More doors!

A while back we put in a new front door. And while its a lovely door, since we've put it in, we've realized two things. One, it would be nicer if it had a blind and two, we have a another "front" door that is pitifully, woefully, inadequate to the task. So we had a brilliant idea. Take out the door and move it just a bit to the left, and down the stairs. 

So that we can give this old, tired, hollow core door a nice final rest. 

Not to mention retiring the screen door that crapped its pants about a year ago.

So Matt and Wayne got to work on just that. We bought another door at Mendards, and they took out the one we've been using (carefully, carefully)

And replaced it with the new one, which has an awesome build in blind (it's up in this picture but I promise it works)

Then they took out the old door.

And gave it a fairly Narnian send off, if I do say so myself

Ah, so much better, and sturdier. And they even raised it up a bit so that the sill was an appropriate height above the sidewalk.

In other random science news, I filled up our soap dispenser with some new clear soap, but there was still a little of the pearly yellow stuff down in the bottom. It sat all day and when I came home, it looked like this. Like a very tame lava lamp or a magical mushroom aquarium. Lovely really.

It wouldn't be a reno

If we didn't run into some plumbing that needed updating in our lovely house. This time, it was the sink, extending into the basement. We (well, Matt and Wayne) pulled out the old copper piping and replaced it with some pvc to allow them to move the garbage disposal (which switched sides in our new configuration).

You remember the old sink, right?The one that came out just a little over two weeks ago. Thought I'd throw in a before just to remind everyone how lovely it was.

And here are Matt and Wayne in the basement, updating the old piping.

The new sink, in all it's pre-installation glory. 

Mid-install

 And after! So much better. Lovely really. And just look at that faucet with it's fancy springy sprayer. Pretty awesome if I do say so myself.  And the white looks so much nicer than the steel. Plus if you look carefully, you might notice a familiar face.

Yep, its our old purified water spigot, the chrome one, with a facelift. Turns out, they sell oil rubbed bronze paint, and after a good rub down with some sand paper and a coat of primer you can save yourself 40 bucks lickety split. I have to touch it up a bit, because they had to install it before it got a chance to completely dry, but it looks pretty good, even with that. I'll post some picks once I put on the second coat.

And just when we thought we were done, we discovered a fun surprise. Our old water softener was weeping, slowly down in the basement all by itself. So we decided to retire it for a new model.

Also much better, much more, this decade, right?

A series of difficulties involving a backsplash

Well, after only a year, its finally time. Time to put up the tile we bought last January. Again, while I was at work Wayne, Matt and Gina got a jump on the job and started cutting and putting up tiles.

I wasn't there to witness the initial steps, but I did get in time to watch the decorative glass and second layer go up. And snap this snazzy shot of Matt working the tile saw. Apparently, he did most of the cutting. Which leads me to difficulty 1 of 5 of our poor naive project plan-  Cuts. Cuts take time, and easier projects have less of them and our design called for cutting every single tile. So Matt spent a lot of time down in our basement, a lot.

We got to the point where we had all the glass up, and were starting to put up the top pieces when we stopped to take stock of what was left. And here we meet difficulty 2 - Buying enough tile. That's right, Matt and I did the math, and we even ordered 10% extra, like the lady recommended. But we must have miscalculated, or more probably, not thought about how many whole tiles we needed, because, due to what was a perfectly normal amount of mistake making (actually, way fewer mistakes than Matt and I probably would have had left to our own devices) we ended up a couple tiles short. So, we did what any normal person would do, we called the tile shop.

Enter difficulty 3- Timing. If you buy tile and wait a year to put it up, they might, just might, discontinue the tile. Which in our case, they did. It was gone, everywhere,  ne'er to return. We did manage to find a store in Milwaukee that had something the guy swore was identical (despite costing about 50% more than our original purchase), so I had him hold it, but no one wanted to start a drive to Milwaukee at 5pm on Friday night, especially to buy expensive tile we weren't sure would match.

Thus, bringing us to difficulty 4 - Sharpies. Now Sharpies are a lovely product, and despite their claim to be a permanent marker, any scientist worth their salt knows that a little acetone or ethanol will take Sharpie right off glossy surfaces. So it seemed like a pretty good choice for marking the tile, nice clean lines. Probably will come off, right? Well, not exactly. Luckily, during this lesson into the micro-porosity of marble, only two tiles were harmed, which for any other project would be a stellar mistake rate. But unluckily for us, we were short, you guessed it, two tiles for our original plan and due to difficulty 2 we didn't have any extra and difficulty 3 couldn't get any more.

So we turned to the good old internet and discovered that a poultice of flour and hydrogen peroxide, wrapped in plastic and left to dry, worked for a lot of people to draw permanent marker out of marble. And we tried it:

The good thing about this plan was that it allowed us to put of all the rest of the tile except for the area that was left without its pieces, just behind the stove. As you can imagine, this took a couple hours and at the end of it we went to check on the tiles we were trying to doctor and found out (you can probably guess this) that poultices wrapped in plastic achieve complete dry-out at a glacial rate. And we didn't really want to wait, not when we only had a few square feet left.

So we put our heads together and mocked out a new plan. We had some left over decorative glass, some smaller pieces, and two full tiles left. After a lot of measuring and some bleary eyed fraction math (damn you English system, no one should be made to do fractions after 11pm), we came up with a plan, loosely based on the picture you see below:

Which we immediately put into action. Ok, not quite immediately, because in my design, despite already having encountered difficulty 1 (Cuts) I came up with a plan that called for poor Matt to cut pretty much every side of the tiles in the design. Luckily, he and Wayne are rockstars and totally pulled it off while I prayed in the other room and watch "The Good Wife" with Gina. We were all up till 3am, but by the time we went to bed, all the tile was on the wall and all that remained was a few lone soldiers in a bucket that didn't make the cut (no pun intended, of course)

Anxious to see the entire finished product? Well so were we, after all we still had to grout! The big reveal is coming though, don't worry.

