Floor prep one

Hello all. With the carpet gone and much of the ceiling and wall painting out of the way we could begin installing floors throughout the Cottage. In keeping with the lakeside vibe, we decided on unfinished, 3.25-inch yellow pine boards. Sixteen hundred square feet of it, enough to cover every surface that won't be tiled.

We opted to buy this in 16-foot-long boards, which look great but are a bit of a struggle to maneuver especially upstairs. Our plan was to start with one of the bedrooms to work out any kinks in our approach, but that meant cutting a bunch of boards roughly in half to make it up the stairs. It wasn't hard work once you have a straight edge, but it was a mite tedious. Once we could use the miter saw things went a bit quicker.

By the end we had a nice stack of enough wood to cover the room that we could bring into the house to acclimate to the temperature and humidity inside.

Another part of the preparation has been acquiring and practicing with some new tools. We had planned to use a manual floor nailer because we have experience with that. The more we thought about it the more we realized that would be a LOT of hammering, so we researched using a pneumatic nail gun and done properly there was no reason it wouldn't work.

We had some spare oak floorboards, which are much harder yellow pine, and put theory to the test. We were encouraged enough by the results to continue down this path.

We also wanted a faster way to do all the three rounds of sanding--one after installation and one each between the three coats of sealer. When doing one room and with no other projects going on it's very possible to use palm sanders with a 5-inch diameter. It's not fast, but it works. With a whole house to do this could have pushed things into 2023. Far beyond our goal.

Typically in this situation we would rent a floor sander (drum or disc). That was an option, but we will be doing a room or two at a time, which meant we'd be renting the machine multiple times. Ok but not ideal. Instead we found something called a drywall sander, apparently made for people who want their walls and ceilings super smooth (e.g. to remove "popcorn" ceilings). There seemed to be no reason why we couldn't use it on a floor. The formula for calculating area of a circle means that the 9-inch diameter sanding disc is more than 3 times as large as the 5-inch hand sander. Thank you math!

One thing that's been enjoyable about this entire project has been getting to honor family members and continuing a chain that goes back at least two generations. For some of our sawing needs we've used this throwback to the Mercury Program from one of our grandfathers and this hammer from one of our fathers. We think they'd approve.

Until next time.

Don't you hate it when...

Hello all. With homage to these old SNL skits, as we've mentioned a few times already, renovation projects have a way of surprising you. The most common surprise is a seemingly simple job becoming an involved one. 

Case in point we took a break from some bigger projects to instal new lights in the downstairs bathrooms. Maybe a half hour to knock these out, that's what we thought. Shut off the circuit, remove the fixture, attach the wiring, and install the new light. Piece of cake.

Unlike the pantry, this was a case of the builders underdoing the work. We started with a very unassuming and fairly typical bathroom fixture.

After removing the bulbs, there were collars around each of the three sockets that held the silver/gold face plate in place. Removing those exposed the backbone of the fixture.

Our surprise came when we unscrewed the black face plate from the wall to discover that, contrary to any building code for at least the past fifty years there was no electrical box through which the wire fed and to which the fixture attached. We literally had a wire sticking out of a crude hole in the wall.

Aside from safety, the main reason for installing electrical boxes is to allow for easier replacement of a fixture. The bathrooms were set up to keep the original fixtures forever.

This required a visit to the local hardware store (much smaller but also much closer than the big box stores) to find a box we could install. We had a pretty small space to work with. There's a 2x4 to the left of the opening and that white pipe is the drain from the upstairs bathroom. Fortunately there now are many types of boxes of different sizes, shapes, and depths. This one is about half the depth of a typical box, which allowed it to sit in front of the drain pipe.

With the box in place we could go back to installing a light as normal. This will get sconces after we prep and paint the walls (easier to work around). Fortunately the wall plate even covered up most of the drywall repair we had to do.

Until next time.

A dash of color in the kitchen

Hello all. We left the kitchen in a state of "things are basically in place for now." Well we've come a long way, baby.

