Delementals » Remodel

The Busy-ness that nommed my blogging

Del — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 08:03:26 +0000

When life hands you busyness – the only thing you can really do is chin up and knuckle down. This last month has just completely kicked my you-know-what. I swear we’ve run from one event or emergency to another the entire time. Between sports events, games, Mr. Man’s work shtuff, and then a less-than-a-week notice that my mother was coming up for a visit, the month of October has just flown by. It’s been productive, but man I’m looking forward to a break.

I’m not even sure where to begin – well, actually, that is not entirely true. I suppose it started when I opened my mouth – something I’ve been known to do entirely too frequently. The details are fairly personal, but suffice to say that there was someone in my group of friends who was aggravating me, and had been aggravating me for a while. I had been trying really hard not to say anything about it, but you know – I’m not a Saint, and eventually I just couldn’t take anymore and I wrote The Email That Started The Discussion. Sadly, the end result of that discussion is that this person is no longer my friend. Happily, given my levels of frustration with her, it didn’t really bother me too awful much. Unfortunately – dealing with that situation probably nommed up most of the first week of October.

Then we had an All-Weekend Sports event that we had to deal with for Miss Thing – which ended up with us having a pretty good time at an Amusement Park for one of those days, but was definitely full of busyness and drain-y-ness. (Only slightly related fact: Batter Fried Oreos with Vanilla Ice Cream is like taking a little trip to heaven.)

We had ONE down weekend, and then just as we were starting to feel normal and human again, we get a call from my mother telling us that she’s going to be up to visit the following weekend. Which was enough to send me in to something of a panic as I began a near week long extravaganza of cleaning up, organizing, and GTTFD. (Getting things the … done) What did I do? Well – the picture up above is of one of the corners of the den. Prior to the weekend before my mom’s visit, this area had been a dumping ground of half unpacked boxes and misc junk.

It was probably my corner of shame in an otherwise decent(ish) house. Unfortunately, I don’t really have any before pictures, which makes me very sad. But my friends can attest to the fact that it was bad. When we were discussing it at Samhain someone said ‘yeah, did you see the pics of Del’s fireplace?’ and I kid you not, a friend of mine who’s been to my house several times turned to me and said “You have a fireplace?”

So I managed to tear all those boxes out of there, unpack a bunch of things, put things away, take three huge car loads of stuff to donate to the American Cancer Society Discovery Shop, paint, buy a cabinet and some shelves from Ikea, badger Mr. Man in to hanging said shelves and assembling said cabinet, all before my mother arrived. Yes, I was a basket case that weekend. Yes, I put in 18+ hour days getting it done. But gosh darn it, it was done before she arrived and it looks fabulous.

Then my mother arrives. I wish I could say that it went very well, but I’ll have to settle for “As well as could be expected.” It was at times frustrating, stressful, good, bad, educational, and over all – simply exhausting. What can I say? We have a complicated relationship.

Anyways, shortly after her visit, I discovered that I was going to need another Root Canal (booo!). I’d been having some severe aching pain for several days, and still didn’t have a dentist after all the aggravation from the beginning of the month. (See here). Given that I was in serious pain, I decided to compromise on my dentist criteria and settle for “Is Not Sears or Smilecare and Can See Me ASAP”. The gods must have felt sorry for me because they led me to a dentist who could see me the next day, and was willing to refer me out to get my root canal done the following day. Still not as relaxing as I would have hoped after my mother’s visit, but I feel good about getting some progress done there as well. I still have a lot more work to do – and now I have another crown to get as well. But atleast it’s progress of a sort.

The only downside to the quick turn around of my root canal, is that I had to have it on the same day that the circle I belong to was having our Samhain ritual. If it had been any other time, I might have bowed out. I was in a fair amount of pain. But it had been a rough month, for all of us, and I am quite simply, so incredibly glad that I went. Everyone was able to attend – the first time the entire group had been together in quite a while. It was probably the most deep and spiritual ritual I’ve been in for a long time, and I felt so loved and blessed to be a part of it. I think we all needed that moment together, to reconnect and share. I know I did – and I’m so grateful to have them in my life.

So yeah – long story short (I know – too late, right?) busyness nommed my October. But hopefully things will be better now.

House Update – Pictures and Recent Activities

Del — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 18:08:45 +0000

So – it’s been a while since I’ve been able to post. We’ve spent much of the last couple of weeks finishing with installing the crown moulding, painting, and doing cleanup and a little unpacking in preparation for Mr. Man’s Grandparent’s Visit over this last weekend. Between all that going on, there just hasn’t been time for much else, like blogging (or even email). However, we did get a ton of things around the house done, and it is looking just incredible, if I do say so myself. We still have a lot of unpacking to do – and the cabinet trim and backsplash need to be addressed at some point, but it’s really starting to feel more and more like home.

