Painting, Painting, and more Painting with a vanity or two on the side :)

Happy Thanksgiving to Everyone.

Monday

I have been a little lax in posting on my blog.  Just been a tad busy.  Decided to take the week off from my paying job and do a little work around the new house and help my husband celebrate his birthday.  So now for a status update.

News from the Cabinet Maker, Jerry’s Cabinets, they may begin installing on Monday.  In the meantime during this week, the finish contractors of S & K Mountain Construction have been putting on the window sills, installing doors, jambs, and baseboard.  Its really starting to come together.

I started my vacation out by first trying to assemble a medicine cabinet for the main upstairs bath.  The instructions were kinda good.  Catch that, kinda?  Yes, I read the instructions.  Laid everything out in the beginning including all the numbered pieces of the cabinets and all the alphabetical little parts, like cams and screws which were in these little red plastic packages.  Just to make sure that I had everything that was necessary.  I even had a screwdriver and, of course, the handy dandy flat-tip screwdriver and combo hex key they provided.

This is the medicine cabinet for the main upstairs bath

Even laboriously following the instructions, when it was all done, one piece was in backward and the finished edge was facing the wrong way.  Of course it wasn’t the last piece I put together, but the first 2 pieces.  This meant that I just spent 3 hours putting it together and now I had to take it apart.  Ugh,  It only took another 1 & 1/2 hours to do it again.  That was way to hard.  So I promised myself that I would be more careful when I do the vanity tomorrow.  The guys are going to bring it upstairs for me later.  It only weighs 170 lbs.

Tuesday

Hubby’s birthday.  Off to Costco for birthday cake and lunch at Famous Dave’s.  No work on the house today.

Wednesday

Now to tackle the Vanity.  Kind of underwhelmed with the medicine cabinet.  Smaller than I thought it would be.  Moving on.  On the plus side, it at least matched the vanity.

The vanity came in 2 boxes.  The one that is assembled with the under-mount sink and granite top.  That’s why that was so heavy.  The top part didn’t need assembly, but below that required to be put together and attach it to the top.  Remember the fiasco with the medicine cabinet, well I was determined not to go through that again.  Here is a photo of the pieces all nicely laid out:

Instructions and top of the vanity for the upstairs middle bath

The instructions followed to a tee.  Now I have to go get the dear husband to help me to set it upright.  As I am not strong enough and I don’t want to take a chance of dropping it.

We still don’t have the railings on the stairs yet and it is really difficult for Lynn to get up the stairs but I got him to come up.  It was heavy and really took both of us to pick it up.  I thanked him very kindly, helped him down the stairs and went back to assembling the drawers for the vanity.  That could be done without Lynn’s assistance.  That part was easy as I had put drawers together before.

Drawers all assembled and ready to go into the cabinet.  Guess what?  They don’t fit!!  Not that the drawers are wrong, the 2 center partitions are put in backwards.  Oh damn!!

So I had to go get Lynn and have him climb the steps and help me lay it down and take it apart.  Again it was two of the first pieces I put in so I had to break it all down.  Then when I took it down to the last 2 pieces, the top (the heavy part with the granite and under-mount sink, fell forward with a loud thud).  Sure that I had broken this $500 vanity I was heartbroken.  Plus mumbling some, not-so-nice words.  Lucky, and that’s all it was, kept the top from breaking.

I broke it down and put it back together and Lynn and I lifted it ups.  So here is the photo of the finished vanity:

Completed upstairs vanity

The only thing left to do on the vanity is put the back on, but I have left that for the plumbers.

Vanity and medicine cabinet. The backs have not been put on yet. I will let the plumbers do that.

Now onto painting.  Something I can’t break.

Thursday – Turkey Day

Worked on the house a little in the morning for about 3 hours, then came in and put a turkey in the oven and made the side dishes.  Just Lynn and I, but I like to cook the turkey and trimmings so we can eat leftovers for the next couple of day.  I also have some soups planned next week to put the turkey to good use.  Can’t let the bird go to waste.  Plus it helps when I get off work.

Friday

Back at it.  I have puttied all the holes in the trim upstairs and caulked the two bedrooms and have a primer coat on some of the doors.  It is slow, but I have found a rhythm and it is going to go faster.  The goal for this week is to get all the trim and doors and windows upstairs primed and the final white coat on it.  Hopefully that will be done by the time they come to put the carpet down.

Caulking and painting the window sills and adjusting the windows as these are the double hung ones. They can be tipped in and cleaned.

Looking at the front pasture out the upstairs window.

The carpenters are still working on the downstairs, but will probably finish with the trim next week.

A little writing on the side.

Another project that I took on for the month of November was the NaNoWriMo, which is short for National Novel Writing Month.  I have been wanting to write a book and have been dabbling in that for the last 3 years or so, so I decided to get serious.  I have started 2 books (fiction) and they are still in the working stages.  But for this NaNoWriMo I decided that I wanted to memorialize this journey in 15 Years and Counting Dream.  The ups, downs, what worked, what didn’t, and all the stuff in-between.  This is going to be a really rough draft for this month, but hope to revise it when the weather is too cold to do anything else.  The challenge is to write 50,000 words during the month of November.  I am past that number now, and I received an adobe certificate but couldn’t figure out how to upload it so you could see it.

