Big Pictures Update

I've been hard at work and have nearly finished the back yard, main bedroom and kitchen. Here are the bedroom pics first, long overdue. All that remains is to clean the carpet.

The picture is finally in. Wish it was bigger, but it'll still do the job.


The mirror is the other thing we were waiting on.


The bed and pic from another angle. I like the high ceilings in there.


Just another angle, looking towards the bathroom.


I sat here for a while trying to think about what would go into a how-to for installing mosaic tile as a backsplash, but there really isn't much to it. Basically you just put thinset on the wall, kncok down the ridges with the flat side of the trowel and put it up. I like to sort of roll it up from the bottom working up because it goes on a little straighter. If you don't knock down the ridges you'll see some of them in the corner of the glass tiles.


Here's how it came out. I don't use anything fancy on the stainless appliances to keep fingerprints off. Just furniture polish.


Here's how the breakfast room came out with furniture in it. Not sure if I've already posted one from here.


And the back yard. Here's what it looks like now that I'm almost done. The squirrels are loving all the fresh mulch because it's easy to dig in, and hating the fact that all the nuts they buried are now 4 inches deeper than they were a few days ago. Tomorrow or Friday I'll trim the bushes that survived the back yard renewal project. It looks a bit bare, but keep in mind what time of year it is. It'll be ready for new plants come spring and protected from weeds by the mulch in the meantime.











The patio looks a lot better after being powerwashed, and with new furniture back there.

Office, Kitchen and Back Yard

Three areas, one update. First is the office. Finally after 2 1/2 years I've figured out a decent layout for the office.





It's kind of sad that it took so long, but at the same time it's great to finally have an office that I'm not embarrassed of. It's very minimal, and the only thing I can think of that would add anything would be a low bookshelf in the corner across from the desk; something maybe 3 feet high maybe.

Next the outdoors... a truckload of mulch came late Thursday afternoon that I got to move out to the back yard. Anyway this is what 10 cubic yards of mulch looks like. What you can't see is that it's about a car length from front to back. It took about 4 1/2hours to get it all back there. Needless to say I was tired the next day. Right now it's in smaller piles in the back yard waiting to be spread around where it belongs.



And the kitchen... the granite is in, everything is plumbed in and the backsplash is nearly up. It would be all the way up, but I didn't order enough. Hopefully it won't take long for another two sheets of the stuff to get here. Here's how it's coming out. This is all that's left to do in the kitchen so we're really close to the before / after post.







Tomorrow I'm going to work on the back yard and get back to work indoors on cleaning things up after it's dark out. We're nearly done with everything and it's been a long time working on all of this, but it'll all pay off soon.

The Great Outdoors

Since I don't have so much to do inside anymore I've been able to work on the front and back yard some. This is something I really should've done when we moved in, or maybe later that year when it wasn't over 100 degrees out for what seemed like every day until December. Anyway on with the show.

The front yard didn't need as much work as the back and I was able to take care of all of it in maybe an hour. Here's the before / after.







The back yard though - it's pretty bad. It's hard to convey the level of neglect it seems to have had since the 1990s, except for the grass anyway. Here's a short video of what it's like.



I spent at least 8 hours or so clearing it all out. So far all the overgrowth is gone except for the bushes next to the house. I hate to cut those down but they've become so overgrown it's impossible to trim them back and have them look even remotely normal within the next year or so anyway. The one fault I could find from what the original owners did was that they planted too many of them. Otherwise they made a wonderful layout that's given me a canvas to make something new from. The short trees have really matured well on their own.

Here's a brief count of things found so far:
Shoes: 1
Acorns 300,000
Beer cans from a nearby high school student or their friends: 1 (this one is on the house but any more are getting returned via their mailbox)
Lost dog toys from someone in the past: 2
Pirate treasure: 0
Huge broken pots that are now part of the landscaping: 1
18 year old RC Cola bottles: 1









I can't do as much when night falls so I go back indoors to pick up where I left off. So far the upstairs is nearly complete. Tomorrow it all will be, except for a couple of things I have to pick up at Target. By complete I mean absolutely nothing at all left to do. Staging, cleaning, building - it's all done. Here's how bedroom #4 and the hallway came out. Bedroom #3 from the last update is the room angling off to the right in one of the pictures.

Blinds - How to + One finished bedroom

It's time for a 2 part post... yeah I've been too busy to make a new post this week so now I have do double down on them. My apologies for some of the pictures turning out bad. I didn't realize there was a fingerprint on the camera lens until I was halfway through.

