This Girl’s House

We’ve been shopping a while for flooring. We looked at wood, laminate, cork, slate, and ceramic and porcealan tile. It’s important for me to have an easy care floor that doesn’t show a lot of dog hair and dirt since right now I spend a lot of time cleaning floors and carpet. We live on a lake, have two large dogs, and our lot is still a “construction zone” according to one of our neighbors. We still have years left of site development work to do. I had finally settled on a teak wood and a raja slate, but I discounted both for solid reasons. One of my neighbors owned a dog kennel and she told me that eventually with two large dogs, they’d wear a path in the hardwood. Stevie found the raja slate to be too rough for his feet. That left me back to square one again until I saw this add on Craig’s list. I had always been attracted to the wood look tile. We had hoped for something darker, but what we found was not that light, and at 62 cents a square foot delivered, it seemed like quite a deal. We bought enough to do the whole house if we feel like it.

Tonight, This Old House had an episode about painting Kitchen Cabinets.  They went into detail about the process.  Geeze, I wished I had seen this episode sometime last summer before I started painting my kitchen cabinets.  It would  have saved me some time and money.  On the other hand, in the end, I pretty much did what they did, but I used a different kind of paint, and I’m satisfied with the job.  However, if you’re going to be painting your kitchen cabinets, this episode is a must see.  They recommended 5 coats (1 primer, 2 coats of acrylic and 2 coats of water based polyurethane), the home owner ended up doing 6 coats (1 primer, 3 coats of acrylic and 2 coats of water based polyurethane).  The home owner also used foam rollers, just as I did. 

To replace what’s  I need without touching the greatroom carpet, I’m looking at 200 square feet.  Looking at Lisbon Cork Dali color, http://www.lumberliquidators.com/catalog/product.jsp?productId=5188&categoryId=448&sectionId=2&subCategoryId=11.  Current price is $3.69.

I’m knee deep into the job of painting the kitchen cabinets.  Hope we have the job done by Thansgiving.  Right now I’m doing the most painting in the garage, even as cold as it is.  I misplaced my camera but I’ll post pictures later.  We’re painting the standard builder’s grade cabinets, bittersweet chocolate.  I’ve seen this same Expresso color on cabinets throughout the home stores lately.  Lessons I’ve learned from doing this job include:

• Do a really good sanding job before you start painting.  Don’t just rough them up.  The underlying finish can prevent the paint from sticking and it will later chip off.  I’d rather  have the paint wear off as opposed to chip off, if it’s eventually going to come off. 
• Tape off the areas adjacent to where you will be painting.
• Apparently 3 coats does the job.  In between coats, I use a fine steel wool and buff the paint in and take the shine off.
• Diagram your cabinets on a piece of paper and assign each cabinet a code.  As you take off the doors of each cabinet and pull out the drawers, mark the doors and drawers with the same code.  You can put the code in the hole left by the door hardware. 
• And yes, remove the door hardware and place that in a little baggy marked with the door code.

I’m looking around for a few good pot lid and pot rack ideas.  Here are a few on my list.

Where to Store Pot Lids

Organize Pot Lids Using Curtain Rods

Pot Lid Organizer

DIY Kitchen Potrack

Wall Mounted Potrack

Inside the Mind of a Monkey

One of the items on my fall list is to complete wiring of the garage.  This is the attached garage that I’m talking about which is basically where I hang out, keep my tools and do my thing, as opposed to the detached garage that Stevie does work in.  When the house was built, they put one outlet in the entire space.  I’m adding 6 outlets and I’m putting in a lot of additional lighting, because that’s the second thing I hate; how dark it is with the garage door closed, and very little lighting.

