You’re Going To Paint What?

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Jef

Let’s again start with a ‘before’ picture, shall we?

There. That needs few words.

So despite the fact that I’ve already spent some time (and money) in the laundry room, there were still a couple of imperative fixes before I could call it finished. I mean, I need to gut it to the studs and then replace the studs and then pour a new foundation and build new studs and reframe it and sheetrock it and waterproof it and then finish it before it’s truly completed. However, before I do any of that, I can cheaply and quickly do just a couple of things to enhance our lives and make the laundry room a little less terrifying to small children.

Last weekend, with Jamie out of town, I decided I would (1) paint that ridiculous looking wallboard and (2) put up some solid wood trim pieces if for no other reason than to hold it all together for a few more years. And (3) the doorway to the laundry room was too small and prevented the fridge doors from opening all the way. I had to widen the opening by about six inches so the refrigerator could open all the way. That’s kind of important to us, the ability to open the fridge.

When you open up a wall, you never (and I mean NEVER) know what you’re going to get. It’s like rolling the dice. This time, the dice came up Termite Damage. Yay! Pounding on the damaged stud not only produced a little hollow sound and revealed wood that had been eaten through from the inside, but also produced a little pile of very fine powder.

That’s more sawdust than my table saw makes in a cut. Luckily, I observed no living termites and we do have pest control spray for the six leggers every few months so I’ll just mention this to him when he comes around again. I dutifully ripped out every damaged board I saw, replaced them, and moved on.

Catastrophe befell when I was staining the trim pieces. I had everything laid out, and was just starting to slop the stain on when I did a little internal math and realized I had barely, just barely, enough wood stain to treat every board. Okay, then, I reminded myself to be a little conservative and spread it as far as I could. That’s when a board slipped from my tired, oily hands and impacted on the can of wood stain, sending its contents flying through the air and all over the concrete floor of the garage. Not only was my entire can of stain wasted, but a large puddle of it splattered over several boards, saturating them in the thick pigment that usually settles at the bottom of the can. These boards were likely ruined, for I could never mop the stain off them fast enough not to leave a dark inkblot.

The hour was later than I’m comfortable admitting on the internet. I was exhausted to the bone and just needed to finish this one final task, to let the stain dry before morning so I could polyurethane them, and all my boards were completely ruined. What did I ever do to deserve this? How had I offended the woodworking gods to deserve their bitter enmity?

This is Orcas Island. We don’t have a home depot open 24 hours a day. If you’re out of wood stain and it’s the middle of the night, then you’re just out of wood stain. Fatigued as I was, I had to think fast, and I ran to my paltry collection of other wood stains and selected the color closest to what I was trying to accomplish. I mopped the spilt stain off the concrete floor (not my proudest moment) and combined it with a can of what I had, and began recoating all my boards. They looked hideous at first, but with a bit of rubbing and soaking I finally got to a color that I can live with.

You’ll see the results. I’ll let you be the judge.

After two coats of Killz (that didn’t stop stains from seeping through) and two coats of the most expensive cans of Valspar paint I could find, I think the color is going to finally stick to the wall! This wallboard was very damaged, and peeling off the studs so badly that nails and screws could not correct it in places. I managed to at least get it coated so it’s no longer the Toxic Waste Sepia color it used to be, and now it’s a nice shade resembling the frothy green sea.

Look, it’s a laundry room, it’s not the Green Tea Reception Chamber at Buckingham Palace. It’s tight and small, it stores a myriad of cleaning supplies and underused implements, and is pretty much a catch-all of orphan possessions that have no other place to live. But that doesn’t mean it has to look like a root cellar with carpenter ants crawling up the timbers.

I kept the woodwork really simple, using readily available and relatively cheap pre-milled hemlock to get the job done. Lots of hooks and pegs for the tools of the cleaning trade. I didn’t do much to the window area for a number of reasons, not the least of which we’re planning on replacing that window eventually so why bother doing work when I’m going to tear it all up within a year.

This laundry room has five power outlets, four of which work, and I replaced them all with oil rubbed bronze covers. Bronze and copper seem to be the metal fitting of choice in our sea green laundry room, with trim the color of driftwood. It’s just like being on a boat!! Except that you’re not out to sea and you still have a mortgage and have to pay property tax.

The finished room is dramatically different. I cannot overstate how oppressive that old wallboard was, nor can I exaggerate how excited I am at my newfound ability to open the fridge doors all the way. One minor disadvantage from all this renovation is that now you can see a lot of the flaws and cracks and areas of water damage that were once hidden and concealed. In that respect, it’s not that much different than other old-house laundry rooms. These are hard working rooms! It’s not a bad thing to give them a little love once in a while.

