If you give a mouse a cookie (bathroom redo)

 So way back on June 25th I saw that the wax ring on the upstairs (guest room) toilet was leaking and knew it needed to be replaced. I thought it would be a quick and fairly easy job. 

Ha! I was so wrong. 

I had the toilet out and was debating whether or not to replace the floor at the same time. The floor still looked good, but was getting older and it seemed to make sense to not put the toilet back in until I was sure the flooring was good for a few more years. 

So I peaked underneath… (Yes, that is the original 1970’s linoleum under the vinyl plank flooring… that bathroom was a time capsule.)

…and found a mess of wet subfloor! (Thankfully it ended up being clean water from the valve, not dirty from the toilet!)

Which led, of course to tearing all the flooring up, letting the subfloor dry, adding another layer of 1/4” plywood on top to reinforce the damaged subfloor, and finally a new floor. 

(Are we having fun yet?)

And while I was at it, we replaced the vanity too since that bathroom still had the original 1970’s era vanity, removed an old non-functioning baseboard heater, patched and repaired a bunch of drywall, and replaced the baseboards and door moulding. One thing definitely led to another with this job! 

It took five weeks (about half of that was plumbing, Joe isn’t the quickest plumber 😂) but it’s done, and I’m happy with it. I repainted it with the same colors since I really liked this “blue sky” bathroom. 

I’m so glad it’s done… unfortunately it’s the kid’s bathroom that really needs a redo…but I don’t have the energy for that just yet.

mudroom barn door: check!

One of the bigger projects on my late winter to-do list was building and hanging a barn door to close off Joe's "man cave" from the mudroom. When we had the basement finished we didn't envision wanting a door for that area, but that room can get messy... and it's visible from the living room when the basement door is open, and it didn't take long for me to decide we should have thought ahead better and made a normal sized doorway and hung a door.

But we didn't.

So... the next best option was a sliding barn style door. I could close off the room when I wanted, but there was enough room next to the entrance into the room to slide the door completely open and out of the way too.

A couple of weeks ago I showed pictures of the track for the door, hung and ready to go... all that was left was building the door. I was a little apprehensive about that part... I'm not a carpenter, and I really didn't want the door to turn out looking crooked, poorly built or cheap.

I am very happy with the finished product though...



Here's how I put it together...

I used a piece of 4x8 plywood, cut to length (at Home Depot) for the base of the door. Luckily 4' was exactly the right width to span the door opening. I wanted a look of random boards for the face of the door, so I played around with the numbers until I came up with a combination of board widths that would evenly cover the 4x8. It turned out to be 4 - 1x6's, 6 - 1x4's and 2 - 1x3's. I just bought inexpensive. common pine boards for these vertical boards.



They didn't look like much at first...

I started by laying them out on the plywood base and playing around a little with how to arrange the different widths.







Once I had my layout planned, I cut them all to length and hauled them outside...

I didn't take pictures of the next few steps, I was in the groove of playing with the wood and didn't even think about the camera!

I sanded each board, softening the edges, removing any marks from the store, and smoothing any splintered edges, then I distressed them... hitting them with a piece of chain and the hammer, nailing in and pulling out nails, etc. (I'm sure the neighbors thought I'd lost my mind... first sanding then marring the same boards!)

Finally I brought them in the house and started staining. I went over each board first with "Ipswich pine" stain, a color that looks good with the natural color of our log walls, then I got out the "jacobean" stain and added some interest to the boards. I used the darker stain to highlight the grain of the wood, especially around knotholes, etc. in the wood. The dents and holes I'd added as I distressed the wood also added interest as the stain settled in those areas...

The darkness on the board on the left is nothing but stain... I just followed the lines of the grain of the wood to make it look natural.



I kept working with the stain and playing around the the layout of the boards until I felt like there was a good balance of color... then I attached them to the base at the top and bottom. (I attached them from the front, knowing the screws would be covered by the horizontal pieces that would run along the top and bottom of the finished door.)

The next day I attached the horizontal boards on the top and bottom using wood glue and screws through the back. I used cedar pickets, cut to size, for those pieces to tie together the door and the cedar door trim that was already in the mudroom.

Once the horizontal pieces were done R and I hung the door, and I added some handles and a couple of coats of polyurethane.

I painted the back of the door to match the wall color so that from inside the room it looks more like part of the wall then just a big piece of plywood.




Hanging the door finished the mudroom re-do and I'm happy with how it turned out...



The the right of the door is our "overflow" pantry...



... to the left is the boot-taking-off spot...




... with a spot for boots, another to hang dog leashes, and the all-important jar of horse treats on the shelf.

Under the chair is a little crate I built to hold work gloves (which always seemed to be scattered all over the mudroom floor).



We had some wheels in the barn that I put on the crate, but they are a little too big... I found the wheels on the chair (also in the barn... Joe never throws anything away!) and they are a little smaller, so I think I'm going to switch them out.

Across the room are coat and key hooks...




It's a tiny room (roughly 10x10), and works much better now that it's been re-organized...



... and I do love the barn door.

diggin' out... catchin' up

The blog's been quiet the past week or so... there is no particular reason, good, bad or otherwise... except maybe Joe's current work schedule which requires me to get up (so I can get HIM up) at 4:30 each morning. 

That's too early for me. 

By an hour or so. (I'm SO not looking forward to "springing forward" with daylight savings time in a couple of weeks!) The early mornings tend to be my blogging time, but at 4:30 I'm not awake enough to think, much less write. Which has resulted in a quiet, neglected, blog.

I do eventually wake up though, and have been getting things crossed off my home project to-do list...

I pinned this photo the other day, thinking it would be the perfect way to store my old tin measuring cups. 

After over-thinking it for days, and almost deciding it would be too much work and skipping it altogether...

... I had a burst of energy, adapted the idea for my kitchen, and got it done. I do love how it turned out. 

The mudroom (which is in our tiny basement, off the garage) has been getting a mini-makeover in preparation for building and hanging a barn door to close it off from the spare room.  Here's the new almost done rack for barn coats, it still needs another row of hooks across the bottom... Can you guess what the wood base is made from?

 

The track for the barn door is up, and I have a plan for how I want to build it...

... next up will be buying the lumber and getting it built and hung. 

I've also been spending a fair amount of time shoveling snow and hauling firewood. We had a pretty good snow storm over the weekend (a foot or so of snow on the ground; a high yesterday of 9 degrees) but the trail to the barn is shoveled, and the house is warm. 

It's supposed to be a cold, snowy week... I'm guessing I'll being seeing a lot more of the snow shovel before it's all said and done. 

Stay warm! 

fixing a dirty little secret, and finishing the blue sky bathroom

Remember when I painted my bathroom vanity about a year and a half ago?  I loved the change from the orange-y 1970's wood to a sleek black.

(This picture was taken before we moved in... the pink carpet is LONG gone!)





The vanity looked good... it looked finished... unless you got down on your hands and knees and peaked underneath.  Which no one did of course.

But if you had this is what you would have seen:




A big glaring dust-kitty catcher where the toe kick should have been.

It was gross...



I'd had the plan, when I first painted the vanity, to add a toe kick and also some chunky little legs. I even bought the legs... but then I got busy and, you know... out of sight out of mind... and I never got that last little bit done.

Until now.

All it took was a $3.00 piece of 1x3, a little creativity with the miter saw, and a little black paint. I'm not sure why I put it off for so long...

Measuring, cutting, painting and installing the 1x3 was easy. To attach it to the vanity, I just marked where the side supports were underneath the vanity, pre-drilled the toe kick, and used a few finishing nails to attach it.



Better, yes?

Unfortunately, the chunky little legs I'd bought back in 2013 to put under the front of the vanity were too wide to fit... With the toe kick in place, they ended up sticking out past the front of the vanity. I measured the space and realized that cutting one of the legs in half would give me just the right size to fit, and would make it easier to install because of the newly created flat side.

But how to cut that round little ball of wood in half without cutting off a finger or two in the process?



I ended up using scrap wood to make a box that held the leg tightly, making one side of the box extend out an extra 8" or so to use as a handle. Then all I had to do was hold the handle and cut the whole box in half with the miter saw. The leg was held firmly in place, my hands were far from the blade, and one leg ended up two.



(Towards the bottom of the cut one half got a little bigger, but it doesn't show now that they're in place.)

A little wood glue, and the vanity is finally done...



I like how the little legs update it, and give it a much more finished look... (MUCH more finished than the gaping dust bunny catcher!)



All that's left is painting the bathroom door, the rest of the room is done...

It hasn't changed much, but it's amazing how much the new paint brightens it up,  and I do love the shutters...

temporarily unplugged... (and a project update)

.... that's the short story of last week.

My computer ended up with a virus, which left it virtually unusable...

And then I broke my (new!) cell phone.

It felt odd not to have either one of them working.

But I did take that time to keep working on my bathroom, and I have to say I'm really happy with how it's turning out.

I spent most of the week working on adding shutters to the bathroom windows. I started out with these two sets of old bi-fold shutters that came off the basement windows in daughter E's house... She didn't need them, but they were too good to just throw away...



I liked the chippy paint, and wanted more privacy for the big windows in my bathroom...



My plan was to somehow adapt and recycle these old shutters to fit the bathroom windows. The height of the shutters was perfect, but unfortunately, the bathroom windows are MUCH wider than the little basement windows the shutters came off of... so I had to get creative.

I finally decided to take the shutters apart, and use two louvers shutter sections, and two newly made solid sections for each of the three windows. Using them that way would give me enough width to span the window, and hopefully look intentional.

I bought some of the better grade pine at Home Depot, and had one piece ripped to size there, because of the strange widths of my windows, and then started taking the shutters apart, and cutting the wood to fit, and then putting them back together again and mounting them on the windows.



I mounted vertical supports between each of the three windows for mounting, so I wouldn't have too many holes in the windows frames... (Just in case this turned out to be a huge fail! I was planning ahead...) Here's a picture of one of the vertical support pieces... i'st just held on with a couple of finishing nails.



I'd already started hanging the shutters in that photo... a looong process that involved hanging a couple of the sections twice to get them as straight and level as possible on a window that, like the rest of the house, isn't as square as you would expect a window to be!



Lots of wood putty and paint later... here's the finished product..







I do love how they turned out.


Plenty of light when I want light, but plenty of privacy too. It was kind of a long, too-much-math-for-me project, but I'm so glad I did it. Just a little more baseboard work and the bathroom is DONE. Pictures soon... (unless my computer crashes again!)

blue sky bathroom...

I've been working this week in my bathroom... I started working on adapting the shutters E gave me for the bathroom windows, and then kind of shifted gears. I'd needed to make another trip to Home Depot to buy a bit more wood for the shutters before I could go any further... but M gets so unsettled there... and we'd already been there several times lately... and I woke up Wednesday morning knowing just how I wanted to paint the bathroom... AND I had the paint I needed (leftover from other projects) already in my paint stash.

So... I started painting... a job which includes replacing the baseboard... which was really door moulding. (The previous owners must have gotten a very good deal on a lot of cheap door moulding... they used it everywhere!)

The painting is going well (I decided to do something different, at least for me)... I'm painting the ceiling and top of the walls sky blue, the rest of the walls white, and adding a decorative wood moulding to cover the transition between colors.

Here's a little sneak peak:



I thought that replacing the baseboards was going to be the easy part of the bathroom update... I've already replaced most of the baseboards in the house and none have given me any trouble. (Some of them weren't even attached to the wall... just set in place!) The baseboards in my bathroom had to be different though... I had a bear of a time getting them off.



They hung on so tightly to that wall that, despite scoring it before prying it off, I ended up with spots like this;






Grumble, grumble...

The good part was. by the time I was done pulling the old baseboards off, so many had broken, and it had been so pieced together, that the pieces were small enough to fit into the trash can!



The plan for today (besides spending time outside enjoying the beautiful weather we're supposed to have!) is putting up the new baseboards and painting all the trim, and then it's time to start back on the shutter project that got me started in this bathroom in the first place!

let the fun begin...

The past few years I've gotten into the habit of spending the first few months of the year working on fix-up projects around the house. With a minimum of outside work needing to be done, no major holidays to plan, and snow and cold keeping us close to home, it seems like the perfect time to tackle some of the larger, inside jobs.... like the jobs I've done in past years... replacing the baseboards and door moldings, painting the kid's rooms, replacing the living room carpet with wood, painting the kitchen island, etc.

This year's agenda is, I think, pretty do-able... hopefully I'll get it done before the weather warms up and it's time to start working outside again.

I want to repaint the main bathroom...

...again.



I painted it twice last year, trying to get the right color to match the old (but still good) tub/shower surround. I finally had to stop painting it because we were having company and that bathroom needed to be available... but I've hated the color for a year. Three test pots of paint later, I think I've found the right color. Hopefully I'll get that done later this week...




Shutters in my bathroom. E gave me some old shutters that came off her basement windows. They are old, but cool, with plenty of chippy paint.



At first I tried to use them in "crafty" sorts of ways (Christmas card holder, for example) but then got the idea to try to modify them to fit my three big bathroom windows.



 I was going to make some "prairie shutters" for those windows this year anyway, but the shutters E gave me have louvers... a plus... and they are about the right height... another plus. But there are only two sets (of four shutter pieces) and I have three windows. I have a plan though, for adapting them to make it work, and made some vertical support pieces yesterday and added them to the window (for the hinges to attach to). I'll let you know how the project turns out, I'm hoping to have it done by next week sometime.

Two bigger projects I'm hoping to get to are adding a sliding "barn door" to our basement room, and adding beadboard (also leftover from E's house) to my kitchen island and upgrading it a little in the process.

The "barn door" is a must-do... when we had the basement finished I thought an open doorway, between the back room and the mudroom, would look best. It's a very small basement, and I didn't want it to feel too cut up. But... I've found that sometimes I want or need to close that room off (it's visible from the living room when the basement door is open) and it's frustrating that I can't.

Joe even got me a Kreg jig for Christmas just so I could build that door. (I have to build the door because the opening isn't a standard size.) I was playing with my new jig the other day, figuring out how to use it, and made this tiny chalkboard out of some old wood I had laying around... I think building the door will be fun!

 

I also have a few smaller projects I'm hoping to get to; painting my bathroom and replacing those baseboards and door moldings (they didn't get done when I did the rest), and replacing a few overhead lights... I'm looking forward to the next few months and excited to get started on the projects I've been thinking about since last spring!