Mr. Man did all the cuts for the crown moulding himself, and the two of us installed and painted it. I was a little leery of it at first, just because I tend to favor less ornate decorations, but once it was installed, I got to say that I’m thrilled with it. It was a hell of a lot of work, but it’s really paid off – Mr. Man and I both will just get these goofy grins every so often when we look up at it and see how beautiful it is. I especially like it on the accent wall and in the entry – since it really frames in the dark colors and makes it pop.

I’ll be glad to get life back to some semblance of normal here for a little while though – the crazy busy schedule was just not doing it for me, and I missed posting.

(For the record, the wall paint colors are all Benjamin Moore Aura Line – the only paint brand I think I will ever, ever buy again. We used:

Kitchen: Ash Blue
Living Room: Greenbrier Beige
Accent Wall: Naples Blue
Entry Way: Cranberry Cocktail
Hall: Sandy White

The Umpteenth Kitchen Update; Now with 85% more complete-y-ness.

Del — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 03:15:00 +0000

I have to tell you, it is so, soooooooooo nice to have a functional kitchen again. Here are some pictures of what we’ve been up to:

Don and I installing the Cork Underlayment:

Starting to lay down the Linoleum (Not Vinyl!):

The Finished Floor: (still needs a threshold, so ignore the seam)

Next the Stone guys came and installed our Soapstone. We had talked about doing the soapstone cutting ourselves, but ultimately decided to go with Architectural Stone out of Brentwood. They did a fabulous job and we’re super happy with it. We picked out two slabs that had a lot of green and a fair amount of movement in them. We also ended up with enough left over to save for another project we’ve got planned for in the future.

The poor guys were running late that day, and didn’t even get to our house until 5PM, and were working on our counters until after 9pm. Even so, they did a fantastic job. Here are the counters just after they brought them in:

Installing the Sink side, with seamless piece going in to box window:

The Bar:

Finishing Up the Install and Oiling the Stones:

And now we’re nearly complete:

And a little project we worked on yesterday, New Pantry shelves:

It’s really turned out wonderful. We’re now down to little things, such as trim – and the backsplash. I still don’t know what I want to do for basksplash. I was kinda trying to talk Mr. Man in to magnetic dryerase backsplash, but he thinks it would look jenky. He’s probably right – but it sure would be fun! (and as an added bonus, super easy) We need to decide soon. Neither of us wants to have the kitchen stay in a semi-permanent state of near-completeness. So that will be pretty high on the priority list. Anyhow – it’s been a crazy ride. I love being able to cook again and have already cooked up up some yummy dishes that I’ll post when I get another chance.

A Kitchen update in Pictures

Del — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:56:00 +0000

Because I’m too tired/busy to do a commentary…

Yet another Kitchen Update

Del — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:04:00 +0000

We’ve been making some (very!) visible progress the last couple of weeks, yay! With the colors chosen – we were able to go ahead and start painting – which is exactly what we did. I am so excited about getting the rest of the house painted now, seeing how well this color turned out. Here’s a pic!

Isn’t it beautiful? We’ve also started hanging the range hood. We would have finished it, but unfortunately, there’s a design flaw in the chimney cover – so we had to call warranty/service to come out to fix it. Our ceilings are low, only 8′ high – so we have the chimney set to the shortest setting. Well – Kitchenaid, in their infinite wisdom, set up the chimney cover in four pieces. Two smaller pieces, that you attach near the top, cutting to fit, and two larger pieces that slide up over that. Unfortunately, at the shortest setting – there’s no space for the smaller chimney cover – in fact it’s EXACTLY the perfect amount for the two larger pieces. Except that you can’t get them to connect on without being able to slide them. Which is totally stupid. But here’s a pic of the (nearly) installed hood.

