14 March
This is what the fireplace looked like when the house was completed three years ago. Nice if you like brick and rough-cut stone, and a mantel that appears to be floating in space.
14 March
This is the dust barrier we put up between the kitchen and the family room. I'll be generating some dust, first as I clean the existing subfloor to get it ready for the new floor. And later, when I'm sanding drywall compound. We want to keep as much of that dust contained as possible. The zipper is a cute touch. Kinda pricey, but it is very convenient.
14 March
Here, the framing is nearly complete. The plywood block in the center provides a nailing target for a picture hanger. And the plywood across the bottom is where the new mantel will be fastened. Granite will cover the bottom portion, and the hearth will be granite as well.
14 March
This is the oak strip flooring we'll be laying, 350 square feet of it. We've almost finished laying a second layer of subfloor, and you can see that we've stopped the lower left. We wanted to have the oak in the house as long as possible, so it could equilibriate with the humidity level in the house.
15 March
We've been trying to decide what color to paint the room. Tina has brought home over a dozen quarts of different colors now, and tried them all out on one wall, as you can see. The most recent choices are in the center. We looked in the gold/brown family earlier, those are the stripes that have been painted over with a whitewash. It looks like something in a blue-grey-green would be nice, and go well with our furniture.
16 March
Last night, we put up the drywall and started spackling. This is what it looks like this morning. I'm no drywall installer, but I think it will come out OK. We also scheduled the granite installation for next Wednesday. That will be an exciting day!
17 March
Happy St. Patrick's Day! Well, I've settled on a two-a-day spackling schedule. Horizontal joints in the morning, vertical in the evening (I DO have a day job, after all!). Here you can see the results of this morning's attempt. I really am not very good at this, so I'll probably have to sand quite a bit. I've already used up the 12-pound bucket of joint compound we bought for the project.
21 March
The scaffold is gone! We spent two long days this past weekend working to get to this point. I finished the drywall work, and we got the right-hand two-thirds of the room painted, all with two coats of that lovely grey-green. The line of blue painter's tape over the window on the left will serve to put a clean line on the wall when we paint it. The transition from wall to ceiling there is not very sharp, and there is no way we'd be able to cut that in by hand.
23 March
The painting work is done. The line above the window on the left looks great. Now I'm patiently waiting for the granite installation.
23 March
We have granite! We are so pleased with how this looks. Tina and I debated the design, and I provided drawings to the fabricator. They came out a few weeks ago to measure and inspect the installation site. Today, they brought in the cut material and installed it. We think it is gorgeous! Now I need to design and build a mantel.
28 March
The gas insert was installed earlier today! Its is a dreary, rainy day today, and this camera is having trouble with the low light, so this picture doesn't look that great. I'll have a better picture here soon.
28 March
Now you can see what the fireplace changes look like, almost completed. The mantel is still to be installed. I'd better get going on a design!
9 April
Here's a shot showing the flooring in progress. Tina is measuring a piece to make the end of a row. You can see the pneumatic flooring stapler and mallet behind Tina, and a few rows of flooring laid out, waiting to be stapled down.
We started laying the floor in the center of the room. The tongue side of the planks face away from the starting point, and the staples go in on that side. We'll put a spline in the groove of the first row so the strips to the left of center will be oriented properly.
18 April
The floor is done! It took a full weekend plus 4 evenings to lay all of the strips that could be set with the pneumatic stapler (once we got to the last eight strips on each side, we were too close to the wall to swing the mallet.) Then, another weekend to lay the last eight strips on each side. I angle-nailed through the tongue using my 15-gague finish nailer, as long as I could get the nailer into position. The last four strips were then face-nailed using the finish nailer.
Still to do: the baseboards and shoe mouldings. And the fireplace mantel ...
By June ...
This is the "finished" room, furniture and all. We're not really done. We don't like the furntiure all that much. We need tables, and maybe some window treatments too.