The Really Important Stuff

Blah blah door blah blah trim blah blah paint blah blah blah...

PIE!!!!




Yeah. That's about all I have time or energy for right now. Check back tomorrow.



Maybe Tuesday.


Yeah.
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Filler post

Figured I should make an update just to check in and say, "Hey, we're still doing this thing."

That said, there are no pictures. You wouldn't want any. Trust me.

So here's the short list of what we've done since the last update:

• Filled and sanded the screw holes in the door casing between the laundry room and the office.


• Sanded both sides of the office door.


• Determined how much we'll have to cut off the ends of the closet doors to make them fit, and worked out a way to install the trim around the closet so the door will still open without looking ridiculous.
  
  (This was harder than you might think, mostly due to some stupid, stupid drywall edges and - of course - non-plumb/non-level framing/drywalling and general asshattery.)


• Installed trim around office door.


• Filled and sanded the screw holes in the trim around the bookcase.


• Primed the bookcase.


• Primed the bookcase again.


• Put a coat of white paint on the primed bookcase.
  
  (I'm so freaking SICK of painting a coat of white paint on a coat of white paint. Holy crap does that suck. And that's also why there are no pictures. Trust me, it's so boring, I can't even describe how bad the pictures would be without falling asleep. Oh, I will post one picture; getting the paint into those top four narrow shelves was an absolute bitch until I saw this pretty little number at the paint store:
  
  
  
  Cute as the dickens, and SO amazingly useful - not just for the shelves, but also for getting the side of the trim when it's too close to the wall for a normal brush.)


• Painted the bathroom door (both sides).


• Painted the bathroom door again (both sides).


• Installed baseboards around eighty-five percent (give or take) of the office.
  
  (I suppose I could have taken a picture of the baseboards, but I haven't finished installing all of them because we have to put the vertical trim up around the closet first, and can't do that until we put the horizontal trim across the top of the closet, and can't do that because it needs to be trimmed down first and I can't do that because I left the dado blade in the table saw and put it away around the corner in the laundry room so I'd have room to install the baseboards and I don't feel like lugging it back into the office and changing the blade over when I'll probably have to put the dado back on anyway to do the trim around the workshop door - if we ever get THAT installed...
  
  Anyway, I'll take a photo when they're done, mmkay?)


• Painted the trim (two coats) on the bathroom side of the bathroom door.


• Painted the trim (two coats) on the office side of the bathroom door.


• Installed the handle and strike plate on the bathroom door

Uh.... I think that's about it... Oh, we also mowed the lawn, got our fridge fixed, watched parts of the three games the Jays lost to the Indians, ruled out one of the places we were thinking of getting hitched, and made an excellent mac'n'cheese with some of the old cheddar the Top Brass brought last week. But nobody cares about any of that except us. So... yeah. Pretty full weekend.



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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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A two-day reprieve

Well, the Top Brass were SUPPOSED to arrive today - or, at least, that's what they TOLD us. Turns out they don't arrive until Tuesday, so we could have been working on the basement this afternoon instead of sitting around in the living room waiting for a rental car to pull into the driveway. Silly parents. At least I know where the War Department gets it from...

Anyway, it hasn't all been lying about on our bums. We've been quite busy, and so has the plumber.

Oh, before we get into it: the pictures in this post may not be up to the usual scratch; my camera is in the shop getting cleaned, and won't be done until tomorrow. So all of the pictures in this post were taken with the old piece of shit we all knew and hated.

So, we had a little extra job waiting for Leonard when he came on Thursday. The sink in the bathroom upstairs hadn't been draining properly for months, and because we had a rubber P-trap on it, we couldn't really snake it ourselves. Also, I had really no interest in doing it with that damn pedestal in the way. So we figured we might as well get the professional to do it, seeing as he was in the house anyway.

