Painting Oak Cabinets- Part 1
Posted by Wayne
Figuring out what we were going to do with the honey oak cabinetry in the kitchen would determine whether or not we would bust our budget. There are three options I can think of when it comes to updating cabinetry:
1) Buy new cabinets- Obviously the most expensive option. Our cabinets are ugly, but still in good shape, so I didn’t see us replacing the cabinets without trying a cheaper option first. We didn’t even get a quote on new cabinets, but I’m guessing it would have been in the neighborhood of $5k.
2) Buy new cabinet doors and veneer or laminate the cabinet boxes with matching material- This was a much less expensive option, but still probably would have cost around $1200-1500. This was my first choice, but my wife got it in her head that any veneering or laminate on the cabinet boxes would start peeling off over time and claimed to have seen this. I totally disagreed, but was willing to try to save money first by going with option #3.
3) Paint the cabinets- This was by far the cheapest option (<$100) but most labor intensive. We had gotten pretty good results hand painting our bathroom cabinets which are made out of the same honey oak material, but those are not at eye level and it is a lot darker in the bathroom than the kitchen.
Kitchen- Replacing a Garden Window
Posted by Wayne
Technically, the window that was in our kitchen is called a garden window, but it is often incorrectly referred to as a bay window (mostly by me). The main problem with this garden window was that it was the same ugly brown/green metal color as the sliding glass door I had replaced, but also that the double paned glass had gotten foggy in between the sheets of glass.
Searching for a replacement garden window convinced me that window business is sketchy and underhanded. I say this because it is impossible to find any good information, explanations, or prices about replacement windows online, even after extensive searches. My typical process would be to learn a lot about a subject online and then go purchase something in person, but this is impossible if the subject is windows. Just try to find a window price online.
Kitchen- Replacing a sliding glass door
Posted by Wayne
The first task I took on in the kitchen was replacing the sliding glass door leading to the back deck. The door I was replacing was metal, brownish/green, was constantly coming off the track on the bottom, and wouldn’t lock so the previous owners of the house has sawed down a broom handle to just the right length so you could lay it down in the track behind the closed door and the door wouldn’t open. Needless to say, this all had to go to make our kitchen look decent.
Updating the Kitchen
Posted by Wayne
Before
Oh boy, now we’re getting to the fun stuff. As I write I am in the process of finishing the kitchen updating. As you can see from the picture above, we started with your typical 1980’s kitchen: honey oak cabinetry, laminate countertops, linoleum flooring, ugly bay window, ugly sliding glass door (just outside the picture to the left), etc. If I go upstairs now and look at the kitchen, I can’t believe it’s the same space.
For this project I’d be painting (hopefully) and installing hidden european hinges on the oak cabinets, tiling or installing granite countertops with an undermount sink (and all the plumbing that comes along with it), adding in some sort of tile backsplash, replacing the appliances, replacing the lighting, replacing the bay window, replacing the sliding glass door, tearing up the linoleum and installing wood flooring, and replacing the pantry doors (not seen just to the right of the photo). This is a big job. Probably not so start-from-scratchish as the office space I completed, but there was just as much work to do here.
I read a while back that the absolute minimum cost for upgrading a kitchen is $15k. I knew for a fact I could do this for $5k, with all brand new nice appliances, and people wouldn’t believe how good it looked. Tune in again to see how I did it and how it all turned out (or come to our unveiling party March 1, invitations to be sent out soon).
Caulking like a pro
Posted by Wayne
Caulking is just one of those things that seems so easy but every time you go to do it it turns into a big mess and you darn near ruin the project you just worked for hours on. I always had mixed results with the Dap Cap, and thought there had to be a better way. I could never figure out how to get a quick, professional caulk bead. It’s just plain irritating is what it is.
Office Space- The finished product
Posted by Wayne
Finishing the office took me a couple of months just working on the weekends. I liked the finished office so much that I had to buy a 20″ iMac for the space rather than put my ugly old computer down there. My wife uses the office space to do her interior design work and we’re both down there frequently.
