Sorting out Details

I've been obsessing the last week or so about getting our soapstone slab from Sacramento, California to Portland, Oregon. When we remodeled the kitchen in 2012, we bought a "remnant" from Teresina Soapstone that was enough for our proposed bathroom project.. At the time, we planned to get to the project sooner, but we all know how that went..... LOL

Anyway, fast forward two years and Teresina has been bought out by Sierra Soapstone and they don't ship soapstone. They did tell us they have a job next week in Gold Beach, Oregon and offered to bring our soapstone up there. So, now we are trying to work out how to transport it from Gold Beach to Portland.

We are getting quite the education. Apparently you cannot transport soapstone horizontally, but are supposed to transport it on an A-frame or on its edge. I researched the cost to rent a full size pickup and we're going to drive down to Gold Beach. We're hoping to borrow an A-frame from our local fabricator, but we'll build one if we have to. Once that slab is safely tucked in at Portland Marble Works, we'll start demo.

And I guess I better figure out the dumpster soon.

For kicks, Jeff and I have been goofing off with the idea of building a gaming lair in our basement that is inspired by this. It would be a fun way to use a bunch of the salvaged parts we have kicking around in our basement.

Last Door!

I have started stripping paint on the last painted door! This is the upstairs bathroom door and since the floor up there is inaccessible, I figured this was as good a time as any to get started stripping paint.

I've been working on this project in short bursts, like an hour or two at a time. I am not going to ruin my hands again; it took 2 weeks for them to heal last time. Also, the forest fires are pretty bad in Oregon so we have an advisory to avoid prolonged outdoor activities.

After about 4 hours in, it got pretty tempting to have this door dipped, but then I remember all the other doors we had dipped came back with the large top panel cracked. Apparently when these doors were made they pieced the wood for the top panel and they come unglued with the soaking. Besides, I would rather spend bathroom budget on tile.

I just keep telling myself I can do this ONE LAST TIME!!

Sewing Room Window Coverings

When I got a sale email today from the company we previously ordered blinds from, I realized I really should think about how to cover the windows in the sewing room. It really isn't good for that cherry furniture to have the sun beating down on it all day.

My first inclination was to order blinds as I did for the other two rooms, but when I went and checked their website it looks like they're not carrying the same options anymore and I couldn't get the same stain color. So, that got me wondering if I could salvage the Roman shades I made for Redwood City. (My father removed them about a year after we moved out and returned them to me.)

They are, of course, not the right size for the windows here. But I made three panels for that bedroom and I have two windows in my sewing room, so I should have more than enough materials once I take them apart. I'm sure it would make more sense to just make new shades, but I did like these and the colors would play well with my sewing room and I don't think I have enough of the peach to make new panels from scratch. In fact, I'm not sure if I have any left or not. I guess I will find out when I unpack my fabrics in a couple of weeks.

More than likely if I tear them apart, I would remove the blackout liner so they let light through like the other set I made. I think it's pretty and looks a bit like stained glass.

What do you guys think? Tear apart the old ones, or just ditch them and make new window coverings from scratch?

New-to-Us Dining Room Set

Jeff didn't like our old rectangular dining room table, so I occasionally poked around on craigslist for a replacement set; last week I found one. It is clearly not new. The previous owners were up front about having enjoyed this set for 12 years. It is solid cherry and was made by Amish Heritage Furniture. (Apparently they used to have a store in Portland.)

We had a few days to sell off our old set on craigslist and I set a pretty low price to get it gone fast. It worked; it went the next day. And fortunately, there was a pretty small difference between their prices.

We lucked out and the seller needed to rent a truck for work so he offered to bring it to us. Score!! (Excuse the mess in the dining room, it's still full of construction supplies, i.e. tile.)

Tragically, those table runners I made won't fit the new table. Oh well. I wonder if I can turn them into something else; maybe place mats. LOL

In other news, our floor refinisher had a change of schedule and he is working on my sewing room floor this week.

Maybe not the most intelligent thing to do right before we demo the bathroom, but I can't deal with not having my sewing and guest rooms for the next many months. We will protect it well before we start demo.

Basement Bath Mirror

I am pretty excited about our latest finished project for the basement bathroom: A Mirror!

