A wasted day, maybe

I can’t decide if today was a total waste of mine (and a few other people’s) time, or if maybe I’ll be able to salvage some of the effort. See, it’s coming on to winter here in my neck of the woods, and it’s always nice to have a project in mind to keep you busy during the cold months. So, in that spirit, I decided that it was time to do something about our basement bathroom. It needs a new vanity top, a sink and faucet, a new shower and faucet, new paint, a vent fan, a couple of new walls/doors, and a nicer floor. My goal was to get all the stuff together to do this project from beginning to end for $1,000 or less. I was close, but the best I could do was around $1600. Way out of budget. And that was assuming that we could use a standard shower stall, which I’m not convinced that we can. And neither was anyone else I talked to. I figured if I could plan for the $1000, if we had an overrun of budget it would still be manageable, but with the $1600, there’s no possible wiggle room for budget overruns. 😦 I wanted to keep it cheap so that we could save our money for the main bathroom remodel (it needs a new tub/shower surround, possibly some new studs, drywall, a new vent fan, new subfloor, and obviously some updating). 😯

But, I put it all in a spreadsheet, tallied it up anyway, and showed it to my partner in all things demolition and remodeling. Hubs said that he thought we could maybe just use those figures on the upstairs bathroom, and maybe just hang up a few plastic sheets in the downstairs shower so we could use it while doing the upstairs bath. Yes, I said hang plastic sheeting…in the shower…not to be confused with a shower curtain…. Some things are just really difficult to explain without pictures, and trust me–you don’t want to see this. Eye bleach is hard to come by. After we’re done with the sheets, we’ll just demolish the shower….thing…stall…?

So, here’s hoping that hubby holds up to getting this done this winter, there will be some pretty amazing demolition pictures to post if he does. And we’ll have one really awesome bathroom out of the deal. 🙂

Things that tick me off Thursday…again!

Ack! I get really annoyed when quality control fails to do its job. Wouldn’t that just save everyone a headache? Or do they think we won’t notice that the paint is all scratched up and that the miters in one corner of the door are welded crooked by almost a 1/16th of an inch (which leaves bare metal exposed to rust)?! This was a rather expensive SCREEN DOOR for Pete’s sake! Thankfully, it appears that they are going to work with us on getting it replaced, but still, it should never have left the factory to begin with! It definitely will make me think twice before ordering from this company–not because they don’t stand behind their product–but because I shouldn’t have to deal with the hassle in the first place!

So, our adventures in home improvement came to a grinding, screeching, teenager-with-a-stick-shift, halt. After that we just decided that home improvement wasn’t high on the priority list for the day. So hubby and the kiddo sprayed weeds and I got some stuff ready for supper (and made a banana bread recipe that I fear will be a FAIL). My banana bread sure smells good though, and I have to say that they’re the most beautiful pair of loaves I’ve ever seen, so I could still be pleasantly surprised. 🙂

*********Edited to add: The banana bread is delicious! Even without the nuts! 🙂

Sewing Room Facelift, the Finale

I’ll confess that I handled Tuesday’s painting disaster rather poorly. I swore (a lot), pouted, sulked, and then set to scheming. My in-laws call me “the beamer”, because I always seem to come up with absolutely brilliant ideas on how to do things better or just fix stuff in general. (Yes, really!)

Anyway, so I had this idea (just over a year ago) about making my bedroom walls a rich emerald green with a very fine coating of gray over it in splotches to look like fog, which in my imagination looked absolutely fabulous, but with my lack of skills in reality? Not so much. But, I had purchased an entire gallon of light grey paint, and had been storing it ever since–because what else do you do with a partially used gallon of paint? So, I went all “modernistic” and painted the two sheetrocked walls of my sewing room in light grey and left the two concrete ones in the blue color (which looks significantly better on the concrete walls now that it’s completely dry). I actually really like it. It gives the room some color without sucking all the light out of it. The pictures don’t really show up as the right shade of blue on my camera, (keeps getting washed out) so there’s little chance it will show up on your screen like it does in real life.

When it was all blue

This corner stayed the same

Newly grey

Newly grey 2

I’m glad it’s finished, I stayed up fairly late last night working on it, so that I could start moving stuff back in today. I’m ready to be able to walk around down there again! If you are interested in the colors used anywhere in my house, remember to check out the house projects tab at the top of the page. I’ve listed the names and their corresponding projects there. 🙂 It’s more for my reference, but if it helps you, that’s awesome too. 🙂

Sewing Room Facelift Part 2.

*Sigh* Home improvement drama–ya gotta love it! *eye rolls*

So, I worked really hard today on getting the paint on the walls. Buuuuuuuuut…..there’s this one teensy little issue. Before we get to that though, perhaps we should rewind a bit.

When I handed the guy the paint chip thingy at the store yesterday, I was excited. I loved the color on the chip, and thought it would go nicely with some fabric from my stash to make curtains with, in a word–perfect. So, I cheerfully waited while the mixer thing mixed up the paint, they put the little test dollop on the top of the can, and I went on my merry way. Now, I had noticed when they put the dollop on that it looked significantly more blue than my little paint chip thingy, but I figured that once it dried it would change.

It didn’t, but I decided that I liked the color anyway, and besides, I probably had enough green going on in my house.***** So, still unruffled I began the chore of painting. While I was painting the third wall (or somewhere thereabouts) I noticed that the paint had finally started to dry on the first wall.

*GASP* WTH?!?! My pretty light turquoise-y blue is more like a weird navy-ish blue! (Except for the floor splatters, the bits in my hair and on my clothes–those all look like they are supposed to.) This isn’t going to work! I have a basement sewing room with two puny little windows for natural light and a ceiling fan with 3 lights for the only additional lighting in the room. 😦 Why me?! So, now I either have to live with it or come up with a fix….*sigh*…..maybe I’ll have figured something out by tomorrow. Stay tuned.

***** Ed. Note: Why is it that my paint has NOT ONCE ever matched the little paint chip thingy? What gives? Even if it looks right on their little dollop it NEVER looks the same on my wall. 😦 I just want the paint to match the chip thingy!!!! If you can’t do that, why provide them in the first place?!?! [/rant]

Home Improvement Drama

You know how it just wouldn’t be a home improvement project if there wasn’t some drama involved? Well, I guess we’ve a home improvement project! *eye rolls* There were like 5 windows that the previous owners didn’t replace, the big picture window in the living room, the bathroom window, and the laundry room window. When we were scraping to do some repainting, we discovered that the big picture window was in pretty sad shape, so we decided to replace it. You might remember from a while back that I had gotten it priced so that we could actually replace all of those windows for the same price as it would have cost to get the local guy to order just the picture window (and the two tiny windows on each side). Well, we had ordered those windows and gotten them the other day, and were super pumped to get them installed…..until we looked a bit closer. It turns out, that the replacement windows I had purchased (and waited three and a half weeks to get) had a nailfin that wouldn’t work with our current setup.

Blasted nailfin!

So, we contemplated taking them back, but ultimately decided that with a bit of retro-fitting, we could potentially get them to work if we cut the nail fin off. Enter the DeWalt version of the Sawzall…we broke that baby out to slice the nailfin off before carefully filing the plastic ridge down smooth. Man I love that thing–no homeowner should be without one. 🙂

Hubs cutting the nailfin

Nailfin carnage!

Enter problem numero dos. The window frame that the replacements fit into has a slant going downhill, presumably to drain water….which, if you haven’t already guessed, won’t work with the replacement windows.

Can you see the slant?

So, after calculating (very carefully) we determined the perfect angle at which we would have to cut a 2×4 to make it sit level (which, was NOT 17* as suggested by someone as a “common rule of thumb”) and so we cut that board a couple of times to get just the right fit.

Whew! No slant!

So now, we’ve got the bathroom and laundry room windows in. I’ve still got to stain the trim boards for the one in the laundry room, and I’m waiting for the stain to dry so that I can put some poly on the ones for the bathroom after hubs gets the window foamed, but the hard part is over! Yay!

As yet, the big picture window isn’t going to happen, because we don’t have a method of transporting it from the store to our house, nor do we have enough help to get that heavy sucker in/out of the frame. Hopefully, by this weekend we’ll have some family come up to help, but we’re taking this one window at a time.

BTW, our new windows are fabulous! We got the obscured glass for the bathroom (which I highly recommend) like what was in there before, and it’s nice and quiet, keeps the cold out, doesn’t get a lot of condensation (except when someone is showering!), and just looks a lot nicer. 🙂 I’d take a picture, but honestly, my bathroom is too much of a mess to show off to anyone for any reason…sorry! 😉