Little Red House

Bathroom complete

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:23:00 +0000

We were almost done nearly a month ago and officially done a week ago. I really lost all will to finish once we got through tiling which is why these last bits have dragged out so long. Hanging the shower curtain involved a masonry drill bit which was obstacle enough to keep me from completing indefinitely. Luckily, Travis wasn't nearly as wiped out as I was so he managed to push through.

I've been meaning to take some pictures but I realized today why I've been foiled so many times. We installed CFLs in the bathroom as many people do nowadays. They take a little time to warm up to full brightness. But in addition, thanks to Title 24, we were required to install auto-off light switches in the bathroom. As I've been walking by, I switch the light on with an intention to come back in a few minutes once it's nice and bright to take pictures. The auto-off switch has been kindly turning them off after 5 minutes. Thus every time I've attempted it, the light has shut off by the time I come back and my memory has lost all traces of my intentions.

Today, I actually just stood around in the bathroom waiting for the lights to come up full to snap these. It's a small space so the pictures are decidedly fish-eyed.

And some panoramas as well.

Tile Day When Is This Going to End?!

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 01:38:00 +0000

In real time, it's only day 5. But I'm living in weird, dilated remodel time where I'm nearing the point of losing all hope. I always hit something of a wall during these projects where I just think we're never going to finish. Travis claims he's not afflicted with this syndrome. Lucky for me, we're passed the tiling gauntlet.

We grouted this weekend. We picked up some fancy new pre-mixed, no-seal grout. What they didn't tell us was that it seems to be have been mixed with some kind of epoxy or other VOC-containing compound that off-gassed as we applied it to the wall. Not having to mix it saved us a lot of time but some of my brain cells may have been sacrificed in the process. All in all, it made for another somewhat delirious episode of home remodeling.

The grout really starts to change the appearance. It smooths out any waves in the wall from our failure to get the tile perfectly flat relative to each other. It also hides all the cut edges on the tiles we had to trim. If it looks hazy on close inspection that's because it is. After I sponged all the sand off the surface of the tile, the murky water left a haze as it dried. In the moment, scrubbing with even the cleanest water isn't really effective. For one thing, the grout is still damp and can easily be dislodged with any scrubbing. Secondly, the cleanest water dirties quickly and hauling gallons of water back and forth from the garage is a big pain. I didn't participate in grouting our last bathroom but Travis swore that the tile was similarly hazy and we could simply wait until the next day to scrub it. So, against every instinct to panic, I left it alone.

The next day, Travis used a little bit of Mr. Clean Magic Scrubber and a lot of elbow grease and, sure enough, no more haze.

You can see the difference the scrubbing has made. The top has been scrubbed and the bottom is still carrying the haze.

Travis scrubbed the tub clean too. It's all so shiny!

Look at that beautiful red glass! So worth it!

The grout really sets off the copper tiles. Despite what a PITA putting in this floor was, I am so happy with the results and pretty proud that we had the guts to run with this idea.

If this were all we did this weekend, I would already be pretty happy. But in other news, we ordered our elfa closet organizers and got them installed.

We ordered so much elfa we got entire shipping boxes of some items -- like these "decor drawer frames".

The office floor was our staging area.

Here's the master plan I drew up when planning out the shelving and figuring out what items we needed and how many. I have one of these for when we did my closet too.

Travis being a (reluctant) elfa model.

Travis is making up for not taking enough photos of me again.

I love organization. This just looks downright sexy to me.

I am very jealous of this closet. Look at all the pretty baskets and shoe racks. I could use those shoe racks. (I am using those shoe racks. I moved some of my shoes in already.)

The first items we loaded into the closet. Since we don't have a hall closet, this one is pulling double duty.

And there's more! As if grouting and closets weren't enough, we also got our countertop installed. The fabricator stopped by last weekend to make the template and came by Saturday morning to install it and the sink.

Squeeee! Look how pretty!

I love the big chunks of red glass. The picture can't nearly capture how pretty the glass looks. I might have to break out the proper camera.

I love that you can see the glass throughout the slab. The little profiles make the edges look really interesting.

Tile Days 3 & 4

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 06:59:00 +0000

It's a tile two-fer!

We finally got the reorder of tile mid-last week. To make up for the lost time, Travis and I decided to start in on the tiling Friday night after work. We worked on the simpler of the two remaining walls which didn't have any valves or obstacles to cut around. So after dinner last night, we got to it. Fueled by my Spotify playlists, it was 2 am before we finally got cleaned up enough for bed.

This morning, after we'd slept off some of last night and had our Peet's, we started in on the final wall. We have 3 shutoffs, 3 supply pipes, and a thermostatic valve to work around. The thermostatic valve was one of the easier items to work around since it at least had straight edges. The only tricky part was supporting the narrow tile edge above the valve box so it didn't sag as more tile was placed on top. I jerry-rigged a tower of tile spacers to do this job and we also took a break after tiling around the box to let the thinset set up.

The real fun came when we were tiling around the hand shower pipe and shutoff. The way the pattern worked out, these had to be cut out of the center of the tile instead of just being notched out of one edge. The escutcheons we have wouldn't be big enough to cover the lost tile if we took the cutout all the way to any edge.

Travis cooked up a strategy for cutting out a hole in the center of the tile. He used a masonry drill bit to put small holes around the perimeter of the cutout. This is an error prone strategy. Sometimes the tile just shatters from the repeated drilling. Sometimes, as in the following piece, he didn't keep enough pressure on the tip and it got away from him, scratching up the surface and effectively ruining the piece. Eventually, after about 7 tries, we got the 3 pieces of tile we needed with cutouts.

And finally, after a 10 hour day, our last wall has tile on it. We have NO more tile to install. Only grout, paint, baseboards, door trims ... you get the idea.

I think I can now definitively say that the Australian glass tile is so worth it!

"Are you still alive in there?"

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 03:04:00 +0000

Tile wasn't the only thing that we've been working on. In our "down time", we slipped in more work on the closet floors and I kept painting everything in sight. During the week, I took some time out to wood putty over the nail holes and the gaps in between the boards. Travis had to sand between each coat of wood putty and we did 3 total in the end. The floors looked like they had caught a bad case of measles after each coat of putty.

Once we were done with sanding, Travis carefully shop-vac-ed the floors and used a rag dipped in mineral spirits to clean the boards in preparation for the polyurethane. I slipped in to paint the inside-face of the pocket door. How you might ask? By trapping myself in the closet with a stepladder and my painting supplies of course. This is what prompted Travis to drop by every 30 minutes and ask if I was still alive. He was worried between the fumes from the mineral spirits and the paint, I might pass out. At least this time I had working lights and the option of cracking a window. I am so sick of painting doors already. I don't know what's worse -- the door thresholds or the doors themselves. At least I'm done with all the thresholds already and now have only 2 doors remaining.

Once I'd gotten a few coats of paint on the door, I started in on the polyurethane. You can see the sheen of the boards change as it's applied. The grain really stands out more. We didn't stain any of the boards in the rest of the house when we last refinished since we really liked the color of the raw wood. (For reference, these floor boards are red oak.) Applying polyurethane is actually very soothing and straightforward, not at all like painting doors. Now there's just 2 more coats of this gloss finish, a buffing round, and 1 coat of semi-gloss to finish off the floors.s

Tile Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 08:38:00 +0000

We got lucky and got in touch with the tile store this morning so have 2 more boxes of the wall tile on order. Travis wanted us to focus on the floor for fear of color variation in the next batch of wall tile. I think it will be negligible given it is glazed ceramic tile which generally has really low variation between batches. The color formulas are pretty stable given it's mass produced. Even Daltile's website says so. Other than color variation issue, we didn't have enough tile on hand to finish even one of the remaining walls, so I agreed to go with the floor instead.

