A little bit of everything, including the kitchen sink

I was getting flack from certain unnamed sources (*cough* War Department *cough*) about not including pictures in my last post. Never mind that I really like the post as it was, and thought it was funnier and stronger for being somewhat deliberately vague, oh no: it's not a real post without pictures, apparently.

You'd think she didn't like my stories or something. (Okay, so, I totally admit that I have told the "So, this guy goes to India and buys a magic carpet..." story more in the past month than I have in the past six years, but still - she said "I do", she should at least have to pretend to enjoy them, right? Tolerate them? Refrain from openly mocking them? No?

Fine. Pictures it is.

Monday night at 7:30 (when we had finished dinner and cleaned up the kitchen so I could work on the sink):



Notice how it was still light outside? Yeah, not so much, when I finally finished at 11:30...

So why was I working on the faucet in the kitchen on a Monday night after work? Well, I might have mentioned at some point (I might not, I really don't know) that everything - EVERYTHING - in this house is broken. In fact, the very first thing we fixed after moving in was that bloody tap up there. The day we moved in we noticed that it worked okay as long as you didn't, you know, touch it or anything. The least amount of pressure on the faucet and water would shoot out the back of the tap, all over the counter. It took two trips - one to Crappy Tire and one to Home Despot - to get new o-rings and a new cartridge, but we did get it fixed. Of course, it was remarkable not for the fact that it was broken when we moved in, (because, as I've mentioned, EVERYTHING is broken) but because it seemed to be the one thing in the house without any mayonnaise on it. Even so, we hated that tap - it doesn't have enough clearance underneath it to wash any large pots or pans, and the directional nozzle doohickey doesn't have enough play to spray more than half a side of either sink.

In short, we hated it so much that we felt it more than worthwhile to spend our Home Despot gift cards from the wedding on a new faucet:



Which, of course, took two tries and some creative counter modifications to install properly. On a weeknight. Hence, the maxims.

Speaking of the maxims, if you don't believe me about the first one, here's another example...

One of the outlets in the bear pit is on the wall right above the stairs. Given that Mike spent a lot of time and energy putting some flooring pieces on the riser all along that side, and we wanted to top it with some baseboard to make it all tie in to the other trim, I decided to move the outlet up about 12 inches so it wouldn't be right in the middle of the baseboard. All in all, a relatively simple task, and one I figured shouldn't take more than an hour or so. When I got started, the outlet looked like this (as with all the pictures on this blog, click to embiggen):



After the War Department marked out where the bottom of the outlet should be, I carefully cut a SMALL hole in the approximate location (knowing that if I tried to cut it full-size, I'd either make it too big or in the wrong spot). Well, the location where we marked the outlet to go just happened to be exactly the point where the guy who installed the outlet in the first place had drilled through the stud and passed the electrical wire through from one side to the other. Which meant that the new location for the outlet was in EXACTLY the wrong spot.

After the requisite swearing, I figured out that I'd have to move the outlet down about an inch-and-a-half. Which, of course, would require that we patch the drywall afterward. At which point the War Department told me that this outlet was now officially my own damn problem and walked away to do something else. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have told her that she was going to have to patch the old hole for the outlet anyway, so why not part of the new hole, too?)

After I finished enlarging the hole enough to put the box into the wall, and moved it to its new location, it looked like this:



Fortunately, the War Department came back to do the actual connections - she's not crazy enough to let me do the electrical myself. She also realized that letting me do the mudding was probably a bad idea and stepped in to do it herself. She smoothed and sanded it nicely, and even painted it over. Which is when Maxim the First bit HER, too. You see, we had had to buy a new can of the "cappuccino" we used in the living room between the time we first painted that wall and the time we got around to moving the outlet, and the colour match wasn't quite exact. So we'll have to paint the whole damn wall over with the new stuff.

Oh, one more thing while I'm (sort of) on the subject of the kitchen. Remember this monstrosity?



