Fireplace Mantel
When we bought the house, one of the first things we said we wanted to do was add a mantel around the fireplace. The room just looked so bland and blah without it, besides, where are we going to hang the stocking come Christmas time.
There is nothing MC loves more than decorating for Christmas, so I knew I had a deadline to find and install a mantel. I started looking on craigslist to see if I could find a mantel with some not so ordinary measurements. After weeks of searching I thought I would have to bite the bullet and shell out at least $200 for a new mantel and hope that it would fit. At just about that time, I found an ad on craigslist that was trying to get rid of their mantel for a whopping $25. Yeah, twenty-five. At first I thought this was a typo since everyone else was selling it for at least $125, so I responded to the ad and sure enough, it was only $25. I got my excitement in check almost knowing that this was too good to be true, it seems to be the right size but what if I measured wrong. At worst, I’d be out $25, which I was willing to accept. I drove over and picked up the mantel, it fit to the inch into my Element (a sign, I thought), and brought it home. The couple I picked it up from were awesome, they were building a new mantel and just wanted to get rid of this…and they had a dog named Yoda, so again…a sign. It needed a new coat of paint, and nails to be removed, but I was amazed to find out it fit PERFECTLY.
Last weekend, I finally went to town cutting off the slanted and banged up bottoms (which I had to cut twice due to a wrong measurement) and MC and I put a fresh new coat of our favorite “polar bear” white Behr paint. Once it was dry, I took a few finish nails and got that sucker onto the wall.
There was one SLIGHT problem I didn’t expect though, and that was a small gap between the wall and the mantel. Why didn’t I notice this before, its because I had to sand that area down due to some caulk that was on there before, and well, I over sanded.
So I took some foam filler and sprayed it in the crack to seal up that gap. Once the filler had dried I did a fresh coat of caulk around the whole mantel to seal it up nicely.There was also one other SLIGHT problem. The firebox slate wasn’t flush to the mantel. My father in law called this the reveal, and so I assumed it wasn’t flush so that you could put some tile on the slate to jazz it up and make it flush. Well, I’m more rock n’ roll than jazz, so I took it upon myself to find a new solution. I took the same trim I used in the kitchen and used it on the underside of the mantel. Now everything is flush, sealed, and just about done. I need to paint the areas of the trim that I had to nail, but aside from that, it’s done. I’ll admit, it’s not 100% perfect, but unless you look really hard, you won’t notice the slight imperfections. Besides, it was $25, and it’s awesome.
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Newspaper Furniture
Yesterday, MC and I decided to hit up one of the local furniture stores to see what we might be interested in for our living room/dining room area. We have this amazingly open room, and there is nothing in it yet, not even curtains, because we have no idea about what we want in there. So, off to the store to see if we can at least get a solid idea of what we would (eventually) want to put in there.
We walked all around the store, but we kept coming back to a display in the front of a sofa and chair that we really liked. We liked it so much that we were mere seconds away from ordering it all, but we decided to sleep on it just to be sure. Mind you that normally, I am the one who says “let’s buy it now,” and MC is the smart “let’s think about it” person, but yesterday was a total opposite (probably because it was my birthday and she just wanted to make me happy), which made it harder for me to say to sleep on it.
I was smart enough to make notes about the size of everything so that we could go home and see if we could manage a way to picture it in the room. After buying 3 newspapers, that’s exactly what we did.
We had a lot of different ideas, and MC was kind enough to take pics while I was dragging the newspaper couch all over the place. We did figure out that the couch was a bit too big for the room, which thank god we didn’t decide to just buy like we originally had planned. I was able to use the couch newspapers as a future dining room table as they were pretty similar in size. So we have changed our plan a bit, and are thinking of getting two chairs and a love seat. This means, much to my unhappiness, there will be no TV in the living room area, it’ll be more of a sitting/gathering room. I’m actually okay with that, for now. We’ll see if I can sway the wife’s opinion over time.
Who knows, maybe the next time you see this room, it will have ACTUAL furniture in it. Until then, these newspaper stand-ins remain the room, and they really aren’t that comfortable.
Read MoreA Calm weekend
So, here we are, a new blog to keep up with, as you watch us fix up our house. But what’s that, no new updates!? What is wrong? Well, nothing actually. This past weekend we were out of town at a family wedding, so that meant no more home repair projects. But fear not, we have a few things that we’re working on at the moment, most notably the fireplace mantel. After sawing down the ends yesterday and prying off the baseboard near the fireplace, I completely ran out of steam enough to even snap a very uninteresting photo.
