What's this? An update? It can't be!

And yet, here you are. Reading this. Huzzah!

Okay, I really have no excuse as to why I haven't made a proper post since... oh my jebus. October?! Really? Wow. I really suck at this whole blogging thing.

Still, there's no time like the present, so how about I fill you in on all the things we HAVE been doing, and pay a little less attention to ... um ... the stuff I haven't? I mean, in my defence, we've been really busy with things like work, and family visits, and - yes - working on the basement. We've also cleaned the gutters, raked the leaves, moved a metric shit-ton of stuff in from the garage, and even found time to argue about whether we should get another cat or not. (No. No, we should not.)

But you didn't come here to read about the standard trials and tribulations of owning a house - you came here to read about how much it sucks to do your own basement reno! And in that regard, my friends, I can definitely help you out.

So... where were we? Ah, right... we had painted the floor in the workshop, got the carpets installed, and we passed final occupancy. (Have I really not posted since the CARPETS went in? Good lord....) Well, once the inspector had gone, it was time to install the floor in the laundry room. To be honest, I wasn't exactly planning on doing this until the new year, but the Top Brass are coming for Christmas, and we kinda wanted to be able to show off a "finished" (or, as we decided, "damn close to finished") when they arrive.

So we started by moving all the enormous, heavy machines out of the laundry room and washing down the floor. As a quick reminder of what our laundry room floor looked like at that stage, voila:



I believe the term for that is "fugly". At any rate, we certainly wanted to cover that abomination up as quickly as we could. Of course, like EVERYTHING in the damn basement, covering it up was a lot harder than I had expected. Oh, and it involved Tapcons, too! Joy!

I suppose that, given the alternative, it went a lot more smoothly and with less ouches than tongue and groove plywood would have, but it was still a largely unpleasant task. Most of the pieces were too large to cut on the little table saw and, as winter's here, the rains precluded setting up the big table saw in the driveway. So the jig was pressed into overtime service to cut all the panels and get them laid out.

A little note here for anyone thinking of doing DriCore (or, as in our case, Sub-Flor) in their basement as I don't think I'll do a whole "Is It Worth It Post" on that alone: make sure your floor is as level as possible. I'm not kidding. This stuff really wasn't made to go over a wavy-ass floor like ours and the levelling kits don't really work for shit. But we weren't about to spend the time, money, and effort to rent a concrete scraper and take up the top layer of concrete so we could lay down a layer of Portland Cement to level the floor. I know, I know, Mike Holmes would not approve, but then Mike Holmes probably wouldn't use this crap anyway.

Anyway, here's what it looked like after about four hours of laying SubFlor:



Yeah. I got a little faster as I went along, but not much. All told, given a couple of breaks, a few sick days, and the occasional more pressing concern, it took us a good three weeks or so to get all the panels down. Oh, and we also completely rebuilt, restructured, and redesigned the cupboard under the stairs. My material estimates were pretty good though - I was only short by two panels. Here's a couple more shots of in progress and the final product and new closet:









Looks pretty damn spiffy, eh? No? Well, we agree. Looked like crap, and had an unpleasantly splintery texture (especially in socks). So it was back off to the Home Despot/Rona to see what would could use to cover over it. The War Department had seen these neat vinyl planks that looked like hardwood in a restaurant, and she thought they would look good in our place. Well, like everything else in this project, we couldn't find them anywhere... oops. Sorry - I meant to say we actually found exactly the ones we had in mind, and they were very reasonably priced. (Yeah, it scared me a little too. I mean, that's just weird.)

Fortunately, the vinyl planks only took three days, but, seriously, what a TOUGH three days they were. My knees, back, hands, and neck were absolutely killing me by the time I finished.

Totally, totally, TOTALLY worth it. Damn, that is a fine looking floor... sad that I'm not going to post any pictures of it. No, really - it's all taped up for painting, and has cables and lights, and cardboard strewn across it. I'll wait until it's cleaned up a bit. Well, fine, one of the floor in progress, just so you can see what the vinyl planks look like and how much cleaner they look than the Sub-Flor tiles:



Anyway, I know I promised some shots of the finished bathroom, and maybe even some of my office with the furniture in place, but I'm missing the final episode of Canada's Worst Driver. So, nyaah.

More later.




For reals this time.




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The briefest of updates....

I was having a conversation (over Instant Messenger, of course) with someone the other day, bemoaning how long things seem to be taking now that we're close to being finished.

As I told her, we're finding it really hard to stay motivated.

So we don't.










