Tag Archives: basement

One Room Challenge Week 4

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We’re heading into week 4 on the One Room Challenge. I feel like the laundry room has turned the corner. By that I mean, I’m seeing some serious progress.

One Room Challenge Linking Participant

The transformation isn’t limited to the laundry room, either. In the spare bedroom (aka the painting area), I folded up all the drop cloths, put the paint cans away and swept the floor. It’s almost ready to go back to being a bedroom. In the basement, I broke out of the laundry room and vacuumed the carpet. This may seem like a more regular chore, but it represent serious progress because vacuuming has been on hold (as if I need an excuse) until the “messy” stuff in the laundry room is all done.

In the laundry room itself, the walls are all painted and the machines are back in place. Shall we sing praises to the power of paint? There’s no decoration or accessories, but I already feel like things are starting to come together.

Laundry room in progress

Let’s take a minute and talk about laundry pedestals, okay? When we bought our new machines and chose front loaders, I knew I wanted pedestals. I hate bending over to just a few inches above the floor to do laundry. The pedestals solve that problem easily.

They do remove the ability to put a counter over the top of the machines (unless I was 10 feet tall, which I’m definitely not). I didn’t need more counter space, though, so it wasn’t a big sacrifice. The pedestals also give a lot of storage in the drawers (although to be honest I haven’t used that either).

I probably could have simply built a platform and saved us the expense of the pedestals (and they were expensive for what they are). However, I do like that we have the option of using the drawers if we want to, and I also like that they match our machines.

You might recall that I mentioned in my update two weeks ago that the washer vibrates crazily (and noisily) when it goes into the spin cycle. While we had it pulled out of the way for painting, I took the opportunity to check it over. It turns out that the bolts holding the pedestal to the machine were all loose. A few quick turns with the socket wrench tightened everything up. Now that the washer’s back in place, it’s operating much smoother and quieter. Task #11 done.

Here’s the rest of the updated to-do list. In total I was able to cross three things off this week. Let’s hear it for progress!

  1. Add shaker style trim to the cabinets
  2. Paint the cabinets
  3. Install doors and drawers
  4. Remove ceiling rack – By Oct. 3
  5. Patch ceiling and walls – By Oct. 3
  6. Paint ceiling – By Oct. 10
  7. Paint and install baseboard and paint window trim – By Oct. 10 Done Oct. 13
  8. Deep clean (sink, counter, floor, machines) – Oct. 13 Rescheduled to Oct. 19 26
  9. Paint walls – By Oct. 17 Done Oct. 18
  10. Replace ivory washer outlet with white one – By Oct. 19 Done Oct. 18
  11. Level washing machine – By Oct. 19 Done Oct. 18
  12. Build and install ceiling rack – By Oct. 24
  13. Build and install towel bar – By Oct. 24
  14. Install cabinet hardware – By Oct. 24 Rescheduled to Nov. 11
  15. Build and install light fixture – By Oct. 26
  16. Remove non-working sprayer from the sink and plug the hole – By Oct. 26
  17. Decorate – By Oct. 31

Still on tap for this week? Paint touch-ups, some minor electrical work, and starting on the ceiling rack, towel bar and light fixture.

Laundry room in progress

I like the small projects stage of the makeover. Hopefully they go smoothly and progress happens quickly.

If you’re curious to see the progress that other ORC participants have made, make sure to head over to Calling it Home.

How do you feel about laundry pedestals? Do you have a front loader or a top loader? What’s your favourite stage of a project? Painting? Small bits? Electrical?

Challenges in the One Room Challenge

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The recommended theme for today’s One Room Challenge update is setbacks. It turns out that this is actually a fitting topic for this point in the laundry room makeover.

Setback 1: The times in between

I’m not sure if anyone else has this problem, but this one’s a common challenge for me in DIYing. In between each stage of a project, I sometimes find it hard to change gears.

I finished painting the cabinets, but then the idea of getting the ceiling ready for painting–never mind actually painting it–was extremely challenging.

A great thing about the One Room Challenge is it helps keep me moving.

Baseboard in the laundry room

Baseboards installed. Yay!

As I posted on Friday, work kicked my butt last week. I fought back, putting in extra time and staying late at the office. Of course, this meant that I had less time at home to work on the laundry room. Which meant that I finally started painting the ceiling at 9pm the night before my scheduled deadline.

I’m sure time will be a common challenge among ORC participants. Heck, finding time is a common challenge of DIYers everywhere, I think.

However, I am very pleased to report that I’m nearly on schedule. Here’s the original plan with adjusted deadlines and a few new tasks.

  1. Add shaker style trim to the cabinets
  2. Paint the cabinets
  3. Install doors and drawers
  4. Remove ceiling rack – By Oct. 3
  5. Patch ceiling and walls – By Oct. 3
  6. Prime walls (pshaw, who needs prime?) and paint ceiling – By Oct. 10
  7. Paint and install baseboard and paint window trim – By Oct. 10 I was a bit behind schedule on install, but it’s done as of Oct. 13
  8. Deep clean (sink, counter, floor, machines) – Oct. 13 (Happy Thanksgiving Monday!) Rescheduled to Oct.19
  9. Paint walls (first coat is on, one more to go) – By Oct. 17
  10. New Replace ivory washer outlet with white one – By Oct. 19
  11. Level washing machine – By Oct. 19
  12. Build and install ceiling rack – By Oct. 24
  13. Build and install towel bar – By Oct. 24
  14. Install cabinet hardware – By Oct. 24 Rescheduled to Nov. 11 due to setback #3 (see below)
  15. Build and install light fixture – By Oct. 26
  16. New Remove non-working sprayer from the sink and plug the hole – By Oct. 26
  17. Decorate – By Oct. 31

So it might be a problem that I keep remembering new tasks to add to the list. It seems like I’m adding things as fast as I’m crossing them off. However, the progress is continuing despite a couple more setbacks.

Setback 2: Paint

The second setback isn’t really serious enough to be classified as a setback. It’s more of a lesson learned.

Painting the laundry room

When it comes to painting ceilings, I just use white primer. We had a bit of primer left in the giant pail that we used for the rest of the basement reno. To make sure the colour was absolutely consistent, I wanted to use this primer. Well, it turns out that this paint has been sitting a little too long. There were all kinds of hardened bits in it. It made painting the laundry room ceiling incredibly frustrating. I got a mostly smooth finish, but I only did one coat. I think it looks good enough. If I have to, I will strain the paint and go again.

The other lesson learned (or confirmed) when it comes to paint is that BM Wrought Iron definitely has blue undertones. I first used Wrought Iron in Matt’s windowless bathroom. There it looks pretty pure, super dark grey. In the laundry room, where there’s lots of natural light from the window, the cabinets look a bit navy blue sometimes.

For the wall colour, we walked up the paint strip and chose a much lighter tone of grey from the same slip as Wrought Iron. It’s close to Bunny Gray (read the story of our Frankencolour). We already knew that this one was slightly blue as we used it on all of the other walls throughout the basement. I had intended that the walls and the cabinets would be a purer grey, but I don’t care enough to repaint.

Plus, anything’s better than that yellow. Sing it with me people in the tune of Elton John, “Goodbye yellow gross paint.”

Setback 3: The hardware

The final setback I’ve had is the cabinet hardware. I wanted cup pulls for the drawers. I wanted them to be pretty simple without a flange or other details, and I wanted a chrome finish. I had ordered these pulls from Home Depot.

Chrome cup pull

A week or so after I placed the order, I got a call from HD that they couldn’t get anyone at the manufacturer to answer email or the phone.

I looked at other big box stores and couldn’t find what I was looking for. HD had offered me a refund, but it took me awhile to make it into the store. By the time I was standing in front of the customer service desk, the associate let me know they’d started receiving orders again from the company. If you read my post on Friday, this is when I heard, “I’ll give you the refund, but let’s try and place the order again. I won’t charge you even if it goes through.”

How awesome is that?

A few days later I came home to a message from HD. My order went through (yay!), but the pulls are on back order (boo!). They should be here by Nov. 10. That’s just nearing the end of the One Room Challenge. I think I should be able to get them on in time for the final reveal.

The moral of the story

So, setbacks aside, the challenge rolls on. The best thing about this challenge is how encouraging everyone is. It’s been amazing to connect with other bloggers and have so many new people stop by my blog and offer their comments. Seeing everyone else’s projects is also super inspiring.

