Bath

What a sad little outlet…

I know! I’ll put a bird on it!

it's so pretty!

Spruce it up! Make it pretty! This is Portland, after all.

We recently made the decision to try to focus a little more on the little things that have been neglected as we have long been distracted by things such as raising our upstairs ceiling, painting our house and building a playhouse.  We’ve been living with a hunk of old kitchen molding serving as our bathroom threshold (OK, actually we have 3 thresholds that look like this), so last week the decision was made to at least finish the one leading into the kitchen and this one into the bath.  The kitchen one was knocked out in no time, since we had a transition piece that had been bought with the flooring (it took me longer to find it than to cut and install it). It’s not very exciting, so I didn’t bother taking a picture of that one.

The one into the bathroom is a little more picture-worthy, since there were some obstacles to overcome.  First, none of the off-the-shelf thresholds we found really worked for this area.  Also, I found that hunks of wood that are sold with the label “threshold” are 3-4x more expensive than a comparable piece of wood.  So I bought piece of 1/2″ oak that I could rip down and add a simple beveled profile with the table saw.  It looks great and matches our oak floor really well.  Secondly, the door jamb is still covered in lead paint, so I didn’t want to just start sawing it and creating a bunch of lead dust.  That meant that I had to use paint stripper to take off the bottom 1″ of paint, not only to allow the cut but to also make things easier later by not having to strip areas immediately adjacent to the threshold.  I was able to dig out the undercut jamb saw that has only been used once, which instantly made me feel twice as justified about having purchased it back in 2005 when doing our kitchen floor.  I did a surprisingly good job on the undercut, because unlike the first time when I just marked the wood and started cutting, I took a small piece of the oak and used it as a guide for my cut.  I just held the saw down fairly tight against the wood as I cut, and it worked perfectly.

We’re looking forward to getting it stained, sealed and installed soon!

Nice cut!

60's molding turned threshold

A few months back, a local photographer – Kim Campbell of Campbell Salgado Studio – came to the bungalow to photograph the insanity! Actually, it wasn’t all that insane – just a relaxing couple of hours of parents, kids and pugs soaking up the sunshine and smiling for the camera.

Click to continue »

We’ve been asked on a couple of occasions for the names of our paint colors, and we thought it’d be best to dedicate a post to them. So now if anyone is ever curious about any of our colors, they can just check here. One of the perks/punishments of being married to a designer is our extensive color palette. While, yes, it would be boring to use the same shade of off-white in all your rooms, sometimes I have found myself wondering “do we really need 17 unique colors in every house we’ve ever lived in?” I can barely coordinate two colors, so I’m always amazed at how Stephanie is able to see how all the colors will relate to each other, even before they’re on the wall. My brain doesn’t work that way, so I just don’t get it. I can recall only twice where she wanted to change a color after getting the room painted…and that’s probably out of at least 40 paint jobs (scarily, we’ve lived in 4 different houses in the last 12 years). Anyway, here’s what we’ve got in this one. By the way, I copied much of this from a reply Stephanie left on another post, so if you want more detail, check here.

Foyer: the red looks much richer in real life than it does in the photo. It’s Sherwin Williams Rembrandt Ruby SW0033. This is probably my favorite color in the entire house. The ceiling is Sherwin Williams Hubbard Squash SW0044.

Living room: walls are Miller Paint Green Acre 8144M (Stephanie chose this one to match the green in the shades on our light fixtures – bungalow greens are usually a little more olive-toned.) Ceiling is Sherwin Williams Hubbard Squash SW0044.

Dining room: Walls are a Miller Paint custom mix (recipe: 05M0470,B – 6,C – 2 x 44, F – 3 x 28,W – 5 X 32, P/G). I have no idea what that all means, but supposedly it results in a pretty cool color. Stephanie says that Miller Sunburst 7845D is pretty similar to this. Ceiling is Sherwin Williams Hubbard Squash SW0044.

Kitchen: Walls are Miller Paint Fog Buoy 8574M. Ceiling was “a very custom mix – we mixed some buttery yellow paint we already had with ceiling white to achieve a creamy color that matched the caramel-swirled art glass in our kitchen light fixtures”

Bathroom: Lowe’s Spongebob Squarepants collection Seaweed. Ceiling is just standard “ceiling white” paint.

Upstairs, main room: Miller Paint’s Pekoe Tea 7673M. (Miller has changed their palette since we painted the playroom – this color is no longer in their fan deck, but they do still have the recipe in their database.)

Chloe’s room: Not recommended for anyone other than 4 year old girls! Sherwin Williams Impatient Pink 3854. I never knew the name before looking it up just now, and somehow it seems very appropriate for Chloe!

