Bathroom Renovation: Tiling
By mid-May, approximately a month after I started our bathroom renovation project, I was finally ready to tile. My first tiling endeavor was to tile the floor. I started by…
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Bathroom Renovation: Closing the Walls
Now for the exciting part! With everything in place behind the walls, it was time to install the drywall, finish installing the subfloor and putting up Kerdi Board where the…
Backyard Renovation: New Garage (Phase 2)
Our existing garage has been in bad shape for many years now. Wood rot and a collapsing roof has made the garage completely unusable. And with some property line issues…
Basement Family Room Renovation: Framing, Drywalling and Painting – Part 2
Last winter we finished the first half of the basement family room because I was returning to work after my maternity leave and I needed a relatively clean space to…
Basement Bathroom Renovation: Framing
With 5 people in the house now, our one 5’x7′ bathroom just isn’t going to cut it. We always planned on adding a bathroom in the basement, so when we…
Basement Family Room Renovation: Framing, Drywalling and Painting
Because our basement bathroom renovation project was so delayed, we decided to shift gears and make progress on the family room – basically a second living room in the basement…
Kitchen Renovation: Part 8 – Framing and Drywall
Once the window and doors were installed, it was time to frame the interior and install the subfloor. This was probably one of the most exciting steps in the process…
New Basement Stairs: Part 1 – Opening the Stairs
When we opened the dining room, we wanted to also widen our basement stairs. But at that point we thought that we would have to reroute our radiator pipes, so…
Load-Bearing Wall: Part 6 – Patching Hardwood
After we removed the dining room wall, we were left with a small trench in the hardwood flooring where our wall used to be. We were planning on waiting to…
Load-Bearing Wall: Part 5 – Removing the Wall!
I’ve had a hate-hate relationship with the wall in our dining room since we moved in. Even though we managed to make it slightly less ugly, my issue was with…
Master Bedroom Closet Renovation
The major change (or one of the major changes) in our upstairs renovation was the installation of a new closet in the master bedroom. The reason we started this project…
Painting the Second Floor
When we painted our living room and dining room, we did a lot of research on the brand of paint to buy and the type of finish. We wrestled with…
Exposing Brick
One of the walls in our bedroom is uneven because the chimney juts out. It’s also in an awkward spot because we want to put our bed against that wall,…
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…
Load-Bearing Wall: Part 4 – Drywalling and Pot Lights
This wall has made me both hope for a beautiful future together and wish harm upon it. These days, it’s the latter. Actually, if the stupid thing wasn’t holding up…
Load-Bearing Wall: Part 3 – Replacing Ducts
We currently have a duct running up our load-bearing wall that goes to the centre bedroom. After thinking about this for a while, we decided to keep the duct in…
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…
Load-Bearing Walls: Part 1
Replacing our hardwood floor seemed like a simple idea. We would tear up the old floor, put down a new subfloor, install the new floor, and stain the thing. It…
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…
How to build a wall: Part 1
Once the washer and dryer were put back together, I started a new project: building a wall. Our bedroom is quite large, but has a slightly awkward layout: the doors,…