State of the 'Vation

State of the 'Vation! Get it? It's like, State of the NATION, but it's VATION, which is short for RENOVATION!

Okay, so it's not, but it totally should be.

Well, here we are, another year, another successfully completed Operation Fat & Happy (mostly the former, but enough of the latter to make up for it), and I thought it was time for a little general update/random assortment of words and almost-words to bring everyone up to date. Especially me, seeing as how the last two weeks or so are a barely-remembered haze of head colds, coffee with eggnog, and lots and lots and lots of really good food - often, but not always, at the same time.

(Note: The preceding paragraph was written just after New Years, and this has been sitting around in draft form since then. I apologize for the delay. Still fat, though.)

Our current project is probably my least-favorite project we've ever done. No, seriously: I hate everything about it. Everything. But it didn't start out that way...

So, we did a little laundry room renovation this past summer, and the room itself turned out great. It started out pretty ratty and outdated, obviously (and full of crap):

We took out all the crappy old trim and cleaned the walls off REALLY well:

Bonus! This Week In Mayonnaise!

I have absolutely no idea what that was about. It was an old drink coaster, stuck to the wall with mayonnaise, covering up a hole in the wall that was filled in with... mayonnaise. I... yeah. Just... no.

Then we painted the whole room a beautiful, warm grey color and put down some pretty stellar vinyl plank flooring, right over the linoleum.

We even cleaned up and repainted the security bars on the window. Not that I think we NEED security bars on the window, but they were already there, and repainting them was easier than trying to fill the enormous holes in the window sashes left by the mounting hardware.

The flooring is great stuff - way better than the crap we installed in the sunroom. No stupid adhesive tabs for one thing; it actually locks together like engineered hardwood. Super easy to install, really heavy duty, and easy to clean. Looks pretty snazzy, too.

Once all that was done - and pretty easily, I might add - the real problems started. See, the War Department really wanted some built-in storage to hold the vacuum cleaner (currently stored in a relatively empty corner in whatever room it happened to have last been used) along with a few other bits and pieces. So, she came up with a design/general layout, and left it up to me to figure out the actual mechanics and implementation.

"No problem," I thought. "I got a garage full of tools and I've always wanted to make some built-in units!"

I'm an idiot, but you already knew that, and I'm getting ahead of myself anyway.

The overall design looked something like this (too lazy to figure out how to draw it up in SketchUp, even though it would probably be a good exercise):

That's three separate cabinets with doors (including a big one for the vacuum cleaner), a cubby on the bottom left without for the cat boxes, and a large open space on one side for the little chest freezer. The only common mesaurement was that they would all be 24" deep. The cabinets would go from floor to ceiling, and be attached directly into the studs in the walls.

I planned to make three separate units: one for the top right cabinet, one for the top left, and another that comprised the vacuum cubby and the open space for the cat boxes.

Here's a list of just some of the things that went wrong (in very rough chronological order):

