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.