Part 1 is something that should help anyone out who inherits an otherwise good set of blinds that have a bad color of fabric (tape) they would like to change to something normal looking. From a cost standpoint it makes total sense because tape can be found for about $1/foot, if not less and it would easily run hundreds to replace the entire set of blinds. Materials came from Fix My Blinds. Anyway on to the how to.



First of course, you'll need to remove the blinds from the wall. You should be able to figure this part out on your own.



Next you'll need to remove the clip at the bottom of each piece of tape. Untie the knot in the string underneath the clip you just removed. Now you should pull the string up past the top slat in the blinds. Once you've done both of them you can now slide the slats to the left or right leaving the tape behind.

Remove one of the pieces of tape from the blind - you'll use this to measure your new one from. This part is VERY important so read carefully. In the picture below you'll see how there are pieces of fabric connecting one side of the tape to the other. These are what each slat from the blinds sit on. These need to all be the same from one piece to the next or else the slats won't be horizontal - they'll be crooked and look terrible.



What I did was measure from the fold at the top of the tape to the first piece of fabric and adjust my fold to make the distance the same from the old tape to the new. In the picture above one part of the new tape is folded and the other is not yet, and it's all lined up so the new pieces will match the old one as well as each other. It took me a while to figure this out and I'm saving you the trouble here. Lining things up like this will also help you to get the other end cut so the new tape won't be any longer or shorter than the old one as well.

Putting the blinds back together isn't hard, but before you get into that go ahead and give everything a good cleaning since it's easier now than it ever will be in the future. The new tape goes in like the old came out, and it's hard to go wrong here. Slide the slats in and thread the two pieces of string back through the holes in the slats. Tie it off at the very bottom, put the clips back on and you're done.





As a side note, if you've ever wanted to see what UV light does to fabric check this out. Once upon a time it was forest green just like the other side is. Tinted windows or solar shades in a hot climate like this are a good thing.



And on to the other part of this post - one finished bedroom. Where are the other two? Not quite there... I need to hang a mirror in one, and do some major cleaning in the main bedroom but they'll be up soon. The office is almost done; I just need to move the desk, hang a few diplomas and evict everything up here that belongs in the kitchen.

This is the room that used to be gold once upon a time ago.







For today I'm moving on to work on the outside. This is a house blog but the back yard needs attention and doing a transformation to the back yard won't take long and will make a real difference to this place. We're still on target for being 100% done with everything next Saturday if you can believe it.

Weekend Update

Nothing too exciting this weekend. I just spent some time staging bedroom #3 and #4, wrapping up all the upstairs bathroom work, and touching up paint in the office behind where the bookshelf was. I still have a lot of work in there; not construction but moving furniture and getting a chair. And moving out all the kitchen stuff that's waiting for countertops to show up but at least it's not anything hard.

Moving forward to next week I'll be up to more cleanup and grout sealing in the kitchen and main bathroom, then changing out the fabric on the blinds in the main bedroom from green to white. There will at least be a couple of pictures of that because I've never done it before and it seems like something really easy to do that can make a big difference for a room. I also need to regrout the fireplace surround and post pics of that with a writeup since it's another easy to DIY project. Most everything coming up this week is touch up work, then I'll move on to landscaping before long. I haven't posted any pictures of the back yard since 2008 so that should be good.

Going from Linoleup to Tile - Things You Should Know

I'm done with the flooring in the bathroom upstairs - basically going from a linoleum (cruddy vinyl tile) to real tile. It's a pretty common thing for people to do but there are a few things that you have to keep in mind or else the whole thing will go horribly wrong.

First thing to think about - the whole floor will be close to an inch higher than it is right now. So if you look at the floor in a bathroom and think about what needs to go up you run into 2 things right away. The toilet and baseboards. Baseboards are pretty easy; pop them off, take the time to sand and paint them, and then put them back on once you're done tiling. The toilet on the other hand is something that gets overlooked and at first can look a lot harder than it really has to be.

On an earlier post I put up a picture of a closet flange


It sits on top of the floor and the drain to your toilet goes there. Now that you've decided to tile you're raising the subfloor (unless you're going on concrete) by installing cement board, plus the actual tile. The wax ring that goes on the toilet drain isn't going to fill that gap. Luckily they make closet flange extenders for this exact purpose. They install pretty easily - spread some wax on the surfaces to be mated and screw them in. Now you're ready to install the toilet.