• After cutting, painting, and assembling the cabinets in the garage, I brought them in to the laundry room to install them and THEN realized that the walls of the laundry room weren't actually square, and my oh-so-carefully built cabinets would have to be heavily shimmed before they could make contact with the walls. 
• When I measured, I had measured the distance at the FRONT of the cabinets - the room narrowed into the corners, meaning that I had to recut one of the cabinets (one I fortunately hadn't assembled yet) before it would fit.
• There was exactly ONE useful stud in each of the three walls. 
• The cabinets were so heavy and unwieldy that I bashed the hell out of the walls and ceiling trying to jimmy them into place.  
• I had glued and nailed the face trim to the front of the first cabinet before realizing that the face trim had to span both cabinet edges - I had to take it off and do a lot of scraping to get the faces flat again.
• I finally had a chance to use my fancy new (to me - I bought it used from the same guy who sold me the saw) Veritas Shelf Pin Drilling Jig to make adjustable shelf pins. The first cabinet went fine, but in my excitement and foolish confidence, I accidentally drilled the holes for the second cabinet in the top and bottom of the unit, rather than the sides. Which meant patching approximately 48 holes and repainting the entire cabinet. Not gonna lie: that really hurt.
• I had to redesign the face frame mid-build because I failed to account for a surface large enough to accept and support decent hinges. Oh, and I had to buy different hinges because the ones I was planning to use looked horrible.
• I had drilled a hole in the side of the litter box cubby hole because the plug was on the opposite side of the center piece from the freezer (of course). Stupid me drilled it too small and I had to cut out a larger one with a hole saw.
• I ordered some poplar from a store to make the doors out of (I had heard it was easy to work with and took paint really well). I went all the way out to the store in Langford the following weekend to pick it up and the guys in the yard in Vancouver had forgotten to actually put it on the truck - and then misplaced it. It didn't show up at the store for another two weeks. 
• I had to take the freshly installed, painted, and caulked trim off the door between the laundry room and family room so I could get the top right cabinet in. 
• Whilst reinstalling and repainting the trim, Amy noticed that the paint I was using was really shiny, and didn't match the existing paint. That's because I had inadvertently bought "medium base" instead of, you know, paint. I had to repaint the door trim on both doors in the laundry room - AND all of the cabinet trim, cabinet interiors, AND the cabinet doors, just as I thought they were ready to install. 
• When I finally finished painting the doors for the second time and went to install them, I realized that the curve in the wall to which I had carefully matched my face trim meant that the door on the top left cubby was overlappping on the top and gapped on the bottom - even with the hinges at maximum opposite adjustments. I had to remove and cut down the doors - and then repaint them to remove the marks left by the table saw.
• At which point Amy and I agreed that the finish on the doors was terrible (mostly due to the foam roller I had been using) and I had to repaint them all for a third time - by hand - to cover it up.
• Oh, and one last little indignity (and one Amy doesn't actually know about yet) I spent a VERY enjoyable evening in the shop making a sweet little jig for installing the handles. It worked like an absolute charm and the door handles are all lined perfectly (which is important because of all the parallel lines involved in the design). They're just a quarter inch too low because I measured the wrong damn thing. But because I double-checked before I drilled, I realized that the jig was wrong before I drilled the first hole. I went ahead and drilled them all anyway because god damn it I had just about had enough.

There's more (of course), but I'm depressed now just remembering all of it and I want to stop writing this. 

If I had to do it all over again, I probably would, but oh my god I would do almost EVERYTHING differently. Starting with the design, damn it. Who the hell thought 24" deep cabinets was a good idea? (Besides me, obviously...)

But, they ARE done - mostly empty still , but done:

Shall we say... two weeks?

Well, I fell into that same old trap again, where I put off writing a post because I thought it would be nice to wait until the bathroom was finished and I could include pictures of all the awesome. And really, on Thursday of the week before last, it looked like my plan was going to pay off.

First, the lighting store called to let us know that the new light fixture was in and ready to be picked up. Then I got a package at work with the two new shower riser connectors I had ordered (to replace the split one - more on THAT in a minute). And then RONA called to let us now that the blinds we had ordered had been finished and were ready to be picked up. Then we got home to find that the towel bar, toilet roll holder and other accessories had been delivered.

So it looked like it was all coming together nicely. And really, when I left for my woodworking course (more on that in a minute, too) on Thursday night, I honestly thought that I'd be winding up my Thanksgiving weekend with a post full of pictures showing a completed master bath.

You would think, after how ever many years this nonsense has been going on, that I would know better by now.

Sigh. And of course, I STILL haven't written anything about the windowsill or how we got the damn vanity to fit. So much to cover, so little time.

Anyway, let's start with the windowsill, seeing as how it's rather germane to the rest of the stories, particularly the ones about the blinds (and let me tell you - there are some stories about the blinds...). As can be seen in some of the previous pictures, the new window in the former Baath Bath is of the bay persuasion. That is to say, there are actually three windows, sharing a single sill. Before I run out of words and high-falutin' phrases to describe said window, how about few pictures of the working area:

Yeah. THAT'S gonna be fun to trim out, eh?

