@lookwhatibuilt / lookwhatibuilt.tumblr.com
I have here what you might call a conundrum. The wood flooring ends at what was once the exterior wall and becomes a slab concrete foundation for a living room addition. The slab is higher than the wood. What do I do to turn this into an even floor? Build up over the wood flooring with plywood and then span new hardwood over the whole surface? If I do that how do I secure the hardwood flooring to the concrete? Adhesive? Not exactly sure the best course of action here...
Still working on house projects. Serious house projects. I stripped 2 layers of painted wallpaper from a big section of the house and am replacing and/or skim coating and repairing the walls. I've also been refurbishing the floors. Hidden under tile and glued down linoleum are the original red oak hardwood floors. Talk about a labor of love. The tile came up ok, but the linoleum glue had to be painstakingly removed so that I could sand without it gumming up the sandpaper. All that's left is to sand the edges, replace damaged boards, and rebuild the stairs. Oh, and stain and finish them. Did I mention my third child will be born on September 15th? Or that my 2yo starts preschool tomorrow? Never a dull moment in our house. PS: after much experimenting I recommend using Citristrip low VOC adhesive remover to get up old linoleum glue. You can't really just let it sit like the can says. It works much faster if you occasionally scrape away the top layer of softened adhesive so that the chemicals can keep working at the next layer. The semi-paste supposedly stays active while liquid, but I think that once it soaks up enough adhesive it's worth the effort to clean it off and put fresh stuff down. I used a refinishing pad and murphys oil soap to clean up.
Question for the smart DIYers and reclaimers out there: the wife has convinced me that it is smarter to scrap the old barn on our lot and build an new one to spec for my new photo studio/creative space rather than sink money into what's there now and falling apart. I'd like to salvage and reuse what I can from the barn before we tear it down, but it has spent many years as a home to raccoons and who knows what else. Here's the question: is it possible and/or worth the trouble to try to deodorize/disinfect the floorboards in the hayloft where the raccoons were living? They're nice worn old boards but I don't want to bring them into the house for use as say floorboards or stair treads if they're just going to smell when it gets humid, or worse make us sick. Any suggestions oh wise DIY gurus?
It dawned on me that I've neglected to share all the hard work I'm doing on our new house. Today my 2yo and I are tearing up tile. Some spots will just need to be refinish, other spots like the stairs we will have to rebuild.
I think I'm just about done setting up my new closet-turned-office. I need to tweak the lighting a bit, and maybe hang some small photos, but the basics are here.
I've been so busy fixing things in our house, and renovating that I've totally forgotten about my tumblr blog. Here's a sneak peak at one project. Tore out some nasty closets in a hall, ended up going all the way to the studs. Hung and textured new drywall, tore up the brick tile to discover original oak flooring, rewired the whole area for dimmable track lighting. All that's left is trim, paint, and refinishing the floors, and it's going to be our family art gallery.
I haven't posted much since we moved to the house, although that doesn't mean I haven't been working my butt off fixing the million little problems we've found. But rather than dwell on those issues, here's a nice surprise I discovered: beautiful 80+ year old oak flooring hiding under the ugly tile. Other than a small patch of linoleum that I have to scrape off, and some paint splatters it should be a breeze to refinish and will look amazing.
Slowly but surely, 1/3 of our new garage becomes my workshop...
There's a gross useless closet in our living room. I'm turning it into my computer/digital photo studio workspace. Let's call this my before pic.
The wife has commissioned built in bookshelves for her office in the new house. After some consideration we decided on this fairly basic set up. Since she has hardwood floors, we'll go with paint, which means we can use baltic birch ply and save a few bucks. The case won't go up all the way to the ceiling so that we can put some upward-facing lighting in the top. Each cabinet has three fixed shelves (dadoed), and I'll plan on using inset metal pilasters for the adjustable shelves.
This will be my first attempt at "finished" cabinetry, which is why I'm keeping it relatively basic. She has a desk with drawers and file cabinets, so she really only needs big sturdy shelves for all her medical textbooks and journals. I'm thinking this will do just fine.
PS: I love google sketchup.
Back at work (sort of). The barn has to wait, but fortunately our new house has a 1,000 sq. ft. 3-bay garage for me to set up shop in in the interim. First project is refinishing our patio table. The spar urethane finish failed after only two years, so time for a different solution. Any suggestions?
The back of the barn has a great small pasture area. We may need to get a goat of two some day.
De-purpling our new bedroom has been quite the process. Bookshelves and cabinets are officially unpurpled!
Basement crawl space treasure. Who's thirsty?
A few more glamour shots of our new basement as we pay through the nose to have it torn apart, scrubbed, disinfected and dried out. This is why you shouldn't panel over your basement walls if you haven't actually waterproofed them.
My son's first workbench build.
We moved into our new house yesterday. A freak rainstorm that led to a flooded basement wasn't exactly what I wanted to deal with tonight, but it did get me started tearing out all the wet moldy crap I planned on tearing out at some point. I'm always amazed at how nasty old basements get if people don't take care of them. Here's one particularly lovely architectural detail.
