Posts made in March, 2011

Kitchen overhaul, PART 2

Posted by matt on Mar 30, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

Where was I, oh yes, the wallpaper is down and the paint is up, it’s onto phase two, the cabinets. We had recently been following a blog called Young House Love, two DIYers in Richmond who are an ambitions young couple that are remodeling their house room by room. Lucky for us, they give pointers and instructions on how they were able to accomplish their renovations, and one of them just happened to be “how to paint your kitchen cabinets.” With the internet at our disposal, we were ready to give it a go. Now, before I begin, I have to admit I was scared to death. If we mess this up, we’ll have to replace all the cabinets and start over, which as you may know, is not cheap.

We first took off all the doors and drawers, the hinges and the hardware, stacked them up in the basement and sanded everything down. In case you are wondering, we had 8 drawers, and 22 doors. 22! Sanding and cleaning the doors ended up taking us all day, because we wanted to make sure that we got everything as prepped as possible. Like a fool, I didn’t take any photos of this, sorry. Next we needed to decide on what hardware we wanted to go with. We both hated the brass that was on the doors already, so off to home depot (again) to take a look. The shocker were the hinges. We looked at them and realized that we’ll need to buy 44 hinges, and looking at the price, each hinge was just over $3. So, in hinges alone, we were already in a bit of a dollar shock. The good news is that we didn’t realize that each packet of hinges actually contains 2, so we were back to ONLY having to buy 22, but still, ugh. We found a few ideas at the depot, and went back with plan in hand. The major change would be the the doors would have a knob instead of the handle they currently have, so we would need to fill all the other holes before beginning to prime and paint. BACK to home depot we go, pick up some winmax woodfiller, and some oil based primer. Now, this process of filling and priming took several days, and I mean full days, to get everything ready just for the paint. Once everything was filled and primed, we busted out our favorite white color (Behr’s Polar bear), and started painting.

It took us 3 coats, on each side. So, it was paint everything on one side, wait overnight for it to dry. Paint it again, wait, paint it again, wait. As you can imagine, it took a while.To complicate everything else, and to go along with our poor planning, we decided to take care of one of those other small details at the same time, the floor. You remember the white laminate, well, just as we were about halfway through the project, we had new hardwood delivered to the house and ready to be installed.

So once the hardwood was installed (since we couldn’t access the kitchen for about a week), it was time to lay the drop cloths down and get to painting the cabinets. I am personally glad we waited until the floors were in, just because there was a lot of dust in the air, and to think that any of that would have gotten stuck in the paint would have really been bad. So, the floors are in, the cabinets are painted, and now we have to wait a few days until we hang the doors.

Looks vastly different, doesn’t it? Well, before I give you the final reveal (of course you could just scroll down), let me give you a small reminder of what it looked like before. Ready?

BEFORE:

and of course, AFTER:

To say it looks different is an understatement. We couldn’t be happier with how this all turned out. The kitchen is easily one of my favorite places in this whole house now. Before, I hated it. I hated everything about it, except the size, now I love it all. There are still two or three small things to be done in here, mainly putting up some trim around the tops of the cabinets, but that is all minor when you consider what we have done so far. I’ll be sure to include those updates as we do them, but for now, we really hope you like what we’ve done.

Kitchen overhaul, PART 1

Posted by matt on Mar 26, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

I promise I’ll do my best to keep up with the site, now that I have actually found a layout I like. So a lot of people Have been asking to see what we have done in the kitchen, and well, it’s 95% done. So, let’s take a tour of what we did. First, it’s important to understand how bad the kitchen was, sooooo, here is your before picture:

Notice the green walls that were so nicely sponge painted so there are varying shades of green, the amazing(ly horrible) apple wallpaper border to remind you that you are indeed in a “country” kitchen and the out dated wood cabinets with brass hardware. I’ll be 100% honest, I am not a fan of brass or gold or anything in that color spectrum. So our plan was pretty simple, or so we thought, we’ll paint the walls, paint the cabinets and replace the hardware. Oh, and then there were a few “minor” details we needed to address, mainly the floor and the ceiling.

The lovely white laminate floors (that were improperly installed) had to go, as did the florescent light that reminded me of sitting in my office, not a feeling you want while cooking dinner. With plan in hand, we decided to hit the ground running. We knew with 100% certainty, we wanted the light GONE. I called a local electrician who came out and ripped down the light and installed new recessed lighting. He also ran a new circuit for the microwave that would replace the hood above the stove.

With that out of the way, it was time to remove the wallpaper border. How hard could this be, I mean, it’s just a border. Yeah…it was hard, very very hard. We tried everything in the book to get this stuff to come off. First, we used Dif, a product made specifically for removing wallpaper, so naturally that seems like a winner. After scoring the wallpaper with our handy “paper tiger,” we sprayed the dif and waited. Then after about 20 minutes or so, we took to the scraper. An hour later, we had removed a small strip about a foot long. This is about when we knew we were in trouble.

We tried a few other options, but nothing was working. My friend Mike happened to be in town that day, so he swung by to lend us a hand. Poor sucker didn’t know what he was in for. We kept at it for hours, and then we decided to call Mike’s Mom who had experience with this, so she said to just try warm soapy water. Seems a bit pedestrian, but hell, we’ll give it a go…and so we did. Wouldn’t you know it, it actually worked pretty well.

Thanks to Trish, we were back in business! The wall paper was down, the holes got patched, and now it was time to paint and get rid of this green, for good. The only problem…we didn’t have a clue as to what color we wanted to paint it, and believe it or not, we were actually considering….green. One thing was for certain though, no matter what color we picked, we NEEDED to prime these walls first. And prime we did, giving us a stark all white kitchen. Now, time to paint! Off to our local home depot to pull sample colors, a lot of them. We came home and put them on the wall and still couldn’t make a decision. Finally, we went with our gut…Behr’s misty surf, a blue-ish grey color.

Now that the easy part (HA!) is done, it was time for us to move onto painting the cabinets. I’ll save that for part 2

the oven door

Posted by matt on Mar 23, 2011 in kitchen | 0 comments

So, as we had our recessed lighting installed in our kitchen, we ran into a small problem. The electrician moved the oven, only to realize that the glass on the oven door popped out! So, as you would open the oven door, the glass would come off and hit you right in the shin. This is somewhat of a problem given the fact that most of the time the temperature of the glass will exceed 350 degrees.

Well, no big deal, we have that home owners warranty, they’ll fix it right? Wrong. When we called and told them about the problem, they asked us “does it still bake?” Well, yes it still bakes, but it is what I would call unusable and dangerous. It didn’t matter because simply put, it still bakes. Great. Well now what!? Clearly we don’t want to buy a new oven, this looks relatively new, and frankly we have our money allocated elsewhere.

Our first idea was to buy some adhesive and glue the glass in place. We asked a few stores about this idea, and all of them said it wouldn’t work, and even if it did, it was a terrible idea. Damn. Well, it’s dangerous, so I might as well take off the oven door. When I took off the door, I noticed something that I never saw before. There were these little plastic pegs on the door handle that actually held the glass in place, and ALL of them were broken. Well, that changes everything. I found the serial number on the oven, and headed over to home depot to see if they could help me out. The guy there gave me a parts website through home depot that I could enter the serial number and see if I could order just the part. Well, I did just that, and wouldn’t you know, I found the exact part I needed for only $30. I placed the order, had it delivered a few days later, took off the old handle and replaced it with the new part.

A 10 minute fix, and $30 later I had totally fixed our broken oven door, which we thought was dead to rights. I put the door back on and now the oven works just fine. So, even when you think that something is completely broken, really look hard at it and maybe you’ll find out it actually a pretty easy fix.

the Workbench

Posted by matt on Mar 22, 2011 in basement | 0 comments

I have always wanted a workbench. My dad had one in our basement, and he would always go down there to build new things, fix our toys or help us with class projects. It was a place where you could create or fix just about anything, and I knew that when we bought a house, I wanted to build one of my own. One of the first houses we actually looked at long before we settled on this house had a work bench built in, and I have to admit, it was a selling point for me. Had the rest of the house been a bit better, I would have made a harder push, but it really did fall flat. Anywho, when we looked at our current house, the utility room in the basement was huge, and had potential for a workbench.

