Slatty

Now that it is spring, we can turn our attention to the outside of our house, specifically the original wrought iron railings at our front and side entrances. If you look closely you can see the heart shapes in the metal. Yuck.  After falling in love with some inspiration (below) found on Apartment Therapy, we decided that we could tackle this project.

 

Inspiration at Apartment Therapy

First, we decided it would be best to paint the cement so we wouldn't see it as much through the slats.  The first color, this flesh type tone, turned out to be terrible, so we went back and had them tint it a darker brown. (You'll see it darker in a couple of the photos below.) Then Matt went to work building the structure for the railings. This task involved drilling 4 inch deep holes in solid concrete, not a fun job but Matt got to buy a hammer drill so that made him happy.



I worked on sanding and staining the cedar slats.  There were way too many to count.

After they dried, Matt started putting them up. Here is some of his work in progress.

After a few more slats and some trim, we were done. A relatively quick and easy project.

Basement Insulation

Since it is winter, we are relegated to indoor projects that don't involve busting through exterior walls or windows, which lead us to the least sexy of our projects, insulating our basement.  Since buying the house, we had always planned on eventually finishing the basement, but the project timeline got bumped up because of a limited term incentive program the City's energy efficiency office that helped us to increase our energy savings by about 20%.  To start, we had a blower door test done by a Home Performance with EnergyStar auditor who determined that the best bang for our buck would be to insulate the basement and airseal the rimjoist.She also suggested replacing the water heater because it wasn't properly vented. Luckily we were starting with a blank slate with no demo needed.

The plan was to adhere 1" XPS foam insulation to the basement walls and tape the seams to provide an air and moisture barrier then frame, insulate, install electrical, and drywall. The first challenge was getting all of the materials home in our little car and into the basement. As you can see the basement quickly became a disaster zone

 Slowly but surely, we worked our way around the basement insulating and framing.

 Then came the drywall, our arch enemy. In theory drywall should be simple. Measure, make a cut or two, screw in place. Somehow between cutting and screwing in place things get messed up by an 1/8 of an inch and I end up cutting again. Despite this challenge and the copious amounts of drywall dust that it generates, after a couple of weeks our basement looks like this.

Like I said, not sexy, but the room is noticeably warmer and  it brings us one step closer to having a truly finished basement.

Mudroom

As you may recall, we closed up a doorway in the kitchen during that remodel and busted a hole into the porch/soon to be mudroom.  Here are the original photos of the porch:

Notice the lovely window into our living room

 

In one quick weekend Matt was able to transform the porch to this:

We worked with our favorite handyman Dave, to rebuild the porch.  From framing, HV/AC window install, siding and drywall, just a quick couple of weeks, and we were here:

All we needed to do after this was add the barn door, cork flooring (we used Lumber Liquidators) and our special lighting, vintage from Grandma and Grandpa Wachter. Here's the mud room in the current state:

We plan to add some cabinets and storage bench sometime early next year, so stay tuned...

Kitchen Renovation : Completed

After three short months we went from this:

To this:

Next up, building a mudroom out of a porch

Kitchen Phase 5, Cabinets

Once we had our new (and gorgeous) floors installed it was time to tackle the kitchen cabinets. Because we had removed all the existing cabinets to create a clean slate, we had a lot of cabinets to buy and a modest budget to do it on. Our first instinct was to go with IKEA cabinets which have a reputation for having very solid boxes that are DIY friendly, but after months of building virtual rooms at ikea.com and visiting the store we decided that they weren't quite what we had in mind. The process of the designing the room with the online tool about 100 times did however get us to a point where we knew exactly what we wanted for a layout, so when we found the perfect slab style cherry cabinets from Thomasville at Home Depot we could tell the kitchen designer exactly what we wanted. To top it off because of an amazing sale at the store we got 30% off of our cabinets and countertops which let us upgrade to quartz for the countertops and fancy storage inserts.

All that was left was for us to install the cabinets ourselves.........NOT! We know our DIY limits and installing thousands of dollars of cabinets and doing fine finish carpentry is outside that scope. Luckily for us, Home Depot provides very reasonably priced installation services that include a warranty. 

A few weeks later Mike, our installer, showed up and made quick work of hanging the cabinets, installing door hardware (from IKEA), and adding custom trim details to make everything look polished.

 

All that was left was to install our "Yukon Blanco" quartz countertops add a backsplash, and get the plumbing to work.

Kitchen Phase 4, Tile

When it came time to select our flooring our initial thought was to go for cork because it is easy to install, comfortable to stand on, and we fell in love with dark rich variety. When we set it next to the wood cabinets that we were debating on buying, we realized that we would be making the room a cave with all of the dark brown towns, so we took a detour down the tile isle at Home Depot. There we saw a lot of nice tiles in grey tones like our inspiration room, but none we perfect so we began our hunting expedition. After Home Depot we tried a half dozen specialty tile shops which all had beautiful and insanely expensive tiles. Then when we were about to give up we stumbled on Maloney Tile, which is basically a small house that is jam packed with tile and there we found our winner, a 12 by 24 inch grey porcelain tile from Italy.

After selecting the tile, it was a simple matter of building a new subfloor, adding a waterproofing/decoupling membrane (rather than cement board), renting a tile saw, laying the tile, and grouting it.

 

In one Saturday we went from no floor to this perfect base for our new kitchen cabinets.