Kitchen Floor: Slated

Still needs to be washed another 30 times and then sealed (twice? we’ll see), but otherwise it’s done. Enjoy the photo retrospective. Or not, whatever works for you. What the in-store sample tiles looked like. It wasn’t very gauged, either. The dry run. Also on the floor: a hammer, wire strippers, small wonder bar, four-foot

Read More →

Cutting Slate Tile with a Wet Saw

This was kind of fun. And now I have a power tool that shoots muddy water at me. Finally. bkd

Light Switch Replacement: 15 Photos

Nine switches down, four to go — upstairs. Then I can hit the basement! Good times, good times. bkd

Installing the Kitchen Sub-Floor

And underlayment. The problem with this overall house renovation project is that it’s mostly finish work, which is no fun. Finally got to do something that wasn’t finish work. Now I want to go and frame something or shoot some .22 rounds into concrete maybe. Next house. Not pictured that should’ve been: Dremeling the underlayment

Read More →

Bedroom Getting on Toward Done-ish

Befores and currents: Other direction. Done: Floor stripped, sanded, and re-finished. Closet hardware removed. Closet wall and ceiling replaced. Ceiling primed and painted. Walls primed and painted (“Barraud House Blue” and “Tyler Stone Medium”). Trim primed and painted. Baseboards cut to fit modern registers. New registers installed. New light fixture installed. New three-prong outlets installed

Read More →

Removing Vinyl Tile: A True Story

Maybe it’s just factual, not so much true. Anyway: here’s a video of me removing a vinyl tile from the kitchen floor. I think the video captures 85 to 90 percent of the tension and raw emotion of the live event. The sound in the background is the fan in the living room. It’s 95

Read More →

Kitchen Plan an IKEA Fan Made for Me

I think this is what I’m going with. Turns out my kitchen is small. I’m probably not going with the doors shown here, though. They cost extra. I’m probably going with these instead. Yep. Yeah, so I posted a question on ikeafans.com and a couple people responded with completed designs. Pretty cool. bkd

First of the Gang to Die

My greatest victory of the project so far: fixing the one bum circuit in the upstairs. I’ve had only occasional electrical in my living room and two big bedrooms. For some reason it took me a month to figure out that the problem might be caused by one bad connection at the start of the

Read More →

Cold Chisel, Warm Heart

For some reason I knocked all the tiles off before I demolished the walls. It was sort of fun chiseling them off, but just unnecessary. I suppose I did it that way because all the write-ups I found online talked about knocking tiles off so that they could be reused. In my case, no, I

Read More →

Meanwhile, Back in the Kitchen

The kitchen has been opened up. The new gaping hole isn’t finished off at all yet, but still: the kitchen has been opened up. Makes a much bigger difference than the photos can convey — a lot more light gets in there and the kitchen now feels like it’s sort of part of the same

Read More →