Did you know?

You can take your dog to the Home Depot?

Last time one of the associates told me I needed to "keep my horse saddled at all times."

On light fixtures

This took me almost four months to replace.

 

It looks extra classy with all but one bulb burned out.

It lets people know that this house is a work in progress.

I was shooting for a light fixture that people wouldn't much notice (did I succeed?) because there's an awful lot going on up there.  Smoke detector, carbon monoxide detector . . . or maybe I should go whole-hog and hang a mobile?

As an aside, I chose a flush-mount fixture mostly because it was cheap.  The underside part, the part that meets the ceiling, is backed with insulation. Insulation is not only itchy, but it also makes it unbelievably difficult to thread a screw blindly into a hole in the ceiling.  I will not buy one of these again.

Finishing the bathroom

I hit a couple of snags while I was finishing the bathroom, mostly because I’d never done it before.  It wasn’t anything major, but it slowed down my progress.  My bathroom vanity finally arrived one afternoon and I thought (honestly!) that I would just install it after work.  No big whoop.

I got the thing unpacked and staged in the bathroom.  It was pretty.  I somehow came to my senses and realized that I wouldn’t be able to put it together after working ten hours.  I should eat dinner, drink wine, and play with the dog instead.

I should also go back to Home Depot because I hadn’t purchased the correct plumbing materials.  Grrr.

The following Friday I put together the sink, which required installing the faucet and the drain kit.  In retrospect this would have been easier with a second person.  I had the sink cradled in my lap while I blindly tried to wrench things into place, all while keeping handles and spigot pointed in the right direction.  This is harder than it sounds.  It’s not anything that requires a professional but there is a certain finesse to doing it.

I chose a faucet one step up from the "builder’s special," which is what they charmingly call the cheapest faucet available.  I didn’t want to spend a ton of money (faucets are surprisingly expensive) but I didn’t want to cheap out, then buy another faucet in a year.  I chose brushed nickel, which seems to be really popular right now.  Do you remember how everything in the 80s was brass and how outdated it looks now?  I hope that doesn’t happen with brushed nickel.

It will probably happen with brushed nickel.

Once the faucet was installed I put a thin bead of caulk along the base and set the sink on top of it and then the weirdest thing happened: the sink was no longer flush with the base.  It rocked a little bit.  I shifted the sink around a little, and still it rocked.  I have no idea what changed but I just hoped the caulk would magically fix the problem.  And you know what?  It did.

My major problem with getting the vanity installed was a shelf installed inside.  It was just high enough that it interfered with the P trap of the drain.  I thought, “Well I’ll just remove the shelf!”  Who needs a shelf?  I removed the screws only to find that the shelf was glued in.  Really tightly.  I tried to fudge it and install the plumbing anyway, resulting in a bit of uptilt of the P trap, but this made the drain leak.  Ultimately I borrowed a jigsaw from the North Portland tool library and cut out a little spot for the pipe to hang.  It doesn’t look that great, but nobody should know but me and my roommate, right?

It took me about a week to stop checking the drain to see if it was leaking every time I used the sink.  I still check every once in a while, sure that my work will fail.  My friend Keith came over and taught me how to change out a light fixture and I hung some artwork.  

I think I like it even better than the pedestal sink I had planned.

The new kitchen floor

The Marmoleum I wanted usually takes about three weeks to arrive.  They send a big truck from the midwest and it travels around delivering linoleum happiness to people.  With the economy in the crapper nobody was ordering flooring, so the truck was just sitting there, waiting to be filled.  Three weeks after we ordered the tiles they said it would be at least another three weeks.

As I mentioned before, I was brushing my teeth in the kitchen sink because my bathroom vanity was on order, and the kitchen floor was just dusty subfloor.  I think it was a real testament to either 1. how much I love this house or 2. how tired I was, that this didn't make me crazy.

I had waffled over the kitchen floor, wondering if I could install it myself.  I had been warned that it's not as easy to install as ceramic tile, that to get the seams sealed required some skill.  The Marmoleum Click tiles, which snap together like laminate flooring, would add height to the floor that I didn't want.  I found out that Marmoleum comes with a 25 year warranty if you have a certified installer put it in.  So I decided to spend the money to have it installed professionally.  I got a ridiculous number of bids and selected A-1 Linoleum.  I can't say enough good things about A-1.  They were fantastic, they were honest, they were NICE.  The owner split the difference of rushing the tiles out, which was about $60.

Worth every penny. Having a real kitchen floor again made me feel like a princess.  I love the feel of the linoleum under my feet.  A lot of people complain about old linoleum in their apartment or house and I have to point out that they have vinyl tile, which is a totally different thing.  Linoleum is made of renewable materials and uses no toxic chemicals.  So if I ever sell the house and the new owner doesn't like the floor (and MANY people dislike my flooring choice) they can rip it out and I don't need to feel quite as guilty if it ends up in a landfill.

The only problem with putting new things in your house is that it highlights how much other things need sprucing.

How bad does that weird carpet in the dining room look, now? Someday down the road I'll fix that . . .

But for now I really really love my kitchen.