So my first idea was to basically create three separate pieces (technically six, as I'd have to repeat the process for the top part of the window), one to go in front of each window, and then carefully patch and seal the seams.  Given that the edges were not exactly straight (or parallel, or anything close to something that resembled EVEN), I figured the best thing to do would be to start with some cardboard templates.

As you can see, even the cardboard templates were a little challenging (though I admit to being pretty damn proud of myself for using MATH to get the angles so close). I managed to trim them up to a semblance of fitting, and then transferred them over to three pieces of 1x6 finger-jointed pine. The next step would have been a LOT easier if I owned a bandsaw, but I made do with some hideously dangerous table saw work, and some futzing with the jig saw. Fortunately, depending on who's side you're on, I didn't hurt myself and managed to make three fairly close wooden representations of my template.

And yeah - that's totally not going to work. Basically, the wood is so misaligned and out of level that I'd practically have to build a form and cover it with concrete to get a flat enough surface for the wood to sit flat. Anything less, and the seams would just split and it would always look like crap.

After some thinking (and swearing, of course), I settled on a different approach: one piece of continuous wood, cut to fit the exact shape of the sill (and a second one for the top). Given the size and layout of the sill, however, I'd have to make this out of plywood.

Man, I can't even tell you the amount of effort it took just to get the damn piece to this stage:

Just. So much.

Gah.

And then, of course, what should have been a fairly straight-forward trace and cut along the line turned into a hellish chore of trying-to-make-do-with-the-wrong-tools again. Mostly because the jigsaw we have is a piece of absolute crap (and it's my fault because I bought it as gift for the War Department), and I DON'T HAVE A BANDSAW.

Anyway, after more swearing than I'm even comfortable admitting to, I got this:

Thanks to a bright sunny day (which I spent stuck inside working on the goddamn trim), you can really see the craptacular job I did cutting it. Nothing like shining a light on something to really pick out its flaws, eh?

Sigh.

Sorry. Got a little bitter about it there for a second.

Still, I stuck with it and got the top piece in as well, though the amount of swearing didn't decrease much at all:

Once that was in, to add insult to insult (no injuries to speak of, aside from my wounded pride and self-confidence), I was now faced with having to install the trim around my trainwreck of a window sill. Which came with its own challenges of course, given that Tony the mudder had to do a LOT of feathering to get the corners smooth enough, meaning that there was no way in hell the trim was going to sit flat on what was an exceptionally un-flat wall. Here's a close up of one of the worst offenders, just in case you want to stare at some random marks on our walls for a few minutes (go ahead, I'll wait while you try to wrap your brain around the angles involved there):

I got most of the trim to fit okay, with a little creative editing, but that corner required some serious surgery to make the trim fit. Don't believe me? Well, here's the corner piece as it looked from the front:

And here's the back of that same piece after I nibbled away all the wood that was in the way:

And the matching piece for the other side:

Oh, yeah, and did I mention that I was, of course, doing all the test fitting and marking at the complete opposite end of the house, and on an entirely different floor, from the saws and tools I needed to do the cutting. SO glad we bought a house with a huge flight of stairs. So, so, SO glad!

I guess the good news is that, well:

 a) I have a pretty good idea of where I went wrong with the sill, and pretty sure that if I ever encounter this problem again, I'll have a better approach. (Buy me a beer and I will tell you - AT LENGTH - exactly what that is. Buy me two, and I'll offer to help fix yours too, but then I'm an idiot for beer that way.)

 b) Thanks to the War Department and her amazing touch with the caulking gun (and a few hours filling, sanding, and painting), it came out looking mostly okay:

No, I don't have a close-up and you can't see it even if I did. Which I don't.


Anyway, this post is long enough, and there are already too many pictures in it (Blogger starting gakking pretty hard on that last one), so I'll sign off for now. (It has nothing to do with how thinking about this bloody window has made me all pissed off or anything.) The story of the shower risers and my woodworking course can wait until next time.

(In case anyone was wondering - no, the bathroom is still not finished. It's gonna be another two weeks. Tops.)