Sifting through past entries, I noticed we’ve never posted photos of the upstairs/playroom bathroom.

Our girls love lavender!

Originally, I was reluctant to photograph the space until the bathroom door and trim were finished. Since we are unlikely to get around to finishing the door anytime soon, I decided to take some photos for your viewing pleasure.

I quickly remembered the other reason we’ve never posted pictures.

This room is so incredibly tiny, it’s nearly impossible to photograph without perching on the toilet lid or on the lip of the sink – hence the weird viewing angles.

view from hallway outside Chloe's room

bathroom sink and mirror

alternate view from hallway

A big difference!

Here is how our garage looks today.  All the trim is up except the header boards, and one of our garage doors is in.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the garage door company fubar’d the hardware, though, which means we have to wait longer so they can get replacement panels.

Because these are faux-carriage doors, we wanted hardware that at least helped maintain the illusion.  Stephanie had discussed this with the door company, and the decision was that we would procure the hardware on our own (since they didn’t seem to be able to or want to get it).  When she came out of the house during the install, though, she found a single, standard chrome handle had been installed near the middle of the door.  It is weird how such a small thing can make such a difference, but it really does.  The handle is neither centered on the door, nor centered on the piece of door to which it’s attached.  It grabs your eye and really makes you look at it.  Additionally, the lift handle at the bottom (not visible in photo) was installed in a similar off-kilter way.  We are now waiting for new panels to be made, and these will end up going to someone that doesn’t want their “carriage doors” to look like carriage doors.  Otherwise, though, the door looks really good and will look even better once it’s painted to match the house colors.

If you compare the two pictures, you will notice the middle looks very different.  Previously, the two doors were centered in their respective openings, but the right garage is about 11″ wider than the left.  This made for a funky imbalance in the trim.  Stephanie had the great idea of shifting the right door over towards the right side, so that all trim could be the same size.  Fortunately, the CMU blocks in the middle section were recessed by almost 3/4″ relative to the concrete header, so it was a (relatively) simple matter of building this area up with plywood, which will get painted to match the garage/house color.  The new symmetry gives the whole garage a much more polished look.

Before the gap between doors was widened

While the timing could have been better, our missing boards were sitting in front of the garage when I got home from work!  It would have been a little sweeter if they had shown up before yesterday, when I re-fabbed all of them, but the good-at-heart person that mistakenly thought they were being given away returned them to their rightful place.  Yay, people!

Missing boards....returned!

Last Sunday, while trying to finish up the trim on the sides of the garage doors, we fell victim to an overeager freecycler.  As anyone who lives on the eastside of Portland knows, it’s super easy to get rid of stuff you don’t want any longer.  Piles of things, some useful and some not, are routinely left out in the parking strips.  This form of reuse is very common, and while I generally think it’s a good thing, it is also important to actually only take the things that people mean to give away.

The three 1×10 cedar boards that I had painstakingly cut, notched and primed to sit proudly on the sides of our new garage doors did not fall into that category.  Yes, they were sitting too close to the curb while I ran to the hardware store for some nails, but there was no “free” sign on them.  It is awfully presumptuous to think you can grab anything within reach of your car without even making the effort to knock on the door first.  Or maybe they were taken maliciously, but regardless, they were gone.

Some signs on the trees and postings on craigslist didn’t result in the miraculous return of our boards, so I had to take yesterday off work to get new ones all ready for the garage door install on Thursday.  Since the 1x10s were kind of scarce (Mr. Plywood had only a few of them, and most were pretty knotty), I switched to 1x8s and used a scarf joint to increase the width by 2″.  This should get covered by whatever trim strip comes with the garage door anyway.

The biggest part of the day was breaking up the concrete under the door.  A tree root growing under the driveway had gradually pushed up the center of the door by at least two or three inches.  Since it was a small area, I thought I could just get it done with a breaker bit on my rotohammer (something I have never attempted in the past, mind you).  20 minutes of zero progress was enough to convince me to drop the $35 on a jackhammer rental.  It still took over an hour to bust it all up, but it would’ve taken three days with the rotohammer!  Eventually, I will break up the rest of the “driveway” (maybe 5′ in length) up to the sidewalk and then replace it, likely with pavers.