Even so, I really have no idea why we ever thought it would be a straightforward job. Nothing else in this house has been, is, or ever will be, and this was no different. He got the pedestal out of the way okay, but then noticed that the pipe in the wall was really corroded and cautioned us (well, Amy - I was at work, getting the story via a stream of increasingly hilarious emails) that it might be difficult. Then, while he was snaking the drain, his auger got stuck in the pipe and promptly broke off. ("Oh, dear," Leonard said. "That'll cost you.") So he had to break open the wall and replace the entire pipe:



I thought we were done with this drywall nonsense, I really did. Anyway, you can see how much fun making THAT patch is going to be.

Oh, and before I forget, take a wild guess what was blocking that pipe... that's right, about sixteen pounds of hair. Guess whose hair?



I haven't had hair that long since my head-banger phase in 1991...

Anyway, that little job took him most of the morning, but by the time he was done, he'd hooked up the shower and installed the toilet and vanity in the downstairs bathroom:





Man, I'd forgotten how much that camera sucks. I wanted to take a picture of the whole bathroom so you could see what a nice job Leonard (and us!) has done, but that camera couldn't take a decent picture of the inside of a lens cap. Piece of shit.

That said, it's time for another edition of everyone's favorite blog feature, infrequent though it may be,

The Injury Report

So, we've been painting the sills and trim around the windows in the office, and the combination of the plywood and the paint we bought just hasn't worked very well. I finally decided to just use the same paint we used on the walls in the laundry room for the last coat or two. Before I could start with it, though, I had to sand down some of the more egregious brush marks and whatnot. So I was sanding furiously along the top of the big window when I rammed my hand into the lip of metal on the edge of the window. It took a nice big gouge out of the back of my thumb, but it was actually the impact that hurt more than the cut.

Still looks pretty impressive, I think:



Anyway, may or may not get to the trim around the office side of the bathroom door tonight.

My money's on probably not, but don't tell Amy that.

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I should work less and post more...

At least, that's the impression I get from all the whining about the lack of updates. You'd think I didn't have a job OR a passive-aggressive, mildly incontinent cat, the way some people carry on. And that's just the War Department!

Anyway, despite the lack of updates, we have been busy. (Even if it seems to me I've posted that same sentiment on this blog at least once or twice before.) While we're waiting on Leonard to come back and install the remaining fixtures, we've been installing trim, caulking trim, painting trim, and doing unspeakable things to leftover bits of trim.

Oh, and digging, of course. Let's start with that, shall we?

When last we saw the enormous pile of crap in the back yard, we'd just taken three full loads off the top of it, and barely made a dent. Well, after another four trips to the Victoria Materials Depot on a hot and sunny Saturday (of which we've had precious few enough this summer, let me assure you), we've made more than a dent in the pile, we've made a dent in the back yard!



By the way, that's a nice little gig they got going on at the VMD. We pay them to drop it off (about $10 a load) and someone else comes in and pays them to take it away again! If we could have cut out the middle man, we might have been able to afford to pay someone else to do some of the work for us...

Anyway, once that was cleared away, it was back into the basement again, where Amy spent a great deal of time and energy installing the trim in the bathroom. I did most of the cutting, but the caulking, hole-filling, and paint preparation was all her:



I wasn't going to let her have ALL the fun, though, as I spent a good couple of days cursing and swearing at the window wells, which had to be closed in with plywood. Of course, this being our house with my framing job, none of them were square (of course) and no two sides were quite the same size:









Every single piece of plywood in those pictures was custom cut and shaped for its location. That was a lot of cutting, nibbling, testing, sanding, cursing, and - eventually - spackling. And no, those last two aren't some elaborate optical illusion. They really look like that. Of course, the trim is square -- it's the windows themselves that are totally out of level. (Since I took those pictures, I've covered over the edges with corner bead and sill trim, but I'm too lazy to go downstairs and take another picture right now. Next time.)

Anyway, we've got about a week until Leonard comes back, and we have to get the vanity installed, the trim done and painted, and a few other bits and pieces finished up in the bathroom before he gets here. And we have to prep, prime, and paint the window wells, build a casement for the workshop door, install the office door, get the office carpeted...

Uh, yeah. So... lots to do. I don't have a joke for that. It's just a lot of work.

Sigh.

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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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We have flooring. Yes, flooring.