Anyway, for those ladies who are scared of wiring, I have this to say to you.  A lot of things in life are a whole lot scarier.  For example, it was a lot scarier having a baby, learning how to drive, building a home, or changing jobs.  Wiring is a lot like beading.  There’s a lot of wire twisting, making sure you use the right wires, and put the right wires in the right areas.  If you take care, you can get the job done.  The first thing you need is a little knowledge.  I have a lot of great books on doing wiring, but my very favorite is the Sunset You Can Build Wiring.  It comes equipped with step by step instructions, pictures and diagrams.  Then you need the right tools, the right size wire, and extra supplies.  I also like to take pictures before I make changes, so it will help me remember how things were hooked up just in case I have to back out of a change.

Today, I installed 2 outlets on one side of the garage.  I had an outlet in the smallest bedroom that I used to start my middle receptacles, but because of where I was installing the 2 outlets, I needed to remove the bedroom outlet, pull the wire from the backside into the garage, run the wire to the first outlet, then run wire from that outlet back to the bedroom outlet, and then from that outlet I ran it to another outlet 4 feet over, and then ran the wire from there.  For middle run receptacles I used pigatils and wire nuts. 

 

The two receptacles in the garage were both installed as single location gfci’s, 4 feet above the floor.  There is a picture of that diagram here.  It took me about 4 hours.  I had a lot of twisting of wires to do, and some work on my knees, but in the end, I was really satisfied with the result.  I still need to cleanup.  And I need to repair the sheetrock after inspection, but I’ll do that once I have all the outlets done.  I’ll insist on having my wiring inspected because it’s the law and because I want that extra insurance that my work was OK. 

Anyway, while I tested to make sure that the gfci’s were working properly and the electricity was flowing ok, I’m going to wait until Stevie gets home to verify that everything looks ok, before I turn back on the circuit on that panel permanently.  

So yesterday I was really feeling lousy.  I’d been dodging sickness for a week or two, and it finally said, feed me medicine.  After sleeping most of the day, I got up, shook the sleep out of my eyes and headed to Home Depot, my favorite spot when I’m looking for air conditioning.  After picking up some paint supplies, I headed over to the contractor area where I shopped shingles.  Let me tell you, custom shingles are expensive.  They start out at about $15 a square foot as opposed to the standard shingle (premier) at $1.79 a square foot.  I plopped my money down for bundles of the standard shingle and had the truck loaded and ready to go.  We’re going to shingle the peaks of the garage.  Can’t wait to see it.

We just finished the sheetrock job.  We had removed the little small pantry and that mean, we had to repair one wall.  We closed off an opening between the dining room and the kitchen with framing.  And then we also did some rewiring in the kitchen.  This is one of those jobs that is essential before we installed the rest of the cabinets, put in new flooring and finished the painting.

 Let me begin by saying that while we installed the sheetrock ourselves, we had a professional do the taping, mudding and sanding.  This is money well spent at about $500 (It took about 4 trips for the guy to get the walls just right) and neither one of us are experienced in this area.  I thought about trying to find some way to shield the area from the rest of the house so I could limit the dust that would fly, but this job was in the great room and there were three walls involved with a twelve foot height.  At the time, I thought there might be no way to prevent dust from getting everywhere, but now that I’m knee deep in cleaning up from that job, I’m thinking I could have tried to find a better way.  I will have dust for weeks to clean up starting with the electronics and working to the kitchen.  Also, even after I clean one area, you come back a week later and still find dust settling.   This is an area where a little time spent preparing for the job would have made a big difference with the cleanup afterwards.

The other thing I had to worry about was the texture on the wall.  In general, the walls were lightly textured when the house was built.  If you look at the picture below in the article on wine glass storage you can see the degree of texture on the wall.  I prefer smooth walls and the guy who did the drywall did the walls, but he just sprayed with drywall primer.  I don’t have any experience doing texture and acquiring the texture tools is a large investment for such a small space.  I was able to address this problem by buying a texturizer 9 inch roller.  I bought my roller at Home Depot for about $8.  Here’s a site that has pictures of what a Goop Loop roller looks like.  Using Primer, I used the roller over the non-textured areas.  I was suprised by how well this roller mimic’d the texture.  And in fact, key to success in this area is that lighter is better.  If you miss a spot or find that your texture is too lightly applied, you can always wait till it dries and go back over it.  For those areas that were too small for the roller, you can mimic the technique with a small brush.  Here’s a great reference for how to achieve this effect with a brush.