We started by doing something we had skipped on the wall: plotting out the tiles. This wasn't so necessary on the wall since a rough calculation guaranteed we wouldn't end up with thin slivers of tile at one end of the row. Thus, we could take the easy option of just lining up full tiles in one corner and working towards the other, cutting the last tiles as needed.

On the floor, it's a whole other story. The floor had plenty of obstacles to work around: the vanity, the door threshold, and the toilet flange. In addition, we wouldn't be able to cut the little copper accent tiles. They were just ¾ x ¾ inch. Even if our tile saw could cut the copper sheeting cleanly, which I doubt, there just wasn't enough to hold onto to feed it through the saw. So we had to choose a positioning of the pieces to allow us to only use whole accent tiles, at least in the visible spots. So we busted out the speed square, tape measure, pencil, and ruler and started drafting some rough placements on the floor.

And we changed our mind when we realized that we were running too close to the tub with our initial placements.

We made a crucial, and in hindsight utterly enlightened, decision to dry fit the entire floor. As it turned out, we needed cuts everywhere. We only ended up with only 10 pieces of whole field tile. Everything else had to be cut. This part took a good 5 hours. See what I mean about our speed with the wall yesterday being completely due to the simpler pattern. I really do swear I won't do this windmill pattern again. Well, at least I won't attempt to do it myself again.

I also reaffirmed how I really have forgotten all my maths, especially the geometry bits. (I never did like geometry much.) I mis-measured about half the cuts and constantly got confused about how I was to even measure, not to mention the countless times I placed the little accent tile in the wrong corner. Of course Travis would only notice after I'd already measured a piece of tile and had him cut it. Luckily, we completely over-ordered on the floor tile so we could easily cover my mistakes. I'm sure measuring tile cuts sounds really simple and tile contractors and carpenters do this all the time. But I swear it's really hard when you're sitting there trying to attempt it. I've noticed this every time I've done flooring or any kind. Cutting around a door threshold is just not straightforward. The pros have an arsenal of shortcuts that have been passed by exampled. We've reverse-engineered some of them in the past but don't use these skills often enough to remember them between remodels. And on top of everything else, we both wanted to do this pattern on a diagonal so anything we did remember would require about half an hour of reasoning and discussion to decide whether they even held over to diagonal cuts.

About 8 pm, we finally had everything dry fit. I was possibly delirious with hunger because I had been making ever more egregious measuring errors and only found them to be incredibly funny. Travis's cold was starting to take over. (Have I mentioned he's been sick all weekend and I've been a complete slave driver project manager?) But I figured we were so close now we could just get this behind us tonight. So I pushed for us to grab a quick dinner and come back and set everything.

We had tested out the accent tile against the field tile and noticed the accent tile is only about half as thick. So we needed to do something to boost the height. After unsuccessfully trying to back-butter an accent piece (applying extra thinset to the back of a piece of tile), Travis suggested treating the thinset like frosting and pastry bagging it into place. This was nothing short of brilliant. This allowed me to fill the notch lines from the troweled thinset on the floor and then build up the height as needed. It also gave me the fine-grained control to do all of this neatly. Then I could just drop the accent tile into its spot and nudge it even with the pattern.

We wrapped up about 10:30 pm which is actually pretty speedy. I'm pretty happy with it so far. Let's hope the grout will go in nicely and clean up some of the larger gaps around the edges so we can hide the rest with baseboard.

Here's a closer shot of the pattern. Those little dots are our copper accent tiles. The inspiration for this pattern actually came from a hotel we stayed in earlier this year in Tahoe. The bathroom was basically this same pattern. Neither of us had seen such differently sized tiles used together and we were both taken with it. It is impressive that such a small addition spices up a boring beige so much. That was when we changed our minds from doing a traditional straight layout to this little monster.

Tile Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:52:00 +0000

We managed to get going on the tile about midday Saturday and honestly made pretty good progress in around 6 hours of work. I must credit most of that to having picked a much easier pattern to execute for the shower walls. Almost none of our speed can be attributed to our experience as we both found we had to rummage through the musty recesses of our brains to remember how to do this tile business.

We started off by taping the edges of the tub with blue tape and butcher paper and laying the canvas drop cloth along the bottom. We were sure to make a big mess with the thin-set as always I don't think we'll ever acquire the skill to not. When mixed up, thin-set has a consistency close to that of crystallized honey. It's sticky and gooey and highly viscous -- all in all, very difficult to work cleanly with.

Taking a break to check our progress and make sure we were keeping our rows straight and lining up the grout lines properly.

Just finished the glass tile rows. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel for the night.

Our little stalker dog Pixie peeping on what we're doing from the hallway. She may also have been hungry at this point and was trying to get our attention so we would feed her.

We managed to finish this one wall over the tub today so you get an idea of the look I'm going for. We did a plain subway pattern with the "Elemental Tan" tile and then accented it with the priced-by-the-piece-not-the-square-foot, hand-made in Australia, "Red Planet" tile from Maniscalco. I realized that we also got the glass accents in the master bath from that same company. I must be having a subconscious love affair with their lines of glass tile. By the way, if you look closely, this is what 750 tile spacers looks like. It doesn't go nearly as far as you think it will.

And here's a close up of our fancy red tile. Now I think this was totally worth it. I'm not sure Travis feels as strongly yet but there's no turning back at this point. At least he doesn't hate it.

The bad news however is that my worst fears were confirmed -- I can no longer do maths and miscalculated the amount of wall tile we need. So let's hope the tile store is open today so we can go order 2 more boxes. I'm just praying we have enough to make an effort towards the wall with all the knobs and valves today. Otherwise, we'll just have to tackle the floor where I've once again outdone myself and chose a windmill pattern on the diagonal no less. Wish us luck.

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Hope everyone is having a safe and happy holiday season.

Lots of love from Travis, Shan, Remi, and Pixie.

Our fireplace is serving as the surrogate tree this year due to this. And of course I picked up stockings for the puppies and hung them with care.

Floors for Christmas and other odds and ends

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 05:30:00 +0000

We took the opportunity while we had the wood putty out to fix up this window stool in the office. (No it's not a window sill. The correct terminology is really window stool. Check out this handy diagram.) The back of the futon had some large metal brackets right at window stool height. Pixie would take a running leap from the middle of the office onto the futon daily, jamming the brackets up against the stool and slowly knocking chunks out of them. So we filled up the chunks with putty and sanded them back into shape. I taped up with from Frog Tape and repainted the whole thing with a few coats of pure white satin-finish paint.

We also got rid of the futon to solve this problem once and for all. I think it's high time we got a proper couch into this office which means furniture shopping is now on our To Do list.

The closet paint is all done as well. I finished painting the window stool in there. I managed to squeeze in a few coats on the various door frames too.

The real bulk of our work this weekend however revolved around the flooring for the closet. We did a dry run Saturday after Travis wrapped up sanding the edges. We found that we were a bit short of being able to fill the space. So Travis ran out to the lumber yard to pick up some fresh red oak boards.

Sunday morning, we moved all the boards back out of the closet into the office and Travis sorted them by size to make it easier for me to pull pieces.

We laid out the felt paper as waterproofing. And now, we were ready for me to attempt a life-size, free form jigsaw puzzle of floor boards. This part is always challenging. You need to mix the old and new boards, the full width runs and the multi-board runs. We had an overwhelming number of full width boards but it would also look suspicious to never have multi-board runs next to each other. The trick is to somehow deliberately give the effect of a random pattern.

All the pieces are laid out. I made Travis give it a once over to see if he could spot any annoying patterns I needed to break up.

About 4 hours later and a run out for a box of nails, the boards were nailed snugly in place and all the nails were set (sunk below the surface of the boards). I have a serious appreciation for knee pads and the original house builders. I can't imagine how many man hours it must have taken to set a whole house worth of flooring nails. It's rather exhausting and slow work and my hands were pretty cramped by the time we were done.

