I know! I’ll put a bird on it!

it's so pretty!

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

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

When Kim later shared proofs from our photo session, I found myself drawn to one image in particular – a photo of our girls, side by side, in the backyard grass. The picture’s vibrant pink, green and black tones seemed like a perfect fit for the playroom, and I knew instantly it would make a wonderful addition to our home.

Flash forward to Christmas break…

In keeping with my resolution to get organized (making our house a more comfortable and enjoyable place), we finally hung the new photos in the playroom — transforming the space from a cute but somewhat generic-looking room, into one that our daughters can truly call their own.

images of the girls personalize their play space

Now if only I could find a rug to tie everything together…

Suggestions anyone?

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!

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…

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!

Because we don’t like the idea of wasting a ton of water just to keep a steady stream running through the heater, we put a mini-tank (Ariston GL-4) under our sink about a year ago. It is fantastic! It provides a nice buffer for the tankless, and is seriously “instant” (hot water in a couple of seconds). Although it introduced a tank to our tankless system, these heaters are very well insulated and we noticed no change in our electricity usage.

So, after a year of getting used to the luxurious hot water at the kitchen sink, we began to wonder what it’d be like to have instant, buffered hot water in the bathroom. Although I had conditioned myself to a routine of shaving only after a shower and carefully using the residual hot water in the pipe to fill the sink and rinse my face, I thought it might be nice to be able to shave any time without wasting a lot of water waiting for the hot water to get all the way across the house or to wash our hands in actual warm water. The distance problem, of course, plagues any variety of water heater, not just a tankless. Anyway, since we are also in the process of adding a half bath on the 2nd floor, we decided to add a 6 gallon Ariston (GL-6) in the basement to feed the basement bath, the main bath, the new half bath and a potential future laundry room and wet bar (once we get the rest of the house done). I started the install last weekend…

The hardest part (emotionally) was tearing out all the plumbing I had worked so hard on in the past. Since I had not foreseen the additional bathroom when I laid it all out and had since changed some ideas about the basement bathroom (future remodel), I decided to start over. This always sounds like a good idea and feels like a bad one 9 hours into the replumbing when you still can’t flush a toilet! Copper takes such a long time that I am really warming up to the idea of PEX, which I’m going to try for the first time for upstairs. Getting rid of most of the connections sounds great! Here is the first stage of the carnage…

Here’s the cleared out ceiling. You can see the before picture here.

Heater and some of the plumbing installed:

Most of the pipes redone:

After getting home from work, I took the supply line apart and made a few discoveries. The washer seemed to be a bit on the brittle side, definitely more than I’d expect from being only two years old. Also, I had forgotten about this, but the washer hadn’t fit inside the nut and I’d had to do a little bit of trimming around the perimeter to get it to fit. It shouldn’t have had any negative effect, since it was only on the wide part of the cone washer, the part that the nut pushes on, not the part that seals against the supply valve. But, there’s no way for me to know for sure, and it’s probably never a good idea to force plumbing parts to work. For the sake of my self-esteem, I’m going with the dried washer idea, but it still doesn’t make sense to me how it could fail with so much drama.

All of our supply lines and valves are of the chromed, old fashioned style that you’d normally see with clawfoot tubs and fixtures of that era. One thing I’ve noticed with several of the pieces is that they don’t necessarily fit or go together as well as the plain jane parts that you find at Home Depot. Or, in this case, the washers aren’t high quality or perhaps were just old. Since they were such a unique size, I wasn’t able to find a replacement for them and ended up having to trim them to fit the nuts that they came with. That shouldn’t be necessary with a brand new plumbing part. I replaced the supply line with a standard stainless hose that I had, and it’s working great. Now I need to get a new one to replace the other line before its washer blows out, too. It’s also making me question the lines on our tub. Both the supply and drain lines are designed for a vertical tub wall, but the tub we bought had a sloped back wall. The online retailer we bought it all from told me to “just go ahead and install it all at an angle. There’s enough give in the washers to make it work.” Looking back, that seems like it was a bad idea to follow our advice, so I may yank out the fancy lines and replace them with hoses just to sleep better at night. It’s jammed up a against a wall, so the irony is that you never can even see the nice chrome finish that we paid all that extra money for. The only way you can see them is if you lean over and crane your neck while on the toilet, but I doubt many people do that…