Make sure you get a chance to visit Calling it Home and see all of the works in progress.

How to build your own shaker cabinets

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It’s time for the first progress report in my One Room Challenge laundry room makeover.

One Room Challenge

Today’s update focuses on the most striking transformation in the laundry room: the cabinets.

You saw in the first post that the laundry room cabinets are basic flat doors. You also saw that my inspiration was a shaker style.

Laundry room before and inspiration

Fortunately, transforming flat doors into shaker doors is a pretty easy process. However, there was one door and one drawer that weren’t basic flat panels. I don’t know what this style is called officially, but I believe it was popular in the nineties. The distinctive feature of these cabinets was a built in wood stained “handle” along the edge of the white melamine flat door or drawer. Look familiar?

90s style cabinet

Before I could shaker-fy these cabinets, I needed to get rid of the ridge part of the handle. I enlisted my new-to-me, but extremely old table saw. I set the fence and the blade at the precise width and height I needed to slice off the handle, and then I very carefully ran the door and the drawer through the saw.

Trimming the edge off a cabinet door

Once the handle was removed, I could work with these cabinets exactly like the rest of the ones in the laundry room.

Using my table saw again, my Dad and I cut 2 inch wide strips out of a sheet of hardboard that I had left over from my bookshelf project. I then affixed the strips to the cabinets to make the raised shaker detail.

Easy peasy.

Adding shaker trim to cabinet doors

I used a smear of carpenters glue on the back of the strips and then I tacked them in place with my Dad’s nail gun. A bit of wood filler evened out the joints and an all over sanding smoothed everything out. I chose to have the vertical pieces run edge to edge on the drawers and doors, and then the horizontals ran between the two vertical strips.

For the drawer and the door that I’d trimmed earlier, the shaker strips covered most of the original handle. At the edges a good daub of wood filler took care of the hole. Here’s a sneak peek of how they look after painting. Not perfect, but good enough for me.

Adding shake style trim to cabinets

Anyways, before I get too far ahead of myself, how about a few more details on the painting? After I painted the kitchen cabinets at our first house, I swore I’d never do it again. Maybe my tolerance for DIY has improved because painting these cabinets was much less torturous.

A few things were different this time around.

  1. After priming I used the Advance paint formula from Benjamin Moore as opposed to a stinky heavy duty oil paint. I’ve been super impressed by the finish I get from Advance, and clean up is a breeze.
  2. I painted just the fronts of the doors. Sure it’s a shortcut, but I didn’t feel the need to flip them over and paint the insides too.
  3. I split the painting into two stages because I chose two different colours. The uppers and two blocks of lower cabinets are all BM Cloud White (the same colour as we’ve used on the trim elsewhere in the house). The lowers on the sink section are BM Wrought Iron (the same colour as Matt’s bathroom). One coat of one colour took just 30-45 minutes–much better than the week of 16 hour days I spent in our last kitchen.

As soon as the drawers and doors were dry, I put them all back in place.

Laundry room cabinet makeover

The room may still need to be painted, cleaned and decorated, but it’s already looking 100 times better. Since installing the doors and drawers, I’ve found myself making special trips downstairs to the laundry room just to admire the cabinets.

That’s not weird, is it?

This is a super cheap, easy way to makeover basic cabinets. I highly recommend it.

And because this is a progress report, here’s where the rest of the makeover stands:

  1. Add shaker style trim to the cabinets
  2. Paint the cabinets
  3. Install doors and drawers
  4. Remove ceiling rack – By Oct. 3
  5. Patch ceiling and walls – By Oct. 3
  6. Prime walls and paint ceiling – By Oct. 10
  7. Paint and install baseboard and paint window trim – By Oct. 10
  8. Deep clean (sink, counter, floor, machines) – Oct. 13 (Happy Thanksgiving Monday!)
  9. Paint walls – By Oct. 17
  10. Level washing machine – By Oct. 19
  11. Build and install ceiling rack – By Oct. 24
  12. Build and install towel bar – By Oct. 24
  13. Install cabinet hardware – By Oct. 24
  14. Build and install light fixture – By Oct. 26
  15. Decorate – By Oct. 31

I knocked off steps 4 and 5 in the past week, but added one new step (#10). I don’t know how I forgot that the washing machine shakes like it’s going to take flight every time it goes into the spin cycle. We have to fix that.