Of course even though our boards were nailed, we were nowhere near done. The old boards were slightly thinner than the new boards having been refinished once already. It was time to rent a floor sander. The first one we rented was busted somehow and kept tripping the breaker and even then would not spin up to speed. So we actually had to brave the rain twice to haul sanders back and forth to Home Depot. Travis put on his sanding gear. We closed up the room as best we could to contain the dust. And I got the hell out of the way.

After making his way through a progression of 24-, 36-, 40-, 80-, and 120-grit sandpapers, the floors were finally one smooth surface. Then came the daunting task of cleaning. Even though Travis had the shop vac hooked up to the sander the whole time and we had covered our furniture in heavy canvas dust cloths, there was a non-significant amount of dust everywhere. It was another half a day before the room was cleaned up. You can see the million holes left from past nail holes and new sunken nails. We still need to wood putty the holes and sand, then rinse and repeat that process a few times until we have a smooth floor. Finally we'll put on about 4 coats of polyurethane to give it a nice shiny finish. We've popped a few things in here for now though so we can have a nice Christmas meal.

We seem to be repeating this pattern but it wasn't until late Sunday night that we realized we might as well install the lights into the cans in the closet. Why this didn't occur to us a week ago when we were dealing with the light bar in the bathroom I don't know. So we ran out to grab 3 LED lights and boy is it bright in the closet now. We could work at all hours of the night now. We put our CPOS back to good use as a current detector on the switch wires to figure out which breaker would shut off the light circuit. I should write that company a letter about cross-marketing their product for year-round use.

Oh time, you sneaky devil

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:15:00 +0000

I've had several people ask me this week: how do you find the time to tackle these projects? Well, we simply do less of something else. Sleep is often sacrificed. For example, after the marathon paint session we had last weekend, we were still short of done in the bathroom. We needed to be done as the contractor was waiting on us to set the vanity. So two nights this past week, after we'd cooked and eaten dinner, we broke out the painting supplies to finish up the wall color. (It looked like chocolate milk as it was going on, by the way, which just made me want dessert.)

This weekend, we additionally had to work our schedule around two company holiday parties we were committed to. This meant the dogs needed to get in a solid romp in the outdoors so they'd be mellow enough for us to be gone. So I don't feel like I've sat down since I left work on Friday.

Somehow though, we managed to cross a few things off the list. Our spring bulbs got planted in the front planter and some much needed weeding in our mow strip by the sidewalk got taken care of. Travis worked through a good chunk of the floor boards, sanding off the residual lacquer from the edges. We're hoping this helps them sit snugger when we install. We get some creaking in the master bedroom closet which was also floored with reclaimed boards. My very amateur suspicion is that it comes from this.

We also installed the light bar, vent fan, and some switches. Up until now, we had been tightening and loosening a light bulb for light. (Yay hot light bulbs!) The electrician had hard wired the hot and neutral in the switch box so the light bulb socket was always on.

We put in a motion sensing switch for the bathroom fan. I like to leave vent fans running for some time after a shower but we have left ours on for full days by accident. Particularly, this model we installed is so quiet, I have a hard time hearing it standing just outside the door threshold.

We also put in our medicine cabinet seeing as this will be harder to reach once the vanity is in. We went on a futile search for instructions on how to install the vanity. This was really predicated by not finding pre-drilled installation screw holes. Failing in our search, we agreed that it must be as simple as dropping in a few screws to tack it in place. Since we mounted this in the wall, we actually placed it in its slot and the fit was so beautiful it didn't budge. We figured 3 screws into the surrounding 2x4's on each side should certainly be plenty to ensure it doesn't move.

Travis drilled and countersunk 3 holes in each side. As he started to screw in the first screw with his impact driver, the light went out. Now this is particularly disconcerting if you've just managed to get the light bar up and working. The first thought that crossed both of our minds was of course: did we just screw into some Romex? But that couldn't possibly be. We saw the framing and there were no wires running over here. Besides, it should have been far more disastrous than a simple light bulb shutting off. I would have expected sparks. As it turned out, all the vibration an impact driver makes had finally shaken the filament off of the old incandescent So we grabbed a spare CFL we had laying around and we were back in business. Disaster averted. And we'd earned another story for our adventures in home remodel tome.

The paint fumes may be getting to my head

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 07:02:00 +0000

Recently, Travis was admiring some photos I'd taken on a vacation and I mentioned in passing that he never picks up the camera to take any. So what does he do? He goes and takes this shot.

Thanks honey. Very flattering.

So from about 8:30 this morning to about 8:30 tonight, we've been busy painting. There were two breaks. One to take the dogs to go do something so they would stop whining at us about how neglected they are and so we could eat lunch. Another simply to buy more paint.

That Folgers jug has been my cut-in paint bucket since day one at this house. It's very handy with its handle, wide mouth, and light weight.

So what does a 12-hour day painting get us? Well we finished priming the bathroom and closet as well as the new walls installed in the hallway and office. We also got one coat of color on the bathroom ceiling, office ceiling, hallway walls, and the entirety of the closet. Up for tomorrow is the second coat of color. Then we'll have to wait 24 hours for the paint to set a bit before I can put in tape on the ceilings so we can commence the bathroom walls and office walls.

You can still see the wet paint in the hallway but it's already starting to set and blend back in. It always amazes me how some paint and some trim can cover up all evidence of a remodel.

We've busted out our Frog Tape again (see window). I really do swear by that stuff. I've gotten so many compliments about the clean paint lines thanks to this very magical tape. And after painting the whole house over, I think we're finally starting to get the hang of this thing and getting faster at it.

Well I finally found a use for all that butcher paper

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 19:12:00 +0000

Admittedly this post is only related to our house by the barest of threads.

We had purchased a roll of butcher paper many moons ago before we moved in when we were painting basically the entire house. I used it to help block off things like the fireplace and and the floor from wayward paint drips. The rolls really only come in sizes large and extra large. So I had plenty left over, a fact that had long fallen into the sieves of my mind and was basically forgotten.

More recently, in the age of Pinterest, I learned that you can make your own lottery scratch off paint. You know -- the silvery-gray paint that you scratch off to reveal whether you're a winner or, far more often, a loser and a dupe for participating in something as irrational as a lottery. So this knowledge knocked around in my head for a while. Then in a rare moment of inspiration, I had an epiphany about how I would use it. I was going to use scratch off paint in real life.

Christmas Presents!

To add just a little bit of whimsy to the presents we send out this year, I can write the recipient on the wrapping paper and cover it in scratch off paint. So no one will know which box is meant for whom until Christmas morning when everyone gets to scratch off the paint and find out. It's like a double-whammy surprise. And to add to the whimsy, I could do plain brown butcher paper wrapping for that old-timey, kitschy feeling. And since I'm already down this road, why not throw in tying up the gifts with twine.

Which is how I found myself sitting on the living room floor for the last two nights, from after dinner until bedtime, surrounded by this:

I had the good sense to go back and read the instructions that came along with the scratch-off-paint pin and found that they have to be made in advance as stickers. If applied directly to the paper, the paint will soak in and bleed the ink. Instead, you have to paint it on top of clear packaging tape which has been stuck to parchment or wax paper. And it takes several coats to get an opaque enough final product. Once the paint is dry, you can cut it to size and it peels right off (because you did use parchment or wax paper and not just paper paper right?) So I had the good sense to do a trial run last weekend and made a nice long strip of scratch-off-paint stickers in advance.

Some examples of the final product. The little post it notes are so I can keep track of who's who's until I get them all in the mail to one of the three houses we need to ship to.

I did have a moment when I was crawling over butcher paper scraps on the floor, terrifying Remi (the ripping sound of packaging tape does not sit well with that dog), and tangling myself in twine that I asked myself, "What am I doing?" But I think the final product looks really cute. And I have only myself to blame for letting a simple idea snowball the way I do. But I'm pretty sure I've satisfied my craftiness craving for about 2 months.

