Day Five-ninety-two: big project, part 2

Aaaaaand we're back. Yesterday we previewed the demolition and here's the rebuild of our garage. Our crew installed new insulation and replaced the OSB board with drywall. They did a nice job plastering over the gaps and screw heads. The brown rectangle in the ceiling is the door/stairs to the attic.

Step two was to give everything two coats of white paint, matching the new side door.

And here's what it looks like now, with five new lights and two fans/lights to replace the seven old ones. It's a very comfortable area now, even with some mild summer heat. Should make a nice workroom.

And in the corner is our completed sink (although this was taken in the staging area in the basement).

Day Five-ninety-one: big project, part 1

With our indoor projects on track and our outdoor work pretty much at maintenance level, we turned to a project that is both interior and exterior--overhauling the garage. Or as one friend called, "a transformation."

Let's step back in time first to see where this all started. A previous owner had turned the garage into quite the workshop, with scads of shelves, drawers, and cupboards. At the very least he worked with wood and metal but probably much else considering his puttering ways.

Some time ago (13 months to be exact) we took away all the old organization because of mold and because our plans to revamp the place didn't include them. So for a year we've been in this stage.

This week a crew removed all that OSB board, the old insulation, the lights, and the side door. The insulation alone produced these piles (yes, these are two separate piles).

We were pleased to find out that behind the walls didn't look as bad as we feared.

To be continued...

Day Five-eighty-eight

This is another short entry, but we promise that we'll have a big transformation to reveal shortly (tease!). For now we'll finish recapping the weekend's projects.

We bought, cut, and started painting all the wood for the inset drawer fronts. These will go nicely with the inset doors that we've ordered. With a slightly different color and a new style this is going to really overhaul the look of the kitchen.

With all of our extra cedar from the deck it would have been a shame to waste it, so we turned one long board and a ton of scraps into this bench that will match our deck.

We were doing a lot of organizing, including in the furnace room, and discovered the need for a little table/shelf. The design worked pretty well with the bench so why not make a mini version that just fits over a milk crate full of other supplies.

Finally, we did some beautification work in the bathroom, filling out the flower vase and putting the colors in harmony with our now all naturals room.

Day Five-eighty-seven: filling a gap

We'll provide a real update later but this was a fun little project. If you looked really closely at the pictures of the sink we're installing the garage you may have noticed that the two pieces of trim around the countertop didn't fit perfectly. Despite being mitered to 45 degrees, the tile top wasn't completely square and pushed the top of the trim out a bit. We probably could have used wood filler but that's rarely the right color and certainly not the right texture.

We figured out that we needed a wedge that was 1 1/8 x 1 1/8 square inches and 1/8 inches wide at the top. Our first thought was to cut a cube out of a piece of 1x6 pine. Unfortunately that left us with a 1 1/8 x 1 1/8 x 3/4 inch block that was pretty hard to work with.

So we thought about making a tube of wood that was 1 1/8 x 1 1/8 x whatever. We cut about 6 inches off of a standard 2x2 and then shaved off two of the long sides to make them 1 1/8 like so:

Next we had to slice off a bit at the right angle. We started small with 7.5 degrees but even that was too wide, so we went down to 6 degrees.

That turned out to be perfect. Along with a little filler at the bottom of the gap we were able to plug the hole.

Once we put the same three coats of Bona Mega to waterproof this section and add some caulk the whole thing will be ready for its sink.

Day Five-eighty-one: weekly wrapup

We put the finishing touches on the kitchen now that the floor is in and done. The first step was to cut a nice piece of 1/2-inch maple plywood into 4-inch strips to become the toekick.

Then came some sanding and painting with the same color as the stairs.

And here's the final result, which includes the new white baseboard along the walls.

We had some touch up work to do with our new fence. We needed a fifth panel and to straighten out the whole thing. At the cost of a half dozen mosquito bites here's the finished product. A far sight better than the ratty old chainlink fence that it's hiding.

