So Tired

I haven't updated in awhile because I have been crazy busy working on the house. I am doing most of the interior finish work so since I last posted I have spent more hours than I can count finishing the and grouting tile, installing the bamboo floor, putting up base board, installing cabinets etc etc etc... My dad has been great, putting in many late nights with me and my brothers in law were really helpful getting a lot of the bamboo down two Saturdays ago.

The metal siding is almost done outside, most of our exterior concrete is in and most of the final grading has been done as well. We are really closing in on this.

Here are a bunch of photos that I'm too tired to narrate, so hopefully they tell the story pretty well on their own.

Am I Bad at Blogging or What?

After the sheetrock was done, things on the inside were turned over to me for the most part. Originally we had planned on doing all the painting ourselves. I hadn't really thought through sealing the windows and doors and after looking into a few products we determined that it would be best to have them spray lacquered. We had a couple of painters that Davido has worked with give us a bid on it. Dave Miller and Dave Burleigh at Allstar Painting gave us such a good bid for that that we decided to also have them spray the primer and a finish coat of white on all the walls and ceilings as well. This saved us a ton of time. In the course of one week we had all the doors and windows sealed and all the walls painted. We still have some walls that we will paint an accent color on but I can't tell you how relieving it was to have the paint 90% done in one week. The painters were great to work with and let me do some of the prep to help keep costs down. They also did an absolutely great job. The combination of a really good paint job with an excellent sheet rock job make the walls look like a million bucks.

We went with a Kwal-Howell product called Envirocoat which is a no-voc paint and it turned out to be a really great product. The walls were given an eggshell sheen and the ceiling got a flat paint. With so much ceiling and no texture anywhere, a flat paint up there will keep light from glaring and make any irregularities in the ceiling less noticeable.

Between helping us prep for paint, Davido and his guys finished up the cedar siding. It looks really great. The mitered corners are a really nice touch. We just hope that they don't shrink up too much. Each board has two coats of sealer on all sides and all cut edges were sealed and all joints were glued, so we think it will do okay.

The painting was done last Friday around noon and as soon as they were done I got working on the tile work. Friday and Saturday morning I got the backer board down and then Saturday afternoon Kersten showed up and helped me start laying the tile down in the bathrooms and laundry room. She was actually really good at it. She's really a good baker and she said that spreading the mortar reminded her a lot of frosting a cake. Saturday we got all the laundry and second bathroom and about half of the master bathroom finished. I was back at it Monday night after work and finished the master bathroom. Then Tuesday night and Wednesday night my Dad came and helped me get the walls around the bath tub in the second bathroom finished. He was a huge help and once we settled on a plan of attack we were able to move pretty quickly. Friday I spent figuring out the rest of the shower pan for the master bathroom shower. Our plumber did the base slope and water proof membrane which had to be inspected by the city a couple of weeks ago but it still needed a mortar layer over top of the membrane for the tile to go on. I used a sand/portland cement mixture that goes in as a dry-pack application. Enough water is added so that it feels a bit like wet sand. It was pretty tedious getting the perimeter edges level and then sloping it towards the drain, but it's done now and I'll start working on the tile for the floor in the shower next.

We went with a 2x2 inch tile mosaic on the floor by American Olean in Ice White with a matte finish. The walls are 3x6 subway tile in the same finish.

Wednesday we got most of our finish electrical work done and even got some lights working. This makes working at night so much easier. We are just waiting for all of our accent lighting to come in and that will be installed. We've got some cool fixtures that we are excited about. Thursday they started installing the ductwork for our air conditioning system. We have radiant heat but really hate the heat, so we are going to have an exposed spiral duct running down the hallway on the first floor that will have registers to cool the first floor and trunks that feed registers in the floor for the up-stairs. We also put an exposed duct in the hallway upstairs to pull all the hot air that will gather at the top of the vaulted space out of the house and cool the house more efficiently. They should be all done on Monday.

Nook

This was the work on the washer-dryer nook over the weekend:


Before giving the beast of a tile saw back to my grandpa this fall, Tai cut all the tile we thought we needed for this little space, anticipating this very weekend and hoping that he could just throw down the cut tile. That cut tile has disappeared. He was able to lay these six tiles, and hopes to snooker some unsuspecting Home Depot or Lowe's employee into cutting the rest...sometime this week?

And this is why I keep saying bratty stuff like, "I want my kitchen back."

Haiku in honor of L'element

Traditional (5-7-5)

You were the greatest
investment we didn't know
we needed to make


We could not believe
Ikea cab'nets fit so
well, until we saw.


Modified

To the bamboo floor
you huffed, "eh, bring it on,"
but your tires rode low.


Free form

Your clean lines evoke minimalism,
but so many people shirk
from your boxiness.


You were cheap and easy —
the only cheap and easy thing
about this remodel.

Countdown

I'm putting this out there to hold myself to it: we want to move in on Dec. 15. That's two weeks from tomorrow.