We had a couple last cabinets to arrange. The skinny one is new, but the end unit used to sit next to the left of the stove. We had a lot of repair and cleanup work to do on the walls in this area after taking down the pantry, which explains why these were the last to install.

To prove that we are fully capable of goofs and gaffes, we plan to thread the cord for the refrigerator into the end cabinet to hide it. We needed access to the outlet (which we first had to install) behind the cabinet. Despite measuring twice we cut once in the wrong place. Fortunately there was enough space to enlarge the cut. No one ever said home reno was perfect.

But we managed to get everything into place (not yet ready to tackle the island, that's coming) and ready for...

You guessed it, primer!

With the cabinets locked in place we could turn to the countertops. Here they are!

Well ok that's a countertop in its natural state of plywood and hardie board (in this case a 1/2-inch board that is the preferred surface on which to tile). Below are the butcher block countertops that will make up most of the kitchen. A bigger version will go on the island.

The tiled area will go around the sink because of the tendency to collect water. We're going to finish the butcher block but even that's less waterproof than ceramic. To make the area around the sink we started by cutting a piece 4x2 feet and removing the area for the drop-in sink.

This part of the countertop will actually be 5x2, so we cut another piece of the plywood to fit before overlaying the hardie board with a matching cutout.

We tend to operate under the principle of working from top to bottom--ceilings to floors. In this case because we needed to finish the cabinet before the countertops and the walls needed so much work that we ended up painting the walls last.

Here's where things stood after this round. We're definitely liking what we see.

Until next time.

Paint, paint everywhere and not a drop to drink?

Hello all. A number of the jobs we've tackled have downtime. For example, tile cement and grout need at least a day to set properly. In case you were concerned we might be getting lazy, fear not. 

Every ceiling and wall surface needed painting both for esthetics and to spruce the interior up. After lots of cleaning, sanding, and patching we've tackled rooms as we can.

It would be great to say that something as straight forward as painting went smoothly. Alas, this is a home renovation story we're telling. The room upstairs with the bunk beds was a vibrant, almost electric yellow.

No problem, right? When we started painting it was clear both that we had the wrong color and that it wasn't covering up the yellow well.

Plan B: Put primer on all the most striking colors. We can year the purists saying, "You always apply primer." Point to you. We learned our lesson and purchased several gallons of primer, once we could find it.

Here's what the room looks like now with a nice, subtle tone that works well with the white ceilings:

The other upstairs bedroom got a similar makeover, this time starting with a vibrant yet cool green:
 

That we turned into what we think is a warmer, gentler tone:

The stairway provided a bit of a challenge given that at its highest it's almost two stories. Fortunately we picked up this versatile ladder that, among other things, is designed to make the sides different lengths and thus perfect for using on stairs.

All of this area and the living room became a nice, warm buttery yellow. It's welcoming without being harsh like the bedroom walls we redid.

We've found that picking the right music to accompany a project makes the time go faster. So far the clear winner is Talking Heads for our painting blitzes. Your mileage may vary.

Until next time.

Rounding out the first bathroom

Hello all. We actually jumped the gun with the last post. Before tiling we painted the walls and ceiling. If you're going to drip, far better to drip on a floor that's about to get covered up. Plain white on the ceiling and a nice, mild gray on the walls, all courtesy of Sherwin Williams.

 

If you haven't tried to buy household goods lately, then you may not know how hard it is to find things you need. We needed a new vanity for the bathroom, but none could be found despite having more than the usual number of home building supply stores around. We improvised by shortening a standard kitchen cabinet (24-inch depth) by 3 inches. With a guide in place it was a simple matter for the jigsaw. Then we added a new back out of 1/2-inch plywood.

This is what the old vanity looked like. It had the advantage of almost no back but the supply lines were so high they interfered with access to the drain.

We fixed the latter by trimming about 6 inches from the supply lines and installing new shutoff valves.

If you followed our previous house renovation blog then you know plumbing isn't high on our list of favorite activities. It always seems as though you create two problems for every one you try to fix. In this case we had a clean slate and tried to do everything right the first time.

You can tell us if you're as pleased with how everything turned out as we are. Before:

After:

Until next time.