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.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
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?"
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?"
Saturday, May 29, 2010
A surfeit of cedars
If you're a fan of trees in general, and cedars in particular, may I recommend skipping this post?
No?
Very well. Then let's proceed to a post I like to subtitle, "In which we do horrible things to vegetation"...
One of the things we really like about living in Broadmead (as opposed to, for example, across the street from Victoria's largest mall) is how much greener and fresher and cleaner everything is. Broadmead has a real (and deserved) reputation as being somewhat dark and dank due to all the enormous evergreens growing all over the place, but our street doesn't have that problem: we live on one of the brightest streets in the entire neighbourhood. So bright, in fact, that there are certain times of the year that I really wish we could figure out a way to block off the high windows in the front hall so that the early morning sun wouldn't stream RIGHT into the master bedroom... but I digress.
Of course, the sunny exposure leads to another problem of sorts: all of the plants in the yard, including the ones we aren't that fond of, tend to grow rather large. Case in point, the voluminous, overbearing, pest-infested, overly-phallic cedar shrub monstrosities on either side of the window at the front of the house.
As near as I can tell, the only actual benefit to having these things in our yard is so that we can locate our house from six miles away.
"Oh, sure! Hang a left off the Pat Bay, and just look for the giant green penises. You can't miss it."
Please excuse the picture - for some reason I had no shots of the front of the house at all, and had to use the one from the original listing. Well, I have this one, but it doesn't really capture the majesty of the two of them together, towering over the house like a couple cast-off sex toys for the Jolly Green Giant (too far? Yeah, too far):
The downsides include the way they darken the living room to the point where we feel like we're trapped in an old, scratchy, disused sauna, and the way they provide a highway straight into our attic for any four- or six-legged critter looking for a way to escape the wind and wet. Oh, and the fact that they're growing too close to the house and ruining both the stucco on that side, and the shingles on top of the little roof along the top of the window. Needless to say, we're not exactly fond of them, and decided pretty much as soon as we moved in that we'd be taking them out.
Well, last Thursday was the day. While we were at work, some guys showed up and cut them all down.
Awesome. Well, apart from the way the stucco is so much darker where the trees were sheltering it from the weather. Still: awesome.
Another area where the cedars were starting to make us feel a little hemmed in was in the back yard. There's a sort of patio area (and when I say "Sort of", I mean it has some gravel and a pathetic attempt at a flower bed - it's GOING to be a patio some day, but it's only pretending right now) in the back that's surrounded by a cedar hedge with a wrought-iron arbor in the middle - yes, like everything else in this house, it's all very twee.
Anyway, because no one in their right mind would ever take a picture of a cedar hedge (read: I never took one), here's another picture from the original listing:
Yeah, you get the idea. Anyway, when I first mentioned to the War Department that I was really looking forward to getting rid of those hedges, she looked at me askance and wondered why I ever thought we were taking them out at all. It took less than an hour for her to go from not even thinking about it to being unable to wait a second longer, and so I found myself roaring away at them with a chainsaw one sunny Sunday afternoon.
Being somewhat smaller hedges, they came out with no difficulty at all, and there was soon nothing left but the roots. Which is where it gets weird. You see, our neighbor is retired AND crazy. Well, he came over to offer us some scrap wood and we were showing him around a bit and showed him where the hedge used to be.
Well, he was so all fired up that he came over the next day, while we were at work, and spent forty minutes ripping up all the roots from the hedge. He said he was only going to work at it for an hour, but they all came out like butter, so he wound up doing them all.
And then he came back the next day and fixed the sprinkler pipe he cut through the first day so it was all good.
And here we are now, no roots, no hedges:
Looks much better, eh? Of course, we now have to take out a few yards of soil so we can level it off and put in pavers or flagstones or something, but it's already so much nicer. I could be wrong, but I think that huge red azalea is a big fan of the change, too...
Right then. It's now time for a new feature on this blog. Given that we're not really doing as much construction on this house (and I really am getting much better at working with tools), I haven't had much occasion to be making updates to everyone's favorite feature, The Injury Report (also known as Don Hurts Himself). Well, I figured that, in the spirit of this house, I'd try something new. It is thus with great pleasure that I introduce the latest Don and Amy's Broadmead Reno blog innovation...
This Week in Mayonnaise
Now, I'm sure all of our regular readers are familiar with the strange substance left all over this house by the previous owner, and which we have decided (rather arbitrarily) to call mayonnaise. But as a recap, so far on this blog we have seen mayonnaise used to patch drywall, fill holes, and serve as extra insulation for doorbell wires. But really, we've only just begun to plumb the depths of the possible uses of mayonnaise.
That being said, listing and showing them all in the same post would be prohibitive, so I thought I'd make it a sometime feature where I can post photographic evidence of this remarkable stuff, and encourage people to comment on whether they felt our old friend Frank was making good use of his magical substance.
For this inaugural edition, I present to you this lovely piece of ... whatever, hanging right on the wall of the garage, on the wall nearest the front door (meaning, you have to walk right past it every time you come in):
Leaving aside the aesthetics of the piece, I urge you to take note of the double duty being performed by the mystical mayo: sealant AND adhesive! It's a two-fer!
I think that's pretty damn impressive. Butt sucking ugly, but impressive.
Tune in next time for the long-awaited saga of the floor in the master bedroom. And probably the floor in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, too.
Yeah. We've done a lot of flooring.
No?
Very well. Then let's proceed to a post I like to subtitle, "In which we do horrible things to vegetation"...
One of the things we really like about living in Broadmead (as opposed to, for example, across the street from Victoria's largest mall) is how much greener and fresher and cleaner everything is. Broadmead has a real (and deserved) reputation as being somewhat dark and dank due to all the enormous evergreens growing all over the place, but our street doesn't have that problem: we live on one of the brightest streets in the entire neighbourhood. So bright, in fact, that there are certain times of the year that I really wish we could figure out a way to block off the high windows in the front hall so that the early morning sun wouldn't stream RIGHT into the master bedroom... but I digress.
Of course, the sunny exposure leads to another problem of sorts: all of the plants in the yard, including the ones we aren't that fond of, tend to grow rather large. Case in point, the voluminous, overbearing, pest-infested, overly-phallic cedar shrub monstrosities on either side of the window at the front of the house.
As near as I can tell, the only actual benefit to having these things in our yard is so that we can locate our house from six miles away.
"Oh, sure! Hang a left off the Pat Bay, and just look for the giant green penises. You can't miss it."
Please excuse the picture - for some reason I had no shots of the front of the house at all, and had to use the one from the original listing. Well, I have this one, but it doesn't really capture the majesty of the two of them together, towering over the house like a couple cast-off sex toys for the Jolly Green Giant (too far? Yeah, too far):
The downsides include the way they darken the living room to the point where we feel like we're trapped in an old, scratchy, disused sauna, and the way they provide a highway straight into our attic for any four- or six-legged critter looking for a way to escape the wind and wet. Oh, and the fact that they're growing too close to the house and ruining both the stucco on that side, and the shingles on top of the little roof along the top of the window. Needless to say, we're not exactly fond of them, and decided pretty much as soon as we moved in that we'd be taking them out.
Well, last Thursday was the day. While we were at work, some guys showed up and cut them all down.
Awesome. Well, apart from the way the stucco is so much darker where the trees were sheltering it from the weather. Still: awesome.
Another area where the cedars were starting to make us feel a little hemmed in was in the back yard. There's a sort of patio area (and when I say "Sort of", I mean it has some gravel and a pathetic attempt at a flower bed - it's GOING to be a patio some day, but it's only pretending right now) in the back that's surrounded by a cedar hedge with a wrought-iron arbor in the middle - yes, like everything else in this house, it's all very twee.
Anyway, because no one in their right mind would ever take a picture of a cedar hedge (read: I never took one), here's another picture from the original listing:
Yeah, you get the idea. Anyway, when I first mentioned to the War Department that I was really looking forward to getting rid of those hedges, she looked at me askance and wondered why I ever thought we were taking them out at all. It took less than an hour for her to go from not even thinking about it to being unable to wait a second longer, and so I found myself roaring away at them with a chainsaw one sunny Sunday afternoon.
Being somewhat smaller hedges, they came out with no difficulty at all, and there was soon nothing left but the roots. Which is where it gets weird. You see, our neighbor is retired AND crazy. Well, he came over to offer us some scrap wood and we were showing him around a bit and showed him where the hedge used to be.
Well, he was so all fired up that he came over the next day, while we were at work, and spent forty minutes ripping up all the roots from the hedge. He said he was only going to work at it for an hour, but they all came out like butter, so he wound up doing them all.
And then he came back the next day and fixed the sprinkler pipe he cut through the first day so it was all good.
And here we are now, no roots, no hedges:
Looks much better, eh? Of course, we now have to take out a few yards of soil so we can level it off and put in pavers or flagstones or something, but it's already so much nicer. I could be wrong, but I think that huge red azalea is a big fan of the change, too...
Right then. It's now time for a new feature on this blog. Given that we're not really doing as much construction on this house (and I really am getting much better at working with tools), I haven't had much occasion to be making updates to everyone's favorite feature, The Injury Report (also known as Don Hurts Himself). Well, I figured that, in the spirit of this house, I'd try something new. It is thus with great pleasure that I introduce the latest Don and Amy's Broadmead Reno blog innovation...
This Week in Mayonnaise
Now, I'm sure all of our regular readers are familiar with the strange substance left all over this house by the previous owner, and which we have decided (rather arbitrarily) to call mayonnaise. But as a recap, so far on this blog we have seen mayonnaise used to patch drywall, fill holes, and serve as extra insulation for doorbell wires. But really, we've only just begun to plumb the depths of the possible uses of mayonnaise.
That being said, listing and showing them all in the same post would be prohibitive, so I thought I'd make it a sometime feature where I can post photographic evidence of this remarkable stuff, and encourage people to comment on whether they felt our old friend Frank was making good use of his magical substance.
For this inaugural edition, I present to you this lovely piece of ... whatever, hanging right on the wall of the garage, on the wall nearest the front door (meaning, you have to walk right past it every time you come in):
Leaving aside the aesthetics of the piece, I urge you to take note of the double duty being performed by the mystical mayo: sealant AND adhesive! It's a two-fer!
I think that's pretty damn impressive. Butt sucking ugly, but impressive.
Tune in next time for the long-awaited saga of the floor in the master bedroom. And probably the floor in the living room, hall, kitchen, and dining room, too.
Yeah. We've done a lot of flooring.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Hello? Is this thing on? Hello?
Wow... I kinda forgot all about this here blog thingy.
Or I would have, were it not for people constantly asking me when the next post was coming. (Still can't believe people actually read this nonsense, let alone wait expectantly for it.)
Of course, we HAVE been kinda busy...
What with the
and then the
and then the
Wait, what?
Yeah. That's somebody's idea of a joke or something. That, or the damn statues have started breeding.
Seriously, that just kind of appeared there one morning. I have no idea why or how, but if the deranged person responsible is reading this, STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW!
It's so not funny. NOT FUNNY.
Regular updates will resume shortly, just as soon as I can lick this damn cold.
Or I would have, were it not for people constantly asking me when the next post was coming. (Still can't believe people actually read this nonsense, let alone wait expectantly for it.)
Of course, we HAVE been kinda busy...
What with the
and then the
and then the
Wait, what?
Yeah. That's somebody's idea of a joke or something. That, or the damn statues have started breeding.
Seriously, that just kind of appeared there one morning. I have no idea why or how, but if the deranged person responsible is reading this, STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW!
It's so not funny. NOT FUNNY.
Regular updates will resume shortly, just as soon as I can lick this damn cold.
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