Plumbing 101

Plumber Pete put his plumbing skills to the test today. As you may remember, the en-suite half bath is the only room in the house that wasn't touched during this remodel so far (well, apart from changing out the blue toilet seat...).

The faucet was corroded to the point where there were distinct visible gaps between the counter and the faucet body. Yuck!

We'd gotten a new faucet a while ago but didn't want to pay the plumbers to put it in. Mechanically, the theory of removing and installing a faucet fixture is easy.

The difficulty comes in, as we learned, when there is so much corrosion on the connecting pipes that it's nearly impossible to get the nuts off to even remove the old faucet!

Here's what the faucet looked like when it finally came out.

And here's a shot of the new, much improved faucet. It's night and day!!

I also rediscovered a framed painting of my grandparents', which works perfectly in the hallway.

The First Sign of Spring

It's spring!! A few weeks ago I was walking behind the garage to check things out and found - gasp! - a rose bush! One thing in the garden I'm going to keep!

So here it is. It's hidden behind some not-worthy-of-keeping bushes, so I didn't bother including them in the picture. AND! There's one in bloom!

It's a gorgeous color - it's orange, yellow and red-ish. Beautiful! And there are more buds, so more blossoms are coming!


Here's a photo of the illustrious granite that is left from the kitchen. The granite guys left it behind the garage for us, which is what I was looking at when I found the rose bush. There's enough to make double vanity for the eventual master bathroom remodel.

I've attempted to cover it with some of the construction plastic that was left, but it seems to have dislodged itself from one end, exposing one side of the remainder of the slab, as you can see. Since it's pretty well hidden from the road, not to mention it weighs a TON, it's safe to say that it's safe where it is.

Oooh Floor Transitions are In!

Get this: the company that we bought the laminate flooring for the kitchen from wanted $200 for two transitions. We needed two: one from the kitchen to the dining room and one from the kitchen down to the first step down to the basement. NOT worth $200 of my hard earned money!

So, I asked the carpenter, a wood-working wizard to make them for less than that. And yesterday he came in with these, shown below, for $60!

Over the weekend we cut off part of a shelf in the stairwell to fit over the lovely linoleum on the bottom shelf. I placed a few cute, new baskets there and voila! Transformed!!


Another project over the weekend was to remove all the layers of from the ironing board. This took some time because there were six - yes SIX - previous layers of fabric and padding underneath the gross top one. I think the previous owners just kept adding layers on top of original layers - yuck! (side note, I don't know why the previous line of text is underlined....). The close-up is me pointing to an old nail, 50's era style. I kept one in for good measure.

One of the layers was so old that it was disintegrating in to powder in my fingers. It must have been a foam padding. The bottom most padding looked like it had hairs in it...maybe animal hairs? Did they use that back then??

Window Coverings!

This weekend was more of the same...adding what seems like an endless number finishing touches. Moving boxes in from the room above the garage, unpacking to see what "treasures" are uncovered and figuring out where it can all go.

Yesterday the carpenter came to finish adding the last two cabinet doors in the kitchen. These were last additions to fill the 8" gaps between the ends of the cabinets and the wall (Ikea doesn't sell them in this size). This means the kitchen is done! Here is a video clip I took of the finished kitchen:



Window coverings went up in the bedroom finally! Down came the paper coverings and up went bamboo shades.

And in the dining room! It was a long, hard search for the right color and the fabric, but I ended up with this blue-ish, silvery gray. It complements the tan of the walls really well!

These just went up tonight for a fit check; I haven't ironed them all or cleaned up the room yet, as you can tell. The front window will get a third panel (right now it has two) so that it doesn't look so much like a sheet hanging up. As you can tell, it looks like it's missing some pleating next to the other windows, which look more full.

One problem we encountered was that the ceiling and floor aren't exactly parallel with the window frame. Surprise! So in comes lessons from HGTV (where else) -- align the window treatments to align to the window so that the eye follows the lines that are parallel and won't look crooked.

We did this for the front window (the one with two panels). If we were to have leveled the drapery with gravity, the right side of the curtain would have looked 5/8" higher. So, we just raised the right side by that amount and tadah! it looks even. Thank you, HGTV!


Here's a video of the bathroom. It'll get a couple more cabinets matching the tall one...eventually.