BYE BYE TREE - THE CHOPPING DOWN IN IMAGES

BATHROOM ACCENT COLOUR - SELECTED

When it comes to home decor it takes me forever to select anything for my house.  For a client I can do it in no time; myself well it took us 6 months to select a bunk bed, but that is for another post.  This post is about the main bathroom.

When we moved in last December the house had no mirrors; we have been taking our time selecting mirrors for the bathrooms.  In January we selected and purchased the one for the main bathroom; however before putting it up we want to paint the bathroom.  Selecting the accent colour took me another 4 months.  I decided I wanted to paint one wall to match the accent colour of the towels and bathmat.  The image below is the winning colour.  After bringing home 12 different towels and returning them all we found this one at Simons it was exactly the colour I was imagining in my mind.  Now to make the trip to Paint Depot to have them colour match it for my paint.

Image from Simons 

I almost forgot you are probably curious as to what mirror we selected. Trinity from Electric Mirror.

Image from Electric Mirror

C MONSTER'S NEW BEDROOM

To convince C Monster to select the room we wanted for him we told him he could chose the colour we would painted it.  I went to the hardware store and selected a dozen colours for him to chose from; that way it would not end up black.  He selected a colour called "mac n cheese" and the name says it all. 

I ended up needing a little over a gallon to paint his room; bigger house, bigger rooms = more paint required then I estimated.  We picked up the paint at Paint Depot on Queen Street East, I highly recommend them.  As always we used Sico paints; they have a no VOC latex base paint. However the tinting colour added to the base is not VOC free. I will post pictures of his room after the room has all been set up.

A sneak peek at C Monster's Room... 

I OWN 2 HOUSES... WELL FOR A WEEK.

The deal closed and the new house is ours.  We have been over twice now to check the house and move a few things.  Geoff is happy that he now has a garage to store his bike each winter.  However the drive there this AM must have been chilly for him.

BIG RED BOX
When we opened our front door yesterday there was a big red box waiting in the entrance for us.  With FATBOY written in an unmissable font on all sides.  It was Geoff's xmas present.  I ordered it on the 29th at midnight and it arrived in the afternoon on the 30th - that is quick service.  That being said it only took Geoff about 30 mins to remember what a Fatboy is.  No big surprise for Geoff this year...  well he was surprised but 3 weeks early.

FRONT HALL RENO
All in all the house looked as we expected minus a few things; the sellers took the hooks in the front hall with them.  They were not our style so it's really not a big deal the only issue is I now have to buy something soon instead of waiting.  I also have to paint the front hall now as the paint got ripped up when they took off the hooks; once again I really disliked the colour they had chosen for the front hall.  So I guess it will all work itself out.  Stay tuned for more picture of our front hall reno.

stinky and not so stinky

Stinky...

We have been in our home now for 8 years I think and have done reno work on all the rooms... now all we have left is to tie up loose ends - one being the cold air return that is in our front hall.  See it's a large 12" x 36" ugly vent that has old scratched up paint that matches noting in that area - solution paint it.  The only real way to effectively paint a vent is spray paint.  I hate spray paint, it's toxic, it stinks, it's bad for the environment. But when you think about it which one is worst dumping the old vent or painting it?

We decided dumping it would be worst - so we got a can of spray paint.  Today I cleaned the vent and sprayed it ( it was so stinky I had to wear a mask - I though I was going to toss my cookies from the stink) I still don't know if we made the best environmental choice - I guess we could have left it the way it was but I really did not want that.

Not so stinky...

Last week I picked up a Abeego Food Wrap.  I had been looking for a reusable sandwich wrapper for a while now and was so happy when I saw these at Grassroots. So far we have only used it for plain bread and nut butter sandwiches - so far so good.  It does the trick seems to keep your bread fresh and soft.  C Monster loves opening and closing it himself - a plus. Best of all it smells so good - they are coated with beeswax to make them waterproof - it smells divine.

I might even need to get a few of their Abeego Flats.

Looking Forward To

My cold air return vent to be dry and back in the house.

Where have I gone to

Some of you may have wondered where I have gone; well, the answer is: deep into kitchen renovation. About a month ago now our plumbing gave under the sink leaving a flood in my kitchen and we decided to take this opportunity to renovate instead of just patching up a kitchen that was already in shambles.

