Adventures in Remuddling

This is our living room

This is Tig unable to do our living room for a few days

Continue reading “Wounded Knee” »

Where have I gone? I’m going to my day job to pay for all the renovations!

Kidding aside, we haven’t been posting as much as we used to (especially me). Tig has been very strict about only posting house-related topics, he doesn’t like “blog creep”. Blog creep is like style creep in a fund manager, or mission creep in a foundation. It’s when a blog starts out about one topic, but then evolves into other topics and general on-line journaling. Not that there’s anything wrong with it; he just wants to keep things focused.

Continue reading “Where have I gone?” »

Well I’m back on my feet working again, maybe not at 100%, but good enough to do some damage.

The living room project requires some preparation before the real work can begin. This means laying down red rosin paper for floor protection and sealing off the doors to the other rooms. Here I used plastic sheeting and taped it to the trim. The goal is to isolate dust and debris; once all the work is done, I just peel the red rosin and the plastic away for easy cleanup.

Next step is to upgrade the electrical wiring.

Continue reading “Living Room Prep & Rough Electrical Work” »

The master gardener (who is also the general contractor) has been recovering from a knee injury. As a result, our status in our neighborhood has sunk to a new low. Weeds have been growing like - well, weeds - through our hedges which have not been trimmed in ages.

Continue reading “Not keeping up with the Joneses” »

Here’s how I fixed the cracks in the ceiling and walls of our living room:

Here’s the crack in the ceiling. It actually runs the whole length of the room (essentially cutting the ceiling in half).

The first step I took was to widen the crack. Yes, you actually have to make it worse before it can get better (this seems to happen a lot in home renovation, whether you want it to or not).

Continue reading “Fixing the Cracks in the Living Room” »

The ceiling fan originally was located in the kitchen. Given the small size of the kitchen, the fan made it feel cramped.

The fan in its original spot in the kitchen.

We decided to move it to the living room, where a breeze would be more useful. First, I shut off all circuits.  After taking a while to figure out how to remove the fixture, I finally disconnected it and got it off. The fan blades were coated with cooking grease and dust. Just delightful. I had to spent a few hours giving it a good scrub.

Continue reading “Transplanting the Ceiling Fan” »

After the living room was prepped for electrical and plastering, we moved on to priming and painting.

Continue reading “Living Room - Painting” »

Meet Stubby:

This is my favorite brush; I use it all the time. Some of the virtues I extol are:

Continue reading “Ole Stubby” »

Living room before.

Continue reading “Living Room - Before and After” »

It’s been over a year since we’ve moved into our home. Recently we’ve begun to think about frivolous things such as hanging up pictures. We currently have a blank wall space above our living room sofa measuring about seven feet wide and five feet tall. For inspiration, Pottery Barn has an entire book devoted to displaying photos. Apartment Therapy had some good information, including a post about a company that sells a packaged system for your picture hanging project. Of course, we opted for the do-it-yourself route.

First, we decided on simple IKEA Ribba frames because they were reasonably priced, and because this is a budget project (not aspiring to be the Met here). To go even cheaper, we could shop thrift stores and collect our frames over time. Given that everything takes us way longer than we imagined, we thought it best to take the easy route and design with stock frames. I took down the measurements of all the various frame sizes and then got to work designing.

Tig whipped out his computer aided drawing program and outlined a seven foot by five foot rectangle (roughly the size of our living room wall). Then he drew one of each frame size and made multiple copies of each. After he was satisfied, he printed the computer drawings and labeled each frame size. We cut the frames out with low-tech scissors (yes, we could have accomplished the same thing with graph paper and pencil). Here I am arranging the frames in various configurations in the “wall space”.

Continue reading “Frivolous Frames and a Freebie” »