Apr 2008
It's All In The Details
Apr/30/08 08:47 AM
Moscow expressing his excitement about the move.
Last night, Kristin and I grilled out and had a nice dinner on the patio. And for the first time in a very long time, the house was NOT the dominant part of our conversation. I’m not sure if this is an indication of our closeness to our move-in, or a reduction in stress since we are over the dry-wall hump. Either way, it was a nice break.
This morning, in our usual discussion of our daily “game plan”, I ventured to say that “there’s not much left to do before we move in”, while I type this it sounds much more ridiculous than at the time. But really all the major, going-to-have-to-throw-your-clothes-away-when-you’re-finished projects are done. Now it’s just a matter of working out the details and of course doing the floors and painting. We can also order appliances. And here in a couple of weeks, my sister-in-law and her husband the plumber will be coming to visit and then we’ll have running water. Move-in time...
I hope.
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Tips On Painting Primer
Apr/28/08 08:45 AM
Well the sheet rock is up and so we decided to spray the primer this weekend. If you have gutted your house down to the studs and put up new drywall, then I highly suggest spraying on the primer. It is much much faster than rolling.
That said, I’d like to offer up a few tips that I figured out the hard way.
- 1.Cover your floors, even if it is just the subfloor.
- 2. If you rent a sprayer, be prepared to shell out some extra $ for a good working tip, because the one you get will be a piece of $#!*.
- 3.Buy an extra 5 gallon bucket of primer (since you can return leftover primer, unless it’s tinted). Otherwise you will end up going to the home center mid-job, looking as I did (above). And yes the cashier laughed out loud at me.
- 4.Wear a shower cap.
- 5.Start early, first coat before lunch, second coat after. I started right before lunch and second coated after dinner. After the second coat and clean up it was 1:00 in the morning on a work night.
One other thing, here in the south we always complain about how everything is closed on Sundays. The one instance that it actually works out in your favor is with rental places. If you rent it on Friday then you have to return it on Saturday. BUT, if you rent it on Saturday, then you don’t have to return it until Monday; and you only get charged for one day!
America's Most Desperate Landscape
Apr/21/08 08:37 AM
As I’m sure most of you know, I mean if you are as
into DIY as we are, then you have either seen or
entered the DIY Network’s
America’s Most Desperate Landscape
contest. Here is our video entry, please
enjoy...Williams.
And if you think we have a desperate landscape
then
please click here and rate our video.
We really enjoyed making the video, and it was as
good an excuse as any to take a couple hours off from
working on the house.
Cabinet Quote
Apr/18/08 08:36 AM
We have now gotten 2 separate quotes for cabinets. One of which we pretty much knew we were going to go with before we’d received the quote (based on our architect’s recommendation). Both quotes are presented in drawings of what the cabinets will look like.
One quote we got was just the measuring stick for our cabinet quote. It was from Lowe’s and they worked up a quote for us based on their Craft Maid line. All in all it was just ok, and they had left out 2 distinct features that I had requested.
Doug Smith of Smith Cabinet Shop also gave us a quote. This guy came HIGHLY recommended by our architect. I have to say at our first meeting I didn’t see anything that seem to set him apart. BUT, when we got the quote I was so damn impressed I wanted to call the guy right then and ask him if there was some sort of mistake, because it seemed too good to be true. They were EXACTLY the way I wanted them, and he’d made a suggestion in the drawings that showed a different door option than one that I described to him. His option added to the eclectic feel the we were looking for AND it reflected the design of our downstairs closet doors. Wow, this guy was good. On top of that his quote for both the living room AND the kitchen were a solid $2,000 less than what Lowe’s wanted for just the kitchen alone. If I get a chance I’ll post the drawings.
The only drawback is, that we hear he may have some delivery issues. One person that I know used this guy for his cabinets and although he was happy with the quality, he had received the cabinets a full 2 months late. He does however admit that he went to him extra early and presented it as having plenty of time. If Doug is truly an artist, similar to myself, then he has to work by deadlines, the tighter the deadlines the better the work. Our architect assures us that you will encounter this sort of thing with nearly every cabinet maker out there, so if you are going to have to endure it, you might as well get some quality cabinets out of it.