New post and pictures to come shortly. I promise.
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We've reached another milestone

Or should I say, we've PASSED another milestone...

At any rate, there we were two weeks ago, merrily enjoying our new carpet, and busily moving stuff back into the office from the garage where it had lain forgotten and ignored for (great Caesar's Ghost!) a year and a half. I had just found a home for all of my files and papers in a new filing cabinet (scored for free from the War Department's work - sweet!) and was preparing to start filling up the bookcase.

Then the War Department woke up and realized something rather disheartening. We still hadn't had the final occupancy inspection.

Of course, this meant removing all of the stuff from the filing cabinet, putting it back into boxes, and finding a place to store the boxes while we finished off the last couple of things we had to do before the inspector could come and look.

The first of these things was the bane of our entire existence, the dye test. (See here for the whole sordid story of why the dye test has nagged us since Day One.) We had done all that work on the drains, but had never actually called the city back to have them make sure all our work wasn't for naught, and that we really are connected to the city storm drains.

As usual, and of course, getting the dye test done meant I had to physically present myself at City Hall and fork over the sixty bucks in person. I wanted to book the final occupancy inspection at the same time, but I had this niggling little feeling that if I showed the least amount of cockiness, the karmic bastards in charge of home renovation would make the dye test fail or something, and we'd be scrambling around with picks and shovels in the rain. I resisted the capriciousness of fate and simply booked the dye test.

Which, of course, went off without a hitch. These pipes are clean!

That left the final pre-inspection task: building a cover for the electrical panel. Which we've been putting off and putting off because we KNEW it was going to be an absolute bitch to design, and an even bigger pain in the ass to build.

And we were right.

As usual, the best way to explain why this thing was such an enormously unpleasant undertaking would be to illustrate it with a picture. This one's from a while back, but aside from the color of the walls, nothing in the general area had changed at all:



Covering the actual panel itself wasn't really the problem. The real difficulty lay in designing something that would cover the corner and the ceiling and tie into the bulkhead without impeding anyone trying to get into the panel to work on something. Oh, and of course, I hadn't really framed in any extra support to attach whatever we finally did design to the wall. Bad Don.

Anyway, after a few heated discussions and some wildly unfair accusations of incompetence leveled against the cats, we decided to take the simplest approach, and just build a cover in place using 1/4-inch plywood.

So I hauled out my trusty framing implements and some scrap pieces of two-by-four and set to work. Several hours and a couple of minor injuries later, I had this:



Then I made these:



Then I attached them to the framing, filled, sanded, and painted them, cut and painted a door, attached some magnets, and now it looks like this:




Ta da!

Not the most elegant of solutions, but it actually doesn't look too bad (from a distance), and it didn't seem to even warrant the inspector's notice, so I'm going to call it a job well done.

Fortunately, you don't have to book the inspections in person, but you do have to be at home to let the inspector in, and as luck would have it, (Injury Report Exclusive!) I was home nursing a really sore neck that day. Which I'm pretty sure was caused by the awkward angle at which I had to hold my head so I could paint the bottom of the electrical panel.

Anyway, the inspector showed up, checked the interconnected smoke alarms, had a look at the programmable timer for the bathroom fan, signed the papers, and left.

We passed our final occupancy inspection! Wooo!

Of course, this is by no means the end of the reno. It just means we don't have anyone checking up on our work anymore.

Anyway, lots more to come, including some shots of the finished (yes, FINISHED) bathroom, and the re-furnished office.


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Perimeter Drainage: Is it worth it?

Welcome back to our special series, Is It Worth It?, where we ask the question no one else (except the people on Canada’s Worst Handyman, of course) dares to ask: are all those things you do during a basement renovation really worth doing yourself? Or should you just bite the bullet and hire a professional before you really screw things up?

Last time, we covered demolition, and it was pretty much an unqualified “give ‘er!” This time, something trickier: digging out your perimeter drains and replacing the weeping tile.

Our experience
Oh man, do I really have to relive this?

Well, digging was one of the very first things we started, and if you must know, we still haven’t completely finished filling in all of the holes. There’s still a dandy little impression in the driveway that requires some concrete/asphalt work.

But to recap the overall process, here’s what we did done dug as diggers:

• We dug a trench about four feet deep and two feet wide across three-quarters of the back of the house - all told, about thirty feet long (including the bit that went around the corner).


• We dug a two-foot-by-four-foot hole, about six feet deep, on the west side of the house, and another, roughly the same size, through the asphalt driveway on the east side of the house.