I also bought a pretty sweet set of Harmon Kardon Soundsticks II speakers off of Ebay and the subwoofer fit perfectly into the box I had built below the desk for that purpose. The sound in the room is incredible.
We also added a few extras like the shelf above the desk and the corkboard on the back wall.
Office Space- Built in Desk
Posted by Wayne
Now that I had the room drywalled it was time for the fun part. Rather than bore you with the details of the decorating (which were all my wife’s ideas, so I can’t take credit), I’ll skim those and get to the built in desk, which is really what the room was all about.
The first step after drywalling was to prime and paint the room. The ceiling was painted white, 2 walls off white, and 2 walls tan. For the carpet my wife picked out some large carpet tiles that I didn’t think much of at first but they have really grown on me. These carpet tiles have a thick rubber backing so they really don’t move if they go down on a concrete floor. I started in one corner and worked my way to the other, sticking the tiles down to the floor with a double sided tape. I think the key to making these tiles look really good is to get really tight seams, so I took my time positioning them and sticking them down. When I got to the edges, the carpet tiles were very easy to cut. I would make my measurements, flip them over, and then use a straight edge and utility knife to cut right through them.
Office Space- Drywall
Posted by Wayne
Measuring, cutting, and attaching the drywall onto the framing was pretty easy and seeing what the walls looked like after all of the work made it a fun job to do. It stopped being quite so fun once it came time to finish the seams. I don’t find that part particularly tough anymore, but it is monotonous work and you have to be a perfectionist if you want the walls to end up seamless.
Hanging drywall is really a two person job so I asked my brother to help out. This required a minimum of tools: a drywalling square, a utility knife, and a drill with a drywall bit, and a drywall rasp. The drywall bit allows you to drive every drywall screw to the perfect depth. You certainly don’t want to go too shallow with the screws because you wouldn’t get a smooth surface, and it you went too deep they’d be more difficult to fill in and/or weaken the drywall.
Leaky valves, blizzard plumbing, & curb stops
Posted by Wayne
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my house, it’s that if I shut off a water valve that’s been turned on for 20+ years it might not want to turn off, and if it does I’m probably going to have some problems when I go to turn it back on. There is something wrong with rubber stop brass shut off valves like the one pictured below over a long period of time.
I have two good examples of this, one that was quite nightmarish:
Office Space- Electrical Wiring
Posted by Wayne
Electricity seems to mystify (and scare) a lot of people, however I find it quite interesting and easy to work with. As far as being scared, I can’t blame those people… but it’s easy to avoid getting shocked. If I’m changing a light fixture I turn off the switch and tape it down with some masking tape so no one turns it on causing me to forget what the off position is. If I’m working with an electrical outlet, I plug something into it and turn it on, make my wife stand there, and then go outside to the breaker box and turn off breakers until she yells that it isn’t working anymore.
Now that I’ve said it’s easy to avoid getting shocked, I have in fact been shocked with 110v several times and it wasn’t too bad (nothing on my body smoked afterwards). I understand that getting shocked with 220v is a much more electrifying experience, and as I have future work involving 220v in the queue I will plan on being much more careful with that.
Before mounting electrical boxes to the framing I had to make a decision on exactly where we wanted the outlet(s) located on the wall. It was at about this time that I made the decision that I would be custom building and laminating a wall mounted permanent desk. I figured the computer would plug in down below and the computer monitor would plug in through a grommeted hole through the desk. I also wanted to have an outlet above the desk just for plugging in things every now and then without having to crawl around under the desk.
Office Space- Framing, part 2
Posted by Wayne
Squaring up the room while attaching wood framing was a fairly simple task, but it was time consuming. By measuring an equal distance from the framed wall in two spots and connecting the dots I was able to get a parallel line which I drew on the floor with a marker and the straight edge of my level. I wanted this parallel line to be exactly 1 inch from the cement wall in the narrowest place (the top right of the image below) because I would be starting with a 1 inch piece of wood for my framing. As I went down the wall the framing would have to get thicker and thicker to keep it even with the line I had drawn on the floor. As long as the framing was built out to that line, I knew I’d have a square room when I drywalled.
