My old place

Another flashback.

This time to back to 2007.

I was living at the Cairo Condominium, which without a doubt is a DC landmark in the Dupont Circle neighborhood and the District's tallest residential building with a colorful and sorted past. I bought my condo on the 11th floor in December 1996 and held onto it until May 2007, when I sold it and moved to Arlington.

Here are some pictures of my old place at the Cairo.

The front facade:

The kitchen. I renovated the kitchen from top to bottom. Sounds impressive? Okay I have to admit there wasn't all that much to renovate. The kitchen was only 6 feet by 8 feet. It was so small, that two undercounter refrigerators (left side of the picture) were a better fit than a regular sized refrigerator. Besides the sink base, I could fit in only one base cabinet (with a roll out trash container) and that meant only one drawer. Space was at a premium in that kitchen!

Opposite the kitchen was the living room. I didn't do much in terms of updating in the living room, except for adding some shades and sanding and painting the window trim and floorboards and putting down some new quarter-round.

Oh and I painted the popcorn ceiling which probably hadn't been painted in 30 years and scraped this weird stucco type of stuff off of all the walls. Then I sanded, patched, sanded more, and then painted the walls including the wall above the kitchen cabinets - since it was all one room with an open layout. The walls and ceiling were a huge project. I think it took 3 or 4 weekends.

And, do you happen to notice Gabbie in the photo? The living room was small too - in fact the entire apartment was only 560 square feet. The exposed brick gave the place a lot of character but on the down side - it was always really dark in the living room.

The bedroom. I installed red oak hardwood floors in the bedroom - on a diagonal. That was a hard job. If I had to do it all over again, I would choose a floating engineered hardwood flooring instead of the nail down installation. In the bedroom, I also had to reframe that closet. There were never closet doors and finally I realized why.

The door frame was not a standard size for doors. It didn't take long to reframe, but it was all about precision work to make sure everything was level and plumb because if it wasn't the bi-fold doors wouldn't hang correctly. But by taking my time and making sure to get the framing right - the doors went in easily. I also painted and installed new floorboards in the bedroom - and throughout the entire apartment.

I did some ceiling work in the bedroom too. I scraped off all of the popcorn ceiling using a spray bottle with water to make it easier to scrape off. Then I sanded the entire ceiling and painted it. This was an incredibly tedious job and the reason why I couldn't muster the energy or enthusiasm to do the same in the living room and kitchen. So that's why I just painted the popcorn ceiling in the living room/kitchen. And by the way, painting popcorn ceilings is not easy. You have to get a roller with a thicker nap - like a half inch - and rollers with thicker naps hold more paint and that makes them very heavy. Even if you have a extension it's a ton of work. If I ever face that situation again, I will hire somebody to do it.

Okay, so where was I?

Oh, the bathroom. This project involved a complete gut of the bathroom - new tub, toilet, tumbled marble tiling, new mirror, lighting, and in this picture you can see the solid oak door that I stained to a dark brown mahogany-ish color.

I had contractors do much of the work but after getting totally fed with unreliable contractors starting jobs and then not showing up and leaving work half finished - I just started doing projects myself - starting out with smaller projects (putting in the frosted glass in the kitchen cabinet doors) and then moving on to increasingly complex ones (hardwood floor installation).

So thanks to jerk contractors, I am now an experienced renovator!

So why am I posting all these old pictures? It's because I was reminded of my old place when the realtor who helped me sell it came over to my current place in Arlington lastnight. We talked about pricing strategy for selling the Arlington condo and I'll be going with her again. We're still working out the timing but it looks like we might be listing around the first week of June.