The walls and ceiling of the new master bedroom and bath have three coats of fresh paint.  What a lot of work!

We are deeply grateful to Deb Allstott, from Home Matters in La Grande, for helping us select our colors.   She was a sanity saver.

Our final choices were Benjamin Moore "Palace White" for the ceiling in both the master bedroom and bath, Benjamin Moore "Somerville Red" for the master bedroom walls, and Miller Paint "Caper Tree" for the master bathroom as well as the original bath.

We love the results, and would highly recommend Deb for help with color selection.

Home Matters – Deb Allstott
1115 Adams Ave
La Grande, OR 97850
541-624-2333

We figured it was time to give you a quick update on the progress of our midcentury home remodel.

John Mueller, our remodeling contractor and an artist, has been working away on the project.

The picture on the top shows the new doorway into the bathroom from the now enlarged bedroom.

The space beyond that door is where Anne's closet and the stackable washer/dryer will go.    The door to the right is the original one that leads from the bedroom into the hallway.

The bottom picture is of Gary's closet space, the shower, and the enclosed toilet area.

Notice the open space above the toilet area (farthest away).    This is going to be filled with textured glass to allow natural light into the space.

On the far wall you can see part of the window we had built by Versatile Sash.    It is now installed and we love it.

John is preparing the shower for tiling and plans to write about that soon.

Stay tuned.

This week we are delighted to have John Mueller, from John Mueller Construction , as our guest blogger.

Here is what John has to say about our projects.

I have been working as a carpenter for 19 years, and I am in the 13th year of operating my own remodeling business in La Grande, Oregon.

La Grande is a small town, and it seems as if there is not a street that I can drive down without spotting a house that I have worked on.

The houses in most neighborhoods have structural and architectural similarities based upon their period of development, so it is usually easy for me to assess the general construction methods and materials of any given house at a glance.

However, I recently began working on a true architectural anomaly tucked away at the dead end of a little street that scales the hill at the west end of town.

The owners, Anne and Gary Olson, contacted me through a mutual friend of my mothers in Portland.   I am glad to have met Anne and Gary.   They are easy to get along with and are very detail oriented and engaged in the project.

I could go on at great length about the journey we have patiently taken together to sift through all of the minutia of the design, function and intent of their vision for the project, but this first contribution of mine to the blog is about an interesting structural situation that I discovered midstream in the master bedroom/bath remodel.

The living room is an open beam construction, with floor to ceiling glazing on the East side (Image One).

The beams penetrate the interior and exterior spaces and are a prominent feature of the architecture and feel of the house (Image Two).

In the area of the master bedroom/ bath remodel, there is a ceiling rather than the open beam design of the living area.

Structurally, it appeared from the exterior that beams had been used to carry the roof load here as well (Beam ends creating the eaves in Image Three).

Based on that, I concluded that the ceiling was a drop ceiling and that moving walls around would be structurally irrelevant.

The Olson's plan did, in fact, involve moving a North to South wall between the bedroom and bathroom and the installation of a pocket door (these create rather large opening spans).

Again, based on my structural conclusions, I thought, no problem!

Then came the surprise.

The decision was made to take down the existing ceiling in the bathroom area.   It was only 3/8 drywall that had suffered damage from a past leak.

When I started the demolition, I was surprised to find that above the drop ceiling joists were 2×12 rafters, not beams.

The beam ends making up the eaves were short pieces scabbed on to the 2x12s. (Image 4).

The problem was that the rafters were spliced mid-span, directly over the wall that was to be moved (image 5).

That was the roof load.

Additionally, when I first looked things over, I could see that the seams and nail lines of the "drop ceiling" were running North to South, which led me to believe that the "drop ceiling" was framed North to South as well.

As it turned out, the framing was East to west and had been furred out with 1×3 in the North to South.   So the framing was spliced mid span over the same wall.

There was the ceiling load.

Fortunately, the laps of the splices for both the roof and ceiling members were quite long, and the planned location of the new wall fell within them.

The major change in my plan involved constructing a substantial 2×10 header for the pocket door opening, (Image Six) sistering the floor joist that carried the load, and having to have all the new framing in place before removing the existing wall.

It all worked out, and I learned some new things about a very unusual house.

Finally!    The remodel of the master bedroom and bath has begun.

As you can see from the pictures to the left, the future master bath has been stripped to the studs.

The top picture is taken from the bedroom into the new bath.    The next picture is from the new bath into the bedroom.

We are on our way!

Our contractor is John Mueller, who is better known as a local La Grande artist.    You can see his work and learn more about him at his web site.

He does his art work out of Way Point Studio.    Fortunately for us, his day job is working as a general contractor doing home remodeling and construction.

We went through a lot of contractors before we found one who appreciated our vision of what we wanted the house to become.    We are very fortunate to have found John.