My mom and dad are down from NB helping (thank you so much). 3 weeks into the reno, my dad is now working on getting the floor ready for my new cork floor. The walls are up and painted; same goes for the ceiling.

I wish we could have done the full kitchen eco-friendly but cost restriction and timing prohibited us from doing so. However I did consider the enviroment at many points in the kitchen reno; below are some of the decisions that we made that are in part green.

1. Cork Floor: When cork is harvested the tree is not destroyed and then replanted but rather the bark is trimmed from the tree every 9 years, leaving the tree and the forest undamaged. Its not unusual to have a 200 year old tree still producing cork bark. Cork flooring is actually made from the waste of the cork wine stopper manufacturing process so cork flooring is a recycled product.
2. Sico Go Prime Duo 100% Acrylic Latex Primer- Sealer and Undercoat: This is a great all purpose primer with less then 78.38g/L of VOC's. I knwo there are some primers out there that have 0g/L VOC however we had some primer left over from a previous project and in our time restraints could not get our hands on anything that had a lower VOC count.
   
3. Sico Paint Chamois: This is a 0g/L VOC paint; however the tint does add some VOC, the darker your paint the more VOC in it. Once again I know more eco-friendly options exist but we had all the paint we needed left over from previous projects.
   
4. I would have loved to get a LED light fixture for the kitchen but the up front cost is too much for us; instead we got a light fixture that could accomodate a compact florecent bulb. When chosing your light fixture make sure to always double check that a compact fluorescent bulb will fit, they are bigger then their incandescent conterparts.
   
5. We are reusing our existing cabinet pulls. We don't have enough to do the full kitchen so the uppers will have the old pulls reused and the lowers are going to have new pulls giving the kitchen a unique fun look.
6. An Ikea kitchen we chose Ikea for a few reasons first they are inexpensive secondly they do have a good enviromental practice. Ikea is not perfect but they do try harder then many companies out there to find out more check out : http://www.theikeaway.ca/en/home.html.

I found a great website with information on non-toxic painting if anyone is interested:
http://www.eartheasy.com/live_nontoxic_paints.htm#2d

On Tongues and Grooves: Hacking Bamboo Flooring

Way back in February, before Christophe came along and took primary position in my spare time, I was installing bamboo flooring in our house.  The bamboo flooring we have is tongue-and-groove (as opposed to click floating flooring, for instance).  One of the things you'll discover if you lay any significant amount of bamboo flooring is that you'll find yourself with a piece that is more than suitable for a particular location, other than the fact that you've already cut the groove off that piece, and a piece with a groove is required to fit into the tongue of the previous piece within that same course.

That's usually no big deal - that piece becomes a good starter piece for a subsequent course instead.  That works as long as you don't get heavily over-subscribed in starter pieces, but you may also find a time when you have neither tongue nor groove on an otherwise usable piece of flooring.  What's a homeowner to do?

In this case, I discovered that our  cheap table saw makes a fine groove.  It takes careful aim and tweaking to get the groove cut, and it's not likely to be perfect, but it doesn't need to be.  The groove is entirely invisible supporting infrastructure for the flooring, so the fact that it may be a little wider than it needs to be or slightly rough is irrelevant, as long as the previous tongue fits into the groove and you haven't weakened the material to the point of irrelevance.

This is surprisingly painless to do, so i'm happy to recommend the process for anyone laying bamboo floor.  If I have to do another one, perhaps I'll capture some video.

Looking Back: January 28th

Almost eight months ago now, I was trying to finish the flooring in the nursery before the little guy came along. Sadly, that was not to be. These are cleat nails, driven through flooring using a pneumatic nailer. You can see a chunk of a row of nails, ready to go into the nailer, as well as a single nailhead in the tongue of the bamboo I was laying, on top of the red rosin paper I was using as an underlayment.

