Sinking the sink

You may remember from the before video, the dramatic moment where I showed off the awesome kitchen faucet. The hand sprayer hand completely come off and all there was was the left over tube that retracts into the faucet neck. If you werent careful it would spray all over you when you turned it one. All of us had been soaked at least once.


First I had to remove this crusty old thing. Die faucet die! I rendered it useless in the process as you can see.


Since I (Doug) am all about the kitchen, I wanted this cool new faucet from Delta. It has "Touch" technology. You may have see the commercial for it. It comes with a lot of parts. Notice the wires and batteries. This thing is pretty high tech.


It works! Notice the cool blue light at the base of the neck. It glows when the the water valve is open. All you have to do to turn it off is touch it.

All I need to do now is add the soap dispenser on the left side. I will show you that and how the faucet works in the "after" video (coming soon).

Pizza Pizza

So we decided to try our new convection oven out... To test it, we baked our favorite frozen pizza. This is the "Culinary Circle" rising crust pizza from Albertson's.


First you must preheat the oven. Here I am trying to figure out how to use the touch control panel. I just accidentally set it to bake the pizza for 23 hours. Oops...


You have to make sure that all of the peperoni are not hanging over the edge. I am excited to be using my special pizza pan. It has holes in it to give the crust a little crispiness. It did not fit in our old oven so this is a great moment for us.


It's going into the oven! I see you eying those cabinets... Don't worry, we'll be posting on the kitchen later this week.


Yummy! You can even see the convection fan in the back. That is really all there is too it. It's an oven with a fan in it. The hot air blows all around ensuring a nice even bake. No more burnt crust with undercooked peperoni.


Ooh Bubbly...


"Honey...dinner!" We broke out the fine china for this glorious event.

Come over some time and we'll bake a pizza for you..

Storage Solution

One of our challenges with this small house is storage. The hallway (and I use the term "hallway" loosely) originally had some shelves which were set into a little nook next the the bathroom door (refer to "before" video).

We took out those shelves and bought a tall, narrow wardrobe cabinet from Ikea. The only problem was that the cabinet was about four inches too deep for the space. I decided I could cut it so we bought it anyway.

After cutting four inches off the back of every piece I assembled the cabinet like normal with a few small modifications.


Here it is all ready to go into the nook. You can see the holes I cut for the electrical outlet and the gas line that sticks out.


Ikea sells shelves for this unit but they are a bit pricey. All you have to do is go to Home depot and get a piece of melamine shelving. They sell all different sizes. From this piece I was able to cut 5 shelves.


Add a few shleving posts (from any hardware store) and the shelves pop right in. Sorry Ikea, you don't get my money for this one... but we'll be back...again...


We liked this cabinet because it left some space on the side for things like brooms, dust mops, the ironing board, etc.


Here is the cutout with the electrical outlet showing through. Picture the iron sitting in here nicely hidden away and ready to go.


Here is the gas line at the bottom. This is connected to the wall heater on the other side. The nice thing is that it is hidden in the cabinet so nobody will ever see this ugly thing.

We can't wait to fill these shelves with towels, extra blankets, cleaning products, and any other things that need to be stored away in a nice clean place.

Just wait until you see what we did with the bedroom closet...

Bathroom Details

Before moving in, it is important that the bathroom be fully ready to go. This way we can get ready for work in the mornings. Here are all of the finishing details that have been patiently waiting to go into our wonderful little bathroom.

You may be wondering what is going on in this picture... Well, before you attach your toilet paper hanger permanently, it is a good idea to test it out at that level. Nothing gross here but we actually taped it to the wall and took turns doing the reach test to get the location right. If your toilet paper is too hard to get to, that can be a problem for obvious reasons. Moving on...


Here I am installing a curved shower curtain rod. This will give a little more elbow room than a normal rod. Always make sure your shower curtain rod is level!


Next to the toilet paper hanger is the double towel rack. There is very little space between the back wall and the shower so the double rod is crucial to make sure that we can hang all of our towels.


These are the new door hooks. Picture some bath robes hanging out here.


The hand towel hanger...


New shower head...


Here are some glass shelves that we added above the toilet. This will help with our storage issues. And they work nicely with the glass tiles...


This mirror/medicine cabinet was actually a wall mounted cabinet, but I modified it with my jig saw and made it slide into the wall. This way it does not stick out so far off the wall. Now there is a nice deep storage area behind the mirror.