Decisions, decisions

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:32:00 +0000

Some years back at some green building fair at work, I had come upon Vetrazzo countertops. (Yes we have green building fairs at work for no better reason than to encourage everyone to consider being green. This is California and I work for that kind of company. And I like it.) These are concrete countertops that are embedded with recycled glass. The glass could have been anything from old drink bottles to mirrors in a past life. It's shattered down to small pieces and mixed into the concrete which is then poured and polished. Countertops made this way are not cheap and runs about the same price range as granite. They have a very distintive look and feel though.

For the bathroom, I had my heart set on getting one of these countertops put it. I had even originally considered having them mold the sink straight into the countertop as one piece. I was talked out of this both by the rather extravagant price and some reports of cracking after use. It being one piece, there's really no way to fix except to replace the entire thing at that point.

Going along with our red/brown theme, I decided I wanted a white base in the countertop with red glass scattered throughout. Vetrazzo only made an countertop with amber glass chips (think brown beer bottles). So I was off to research online.

I found a company, Glass Recycled, based out of Irving, Texas (back to our roots) which had a much wider selection of colors. They use an epoxy resin instead of concrete as the base. This allows for actual flexibility in customizing the matrix color that concrete doesn't offer. And instead of offering just a handful of prescribed color formulas, they basically allow you to pick a custom mix from their available selection of epoxies and glass.

One of Glass Recycled's off-the-shelf colors actually seemed to fit the bill (and was even named SW-1 just for me). So we put in an order for a sample which arrived last night.

After looking at this piece in person and hemming and hawing, we decided the base resin was too off white and we'd prefer the true white. In addition, there are pieces of mirrored glass that we don't want and we'd like to boost up the amount of red glass just a little more.

The other item we had to decided on last night was a new man door. This is the door from the backyard straight into the garage. Let's just say that door has seen better days. Our contractor left a brochure of doors for us to choose from.

There were 30 pages of door options in here. We somehow only agreed on a single door that we might both like. Otherwise, we'd have to go off-script and see if a door which isn't shown in the size we need in this catalog would be available at the size we need.

I did have a meta-moment last night while we were doing this when I realized that we somehow always manage to end up off-script. There were only about several hundred options for countertops and doors we were presented with. Yet we were unhappy with just about all of them. Perhaps it's because we have such a strong image in our minds of the look we want. Perhaps we've just been spoiled into being far too picky.

Rainy days and drywall don't mix.

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 04:22:00 +0000

The drywall went up earlier this week but mudding has been extra slow. The cool temperatures plus the high humidity and outright rain has made it slow going. Drywall mud needs to dry completely before it can be sanded. We've had fans going nearly 24/7 for a few days and have kept the heater turned up. On Friday, everything was finally dry enough for some sanding. The bathroom door got hung and the bathroom and hallway were textured which should wrap up work on the walls there as far as the contractors are concerned.

The office and closet were sanded smooth. The office was once wallpapered and was since painted over so we did smooth walls here to match. The drywall guy also matched a very lightly textured ceiling in the closet to the rest of the office ceilings. I'm not clear on whether or not he intends to work on it more. It looks good to me at this point.

We did some minor odd jobs. I took on hammering nails out of the salvaged floor boards so we can reinstall them into the new closet. Travis worked on pulling up nails and staples left in the closet floor so we get a proper foundation to work off of.

Like the pink gloves?

I'm a pro at this these days. It's incredibly cathartic. Though possibly only because my day job is so vastly different. The trick as always is to keep the nails you want to hammer out close to the edge of the bucket to cut down on vibrations. Then you just swing hard. I'm always impressed by the quality of these boards -- not a single hammer mark left on them. Travis was proud that I actually put on the safety goggles he left out for me.

Of course, Pixie was on hand to supervise. I may have scared her a little with some of my banging.

It's a rare day that we take off the drop cloths in the office. But I decided with the recent drywall sanding, I couldn't stand the mess and dust any longer so we engaged in a deep clean knowing that the contractors may just void it all come Monday.

The Great Wall(s)

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 06:25:00 +0000

The whole house smells like drywall mud right now. Not entirely unpleasant but it keeps hitting me. The drywaller has a fan going and we're leaving it running all night to help dry out this first skim layer so it'll be ready for sanding and another coat hopefully tomorrow. This part is always the roughest on me -- sanding drywall kicks up the worst dust.

Shot from the hallway into the bathroom. This hallway way has basically been entirely replaced now thanks to the current and previous bathroom remodels.

HardieBacker walls around the tub. Cement board has to be used in high moisture areas as a backer to tile.

All that plumbing on the shower wall is now hidden away.

My cubby where we'll install the medicine cabinet.

Office wall. We're due for some serious painting in here. We bought ourselves some extra wall space in this room thanks to the new pocket door to the closet instead of the pair of sliding panels.

Nice roomy closet. I considered claiming it but probably won't as I'm too lazy to walk over here every morning.

Rough-in inspection: check!

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:31:00 +0000

The tub is in! The tub is in! Isn't it pretty!

Shower pipes are all done. We did get him to swap out for the higher flow valve. But apparently the actual tub spout is ½" sized so, oh well. :) The hand shower supply is all done now as well.

We'd also asked our contractor to replace the door between our kitchen on the garage. This is now a proper fire door that's actually rated for being installed to the garage. Unfortunately it's beige. Just one more thing to put on my "To Paint" list.

Look at the beautiful threshold. We used to simply have a gap between the door and the floor. There wasn't even a door sweep attached. Less cold air leaking out of the house!

All the galvanized riser pipes. Good riddance!

Woe is my tub

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 02:04:00 +0000

I had actually hemmed and hawed for a while about whether or not to get rid of the salmon colored tub. The cons against it obviously involved it being salmon colored. The list also included that this large, very heavy tub had to be turned and moved to its new location -- no easy feat considering how tight of a space we are working with. But the tub had a list of pros to it as well. It was a sturdy cast iron tub having withstood nearly 60 years. It showed some signs of wear but was more than salvageable. There is in fact a process to have a tub refinished to overcome its salmon-ness. This Old House has an excellent article about refinishing tubs and we actually watched an episode showing the highlights. In short, they etch off the existing finish using acids and then spray on a new coating in place. The new coating won't last nearly as long as the original but it still comes in at a not too shabby 15 years give or take. There is even an option of having the tub sent off to be re-enameled giving you a finish that rivals the original at the additional cost and frustration of course of shipping the damn thing back and forth. However, refinishing alone costs more than most new tubs. Which is why, in the end, I decided to chunk that monstrosity and simply buy a new one.

I knew though that I didn't want a flimsy acrylic model and didn't even really want a fiberglass one. What I really wanted was enameled steel or even cast iron again. Something about a tub flexing underfoot just gives me the heebie-jeebies. (I hold this opinion firmly despite knowing that I may never take a shower in this tub -- it will be used primarily for bathing our dogs first and for visiting guests second. I also thumb my nose at those one-day bathroom remodels where they just install a new plastic surround. But then I like being on my high horse so make of it what you will.) Besides, when it comes to my house, I have to justify living through the mess that is remodeling with something really worth it at the end.

With all this in mind, I picked out this American Standard Cambridge model with pretty decent reviews. It was budget-reasonable, porcelain finish, cast iron-ish (supposedly some proprietary Americast material), and had an aesthetically pleasing shape. I had it on order and it's on a truck on its way here as I write when the contractor pointed out that this tub is 2 inches too wide. Yes 2 inches. We could either go down from our 36-inch vanity to a 30-inch vanity (also already on order and on its way to us) or we could swap out the tub from the 32-inch wide model down to a 30-inch model. Well this was a no brainer to me. Part of the reason being it was in fact cheaper to swap out the tub and the other being I will use the vanity far more than the tub.