The other thing you want to keep in mind when you go from linoleum to tile is the actual subfloor itself. If you're installing on top of a concrete surface you're good to go. Wood, like on a second floor / room above a basement or crawlspace takes a little more thought. First off in my opinion you shouldn't tile directly on top of typical oriented strand board (OSB). It'll just flex too much and your tile won't stand a chance. It'll crack and break. If you have a plywood subfloor you're doing better but only if the grain runs perpendicular to your joists. But the other part is, you need to consider what's below the wood. Rather than get into great detail about joist spacing and whatnot, just plug your information in here to see what you're good to install. When everything is set up right you won't have to worry about a thing. It's something you can really feel when you walk on it after a while. A good installation feels really solid - almost like a concrete subfloor. It'll last until you're tired of looking at that kind of tile and are ready for something else.

Oops!

I just spent a couple of minutes going through this and realized that I completely forgot to get pictures of the bedroom in! There won't be a before / after because with the furniture (now living in a guest bedroom upstairs) it was too bad to take pictures of. Anyway there are just a couple of slight problems with getting bedroom pics in right now...

There are 3 changes still in work. 1st is that the mirror came in damaged so we're waiting for another one so that means there's no mirror. It's pretty massive and makes a big difference. Second, the blinds. They still have that *lovely* forest green webbing but I've ordered white. The dark green was and still is one of my least favorite things to come out of the 1990s. Lastly, we ordered some wall art for the huge space above the bed. A king size bed is about 6 1/2 feet across and it's kind of hard to find something that big that still looks good. Luckily we found something that weighs in at about 60 inches across. It's intended to have an inch or two in between panels so it'll spread out a bit. I wanted something great big, but 100 inch wall art that's not actually painted by someone famous and is freakishly expensive is hard to come by. Maybe someday but not now.

Tiling in the upstairs bathroom is coming well and there'll be a brief writeup on how to deal with going from linoleum to tile soon. There are a couple of issues most people probably don't think of that can trip you up if you aren't prepared. I'm going to cut and set the last few pieces of tile today. Tomorrow the toilets go on, grout goes in and baseboards go back where they belong. Then we'll do some painting to get rid of the lovely shade of breen in the small room with the shower and call the bathroom finished. Then it's off to do some staging in the two upstairs bedrooms and touch up paint in the office. The whole upstairs is very close to being done and I'm guessing it will more or less be by the end of the weekend.

Kitchen Work and More

I've been spending a lot of time with the last few things in the kitchen left to do besides the obvious backsplash which can't happen until countertops are in. As of now it's basically done with only touch up paint and sealing the grout remaining.



We got some furniture for the dining room. It was a royal pain to put together, and shockingly enough wasn't made in China (but a country not too far from there). Holes from one piece to the next didn't line up very well. Here's how it came out.



The last really big challenge remaining indoors is to do something about the horrible upstairs bathroom. The wallpaper isn't great, but it's passable. The really bad part was the floor. Someone thought it would be a good idea to take up the linoleum but then must've gotten too scared to tile the floor so instead they got a bunch of u-stick-em tiles (pull the paper off the back and stick 'em to the floor). Those looked terrible and didn't stick to the floor very well at all.



So I decided to do the right thing and put real tile down. I'm not trying for anything fancy here. Just something that's neutral and would go with pretty much anything. Since it's upstairs I had to install some underlayment first. I decided to use 1/2" thick cement board (Perma Base) and it worked pretty well. To make a cut just score it and snap along where you cut. Then to install put thin set down first, then screw it in with 1 1/4" screws. It seems pretty solid. Anyway I'm done installing all the whole tiles and only have the ones that need to be cut next. I'll try and finish those tomorrow, then install the toilets and grout everything on Tuesday.



There's only one small problem but it has an easy solution - the toilets used to sit on linoleum, then junk tiles on the floor. Real tile sits about an inch higher. Luckily they make extensions for the closet flange that will make up the gap. Stick it on with silicone sealant and you're good to go.

So if you're ever going from linoleum to tile you'll need two easy things. An extension for the toilet drain (closet flange) and cement board as an underlayment. Then you're good to go!