This faucet is nice because the neck swivels. This will be great when we are trying to clean the sink or share the counter while getting ready and brushing our teeth and all of that fun stuff.


We took out the old pedistal sink and added this nice cabinet and sink top. Now we have plenty of storage under the sink. So we bascally went from two shelves before to a sink cabinet, three wall shelves, and a deep medicine cabinet. This will hopefully really help meet our storage needs. Anything alse can be stock piled in the new hallway cabinet (To be posted on later).

*Disclaimer: This picture is a bit out of focus. I took it, not Laura. So if you are thinking of hiring her to take pictures have no fear.


Here is how it looks with the shower curtain and the towels all working together with the colors of the tiles. We hope you like it.

Stay tuned this week. We are moving in over the next couple days and I am going to be posting some of the projects and things that have been happening these last few weeks since we have kicked it into overdrive.

Details: Moldings, Blinds, and Curtains

We are very close to actually moving into this house that we have owned for over three months now. Before we do, there is some detail work to do. One major step in the finishing of the interior is molding. We put all new trim moldings around all of the doors, windows, and floors. We even installed crown molding in the living room.
To save time and effort, we painted the molding before installing it. This way we only needed to touch it up after it was installed and caulked. Here I am cutting a piece of crown moulding. It is crucial to have a compound miter saw when doing this. Installing crown molding is a geometric nightmare. Every cut requirs 10 minutes of pure concentration. It is very easy make the cut in the wrong direction. Don't I look serious about this?

To make the work easier, I purchased a pnuematic brad nailer. I already had a small air compressor so it was all I needed. A little glue and a couple of brads and the molding will stay right where you want it.

The trick with crown molding is getting the corners right. Without perfectly square walls you can easily get a connection like this. One option is to use a scrap piece and keep trying different angles until it is right and then do the cut on the actual piece. I did not have any extra pieces so I went with the "fill it in" option.

All it took was a little "Fix-all" patch comound and some sanding...
Add some caulk on all of the edges and seams and little touch up paint...

and now you have a beautiful corner. Nobody will know your walls are not pefect (who's are?).

We also installed all of the window treatments (minus the sliding door). For the two sets of French doors in the front we used shear curtains which will add privacy but still allow a good amount of light to come in.

For the bathroom and bedrooms we used composite 2 inch blinds. They install very easy. Just attach these brackets in the corners of the window frames...


...lift the blinds into place, and now you have a nice finshed look.


Here are the bathroom blinds (nice to have some privacy).

Here are the blinds looking good in our second bedroom. Notice the moldings around the windows and the floors. Just wait until you see it with the floors all exposed and polished.

What are those blue things you ask? You'll just have to wait for our "Kitchen Finishing Touches" post (coming soon...we hope...).

Now We're Cookin'

It was finally time to put our new convection oven/range in its place. It had been sitting in the middle of the living room for weeks. We were done painting the lower kitchen cabinets (to be posted on soon) so it was finally safe to install it.
Here it is with the box off. You'll notice that the sides are exposed. This is because the whole unit slides in and the sides are not ever seen. We had to actually disconnect it from the bottom of its box so we could move it into place. (Do you like our entertainment center on the left?)


Here we are trying to lift it off of the base of the box. It is tricky doing this without breaking the top.


Once we got it to the opening, I slid in behind to connect the gas line.


You always want to use this special pipe sealant to avoid gas leaks. We wouldn't want that...


Now you just push it in... easier said than done.


To lower the top you just retract the wheels using your power screw driver.


This may require getting on the ground. If you are lucky, it will lower nicely and make contact with the counter on all three sides. This one gave us some trouble, but after a lot of tweaking, I got it to fit perfectly. (Tweaking required a couple of screws, a hammer, and a shop vac).


All of the grates and shelves are on the inside for shipping. We'll leave them in there until we are ready to turn this thing on and really get cookin'.


Here it is sitting nicely on the counter. This "Slide-In" model is great becuase the controls are all on the front and nothing stands up in the back which would interfere with the bar top. Doesn't it look great with the color of the bar top? The front is stainless steal. It has a white protective film on it in this picture.

For now we are keeping all of the protective cardboard and film on until we finish up the remaining kitchen details. Stay tuned to see what it looks like with the rest of the completed kitchen. Come over and we might just bake you some cookies (on the "Convection Bake" setting of course).