Doors!

Despite the gigantic winter storm that threatened to ruin our plans, Wayne and Gina managed to make it safely to Milwaukee. In fact, because of the winter storm, they called the airline and got their flights moved up for free. So not only did they make it in safe and sound, but we got a whole extra day!

I had to go to work on Thursday, but everyone else wasted no time in getting busy working on the house. We've had two slab doors sitting in our living room for about a year now, and well, it was about time that they got out of the living room and onto some hinges. Turns out, it was quite an ordeal, since our house is, well, eccentric. You can see the lovely before below:

And then the final stages of putting in the new paned door for the staircase, including Wayne drilling the hole for the knobs (which doesn't come pre-drilled on a slab door). It was quite a struggle to get them up, and I know we couldn't have done it without help.

And then, the (nearly) finished product. All that's left now is to paint them and put the trim back on (and take the plastic off the glass so that you can actually see through the door to the stairs). Also, check out the custom stop on the bedroom door (that pale bit all around the frame). The stuff we could buy at the store just looked way too wimpy, so Wayne and Matt made their own! It looks pretty awesome, if I do say so. 

Kitchen Counter Redo, day 2 (and 3, and 4)

Saturday morning, we woke up bright and early to tackle our too-big-hole problem. Our (ok, my) bright idea involved cutting a horseshoe shaped pieces from the old island counter that has been living in our garage since it was replace last november with the vastly prettier butcher block. So, in order to facilitate this, I needed to trace the sink size, like so:

And then traced that onto the old counter, which we set up on saw horses in the basement. Then I used the sink guide that came with the sink to trace the inside line. And then I left poor Matt to cut it out with a jig saw while I ran to Home Depot for some supplies. Well, he did a great job, but what with all that tracing and it being a horseshoe shape, well, it didn't quite fit right:

Actually, the picture makes it look worse than it was, it did fit, it just stuck out and when we measured it, it ended up making the hole too small anyway. So we went with vastly improved and much simpler plan of just building out two sides

Or course, we also had to build out below the little bits of counter so that it was actually supported. It took longer than I'd like to admit to get to the step you see in the picture above, but gosh darn it, we got there.

That being done, it was time to move on to the big show, putting down the base coat and the paint chips. Now, this was stressful because you only have 20 minutes to apply the chips once the base coat goes down, so I don't have any pictures of the "during" but here's what we ended up with at the end of the day Saturday:

Then we have to leave it sit overnight to let the basecoat cure and make sure the chips stuck. On Sunday we got up and proceeded by scraping off the excess chips (and vacuuming up the loose ones) so we could put on the topcoat (after another copious round of sanding with the provided tools).

We were on schedule, all ready to go, but as I was wiping everything down to get up the last of the dust, tragedy struck. You could still see the old counter through the new cover. Now, I don't know if we overthought things, or didn't put down enough basecoat, or going from white to dark brown was just too much, but honestly, you could clearly see the old counter and I knew it was going to bother us forevermore. So after some dejected fuming and a brief look at what new counters would cost (more than we wanted to spend, even for new formica) we did the only thing we could think of and, that's right, went back to square one. We bought another kit and, rinse, lather, repeat, we applied another basecoat, let it sit overnight, scraped and sanded and finally got around to putting on the clear stuff Monday night (after, I might add, a patch session that put us starting the project at midnight)

But, despite the lack of sleep, the heart ache, the extra money for another kit, and the persistent feeling that we must be some kind of idiots to screw up an idiot-proof kit, it looks lovely and we are very happy with it. Next steps are to take off the tape and let it cure for a week, which puts us getting the sink in just before Wayne and Gina have to head back to Marlyand. Wheeew.

Back to it

Well, as some of you know, the job hiatus put a minor damper on our home improvement projects. Something about spending a ton of time networking and the constant nagging fear that perhaps you won't find something really put the kibosh on even thinking about home improvement. But, as it normally does, everything worked out and I've been gainfully employed for about a month now, which means it's more than high time to get back on the horse and do some home improvement.

So, we turned out eyes back to the kitchen and decided that it was time to maybe complete a project. It didn't hurt that Matt's parents kindly agreed to come out again and help us finish up. But, first things first, that old tired countertop had to go. So we went to Menards and bought the Rust-o-leum kit we've had our eye on (which miraculously had gone down in price) and got started.

The box advertised that you could complete the project in a weekend, so we started friday night with prepping. With Matt's parents around to help, we felt it was time to not only redo the counter and (finally) put up the backsplash but also replace the sink and faucet.

The sink is a cast iron Kphler and the picture doesn't do it justice, it's pretty, I promise. But before any of this could get into the counter, the old stuff had to come out. So we set about taking out the old sink and faucet:

It actually didn't take too long to get the old stuff out, but once we did, we noticed a slight problem. The hole for the old since was about half an inch too big each way for the new sink. However, since it was getting late, we tabled that issue for the evening and proceeded with step 1 of the kit, which is scratch the living daylight out of the old counter to remove the gloss in to allow the base coat to stick.

It's a little hard to see the scratches in the second photo, but I assure you, they are there. After that, we talked quite a bit about the sink and how to fix it and came up with, frankly, some pretty dumb ideas. Which we actually tried out, but more about that in the next post.