Inky’s hobby: trying to fit herself into the smallest sized box possible.

So you still think you want a hot tub?

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Jef

It’s here. Just needs some cleaning, some repair, and some replacement parts. And electrical hookup, and chemicals. Oh, and it’s on its side so it needs to be set down on the ground. But I left it on its side because it’ll be easier to repair some of the things that need repairing.

The deck needed a little patching up.

The frame is perfectly level for now, but eventually gravity will do its job and make it all catawampus.

The controls look pretty fancy. There’s even a key so you can lock your neighbors out.

Finished pics of wall demo

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Jef

Five short weekends ago, we started ripping out the wall between the kitchen and living room. It got pretty involved: lots of electrical work, structural work, drywall, trim and woodwork, and finishing. But finally you can walk in the front door and it doesn’t look like The House That Time Forgot. Oh, sure, we still have a long way to go, but I’d say now that about 1/4th of the house renovation is all done.

Tacky and cheap have been transformed into open and inviting. We’ve added lights in the right places, replacing the 4′ florescent tubes from the value bin at Ace Hardware with modern halogens on dimmer switches. The old lights were so ugly that even moths would avoid them. We went with paint colors that we had on hand, choosing to avoid purchasing more and more gallons of paint. One thing I can’t stand is a growing collection of paint cans. So we use what we have.

We’re not fans of conventional lighting, either. We have a lot of low wattage fixtures, colored night lights and art glass pieces, to bring sparkly color to the place. We’ll appreciate it this winter when we get 18 to 24 hours of darkness per day.

The elevated bookshelf is a real hit with the cat, who likes to hang out underneath it by the heat register. Someday I’ll do something to cover or conceal it but it’s fine for now. I got a million things to do before I fix something that isn’t broken.

This nice (and expensive) hook makes a good place for the yoga mats. Wall space is really rare in this house and we have to take advantage of every bit of it. I had just enough room here for one hook.

There’s still a lot to do in the kitchen. I’ll do cabinets when I’m ready, and with that will come new countertops and a new sink. That door to the laundry room needs to be widened too, which will allow us to open the fridge doors all the way. Believe it or not, the kitchen seems smaller after opening the wall up. It wasn’t big to begin with, though.

The view from the kitchen has dramatically improved. Yeah, there’s more paneling and those stupid logs there too. Nothing a little bit of gasoline and a match won’t fix. Ha ha. I’m half joking, of course.

Altogether, it went really well and we’re very happy with all the changes. The sight of it still takes us by surprise when we turn the corner and expect to see a giant rectangle of pressed hardboard paneling, barely affixed to its poorly installed frame of scrap lumber, covered with little piles of carpenter ant frass. Yeah, a much nicer space to live in.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Jef

This summer I knocked out the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Like every other project I do, this one was a major pain in the butt. I had to dissect kitchen cabinets, remove lots of crappy paneling, remove the support from a load bearing beam, replace the support under the load bearing beam, hope I did it correctly because I’m too cheap to hire an engineer, and make a little half wall.

I discovered that I really suck at drywall. But that’s okay. It looks good, it’s solid and durable, and it doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke and dog pee (which is what the old paneling smelled like). The joints and seams are not that visible if you just avoid certain kind of lighting. It’s all good.

See? In this light it looks great!

In my opinion, it’s the woodwork that makes this house stand out. And I had to get a little creative and a little unconventional to make it all work. I’m not sure how well it comes across in the pictures, but that beam twists about 10 degrees along its full 24 foot length. It makes it a real challenge to make anything square. In particular, the walls and the kitchen cabinets.

This wall got a nice layer of turquoise paint. I love color, lots of bold color. Our house is a cabin on an island, so I expect to decorate it like the island, with the colors of the sea, the forest and the rocky land. On a really nice day, that turquoise is what you’ll see when you look out past the shore.

I need to mention that if you feed a deer your apple cores, they will follow you for about an hour, looking for more of that apple. I wonder if it’s legal to feed wild deer. Maybe it’s not. It’s perfectly legal to shoot them, but you’re probably not supposed to feed them. Go figure.

The Funny Smell Of Wood Stain

Posted on July 26, 2014 by Jef

Finishing wood is not what I’m best at. I do a passable job, probably better than most. I prefer using an oil based stain and then a few coats of polyurethane on top of that. Everything else I’ve tried has either resulted in disaster, a poor finish, or a disastrously poor finish.

The wood I’m using isn’t very high grade. It’s fir construction lumber. You can say I’ve lowered my standards but it actually fits in well with the house (which came with low standards built in). I planed it, routed it, jointed it and sanded it. I sanded for hours today. Burned through about $20 worth of sanding discs.