Steve and I have lived together for 3 years now, and it looks like it will be forever.  Our roles have largely gone down the line of traditional male and female roles when it comes to distribution of work in the house.  While it’s an extreme change for me, I can live with it.  I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to cooking and cleaning, and I’m not afraid to get some help in here when I need it, so that’s OK.  But then there’s the subject of our home projects.  There are the projects that we work on together, then Stevie projects and Teresa projects. 

Now the Stevie projects go ok.  I let him do his thing.  The Together projects are slightly rambuctious.  Stevie likes to do things very exactly, and if he’s off by an 1/8″ he gets upset with himself and he wants us to do everything over.  On the other hand, I look at the project and say, will being 1/8″ off affect performance, or is this some asthetic issue.  If it’s an asthetic issue, then I say do I have time to do it over, or do I need to use this time for something else. 

So it is, with my current project (which I plan to provide more details on later).  I’m building a pantry in a large closet next to kitchen that we’ve used as a dumping ground for coats we rarely wore.  I’m cutting out the wood panels and I did a dry fit, but I didn’t quite plan how I would fit the cabinets into the closets after I screwed and glued the boxes together.  Anyway, Steve didn’t like the way the cabinets were put together.  On one side, the back side mind you, I was off by an 1/8 inch.  I told him it was a pantry and the shelves would always contain cans and boxes of cereal.  no one would notice that problem, and if they did, I wouldn’t care.  My major concern …..  Is the cabinet strong enough to hold all these cans, and what do I need to do to secure the cabinets to the walls.  I told him that Stevie that he needed to let me make my  own mistakes.  He hemmed and hawed for a day or so and then he helped me put a long length of heavy wood on my saw horses, so I could cut them out with my circular saw.  Did I tell you that he bought me that circular saw and he also taught me how to use it?  Isn’t he a lovely partner?

I found some good recipes for homemade cleaners at TipNut.com. There are dozens of recipes here. My favorite seems to be the Lemon Air Freshener.

It was a very wet wet winter and spring this past year. This next week we are almost guaranteed a full week of sun, and accompanied with the three day weekend, Teresa has decided to use this time to get out the camping gear and work on the 5th wheel. Now, did I tell you about the very very wet winter we had. Well in one particularly wet week, we had a solid downpour for maybe 3 or 4 days. The gutters could not keep up, and water just dumped off the roof and went down into the crawlspace. After the deluge, there was 2 or 3 feet of water in the crawlspace. With the help of the pump and some good luck, that water disisipated in a day or two, but it left it’s mark. We keep all of our camping gear, all of our outdoor furniture in the crawlspace and it was time to take a look at the damage. With some work, we hauled everything out. The camp gear was stored in these 2 feet tall by 5 feet long rubber bins, and when we picked them up it was clear that they also contained water. Our sleeping bags were wet and smelled of mildew. I laid them out on the ground to dry out for a day, and then one by one, ran through the washing machine, a couple of times using a solution of tide, baking soda and vinegar. Followed by a rinse of something sweet smelling. It did the trick. The 5 wheel is getting a vinegar and bleach spray and wash and Stevie is replacing the roof. Not sure it will be ready for our first week of camping, but we will using it this summer.

I’ve been thinking about creating new slip covers for an old beige couch we have in the living room. Here is a really good article about doing reupholstery, but I’m still thinking slip covers because I want something I can slip off and throw into the wash.

I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with the cabinet situation.  I finally discovered what brand of cheap builder’s cabinets were installed.  The manufacture name is Aristokraft.  I’d like to take the line of cabinets all the way up to the ceiling, but that will only work if I can find the same brand or close to it.  We will see.