So, there was some serious mid-week scrambling. I managed to turn up this Kohler Villager model that fit all my previous requirements and the new 30-inch width (basically) and had some interesting lines visually, and was available for pickup immediately from a local store. It was the last one in stock in fact. Now, the only reason I hadn't settled for a 30-inch before was that this was the only model I'd turned up was this American Standard Princeton which looks like shiny, mass-manufactured, unimaginative banality. I somehow just couldn't stomach it. Travis thought I was nuts. And I say that this model basically fits the 30-inch requirement because if we were to get technical, the spec sheet lists the Villager as 30 ¼". And if some city inspector is going to give me grief over that last quarter of an inch, I think I will just throw the worst temper tantrum ever in his (or her) face.

Oh and here's a quick visual update on the rest of this week's progress. It's basically around plumbing right now which always feels really slow. Partly because a lot of the work happens under or above the house and isn't directly visible and partly because it's inherently slower, more intricate work.

We did get our pocket door installed. I guess I will be locking myself in the closet to paint yet another pocket door on its tracks. I have become exceedingly efficient at this.

The new vents are installed for the sink and toilet. You can see the toilet flange there in the bottom right and the new hot/cold pipes as well as the toilet supply. The old tub risers are still there. Those are the last bits of galvanized water pipes in our house so definitely worth celebrating being rid of those after this is all done.

The maze of water pipes feeding into our new shower system.

Lesson #13 in Home Remodeling: Always check your contractor's work

This doesn't mean I don't trust my contractor. Contractors have not been present for every planning and design meeting that you've been at. They don't have access to every vision you have for this bathroom. If you don't tell them one way or another, they may just make a reasonable assumption. Hell, even when Travis and I plan out a remodel together, every step of the way, we've crossed wires at execution. (Case in point: our exterior soffits got painted red instead of white which turned out to look just fine but certainly caught me by surprise.) In addition, contractors are human. Humans make mistakes. That's no fault against them.

So, given that there are a lot of details in a home remodel project, even when it's really just one bathroom, you really have to keep a close eye on what's going on. Ask questions and clarify if you get the faintest inkling something is unclear. In that last photo, you may notice a spare valve sitting on the box in the center of the photo. We thought we had been quite clear that we had ordered 3 valves: two ½" valves (which are installed in the above picture) and one ¾" valve. The ¾" valve was intended for the tub spout to fill the tub faster while ½" valves were intended for the shower and hand shower which wouldn't be able to do anything with a higher volume of water anyway. That ¾" valve is obviously not installed where the tub spout would go. There will be a discussion about this on Monday with the contractor. Who knows. Maybe that's why these pipes are still unfinished. Maybe he quit for the weekend when he realized his mistake or was confused by the larger valve he'd just opened up and figured he'd get to figuring things out come Monday.

Go!

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 05:54:00 +0000

I'm always impressed by how fast the framing stage goes. In one day, they're ripped out the ugly salmon everything. How they got that tub out, I'll never know. We've always assumed they would cut it into pieces to haul out considering it was cast iron and insurmountably heavy.

View from the office.

This will be the closet. You can see the remnants of our floor boards and the telltale signs it used to be a bathroom: toilet paper roll still on the wall. Not to mention that pipe of course. A new pocket door will be going in here.

What will become the new bathroom. At the far back you see the end of my closet. We've finally revealed the 6 inches of dead space at the end of my closet we buried into the house -- nay -- meticulously saved into the house -- back when we launched into our first remodel. Yes this bathroom has been a long time coming.

When I came home, the door to the office (far right of the photo) was actually closed. It looked rather amusing.

With the first day down, we move onto homeowner-homework. We're busting our shower fixtures out of the box for the first time actually. And I must say, we are both very pleased. All the items have a nice heft-in-hand to them. At first blush at least, they feel like sturdy, solidly made bath fixtures. I for one am so glad we didn't settle for the dinky plastic Delta models.

Our homework involves diagramming the placement of our various handles and spouts and valves. We chose to have a shower head, hand shower, and a tub spout. All of this has to be looped through a thermostatic control -- the master valve that mixes the hot and cold water. On top of this, each spout needs to have its own shutoff valve. So we were madly play acting with some sample pieces and a tape measure to find our preferred heights, clearances, and placements.

Sample plumbing diagram that's the closest to what we chose. Instead of body sprays, we just have a traditional tub spout but you get the idea. It's going to get pretty complicated behind the wall.

And just for kicks, we opened up the handshower wand we ordered.

Isn't it awesome?!

Ready...Set...

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 04:27:00 +0000

The contractor is booked to start tomorrow. The weekend before last, we got the closet and the bathroom (which I'd totally forgotten about) all packed away. We're living with a make-shift closet for Travis out of wardrobe boxes in the living room and some bare necessities out of the bathroom packed into our bedroom. The rest has been relegated to the garage.

Empty office closet.

Empty bathroom cabinets. We took off the doors for their hinges and handles which we're saving. Handles are likely to go back on the new cabinets. Hinges are for the cabinets in the garage. I am SO ready to be done with salmon-colored anything.

Travis's makeshift closet. Yes, my shoes invaded his closet a long time ago.

Myriad of boxes of our junk.

"No Mama! Don't pack me away!"

What a beautiful day for pumpkin carving!

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:51:00 +0000

I can't really remember how Halloween pumpkin carving became a thing at our house. But at this point, it's just accepted that part of our Halloween decorations will be a freshly carved pumpkin. I'm not particularly obsessive about it. I bought one of those cheap kits some years back with a book of patterns and some cute tools meant for 10-year-olds and have been slowly moving through them one by one.

But then this year I saw this on Pinterest:

To which I exclaimed 1) How brilliantly meta! 2) I could totally do this! (Famous last words!)

To start off yesterday morning, I'd accidentally dressed for Halloween. It began with me discovering that that tunic plus shorts makes me look like I don't have pants on and then some rummaging in the closet for substitutions. I don't believe in leggings/tights as pants so that option was out. So were a few others I tried on which made me look weeble-wobble-esque. I finally gave up and pulled on a basic black skirt out because well, when all else fails, go with black. But then unsure of the results, I asked Travis to give his comments. At which point he noted that I was in Halloween colors and that maybe I should just try throwing on white belt. The fortuitousness of my decisions convinced me to stay with the outfit.

The California weather pulled itself out of its doldrums from early in the week and turned out a mid-70's day with the sun shining bright in the sky. Travis and Remi were out of the house on their first bird hunting lesson. So with all systems go, I settled in to make this sucker happen.

(If you'd like to peruse the photo album on your own, it's available here.)

We are a go on the bathroom

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 16:00:00 +0000

After the dead end I hit trying to look up faucets, we decided to head into Water Concepts to look around in person. A very nice salesman approached us to go through the pleasantries of asking if we were after something today. So Travis started to explain our shower dilemma. Long story short, we walked out of there within 30 minutes with all of our problems solved. (Why didn't I just go here to begin with? I don't know.) The salesman asked insightful questions, jotted down notes, and promised to email us a quote in a few days. And sure enough, 3 days later, we had a quote listing out everything we needed for our bathroom. We visited today to nail down final details and drop a healthy chunk of change to order all the fixtures we need: shower, hand shower, shutoffs, valves, wall mounts, faucet, towel bar, robe hooks...everything. Done! We're going with the San Clemente line from California Faucets in oil-rubbed-bronze with white porcelain index caps on the handles. My OCD is overjoyed that everything is coming out of one manufacturer and one line so things will match.

We ended up doing a configuration with individual shutoffs for everything so I'm at a loss for what would look good. So in addition to helping sorting out all the hardware we need to buy, the salesman is helping us brainstorm how to place our knobs and bells and whistles up on the shower wall. Thank goodness.