On another front we made progress on the new sink for the garage. When we left off the tile top needed grout, so we added that.

Here's a cleaned up version.

Then we added the framing trim and the legs. We decided against a new cabinet for this sink to make all the hardware--water lines, drain, etc.--more accessible once this is installed. Mission accomplished.

And here's the beginning of the backsplash and sidesplash for this sink. We need to cut the bigger one down and then sand and waterproof both pieces, but we should have this all ready by the time that the garage is overhauled in a couple weeks.

The basement bathroom is in the home stretch. The new doors and drawer front have been painted and now await installation.

Finally, the big activity of yesterday was replacing the countertop in the upstairs bathroom. So this was a little tricky. First we had to remove the old countertop without disturbing our backsplash. After disconnecting the water lines and drain this meant removing a tiny piece of bullnose that let us slide the counter to the left about one inch (so we could get out from under the sidesplash) and then rotate the whole thing up from the front like opening a lid. 

Here's the old counter after performing this DIY jujitsu.

Here's what we planned to put in its place, a much warmer toned marble that matches the countertop in the downstairs bathroom.

When putting the new one we had to reverse the process above. We had the counter under the backsplash and lowered down but something was making it too high in the front by about 5/16 of an inch. Turns out one of the clips holding the sink bowl in place was in the way, so after taking the counter back out we cut a little notch to accommodate the clip. This picture is taken looking up at the bottom of the counter.

It was a bit of a challenge but the final result was definitely worth it.

Day Five-seventy-five: a touch more tile

So almost a month ago we previewed this job (scroll to the bottom)--creating a new countertop and sink for the garage. We had torn out the ratty, 30-year-old one when we were looking for a leak in the garage. That was back in February when the water pipe to the garage froze and burst. Today was another adventure in ThinSet, which is one of the messier projects you can imagine.

Step one was to cut our piece of 3/4 inch plywood to the right dimensions. The straight cuts on the side were a breeze with the table saw but making the donut hole part where the sink will sit required a little fancy jigsaw work.

Then we cut some drywall to match the plywood because it makes a better base on which to lay the tile.

Next came the tiling itself. These are Mexican tiles from the same place we got the ones we used in the basement bathroom. We had cut these a couple weeks back so the tiling went pretty quickly.

We'll grout the counter tomorrow and once that's done we can drop this stainless steel job into place and wait for the rest of the garage to be redone and brought up the standard of the new sink.

Day Five-seventy-three: yardwork

The arrival of summer encouraged us to tackle the last remaining outdoors projects. Of course, with temperatures and humidity so high and the full sun bearing down on us, we more than once regretted our decision. We are nothing if not persistent and somewhat stupid. Onto the projects.

The one part of the grounds that we didn't clear out last fall is along a old chain-link fence between our house and the neighbor's. With the rain, sun, and progrowth climate this was seriously overgrown. Points to you if you can even find the fence buried underneath.

So we got out our shovels, axe (for a couple stumps), pick mattock, hedge clippers, and a ton of lawn trash bags. Here's where things stood at the end of yesterday.

With the area cleared we needed to do something about the fifty year-old fence. We got four of these premade panels from our friends at Home Depot and stained them the same color as the pressure treated parts of the deck.

A few zipties later and voila! A fence is born! (Impending rain cut short our design work. We may try to level the center pieces.)

As if we needed confirmation, we discovered that we're one panel short of a full fence. What's another trip to HD?

Feeling inspired by this faux woodworking, we tackled the last construction part of the deck--installing the stairs. (Staining is still to come.) About seven months after taking off the old decking we finally have a complete, functional cypress deck.

We did one final project that we'll chalk up under "neighborhood beautification". Our neighbor on the other side of the fence/weeds/jungle has an old wooden shed for tools and such. At some point the kids had been allowed to spray paint the outside with the sorts of things that kids are wont to create. All concerned agreed that it was something of an eyesore, so we dug into our trove of surplus paint and transformed the shed into this.