This weekend we put in 3 (out of 6) new windows and started the trim…

I pulled off all the vertical trim on the exterior and cut new pieces to better camouflage the wood strips I had to put in to make the windows fit better. It took so long (and used more wood), so I’m thinking of skipping this step on the other side. Even if it doesn’t look as clean, it shouldn’t be a big deal once everything is all painted.

Some door and baseboard trim

My formerly clean work space is trashed again. The MDF molding makes an unbelievable, eternally-reproducing pile of sawdust!

A few weeks ago we got our doors and jambs back from Houck’s Stripping.  Actually, he had been bugging me for awhile, but I was trying to defer picking them up until we were ready for them.  As usual with remodeling projects, it became clear that the timing wouldn’t work out, so I just picked them up and jammed them in the garage.  Our garage has looks more like the Rebuilding Center or the basement at Hippo Hardware than a garage, since it is packed full of wood, windows, a pink toilet and other materials that came out of our house.   In fact, since we’ve never actually parked a car into either of its two stalls, I’m afraid that it probably feels very emasculated. Continue Reading »

This weekend I finished up ALL the floors.  I’m a big fan of the laminate floors now.  In probably 20-24 hours of work, I was able to get the entire upstairs done by myself.  I can also say now that I’ve put it down that I’m really, really impressed with how well the laminate coped with some of the floor issues.  There were a few places that I laid down a layer or two of felt paper to smooth a transition or to bring up a low level, but otherwise the floor and it’s pre-attached padding dealt with the rest on its own.  I was actually shocked that the area in which I had spread the leveling compound in Chloe’s room was covered without a hitch.  There is just enough “give” in this material that it could probably deal with most normal floors without much prep at all.  I recommend the felt paper as an easy-to-work-with material for building up floors where you have to, but I honestly used MUCH less than I expected to.  I’d guess that most brands are similar at any given price point, but we will definitely give a thumbs up for the Pergo Accolade.

This opinion piece by bunaglow author and expert Jane Powell ran in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle. I found it to be a very thoughtful piece, and well worth sharing.

One of Ms. Powell’s most compelling arguments, which I think applies to most of us who are in the process of breathing new life into an old home or building, is that it may be far more healthy for our planet to retrofit an existing building using recycled and salvaged materials than it is to build something new, no matter how “green” the building materials may be. Continue Reading »

I started working on the upstairs floors this weekend, and it’s amazing how fast these laminate floors go in.  It took awhile to get into a good groove and figure out all the tricks (the rubber mallet is your friend), but once I did they went in about 3x as fast as the engineered wood we put into the kitchen.  In about 10 hours, I was able to finish 2/3 of our upstairs (450-500 square feet, with lots of walls and cut-outs).  While I’m still not convinced I’ll like them as much as wood, the click system is awesome, and I think they will hold up well over time.

Today we picked up our 42 boxes of Pergo and brought them upstairs to acclimate. We’re going to start laying them down this weekend, but you can get an idea of what they’ll look like with this sample patch I laid down. We are still trying to decide if we need to go with a separate underlayment or not. The boards have the pre-attached variety, but it Continue Reading »

No, I’m not talking about the excessive amount of coffee I may have drank this morning but rather about the fact that we now have working lights and outlets upstairs. It felt like I was on an assembly line by the time I screwed in the last outlet, but everything is all juiced up now. Except for most of the sconces, which I’m leaving until the end. I can easily see myself whacking one with a piece of trim, so it’s safer to wait. It is the most exciting feeling to walk up there and be able to flick a switch or be able to plug something in in any room. For the last 16 months, we’ve had to coordinate a maze of extension cords, all fed from single cord snaked up from the basement. And before that there was no power up there at all, a byproduct of our “let’s just gut the upstairs now, so we can save a bunch of time” decision we made back in 2004. I still have to say that was the right choice, because if we had moved even a single piece of furniture up there, this project would NEVER have gotten started. Yesterday I taught Chloe the most important lesson about working with electricity Continue Reading »