Office Space- Framing, part 1
Posted by Wayne
Probably the most difficult part of finishing this unused space would be the framing (or more accurately, preparing the room for drywalling). When we were looking at buying this house I took a quick look in this space and I thought this would probably be an easy task. However, after living in the house for a while and examining the room more thoroughly I recognized several problems with the space (perhaps explaining why the previous owners left the space unfinished when they were finishing the basement right outside the door).
The first obvious problem was that 3 of the walls were cement foundation (the other wall was framed with 2×4 studs). The cement walls would require that I put up some shallow framing on them so I would have something to screw the drywall to.
Another thing that I noticed was that the walls were not square to each other. In the image below I’ve estimated the angles of the corners. Because we wanted to put a desk in the room, the room being anything less than square was unacceptable because I believed once you put a square desk in the room you would quickly notice all of the funky angles.
Although I could have just framed and drywalled as is, I really didn’t want to spend all the time finishing the room only to find I had created a room that you have to stumble around in like a drunk because your subconscious brain could tell the walls were all going in different directions.
Office Space
Posted by Wayne
This next project was something that I did to an awkward little room at the bottom of the stairs in the finished part of the basement. It could have been a good laundry room but there was no 220v electricity, venting, or plumbing nearby. Basically the room had no purpose. My wife wanted me to make her a little office out of it for her interior design work. Originally I had told her that this would be a piece of cake but changed my mind about that and put it off for quite a while until she finally talked me into it.
Despite the size of the room, this was the biggest project I had taken on in our house to this point. I would have to lower the ceiling two inches (more on that later), frame out the walls because 3 or them were cement foundation (the one closest the camera was framed already), while framing the walls attempt to square up the room, install a lighting canister, run electricity and install electrical outlets, do some difficult drywalling, paint, carpet, trim, and build and laminate a custom built in desk. This was a big project!
This is the first project where I’m going to try to break it down a little more step by step. Check back soon for my first installment.
Replacing the Deck surface
Posted by Wayne
A couple of weeks before our July wedding, after I had replaced the support column below the deck, I woke up one Saturday morning, took out my trusty scraper and was not looking forward to a day of scraping, painting, and getting baked by the sun. After about 5 minutes of scraping and cursing the idiot who ever decided to paint the deck, I decided to just replace the deck surface with a composite material that didn’t need painting. I figured it would take the same amount of time to replace it as it would to try to make the existing surface look good.
As you can see in the picture below, the old deck surface didn’t look very good and this picture was taken a full year before I made the decision to replace it. It was really peeling, the wood was rotten, it just didn’t make sense to paint it again.
Before
Replacing a Deck Column
Posted by Wayne
In the Summer of 2007 my wife and I were scheduled to get married, and to save money we had the bright idea of having the rehearsal dinner at our house. We both love having parties at the house and it definitely gives motivation to get stuff done, but I think getting married was stressful enough without having to rush through a bunch of house projects.
I knew at the party we were going to have a bunch of people on our backyard deck, and one of the support columns under the deck was a little iffy. The wood columns stand on the concrete below, so after a certain period of time the 8 foot tall 6″x6″ columns soak up water collected on the concrete and begin to rot. Only one of the columns appeared to have real issues and it needed to be replaced to support all of the weight above.
Entryway Tile
Posted by Wayne
Fairly soon after I had completed work on updating our fireplace, I began a couple of projects in the small entryway of the house. The front door, the door to the garage, and a coat closet are all located in this space.
The ceiling in the entryway did not have the acoustic texture, although this was of little consolation considering the several weeks of hell I had recently endured scraping it off the ceiling in in several other areas of the house (see my entry Scraping Popcorn). The entryway was, however, ripe for several easy improvements.