As with a lot of things I try, I don’t succeed the first time.  Well I didn’t this time either, so you will just have to take my word for it right now, until I can converse with the experts at work on how to accomplish this elementary task.

In trying to convert this pdf to a jpeg, I managed to accidentally close my blog and lost about an hours worth of work and had to recreate it.   If I believed in ‘a sign’, I think that I am being told to just give it up for the night and go vegetate in front of the tube, maybe with a hot cup of tea and a warm sweater.

Sounds like a plan.

Annie, the techno challenged, novice vanity builder/aspiring novelist.  🙂

Caulking and Washing Windows

Good Evening,

Didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted to this weekend, working on the house.  Yesterday we picked up the French Doors that will go to the Bonus Room upstairs, and 4 toilets.  I think when the toilets go in we can say we are almost ready to move in.

I caulked the trim and baseboard of two upstairs bedrooms and the hall.  I checked with Preston, my do-it-yourself-go-to-guy, and asked him if there was a good way to caulk.  The way I do it seemed so labor intensive.  So here were his instructions:  Make a small whole in the caulking tube, at an angle of course.  Have a container of water which has a edge that you can clean the caulk off of your finger.  You will put a small bead of caulk then smooth out with a wet finger and scrape any excess off your finger on the edge of the water bowl.  It works great.  I am still slow, but that is just me.  He suggested I use Spackle to fill in the tiny wholes of the finish nail gun.  I tried that but the wholes were so small that i just used excess caulk and wiped the excess with a wet cloth.

During the time in each room, I wanted to wash some of the windows as they were so dirty from before the house was closed up tight.  That was only accomplished this past July when we hired the contractor.  Then everything was closed up and no more birds could come inside and build their nests and poop all over everything.  Thank you, Thank you S & K Mountain Construction.

While washing the windows, I had time to reflect on when we ordered the windows and purchased them from Home Depot.  They are Jeld Wen windows.  They are vinyl or plastic clad.  With the front of the house getting so much weather out of the south, wood windows were not a good choice.  It is really hard to keep a finish on the wood.  We are known for getting lots of wind and it reeks havoc on painted wood finishes.

One of the reasons we chose Jeld Wen Windows was because they were affordable and they came double-hung so that the upstairs windows could tip-in for cleaning.  There is a total of 44 windows in the whole house.  We purchased the lower windows first and installed them.  A couple of years later we went to purchase the windows for the upstairs.  That is when we had a problem.  I had picked up a brochure which touted the double-hung windows that would tip-in for cleaning, but when I went to purchase them, they said they were not available on the west coast only in the east and midwest.  I was not a happy camper.  That was the reason that I went with Jeld Wen Windows.  The clerk at Home Depot took my number and said the Rep would be on Monday and would give me a call.  The Rep did call me and he then spoke to the home office and explained the situation and they shipped a special order of double-hung windows to complete the upstairs.  Now it doesn’t get much better than that.  They were courteous and helpful.  They kept in touch and delivered them without shipping costs.  What an upstanding company.  I would do business with them again.

Also when washing the windows, it struck me that we, Lynn and I, have really worked at the house.  Kinda like an inch-worm these last few years, but we installed the windows.  We used the bucket truck to install the upstairs windows.  So the bucket truck did come in handy, but once it was broke, it was really broke.

Now for some of the pictures:

Master Bath Vanity

My Jeld Wen Metal French Doors that lead onto the upper deck.

North Bedroom with the two closets. All caulked and ready to paint

By Pass Doors for one of the closets. Oh and they are Jeld Wen also.

South East front bedroom. My Jeld Wen windows. The double-hung ones. There are bigger double-hung windows in the South West front bedroom, but I didn’t get that far today.

Toilets for the 3 baths. 2 upstairs and one off the utility room.

The Master Bath Throne.

The interior French Doors (the glass is covered with plywood) That may be Jeld Wen, but I’m not sure of that.

It has been a busy weekend.  Started packing up some things also in the dining room.  Next on my schedule is to get an estimate from a mover.  I don’t think we will make it into the house until after the first of the year.  I am trying to get some of the trim caulked and painted before the carpet goes in.  I will be on vacation during Thanksgiving week so I should be able to get more accomplished, either packing or working on the house.

Oh, I almost forgot we went shopping at Sears for the appliances.  Delivery is tomorrow.  We did get a water heater that works in conjunction with the heat pump.  That is more efficient that a regular hot water heater.  Bonus, Pacific Power and Light gives us a $600 rebate so the actual cost will be approximately $300.  We need every savings we can get as I am already making my banker nervous.

Annie, The Caulking, Window Washing Queen.