For the most part, the wood looks nice and smooth and has some minor resemblance to something a professional would do. In some places (such as the above pic) I left a few rough patches in deliberately, to give it a distressed look here and there.

There’s still quite a bit of work to do, including more trim and finish work. This pic shows a particularly challenging area. Like all the exposed 4×8 beams in this house, this one has a nasty warp to it. The trick will be to put some wood trim around it and make it look nice and straight even though it connects to something as twisted as a bent corkscrew. I’ve got some ideas, though. It should look good in the end.

I like the way I was able to make a cap around the top of this post and join it into the false bottom that runs the inside length of the beam. The false bottom is there to make room for the light fixture, and run the electrical to it. I ran the electrical through a steel conduit so it should be fairly safe. I considered digging a channel through that beam for the electrical wire but it was too warped to do that safely and it wouldn’t even look good if I managed to do it without screwing it up. Which probably wouldn’t have happened. Putting a little slab of wood on the bottom was the way to go.

So now the entire house has that volatile oil smell that probably won’t go away for about a week while the stain cures and sets, not to mention the polyurethane I plan on putting down just as soon as I think it’s dry enough. Two coats on the majority of it, and a few more coats across the top where it will need the protection.

There’s the top shelf. May it live forever because I don’t feel like replacing it anytime soon. Slowly but surely, this is changing into the house we envisioned, as opposed to the house we purchased. Things are transforming. At first we had to spend a lot of money on things we needed but didn’t see (like a new boiler, for example) but now we’re working on the things we see every day. When I wake up and wobble out of the bedroom every morning, this area is the first thing I see, and now it’s going to look a lot nicer. And soon, the whole house will be updated.

Or maybe it’s just the stain fumes getting into my head.

How To Attach Your Bookshelf To The Wall And Not Look Like A Redneck

Posted on July 19, 2014 by Jef

So, almost two years ago I made the Jeff Foxworthy inspired joke “You might be a redneck if you mount your bookshelf on the wall with 2×4’s.”

Yeah. You see, we have these little hot water radiators that heat the house. They work ok. I guess. But you can’t really put furniture in front of them or you lose all that heat. Plus, the furniture doesn’t go right up against the wall. Ergo, I mounted my bookshelf up on 2×4’s and installed it into the wall. The resultant space beneath the bookshelf was a favorite cat hangout, due to the nice warmth it gave and the opportunistic view of the birds out the back door.

Well, I always knew that when I got around to destroying the paneling and replacing it with drywall, I’d make something a tad nicer than a 2×4 block to support the front load of this 600 pound bookshelf. But first, a bit of history about the stupid bookshelf.

This was one of the first pieces of furniture I ever made. I had some spare boards from my old house in Denver, good aged fir 1x12s with really nice patina and very good strength. These were from old growth trees, and the wood is nice and dried now. It’s a shame they were butchered by my amateur techniques but there you have it.

The poor thing has been through the war and crossed several state lines to be where it is now. It’s never had a proper backing, so I bought some 1/4″ plywood that I’ll stain and affix to the back. Other than that, I’ll give it a few coats of polyurethane that it always deserved and patch it up nice. And when I put it back on the wall, it’s not going to be on crappy paneling but real sheetrock, just like modern homes. And it won’t be on 2×4’s!!

I made this little base to support it, and it rests on a ledge that’s screwn directly into the wall studs. I’ll stain this to resemble (not match, I never have any luck trying to color match) the bookshelf and I think it will go together nicely. In another week or two, this monster bookshelf will be built into the wall and suspended over the heaters and our cat will have a nice warm place to watch birds from.

In other news, we’re making progress on the wall demo. I’ve almost finished all the electrical work. It was finished last week but we decided we wanted lights dangling in that little open space so now I have more electrical work to do. I had to run the wire through a 4″ post, a 4″ post with 2×4’s joined to each side (that was fun to drill through) and now I get to decide which of the three circuits I want to draw power from. That wall has wires from (1) the bathroom circuit, (2) the laundry room circuit, and (3) an unknown circuit that has some kitchen outlets on it now. I’ll sleep on it but I’m probably going with (3).

One of the funner bits of woodworking I got to do was make a cap for the half wall. I used one of the remaining 2×6’s I had left over from the garage construction, and planed it down to about 1 1/8″ so it doesn’t look like a 2×6. I had to cut holes for the posts and install them around like that. I was going to do some fancy pants joinery like triangular feather joints at the corners, but I really need to finish this project by 2016. And I have a full time job that eats up more of my time than I spend sleeping. So I’m probably just going to use tenpenny nails.