I was going to post some after photos of our newly painted basement, but the color really doesn’t show in the photos, actually it looks the same. Trust us, it’s not. I’ll update a few items this week, but the bulk of my work looks like it will be happening on sunday. Woohoo.
Read MorePicking paints
This weekend MC and I decided to paint the basement. Okay, to be perfectly honest, I decided to paint the basement and conned MC into helping me. As you may have noticed (if you’ve read the past posts), we have painted a lot of rooms so far. Sadly, we still have a lot of rooms to go, but I won’t get into that now. As we have been painting, we’ve been experimenting with different brands and styles of paint to really see what we like the best. Our bedroom, bathroom and kitchen have all been painted with Behr paints. Our living room was painted with Sherwin Williams paint, and so we decided to try our hand at Glidden paint for the basement.
Of all the types of paint we have used so far, Glidden has been our least favorite. Along with trying Glidden, we also went with the “eggshell” sheen, which was new to us, as we almost always go flat (or semi-gloss for the cabinets). It took a full two gallons to get everything covered, which was just brutal. We almost always overbuy our paint, thinking that having half a gallon left over would be good for future touch ups or anything, but we used just about every last drop of the Glidden. As we rolled it on, it looked patchy and spotty all over. It started to become disheartening as we moved along the basement, thinking that we would have to do (dare I say) THREE coats of paint, meaning another trip to the store, just to get it to look complete. Having had so much experience in painting now, we knew that it would need two coats (we believe everything needs two coats), and usually the second coat is more to touch up a few bad areas where we got lazy or tired. But this was insane, it looked like I had skipped 1/3 of the entire wall. All said and done, we were not pleased, but it is all covered and looks great now (that’ll be tomorrow’s post).
I’m not saying, don’t go buy Glidden paint, what I am saying is not all paints are equal. Try a few out, find out what works for you. We did learn that if you have a swatch of one brand that you like, the paint guy can match the color for any brand, so if you really love Behr paint (like us) and you find a swatch in Glidden, take it to the counter and tell them you want that in Behr. Totally worth it. Oh, and while I’m thinking of it, we also are big BIG fans of the Behr paint with primer. It’s thicker, covers more evenly and really covers any drywall patching you may have done earlier. Going forward, I know that the only paint we’ll be using will be Behr or Sherwin Williams, both we’ve been overjoyed with. That is, whenever I can convince MC to do more painting, which probably won’t be for a while.
Read MoreMay I Cut In
As I had said before, the kitchen is just about done, all I have left to do is replace the trim above the cabinets. Before there was this terrible plastic like wood trim on top, and originally I was just going to remove it until I noticed that the cabinets aren’t flush to the ceiling (or bump outs). So, I went back to my favorite store (yep, Home Depot) and picked out a ton of new trim. I measured it all out, and made my miter cuts then painted all the trim to match our Polar Bear colored cabinets.
A bit of advice, if you are going to paint semi gloss white paint, on top of a white door, don’t do it outside on the sunniest day alive. My eyes hurt so bad that everytime I walked inside, I couldn’t see a thing. It took my eyes a good 10 minutes to adjust, just in time for me to go back outside and basically stare directly into the sun again. Do it on a cloudy day, or better yet, inside.
Once I got all the cuts done and trim painted, I let them dry inside overnight. Yesterday was supposed to be the big finish, and I actually had a blog post all planned for how great it looks and all, but alas, that was not the case. Instead, I’m here today to tell you the age old adage, measure twice, cut once. It’s not that my measurements were off (okay, some of them were), it’s that my miter cuts were a bit off. I have done miter cuts before, actually MC’s Dad and I did all the baseboard and shoe molding on the first floor, and that was no problem. This time, however, I was dealing with a bit more sophisticated cuts and angles that I didn’t take the time to rough fit before painting. That, my friends, is the rub. Here’s what I mean.
Good Cut:
BAD Cut:
So now I need to go through and see which cuts I made right, and which I made wrong. This would also be a lot easier had I marked each piece of trim to it’s location. Nope, I didn’t do that either, so now I have a puzzle to put together with mismatching pieces. It’s going to be a fun day.
So, lessons learned:
1) Measure twice, cut once
2) Double check all your miter cuts
3) Rough fit the cuts together before painting
4) For the love of God, do NOT paint semi gloss white paint on a white surface when it is uber sunny out.
5) Buy sunglasses
6) Don’t get your hopes up and always be prepared to do it twice.
7) Having a beer after realizing your error makes your mistakes seem better. More beer = much better.
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About Matt and MC
We just recently bought our first home, and we decided to share our story of our adventures with you. The ups and downs of home ownership, and all the fun we'll have in between. Ignore the typos and just have fun, that's what we're here for. 
