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).

Bar Counter Top Extravaganza!

When we bought this house, there was a small opening in the wall between the kitchen and the living room. In this opening was a small granite counter. You might remember from the "before" video that the counters all had a rough edge.

Here it is close up.


Notice the hand chipped edge. (very rustic)


We had our granite guy come and smooth out the edges so they looked nice like this.


The granite guy decided to remove the piece in the opening and smooth it out while it was off the wall. Well, it broke. He offered to replace it and then suggested we make the opening bigger. He even offered to make it 18 inces wide like a bar top. We took him seriously and opened the whole wall up.


We even went to his workshop in Gardena and chose a granite color for the bar counter top from his scrap pieces of granite. We decided to go with a darker color that would play off the dark tones in the other granite and work with some of the colors in the living room. Here are the two granite samples next to each other. The existing color is on the left and the bar counter is on the right. The brown tones will match our couch and flooring nicely.


Here is the crazy part of the story:

We could not get a hold of the granite guy when we tried to have our new counter delivered. All of his numbers were not working. He literally fell off the face of the earth. My mother-in-law (Mom 2 as I call her) decided we should drive down to his shop (since we actually knew where it was) and see what was going on. When we got there, we spoke to a man who was working. Good thing mom 2 speaks Spanish. We asked what happened to the main guy. He didn't seem to really know.

I looked at the counter he was working on and realized it was ours (shocker!). I asked for a tape measure and noticed that it was 8 feet long instead of 88 inches like we requested (I originally told the granite guy to write down the measurements but he did not... He said he would remember them..). This nice man at the shop said he would cut it shorter and that it would be ready by 1:00pm. Somehow he believed that this counter top belonged to us. I guess we look very trustworthy.

So we went to target (2 different locations), had lunch at Red Robin (My fav), and went back to the shop at 1:00pm.

They were just finishing polishing it up when we got there. Rather than wait for them to bring the counter and install it, we decided to grab it and go (everything had been paid for anyway).

Here it is in the back of the car.


I had to get the area ready where the counter would go. Here are the brackets that we chose.


Plywood goes under the granite. We stained the bottom brown since it is slightly visible while sitting on the couch in the living room. This way it will not be noticed easily.


The plywood gets attached to the top of the wall.


It took all four of us to hoist this thing on the wall. This picture is staged since Laura had to step away to take it. It must weigh about 200 pounds. Underneath I put some construction adhesive even though it probably would not be coming off that wall ever. The top slips right over the plywood. The edge hides the plywood nicely (the edge of the counter is twice as thick as the main part).


Doesn't it look great?


Here is the side view.


And now from the kitchen. We love it! This is where we will be eating since there is no room for a dining room table in this cute little house.

So that is our crazy story about the counter top that just happened to be made the day we decided to randomly show up at the shop that did not know we were coming. And, they actually gave it to us. How did that happen? I thought we were going to be eating off of a plywood counter for a while. We are just so glad it is here!

We hope you will come and dine with us in the near future and help us enjoy this miraculous addition to our home.