Lots of Big Little Details

Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 37)

Miranda Suman (Steinhauser)

Published in

Between 6 and 7

6 min readDec 14, 2017

Master Shower (Redux)

So with our tile cracking disaster discovered last update, we were forced to tear out and completely redo our master bath shower from scratch. Val, our tile subcontractor spend days chiseling out the old shower and after about a weeks time, had our new shower in place! The following weekday, our plumbers reinstalled our fixtures and it looks even better than the first time. While this was a huge hassle and slowdown of the project, we are happy it is complete and looks better than ever!

Hanging Things!

After spending waaaaaay too much time patching the walls and repainting behind our wall sconces (our blue tape did a number on the drywall) we finally had a finished wall ready for mirrors! Our contractors, Cal and Christian set up their laser level and got to work hanging our mirrors. After much measuring and anchoring, they finally were up on the wall and suddenly, our room looks essentially complete! All that’s really left in this room now is our shower door, and then we need to repaint our wood doors, add some artwork, and find some kind of makeup vanity for myself to put next to the bathtub.

Our Very Own Aslan

In other hanging news, OUR LION LIGHT IS UP! I am so excited that this side light is back up and running, and it looks stunning! This light has made a big transformation from when we first bought the house, when it was covered in layers of paint, rusted and broken marbled glass.

Shower Curtains

Another thing to be hung this past week was the shower curtains to our two guest bathroom showers. In the pink guest bath, we converted our tub into a tub/shower, and so a “L” shaped curtain rod was necessary to hang the proper length shower curtain. This room is largely ready to go now, We have 1.5 coats of ceiling paint up (but we’ll need another coat or two) and I currently have our trim primed. We are debating whether to wallpaper the walls in this bathroom or simply paint, but choosing a color has proved itself difficult.

We do already know the artwork I want to place in this bath, however. Our lovely roommate and one of my best friends, Megan Kelley, has given me one of her Master’s Thesis pieces from her time at Cranbrook. We are super excited to hang it in the space and really make this pink bathroom POP.

We also got the curtain rod hung in our 3rd floor maid’s bathroom. Christian made us a nice wall mount for it that we will now have to paint, but overall the curtain rod seems pretty stable. We’ll know how well this works once we actually hang a few curtains on it.

Last Of The Lighting

Finally, the last of our lighting was installed in our 1st floor powder room, along with our new sink. All this room now needs is a little more paint and a mirror! Our green wall color goes with our blue-green original Flint Faience tile really well. This room started out so dark, with black wallpaper walls, a black toilet, a black sink, and black trim and doors, so it has come a long way!

Our electric subcontractors have completed all remaining electrical, adding some lights to the basement and a few plugs here and there and we are now ready for our final electrical inspection!

Odds & Ends

With move in day growing ever closer, we’re getting little details done here and there to prepare for our arrival. First, Brandon has been programming our smart lights in the house, making sure everything works as planned. We now have keypads at major locations around the house that can control just about every single switch on the 1st and second floors. We now simply only have to press one button on the way out to make sure all of our lights are off before we leave. We also finished installing our new Nest Protect smoke detectors around the house.

Secondly, we spent some time in our basement. Much of these rooms were filled with junk and debris from the last few years of damage and construction, making them not very practical for storing things in. We took the time to empty and clean everything out so that we can actually use this space for some storage. We had an especially good time emptying our maid’s pantry in the basement, finding all sorts of 1960s & 70s gems in the process.

Next, our laundry machines are finally in place! We still need to install a small table and some shelving in here to make it really usable, but we’ve already successfully been able to wash some of our dirty work clothes!

DOORS

Finally, the big focus right now has been our doors. Many if not most of our doors were not hung up when we bought the home, and we are now realizing that due to water damage we have a lot of swollen doors and door openings that are causing all kinds of havoc. Only about 2 of the 20 or so doors we have seem to close normally with little or no effort. For the rest, Christian has been spending many hours cutting, adjusting, shimming, and re hanging our doors. We also were missing a lot of door hardware, so Brandon and I went to Detroit Antique and Prop and dug through boxes and drawers to find about 18 new glass door handles to replace missing ones. Finally we are down to the last one, our vestibule door that has a large leaded glass panel in the middle.