• We dug a trench 12 inches wide and 24 inches deep across the front lawn for the new water service.


• And, of course, the hole to end all holes, the giant monster in the front flower bed which, by the time all was said and done, measured six feet by eight feet, and was a little more than ten feet deep. And yes, it really is that big, and no, it really doesn’t look that impressive in pictures. You have to stand in it to get the full effect. (I really took a lot of pictures of that hole, didn’t I?)

Pros:
There really isn’t much in the way of “pro” for this. I guess you could make a case that doing it ourselves let us progress at our own pace, which meant that making holes for the plumber bigger, or digging an extra clean-out for the Roto-Rooter man, didn’t entail having to stay home from work while we waited around for some chain-smoking deadbeat to come by and hand-bomb a few shovelfuls of dirt over the fence until he passed out from the heat and the six beers he drank at lunch.

Um… where was I? Oh, right. We could go at our own pace, work on the holes that needed work when we had to, and didn’t have to pay someone to do it for us. Those are your “pros”.

Cons:
You do know that they make people do this sort of manual labour as punishment, right? I mean, it’s HARD. It’s even harder if all you do is sit around on your secretarial spread all day, staring at a computer screen, and then try to put in a few hours of shoveling after dinner. I dunno if it gets any easier if you do it for a living, but it sure couldn’t be any worse.

Oh, and let me assure you, it’s not without hidden costs: I went through an entire bottle of Vitamin I last summer. So, yeah. There’s that.

Is It Worth It?
Yeesh... you know, I’m really not sure about this one. I mean, on one hand, it’s just digging. It doesn’t exactly require a high degree of technical acuity, if you know what I mean. It’s something just about anybody can do, and requires nothing more than a shovel and a wheelbarrow. And, of course, a pick if you happen to be unlucky enough to live on a lot comprised entirely of clay. But really, that and a little time in the salt mines are enough to tackle the job.

That being said, I have to admit that if we were to do this all over again, I think we would have bit the bullet and at least tried to hire somebody. Manual labour is generally pretty cheap, and for a few hundred dollars, we probably could have had it all done in a day or two, as opposed to dragging it out for months (or - cough - years). While it’s certainly true that finding contractors to do that sort of work has been nearly impossible in this town for the past few years, even if it took a couple of weeks to line them up, it still would have been done faster in the end.

At the very least, I can assure you that I’d rather not do that much digging again – unless I get to rent a Bobcat!

Next time: framing!

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Winding down the reno

Yes, it's true, we're starting to actually finish things. For instance, we've already started bringing in the stuff from the garage and putting it into my office. Which, of course, turns out to be another one of those hidden renovation costs that they always forget to tell you about on the home renovation channel.

You see, when you spend more than a year of your life doing a renovation, and blow through enough money to buy a new car (not including the money you may or may not have spent on a new car), when the time comes to move back into those lovingly renovated rooms, your old crap that you stashed away a year ago starts looking pretty damn ratty sitting on that nice new carpet, next to the carefully painted walls.

So, of course, we find ourselves having to buy some new furniture...

Anyway, I'm saving the "after" pictures of the office until I get all of the furniture and artwork in place, so this won't be an especially graphic-intensive post. I do have some pictures, however, so let's get this party started.

One of the pictures I didn't post last time was this puppy here:



That's all of the SubFlor (aka Dri-Core) panels we need to do the laundry room. Yes, they ARE just stacked in the workshop for now. We wanted to save them for the weekend my brother was in town - ssssh! He doesn't know this is going to be a working vacation yet! Hee hee hee!

Oh, and note how spiffy that freshly-painted floor looks. That paint turned out really nice. You know, once we did four separate coats (two overall, but we had to do the room in two goes).





Anyway, that's about where things are. Oh, and I wanted to take a picture of how awesome the grass looks in those patches we seeded three weeks ago... but I forgot, and now it's dark. Instead, I'll leave you with another shot of the awesomeness that is my office carpet:



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Wanna see something cool?

Carpets!



Woo!

Yeah, there's a lot more to come, but I felt I should at least post SOMETHING.



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Demolition: Is it worth it?

Welcome to the first in a series of “Is It Worth It?” posts on Don and Amy’s Basement Reno blog, where I take each of the tasks we tackled over the course of our renovation, and describe the trials and tribulations we encountered and conclude whether it’s worth doing yourself or if you should just hire someone to do it for you.

You know, if you were ever foolish, wealthy, AND bored enough to want to try something like this yourself.

