Tuesday, July 24, 2007

More progress

Well, we got the doors delivered and one of them is now painted and installed. The other one is a bit of an annoying story. As with almost every renovation I've ever heard of, we had a glitch. I order the doors primed and machined to my specs. This way I didn't have to mess with buying new tools and finding a workspace to do everything. So the doors arrive and the bathroom door is next to perfect. I had to trim a little bit to fit the hinges, but otherwise a perfect fit. I painted it and installed it and it was damn sexy. The bedroom door, however, was NOT perfect. I took a look and realized the door would open the wrong way. It was machined wrong. BASTARDS! So I called the store where I got the doors and told them what happened. They replaced the door pretty quick, but since they only deliver during the day on weekdays I had to figure out how to receive them, since I'm usually at work during the day. Luckily I had a day where I had to go to our Surrey office, so I stopped at home on my way there and received the door. The new door is right, so all I have to do is paint it and install it and we're good to go!

I also painted the front door with i think like 4 coats of paint. For some reason the door looks yellowish and the door casing is white... it's annoying. I friggin' primed the thing so this wouldn't happen, and it happens anyway! oh well, still looks better than the fake wood grain crap.

Last weekend we purchased the tile for the bathroom floor and tub walls. For the floor we got a nice 12x24 grey porcelain tile. It sort of looks like slate, but it's more uniform in colour and the surface is flatter. For the tub walls we got a 4x16 white glazed ceramic tile. We'll be laying this in a brick pattern and it should look very nice. We still need to pick up the tile for behind the vanity. We're going to be tiling the wall that the mirror hangs on with multi-shade glass mosaic tiles. it's going to look swanky.

I'll post pictures of the doors and tiles to the gallery later.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Progress!


So Deb and I took this week off from work to do some work on the condo. Originally we were going to do the bathroom, but I blew the budget for that by buying the doors first etc etc. So instead we decided to tackle the hideous situation with the walls.

Ever since we bought the condo, we've had a few walls that looked like someone had been
gnawing at them. They were in rough shape because they had 3 layers of wallpaper on them and that stuff was a bitch to remove. There was still remnants of this paper up until yesterday. Deb took care of washing the walls with TSP and scraping the paper bits while I patched up the walls with drywall compound. After that I went at it with the sandscreen (I bought a vacuum-pole sander... what a great decision that was!) and then primed the walls that had been patched. To say it's an improvement is an understatement! We still have 2 more walls left, but we're getting there.

The other thing we did this week was tear out the old closet "system" we had in the bedroom. It was made with old particle board that has since warped and is not really good for holding anything heavy. So we tore that garbage out, patched, primed and painted the walls and tomorrow morning we're installing the Rubbermaid Configurations closet system. It's not the fanciest system, but it's a HUGE improvement and it'll organize the closet better.

^^^^^ OLD!^^^^^




NEW--------->


We also primed the front door so we can paint it up when we figure out what our colours are going to be. The wood grain look is ugly.



We get our new bedroom and bathroom doors delivered tomorrow, so I'll post pics of those when we get them.

All in all, I'm very pleased with the progress we've been making this week.

There are more pics at our Picasa photo gallery