That thing came in tied for last place in the Ugliest Light Fixture Poll, but -- aside from the Dear Sweet Jesus, What Is THAT!? entry which we tossed into a dumpster down at Ellice more than three months ago and the Faux-Bling chandeliers which didn't survive the first week -- we've decided to replace it first. We replaced its bastard stepchild above the sink ages ago with a nice pendant light, and actually bought this light at the same time, but never got around to putting it up until a few weeks back:



Now if only we can do something about those hideous counters...

And finally, for this post at least, we turn our attention to the outside. I think our long-suffering neighbour had dropped more than a few hints -- chief among them being the time he gave us a dandelion fork with the lame excuse that he already had a few -- about the sorry state of the hedgerow in the front yard. And I have to say that, even without comparing it to the immaculate lawns and frontages of the other houses in our neighbourhood, he had a point:





So on the first really nice Saturday we've had in months, we spent the day weeding, hacking, and cutting all the weeds and nonsense out of the bed, and covered it up with a nice layer of bark mulch:





Looks pretty good, eh? As long as nobody comes into the yard and looks at the other side of the hedge, we're golden.

Don's Renovation Maxims

Here then is the first in yet another ongoing series: Don's Renovation Maxims. I would call them Murphy's Law, but a) that was taken, and b) Murphy was better at renovating than me.

Maxim the First:
It doesn't matter how many times you tell yourself that this time will be different, you will still get it wrong the first time, and have to do it twice.

Corollary to Maxim the First:
The quicker and easier a particular task seems, the more Maxim the First applies.


Maxim the Second:
Plumbing is a job best left for weekends.



So what does posting these maxims at 11:30 on a Monday night have to do with anything? Well, you tell me, smart guy.

My very first hardwood floor (part one)

I've done flooring before. I laid some surprisingly nice vinyl tiles in the upstairs bathroom of the old house before we even moved in, and of course, I did the cork planks in the downstairs bathroom of the old house twice. I even did a combination of the two when I installed vinyl planks in the old laundry room (still really like those - so much so that we're planning on using the same kind in our new laundry room... eventually).

But in the new house, I had my first opportunity to install some hardwood flooring, and - even if I say so myself - I think I did okay.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably admit that the stuff we used is engineered hardwood, and not hardwood hardwood, but the installation process is very similar - except for the lack of sanding.

Also in the interests of full disclosure, I should relate the story of how we wound up with the flooring we did, because a) it's interesting, and b) I like to think that SOME people who come to this blog enjoy the posts for the stories, and not just for the pictures. Okay. One person. Sometimes.

Anyway, the story goes that we knew before we moved in that the carpets in the house were terrible and would have to be replaced. We didn't know how terrible some sections were, as opposed to others, or we might have done things in a different order, but whatever. Our first priority at that point was to get the carpet out of the living room, dining room, and front hall, and maybe even cover up the hideous linoleum in the kitchen.

We knew this was going to be a HUGE job, however, and given that we were moving, and it was Christmas time, and we were going to do all the demo and prep work ourselves, and I'm kinda lazy anyway, we decided to hire a contractor to do it for us. We had a little money available from the sale of the old house that we kept back from the down payment for the new house specifically for this reason, so that part was covered. Then my buddy Mark had a good recommendation for a contractor and he was even available to work more or less at the time we needed him, so that part was covered, too. All we had to do was go pick out some flooring.

Well, we hied ourselves off to Pacific Coast Floor Coverings (eventually, after a couple of disappointing stops at other stores) and managed to find something we really liked: the Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron. Well, we plunked down our money (a rather large amount of it, actually), and a week later I made two trips out to Langford to pick it up. I had to make two trips because it was a metric butt-load of flooring (which is roughly half of a metric shit-ton, or 1.69 imperial butt-loads), and our little pickup wouldn't handle the whole load in one shot.