What Is More Work
Apr/16/08 08:35 AM
At first, it seemed like demolition was the hardest and the most physically demanding work of the whole project, and it seemed as if it would not end. But really, I think that we actually put more work into clean-up than demo, because if you think about it we have to clean up the demo and then clean up the construction, then after all is FINALLY finished and complete, what is it that you do?
...clean up.
Renovator Pride T-Shirts
Apr/11/08 08:34 AM
I figured since I have a screen printing press just
laying around then “what the heck” why not print up
some RENOVATOR PRIDE shirts, and who knows, if I sell
a couple then it can offset the hosting fees for the
blog. You can click
HERE
to go to the order page or just click on the shirts
to the right. ----------> ---------->
---------->
How bad-ass will you look to your subs when you walk
up in a “Jolly Renovator” shirt and say “What
arrrrrrr you working on?”
Shirts are $12 plus $3 shipping. These are high
quality shirts, screen printed on 100% cotton, Gildan
brand tees. Sizes range from Medium to Extra
Large, if there is enough interest to justify a
reprint then I will consider additional sizes
(email
me interest in additional sizes). All proceeds from
the sale of these shirts will go to support the
upkeep of this blog. Numbers are limited so hurry.
Friends and family who want one, are welcome to
arrange local pick-up.
Drywall Install
Apr/04/08 08:32 AM
Well the drywall installation has begun. We had the drywall delivered on Tuesday morning and it required 2 trucks! Not because we ordered so much, but because the first truck got stuck in our yard and had to be towed out by the other truck. We now have 2 symmetrical ruts in our yard, both about a foot to a foot and a half deep.
Roberto Diaz of Diaz Drywall showed up to orchestrate the delivery. I’m not sure exactly how many people were on his crew, but it must number at least in the teens. They showed up in 2 “church” vans went to work, cutting and nailing amongst themselves. I’m not sure which was faster, how quickly they put up the drywall or how quickly they spoke spanish coordinating the whole thing. It was a little strange as when I would walk through they would avert their eyes or try to pretend that I wasn’t there. I think that maybe they were worried that I might single one of them out and ask a question... in english. Because at one point I asked a guy a question about the refrigerator water line coming out the wrong side of the wall and he seemed to panic then he ran to get someone who would understand.
So far they have done a fantastic job and they did it in ONE day! The only thing that I noticed was that the crew walled over two light fixture boxes. But I hear that this is a common occurrence. The electrician cut one of them back in and we are going to have to ask about the second one, because once the walls were taped they abandoned the house, to let it dry I would assume.
Since we are over the drywall hump and now we enter the finishings phase, I created a slide show of our progress. I assembled what I refer to as the Before & During slideshow, and you can see the photos by clicking here.
Diy Pocket Doors
Apr/02/08 08:30 AM
I picked up this pocket door frame at Lowe’s for around $50, which seemed pretty reasonable to me since I have never purchased or installed one before.
This Sunday’s project was to install 3 pocket door frames, simple right? Well, first of all I read through the instructions and I’m not sure if I read the english version or the greek version, because I didn’t understand a word of it. All I know is that there were fractions involved.
Plan B: I went to the manufacturer’s website and I downloaded an installation video. It was pure gold. I musta watched the video at least 20 times that morning, in fact I was a borderline expert at how to install the buggers. One thing in the video that really stood out was, “The average installation time for this project is 10 minutes.” This gave me a huge dose of needed confidence.
I began the project and the first hang up I had was the rough openings weren’t what they needed to be. Who would have thought that I should have looked at the rough opening sizes for the pocket doors before I had them framed up. Luckily, the framed openings were a little too big and and the height was a little too short. No biggie, I could just trim off the door height by 3/4”. The frame for all three doors was exactly 1” too wide. Simple fix, right? I just sister a board in to bring it up to the correct size. Only problem is that it requires 1” thick lumber.