Back in February, we had a little incident with our sink supply line suddenly popping its gasket and shooting water out in our downstairs bathroom.  I had replaced the defective semi-rigid supply line with a new hose and had intended to change out the other as soon as I could.  Well, as with most things house-related, even things you panic about can lose their crisis status after being ignored for a few days.  Every once in awhile I’d think about it and say to myself “I really should change that out before it fails.”  And then I’d do nothing.  Yesterday I finally remembered to pick up a new hose and swapped it out.  Now I can stop losing sleep at night (actually, I wasn’t, which was why it took me so long to do it…)

It has taken us a long time to get to this point. Specifically, 2 1/2 years since we bought the house, almost 2 years since we moved in and about 13 months since we started working on the upstairs (not counting the gut job we did a week after we bought it). As we mentioned before, we have the pressure of a 2nd kid on the way to push us to turn our 2 bedroom back into the 4 bedroom that it started as. And while we’re at it, we thought why not raise the ceiling and add a bathroom? In retrospect, it’s probably ideas like those that cause our projects to take so much longer than they feel like they should. Here’s a quick update of what I wrapped up during my “vacation” last week…

Chloe’s room. In the 2nd picture, you can see the cavity that will eventually house a pocket door, one of the greatest inventions of all time:

Bathroom. This room also gets a pocket door. I threw in and old picture so you can see how we stole some space out of Chloe’s room and the main room to create the bath. In that picture you can see the old closet doorway, the right side of which was where the dividing wall between rooms originally was.

Main room insulation and vapor barrier completed.  I didn’t take any pictures of the front room (the new baby’s), but it is also ready to go.

We can now start getting bids from drywallers.  We’re going to hire it out, because we want to finish sometime this year, not sometime this decade…

I took last week off work, so I got 7 days of work in. This is exactly what our upstairs project needed to get over the hump. Since we’re expecting a baby in July, we are feeling a new pressure to get upstairs finished. Our 4 bedroom house has effectively been 2, since we gutted the upstairs before we moved in and didn’t even start working on it until a year ago. Last January we certainly didn’t think that we’d still be working on it a year later, but you know how those things go!

This is our first experience with PEX (polyethlyene) water lines, and I gotta say that I am hooked. While I associate copper with “quality” plumbing, the difference in labor and effort is massive. To run copper from our basement to the new upstairs bathroom would have been a monster project. Lots of joints in tight places for both the hot and cold lines. With the PEX, I was able to run both lines as single, continuous piece. With copper I would have inevitably ended up with a leak somewhere in the middle, forcing me to drain the line and repair it while trying not to set the house on fire. With this stuff I just uncoiled it and fed it through joists and up our closet chase and up into the bathroom.

PEX lines in new 1/2 bath, along with partially completed vent:

Drain line in closet and in basement:

Maze of pipes at mini water heater. I always vow to keep it simple, but my plumbing always ends up looking like this. I’m addicted to shutoff valves, since they make it so easy to work on future projects, such as the future basement bath remodel. Now I can just work on the new pipes without having to shut off water to anything else. That’s a big deal after you’ve spent entire days without a toilet or shower because the water had to be shut off. The 2nd picture shows one of the PEX lines connected to the copper. There are 2 varieties of PEX connectors, the “official” ones that’d be used by a plumber and require a $100 crimper (or $200 if you’re working with 2 sizes) and the “Joe Homeowner” ones I used. They are pricy (about $5/connector), but they’re really cool to use. You literally just plug the pipe into it. It’s that simple. And if you have to change something later, you can pull back a spring-loaded clip and pull the pipe back out. I can’t imagine anything easier than that!

Over the last two years, we have progressively developed one of the most complicated water heating systems in the world. At least it feels that way. I have written previously about our problems with our defective tankless water heater and its recent resolution. As much as we love our tankless heater, there is no avoiding the fact that they pretty much suck when it comes to the little stuff (i.e. handwashing and dishwashing). They require a minimum flow rate to kick on and a sustained flow to stay on. If you aren’t using a constant stream, as with a shower or filling a washing machine, you will end up with a pattern of hot/cold/hot/cold/hot water in your pipe. While this is tolerable for washing your hands, it can be a real shock when you’re trying to shave.

Because we don’t like the idea of wasting a ton of water Click to continue »

We woke up in the middle of the night to what we thought was our daughter running the bathroom faucets at full blast. When I went around the corner to tell her to turn them down, I noticed two things. First, she was not in the bathroom, and even more worrisome, the water was coming from below the sink, not above it! It was spraying gushers out of one of the supply valves. After turning off the valve and mopping up the mess, I was left wondering how this could have happened. Any time I’ve seen a washer or seal give way, it always starts with a few drops or a trickle. This one went from perfectly normal to fire hose in a single step. Because our daughter had a bad cold and had woken us up about a dozen times during the night, I was tired enough to put it out of my mind and just go back to sleep. While I recognized and appreciated the fact that we had narrowly avoided a disaster (what if it had been during the day or while we were on vacation?), that wasn’t enough to keep me awake. Click to continue »

We finally got around to taking a nice picture of our finished bathroom. It’s amazing how good the wide angle lense makes things look!