A little glue, some cabinet mounting screws, some time with the Festool sander, and it’ll look great. Okay, it’ll look adequate. And I’m proud of myself: it’s one of the few things in this house that is actually level. It’s kind of weird. Makes the rest of the house look lopsided.

Of course, some of those who live here would be perfectly happy if everything was made out of cardboard.

Down With Crappy Wood Paneling!

Posted on July 6, 2014 by Jef

Now, we’ve always wanted to remove the wall between the kitchen and living area. We’re really sick of having to run around the corner every time someone scores a hockey goal. With the wall out of the way, we can raid the fridge and watch hockey at the same time! And, it really opens the house up, making the tiny kitchen bigger.

And we hated the paneling. HATED!

It wan’t even real paneling, just the cheap imitation pressed cardboard stuff. Removing it took about 15 minutes. Didn’t even put up a fight. Just popped right out like it knew its time was up. Naturally, it’s what you find behind the wall that sets the tone, and budget, of the project.

I’m not terribly sure what to make of the slanted wall area. It’s a shadow of its former self, and I think it used to be a tepee of stone and mortar. I think that’s about where the old wood stove used to be. Or an open fire pit. Or something. No idea what they were thinking.

Now the first thing we had to do is empty out some valuable cabinet space. There was about 24 cubic feet of storage area in those cabinets. There is not a lot of storage here so we had to get creative. And throw a lot of crap out, too. But once those shelves were empty, I could proceed to demo the cabinets and get working on that wall.

The cabinets were all one piece, so it required a little surgery to separate them.

And a little brute force.

There’s about half the cabinets and most of the paneling. Out by the trash where it belonged.

After one weekend, we’re not even close to being finished. In addition to demo and framing and re-framing, there was a lot of electrical work that needed to get done. There was an outlet hidden behind the cabinetry, a perfectly good outlet that no one could get to. We used to plug in the coffee by using an extension cord that reached behind the stove. Shameful.

So now all the framing is complete and I have one sheet of drywall in on one side of the half wall. There’s some more drywall to put up and quite a bit of finish trim to do, but it’s coming along.

Restored Laundry Room Cabinet

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Jef

Alright, $24 for a melamine top, $28 for a register cover, $85 (ouch!) for new hinges, and I used drawer pulls, scrap wood, stain and polyurethane that I already had, and this cabinet lives another day. Oh, and I needed to order some special cabinet screws for those drawer pulls, so another $8. (I had existing screws but the heads kept popping off; I have a real low tolerance for that.)

Here’s a little trick for when the holes for your new hinges don’t line up with the old holes. Now, you’re going to drill new holes in new locations and that’s fine. But this is such a small area that if you leave the existing holes alone, the wood gets really weakened. So you want to stuff something into that hole, a little dowel or even a couple toothpicks and wood glue will seal it up fine. Maybe it’s overkill, but it does prevent the new screw from trying to wander into the old hole, making your hinge install go wonky.

One challenge I faced is that the door frames were all skewed. I think when this cabinet was moved, the whole thing kind of slanted over, making distinct parallelograms where you really want rectangles. Oh well, huh? So no matter how I cut and trim and shim the cabinet doors, they’re not going to close straight.

BUT THEY DO SHUT! And they shut cleanly, That alone is an improvement.

Nonetheless, it’s still the Cabinet From Hell. It’s just less of an eyesore now, and it will serve and function until such time as I decide to make a new cabinet for the laundry room. A task that I can now put off another few years while I work on fixing other broken things around here.

The melamine top is the biggest difference by far. You can clean it. You can spray it with windex and it actually comes clean. Amazing.

Our laundry room is a hard working room. A lot gets done in that small space; not only laundry but storage, cat dining area, and the only place in the house that the microwave will fit. And now it’s just a little less embarrassing. New flooring too, but I’m holding off on pics until that’s finished.

If I owned a cat restaurant, that’s the pic I would put on the wall.

The Cabinet From Hell

Posted on May 18, 2014 by Jef

It’s time to face facts. We can do whatever we want to make the kitchen look better, but this hideous cabinet is all you see whenever you’re in there. All the new appliances and knobs and flooring in the world won’t hide this demonic thing. I’ve considered covering it with a drop cloth but then Inky wouldn’t know where to eat. I’ve considered destroying it with a flamethrower but I doubt I could keep the rest of the house from burning down with it.

This cabinet is old, and it rests on scrap 2×4 pieces the way an el camino rests on cinder blocks in someone’s front yard.

Nothing meets at a right angle. The doors do not stay closed without the aid of a rubber band or a thumbtack. I’d love to get rid of it but that’s 24 cubic feet of storage I don’t have anywhere else.

