A Good Day's Work

I've gotta say, it's a FANTASTIC feeling when you work for about 6 hours and nearly (I'd say 90%) get a project done. The upstairs hallway had been carpeted with some beige carpet from our old gymnastics center, but after our previous renters had dripped something that stained the carpet to the point of no return - I'm inclined to think they carried something up the stairs that was leaking as there was little breadcrumbs all the way down the hallway.

Anyway, we rolled up the carpet and pad down to the original wood floor, but being so roughed up we decided to go ahead and put down wood laminate in the main hallway as we did in the N/S bathroom hallway. It's the same color as we did the dining room and kitchen areas downstairs, and as I said, almost got the whole thing done today (and had I had about 20more sqft of padding I would've been able to).

 

But as I said, it's a great feeling to actually get something completely done (well, almost)...

Kitchen Kitchen Kitchen

Okay, so I mentioned in the last post that one of the projects Dad and I recently did was the kitchen. The kitchen has always had issues, largely because when the house was built back in 1873, it didn't have a standard kitchen - given there was no indoor plumbing. And once the kitchen was built to accommodate indoor plumbing, it was really small. While it would be wonderful to tear down more walls and remodel the kitchen completely, we just don't have the time. However, what we do have are new'er' kitchen cabinets Dad bought online.

After finding some L-shaped cabinets someone was tearing out of their kitchen (kitchen remodeling must be the 'in' thing now), Dad thought there was a pretty good chance that they would work in our kitchen. After a debate on whether or not we really should redo the kitchen cabinets (I lost), Dad and I went to work on tearing out the old stuff and went to work on putting in the new stuff.

Once the old bottom cabinets were out, we decided to finish the flooring under the new cabinets since we had extra flooring. Once that was done, the work of bring in the new cabinets and leveling off the floor began.

The foundation work on the south side of the house has been a problem before, large in part to the addition of indoor plumbing. When the owners of the house first added on bathrooms, they were located where the breakfast nook is now, between the kitchen wing and the utility wing on the south side of the house. The problem was when they added them, they failed to pour any foundation beneath them, so the added weight pulled down the dining room and the kitchen. Growing up, I could literally put on my rollerblades and roll down north to south in the kitchen, it slanted that much.

Back in 07 when we tore out the bathrooms and added the breakfast nook - our attempt to help increase the kitchen size, we blocked up the foundation on the sound end of the house and got it about an inch within being completely level. That took care of most of the slant in the kitchen, however on the SE corner there was still a little slant, given there is only crawl space beneath that area and it's not really accessible to get leveling jacks in there. So instead, one cabinet by one cabinet we built up using 2x4s underneath, so when we positioned them on the east and south floors, the counter-tops would be level and would then 'trick' the eye and make the kitchen look, well, like it's supposed to look.

The L-shaped cabinets also helped add storage space to the kitchen, and while the additional space makes the kitchen appear smaller in size overall, the storage seems to balance everything out pretty well. While I still have sections of drywall to put up on the east wall and the marble tile counter-tops to install, overall, this is what the kitchen will now look like.

  

Last Bedroom - again

Okay, so it's been a while, but I've finally got good news on the last bedroom frontier - it's nearly done! And when I say nearly done, I mean that it's like 85-90% finished!

After a brief detour, given one weekend Dad decided that we needed to do something in the kitchen - and truthfully we've always known that the kitchen did need work, but were never sure just what to do in the kitchen - I finally managed to get back to working on the last bedroom upstairs, what used to be my Dad's old office.

If you recall my last post, where I talked about having to known down the closet wall in order to create a bigger closet, I finally finished the drywall and mudding that, in addition to hanging sheetrock on the ceiling and the north wall. Anymore, our $20 paint and texture gun works wonders and really is pretty easy to do, so Dad's more to the mind-set of 'if it's not an easy fix, let's just completely cover the (wall/ceiling/insert whatever have you) with sheetrock and spray it!'. So that's what we've been doing. It looks great on the ceilings, we don't even have to paint over it, and once it drys completely for a few days it's pretty easy to use a roller and paint if you need to even out the walls. So needless to say, the NE bedroom has a new ceiling, bigger closet, and newly textured north wall.

Apart from painting touch-ups on the trim and wall, in addition to putting up the shelves for the built-in bookshelf next to the closet and hanging up the remaining Closet-Maid closet stuff, the room is done. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do for carpet - the carpet that we had in there ended up ruined after paint and other stuff got dumped on it from our previous renters, but as far as I'm concerned that's a last minute fix.

So here are the pictures of the finished product (mostly) in addition to what I started out with once I began tearing out the walls of the old closet.

Last Bedroom

Okay, I know it's been a while since I've updated - my fault. Will try to do better next time.

So what has been going on? Well, work on the last bathroom begun with the destruction of the too small closet. We had about a foot of dead space between the room's door (which you can see in the pictures) and the wall for the closet, so we decided to basically pull out the closet wall a foot to eat up the dead space and have a much roomier closet.

So here are pictures of the project so far. It's slightly on hold until I figure out how I want to run electricity for a light, given that it's now a bigger closet it really should have one. The other issue is that on the left side of the pictures, you'll notice the new wall doesn't go all the way across. This is because that corner of the room is an old fireplace chimney. Since I didn't want to have to try and drill or nail into the bricks (given their age they'd probably crumble or fall apart if I tried), I'm planning on putting in a built in bookshelf there.