Now of all the mysteries of the universe that exist, the most mystifying is the nature of lumber sizing. If you go to the lumber store and buy 1” lumber, it is not 1”. Nope, it is 3/4”. Therefore I would need to buy 5/4” lumber to get the correct thickness, because for some stupefying reason five quarter inches equals one inch. That being said, I challenge you to find 5/4” lumber on a Sunday morning. It is next to impossible. Luckily, I remembered that treated decking planks come in 5/4”, which seems almost as stupefying as the enigma of lumber sizing. So I went to Lowe’s and bought them, I then had to cut them down to the correct width. You know, the width of a 2”x4” which, in fact, is actually 3 1/2”.
Anyway, I got the doors framed in to the correct size. After that I began installing the door. I cut down the headers to the correct size, and this was pretty easy. They have the standard door sizes pre-marked on the headers which really simplifies the sizing and cutting. The installation video said that it only required one person to install the door. Well, I’ve never seen a person with 4 arms nor did I have an extra set I could borrow, so I got my wife to help me hold up the header while I nailed it into place.
After it was all said and done it had taken, NOT the prescribed 10 minutes to install the door. I had taken 6... Hours that is. In all honesty the other 2 doors went pretty quickly, taking about 30 minutes each.
The Orange Foam Incident
Apr/01/08 08:25 AM
Last night was our final run through before the dry wall goes up (being installed as I write this). So we scrambled around until about 1:00 in the morning finishing up all the little details. One of which was, using orange fire-foam to seal off the range hood vent pipe in the attic (which is a fire retardant foam related to Great Stuff foam).
So I gathered up all of the tools that I would need and climbed into the attic from the second floor. From there I sealed myself in with the foam backer board, and Kristin put up the insulation behind that. I would go out the gable vent that I had removed the cover from and placed a ladder to previously.
I trimmed the duct and used the foam to seal the gaps around the duct and the roof vent... This is where it all went horribly awry. “After I sealed the duct I thought, gee I have all this extra. I will seal the duct at the ceiling.” So I bent down and finished off the rest of the can, and at that precise moment I felt a strange “KER-PLOP” right in the middle of my back. Yes, somehow the foam managed to unstick itself from the vent and fall off... onto me. Well, fortunately, not all of the foam fell on me; some, in fact, fell onto the board I was kneeling on. In the process of fussing with the huge blob of orange foam on my back, I managed to plant my knee smack dab into the middle of the blob on the board. This would have been fine had I not been wearing jeans that I had recently ripped the knee out of, the foam squished inside my pant leg.
After a stream of curses, that would have made the burliest of sailors tell me to watch my mouth, I came to realize that if I didn’t reseal the vent above me I would have to come back up here and do it all over again. But I was out of foam... “Wait, there is a huge blob right in front of me.” So I used the closest tool I could find to reapply the blob of foam... my bare hand. It seemed like a good idea at the time, I now know differently. Once it was on my hand it started spreading like a highly infectious disease. It was then on my other hand, on my tools, my clothes; and on top of all of that, the rock-wool insulation from the attic was getting mixed up in it. At this point I realized that I needed to abandon ship before I was permanently encased in orange foam in my attic. I stood up as best I could and hastily made my way to the vent opening and on my way I slipped on the ceiling joist that I was traversing and fell across the other joists (If I’d slipped in orange foam, I would not be surprised). I now have a 2X4 shaped bruise across my ass and side. Kristin came running outside to see if I was OK and honestly, my pride seemed to be hurt worse than anything. I threw the tools out and climbed down the ladder. As I climbed down, I noticed that every step was accentuated with the ripping of the dried foam that was tangled in the hairs surrounding my kneecap. Kristin got a fresh shirt for me to change into and we sat down to read the empty foam canister on what to do in case of skin contact. To my horror, the can said: DO NOT apply a solvent. It said to apply mineral oil and that EVENTUALLY it would wear off...ugh.
I managed to get an exacto blade and “shave” off most of the foam around my kneecap, but no amount of Gojo or scrubbing seems to make any difference to the foam on my hands.