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: