Adding an Electrical Outlet
Posted by Wayne
One of the things that bothers me most about my garage is that there is only one electrical outlet, and it’s not in a great location. As part of my built in work bench I wanted to have at least one additional electrical outlet on top of the bench. Unfortunately the entire area is already drywalled so running new wire from somewhere else isn’t really an option.
I had considered tearing down the drywall to get some more electrical outlet to the location that I wanted it, however recently I noticed that there is an outlet on the inside of the house directly on the other side of the garage wall where I wanted another outlet. I knew that with some careful planning I could tap into that circuit without doing much damage to the existing drywall in the garage.
Inside Outlet
Finishing a Garage, Part 1
Posted by Wayne
After a much needed (and much deserved, if you ask me) break, this past weekend I started on a new house project.
I’ve spent the past couple of months deciding on which project I wanted to tackle next. I’ve been wanting to finish off our garage just so I can have a nice place to work on the rest of the house projects. Our garage is gloomy and ugly. Some of the drywall work is the worst I’ve ever seen. The walls of the garage are covered with that “holey” material to hang tools from. There is only one electrical outlet in the garage. There is only a single light bulb in the garage. I temporarily fixed the lighting issue before we even moved into the house by adding some fluorescent lighting, but nothing is hardwired and there are cords running all over above and below the rafters above. With a little effort I can fix all the shortcomings of the garage and have a really nice place to work.
This past Saturday my friend Tito was helping me pick up our old appliances and countertops to load up in a trailer to take to the dump. While I had the trailer (borrowed from my folks) I figured I should swing by Home Depot to get some drywall and start on the project.
Before
Installing an ethernet outlet
Posted by Wayne
If you read the previous post about the “forearm forklifts”, you’re already aware that I had the good fortune of being given an awesome big screen TV. My father in law wanted to get one of those flat panel screens to hang on his wall instead of having his giant big-screen, so he generously gave it to us.
This rekindled my interest in my barely used XBOX 360. I previously had it hooked up to an okay sized TV, but it wasn’t great. I would really only play the XBOX on rare occasions just because our basement TV room was kind of dreary. The big screen (and awesome surround sound speaker system that came with it) pretty much changed all of this. Now it’s my favorite room in the house.
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).
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- 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.
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.
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
Updating the Fireplace
Posted by Wayne
The one thing I hated about our house when we were looking at buying it was the fireplace. Huge brown beams from floor to ceiling (one was twisted and warped), ugly brick, brown mantle….. just plain nasty and 1970’s. I knew that it would have to be the first thing to go, but it was an imposing task. I didn’t know what I’d find behind the brick or how easy the beams or brick would come down.
What I was particularly worried about was that all of the walls in the house have the orange-peel texture finish, and I wondered if the builders had sprayed the texture on the walls before (under the brick) or after (not under the brick) finishing the fireplace. If the wall underneath didn’t have texture it was going to be a nightmare getting it to match the rest of the wall.
One day a couple of months after we had moved in and gotten settled, my wife was at work (I was self-employed at the time) and I decided I was sick of looking at that monstrosity so I decided to go for it. The beams came out fairly easy. I just had to be careful not to pry against the good drywall.