The frame is literally coming off the cabinet. Look closely – you can see the frame is just held to the cabinet by a nice, smooth, bright finish nail. I could pull it out with my fingernails if I wanted to. The one across from this was repaired with glue, so now it’s permanently 2 1/2 degrees off. Ugh.

The worst of it is the top, which is just painted construction grade plywood. Painted a long time ago. It does not come clean. It’s pitted, stained, moldy and warped. The only really good thing about old paint is that it was made before a lot modern environmental laws, so it’s generally better quality than new paint. Plus it’s fully cured so it forms a hard shell that’s arguably stronger than the plywood it envelops. Other than that, it’s disgusting.

Do not ask me why, but I decided to restore this thing rather than smash it to bits with a fireman’s ax. The drawer pulls are easily replaced, and I even have some good pulls in mind for it. And replacement hinges are affordable, right? (answer: no. $25 per pair is not affordable, but that’s what well machined hinges cost). What else would need to be done? A melamine top is not hard to do. A band of wood around the bottom wound conceal that weird heating apparatus underneath so we don’t have to see it. And I can take the doors off, sand them down, stain them and polyurethane them and they would look significantly better.

And so, it’s come to this. 50 year old cabinet parts are in my shop, sanded smooth, re-squared, fitted, stained, and ready to go. The cabinet will live again. It’s still a piece of crap, but at this point, it’s like a personal challenge. See how long I can keep this box limping along, serviceable, and in working order. See if I can get the doors to close straight, or close at all.

I love making cabinets, and sometimes restoring the old ones teaches you a thing or two about making new ones. But that’s really not the case here. This Cabinet From Hell is a textbook example of all the things not to do when you’re making new cabinets, from the materials and hardware not to use to the way not to join wood together. Well, let’s see how long I can keep it going. I have to move it out when I drywall the laundry room, then put it right back in. If it survives that, it can probably last a while longer.

New Bathroom Countertop

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Jef

Like most everything that came with this house, the bathroom sink and countertop was ready to be replaced. It was one of those one piece resin things, and the resin was becoming cracked and moldy and leaking and just all sorts of awful. We had one like that in Denver and we lived with it for ten years. We finally replaced when we got ready to sell the house and we wondered why we had lived with the old crappy one as long as we did.

So up there is our new countertop, a nice pretty quartzite that should last about 4,000 years. All I have to do is drill two holes in it and I can install the faucet. I thought I had to drill three holes but it came with one pre-drilled so that was a bonus.

To drill the holes, first you make a template. You need a diamond tipped hole saw to cut through stone like that and it helps to have the correct size hole saw (unlike the one the fricking jerks at Lowe’s sold me) (“Oh yeah, don’t forget to buy a diamond hole saw on your way out, sir. It needs to be 3/4″ diameter, sir.” “Okay, Mr. Lowes Salesman, I’ll buy a 1″ diameter diamond hole saw just to make sure it’s big enough.” “That would be swell, sir.”) (Then I get back on the island and realize I need a 1 1/4″ hole saw and the one I bought was too small and no one on the island sells diamond tipped hole saws.)

But I digress.

Use your correct size hole saw to cut straight through the plywood at the same distance from the edge you want your faucet holes to be. This way, you just line up the template with the edge of the stone and you use the plywood hole as a guide. Also, cutting through stone requires some water for lubrication, to help cut through the stone without creating so much heat that you melt your expensive hole saw.

To make sure the water doesn’t seep out of the bottom of the plywood, you take some plumber’s putty and make a snake.

Don’t get too attached, though, because the snake will probably not survive. So don’t give him a name or anything. Wrap the snake in a circle around the underside of the plywood.

Now, when you clamp the plywood to the stone, the snake makes a watertight seal and you can fill the hole with water.

This is a dirty job. Water and powdered quartzite will splash around in a 20′ radius and cover everything with little white dots that don’t clean up easy. Do this outside if you can.

That’s what a hole saw looks like, by the way. Take your time with this step. Let the drill do the work, don’t press it. You’re kind of wobbling it down, rocking it up and down to let the stuff you’re digging up work its way out. Periodically, take the saw out and cool the tip in cold water, replace the water in the hole, and just rest a bit. If you try to hurry this step up, you can break your expensive quartzite countertop.

Yeah, the snake doesn’t make it. But that’s okay, you can make more with plumber’s putty and play with them later.

And there’s the old one, out with the trash where it belongs. It didn’t even give up much of a fight taking it out. I think it knew its time was up, and it was ready. The new one is in and it’s great. Will post some pics of it all later.

Diary of an Orcas Island Homeowner

Category Archives: Renovation