Day Four-seventy-five: when one door closes...

...another one opens and another one opens and...well you get the point. Behold our eight finished doors. It's been quite an odyssey with these buggers, several attempts at staining, one false start with paint, and finally the holy grail of interior design. They look great against the white trim, hardwood floors, brass hardware, and light-toned walls.

Here's the bedroom door, open and closed.

This is our coat closet.

And here's the library door.

Here's our linen closet.

 This is the closet in the main studio where we added the shelves.

And this is the door into the other studio.

This is the upstairs bathroom.

And finally here's the downstairs bathroom.

Day Four-sixty-eight: The house is done!

Well, a house is done. Apparently we're so much in home reno mode that we decided to upgrade the two new birdhouses before installing them. The perch outside the opening seemed too small for any bird to land on securely, so we added new ones.

We put one under the eave on the garage.

And the other in a similarly covered area on the house. 

This brings to five (including the 3 we inherited) the number of places where our fine feathered friends can stay. We feel as though we're running a cabin retreat.

Day Four-sixty: inching along

Peeling back the curtain on the magic that is home renovation, here's what we've accomplished in the past two days.

Our third (of eight) interior doors is painted. For those of you playing along at home we have done 17 of the 32 sides of doors (8 doors x 2 sides x 2 coats). Unlike the other ones this one on the bathroom still needs a shade (we do believe in some privacy) but it's looking good and the brown is just the right shade contrasted with the light brown walls and white trim.

Working our way upstairs the main part of the stairs and landing are done, with nice white risers setting off the dark brown treads. Apparently white and brown are this year's theme.

Outside we managed to add the final board on our cypress deck. The old pressure treated rails are now off (quick work for a sledge hammer) and the cypress replacements are ready to be cut and installed. Now all we need is another mild sunny day.

As more paint went onto the doors and vanities for the downstairs bathroom it became clear that the new components are not matching the existing items with their multiple coats of stain and paint. What to do?

Go back to square one--or in this case bare wood--to match the new cabinet and doors. Now all will start from the same level playing field. That seemed only fair.

How does one get off unknown layers of paint and stain? Well a good place to start is with a nice belt sander like we just got and use very coarse grit paper (in our case #50). We opted for this over an orbital sander to avoid the inevitable circles/curves that an orbital leaves in the wood.

For the finer work along the edges or in those hard-to-reach places, we used the sanding attachment on the Bosch multitool.

As mentioned last time the drain we took off the bathroom sink was nearly clogged. This is what happens when your contractors put grout down the drain.

Finally, because we needed a reason to say "The house is done!" we polished up the bird houses and they're ready for hanging. In our little avian housing development the floor plan never changes but you can choose from the "Classic" or the "Spanish" models.

Day Four-fifty-eight

Maybe it's advancing age or the lost hour of Daylight Saving Time, but progress is sometimes harder to come by these days. Still, we manage to plug along across a variety of fronts.

As a first step...we continued our facelift of the steps. With the lower flight in need of a little more paint on the risers we moved onto the landing and upper steps to the kitchen. First we had to tear out the maple flooring and treads and replace them with paintable oak. Here's the oak landing with treads still to come:

With a lot of double- and triple-checking our measurements (the treads and risers are more like trapezoids than rectangles) we cut the pieces to fit snugly.

Now they have one coat of brown en route to matching the finished parts of the stairs.

Behind door #2 we have...our work finishing the doors upstairs. As regular readers will know we have had a devil of a time getting these doors to look just right. Clear stain made the pine doors too woody. Our favorite paint/stain company has a very limited selection of colors. Aside from the stain showing our brushstrokes, the imperfect sanding off of earlier attempts left the doors looking unintentionally "distressed". 

After more trial and error we settled on a nice, warm brown paint. Here are some pictures of doors in process:

And here's a finished door, with its hardware back on.

The last major job has been our efforts to get the downstairs basement "just so". As with the other projects in this entry we are continuing to refine things that we had worked on previously. First there was finishing the bath, then moving the wall to expand it, and now improving the look. Last time we took up the grout and now we removed the vanity in preparation of replacing the stone tile with more user-friendly ceramic. Here are the components of the bathroom:

We have the doors of the old (orange) and new (unfinished) vanities that will line one wall:

We have the tile that will be made into a backsplash along the new, long countertop:

We have the drain that we had to take off to get the sink and vanity out. With the amount of gunk in the thing we'll likely replace it:

We have the underside of the sink:

We have the sink vanity that will get some patching and repainting:

And here's what the bath looks like now:

So one thing you want to avoid when cutting the sides of a vanity to make holes big enough to get around the water supply lines and drain pipe is actually cutting the water supply line or drain pipe. We learned the hard way what happens when a quick-moving, sharp, steel blade meets copper. Even if it's just a glancing blow.

After shutting off the water and consulting our more experienced and knowledgeable neighbor, we learned of something made by SharkBite (which is not to be confused with this). The result is this:

Finally, we've decided to unleash our inner ornithologist: