Casa de Lovely

Renovating In West Seattle

Posts Tagged casings

Stick a fork in it…

Jul 11

Posted by Bryan in Bedroom, Lessons Learned | 4 Comments

The @#$%@# bedroom is done. Well, almost done.

   

(The toxic pink curtains were my daughter’s idea — Jen showed her five different colors at the store and she picked that one. Also, the last photo shows the plexiglas protector to prevent the annoying orange cat in photo #3 from scratching holes in the corner again.)

Next on the agenda

  • Apply border
  • Wall plates for the plugs
  • Install door jamb and bifold doors for the closet
  • Install prehung bedroom door
  • Install window jambs and sills
  • Install casings 
  • Patch floor where old wall floor plates used to be
  • Fill and paint nail holes
  • Touch up painting
  • Install plexiglas corner protector
  • Clean old linoleum mastic off the floor
  • Move my daughter and all her stuff in
  • Cut hole and install heat vent

I’m not sure what I was doing wrong with the baseboards, in that there’s lots of gapping between the baseboard and the drywall. Is that something I should just caulk and call it good, or is there a better technique? Coping the corners wasn’t too hard, since I had a very simple profile, but I should buy an actual coping saw for the next time I do it.

I do know that I almost certainly won’t be using MDF for casings in the future. Yes, it comes pre-primed, but the primer doesn’t do all that great a job of holding the final coat of paint. Also, the edges aren’t square, it’s hard to plane, it doesn’t really hold screws very well, and it tends to bulge up around the finish nails (where wood doesn’t).

Now all I need to do is buy an inexpensive jigsaw so I can cut a hole in the floor above the existing heat duct for a vent grille. Which I should do soon, but which isn’t really necessary before I move my daughter into the room.

 

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Casings!

Jun 3

Posted by Bryan in Bedroom, Painting, Windows | 1 Comment

… and sills and jambs and doors and floor patches (oh my).

Lots of progress since the last post.

Two weeks ago I got the prehung door in, which was a bitch and a half to do solo. I plumbed it up and the door wouldn’t close. It’s a solid MDF core semi-custom Jeldwen door, so it’s pretty heavy. I had to do lots of adjusting and re-shimming to get the door to swing shut, and I didn’t realize until just yesterday when I was putting the casings on that it was actually seriously out of plumb, because the door was sagging in the frame on the top hinge. Once I did the thing with the long screw into the framing, it squared right up and I was able to re-adjust the frame so it was plumb. A little loosening of the screw adjusted the door so the latch would go into the strike plate. It’s a little tough to close, but completely within acceptable limits.

The closet door jamb was easy by comparison, and hanging the bifold doors was a snap. Unfortunately, they’re basic unfinished slab doors which suck down the paint, so I’m going to have to give it a third coat (at least) so as not to see dark wood grain through the white.

I also built the window jambs and sills. This proved to be difficult. I’m using MDF, so it doesn’t plane very well, so I had to resaw the boards to narrower and narrower widths on the table saw to get them to fit property. And for some reason I couldn’t get them tight to the window, so there’s about a 3/32″ gap that I’ll need to fill in with caulk.

Last weekend I built all the lintels. I knew I wanted to do a keystone design, but the problem was how to get a three-piece lintel to have nice tight joints and all be on the same level plane. I’ve been planning on getting a pocket hole kit for eventually doing built-ins and cabinets, so I went ahead and ordered this one and used it to mate up the lintel pieces with the keystone. I made a jig to make it a repeatable process, which I’ll keep around to make more in the future.

Yesterday I got the nailgun back out and put up all the door and window casings in the bedroom (I still have to do the simple casing on the inside of the closet).

The door and window casings in the hall will have to wait until I can saw or plane off a quarter inch of the existing jambs. They were built to be even with the old 3/4″ tongue-and-groove planks, so now that there’s 1/2″ drywall there’s too much jamb. Planing seems like it would take forever, but I’m not sure how to get a controlled saw cut. Maybe I need to buy a jigsaw.

Next week I clean up enough sawdust around the edges to put on the baseboards. I’ll be using 1/2″ x 5 1/2″ MDF boards, but I’m thinking that a square edge on top will be boring and tend to collect lots of dust, so I think I’m going to cut the top at a 45° angle. Yay tablesaw!

Also, back when the room was still open framing, one of our cats liked to use the closet corner as a scratching post. Unfortunately, the mere existence of drywall and paint on that corner didn’t discourage him, and he scratched a hole in the paint. I sanded it, patched with patching compound (I also patched the socket cuts where the hole was too big for the plate), and primed. When I do touchup painting, I’ll paint them, and then screw 4″ of plexiglas on each side up from the baseboard to higher than he can reach. Damn cat.

Jen’s had some luck in using mineral spirits and Murphy’s Oil Soap to get the mastic off the floor, starting in the hall. But nothing else we’ve tried so far has worked as well as the time I unknowingly spilled a bottle of air compressor oil on my way out of the room and left it there overnight. So maybe we’ll just get a big bottle of light oil, mop it onto the floor and clean it off the next day. Seems plausible. Right?

 

Next on the agenda

  • Apply border
  • Wall plates for the plugs
  • Install door jamb and bifold doors for the closet
  • Install prehung bedroom door
  • Install window jambs and sills
  • Install casings (mostly)
  • Patch floor where old wall floor plates used to be
  • Fill and paint nail holes
  • Touch up painting
  • Install plexiglas corner protector
  • Clean old linoleum mastic off the floor
  • Move my daughter and all her stuff in

P.S. Our friend Erin came over and painted clouds on the blue-sky ceiling. And they look gorgeous.

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Yard Work

Feb 24

Posted by Bryan in Bathroom, Why We Hate The Previous Owners, Yard | 7 Comments

So long time no post from me and all that. Yeah yeah yeah, I know.

The bathroom is still tantalizingly incomplete. I bought window and door casings from Second Use and cut them to size, but now they’re sitting in my basement unsanded, unprimed, unpainted, and uninstalled. And of course I still haven’t done anything about the tub/shower valve escutcheon, although I did fix the broken screw in the shower arm drop-ear, so it’s solid again.

The main point of this update is the most recent bit of yard work Jen and I did last weekend. It’s been unseasonally good weather the last week or so (it stopped today, naturally), so first Jen got out and raked up all the leaves, sticks, and dead morning glory from the side yard.

As it turns out, there’s actually a brick patio underneath all of it, not just a bit.

Typically for this house and yard, whichever previous owner installed it installed it wrong — there’s no base of gravel and compacted sand, no! They just laid down bricks over black plastic directly onto the dirt, so of course it’s all wavy and uneven. Sigh.

But: since I’m pretty sure the bricks are pavers and not wall bricks, we’ll be able to save them and use them for our own patio to be overlaid over the existing concrete patio directly behind the house. Someday. Yay!

As you can see by the photos, there’s also a pond — we knew it was there but didn’t realize it was about 30 inches deep. Apparently there was supposed to be an upper pond with a stream and a waterfall leading to the lower pond. I’m sure a shrubbery was involved somehow. In any case, it’s going to be siphoned out and removed and eventually appear on a Craigslist advertisement.

So: last weekend we acquired a lawn mower from a friend’s shed where it had been sitting idle for at least three years. A $50 trip to a local lawnmower repair guy later, I was able to mow the entire front lawn for the first time in five months. As you can see, the entry looks a lot nicer when it doesn’t look like a jungle:

The mower doesn’t have drive wheels like the mowers I used to use as a teenager, but at least our yard is almost entirely flat.

I would have continued mowing and done the back yard, but since there were huge piles of yard waste covering parts of it I figured I’d take care of those first. The largest pile under the trees was mostly leaves and sticks and not so much morning glory. I filled up the 40-gallon yard waste bin plus nine big Home Depot bags:

You can see more or less where the pile was — everything in the area from the leftmost tree to the fence to the concrete driveway was a foot and a half or more deep in crap:

Meanwhile, Jen completed (or nearly so) work on the front garden beds, which are going to look very nice when they’re planted with flowers in the spring:

Sadly, the end of the great yard cleaning is still pretty far off. Not only do the piles of dead morning glory in the first picture remain, but in the raised area at the southeast corner is this:

We’re kinda scared to poke about in this treacherous pile of junk, construction debris, tree branches, weeds, and rocks to even determine how bad it is. And there’s another similar pile on the other side of the garden shed. When the clerk at Home Depot saw me buying twenty yard waste bags, he commented, “Those are pretty big, you know.” To which I could only reply, “Oh, believe me, I’ll be back for more…”

Finally, since it was such a nice day and both Jen and I were working outside, we brought Thekla out to play, which led to lots of hysterical crying. Turns out she’s terrified of grass.

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