I'm proud of Jeff for doing such a good job on what is really his first solo woodworking project (excluding the rustic workbench out in the garage). He used the same router bit to finish the edges as we used to build the linen cabinet doors which matched the existing cabinetry in the house.

For this project, I wanted a beveled mirror to match all the other mirrors in the house so I bought this relatively cheap plastic framed mirror from Walmart. Yuck, that plastic frame is awful. Do folks actually hang these as is in their houses?

It was actually a bit of a trial to remove the mirror from the frame without breaking it. It was mounted really well in that frame, with glue and everything.

We dug around our garage for narrow fir scraps and we had plenty. Most of our fir is a little thin though because it has all been planed, so it was quite a challenge for Jeff to get the depth of the bit set up correctly. There was not a lot of room for error.

This particular router bit was designed for cabinet doors, so the channel in the wood was a little thick for the mirror. It sort of wiggled back and forth, so Jeff made these tiny pieces of wood that fit in the channel and locked the mirror in place.

It was a bit of a challenge to get the rails and stiles sized exactly right. It took a few trial fits...

...but Jeff eventually got it just right and then glued the mirror.

I stained and shellacked it over the last couple of days and we got it hung up tonight. I'm really happy with how it looks.

We've also started receiving hardware I ordered. Tonight Jeff hung up the towel ring. After I paint the door, we're going to put a couple hooks on the back of it for hanging towels. We're still waiting for the mission register covers I've ordered.

This bathroom is almost ready to be our primary bathroom temporarily while we remodel the upstairs bathroom starting in a few weeks. We've been spending a lot of time the last few days running around looking at floor tile and shower doors and scheduling appointments for estimates. I do believe we're getting close to being ready to demo.

Sifting Tile Again

I had plans to work on other projects today, but I got distracted looking through the many boxes of tile again. I've been working on getting quotes for the tile install in our master bathroom and I'm trying to finalize details of the plan. And once I found this cool tile set, I've been trying to figure out a way to use it.

I made quite the mess in the dining room. LOL (We sold our oak dining room set. We bought a new-to-us cherry set that we're getting next week, but that's for another post.)

I found this nice set of tiles, but tragically (again) there is not enough tiles. It would also look good.

One of the tiles has a different brown color, and one has a blue smudge in the corner, so there are really only 5 usable tiles with the design on it. But there are like 35 of the brown stripe tiles so perhaps someone will be interested in this set. I'll probably end up putting them on craigslist. Or if no one wants them, I may put them at the door into the basement. That would be pretty hilarious to have this pretty tile at the dog's door. (I'd even have the stencil that matches.)

Anyway, I think I worked out a plan to use the other flower border in our bathroom where I just end it at the shower. I realized that once we install rain glass in the shower enclosure we really won't be able to see the tile inside the shower and I can live with plain tile in there.

I really liked this plan with the yellow tile strip but (again) we don't have enough of the yellow. (drat)

 We have plenty of the bright white trim pieces, but they won't work either. The field tile is historic white so the bright white doesn't match. If we have to, we'll cut down field tiles into strips and use those. LOL

I'm pretty sure we have at least twice the amount of historic white field tile we need to tile this bathroom so we ought to be able to figure something out.

More Basement Bath

We got a pretty in the mail today; a chrome waste bin. It's quite nice looking with a slight hammered look. I bought this off of Amazon and I'm happy that it is real metal. Often when you buy stuff that looks like metal in a picture, it's actually plastic when you get it. I'm probably going to buy another one for the master bath.

I also did a little spray painting project. The floor has this weird hole and cover in it. Very ugly and I'm not exactly sure what it is. Maybe it is the old plumbing.

I've been trying to find a chrome drain cover for it, but the hole is too big for most standard sizes. I've spent far too long on google surfing for options to replace this ugly thing.

So, instead, I decided to try just spray painting it. It was about $10 for the two cans of paint. I followed the advice of this blog and bought plastic primer to use before the metallic paint.

I'm not really sure if this is better because it really makes it POP visually. I guess we will see if it bugs us. I may try and buy some tan paint that matches the flooring better and give that a try if I end up hating the chrome.

Jeff also worked on a basement bathroom project today, but it's not quite done. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have something else to show.