In process right now is using floor patch to smooth and level the underlayment – and then we’ll be putting moisture barrier down, at which point we will finally finally finally be able to hang cabinets (I hope). Once the cabinets are in place, we’ll be in the home stretch – the floor should be easy to do since we decided against going with tile – we are instead going with a floating linoleum (not vinyl!) “click” floor. It was a tough decision, and one we talked about at length. There were quite a few reasons – the first of which was that I started really thinking about how comfortable hard ceramic or stone tiles would be to stand on for long periods. With Linoleum being a green product and being resilient to boot; I was pretty sold on the idea early on. Mr. Man was more hesitant – but when we discovered that the span between our floor joists were 48″ and would require extra support in order to prevent deflection (and subsequent breakage) of tile, I got him to consider it, and when he had a chance to walk on some linoleum and see how comfortable it was and how it looked, he became more amenable. The kicker was when we got a steal of a deal on linoleum click-together style floating floor tiles. At the price we got it for – if we install it and decide after a year or two that we want something different, we can totally justify it, so I’m pretty happy about it. We’re also going to install a 1/4″ cork underlayment to go under it – which will help with standing comfort and reduce some of that clicky noise associated with walking floating floors. Here’s a sample pic of the flooring we chose:

We’ve also decided to go with Soapstone over Granite counters. We both love the matte look of soapstone, and we’ll be able to save a lot of money by installing it ourselves – since Soapstone is one of the few natural stone counter top materials that can be installed by the diy’er. It’s also easier to take care of and more resistant to stains than, for instance, honed Granite – which has a similar matte look. It’s softer than granite, which does mean it will scratch a little easier – but fixing scratches doesn’t require having a proffessional come out. You just buff it out with a little bit of sand paper and then wipe it down with mineral oil. Easy-peasy.

The Backsplash still hasn’t been completely figured out – but I think in the scheme of things – that doesn’t have to be done right away. I wouldn’t want to do it before we put the counter in anyways, so we might as well wait and see what that looks like before bothering with figuring out the tile.

Anyhow – in all this mad rush of getting stuff done, we did manage to finally complete one small project – and that is the hall closet. We painted it the same color we’re going to paint the hall way – and then I used the paint from a sample can of blue paint that we were considering for the kitchen/living room (but didn’t end up liking enough for that) to paint the shelves with. It really makes the closet look nice, imho. The network is all hooked up there, as well – with our patch panel and router and everything up and out of sight. That work had actually been done for a while – Mr. Man networked the house with CAT 6 soon after we moved in; so every room has internet – which is totally hawt. It was hard to get a good picture, given the small amount of space I could work with – but this will give you some idea.

Anyhow, I think that is everything we’ve done recently. Not too shabby, eh?

Kitchen Remodel Update

Del — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:27:00 +0000

It’s been a while since my last update – mostly because I’ve been too busy DOING the work to POST about it. lol. We’ve managed to accomplish a lot and it’s FINALLY starting to look like the end might be in sight. Here are some pics of what we’ve been up to.

First, we passed our gas and wiring inspection, yay! Then we put in a new plywood subfloor and installed new insulation in the walls.

By the way – I hate working with insulation. It was really, really not fun. But we got it up, and it really does help keep the temperature regulated – we can actually use the heater now, yay!

Here’s Don going up in to the attic to fix the attic insulation:

After insulation, we hung new sheetrock. Here’s a pic of our new sheetrock hung on the ceiling, and our recessed LED lights temporarily installed.

After we hung (most) of the sheetrock, we hired a company to come in and do the taping/texturing. Here’s some pics of the work in progress:

Here’s the completed taping/texturing (still drying). They did a pretty good job matching the texture to the old texture that was in the rest of the house. There are some things I’m not keen about that they did – but overall they did a pretty good job.

This picture was actually taken before they did the texture – but it was when we took the plastic dust shield we’d had up to finally get a glimpse of how it’s going to look when completed. I’m so glad we decided to take down that wall. It’s going to be an amazing space.

If you can believe it though – in all this time that we’ve been working on the kitchen, we STILL hadn’t been able to decide .. colors. Part of the problem was, of course, that everytime I tried to talk color, poor Mr. Man’s eyes would roll back in his sockets and he’d begin to twitch. I finally managed to nail him down and get him looking at paint swatches, but I have the feeling he was a little bit confused about how the process was supposed to work.

We finally decided .. colors – thank goodness. All colors are from Benjamin Moore, and we decided to shell out the extra $$$ for the Aura line paints, which are supposed to be low VOC and scrubbable at any finish.

Kitchen: Ash Blue
Living Room: Greenbrier Beige
Accent Wall: Naples Blue
Entry Way: Cranberry Cocktail
Hall: Sandy White

With color choices in place, we started priming the fresh drywall.

We’re just about ready to put the new ceiling paint on – probably be doing that tonight. It’s coming along, yay!

*See Update here

Another Kitchen Update, huzzah!

Del — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 17:57:00 +0000

So it’s been a busy week or so at Casa de Del. We finally decided to go with a plumber to get the gas line installed, and so far, it seems like they did a pretty good job – although we’ll see for sure after the inspection. Reserving judgment until then.