The bottom picture to the left is huge wasp's nest John found when he pulled down the ceiling.

Fortunately it was an old, mostly abandoned nest, and the remaining wasps were sluggish from the cold weather, so it wasn't terribly nasty.

As you can see, the nest is huge.    It entirely filled in between two rafters.    It was most impressive.

We added sealing off the holes to the outside where the wasps got in to our to-do list.    We've had enough of those critters.

So that's where things stand with our mid-century home remodel project.

Stay tuned for further details.

Our home -- with its open floor plan, beamed ceiling, and floor to ceiling windows -- was most unusual for our little town in 1955.

We often wonder how it came to be.

La Grande did not issue building permits until the 1970's so that usual way of finding the history of a home is not available.   Unlike its cousins–the Eichler’s, The Rummer's, the Cliff May's -- our house is not part of a development.   There are no others like it in town.

A friend who lived about a block away when the home was built told us it was built by a contractor, we gather as sort of a spec home.

We did do a search of city directories at the public library, thinking perhaps the home had been built with a specific family in mind, a family whose home it was for some time.   Not the case.

The city directory shows the first two owners stayed only about two years each.

The home had six different owners in its first 28 years, the families of: Forrest Russell, a teacher; James Haas, a biologist with Oregon Fish and Wildlife; Dave Slaght, the city manager; John Reid, a physician; Eugene Washington, a civil engineer; and Barry Heath, a Presbyterian minister. The next owners, the Fetz family, kept the home for 20 years and then sold to the people from whom we bought our home.

We would love to learn more about our house, how it came to be, what it was like originally, etc.   If anyone reading this lived in our house or was in it in its early years, we would love to hear from you!

As we mentioned in our previous post about our master bedroom/bathroom remodel, we are having two new windows installed.

One is for the new master bath and will go where there has never been a window.   The other will replace the vinyl window in the original bathroom.    Both windows face west and are adjacent to each other in the back of our house.

Since the original bathroom has a vinyl replacement window, we have no idea what the original bathroom window was like.    This left us with no template for our new windows.

We had to get creative and design new windows based on the appearance of the original windows we still have.

The top picture on the left is of our original kitchen window.    One of the things we love about our house is the rather unusual windows which combine a casement window with a fixed sash.    We wanted to replicate that look throughout the house.

After a lot of thought, we decided to design our own windows based upon the style of the original windows.

We did a rough drawing of a casement window with a small fixed pane designed to fit in the rough opening of the original bathroom.

We then worked with Versatile Sash to turn our drawing into finished windows, one of which you see at the bottom left.

Though there are some minor differences due to changing technologies, the windows are remarkably similar.    We are quite pleased.

As you can see, Gary has already primed the windows and they are ready to be installed.

Once the ice melts that is making it nearly impossible to do anything, we are going to have both of the windows installed.

We are almost ready to begin remodeling the master bedroom area of our home.

The top picture on the left is the current bedroom, and the picture below it is of another bedroom that was converted to a bathroom/utility room by previous owners.

We had considered turning the utilitarian bath back into a bedroom, but it was impractical.      After all, with all the plumbing and electrical already installed it would be crazy to yank it all out.

We decided instead to join the rooms in a master bedroom/bath suite.

Where the closet is in the bedroom (top picture) will be a passage way into the master bath.     Closets will be on either side of the hallway leading from the bedroom to the bath.

On the wall you see in the picture, there will be a stackable washer and dryer next to a built in vanity.    The existing window will be removed and replaced by a long narrow fixed pane window higher up.  

  
On the other side of the room are the existing toilet and shower.  We’ll leave them where they are but partition the toilet with a pocket door. We will also upgrade from a plastic shower stall to a tiled one.

The back wall will have a custom-made new window from Versatile Sash that will go where the blue tape is.   Although it is a different shape from the existing windows in our home, we designed it to mimic them in style.

We are excited to be working with a couple of very talented people in La Grande.   Our contractor is John Mueller who is really an artist but does contracting to pay the bills.

We became overwhelmed with the decision making around paint colors, flooring, countertops, and tile and turned to Deb Allstott and her business Home Matters for help with making these choices.

Stay tuned as we begin this project early in 2009!.

This is another of our mid century modern bargain hunting finds.

We found this wonderful retro chair at a garage sale in La Grande for two dollars!   Obviously mid century modern hasn’t caught on in La Grande yet.

The chair appears to be made of some sort of rubber like material.    It does not appear to be plastic.    If anyone could tell us more about his chair it would be appreciated.

As you can see, the chair has a light film over it which may be paint, or possibly from sun exposure.    If anyone knows what might have cause this, and how to clean it up, the information would be greatly appreciated.

Another option we are considering is painting it.    Unfortunately we don’t know what kind of paint would work on this surface.   Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks.