Sunday, June 13, 2010

Appliance Update

First and foremost can I just say I AM MOVED IN!!! This weekend was it, I HAD to be out. Thankfully, I had a lot of help. My parents, my sister came up from Provo, Leah, Jake, the Relief Society, and one guy from the Priesthood (way to rep Nate).

So from here on out, I'll be catching up on blogs and finishing a lot of unfinished work around the house. Currently I don't have my dryer, dishwasher, or cooktop hooked up. There are still lights that need to go up and a plethora of things to get done. *sigh* It'll get there...

When I first moved in there was a terrible wall oven that we took out. I found my new double oven at the ReStore for $125. Lets skip to the goods; here are the pics!
Old oven taken out. It was set up to be a wall oven with a built in microwave over it. So we had to modify it a little bit in order for it to work.

We (meaning Wes and Jake), cut out the shelf and got it to fit the oven size. Don't be fooled, it's not as easy as I make it sound. It took them around four attempts to get it in there. All sorts of things went wrong and there was wall cutting and duct tape and sweaty boys and ....... Lets just say that it took about four hours.

Personally, I think their effort was entirely worth it. Now I can make enchiladas and cookies at the same time. Oh, and top oven is a convection oven. Anyone know how to adjust the time for convection ovens?

To new kitchens to cook in,

Boomba

Friday, June 11, 2010

I'm thankful for running water

So this post is going to have a ton of pictures. It's really like three posts in one: the bathroom floor, the shower/tub, and the vanity projects. I'll keep my captioning short so this isn't a novel.


Britney removing the trim after the old vanity and privacy wall have been removed


All the linoleum stripped off the floor


Hardy Backer going down


Tile down



Tile, paint, and new vanity in. Sorry, my bathroom is long and skinny so these pictures aren't super interesting.


Nasty old tub


Sheet rock taken out of the shower surround


Tile up!


New faucets


Not much of a picture, but this was the old vanity and you can kind of see the privacy wall. Wes was super gung ho and started taking it all apart. My camera and I couldn't keep up.


I found a vanity I liked at Lowe's, but it was $400. This old, ugly dresser was $50 on KSL Classifieds. The ugly dresser was more in the budget, but I'll make is sexy... don't worry!

The drawers

Dresser painted and new sink installed!

My running water in my b-e-a-utiful sink!

I still need the drawers put back in the vanity. Sadly, the dresser is so old that the handles are a weird size. So I'll need to get some custom, but I'm not sure where I can do that. If anyone has any contacts for that, let me know! I also need a new light for the bathroom. The problem is, the light box is center to the OLD vanity size. To be center for the new vanity it needs to be about two to three inches over. *sigh* So I'm working on the light situation still. It's starting to look really great though!!! It's move in weekend, so it's crunch time to get everything functional. More blogs to come, when I get some time!

To being able to wash my hands after I ... I'll stop there,

Boomba

Sunday, June 6, 2010

What Lies Beneath


This is me sitting on the current master bedroom floor. See all that white? Yeah the prior owners decided to paint everything and get carpet. So all of these wood floors were covered in it. This is me going around and pulling up all the staples I could find.


When you strip off the paint, here is what was hiding! Removing the paint was seriously a daunting process. I got two rooms completely stripped, but it took three people each and about 5-10 hours a room. I didn't really have that sort of time, so I ended up sanding the paint off the other two. Much easier! However I did still have to go around the edges to get the paint off. I went through lots of different methods to remove the paint: various paint strippers, Goof Off, and mineral spirits. What I recommend? Sanding, then getting what is left with Goof Off and steel wool. I read some things that said not to use steel wool, but it was all that worked. I guess we'll see if my floors rust.


Meet the buff sander! Ridiculously easy to use and fairly cheap to rent at Home Depot. For $50 a day you can have this for 24 hours. I had about 1200 square feet to do and this was plenty of time. The sand paper is the biggest expense, but get what you have to. Don't skimp!


Putting varathane on the floor... also super easy. I bought a water based, satin varathane that is about $50 a can. I've used one and half, but still need to do the hall. It says it only covers 400 square feet a can, but mine went way farther than that. I HIGHLY recommend using this product to finish your floors. Way easy to use!

I bought three types of applicators: a deck stain applicator and two different kinds of lamb's wool applicators. Consensus? The all work the same. The two lamb's wool applicators had longer handles which was convenient. Deck stain applicator was a hands and knees tool. Other than convenience, they were all equally easy to use.


The finished product!!! They look a million times better :) Special thanks to Jake, Britney, Leah, Braden, Shellee, Travis, and Gary for all of their help throughout the floor process. Couldn't have done it without you all!

Are they perfect? No, but let's be realistic... the house is 38 years old and they were trashed. I would have had to pay serious money for them to be perfect. Just in case you didn't know, "serious money" is not what I'd call my budget. Things are coming together and I'm a million blog posts behind. I have to move in this weekend, wish me luck!

To seeing past the surface,

Boomba