And yes, I stole the idea from Canada’s Worst Handyman. Good show. But we're going to Seattle to catch one last baseball game this weekend and I won't have much else to post, so this is what you get.

First up: demolition!

Our experience

As I’m sure you remember, our demolition came about in multiple stages. The majority of it went fairly smoothly, and we didn’t actually destroy anything we didn’t mean to. The only injury incurred was a bruised eye socket thanks to a stubborn nail and a certain lapse in concentration when switching between dust mask and eye gogglers.

The advantage for us in doing the demo ourselves was the whole multiple stages thing. We actually needed to frame in parts of the office and bathroom before we could start moving other things to get to the rest of the bits we needed to demolish. If we had hired somebody to this, we would have had to ask them to come back several times, which probably would have cost more.

Pros:
Let’s face it, demolition is kind of a no-brainer: see wall, smash wall, done. Of all the tasks involved, demo certainly requires the least amount of brain power and - surprisingly – relatively little brute strength, once the concept of leverage comes into play. Not only that, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun, too.

Cons:
The potential for injury and/or tetanus is fairly high, it’s generally very dirty, and once the fun of all the smashy-smashy is over, there’s quite a bit of clean-up involved.

Is It Worth It?
In a word: absolutely. Just remember to wear your eye gogglers, kids, and invest in a pair of decent gloves and a Magic Bar or two. Oh, and I highly recommend hiring someone to take the trash away for you as we did. Saves a lot of time and, believe it or not, money. We’ve gone with 1-800-GOT-JUNK on more than a couple of occasions, and they’ve been consistently great.

Next time: digging your own drainage ditches for fun and profit! Or not!

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A little more of that old in-and-out

Inside and outside, that is, as we tried to take advantage of the non-inclement weather this past weekend to button up the landscaping (read: massive holes in the ground) before winter, and hurried to get the workshop cleaned up a little before the carpets/laundry room floor go in.

Of course, the War Department was not content with just doing OUR landscaping, but insisted that we also help the Maker Of Pies and her hell-dog do their lawn as well. As it turned out, this was a good idea because once we got done helping Maker Of Pies' husband (Mr. Awesome) with their house, he came over and helped us with ours. As you'll see, this was a good trade for us...

The day began with a large truck backing into our driveway and dumping three yards of "lawn mix" (sand and topsoil) in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, the truck was back with another three yards of topsoil:



Mmmm... dirty.

We promptly left it sitting there and went over to help Mr. Awesome with his place, hoping that the rain would hold off for at least a while so we wouldn't have to shovel mud when we got back.

It only took the three of us (the Maker of Pies had the plague or something so she couldn't help out) a couple of hours to grade, seed, roll, and fertilize their lawn, so we were standing in front of our twin mounds of hard labor by one o'clock.

And that's when the real fun started.

Before:
Just in case you've forgotten what the fruits of our previous labors have done to the outside of our house, I took a few pictures...

Here's the rather sizable depression in the back yard where we hauled away all the extra dirt that was left over from digging out the perimeter drain:





Also in those pictures (but impossible to see) is the trench we dug for the electrical line out to the garage that sunk down over the past year. It's quite narrow, less than six inches, but could be treacherous when racing out there in sandals to disentangle the cat from the lawn furniture again.

In the front yard, we had the remnants of my all time favorite hole:



As seen from the street, with the big bare swath over top of where we laid the new water service line:



After:
So, with Mr. Awesome's invaluable assistance, we got started shoveling, wheeling, spreading, seeding, raking, and hurting. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the driveway was clear:



The backyard was filled in:





And the front hole was topped off and a scattering of lawn mix laid down over the whole yard:





In case you were wondering, the brown patches are peat moss that the War Department laid over top of the grass seed so it wouldn't blow away. She claims it works, and when it comes to outside stuff, I know better than to argue with her. (Yes, it could be said that I should know better than to argue with her about the inside stuff, too, but where's the fun in that?)

All in all, it went amazingly smoothly, and it's quite the relief to get that finished up before the really bad weather comes. Pretty much the only complaint I had with the whole day (aside from needing THREE vitamin I before bed) was the outside supervisor:



NOT the sort of thing you want glaring down at you when loading a wheelbarrow with yet another load of dirt, I have to say... the inside guy is much more laid back.

Speaking of the inside, we have a hard deadline for prepping the office floors and we're going out of town this weekend, so we decided to start another project that would entail moving everything out of the workshop and storing it in the office where the carpet is going to go.

Yeah, it didn't make any more sense when I was typing it than it does reading it over again now...