So week one of the One Room Challenge is over. Five (or hopefully less) to go. If you haven’t had a chance, I highly recommend checking out the link-ups on Calling it Home. The 20 participating bloggers post on Wednesday and then the linking participants (like me) share our progress on Thursday. There’s an impressive range of projects and lots of inspiration. Exactly what this challenge is all about.

Have you ever made over cabinets with trim or another add-on? How about painting cabinets? Have you ever taken on that fun task? What’s your favourite cabinet style? Anyone know what that nineties built-in handle style is called?

One room challenge – Laundry room makeover

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I am so excited for October’s project. Remember back in September when I didn’t have a project on my to-do list and I took apart the laundry room? Well now it’s time to put it back together.

I’m even more excited for this makeover because I’m going to make the laundry room my part of the One Room Challenge.

One Room Challenge

Linda at Calling it Home created the ORC three years ago as a way to help people stay on track and finish a room. Over the next six weeks, a group of bloggers and a whole bunch of joiners like me will be making over one room. We’ll be posting weekly updates on our blogs. So it’s not all that different from how I’ve handled my other projects so far this year.

Now, I will admit that I’ve gotten a little bit of a head start on this challenge. I trimmed out the cabinet doors and painted them last month.

I wanted to complete the makeover in October, but I knew two weekends this month were booked for non-DIY activities. As a DIYer with a day job, I absolutely need my weekends if I’m going to finish this in one month.

Well, it turns out that the ORC gives me six weeks. So I’ll have a bit of a cushion.

The purpose of today’s post is to introduce my room and tell you my plan.

Everyone, meet the laundry room. Laundry room, meet everyone.

Laundry room before

Here’s the part where the laundry room tells you a little bit about himself. We are very fortunate that we have a great space to start from (and yes, I took these photos after the makeover had already started–bad blogger). There is lots of counter space and built-in cabinets. We have a utility sink and our new (okay two-year-old) front loading washer and dryer. Even though we’re in the basement, we have a nice large window.

Laundry room before

before19

Now we redid the basement when we first moved to the farm. However, the makeover pretty much stopped at the edge of the laundry room. I scraped the stipple ceiling, took down the fluorescent light fixture, removed some posters that had been tacked to the front of the cabinets (why?) and that was it. Oh, except for our new washer and dryer (love you babies).

Since the room is open to the rest of the basement, I’d really like it to be as pretty as the rest of the basement. And right now, it’s not.

Laundry room before

So this makeover is purely aesthetic, and I’m working with what is there in the laundry room already.

Here’s the vision:

And here’s the plan:

  1. Add shaker style trim to the cabinets
  2. Paint the cabinets
  3. Install doors and drawers
  4. Remove ceiling rack – By Oct. 3
  5. Patch ceiling and walls – By Oct. 3
  6. Prime walls and paint ceiling – By Oct. 10
  7. Paint and install baseboard and paint window trim – By Oct. 10
  8. Deep clean (sink, counter, floor, machines) – Oct. 13 (Happy Thanksgiving Monday!)
  9. Paint walls – By Oct. 17
  10. Build and install ceiling rack – By Oct. 24
  11. Build and install towel bar – By Oct. 24
  12. Install cabinet hardware – By Oct. 24
  13. Build and install light fixture – By Oct. 26
  14. Decorate – By Oct. 31

Fourteen easy steps to laundry room bliss. Simple right?

Is anyone else doing the One Room Challenge? Do you find pretty laundry rooms as exciting as I do?

Surprise laundry room makeover

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So you saw on Friday that I’ve started making over our laundry room. As I said, this project kind of snuck up on me. Yeah the laundry room was on my Home Goals 2014 list, but I wasn’t exactly sure when I was going to tackle it. Fall was always in my mind.

But then the stars aligned last weekend.

My thought process went something like this:

“Dad’s here today. He can help me get the table saw running and cut the strips to trim out the cabinets.”

“Dad brought his air compressor. Maybe he’ll leave it with me so I can attach the strips to the cabinets.”

“I have the Advance paint out for the bookshelves and a good stash of foam rollers. I might as well paint the cabinets at the same time.”

So my go-with-the-flow non-project plan for September has resulted in the biggest project of the year.

That’s absolutely okay with me. Here’s the before picture. I think you can probably see why I’m so excited to have this makeover started. Functional? Absolutely yes. Pretty. Not so much.

Laundry room before

I feel good about the possibility of having the makeover done before the end of the year, thereby meeting one of my home goals for the year. I feel even better about the possibility of the makeover matching the picture in my head. It’s not just going to be pretty. It’s gonna be puuuuuuurty.

Here’s some of my inspiration for the laundry room.

I’m not doing one of my formal project plans. At least not yet. I’m sticking with my September plan of going with the flow. So, I’ll be back with an update when I’m back.

Do you have a pretty laundry room? What’s on your dream laundry room wish list? Do you have any suggestions for what I should do to my laundry room?

Damp, soggy and sloshy

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You know that stale air musty house smell when you come back from vacation? After our week at the cottage last month, that’s exactly what Matt and I came home to. And then we walked down into the basement.

There we sniffed a distinct eau de damp.

Turns out that at the very start of our holiday, while we were lakeside, there was some water flowing at home.

A torrential downpour washed half the gravel down the driveway, overran the sump pump in the cold cellar and seeped through the foundation in the laundry room.

Believe it or not, we escaped with very little damage. The worst was some damp carpet in the long room and beside the laundry room. Some of the baseboards have swelled a little bit as a result, but overall it’s not too bad.

The cold cellar is about 6 inches below the rest of the basement, and the floor is concrete, so even though it appears that area was the sloshiest, the water didn’t seep into the main basement. Thank goodness.

Running the dehumidifier for a few days dried out the carpet.

The biggest bummer is that we had patched the laundry room foundation before we left on vacation… or we thought we had.

At one point, the laundry room window was a door into the basement. When we found occasional puddles on the laundry room floor, we figured that was the most likely source.

Matt dug out the foundation, I found a membrane at Home Depot, we stuck it onto the foundation and back-filled the hole. (Forgive the bad iPod photos. We temporarily misplaced the real camera).

Patching a leaky foundation

Well, either we missed the location of the leak, our patch didn’t work, or the freak volume of rain would have overwhelmed the foundation anyways. Hence the eau de damp.

Back at the farm after our vacation as we were drying out the basement, we watched on TV as more torrential rains flooded a town nearby. When the storms rolled into our area, the rain spewed over the edge of the gutters and puddled right next to our apparently porous foundation. Uh-oh.

A break in the storm found Matt and me outside in our raincoats and boots. Matt fetched the extension ladder, I held it secure, and he climbed up on the roof to empty the eaves troughs.

Cleaning out the eaves trough

Our pine trees shed like crazy, and their needles clog the downspouts. When the second wave of the rain hit, the gutters flowed like they should.

Clogged downspout

We’ve had more rain since then, and Matt has been super vigilant about making sure the water runs away from the house and that the basement stays dry.

So far so good.

The problem of the clogged eaves troughs and downspouts has been solved. Now if only we could solve the where-the-heck-is-the-water-getting-in? problem.

Who else has come home to a not so pleasant surprise after vacation? Have you ever dealt with leaky foundation issues? How often do you clean your gutters? I swear I did them a few months ago. Anyone else ever done some mid-storm water diversion?

Popcorn ceiling and barn doors

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So July’s project was my biggest failure yet. Remember that dirty bumpy stippled ceiling in the guest room/soon-to-be master bedroom?

Popcorn ceiling

Yeah. It’s still there.

The week that I was planning to start operation popcorn, Kate posted about removing the stipple ceiling in the flip she and her husband are working on. She mentioned doing an asbestos test before she started. Our house is built the era where asbestos might have been used, so I thought a test sounded like a good idea.

However, finding a test kit was harder than expected. It seems home tests are an American thing. I ended up finding one online. So the extent of my progress this month is a credit card charge and my Dad’s drywall sander sitting in a corner of the guest room. 😦 (Please note as well the light switches behind the door. Really convenient.)