Water Concepts actually did our shower door some years back and is an arm of Dale's Hardware, the local Ace affiliate. We've always been very pleased with the helpful and knowledgeable staff at Dale's. The Home Depot guys can be a little surly and the Lowe's guys often don't know what they're doing (see: Nail sets and sets of nails). Dale's is by far our favorite hardware store though sometimes a little more expensive. So in the future, I will remember to just go directly to them and spare myself days of wasted internet searching. Sorry Google but you just can't cut it in this service department.

Now please excuse me while I have a little panic attack about tearing into our house again since shit just got real. (In a good way.)

For stress relief, call us

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 19:49:00 +0000

We would like to open up the opportunity for anyone needing to work off some angst to come prune our oleanders. I prefer to use my gloved-hands only and no gardening tools as I find it immensely satisfying and therapeutic to rip oleander branches off the tree (bush?). No prior experience required. These always manage to grow back. Today, we took this (plus what little we could stuff into the green compost can)

off of this (after-shot only).

We sometimes can also offer mid-summer sessions. Call for details.

The woes of finding the perfect showerhead

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 16:00:00 +0000

It's been quiet here for a while because we've been so busy enjoying our house for a change. This means we've lost a little bit of the drive to get.things.done. Just a little bit. But we're gearing up again to do some work: the hall bath which is last on my list of "inside the house" projects. We've chatted with the contractor we used for the kitchen and things look good there. Bonus: we're planning on getting our hands dirty again with the finish work.

Before I let anyone take a sledgehammer to a wall though, I need to line my ducks up and this means sourcing all the finish items we're going to install. Some of this directly affects the rough-in our contractor needs to do for us. Think installing a tub, placing the electrical box for the light bar, or hooking up the shower valve to the plumbing inside the wall. Also, I want get my hall bath back in working order as soon as possible so this means we need to have our materials mostly on hand by the time the contractors get done.

For this bathroom, I knew when we bought the house that I would be doing a red/brown/beige color scheme. (Yes I really do plan that far ahead.) And to go along with that, we're planning for an oil rubbed bronze fixture scheme. Our kitchen ran with black fixtures and a sunshine yellow/orange color scheme; our bathroom went with brushed nickel fixtures and a blue/green color scheme. This bathroom will receive a distinctive theme too.

We also knew that we would put a tub into this hall bath. Though I'm not a fan of tubs for myself, we knew that a lot of families liked them for bathing small children and we need them for bathing the two dogs, especially when they get looking like this on a semi-regular basis:

And since we would be washing critters in our tub and not ourselves, we knew we needed a hand shower to bring the water down to their height.

So here's our entire list of requirements:

oil-rubbed bronze finish
standard shower kit of tub spout/controls/shower head in a hand shower style
matching faucet

This seems trivial so it wasn't until recently that I even started to search for it. But as the title of this post suggest, it is turning out to be a battle. Here's the collection of items I've perused so far and summarily rejected:

All Delta In2ition models which I was initially really excited about when I first heard of it. It has the hand shower nested into a conventional shower head so you can turn on one, the other, or both and either leave the hand shower in for a full pattern or take it down to use separately. It is a very compact design BUT it is made entirely of plastic. I didn't believe it when I read the first review mentioning this and I went down to the local Home Depot to physically manhandle one of these. It is plastic. Through and through. Why?!
Kohler has all of 3 models of handshowers in oil-rubbed bronze which are all unimaginably fugly. That's right -- they've shot right past ugly to land solidly on fugly. See Bancroft, Forte (the model we have in our other bathroom which looks so much better it baffles me that this can be in the same line), and, completing the fugly trifecta, Kelston. On top of this, they don't even offer all the items I need together as a kit leaving me to try to piece the items together or spring for the $1000 to $2000 packages which include 4 body sprays I have no need or space for or be stuck with an showerhead and slide-bar mounted hand shower.
Kohler owned brands: none of them have websites where you can browse by anything but product names. If I knew the product name genius, I would have just Googled for it instead of coming to your website. Add a search for goodness sakes. It's the 21st century.

Some combination of the above problems have occurred with each of Danze, Grohe, Moen. The only thing I've found so far that fits my criteria is this Pfister model but the occasional reviews I've managed to find have been hit or miss. So I suppose it's off to Water Concepts for us over the weekend to see if their catalogs can render more leads.

A quick update on our lights

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 16:00:00 +0000

We never intended the 4 little spot lights to be the final configuration over the dining table. We wanted a longer track that ran the length of the table with some pendant lights dropping down the whole time. But apparently, we had never considered how difficult it would be to find 1) 6-foot runs of track in brown, 2) pendant lights fixtures that were designed for attaching on a track. After hunting around at various home improvements shops, we finally hit upon Universal Electric who could custom order anything we could find on the manufacturer's website. Though even this was not without its own snags. A few of the pendant shades we liked had low or nonexistent stock and it wasn't clear when they would come back into stock. Well, after a week of back and forths and a alarmingly large bill, we have our lights up.

OFF

That's it. Next time, I'm going to Wimberley Glass Works. Admittedly, that's partly because I have a soft spot in my heart for the Wimberley people since we got engaged there oh so many years ago.

Come on in. Grab a seat.

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 22:42:00 +0000

One day recently when Travis was out of country for work and I was wrangling two dogs at the crack of dawn for our morning walk, tangled in leashes and struggling to tie my shoes, it occurred to me that what we really needed was an entryway bench. You know, like this:

But less dowdy. And less boring. And with a slot for a cushion on top. And with some shoe cubbies built in. And with the same trim detail as our entertainment center since you see both when you walk in the door. And shallower and narrower because the space I need to put it is pretty small.

So I decided Travis would have to build one for me. As soon as he got back from his trip I presented him with the idea. And coaxed and cajoled and manipulated a little until he acquiesced to do it.

He found some great, detailed plans online. They even come with SketchUp drawings to make it easier for you to manipulate and customize the design for yourself. This was his final sketch based on all the requests I'd made:

Off he went to Home Depot to pick up lumber. He decided to spring for poplar instead of pine. (He damn well better have -- I don't want any knots in this bench.) First step was to make all the necessary cuts.

Travis opted to double up two pieces for the bench. To make it comfortable for sitting, he rounded off the top and bottom edges.

To make the edging detail match our entertainment center, he needed a new router bit. And of course he used this as an excuse to get himself a router table too. But I'm quite happy with the results so I'm willing to overlook that.

This will be one of the pieces that make up the "footer" around the base of the bench.

With everything cut and routed, it was time to start putting everything together. Travis kindly opted for pocket screws for aesthetics. Pocket screws are like screwing from the back. They have to go in at an angle to accomplish this but you get to avoid unsightly screw holes in the front of the piece. These are quite easy to make if you pick up a jig at the local hardware store. And personally, I think they really take the results up a notch and are worth the investment.

Travis didn't do all the work. I helped too.

I helped keep everything stable while Travis screwed on the bench top.

And even Remi pitched in by keeping guard of the house. Or maybe he's greeting strangers like best friends. Yeah that's more likely it.

With all the pieces assembled, it was time for some wood putty to fill in all the cracks and seams.

A few rounds of wood putty followed by sanding later, it was ready to paint. Aiming to match the ever-so-slightly off-white of the entertainment center, we started with the Rust-Oleum "Antique White" in satin. This looked ever so slightly more yellow. So we decided to do the color-cover with "Antique White" but then finish off with a skim topcoat of "White" in gloss.

The fit is absolutely perfect.

With the help of two great Etsy shops, we had the final accoutrements. Stacy at jackmat offers custom made window seat cushions which double perfectly as bench cushions. I got to select my own fabric pattern, Bailey in Chocolate/Linen. Melissa at Diva's Intuition was wonderfully accommodating and customized not only the size of the bucket but the fabric to match to the cushion and location of the handles as well. Now we're all good to go!