In those two weeks, we need to do the following:

Install and paint baseboards, paint door trim, install kitchen cabinet doors, install kitchen trim pieces to match cabinet doors, build and install a concrete kitchen countertop, install a kitchen sink, install a kitchen sink disposal, install a kitchen tile backsplash, reseal the tile, build living room bookshelves and fireplace cover, install window coverings, find a plumber and get a washer drain line hooked up to finish the washer-dryer nook, purchase and install a refrigerator, install a bathroom sink and cabinet, install a bathroom mirror, find and install a bathroom light, paint interior of hall linen closet, install hall linen closet doors, install closet shelving systems in two rooms, touch up living room paint, paint inside of living room coat closet, rehang remaining doors, install new doorknobs, find and install kitchen lights, put up a shower rod, install a bathroom fan cover, saw off and cover the toilet floor bolts, caulk baseboard, install threshold pieces between bamboo and tile flooring, replace the bedroom ceiling fan with something better looking, and clean everything.

Oh my.

Tile's Done

I'll spare you all the details, but the tile has been cleaned, sealed, grouted and is done. The grout was perhaps my least favorite thing about remodeling that I have ever done. We used a sealer/enhancer, which turned our gray looking tile to almost black, which is what we wanted.

Once we have stopped making a mess in there, I will seal the tile one more time.

Here are some pictures.

Tai-el, part II

The tile saga continues:

The entryway required a bit more prep before I could get to actually laying the tile down. The subfloor in the entry is concrete, so I couldn't just screw some Hardi-backer down. It needed to be fastened to the concrete with the same thin set mortar that we are using for the tiles. Before I could do that though, there was some old mastic all over the floor that had been used in the condos previous life to glue 1/4 inch particle board down that the carpet sat on top of. This required a lot of chipping. Then I had to make all the cuts to the Hardi-backer to make sure that they all fit before starting with the mortar, since I didn't want the mortar to solidify as I made cuts as I went. Once I made the cuts, I spread the mortar (it took about 35 lbs) and placed the boards. Then once those had set, I was finally able to lay the tiles.


Am I done yet? Nope.


There is still the issue of cutting the tiles. Kersten's grandfather offered us the use of a tile saw, which was great, so on Monday night we went out to his storage unit to pick it up. He said it was heavy but I was completely unprepared for this thing. I had rented a tile saw before, but a rental saw is usually a few years old at the oldest. This thing is at least 20 years old and is HEAVY duty. In a previous life it was used by US Steel to cut through core samples for their mining activities, and it must weigh at least 200 lbs (her grandfather was/is a geologist). The saw collapsed a cart, so to save the garage floor, I had to heft the thing off by myself; it was all I could do to move it about 3 feet inside the garage. It ended up on two sawhorses in my parents' side yard.


I made about 90% of the cuts and then went to the condo and installed them.

Because slate tiles is essentially compressed dirt, it makes a really muddy mess. Now the installed tile needs to be cleaned, sealed and grouted. My goal is to have the tile all the way complete by the end of Saturday...

...which means stay tuned for Tai-el III.

Tai-el

I have been working on the tile in the entry, kitchen and bathroom since last Thursday. Let me just start by saying that this is the last time I work with slate tile again. It looks good, but man, it's a pain to work with. The problem mostly lies in the fact that the pieces are so imperfect. It's the nature of slate that it is a bit of a rustic material. As such, they aren't exactly square and they aren't uniform in thickness either. This makes getting perfect grout lines impossible. So instead, you have to have a margin inside which your grout lines fall. We have been trying to keep them between 1/8" and 1/4".

Last Thursday my dad, who will forever be referred to as "Rockstar Dad," came over and we took the day off and worked on tile to get us started. Even though he didn't have a ton of free time, he took time from his own projects a few days before he left the country to help us out.


We started in the kitchen because we needed frequent access to the tub in the bathroom, which is currently our only water source. By the time my dad had to leave at around 4:30, we had finished almost all of the kitchen, which is about 150 square feet.


Two things kept us from finishing. The first was that we don't have a tile saw on-site, so we left out any tiles that needed to be cut. The second reason was that when I purchased the tile that morning from Contempo Tile, they only had about 120 square feet of the 240 square feet I had ordered currently in stock. The balance would not be available until the next morning. One of the problems with slate being so imperfect, as I mentioned above, is that sometimes you just have tiles that are unusable, and I had run out of usable tiles.

In the kitchen we had been trying to use tile spacers to set the tiles. These are usually great because all you have to do is get your first row in straight and then use the spacers to insure that the rest of your tile goes in straight.


Slate, we discovered, is a different story. After some research on the internet the next day, I came up with a new method. I snapped a chalk line for each row of tile that included the desired spacing between the tiles and then did my best to eyeball the tile within those chalk lines. This allowed me to adjust for tiles that weren't square or uniform in width but still keep my overall tile rows straight.