Drywall pole sander

Wanna see some actual progress? Let’s look at some other doors instead.

Hello basement barn doors.

Basement door makeover

Here’s the before picture just for reference.

Slab doors

Yes, redoing the doors was June’s project, but the painting was left until July. It must have been something about this month because, like with the stippled ceiling, the final stages of painting and hanging the doors didn’t go smoothly.

For painting, I planned to use my Dad’s sprayer… or rather I planned to have Matt use my Dad’s sprayer. Well, the air compressor conked out, so spraying was a no go. So much for all of the time we spent tarping the driveshed.

Our mechanical difficulties are totally on me. I was the one who set up the air compressor. Earlier the same day I’d killed the push mower, so I obviously had a hex working when it came to mechanical objects.

Painting became a team effort as Matt rolled and I brushed. Soooooo sloooooow.

Painting the basement doors

Installing the doors turned out to be another headache. Only five out of the nine doors that we made over fit smoothly back in place. Somehow, two doors grew so that they were too fat for their openings. The closet door that we’d accidentally put the trim on the wrong side wouldn’t close because the trim hit the doorstop (I don’t know why I didn’t realize this would be a problem). The best one was discovering another door where I’d put the Z on the backside. No idea how I missed this.  My mistake left the completely flat slab door facing out into the room–exactly the situation I was trying to correct.

Ugh. I was very frustrated.

It took a few hours of work spread over a few days to fix my mess ups, including repainting. Double ugh.

Matt was very patient, installing and removing the doors multiple times as I tested the fit.

Finally, all of the doors fit, swung smoothly and closed properly.

I installed the old hardware that I’d ORBed, and I called this one done.

ORBed doorknobs

The Z detail is subtle–the strips are only about an eighth of an inch thick–but I think it’s a really nice touch. Our barn doors are absolutely a lot more interesting than the flat slab doors. Plus they fit really well in our farm setting.

Slab doors become barn doors

Slab doors become barn doors

Issues aside, this is a pretty easy update–and much, much more affordable than buying nine new doors. It would have been even cheaper if I hadn’t bought all new hinges. All in, this makeover cost less than $200 (although I did use glue and nails that I already had):

Panels (two sheets of hardboard cut into 6-inch strips): $18.53
Hinges (Stanley Home Designs in Egyptian bronze-I couldn’t find the exact version online, but this one is close although a little more expense): $96.39
Paint (Benjamin Moore Cloud White in the pearl finish): $59.67
Spray paint (Rustoleum Oil Rubbed Bronze): $11.28
Total: $185.87 (just over $20 per door)

Our master bedroom makeover may not have started, but our basement makeover came a lot closer to finally being finished.

Let’s just not discuss that the basement was summer 2012’s project.

Barn door makeover – Progress report

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It’s not quite the end of the month, but I’m calling it close enough. Time for an update on how I did on June’s project. You may recall that the plan was to update the boring slab doors in our basement with some trim.

Here’s where we’re at:

A plastic bag full of old hardware.

Bag of door knobs and hinges

And seven doors trimmed out. (I know there’s only six pictured here, but trust that the seventh one is laying in the driveshed with the trim in place. To make it up to you, I’ll give you a cute puppy instead.)

Making slab doors into barn doors

My timelines shifted a little bit (i.e. my bias to procrastinate came out), but I’m not too far off schedule. Here are the details of how the update went down.

1. Figure out design for the doors. By June 6. Done June 10

As you can see, I decide to go with a basic Z (that’s a Canadian ‘zed’). It’s a classic barn door motif for a reason. Plus, I was able to keep it simple and lay out my strips so they don’t interfere with the door knobs or hinges.

2. Buy material (and hopefully the store staff will cut it into strips for me). By June 13. Done June 13.

A very accommodating (if slightly math challenged) associate at Home Depot along with his beautiful panel saw ripped two sheets of hardboard into 6-inch strips for me. Thank goodness it was a quiet Friday night at the store.

3. Cut strips (if I have to). By June 14. Non-issue.

4. Remove doors. June 14/15. Done June 21.

My Dad came over and helped me get back on track last weekend. He popped all of hinge pins, and I schlepped the doors upstairs.