Sitting flat for the first time in years

Added to the playhouse this weekend:

• one set of X railing
• the back horizontal railing
• the plywood back wall

We had intended since the beginning to make the back wall completely solid, but now that 1/2 of it is done, we are liking the more open air feeling and look.  We’ll let it gel for awhile longer, but that’s probably how it’s going to stay.

New rails and back wall

We have been looking at our rotten garage doors since we bought the house in 2004.  Rather than put any money or effort into their repair, we decided to hold off until the stars lined up for their replacement.  We are going to get doors much more suitable to our house style (fake carriage house doors), but first I had to remove all of the rotten framing and trim and reframe the openings in advance of the door installers.

As we’ve come to expect from our previous owner, most of the wood used was untreated and therefore inappropriate for a location with high weather exposure.  You can see how well (or not) it all held up in the pictures below.  I replaced the framing with pressure-treated wood and will be using painted cedar for the trim.  Additionally, since the openings are not equal width, we are offsetting the new framing to move the right door further to the right.  The gap in the middle will grow larger, but it will be covered with plywood and painted garage color in order to make it all look much more symmetrical.

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

Answer: speed it up to 120x speed. That means that every 2 minutes now takes only 1 second. I am trying hard to figure out a way to apply this same technique to my job as well.

This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, ever since seeing some of the first sped-up recaps on home-improvement shows years ago. The cool side effect of speeding it up so dramatically is that it basically turned it into a stop-motion sequence of our entire project.  While I didn’t capture every minute of the construction (due to having only one large memory card with me and having to dump it every 3 hours), I did manage to come back with 38 hours of video (or a whopping 65 GB for the geeks out there.)  Working with so many large clips proved problematic for editing, so I spliced each day’s together into a single, uncompressed movie sped up to 12x real time  Once I had the four intermediate clips, I then sped each up to as much as an additional 10x.  There are a few places where I kept the speeds lower to better emphasize a portion of the video.

Was it worth the time to do?  Probably not.  But I can’t think of a better way to immortalize the time we spent building that thing. To see the best quality, make sure the change the video from 360p to 480p.

And for those who can’t access youtube at work:

After my recent learning experience on how to properly space cedar roofing shingles, I had gradually been reworking the roof.  Yesterday Chloe went to play at the neighbors’, so I had a big block of time to keep pounding away.

Installing these is tedious, but they really are beautiful.  I got everything done up to the ridgeline, so all I need to do is install some flashing on top to complete the job.

Another project 5 years in the making.  We have been sans a step down to the patio ever since we replaced the 60′s solid door with a glass one and removed the subsequently obsolete back step.  The patio door isn’t very high…maybe about 10″ above the patio, but it has started becoming a problem for Zoe, one of our dogs.  She and Porter are both 11, and there just isn’t as much spring in their step as there used to be.

The rest of the family was out of town, so Chloe and I spent some time Saturday making a new step.  We made it a full 6′ wide for aesthetic reasons, although 1/2 of it serves no purpose, as it’s in front of the non-opening portion of the door.  We used some left-over 4×6 pieces that were cut from the playhouse beams, as well as another piece of cedar recycled from our neighbor’s deck.  The construction was deceptively complex, as our patio has a slight slope down to the left, so each 4×6 had to be cut at an angle and to the appropriate height to make the steps level.  Needless to say, I botched a couple and had to do some “fine tuning.”  The top of the step is standard 2×6 cedar decking (new), and the trim piece that wraps around underneath the steps is actually made of cedar fence stock.

That trim piece is something that I am particularly proud of.  When Chloe and I were shopping for the piece, I initially picked out a beautiful piece of 1×6 cedar.  I was a little reluctant about the nearly $11 price tag, since it was yet one more wound in the constant bleeding of our wallets.  In the next aisle, I noticed some 1/2″x6x6 pieces of rough cedar fencing.  While most were the typical broken, knotty pieces, some didn’t look too bad.  After going through about 50 pieces, I managed to find two that were nearly knot-free.  As they were only $1.75/each, I decided to get a couple and take a chance.  Well, to my surprise, they sanded down beautifully, and they look like knot-free, Grade A cedar.  Not bad for $3.50 (and the 15 minutes it took to find the only two pieces that had this potential.)

Step construction, confused Zoe

A wary Porter tests the new step

Completed step. Someone should really fill in that hole in the concrete.

Rough v. Sanded