The hardwood patch is pretty much complete. In retrospect, I don’t know what was worse — the sweat sessions that characterized the wood preparation and replacement stages or the non-stop cleaning sprees the wife and I have undertaken throughout the past week.
Preparing the new wood was labor intensive, but at least there was no chance I would change things for the worse in my house. Once I moved to the ‘removal and replacement’ step, that became a very real possibility. With any DIY project, you run the risk of screwing everything up even worse and paying someone else to fix the original problem and your additional mistakes. Knowing that, I was determined to get this one right. Before I could start working with my new wood slats, I had to remove every piece of wood that made up the old vent hole.
Like so many houses from the post-war era, our place has a huge hole in the hallway floor where an old oil furnace vent used to be. The furnace has long been drained and filled with sand, but the grate was never removed or replaced.
The old vent was depressed to the point that it seemed unsound, but we eventually learned to walk around it without even noticing it was there. It wasn’t until our first winter in the house when I realized how much cold air was seeping through the porous opening.
On our block, all of the addresses are painted on the curbs next to the driveway. They’re very faded and it’s almost impossible to discern the street number while you’re moving in your car. Who looks at the curb anyway? Even if someone down the block has noticeable numbers you could use as a benchmark, the randomness of the double-lots would throw you off every time. Whenever we’re having friends over or something is being delivered, we have to tell everyone to look for a green porch swing. I decided to finally make an address marker that would be impossible to miss.
I wanted it to be in the fashion of some of the wrought-iron plaques that some neighbors have, but I wanted to use some of the scrap pine that’s laying around my garage.
As apart of our Labor Day “staycation,” we cleaned the house. While my wife worked to organize her sewing supplies, I was cleaning the workshop in the garage and fixing a few things around the house. I’ve been looking for something to do with the wood that I have leftover from the kitchen remodel, so we came up with a short list of things to do:
It just doesn’t feel like a weekend unless I paint something white.
I ended my last kitchen remodel update by saying, “we still have some little things to do in the room (build an island on wheels to rest beneath the matching pot rack, add shelves to the rear of the washer/dryer cabinet door to hold various sundries, and put a flat screen TV above the fridge), but that’s all cosmetic work.” Well, now the cosmetic work is done:
I gave myself the arbitrary deadline of before football season to finish the work. It seems I barely beat the bell, considering that the college football season kicks off tonight.
I wanted to make a rolling island to match the pot rack I hung on the kitchen wall last month. Last weekend, I finally got up the courage (and the cash) to give it another try. This was the design:
This might look like an easy build, but the finish work and attention to detail made it quite difficult.
I’m such an idiot. After we remodeled our kitchen, we had no use for our old sink (pictured here). It was a white, porcelain coated, cast iron, double-well sink. I’m sure it was pretty expensive, but we had no use for it anymore. You could say I’m the opposite of a pack rat; I hate holding onto anything that has no use or hasn’t been used in a couple of years. So I put our sink on the sidewalk in front of our house and it was gone in a couple of hours. A few days ago, I ran across this article and it hit me that I could have made a drink station like this out of the old sink:
Seriously, how cool would something like this look on your back porch?
Our kitchen remodel is finally finished. Here are the before and after pictures:
As you know from the last update, we encountered some unexpected grief from the kitchen sink. Once we got all of that sorted out, my wife and I were able to turn our focus back to finishing the room. We’ve been very busy with work and family lately, so we haven’t had more than a day or two where we could devote our attention to the house. I managed to get a little carpentry done after work, including building these 18″ deep shelves for the pantry:
The pantry space is over three feet deep. We figured there was no reason to install such deep shelves, as we wouldn’t be able to reach anything in the back. And we couldn’t treat it like a walk-in pantry with shallow shelves, because the space is only two feet wide. My wife balked at the idea of putting in a false backing, since we’d essentially be throwing away good storage space in an otherwise small room. She recommended that we put shelves in the back for things we seldom use (specialty appliances and seasonal china), and build a movable pantry to maximize the volume of the space. This solution is actually closer to her original design, except that the pantry moves on wheels instead of on expensive, heavy-duty slide rails.