And so, after pleading with my wife, she kindly allowed me to build a workbench. Huzzah! However, I needed a better spot of the workbench. So, here I am (above) standing in a doorway that was in a really bad place. It was my call to move the doorway all the way to the left, against the wall, and put the workbench basically where I am standing right now. Then, I can pull down those awful lights and move the peg board to where I can actually use it.

Now I’ll admit, I don’t know how to build anything. I have rarely used a saw, I couldn’t tell you even what type of saw I would need, and I really had no idea there were so many different types of wood. Not a great start, but alas, thanks to the wide world web, I was able to track down a whole bunch of website dedicated to people like me, and instructions on how to build a work bench. I got my list of parts and headed over to home depot. Again, not knowing what I was doing, I found some great employees that walked me through exactly what I would need, and even cut some of the wood to more manageable pieces for me. I didn’t have them cut it to what I specifically needed because I wanted to do as much on my own as I could. Why? Well, my theory was simple, if I couldn’t build a work bench, I shouldn’t try build anything else. Now with all the wood transferred from the Element to the back yard, I had one small problem, what was I going to cut the wood on? I’d need a workbench for that, but alas, that’s what I am building. I had picked up two saw horses at home depot as well, and taken the old door I just had removed and used it as a make shift table out back. Pair all that with a table mate like vice that my father gave me, and I was all set.

With my dad’s circular saw all ready to go, I marked my first cut, hit the trigger and gave it a slice (insert buzzing sound here). What I didn’t realize was that the saw wasn’t going to cut through this 4×4 in one cut, like I thought. I had to flip it over 4 times just to get one solid cut, and I had 4 legs to do, so that was 16 cuts per leg, and trying to get them perfect, well, that wasn’t so easy. Alas, I forged ahead and made all my cuts, stacked my wood and marked each for their location.

I hauled everything inside so that I could assemble the table where it would actually reside. Following the instructions as carefully as I could, I began to assemble the legs of the table.

Once I had all the legs done, I flipped them onto the table top, screwed it all together until everything was attached. Now, all I had to do was flip it right side up, glue the hardboard on top and let it sit overnight. “No problem, let me just pull from back here….uhhhh…oh no, it weighs a ton. Crap.” Well, my stubbornness wasn’t about to let this table defeat me, so I muscled up and after struggling for a while, was finally able to flip it right side up and only pulled a few muscles in my back. Once up, and in place, I pushed it against the wall, put the hardboard ontop with the glue, and put some weight on it to sit overnight.

Sorry for the blurry picture, I wasn’t able to stand still at this point. The next day, I cam back and was able to put the finishing touches on it, adding the peg board behind the table, laying the carpet back down, and putting everything it its rightful place.

And in case you were wondering, where I am standing now is where the peg board was in the original photo, and where the orange extension cord is hanging, is the original doorway I was standing in. So, now I have my work bench, and I am ready to move onto the next project, whatever that may be.

Yellow Yellow Everywhere

Posted by matt on Mar 10, 2011 in bedroom | 0 comments

The one overwhelming thing in our house…color, and mainly in the master bedroom. Not only were the walls yellow, they were filled with lovely plastic AND metal anchors, so naturally, I felt the need to pull those out before we repainted.

I had no idea how many I would be patching. When all said and done, I patched about 9 holes per each side of the window, including a few below the window for some strange reason.

So, once we were patched, we were ready to start painting. Luckily this was the easiest decision so far for us, as we painted our current bedroom in our apartment when we first moved in, so we knew exactly what color we wanted. Two cans of Behr’s “Tropical Breeze” paint with primer should do the trick.

But for us, just painting the walls was not enough. It being a new house and all, and we already had the drop cloths down, we did it all, ceiling included.

and the closet doors, because…why not.

and finally, put up some fun new curtains that match our bedding and artwork, and here is what you have:

Not too shabby. One room down, a whole lot more to go!