Here’s the end result; a shiny new gas range hookup!

And here’s the new pipe coming out of the service:

While we were at it, we went ahead and had them install an Earthquake Shut-off valve, whichwe wanted anyways, but is also required by code.

Also, the best place for them to come back down the garage wall and shoot underneath the floor just happened to be right by the dryer, where we currently have an electric dryer, so we went ahead and had them set up a T so that sometime in the future if we decide we want a gas dryer, we have it all ready.

As if all that wasn’t enough, Mr. Man has been busily working on the wiring, getting new kitchen wiring run over to the new service panel, and setting the stage to turn our old circuit panel in to a Junction Box. Here’s the old panel:

And here’s the shiny new one!

We’re hoping to have our inspection SOON, and then it will be time for Drywall and laying down new subfloor in the kitchen, and then (yay!) cabinets and appliances! We still haven’t completely decided on a color pallet. We’re leaning towards a Blue-blue/green in the living room and then something in the neutral range of green for the kitchen (maybe an olive-y green?) Which we really should try and figure out soon – but until our new living room rug arrives and I see it in the room, it’s kind of hard to gauge.

I also still need to figure out what kind of tile we want for the floor and backsplash. I’m still trying to talk Mr. Man in to a nice slate floor, but he doesn’t really like the slate I picked out, which has been a bit of a stumbling block. I think I’ve narrowed the backsplash down to two choices, although it depends on cost, since I’m not quite sure how much they’ll be, and I may decide that frugality is better than cool and just get some tiles from the big orange box store. But these are probably my top two choices right now. The first pic is from AJI Tiles. The tiles are Stainless Steel, with a brushed finish. They would reflect the light well and fit in with the stainless steel appliances.

My second top choice is from Tetris Tiles. These tiles are fun and a little bit geeky (like me!) without being too niche or obvious. Plus, they can be customized in to a color pallette of our choice. I’m waiting to hear back from the tetris people with a quote, but here’s a pic from their site:

Accents for teh kiddle’s room

Del — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:07:16 +0000

Spent the day working on a little flair for teh daughter’s bedroom. I purchased these photo storage boxes at Michael’s a while back for like $4.00, and thought they’d look super cute if I added some fabric and ribbon to them.

I already had the fabric – leftovers for making her message boards (I’ll post a pic of those later). First I cut a piece of polkadot fabric to be slightly larger than the top of her box. Then I used Spray adhesive and carefully positioned it on the lid of the box, smoothing out any wrinkles. Next I folded over the edges and smoothed them down. Then I took some pink ribbon, and using spray adhesive, I laid it along the edge of the polkadot fabric, wrapping it over itself at the middle of the front of the box. While the adhesive dried, I cut the loops off the back of these adorable buttons I’d found at JoAnn’s, and using C-clamps and PVA glue (Cuz thats what I had on hand), I glued the buttons over the seam of the ribbon, and clamped in place to dry.

I had considered putting fabric over the rest of the box, too – but I didn’t quite have enough fabric, and I didn’t want to build up the sides of the box too much, since that would make getting the lids on and off harder. I think they came out really cute! Perfect for storing pens, pencils, doo-dads and what-nots in.

Pictures of the kitchen

Del — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:44:00 +0000

So here they are – as promised! Pictures of the kitchen. So far, we’ve:

A) Tore out the old flooring and cabinets
B) Removed the wall that was between the Kitchen and the Living room
C) Reinforced the joists with sheer walling to offset some of the loss of support
D) Replaced said wall with a half-wall suitable for securing a bar and cabinets to.
E) Took out a lot of freaking drywall
F) Rewired the entire kitchen to bring it up to code
G) Installed our Title-24 compliant (and completely hawt) LED recessed lights.

Left to do:
1) Finish the last little bit of wiring
2) Run a gas line for the stove
3) Install new ossm circuit panel to handle our new kitchen circuits
4) Get electrical/gas inspected
5) Hang new drywall
6) Paint
7) Lay cement board over the sub floor
Install Cabinets & appliances
9) Get granite installed
10) lay tile
11) Drink scotch (this can be completed before, during or after each step, and may be repeated as often as neccessary)

The nicest room in the house (currently)

Del — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:46:00 +0000

So here it is: the only room in the house even close to being done. I still need to hang up the art work and the new blinds – and the curtains are in the process of being hemmed so they’re MIA at the moment. But it gives you some idea of how it’s shaping up. I also need to get some shelves up for the stereo speakers (I hate having them on the floor!) But it’s shaping nicely. I’ll post some more pictures when it’s finished.