The first area of improvement was the flooring. As this is the entryway to the house, naturally the area should have a waterproof surface that is easy to clean because people are constantly coming in with dirty feet. The builders or perhaps later residents of our house decided on a pretty ugly linoleum pattern that we couldn’t wait to replace. We decided to replace it with 12″x12″ travertine to match the travertine we used around the fireplace.
Thermostat Wiring Woes
Posted by Wayne
When I was painting our living room in the fall of 2006, I removed the thermostat because it only took a couple of minutes and I’m a perfectionist so I wanted to paint underneath it instead of trying to paint around it. This was mistake to the tune of about $125.
There were about 5 different wires connected to the back of the thermostat, each a different color, and each connected by a screw that was clearly labeled with the color of the wire. These were easy to remove and easy to see where they should connect back to.
Scraping Popcorn
Posted by Wayne
One of the biggest projects I’ve undertaken thus far was the removal of the acoustic “popcorn” ceilings which covered every ceiling in the house. This is a great way to update a house so I was eager to get started, even though I had heard bad things about the actual work (namely that it was very messy).
After doing a bit of research I learned that this acoustic texture can have asbestos if your house was built before 1974 (and even some time after), so you should get it tested before undertaking this process. If I had known more about asbestos I would have been more careful about the year of the house I bought. Thankfully our house was built in 1980 so I’m fairly certain I was safe (cough, wheez).
I bought a small garden sprayer (similar to what is pictured below), found my trusty 5″ paint scraper, a ladder, a bucket, a mask, and goggles. I covered the floor with plastic, fearing the mess that was to come. I filled the sprayer up with water and a little bit of dish soap, and I was ready to spray.
Fixing a Crack
Posted by Wayne
Another thing I knocked of the list at the same time as the fireplace was a big unsightly 12″ long crack from the ceiling corner of the kitchen into the living room. I didn’t really know what to expect or how to fix this, but I assumed this was just happening at a drywall seam. I started digging with a putty knife and sure enough, I was picking out paper drywall tape (which is only used at seams). I dug down with the putty knife all the way to the drywall, about 3″ wide, and dug back past the crack along the seam being careful not to tear into the drywall. I then replaced the old drywall tape with a strip of the sticky drywall tape, and then filled it back in with joint compound.
Whenever I’m doing a fill in with joint compound I know it’s going to shrink a little bit when dry, so I overfill a little bit and then when it’s dry I wipe it down with a wet sponge until it is smooth and flush with the wall. If you fill it in flush when it’s wet, expect to see it indented when it’s dry in a couple of hours.
Once this had dried I put another thin coat on it, dabbed with a real sponge to create a random pattern, and when that had dried I wiped it a couple of times with a wet drywall sponge to knock down the peaks and match the surrounding drywall texture. Once again, this worked like a charm.
As you can see from the picture below, well… there’s nothing to see. I wish I had a before picture so you could see what a fantastic improvement this was with just a little effort. Now I don’t feel like I’m living in that house from Fight Club (my wife probably still does though, considering I look just like Brad Pitt).
After
Total Cost: < $5, Total Time: 1 hour
Hair Club for Carpet
Posted by Wayne
Once the fireplace beams were removed we were left with an approximately 5″ x 5″ spot of missing carpet on each side of the hearth and the same width of missing trim. This didn’t look so hot, and it’s not like we have spare rolls of carpet laying around.
I made templates of the missing carpet pieces and went to the far back corner of our bedroom closet, under a shelf, and cut equivalent pieces of carpet from there with a utility knife. This spot in the closet is not something you can see unless you’re on your hands and knees, so it was a no brainer to use that spot as a donor area. I stuffed the new pieces of carpet in the bald spots and voila! You can’t even see them anymore. We plan on getting new carpet someday, but this was the perfect fix for the short term. I believe this technique is similar to the one Sam Donaldson used for many years to cover his dome.
As far as the trim, the piece in question heads all the way into the kitchen and we knew updating the kitchen was in the list of things to do, so we’re waiting until we’re ready to do the kitchen trim as well. Eventually all the trim in the house will be updated with new white trim.
After
Total Cost: $0, Total Time: 30 minutes