The kitchen floor debacle

I had to go back to work the next week, which was probably for the best.  My fingers and wrists were so swollen and sore from gripping tools, scrubbing things, and holding a paintbrush that I woke up in the morning with my hands frozen in a claw.  None of my rings fit and my back was a mess.  I stopped by the house after work to throw another coat of paint on the closets and built-ins and found that the cheap styrofoam cooler of beer I had in the kitchen had cracked and leaked all over the kitchen floor.

 The kitchen tile before

Since the tile was cracked and lifting in places (which you really can't see in the photo), all the water traveled into the subfloor.  Luckily, I was already planning on replacing the kitchen floor and had already gotten six bids and ordered the materials. 

I pulled up the tile right then and there until I hit dry floor.  The water had spread the 9 ft length of the kitchen, to about a six feet width.  I pointed a fan at the floor and hoped it would be okay.

The upshot to this whole situation was that the mortar and grout that had been used to put the tile down scraped off quite easily.  In retrospect I wish the water had spread MORE because that last 30 or 40 square feet that stayed dry was a pain to clear.  I rented a floor scraper from the North Portland tool library but I didn't have the requisite upper body strength or stamina to use it very effectively.

I had ordered black and white Marmoleum, to be laid in a checkerboard pattern.  The installers were planning to put down a 1/4" underlayment beneath the tiles, but the subfloor would need to be pretty smooth.  Ultimately I went to the hardware store and rented a belt sander.  Gary at the Home Depot really didn't think this would work.  He asked he if I had considered a power washer.  I reiterated that I was removing thinset INSIDE MY HOUSE.  In the kitchen.

He suggested Goo Gone.  I asked him if he knew what thinset was.  Was he familiar with ceramic tile and how it gets attached to things?

He really tried to talk me out of the sander.  I was really tired at this point.  He very begrudgingly rented it to me.  He and his coworker joked back and forth that it was going to take me all night, that it was good I had a sleeping bag in my trunk, that it was a good thing I could have the sander until morning.  He tried to sell me 15 sanding belts, because "I was gonna need them." 

And guess what happened?  The sander worked like a charm.  I had the sander back to them in less than two hours.  I had used two sanding belts, but could have gotten away with one.

Suck it, Gary.

Day 7: Painting

My very tall friend Garbear came over to help me paint.  Painting with tall people is the best.

Despite the fact that I bought a sample of this paint color and painted a large swatch, it still ended up different than I wanted. The swatch was gray with a purple undertone; it was perfect. When we actually painted the entire room I got lavender.  It's pretty but it's not exactly what I wanted.

For all my work, it still sort of looks like Easter ralphed in there.  But it's clean and fresh Easter puke.  And man, painting the ceiling is the coolest trick in the world. I will never ever paint a room without painting the ceiling as well (except for the dining room, but I was really tired!).  It makes the room look so clean, so crisp, so brand-spankin' new.

Garbear then painted my bedroom ceiling, the bedroom closet, and the insides of the built-ins.  A funny thing happened, though.  At some point during the day one of us filled his pan with flat paint.  Then at some point I filled it with semi-gloss.  Then who knows what went in there.  It was the exact same color (MetroPaint's Mountain Snow) but in a different sheen  Imagine the tiny bit of shininess you see here:

painted in great swaths across your ceiling.  It looked terrible.  Until I figured out the sheen mix-up (and I'm going to blame MetroPaint for mislabeled paint, not the beer we were drinking. BEER DOESN'T MAKE BAD THINGS HAPPEN.) I was thinking that Garbear was a spectacularly untalented painter. I assumed he was pressing harder with the roller or something, which doesn't make any sense.  I wish I could say that this was the last time I made this mistake, but after three months in the house I'm realizing that half the bathroom door is shiny . . . and the closet (which I hit with a second and third layer of what I thought was flat) has some shiny spots where I accidentally touched up with semi-gloss.  AGAIN.

Seriously, keep your semi-gloss and flat paint in different zip codes.  Or maybe ventilate better than I did?  Addled brains do not lend themselves to good decisions.

Day 6: Manly men!

Another issue that hung up my closing was the shed on the back of the house.  It was rotting and not truly anchored to the house anymore.  My insurance company required that I remove it within thirty days or they wouldn't cover me.  So instead of installing laminate flooring the boys got to rip apart the shed.

They had such a good time.  After pulling some nails out they decided they could just yank the thing down.

Rad.

Small problem: I had neglected to think about how we'd get this out of the backyard.  My friend had even stopped by that morning *with his truck* and I didn't even think about swapping cars.  So dumb.

A few frantic phone calls later and I was headed to the Home Depot to rent a flat bed truck.  The previous owner had stored 17 bags of concrete in the shed. At some point these got waterlogged, which meant we had about 1600 pounds of concrete pillows to move out of the shed.

All together we took two trips to the dump, with a total of 2200 pounds of materials.  I mostly fetched beers and took pictures on this project, making these guys very good friends indeed.  My favorite part was when we finished getting all the debris into the truck and Z quipped, "The best part is that they'll never know where the shed was."