On Friday I picked up the remaining tile from Contempo and bought some more thin-set mortar to set the tiles in. This time I got the rapid set stuff that dries in 3 hours — they said it was good for smaller jobs. Since all I had left at this point was the bathroom and entry way and filling in the rest with cut tiles, it seemed ideal. I started out by mixing a 25-lb. bag of mortar, since I would normally work with about that much of the regular stuff at a time. This turned out to be quite a mistake. After only laying about 14 tiles, using half of the mortar I had mixed, the rest of it had turned solid and I ended up having to throw it, and the bucket, away. I was pretty frustrated. I found after that that if I would just mix half of a 25-lb. bag at a time it worked perfectly, and it is really nice to have the tiles set up so much faster.


On mixing the mortar. When I picked up the first batch of tile on Thursday I also purchased a mixer (giant egg beater) that you can use with a drill to mix the mortar. This seemed like a wise purchase, since mixing by hand is quite fatiguing. When we went to mix the first batch of mortar on Thursday, it turned out that the 1/2" mixer was too big for the three drills we had on site, all of which are a 3/8" chuck. So, we mixed 100 lbs of mortar using nothing but the strength we possess in our forearms and a putty knife. Not so much fun, so the next day when I picked up the rest of the tile, I bought a mixer that would fit a 3/8" chuck and it's a beautiful thing. My 12-volt DeWalt only has enough juice in a fully charged battery to do about 4 minutes of non stop drilling, so I had to charge between each bucket of mortar.


More later.


(Our version of the Titanic handprint.)

Known carcinogens

Even with all this work on the floor, there were two sections that weren't exactly level. They were spots of the floor where it wasn't practical to repeat the processes we've used on the rest of the floor. One of these was the length of the wet wall in the kitchen, about one foot deep by eight feet long. Another was a little patch in the middle of the floor where the crooked joists didn't line up for enough sub-floor support.

The solution was a batch of self-leveling concrete. This was the warning label:


Having a level floor *might* just be worth the exposure to these known or probable human carcinogens...

Level footed

The lack of posting this week hasn't been due to a lack of work — it's been a week of tedium, frustration, dedication, and eventual reward. (I'm trying to write this with Tai's attitude, seeing as how remodeling is not in my Top, oh, 5,000 favorite activities.)

Tai and his father attacked a lot of the floor last Saturday, but that day's work didn't even begin to accomplish what we needed. If we were working on this project full-time, we would have finished it days ago, but since we're evening and weekend warriors the tasks have been spread out and necessarily sharing time with trips to Lowe's, work, sleep, eating, and episodes of "The Office" and "30 Rock." By the end of Saturday, even though Tai and his father put in a good 10-hour day, we still had a joist-and-fiberglass "floor."


On Monday, we finished leveling and cross-bracing the joists to make sure that we had a sturdy foundation for all that slate tile we're planning. While most of the joists were too low, in the middle of the floor bordering a steel beam two joists were riding about half-an-inch too high. Tai used a bit of the muscle that his sister/trainer helped him develop to plane away the top of the joists on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. He also finished cross-bracing everything Wednesday, setting the stage for one awesome party Thursday night.


Thursday night we screwed all night. Screwed and screwed and unscrewed and rescrewed the crooked screws. We got four of the five sub-floor sheets down and SCREWED IN TIGHT. I cannot communicate how gratifying it was to step on a floor that didn't give, dip, squeak, mush or compress under my foot.


I also cannot communicate how poorly I handle a power drill. Have you ever been lucky enough to have the "help" of a younger relative with a project — that special niece/nephew/child/grandchild who just really wants to help but has no idea what to do and ends up getting in the way and actually creating more work for you? I am that person, only with a more colorful vocabulary.


Tai's rock-star father and his rock-star nail gun came by for more help on Friday. The two of them finished the fifth panel of sub-floor, which was in a tricky corner of the kitchen where we hope to add a washer/dryer unit and additional pantry space. They also framed out the walls necessary for those accoutrement.


The rest of the weekend will require additional fiddling with the framing, dropping a ceiling panel above our future washer/dryer's home corner, and installing hardi-backer (a cement fiberboard subfloor layer) on top of the current subfloor layer. The hardi-backer will form a water-resistant, level layer for the kitchen tile.

Demolition — Days 3 and 4

As promised:


Kitchen in the living room:


Fun times with the bathroom floor tile:


Topless stove — HOTT!


Am I done with the tile yet?


The sink smelled like sewage.


The fireplace adventure (note the fireplace installed ON TOP of the carpet...):

Kitchen

So, the kitchen for the place we are buying needs a little work. And by a little work, I mean that it needs to be ripped out.

The layout is not that great and it is, well, ugly. It feels so cramped and chopped up as it currently is. Here are a couple of photos of the kitchen now.




So, what we want to do is open up the kitchen a little bit. This is a hard task because it is a small space, but we want to take out the island and wrap the kitchen in an L around the wall. We will lose a little bit of the dining area to do so, but I would rather have a more comfortable place to cook and in a 950 square foot condo, you probably don't need a gigantic dining room.

Here are some renderings of what we would like to do using the Ikea cabinets that Kersten mentioned earlier in the blog.




The tile back splash in the rendering isn't exactly what we want to do, but it was the only texture option I had in my rendering program. We would likely do something like this: