Category: House

Over Memorial Day weekend I took a few extra days off and rebuilt the deck.  Most of the decking decking had rotted to the point of no longer being safe to walk on. I had to strip the whole deck back to the bare structure, replace a few rotten joists, and then add new deck boards, railings, lattice, and azalea bushes. It was a LOT of work, but I think it looks pretty good! In a few months I should be able to stain it - once the pressure-treated decking has had a little more time to fully dry out so it will accept the stain.

Over the Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks I put down a floating hardwood floor in all of the bedrooms (plus the hallway) upstairs. I'd been wanting to do it since we moved in, to get rid of the old stained and nasty carpets that were in all of the bedrooms. I still have a few thresholds to install, but it's essentially done!

I've been working my way through our kitchen, and adding pull-out drawers to all of the lower cabinets. It makes the space a lot more useful, and also a lot easier to access. I've also turned a few of our narrower upper cabinets into pull-outs as well (but forgot to take a picture of those) - turning one into a pull-out spice rack, one for cleaning supplies, etc.

I finished and hung the decorations I had been working on in the previous post. We're pretty happy with how they came out! And it has definitely made a difference on the audio problems we were having in there. It's still not perfect, but there is definitely a significant improvement.

Our living room has a high ceiling, which leads to lots of bare sections of flat wall up high. Because of this, when we watch the TV in there the audio is always sort of muddy - just too many reflective surfaces and echoes. In an attempt to break up those flat planes with some texture, I'm making these decorations for the wall above the window in the second picture. They're made of lots of scraps and offcuts of hardwood that I've been unable to throw away over the years. They're also lots of different thicknesses, which should help break up the reflections even more. Once I get them finished and installed we'll see if it helps!

I made these drawer organizers for our 'junk drawers' a few weeks ago. They're made from some cherry scraps I had left over from another project, and are two-tiered - the top tier can slide around on the bottom tier, for even more storage. Working out great so far!

I redid our kitchen backsplash over the Christmas break, but forgot to post photos of it. The old one was white square tiles with pictures of grapes and flowers, or something - not really our style. So I replaced it with this natural stone mosaic. I love the way it came out (especially with all of the minor color variations in the individual tiles) but working on the 45 degree angle like that was torture - it meant every single sheet of tile needed to be cut on at least one edge. I'm sure glad it's done now. :)

In every garage workshop I've ever had (this one is the third), I've always just used extension cords to get power from the one lone outlet that is in most garages over to the various tools. It's kind a pain in the butt (and you wear out extension cords faster than you'd think), but I've never bothered to do anything about it. This time I decided to use some conduit and run a bunch of outlets along the walls to each of my tools, so everything is ready all the time. I still need to use an extension cord to get to the table saw (because it is in the middle of the room), but for everything else this has been working out great! It wasn't that hard or expensive - I should have done this years ago.

As part of the ongoing sprucing up we've been doing to the house, we painted all three bathrooms and replaced their towel rods, TP holders, mirrors, light fixtures, etc. This photo is off the downstairs bathroom, which I though came out especially nice. We painted in a rich grey color, swapped out the "hollywood" style light fixture for one a little more classy, and put up the mirror I built at the old house (from lumber I milled from a tree that fell on the property).