Three more boxes of flooring ready to get laid down. One of these is still unopened, the other is half-used as I finish the floor upstairs. Pierrette already had the closet organized:
Finally, a bamboo plank where you can see the tongue clearly, sitting on top of the red rosin paper:

December Renovation Review

Back in December, we were still doing some tear-down. In the upstairs hallway, I'd peeled back the layers 'til we got to this nice plank subfloor. A little squeaky, but authentic. On top of it was really thin 1/4" ply with some strips around the edges, which I decided to replace:


Downstairs, we still had linoleum and carpet, which we'd just gotten clearance to replace without worrying about asbestos, which was great news:


Mostly, pulling the linoleum was as simple as sticking a prybar under it, hitting it with a mallet, and then prying:

Although you had to be careful not to lose a cat into the cold air return where they could go climb into the furnace ...
Once the linoleum was pried up, I cut it in strips and sealed it with duct tape to be trashed.


The carpet was broadloom rolled-goods, held down with a transition strip that was no match for a prybar:
Although the underpadding revealed some more of our friendly neighbourhood carpet-wormy things.
At the transition to the kitchen, I discovered that the kitchen may have a layer of christmas tiles, red and green. I'm not sure who thought that would be a good idea.
The subfloor was covered with ply, and the ply had some crusty layer of paint or possibly adhesive that I could easily scrape off with the prybar:

So, that's where we were in early December. Things have come a long way in the last month or two.

Finishing the Living Room

I've been working on the living room for the past few weekends. On February 9th, I was almost finished, but we had to go off to a shower (more on that later). When I sink a cleat flooring nail most, but not all of the way into a board, it's very difficult to remove without damaging the flooring, and they're very difficult to drive all the rest of the way in with a nail set, so I'd struggled with a few of these before Shawn suggested that I use a Dremel to cut off any exposed nail surface. That has worked fairly well, so I've been using that strategy ever since. It throws a lovely shower of sparks. I'm not sure what causes some of the sparks to fork in mid-air, but it does make for a good picture.

When you can use the pneumatic flooring nailer, it makes fairly quick work of installing flooring. I'm able to do about three courses in an hour in the living room, and I'm still pretty new at it. When I can't use the flooring nailer, it takes a lot more time. As you get close to the wall, you run out of room, and you need to use another strategy.

Initially, tried using Shawn's brad nailer for this, but it's just not accurate enough for my tastes, and at times the brad nails deflect. Perhaps with a very accurate sense of where the nailer will drop the nail (or a nailer that makes that more apparent) and fewer deflections (better nails? better nailer? not sure...), I'd go this route.

For my uses, though, I only have so much flooring to do, and I found it simpler to pre-drill, put in a spiral nail, and nail-set it. Takes a while, but it takes longer to brad-nail a strip of flooring and then take it out again when it gets screwed up.

Tiling (22-Jan)

So, although we'd been prepping for it for a few days before, on Tue 22-Jan-2008, we finished the tiles. I wasn't expecting it to be noisy, so I started them after work. Unfortunately, in order to set the tiles in place, they suggest that you whack them with a mallet, which is, perhaps not surprisingly, noisy.

So we checked with our neighbours to ensure that it was ok that we continue despite the noise, after the noise limit (7pm). It mostly went well, other than one tile that cracked as we tried to set it, and required a last minute replacement. We were also not able to get the first two tiles completely level, as I probably used a little too much mortar on those. It's also surprisingly difficult to lift a tile from mortar to put it down. It's suggested that you periodically lay a tile then lift it up to check coverage of the mortar, but that's difficult to do when it feels like it's being held down by super-powered suction cups.

Still, all things considered, I'm happy with the results. This is the tiles laid, in mortar, no grout, with tile spacers.

Here's a closeup of a tile spacer in position between four of our tiles:

And finally, my loving wife, with mortar on her knees, threatening to step on the tiles before they're set.

This post is a little late, but I've been busy doing the work instead of posting about it.

Drywall anchors

As we are preparing the house for baby one of the items I needed to do was hang a few shelves on the wall.  I bought these ez-anchors for drywall and I will never go back to those annoying little plastic things.  Anyone that has ever mounted anything in drywall has struggled with getting those stupid little pieces of plastic in the drywall with out bending them.  Well the ez-anchors (that I bought from Home Depot but I am sure you can get anywheres) screw in; no fuss; no mess; perfect in the first shot. You could even do this when baby is sleeping, since no hammering equals no noise.