So we were all set to go when Mike (the contractor) showed up and let us in on one teensy weensy little problem. See, we needed a floating floor because we were installing it over a slab, and didn't want to install a subfloor (and the roughly 750,000 tapcons that would require).

The Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron flooring is rated for nail down, glue down, or float installation. The problem with the Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron flooring is that it's also tongue-in-groove. See?



The fact that it's T&G means that, in order to float the floor, you have to glue all of the joints. Which means every tongue, and every groove, must be glued, or the joints will separate. Which means that the installation would take approximately three times as long, and cost approximately three times as much. And THAT was not in our budget.

So there we were: 6:30pm on a Friday night, a week before Christmas, and our contractor telling us that the $5000 worth of Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron flooring we just bought was no damn good.

Well... shit.

So we did what any self-respecting home owners do when confronted with the fact they spent a metric butt-load of money on product they can't use.

We drove to Home Depot.

Okay, FIRST, we had a little discussion about what to do with the $5000 worth of Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron flooring sitting in the living room. Once we decided that the Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron would actually look really good in the bedrooms upstairs and that, yes, we had enough of it to do all three, THEN we went to Home Depot.

Okay, so FIRST we actually went to Rona and another crappy hardware store that didn't have a) anything we liked or b) enough in stock of the flooring we DID like, but THEN we found ourselves at Home Depot (at 8:30 on a Friday night), looking at not only a different brand of flooring, but a different color and a different species of wood. Specifically, the Trillium Imperial Walnut Uniclic Engineered Flooring. This product held our interest for one specific reason: the patented Uniclic technology; look ma, no glue!



So we bought $4000 worth of Trillium Imperial blah de blah, screw it: the flooring. I went back the next morning, rented the Home Depot van and brought it all back in one fell swoop (cause I don't really care about the Home Depot van's shocks).

I wish I had a picture of $9000+ worth of flooring sitting in our living room, but I completely failed to take a shot of it. It was damn impressive.

We spent the rest of the weekend finishing the demo, grinding off the nail heads still stuck in the concrete from when we pulled up the carpet tack strips, and generally getting it ready for the guys to lay the flooring. Of course, we found some unexpected things, like the way the stairs, once we took the carpet off, were amazingly poorly constructed, and would need some reworking:



A bow that big is going to make laying floor across the top something of... well, an impossibility. There was also the giant crack in the hallway floor:



But Mike assured us it wasn't anything he couldn't handle and so we turned over a key to the house, locked the kitties in the upstairs bedroom and went off to work.

Well, they didn't finish it by Christmas - it took them a couple of extra days in January - but they did it, and they did a better job in less time than we would have. They also said that the flooring was some of the nicest material they had worked with. It snapped together really easily, and held tight. It also came in thirteen (13!) different lengths, which made it easy to avoid getting a repeating pattern. And it looks, even if I say so, fabulous:







Mike himself undertook the huge job of covering the stairs:



Which is covered up so we could paint it... The sad part is that we STILL haven't quite finished the rest of the trim.

So, next time: I actually get to the part where I'm installing the Elements by Kentwood Maple Saffron engineered hardwood flooring! (Unless I take a slight detour to cover how to remove a popcorn ceiling, of course.)

And now, a return to This Week in Mayonnaise!

Apparently, last week's inaugural edition of This Week In Mayonnaise met with some criticism - from the War Department, who insisted that I posted a picture of the wrong side of the Mayo Lion on the front of the garage. Far be it from ME to disappoint the War Department (deliberately, at least), so here is the other side of the thing which, I must admit, highlights the deficiencies in using mayonnaise to adhere AND seal an exterior decoration:



(Don't hesitate to click any of these for a higher-resolution picture, by the way.)

Oh, and as a bonus, here's a close up of the nails at the bottom that are, yes indeed, coming out from the inside of the garage:



Yeah. Really. I think I said it best when I first noticed them, actually. As I recall, I turned to Amy and said, "Buh?"