connection to times gone by.  An era that was much more simple, but one we've come to appreciate and even emulate on a few evenings.

To wrap this up, let me quote a neighbor since I love the way he put it one evening while sitting with us. "This porch is a black hole.  It just draws you in, you lose all aspects of time, and even hours later, you just don't want to leave."

Exactly...mission accomplished!

Welcome

Welcome to The Manor on Broad. We are located in the Historic neighborhood of Port Norfolk, in Portsmouth, VA.  In Port Norfolk, you'll find tree lined streets stretching for blocks, leading to the edge of the Elizabeth River.  Most of the homes in the neighborhood date back to the early 1900's.  The Manor was actually built in 1900, so it has seen a huge amount of history unfold.  Those who have lived here throughout the years learned of the Wright Brother's famous flight, the tragedy of the Titanic, and two world wars while under this roof.

Our blog is just a little place to collect random thoughts and experiences while living in an older home. We've yet to venture into any huge or significant DYI projects, so if you're looking to learn how to install a hardwood floor or crown molding, I've got some bad news for you.  We will however, keep friends and family updated on what we are doing with the house and who knows, if we do attempt something big and bodacious, it might turn into a great laugh!

So come on in and relax. While you're getting comfy, take a little tour below through the neighborhood. You'll find character and historic charm along our streets!