The Little Things that Kill

30 pulls. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? I didn't think so either until we bought them and then realized that there aren't templates to drill holes for 5in pulls. That means I get to measure and drill them all by hand. All 60 of them. Two evenings in and we have 4 left - easy ones at least. The horizontal ones that go on drawers are the hardest because they go through 1 1/2 inches of wood and aren't free to move about very much. Holes have to be way too straight and precise or the screw will just push the pull out of its way instead of screw in to the pull... Now you see the problem with this.

The good news is that they look pretty good, and that the kitchen will wrap up on Friday sometime. Pictures to come then.

3 Week Countdown???

The title says it all - we may be closing in on about 3 weeks left until the inside portion of the renovation is finished. What's going on...

Today we buy the next to last part of the kitchen project - the granite. Estimates from Delta looked pretty good, and we're going over there in about 2 hours. Yesterday we bought the sink, tap and soap dispenser. They won't be in for about 2 1/2 weeks but that's about how long it takes to get the granite done anyway. The part for the oven came in and it works great now. So today's to do list:

- crown molding for the cabinets

- finish touching up grout (this is getting old...)

- build panel to sit between the dishwasher and small cabinet

- Caulk along baseboards

- Cut shims under cabinets / install toe kick

- Cut a hole in the small cabinet for an outlet, install outlet.

And finally... CLEAN UP!! Because tomorrow family is coming over so I'll have a little help getting the new fridge in and the old one into the garage.

So moving forward, what's that leave us? A couple of touchup things in the bathroom - caulking below the countertop and above the bathtub, grout in between just a couple of tiles in the bathtub surround, and touching up a bit of plaster. All that will be left in the kitchen is to install the backsplash but I can't do that until countertops are in of course.

After that closes out then we'll be able to do something about the cruddy fake tiles in the upstairs bathroom. Nothing fancy going in there - just regular tile from Lowes. I'm hoping that'll just take a few days. The one question in my mind is how to raise the closet flange for the toilets up to meet the surface of the new flooring. Maybe they make extenders or something... gotta read up on that one.

Then we'll work two projects outside. Remove a couple of bushes that've passed on and do some landscaping in the back yard, and touch up the finish on the concrete foundation. There's a skim coat that's started to come loose in a couple of spots but that's just maintenance. Finally clean up the patio and then we are DONE!

Running out of creative 'kitchen' titles

I had more fun in the kitchen today, in between watching football and helping my other half study for a test next week.

The plaster is almost done in the kitchen. I'm going to have to put a thin coat on in the dining room, but that's not as bad as it sounds. All that's left in the kitchen is the last coat above the cabinets with the oven. Also managed to get everything in so the refrigerator could go back where it belongs, and I can finally use the door to the formal dining room again (hooray!).





I got to spend some time figuring things out on the oven today. Mainly why it takes so long to preheat anything. It seems like a preheat element is burned out, but I could see the big one at the top of the oven glowing so that's obviously not it and there aren't any more in sight. Making things even more confusing was the fact that it'd get really close to being up to temperature and then not warm up any more, never completing the preheat cycle. Then I read a review where someone commented on the glow coming from the convection fan and I definitely didn't see that. I took the cover off the rear wall of the oven and found



So it's warranty time. LG makes it easy - you can register your oven and file a claim online. Trouble is, you navigate to my oven model and then it tells you they're all out of warranty. Trouble is, I bought it new in August, this model is still being sold today, and the paperwork says that you get a 1 year warranty from the date of purchase. How this type of oven, still sold to this day, can be out of warranty is beyond me. In the end it was just easier to order a new heating element from Sears than try and make it through LG's runaround since they're not expensive. It's a shame because they do make nice appliances and the part that failed probably died because things got rough during shipping, but LG really needs to look into things like this. If you're selling something today that comes with a 1 year warranty it's impossible for all of them to be out of warranty already, and if you stop selling them at least wait a while for everything to clear out of the supply chain and don't remove the ability for someone to file a claim online (especially when the 1 year starts when someone buys the thing).

Anyway the moral of the story is... well there isn't one. But if your oven preheats really slowly it's time to have a look at the preheat elements, which are really easy to get to if you can't see them from just opening the door and looking up and down. If they're broken it's pretty obvious.

Bathroom - Before and After

It took far too long to get to this post. Here's the bathroom - before and after.


















Not a lot else going on... just measuring up the kitchen so I can get an estimate for what granite will run in there. I'd like to get going on that as soon as possible because it'll take time to get in. It's the last major expense of the renovation and I'll be glad when it's behind us.