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Are you planning to remodel your home? Do you have idea on what concerns that you need to take care about while planning? Here is the simple solutions that will aware you on all aspects of home remodeling @
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Painted the stucco in the back over the long holiday weekend.
Home improvement pictures are probably viewed best from the "taken on" archive; link: www.flickr.com/photos/jsf/archives/date-taken/2006/calendar/
The hall bathroom in our 1983 house needed a little facelift, and while it's still not ideal, it's miles better than it started out!
More details here
after a months-long struggle with lack of motivation and paint stripper, the bike room is painted! and the nasty carpet has been removed! now all that's left is to sand and paint the window frames, the windows themselves, pull & paint the baseboards, nail in some quarter round trim, and either re-finish the floor or call it 'done'.
Posted for those who keep hearing about the bathroom remodel I did last year (with little additions over time). Metal theme is brushed nickel.
Shower rod: IKEA
Flange, draincap, tap handles, and escutcheons: Lowe's (Danco brand)
Showerhead ("dual European"): company in California who was at the fair last year
Curtain: Ross Dress For Less
Curtain rings and caddy: Target
Tub spout: Danze brand, from an online outlet
The hall bathroom in our 1983 house needed a little facelift, and while it's still not ideal, it's miles better than it started out!
More details here
The completed sink installation. [before]
I'm going to spare you the whole detailed story of how much of a bitch this was to put in. I thought it'd take just a few minutes, it shoulda!, but I didn't count on three things:
a) The sink didn't quite fit in the hole I'd made, so I had to get a carbide wheel for my grinder to do a little trimming.
b) Shuffle the following statements in any order at least twice and you will be accurate: "grinder won't turn on" "don't have my eye and ear protection on" "phone rings" "protective shield on grinder has slipped off" "can't get carbide wheel on correctly" "must remove screws at bottom of grinder to turn on from the inside" "must take carbide wheel off to fix shield" "is this plugged in?" "must replace silicone caulk strip I'd laid around the edge earlier, it's unusable now"
c) Why is it that the water spouts on the wall are half-inch diameter but the tubes that are supposed to connect to them (that are 'hardwired' to the faucet, so replacing them isn't an option) are three-eighths-inch diameter? Moreover, why doesn't Home Depot sell JUST the adaptor on the shelf, rather than make me buy a kit with a tube and a second slightly different size adaptor, neither of which I need? (More donations to Habitat For Humanity...)
Anyhow, once the aggrivating physical installation of the basin was done, I moved along to the plumbing part. I don't just hate doing plumbing, I fucking hate doing plumbing. At least with electrical it's binary: The light comes on or it does not. You get shocked or you don't. With plumbing, there's any number of places where something could leak, including a few you hadn't counted on or can't easily access to fix. And that's exactly what happened here... I mean, after three tries of getting the PVC pipes under the sink to stop leaking, I realized there was still one more leak dripping in the cabinet -- IN THE FAUCET ITSELF. Had to take the faucet back out, hours after I'd put it in, to find out where and why it was leaking in a place it shouldn't. Then redo the PVC pipes twice more to stop drips that took more than a minute to show themselves.
But it's all in, it's not leaking anywhere, it works great, and it's mighty pretty. And it's huge -- you can put a cookie sheet flat in there.
The hall bathroom in our 1983 house needed a little facelift, and while it's still not ideal, it's miles better than it started out!
More details here
Rather than tile the top of the 9" cabinet to the right of the stove like all the others, I decided to put an 11" butcher block top, perfect for holding hot pots and such (since the width and location make serious cutting on it unlikely), as a countertop on it. And there's a liquidator in Puyallup that has odd-sized chunks of butcher block planks for an agreeable price, so I was able to cut a 13"x36" piece to size with yonder radial saw, sand up the sides and edges, and look up what to do next on the DIY websites. :)
The things you can learn on teh Intarweb: To prepare a butcher block for use, it must be treated with mineral oil a few times. The directions say to use "food grade mineral oil" and because it's available in every supermarket's health & beauty section as an "intestinal lubricant" (a.k.a. laxative) it's obviously food grade since it was meant for ingestion. And that's what I'm doing on the back porch workbench right now, slathering on the mineral oil and letting it soak in for a few hours then adding more, and it should sit for eight hours after the last application before being installed. By tomorrow afternoon the countertop (at left) will be ready for being put atop the cabinet, and after another coating or two the little remainder block (at right) will be ready for some LRF's [little rubber feet] so it can be used in the future on the new countertop. Said sites also say to oil the wood [huh huh huh...] once a month to prevent the wood from drying out and cracking.
And if you have never invested in Painter's Pyramids to elevate flat surfaces you are painting, staining, polyurethaning, basting with a curry brush, drying, or otherwise need off the ground... you really should. You'll wonder how you went this long without them.
Now that we have the countertops installed we need to shop for stools so we can finally sit at our breakfast bar.
but instead of posting pictures of the kitchen, I'm posting a picture of myself with a green forelock.
The hall bathroom in our 1983 house needed a little facelift, and while it's still not ideal, it's miles better than it started out!
More details here
Originally I thought to go with black steel pipe for the legs but that wasn't sturdy enough. No matter how much I tightened the pipe there was always some sway which would have been quite annoying in a desk. I returned the black pipe and got wider (1.25") galvinized pipe. The thicker pipe has made for a rock steady frame for the heavy butcher block top.
Putting down the new tile over the old. The cheap tile on the left were to fill in the untiled gap of the old sink cabinet. The new one (with slightly different dimensions) is built right on top of it.
Listed as built: 1975 (King Co. Assessor's webpage). McLendon opened this location in 1996. The plaza is known as Benson Center.
Originally the trim around the window was some real cheap dark brown plastic trim. Ugh. The window frame isn't flush with the wall at all and in fact the wall bows quite significantly. The wall is flush with the trim in the middle (actually recessed on the bottom) and about 1/2" on the edges. The original plastic trim was bent in an attempt to hide the warping wall.
Today's project is to install some nice poplar wood trim around the window.
After lots more work, the base cabinets are now gone. Just as with the wall cabinets, the backs of these cabinets were just plaster. Tools for this job included crowbar, screwdriver, mallet, and reciprocating saw to chop up the countertop.
A few new Ikea Akurum wall cabinets, with Lidingo doors, are in place on left and right.
Like the kitchen, the pantry has two layers of carpet, the bottom one foam-backed and glued to the floor. The trap-door to the basement adds an additional challenge to the project.
The first problem with the closet is that the shelving is very recessed and hard to access. The second half of the closet is taken up by space for closet rod that hadn't been used by us or the previous owners -- indicated by the missing closet rod and nail "hooks" along the back wall. Overall, it is a pretty cramped and poorly designed space.