5. Remove hardware. June 14/15. Done June 22.

A lot of the handles were dummies, and it took me a few minutes to figure out how to detach them. This video was helpful, even though my handles didn’t slide off nearly as easily. I got them eventually.

Bag of door knobs and hinges

6. Trim the bottom of the door to the electrical panel closet (since it rubs on the carpet). June 21/22. Done June 21.

No matter how much I practice, I still can’t cut as straight a line with my circular saw as my Dad does.

7. Install strips on the doors. June 21/22. Done June 21.

It took my Dad and me just two hours to add the panels to all seven doors. Easy-peasy (except for the door where we put the strips on the inside (closet side) of the door, hence only six doors in the picture below. Oops.)

Making slab doors into barn doors

To attach the panels to the doors, we put a smear of carpenter’s glue on the back of each strip and then tacked it with the nail gun. We let the doors sit for about 24 hours, and then I filled all of the nail holes and joints with wood filler and sanded it smooth.

I was on my own to fix the mess-up on the closet door. Since the nail gun went home with my Dad, I used construction adhesive on the panels and weighted them down with everything I could find in the driveshed.

Weighting down the panels until construction adhesive sets

I’ll be interested to see if one method holds up better than another. I sincerely hope that no matter what the panels stay securely in place.

8. Buy new ORB hinges. By June 27. Done June 25.

Upgrading the hinges is the biggest expense on this project. I figure I’ve saved everywhere else, so I can spend a little bit to get exactly what I want. The cost for 20 new hinges is still less than $100, so it wasn’t a huge splurge.

There are a few things left to do before this door makeover is complete, so here’s the plan for the final tasks and June’s final four days:

9. Paint the door jambs – By June 27

I haven’t started painting, so this task will not be done today. It should be an easy weekend project though.

10. Spray paint old knobs ORB – By June 29

Good weather is forecast for this weekend, so I’m planning to set up a spray paint station outside.

11. Paint the doors – Not my problem.

You might recall my plan is to have Matt paint the doors. Well, he starts summer holidays this afternoon. Happy holidays, honey.

Do you have any last minute projects you’re hoping to knock out this weekend?

June project plan

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June’s project might seem a bit unexpected. Weather has finally turned nice. Summer is almost here. Now is the time to be working outside.

However, this month, I’m going to turn my attention back inside to an area you haven’t seen too much of in a little while… the basement. The basement renovation was the big (all-consuming) project for Year One. That was not last summer, but the summer before. As with any renovation, there are still some finishing touches yet to be completed, even two years later.

This month’s project is the basement doors. There are 10 doors in the basement. Two of them are standard colonial style. The other eight (five of which you see below) are basic slab doors. Boooooooring.

Slab doors

All of the doors need to be painted. Smudges, scratches and yellowed paint make them look pretty shabby, especially next to our nice white trim.

Smudges on white doors

Even more than paint, the slab doors need an injection of personality. I think their personality should be a little bit country, so I’m taking inspiration from barn doors.

Barn door options

Sources: 1, 2, 3

A simple raised Z or X detail would be easy to apply, wouldn’t interfere with the hinges or knobs and would fulfill my interior design philosophy that every room needs at least one rustic element.

So the plan for this month is as follows:

  1. Figure out design for the doors – By June 6
  2. Buy material (and hopefully the store staff will cut it into strips for me) – By June 13
  3. Cut strips (if I have to) – By June 14
  4. Remove doors – June 14/15
  5. Remove hardware – June 14/15
  6. Trim the bottom of the door to the electrical panel closet (since it rubs on the carpet) – June 21/22
  7. Install strips on the doors – June 21/22
  8. Buy new ORB hinges – By June 27
  9. Paint the door jambs – By June 27
  10. Spray paint old knobs ORB – By June 29

You’ll notice that actually painting the doors and rehanging them are absent from this list. This is because my secret plan is to get the doors ready to paint, but then pass them on to Matt. He painted all of the doors in our last house, and I think it would be good to continue the tradition. Don’t you?

This probably is more of a one week project, rather than a one month. However, stretching it out will give me a chance to do some work outside still. It would be hard for me to spend the whole month of June indoors.

Have you ever dressed up basic doors? Are you on board with the barn door trend? What’s on your to-do list for June?