Bathroom Face-Lift
Now that we’ve pretty much renovated our entire house, the parts that are unrenovated (our kitchen and bathroom) look pretty sad in comparison. Our plan is to renovate the kitchen…
Gus
Stair Upgrade: Part 2
Once the floors were finished, we were ready to finish our stair upgrade. Handrail During our design, we determined that both the handrail and baserail would be exactly 2½” wide.…
Stair Upgrade: Part 1
We originally planned to hire someone to come and rebuild our stairs – both in the basement and the handrail on the second floor. But as our basement work progressed,…
Replacing Hardwood Upstairs: Part 1 – Master and Middle Bedroom Demolition
The upstairs floors were generally in better shape than they were downstairs. There were, however, a few problem areas that looked like they fell victim to water damage. Given how…
Drywall Nightmares: Part 1 – Master and Middle Bedroom Demolition
Before we could start painting, we had some drywalling to do. We wanted a new wall flush with the exposed brick, we wanted a closet opening that would fit an…
Vestibule Tile Installation
Our front door has a small vestibule. It was originally covered in tile, but when we replaced our hardwood floor we took this nasty blue tile out. We opted to…
Load-Bearing Wall: Part 2 – Demolition
I have (mostly) made my peace with the fact that our ugly little wall cannot be removed. But I refuse to let this wall totally win. When I’m done with…
Fireplace Renovation: Part 8 – Fixing the Brick
Now that the hearth is done, we still have to address the missing brick in the fireplace. We had a couple of people come and look at what could be…
Fireplace Renovation: Part 6 – Pouring a Concrete Hearth
Our mold was ready and we were excited. The day we were working towards was finally here! Today we mixed and poured our concrete. Prep To prep the area, we…
Fireplace Renovation: Part 5 – Building a Concrete Hearth Mold
Alex’s mom is visiting this weekend, but we stole a few hours for ourselves and made some serious progress. In the couple of hours we had before dinner on Saturday,…
Fireplace Renovation: Part 2 – Preparing the Floor
We’ve been stalled on our reno work for a while because we’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. Our concrete hearth idea is complicated for newbies, and…
Under Attack
We seem to have finally won the battle against the raccoon living in our garage. For now. But now we have a new problem: squirrels. Squirrels are relatively cute creatures;…
How to build a wall: Part 2
We’re getting there. It’s not pretty, but we’re getting there… We’ve been working for about a week straight, and we’re getting cranky about it. We let dad take Friday night…