A coat rack for strictly coats. Finally.

New year, new lights

noreply@blogger.com (Shan Wang) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 08:36:00 +0000

Since we got the first dog and even more so since we got the second dog, we've scaled back a lot on our home projects. Don't worry, I still have a healthy To-Do list (I'll probably never run out of ideas), but it's just harder to find the free time and will power to tackle them now. The house is also getting into reasonably presentable order which also saps my motivation.

One of my long-queued-up projects was to replace our living room lights. I'm being generous calling them lights. It's a stand-up lamp really.

Do you disagree? There is one outlet that is switched by a light switch (not the one in the picture but we'll be getting back to that guy shortly) into which this lamp is plugged into. Due to the need to plug into this outlet and where our couch needs to be, the lamp ends up in an awful location. Namely, it is in front of that thermostat and tends to amp up the temperature by several degrees just in that vicinity thus tricking the heater into thinking it doesn't need to run when in fact it does and we're freezing our tails off. Moreover, those two bulbs are supposed to light all of this:

To which I say, "Yeah right." I dread trying to scrapbook from that dining table; it feels as if I've gone back to pre-Industrial Revolution and am working by candlelight. If my mother were here, she'd tell me how I was wrecking my eyes with the bad light.

So we cooked up a grand plan to:

Tie off the outlet such that it would no longer be controlled by the switch and thus always be "ON".
Pull a new power line (on the existing outlet circuit) for a set of 7 recessed lights over the living area controlled by 2 3-way switches
Pull off another new power line (also on the existing circuit) for a set of track lights over the dining area controlled by another set of 2 3-way switches.
Enlarge the switch box controlling the outlet to hold 2 switches.
Finally, move the switch in the first picture (which actually controls the back porch light) to the left side of the stud it's nailed to and enlarge it to hold 3 switches: 2 new and the 1 existing. Moving it is necessary as it's currently located snug between two studs and has no room to expand.

We ran this plan by Travis's Dad (who's an architect and has some expertise in these matters) just to make sure it was sane and he felt it sounded ok.

So early Friday morning, we made a round of all the local hardware stores and this was our haul.

Our first task was to pick out roughly where we'd like the new recessed lights. We had already thought about this enough that we knew we would need 7 lights. If you don't have any idea how many lights you want, do this before buying materials.

Knowing we wanted 7 and the rough arrangement we wanted, we grabbed some dessert-sized paper plates we had lying around, put some tape on the back, and started popping them onto the ceiling so we could see how they looked together. This made it easy to play with spacing and alignment with the furniture in the room.

Once we settled on a arrangement we liked, we took our stud finder up there to locate the joists and beams that we'd have to avoid when drilling holes, lined up the holes neatly, and finalized placement.

Separately, we needed to find the wires supplying power to the outlet switch. To do this, we killed this circuit's breaker, opened up the junction box of wires going into the house, and started scanning wires with our Christmas tree light fixer. It has a built-in EMF detector for locating which light on a line is burnt out which is in essence the same as detecting which line doesn't have a current running through it since the breaker is off. That little sucker has more than paid for itself now.

We put Travis's new "multi-tool" to use to cut our new switch box openings with great results.

We cut a brand new, 3-gang opening and got mighty lucky -- the kitchen switch is just behind this location but just more one switch box lower. Phew. This turned out to be even more lucky when we went to locate where to drill for the new drops later on since we could use the kitchen lines to locate the new hole location. We cut the old switch box out of the wall, using the multi-tool to slice through the nails. The porch light switch box had 3 lines of Romex coming into it, two of which were tied together. These could basically stay in place but the last line needed to be wired into the switch which meant it would have to cross over 2 2x4's into our new 3-gang opening. To do this, we drilled a hole through those studs with a spade bit. The existing wire actually didn't have enough slack to cross over so we actually just wired in a short section of Romex. To protect these connections in the wall, we used a "handy box" to contain the connections.

For the existing switch box, we had to cut out the nails holding in the old box and widen the opening so it would accept a 2-gang switch box. This box only had one line coming in -- it is essentially the terminal point of this circuit. Since we just wanted an outlet that was always on, once we removed the existing switch, all we had to do was hard wire the black and white wires together and toss the switch.

At this point, we'd exhausted the various things we could do down below and it was time for Travis to head into the attic. With all the Romex in hand, a fish line, and a drill with an extender and a spade bit, he started crawling around and yelling at me from the attic. With a bit of knocking on the ceiling and using the kitchen wires as reference points, we located where he needed to drill. So he drilled. And drilled. And drilled some more. We'd forgotten to take note that there was a header (a very large chunk of wood) in the path of the drops. So even with this drill setup running about 12 inches long, Travis couldn't make it all the way through.

Not to mention, he lost the spade bit at some point during drilling. We did manage to recover the bit later on after buying a much longer extender and made it all the way through.

To make the drops, Travis taped together all the wires that needed to come down and threaded the fishing line through, securing it with more tape, paying special attention to creating a tapered transition from the fishing line to the Romex and covering any exposed wire ends to prevent snags. Then he dropped the start of the fish line down until I could get it and I yanked while he fed until we'd pulled a few feet through the switch opening.

Next up, with a utility knife, some wire cutter/strippers, a Phillips head screwdriver, and a pair of needle-nosed pliers, we started wiring together our switches. The Romex had to be threaded through the holes in our switch box and the switch box placed into position in the wall first. We bought these switch boxes designed for use with remodels (vs. new construction).

Notice the two flaps on top of the box (one is rotated vertically). The flaps lay down on the box for insertion into the wall and when you tighten the screws, the flaps flip up. As you screw further, they clamp against the drywall. Notice the series of, on this particular model, 4 lips at the top and bottom of the box which clamp from the outside.

With the box in the wall, it was time to strip the outer Romex insulation to expose some number of wires. In this case, it's the hop over from the patio switch so there's a black (hot), white (neutral), and bare copper (ground). You'll want to strip about half an inch or so from the black and white wires. This exposes just enough material to make a strong connection but not so much that you may cause short circuits. Remember, erring on the side of stripping too little material is easier to fix. Then we made a U shape out of the tip of each exposed wire and attached it to the switch. Our switches are new enough that the screws are color coded to an extent. For example, in this picture, the green screw signifies ground. Read the instructions if you're uncertain or better yet, get an electrician.

It gets harder as you have less and less switches to wire in a single box because there's just less space for you to squeeze your hands into. Perhaps that's why I found I was quite adept at wiring these things since I have tiny hands. But now I have about a dozen scrapes and nicks on my hands to show for it.

At this point, we felt it was a good checkpoint and decided to throw the breaker back on and test a few switches. We had a porch light we could test to make sure we hadn't shorted anything out and also checked that the outlet was now on. All that was left for this little panel is to pop a face plate on it and call it done. I think it's well worth it to spring for the "preferred" face plates as they're labeled at Home Depot. They're much larger and more forgiving of drywall-sins.

We've finally gotten to the recessed light installation. Unfortunately, this is also where the pictures go on hiatus (the reason for which will soon become self-evident).

I sent Travis into the attic to clear insulation in each spot we were installing a light to prevent it from falling into the living room once we drilled holes. I found however that I lack the strength and/or confidence to competently operate a 6" hole saw. This meant all I was drilling where pilot holes and Travis would have to come down and drilling the ceiling cutouts before heading back into the attic to help me run the lines between lights. All in all, this meant it took use a couple hours to get 7 holes cut in the ceiling.

