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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We seem to be running out of holes....

There seem to be fewer and fewer holes in the basement these days. Because we keep putting things in them or covering them up with other things. And no, not just random things we find lying around. Things that are supposed to go there. Things that we bought or built for that specific purpose.

It's actually somewhat freaky, to tell you the truth. Things are ... getting finished. Like, actually done-finished, not just finished-until-we-finish-this-other-part-we-needed-to-finish-first-and-then-we-can-do-more-work-on-it.

Yeah.

First off, we do have a small cause for celebration: we passed the final plumbing inspection! Woo! Couldn't have done it without Leonard, of course. The guy's an absolute gem.

With that all wrapped up, however, it was time to turn some serious attention to the trim and other bits of finishing that must be done before we can pass the final, FINAL inspection, the dreaded (and deservedly maligned) Final Occupancy Inspection(tm).

Not that the inspector is likely to care how much attention to detail we apply when filling nail holes and sanding the edges of things, but that's more for our benefit anyway.

Oh, and something I think I forgot last post: we installed one more of the doors in the basement, the one between the office and the laundry room:





We had to put that in as a barrier to keep the cats out of the office while we were sanding, prepping, priming, sanding, painting, caulking, and painting the window wells. They're still crooked, but at least they're white, shiny, and crooked:





Oh, and did I mention, done?

Anyway, the big project this past week was the built-in bookcase. (You can see the hole it's supposed to go into in the second of the two pictures of the door up there- the big hole to the right, with all the crap sitting in it.)

I, of course, had never built a built-in book case before, but I know someone who has. And he just happened to be in town this week! Amazing coincidence, that, eh?

So poor Top Brass Pa had to spend his Saturday on vacation helping me manoeuver a jinormous sheet of 3/4-inch good-one-side plywood around on top of the table saw out in the driveway. He was very gracious about it, however, and I must admit that I probably couldn't have done it without him. That's not to say that he actually did any of the work, mind you - I made every measurement, cut, and tool mark on the bookcase myself - but his advice was invaluable, and he was always on hand to catch the pieces of lumber as they came off the other end of the table saw. (I actually only made one wrong cut - and we had enough spare wood from the sheet that it didn't matter at all. For me, that's pretty damn good!)

What we did was to take some measurements of the hole and design the shelf layout on paper. We then built a box, complete with back, that could be lifted right into position on the two-by-four supports I had built into the wall when I framed it. Overall, it worked like a freaking charm.

So here's my wee beauty after we sledge-hammered it into position (it was a shade tight on the bottom. Just a little):



And just in case you thought it was a simple matter of nailing some boards together, think again:



All of the shelves are dado cuts - and yes, that took a lot longer to do it that way. Nearly the whole day, in fact.

Here it is with the trim around it and the edge pieces glued and nailed into the shelf faces (the tape is just to hold the trim until the glue sets - it's not staying, no matter how well you think it matched the colour scheme):



And yes, the nails in the trim are some of the holes we've spent the rest of the weekend filling.

Among the other holes-that-aren't-holes-anymore, are the two heating vents and the cold air return:







And that's about it for this update. I'm hoping to do the final sanding on the trim for the door and bookcase tomorrow, followed by a coat of primer on the bookcase. Then it's paint, paint, paint. Oh, and caulking of course. And then some painting.

But damn me to hell if it isn't starting to look like a real room!



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Platitudes are bogus

You know that old saying, "When one door closes, another one opens"? And how it's supposed to signify something meaningful about opportunity or some such?

Yeah, well, in home renovations, when one door closes (FINALLY!), the only door that opens is the door to the fridge because it's time to get a cold beer and stop bloody working for the day.

But I'm kinda getting ahead of myself. It seems that I've been rather lax about updates this past week as we've been making a great deal of progress (well, for US at least) and I haven't posted anything about it at all. Better late than never, I suppose, so let's start at the beginning - or, in this case, Monday - when the electricians showed up to finish the wiring.

We weren't really sure how long it was going to take the electricians to finish all the wiring and put in the lights and whatnot, but we were really hoping they could get it done within a day so the War Department wouldn't have to work from home for too long.

Well, we really needn't have worried. Including a trip out to the Home Despot for a couple of switches they needed, it took them a little less than four hours. Yeah. Nice to work with professionals, I gotta say.

Anyway, here's what the new lights look like in full operation:



And in the bathroom:



Man, I can't even tell you how amazing it is to walk into a room and have lights come on just by flipping a switch. Seriously.

Anyway, once the electricians were done (and it became obvious that they wouldn't require an inspection - bastards) we turned our attention to something I, for one, have been dreading since the day we bought it. If you go back through this blog and look at some of the pictures, you'd probably notice that in a lot of them (like, say this one, or this one, or this one) there's this enormous cardboard box sitting in the middle of the floor where we're equally likely to either trip over it or attempt to use it as a workbench. We've been stepping around or over that bloody box for MONTHS and it was finally time to open 'er up and take out the glass walls for the shower. I had been dreading this for so long, I can't even tell you. The instructions made it seem like a relationship-ending nightmare in a box.

So, imagine our surprise when we got it out, set up, and installed in one measly evening. I don't even have any work-in-progress shots for you, it went in so fast:



Yeah. Took us an evening or so to clean off all the glass, and Amy did all the caulking (fiddly little stuff, drives me NUTS). All that's left is to fine-tune the door and put up the water stopper thingies.

Anyway, yesterday was manual labour day once more, as we turned our attention to the enormous pile of crap in the back yard that's been sitting there all winter, hardening slowly back into the impenetrable mass of clay it was before we dug it up from the ground:



Yes, even the Supervisor Kitty was astonished at how rock-solid it was.

Anyway, four hours with a pick, shovels, two buckets, and three trips to the Victoria Materials Depot (and $40 in drop-off fees) later, and... well, we barely made a dent:



Let me tell you, loading dirt into buckets and then dumping it into the back of a pickup is every bit as much fun as it sounds. No, really, and if you want to try it out, we've got plenty left...

So, finally, we come to the subject of our little platitude: the bathroom door. I'm not going to go into excruciating detail about the swearing, yelling, cursing, and screaming to which this particular task gave rise, and I'm not going to harp on about how long it took us to do (though, to give you an idea, we could have made at least four trips to the dump with more dirt - if it was open on Sundays, of course, which it's not, but THAT'S a rant for another day), but I will attempt to give you at least a hint of the frustration involved...

After trimming down both the door and the jamb in which it came, we maneuvered it into position in the doorway (gouging the ceiling a little in the process) and balanced it precariously in the opening. I was holding it up from the bathroom side, Amy was on the office side, and the door was threatening to fall either in or out, depending on which of us was a little too eager in making sure it stayed flush with the drywall.

It was at this point that Amy said, "So, ... now what do we do?" and we both realized that neither one of us had the foggiest idea how to actually hang the damn thing.


But we got it, eventually:



And let me tell you, when that door closed, I made a beeline for the fridge. It's like they say, when life gives you lemons...uh, it really sucks? But hey - if you have a lime, you can cut it into wedges and drop one in your beer.

And that's good.




I think there's a moral here somewhere, but screw it - I'm going to bed.
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