Superbase

This weekend was the last I’ll see of the dogs for a while. The parents made it back from Texas late Friday night, and took the dogs Saturday afternoon. I took lunch over to their place and we got a game plan for the weekend.

My little carpentry project last weekend: lining the closet with wood, hanging shelves, and painting. One or two more coats should do it..the roommate got antsy to move her things back in..

Dad and I decided we’d like to get started hanging the baseboard. And while the thought was nice, the execution was going to drive me crazy.

For a while now, every time I’ve gone to look for something it has miraculously gone missing... either because I’m a crazy person or because everyone puts things in a different place when they’re done. So, rather than wander the house for an hour looking for tape measures and things like that, we decided to clean and organize the garage as it has needed it for quite a while.

You can tell we cleaned, right?

Believe me, it's so much better than it was!

We finished up with that project and had dinner at my place. Take-out = no dishes.

Sunday morning, I got the chance to work on my surround sound system a bit. I ordered a system through our local Radio Shack and it came in! I started putzing around with it Friday on my lunch break, but quickly decided that I was probably going to need to focus on this project for longer than the extra 25 minutes I had at the time. In addition to the speakers, I bought a kit that will mount each unit to the ceiling and orient the speakers so the sound hits me in the teeth while I’m sitting on the couch J

Tiny rear surround speaker. It rocks :)

We had computer speakers rigged up to the TV for sound. Shouldn't need those anymore!

Dad stopped over just in time to lend a hand with this project and it went together pretty smoothly.

After that, we got to work on the baseboard. After messing with the table saw for a bit, we got to work and got quite a bit done considering we were sort of learning as we went along.

This is what we were up against..

Because the floors slope toward the front of the house (remember, my “greenhouse” was originally a porch.. and the floor still sheds water!), we thought for a while about the best way to hang the baseboard. I decided that I’d like the trim to be at the same level all the way through the house. Whether that’s the easy way to do it or the hard way, I don’t know.. Anyway, I bought 8” and 10” baseboard so that we would have plenty of excess board when scribing it to the variations in the floor.

We still need to lay some quarter-round along the bottom to hide any gaps, but it already looks so much better!

We got to the point where we’ll have to switch over to the 10” boards before calling it a night. More work on this tonight, I imagine.

One corner hung, waiting for holes to be filled and sanded. See the need for quarter-round here?

And you can see the floor sinking slightly here. The closer you get to the front door, the more the floor drops. We've got taller boards to make up the difference.

As I write this, Dad is on his way to the store to pick up materials for cabinet-making! We measured everything before he left for Texas, and once the baseboard is hung, we should have room in the garage to build a few boxes. Pictures and posts to follow…wish us luck! J

This is what the door/drawer fronts should look like (we hope!) when done. They'll be painted the same white as the trim, door jambs, and fireplace brick. Again, wish us luck :)

Buried!

I have been swamped lately! There are lots of things happening at work (which is good), lots of things happening at the house (which is great), and generally too much to think about (which is bogging down my mental capacities). This is a blog entry, but it’s also a bit of a purge. Here it goes..

We’ve accomplished so much in such a short amount of time. It’s really amazing to watch everything come together.

All the electrical head-scratchers have been worked out regarding three-way dimmers and whatnot, and the house looks amazing! Especially at night..It’s going to be a cool party house J More on that later.



Sconces on the vanity wall in the bathroom. There's a big mirror between them now - pictures to follow. 

The floor sanding went well and I used three coats of water based satin polyurethane to get the color and sheen I was looking for. It’s actually a bit shinier than I had in mind, but I really like it and I know it will hold up to stains and scratches much better than what I had thought. There are imperfections here and there, but I’m leaving them in place because I think they add a ton of character. The house is nearly 150 years old, after all.

A good view of the floors in the dining room. Chairs from PierOne thanks to my sister's discounts! :)

The big project lately has been hanging doors and figuring out how to trim them. I believe I mentioned a while back that all the doors in my house have been “saved” (wink) from the house next door that’s slated for demolition. While this also adds lots of character, it adds its own set of challenges. When these doors were installed, they were made to fit. That means some of the doors have been hand-planed on the edges here or there to account for a floor that was out of level or a door jamb that was out of plumb. Since only two of the interior doors in my house will actually hang on jambs we had a little bit of room to play. The “jamb doors” in my house needed to fit, obviously; the rest will be cut down slightly to fit the openings created for pocket doors. Now all my doors will match – OCD intact. J  

I put second and third coats of paint on several of the doors last night. Hopefully they’ll be dry enough to work with this evening when we attempt our pocket door and closet bypass door installations.

The other thing that will match is the trim throughout the house. Luckily the house next door also had the same decorative trim over the doors and windows as mine. We “salvaged” quite a bit of that and Dad/Roommate and I have planed and sanded everything down to bare wood. Now every opening should have the thick old moldings that the front/original portion of my house had and the later additions lacked. Since the trim will be painted anyway, I’ll be buying new wood for baseboard so all the woodwork matches all the way through the house. 

The bathroom vanity being put to good use...

Odds and ends, too:

·         Something to do with the refrigerator quit working, so I called in the Home Warranty company and had that fixed. Highly recommend the Home Warranty.

·         We’ve brought the washer and dryer back in to their rightful places and even did a test load of shop towels to make sure everything was still working there.

·         The dining room table came home! This is still so amazing to me: we found this wood in the attic space of the old garage and The Genius planed it down and made probably the coolest table ever. He copied the design from Restoration Hardware’s online catalogue and it looks amazing in the room. I’m really looking forward to having people over for dinner now! 

Dining room table with some of the chairs. It's the perfect size...and just plain cool.

·         Mom/Roommate primed the brick on the fireplace and got it ready for painting. I’m not totally sure what color it will be yet, but the living room is so much brighter with the bay window open and the dark brown brick primed a bright, clean white.

·         Dad/Roommate and I hung the closet organizer in the master bedroom closet. It’s pretty straightforward, but I don’t need anything fancy.

Closet organizer in the master bedroom. Lots of room for lots of shirts!

Oh! Speaking of this being a cool party house.. I was at the Brewery downtown a couple weeks back and they had a great band from Des Moines playing called the River Monks. The whole evening was themed around this Monk idea: they were featuring a Dopplebock from a brewery in Des Moines; the author who subjected himself to the 46 day Dopplebock beer fast (as touted by the Paulaner monks of Neudeck ob der Au in Munich for its nutrient/mineral content) was on hand to sign books and talk to us beer geeks; and the aforementioned River Monks were playing their brand of folky, minimalist pub music – it really made for a fun evening.

Anyway, I met up with a couple of the band members after their set and asked, half-joking/half-serious, if they’d play my house-warming party when they returned from their tour at the end of March. They were actually really excited about it, and I think I will set them up in the entryway J Dim the lights, chill the drinks, sit back and enjoy the night with some great music.

Anyway, I think that’s about it for now. My head feels significantly lighter now that I’ve gotten some of this out. Thanks for reading J