For the recessed light housings, I could wire it up partially in the living room. These lights would be wired in parallel such that if one burnt out, the others could keep running. This means that at every light except for the last light in the run, there three sets of wires that should be connected: line from the previous light/switch, line to the next light, the current light. (The light in the last run doesn't have a line to the next light because it's the last light.) Thus three black wires had to be connected together and same goes for three white wires and three copper grounds. On the ground, I could get the line to the next light wired in. However, the line from the previous light/switch had to be wired in with the light dangling. Because of all this, I used these push-in wire connectors instead of possibly the more popular wire nuts. I've heard some electricians don't like these push-ins but I was very happy with their performance, especially in this application. These allowed me to wire together two wires on the ground and then add a third wire later whereas wire nuts require all wires to be present in order to tie them together. Also, the push-in connectors held nicely to being tugged on in mid-air without coming loose. I can't imagine trying to screw wire nuts while on a step stool while support a light housing and fiddling with 3 sets of wires.

The real tricky part came with push the clips of the housings out so it would hold itself up against the drywall. The housings won't stay up unless you hold them up or the clips have been set in. This means until a set of lights are in, either I have to hold them up from below or Travis has to hold them from above. This means I basically spent the entire afternoon holding my arms above my head and having Travis yell, "Are you ready to push?" to me. Never would I have imagined that phrase yelled at me so much without me being pregnant.

But working with my arms over my head gets really exhausting, really fast. So let's just say that I had my moments where I thought we'd just have to give in and call someone to clip the light housing in because I just didn't think we'd make it. Travis finally discovered the secret to getting the clips in (see the Lesson section at the bottom) and we forged ahead. Around 4:30pm, Day 2, we found our groove with these housings and were able to pop them up in about 15-20 minutes.

Once we finished the housing, we completed the power connections in the junction box in the garage and flipped on the breakers to check out how we did. We stole some light bulbs from the kitchen which take identical bulbs and started trying out our hookups. (We didn't want to commit to the same light bulbs as the kitchen as we weren't sure we would want our living room to be so bright. We were right and found we needed a softer white.)

Miraculously the electrical connections worked. Unfortunately, we bought the wrong trim kits. So early the next morning, we grabbed 7 light bulbs, swapped out for 7 trim kits that actually fit and wrapped up the install.

New track light over the dining area. These spotlights work well for our paintings but I need to get some replacement LED bulbs from the interwebs. I'm not a fan of halogen. I also need to pick up a few pendant light track fitters in this bronze color which is proving to be next to impossible to find, even with the interwebs. The track light installation itself was pretty standard box-instruction-following. The only special thing we did was to install a ceiling pan (a fancy name for a metal dish with some pre-perforated holes you can knock out to thread wire through meant for attaching light fixtures to) and drop in the new Romex to power these lights.

You can see the baffle-ing in the trim kit we picked out. We went with a flat white all the way up over the kind we have in the kitchen which switch to a metallic reflector surface about halfway up. We wanted to soften the light coming out of the living room cans versus intensifying it as the reflectors do.

Our finished lights over the fireplace.

You may be wondering how our dogs coped through all this commotion. The short answer is they did well.

Remi mostly slept in his bed. Even when his bed was covered by the canvas drop clothes, he managed to find it and sleep thereabouts. He was a bit frightened by the loud noises: drilling, sawing, hammering, vacuuming, and the vibrations those caused. Perhaps he needs a Thundershirt. Kidding.

Pixie puttered around, alternately chewing on pieces of stripped rubber insulation or sighing and collapsing into bed. She was a bit nervous about Travis, covered in insulation climbing down from our attic. She also barked a few times when she heard Travis yelling from the attic thinking we had an intruder on our roof.

Both dogs tried to eat a little insulation but luckily weren't really taken with the taste or texture and gave it up quickly. It looks like we'll be able to attempt more projects with these two. You know. Once we recover from this one. Which will take a while.

Lesson #12 in Home Remodeling: Electricity, 3-Way Switches, Recessed Lights, and etc.

I'm afraid I don't have a pithy title for this lesson. It's just a smorgasbord of all the little things I wish someone had told me.

Romex is labelled as [wire gauge]/[# of wires]. (American) wire gauge is an odd system. The larger the gauge number, the thinner the wire. Generally, 14 gauge wire is rated to handle up to 15 amps and 12 gauge wire is rated to handle up to 20 amps. The thicker the wire though, the stiffer it will be to handle. (Duh.) The packaging will label whether a ground wire is included (everything I saw at Home Depot does). This ground wire doesn't count towards the number of wires in the labeling. The minimum number of wires should be 2: one hot (black), one neutral (white). There are also those with 3 wires: 2 hots (usually colored black and red), one neutral. We needed these 3 wire ones to hop between our 3-way switches.
When locating any boxes in the wall, look up, down, behind, and around. Just because you can't see any obstacles on the wall you're looking at around your location doesn't mean you're home free. There may be boxes, or appliances or plumbing behind or inside the wall. There also may be headers or cross-run wires above your location. A stud finder with a current detection alarm can often alert you to these cases but this can only work if the circuit breakers are all on. Even then, you only have a rough idea of where wires are. Remember, you can always cut a hole in the drywall, poke in a mirror and a flashlight and look around for yourself. At the end of the day, patching a hole in the drywall that didn't work out is far cheaper and less of a hassle than running into some wiring or plumbing in your walls.
If you need to communicate and one of you is in the attic and the other one isn't, get a pair of walkie-talkies. It'll save a lot of frustration and perhaps prevent a stranding or two.
Since we were dropping two sets of cables (one for the living room, one for the dining room), we arbitrarily picked cables that we labeled as for the living room as we dropped. This prevented any wire mix ups down the line, allowing us to get everything wired right the first time. It also allowed us to decide how we wanted the lines to go into the switch box and, by extension, what order the switches would operate in.
If you're using extenders on your drill that don't have a locking feature, tape the heck out of it. It sure beats fishing bits out of awkward places, or worse yet, losing bits entirely.
Draw a wiring diagram to help you understand the circuit. However, the tricky difference between wiring theory and wiring in practice is that a line of Romex contains two way of traffic. What does that mean? When you draw a wiring diagram, it has a line leaving the power source, makes a loop through your switch or outlet or light or whatever and then comes all the way back to the power sources. When you wire with Romex, you don't pull 2 lines of Romex from your power source to, say, your outlet. You just pull one because inside that one line of Romex, you have hot AND neutral (at a minimum -- see previous bullet). The hot is that line leaving the power source but the neutral is that line coming back to the power source. Romex helps you pull loops but takes some getting used to if you're stilling thinking in terms of physics class electrical diagrams. When you get really desparate, check out these wiring diagrams which were real life savers for us.
When wiring switches, you'll make a loop of exposed wire to hook on a screw terminal. Make the loop in the clockwise direction of how you will turn the screw. Thus when you go to tighten the screw, the tightening motion encourages the loop to stay on the screw instead of trying to spit the loop out with each turn.
When wiring up 3-way switches, you may want to have them configured such that when all the switches are down, the lights are off. I understand this isn't as important to other people as it is to my OCD-ness. Now when you wire 3 way switches to one another, you have to use Romex with 3 wires inside. The two hot wires create two potential paths between the 3-way switches which is what gives you the ability to turn on and off from 2 different spots. You may be tempted to think that it would be wise to wire the two switches consistently -- that is you wire the red wire to the same pole on both switches and black wire to the same pole on both switches. Well you would be wrong as I was. You would end up with a switch configuration that can only turn off if one switch is up and the other is down. You have to wire one switch opposite to the other.
The recessed light housings for remodel installations are meant to slip through a small hole and then clip into position by compressing the drywall using the lip of the housing from the bottom and 4 push-in clips from above. Well neither I nor Travis were strong enough to push the clip into place or we were both just doing it wrong. The trick we finally discovered about 4 lights in was for Travis to use vise-grips to pull the clip both out and up from the attic side. Until discovering the secret of pulling up on the clip in addition to out, we sometimes got the clips to snap in but the pressure caused it to pop back out as soon as anything shifted or we let go.