Anyway, here's the pictures to explain.

Before before
This is what the workshop looks like (from both ends) most of the time:





Yeah, we're a tidy bunch.

Before
Here's what it looked like after we moved all the crap out and washed the floor down twice, once with TSP and once with muriatic acid:





After
And here's what it looks like after we painted it with an alkyd epoxy concrete paint from Rona, followed by waking up with terrible headaches from the fumes and Amy deciding to stay home from work and paint over the smelly paint with some good old Armor Coat from Crappy Tire:





Sadly, no after after yet; still have some painting left to do. Anyway, I think that's enough pictures for one post. I have more, but one of them is going to be a post in and of itself.

Oh, and coming soon: a break-down of all the different tasks and jobs involved in doing your own basement reno, together with a frank appraisal of whether they're worth doing on your own, or if you're better off hiring someone to do it properly. Er, for you. To do it for you. Yeah.


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Unexpected diversions

I'm sure it happens to everyone who renovates their own house. Hell, I'm sure it happens to people who aren't renovating their own house. But why does it seem to happen MORE when WE'RE renovating our house?

I'm speaking, of course, of those little things that go wrong with stuff in the house that are completely unrelated to whatever it is we happen to be working on. Here's a fun idea: let's make a list!

Here's a short, non-chronological (and probably incomplete) list of unrelated things that we've had to fix unexpectedly while working on the basement:

• front door sill


• kitchen drain


• bathroom sink drain


• my wisdom teeth


• refrigerator


• kitchen linoleum where we ripped it while moving the fridge


• dining room chairs (reupholstering)


• the cat

...and a whole bunch of other stuff I'm too tired to think of.

Oh, and of course, this weekend's very own unexpected diversion:



The damn garbageratormajig lost one of the little blades inside and was making an awful racket. Of course, this happened while I was in Prince George, so it took the War Department a couple of days to decide that MAYBE that loud, metallic grindy-type noise wasn't a usual thing, and maybe she should just not use it for a while.

Anyway, we got a new one, but holy hell, when did garbage disposal units get so damn pricey? Of course, we couldn't find the make and model of the one that was in there, so we had to completely dismantle the kitchen drain and put in the new one from scratch, but it's done, and really only took a couple of hours. Or three. No more than four, really.

Oh, and as an added bonus, the new one is called a Badger 5. Tee hee. (I spent the whole afternoon yelling "Snake!" It was awesome.)

Anyway, the real basement news is ... the painting is finished! Wheee!

That's right, we have officially finished the painting, and even put down a deposit on some very nice carpet. It's looking pretty sweet, even if I say so myself. And here's a schwack of pictures to prove it (I took some with and some without the flash so you could kind of see the colors in different light. I dunno if it worked though, I'm still trying to figure this camera out.)











(Needless to say, if you have any ideas on how I should go about building a proper cabinet for that gaping hole around the electrical panel, I'm all ears.)

All I have to do is pop in a couple more tapcons to crunch the floor right down and we're ready for the carpet guys.

Tapcons. Joy.


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All doors, all the time. Except when it's thresholds.

So, yeah. Doors are done. Well, except for the closet doors, which only just occurred to me as I was typing that.

Damn it.

Anyway, EXCEPT for the closet doors (which really only need to be hung - twenty minutes' work, tops) we're finished the doors. That includes the bathroom door, the office door, AND the workshop door.

Oh, and as an extra bonus, the War Department decided to fix a door that wasn't actually broken. No, wait. It WAS broken, we just didn't know it was broken until she started fixing it. Painting it, actually. She started painting it, and ... you know what? Let's just get on with this.

First up, here's the door between the office and the laundry room after we put up the trim and painted it white (of course):



And from the office side:



Must admit that it was a lot easier to set up the hardware on that door than it was the stuff on the workshop door. For one thing, we needed to get a new spindle and a new knob for it, and the ones they sell at Rona are those cheap-ass, tacky little fake brass things. Lucky for us, the Restore had a pair of knobs that matched the one we already had exactly, and the spindle for them to boot. Of course, we had to wander into the employees-only section of the store and pick through some contraband boxes, but they were nice enough to forgive that transgression and sell us the bits we needed.

And after much fiddling about with cork spacers, a 3/4-inch spade bit, and a little old-fashioned cursing and swearing, we've got the hardware installed (and working!) on the workshop door:



We've decided to leave the back of the door unpainted as it sort of fits in with the rugged look of the workshop (read: drab old concrete and exposed pipes):



And yes, I will EVENTUALLY finish that last little bit of drywall - I just have to patch the hole in the upstairs bathroom first so I know how much scrap I'm going to have left to work with.