Oh, you know the end is officially in sight when you can stand up (almost straight) and say (with a grimace), "Wow. That looks like a real floor."

And then go take a fistful of ibuprofen and lie down for a while.

Yes, we have a bathroom floor. Much like the floor in the upstairs bathroom, I can take full credit for this one as I did pretty much the whole thing myself. The War Department had a few too many beers on Friday night, if you must know, and wasn't up to helping much. Well, to be honest, that's only a half-truth; yes, she had too many beers on Friday night, but we had already decided that this particular job was probably best left to a me, given that only one person would be able to work in the bathroom at a time, and I was reasonably confident in my ability to do the floor myself.

The first part of the task on Saturday morning was to set up a little workstation for myself in the office so I wouldn't have to keep trudging back into the workshop every time I needed to trim down one of the planks:



Of course, the planks were far too wide to be cut on the chop saw (I used it exactly twice), so I wound up using the table saw almost exclusively -- except for those times I had to go trudging back to the workshop so I could clamp a piece down to the workbench and have a go at it with the jigsaw.

Then, as per the instructions, I opened all of the bundles of flooring so I could pick and choose pieces at random and not wind up with a weird pattern in the floor:



Which... I kinda did anyway, so ... well, whatever...

Anyway, the next step was a false start. See, the instructions (yes, I read them and no, they weren't singularly uninformative. I found them to be of tremendous use. Mostly to cushion the bottom of the floor tool so I wouldn't mark the cork when I was hammering away on it trying to get the boards to close up that last 32nd of an inch, but I digress) say to make sure that none of the pieces of flooring are cut to less than 4 inches wide. Given the weird shape of the bathroom, this was actually much more frustrating to work out than you'd think. Remember that I'm not very good at math, and then take a peek at the worksheet I used to figure out how wide the first strip of flooring needed to be:



(The reason there are two worksheets is because I worked out all of my calculations on the first worksheet (the one on the left) based on the floor planks being 7 and three-eighths of an inch wide. The right-hand worksheet is the one I made up after I remembered that the planks are actually 7 and FIVE-eighths of an inch wide. Measure twice, cut once, grasshopper -- but it's probably okay if you spend twenty minutes working up a plan based on the faulty first measurement. Sure. No one's in a hurry here or anything.)

Working from the correct calculations, I cut the first piece of floor to exactly four inches, got the first row hammered together somehow, and then started work on the second:



AND... that's about where I stopped for a break because I realized that I really should have borrowed Clamb's floor tool because I had to go off to the damn store and buy one.

But with the new tool proving to be something of a valuable asset, I managed to get into the groove a little bit and was pleased when my measuring turned out to be pretty dead on, at least at the first odd corner:



Then the second corner went in all right, even though it had a tricky angle on it, and I realized I hadn't even sworn at anything since I put in the third row or so. Woot! Now I was cooking with gas!



(And where, you may ask, was Amy during all this work on the floor? Well, she did come to the store with me to pick up the little flooring tool on Saturday, but then she went right back to what she was doing before we went out:



Ah, must be rough, eh?)

Anyway, it took me pretty much the whole day, but I got it done. Here's a shot of where I called it a day:



Yeah, that last piece wasn't actually hammered home yet, but it was proving rather finicky, I was starving, my back hurt, I had to clean up and make dinner, and I just couldn't deal with the nasty little bugger. As it turned out, I pulled up three rows this morning anyway so I could fix the second of the two corners at the shower because I'd munged up the cork pretty badly trying to get the pieces to lock together, but it all went back in with no problems, and it's officially finished.

(Oh, and my measuring job with the worksheets and whatnot? I was off by less than a quarter-inch. Not too shabby, especially for me!)

If you're wondering where the hole for the toilet went, I used the router to cut it out this afternoon. Which, of course, required another trip to Canadian Tire because, for some reason, among ALL the bits Amy had for her router, she didn't have a flush-trimming bit. Go figure.

Of course, you can't see the end result because we had to cover it up with cardboard in preparation for the return of the electricians, who are coming in tomorrow to finish wiring the outlets and putting in these babies:



Yes, they install cardboard boxes. Why not?
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