The closet has been finished, caulked, painted, and touched up in preparation for hanging the closet doors (which won't actually go in until after the carpet):



And that's about it for the doors... oh, right! I seem to have mentioned a threshold and a certain little project of Amy's that took an interesting turn...

The War Department has been wanting to paint the threshold under our front door for quite some time. It's exposed to the worst of the weather, being at the southwest corner of the house and all, and she was worried that it wasn't going to make it through another wet and rainy winter. So while I fussed about making chili (Labour Day tradition, don't you know - goes great with Edmonton kicking Calgary's ASS ha ha ha!), she got the wire brush and sandpaper out there and set to cleaning up the threshold in preparation for painting.

This is sort of what the threshold looked like when she started (except it was still attached to the house, not sitting on our workbench):



Look okay, right? Maybe just a little brushing to get off that loose paint and some extra TLC? Well, not so much...

Shortly after the War Department got going with the wire brush, she peeled off a great big piece of caulking. And then another. And that's when she realized that the job was a little bigger than she thought. Turns out that the threshold had been broken for a while, and whoever had repaired it last hadn't taken it upon themselves to do it properly, but had just caulked up the biggest cracks and slapped another coat of (crappy) paint on it.

And this is the result after the caulking came off:



Yeah, that'll be FINE for a winter or two!

Anyway, it's a good thing chili gets better the longer you cook it because we had to let it sit for a couple of hours while we cleaned up the mess, cut a new threshold out of some pressure-treated lumber and installed it into the doorway:



Looks pretty innocuous just sitting there, but let me assure you that it took some precision cuts - and not just reciprocating saw precision, either! REAL precision.

Anyway, the gap under the door has been repaired and the house is safe from marauding wildlife - the stuff that doesn't already live inside, at any rate. I'm off to scenic (HA!) Prince George for a few days to help yet ANOTHER person move, so don't expect much progress in my absence. Unless Amy decides to bite the bullet and get the carpets done while I'm gone...


Shyeah. Right.
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White on white on white

Urgh.

We're so close. So very close.

But oh. my. god. The freaking trim. The trim, the trim, that terrible trim.

Cut the trim. Dado the trim. Fasten the trim. Fill the holes in the trim. Sand the trim. Caulk the trim. Tape the trim. Paint the trim. Paint the trim. Remove the tape, and touch up the wall around the trim.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Urgh.

I guess the good news is that I won't be doing a whole lot of the old before-and-after pictures in this post. The difference between one coat of white paint and two coats of white paint might make all the difference in the world when it's live and in person, but it doesn't show up at all on camera - not even MY awesome camera.

(Did I mention I got it cleaned and it's all shiny-like-new-like?)

The bad news, I suppose, would be that there are a whole lot of pictures of, well, white paint. But if I have to suffer through putting the crap on, you have to suffer through looking at it. (Trust me, you're really getting the better end of that deal.)

Anyway, when last we left off (besides the pie, obviously - which I should also hasten to point out that I did not make), we'd just finished hanging the door between the office and the laundry room, and built and installed the bookcase. So, for starters, here's the bookcase with not one, not two, but FOUR coats of paint on it:



Here are some of the baseboards, which have all been cut, attached, filled, and painted (except for a couple in the back of the closet that need a little more sanding):



And the trim around the closet:



And the doors that will eventually go in the closet:



And, lest you think the laundry room isn't getting any love, we also put up the trim on the laundry-room side of the office door:




So we had one last little bit of construction-type work left (uh, I think it's the last bit of construction-type work) and that was to build a new casing for the old, battered office door and hang it in the doorway between the laundry room and the workshop. This doorway, in fact:



Of course, we originally made this plan back when we thought it would be cool to keep at least part of the original house, and before we realized that setting the old door on fire and buying a new one would be a lot less hassle at this stage of the game, but that's renovations for you! Ha ha! Please kill me.

Anyway, here's the old battered door itself, patiently awaiting our attention:



And here it is with a new casing:



Woo!

Here it is hanging in the doorway!



Woo woo!

And, of course, (oh, you KNEW this was coming, didn't you?) here is it after we took it down and replaced the hinges, routered out the casing properly, and rehung it in the opening:



Sigh. Just once. ONCE. That's all I ask. But hey, check it out - now it CLOSES:



Pretty sweet, eh?


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