Gates Reno

I watched as the doors were all hung, and everything looked all right to me. Without the molding around the doors, they looked weird anyway, so I didn’t notice anything amiss. I did notice that they were not flush with the walls, but since they were all being done that way, it didn’t look like a mistake.

When the door hardware started getting installed, that’s when we realized that there was a problem:

That’s right, with the door set back from the wall, the strikeplate didn’t extend past the door casing like it was supposed to. Mr. Architect came over to take a look and started asking questions as to why they were doing the doors recessed, not flush. Turns out that in a drawing detailing the molding that was to go around the doors, the doors were shown recessed, but in the drawing detailing the doors, the doors were shown flush, and that was the one that the contractor was supposed to follow. Oops.

They could have left the doors the way they were, but then we wouldn’t be able to use the strikeplates that came with the door hardware. It’s not a common finish, and it would have been difficult to find larger strikeplates that matched the hinges and knobs.

So, all of the doors had to be rehung flush. This meant that every hinge had to be moved about 1/2 inch on the door frames,

and every door casing had to be rebuilt. Now they are all flush.

But that’s not the end of the door problems:

If you look closely you can see that the top screws don’t go in all the way. Apparently we were sent the wrong faceplates. Or the wrong inside part. The top screw holes in the faceplates don’t match up with the holes in the big metal part that goes inside the door. At first the company said that they would just send us shorter screws, but something weird is going on. We don’t think we were sent what we ordered. We thought that these would be regular old indoor locking knobs, and we’re pretty sure we’re supposed to have the small faceplates that they sent us. Instead, they appear to be, possibly, entrance sets with big deadbolts (and faceplates that are too small).

If that’s the case, then we have a problem, because a space has already been carved out of all of the second floor doors to hold the big metal mechanism, and if the ones we actually need are smaller, I’m not sure what we’re going to do.

This was what the old opening directly above the staircase looked like. Whatever used to be in that space was long gone by the time we got here (stained glass I guess? Was that the norm?).

Not wanting to spend much of our budget at this point on something purely decorative, that would never be touched or used, we opted for a plain piece of frosted plexiglass.

I took the pic at night to show the opening in the roof in comparison with the plexiglass – it was placed flush with the rest of the ceiling, as opposed to whatever used to be there which had been much closer to the roof opening and much smaller. Here’s one from daytime (hard to get a really sunny one this time of year):

Someday, way far in the future, it would be great if we could replace that with something more interesting. But for now it does the job, and looks pretty cool in its own way.

So I ventured down to the garden floor to see what was going on with the doors. It reminds me of junior high school wood shop down there. I have the overwhelming urge to make a heart-shaped mirror shelf with a little dowel to hold a roll of adding machine paper.

First, they build the frame around the door and mark off where the hinges will go.

To make space for the hinges on the doors and the frames, they use a tool that carves out about 1/8th of an inch to allow for the thickness of the hinge.

However, since the little spinny thing in the tool makes rounded corners,

they have to chisel out a squared corner for my squared hinges.

And voila, the doors have hinges.

PS for the people who inquired about the door hardware on the moving wall:

I had been getting quite a workout each time I opened or closed the moving wall between the back bedrooms, as it was very difficult to move. Having never had a moving wall, though, I thought that perhaps this was normal. It’s a huge, heavy, solid core piece of wood, so it didn’t occur to me to complain. But when Mr. Contractor came by and opened it, he didn’t like what was happening. Not only was it too hard to move, but the studs were rubbing the paint off the door in a couple of places.

He had his guys open the wall and try to fix it. They tried sanding the studs, and taping them up at the places where they were rubbing, but nothing was helping.

So, Mr. Contractor had his guys open up the wall completely and re-hang the track that the door hangs from so that it was perfectly centered.

Now it glides open and closed, with no rubbing.

Anyone expecting to see a picture of our first dead mouse, I’m sorry. I took one, and was going to post it, but Omer doesn’t want any rodent snuff pictures on the blog. If I don’t respect his wishes, he may not empty the RatZapper next time.

I was disappointed this morning that the RatZappers were empty. I really expected to catch one the first night. But when I checked them this morning, no red lights. A few minutes ago, though, I opened the door under the sink to get a garbage bag, and actually shrieked when I saw the light blinking. I continued to shriek while calling for my husband and looking for the camera.

I feel bad. Poor little guy didn’t even get to eat any of the food, it was all still there.

Definitely a fan of the RatZapper. Mighty slid right out into the garbage can, no mess. I hope it was as quick and humane as the company claims.

One thing that happens occasionally is that we’ll go away for a couple of days, and something major will happen, and we will miss out on documenting it. This happened twice recently.

We took the kids out of town while their bedrooms were painted. Seemed like we wouldn’t miss anything much. I mean, pictures of people painting? Please. Nothing to see here.

However, while the guys were prepping the ceiling of the back bedroom, they discovered that it was mostly rotted out and would need to be replaced. I hate calls like that. Basically, all you can do is say “How much will that cost?” and then bend over, because it’s not like you can skip it. “Yeah, you know what, why don’t you just leave it the way it is. Yeah, I know that a child sleeps under that ceiling, but we’ll take our chances.” Of course you can’t do that. So, the ceiling was removed and done over.

The other thing we missed (and this was a big bummer) was the stair railings and spindles being removed. Not only did we miss this happening, but we didn’t even know that it was going to happen.

I guess I should start from the beginning. When we bid this job out to Mr. Contractor, everyone was running under the assumption that the original floors would be kept, sanded, stained, and polyurethaned. These items were included in the bid. When we decided to replace the floors, and Mr. Contractor was trying to come up with a price for that, he had to add the cost of the labor for laying the plywood sub floor and the new floors, and the cost of materials. We got a bit of a credit for the staining labor, since we chose a wood that we didn’t want to have stained. The sanding and poly labor was a wash, since those had to be done no matter what.

The new floors were an unexpected cost, and we were trying to keep that cost down as much as we could, and that was how we were talked into not having the floors laid around the stair spindles. Mr. Architect said that this was something that was sometimes done when people didn’t want to go through the hassle and cost of taking off the railing and spindles to lay the floors underneath. Instead, the new floor would end a few inches from the spindles, with some kind of decorative edge.

I didn’t like this idea, but said OK anyway. The more I thought about it though, the more I hated it, and told Mr. Architect and Mr. Contractor that we had to find another solution. So, we decided that the new floor would be cut to go around each and every spindle. They thought that this would be easier and cheaper than taking off the railing and spindles and then having to trim the spindles to account for the new floor height.

When we got home, though, we could see that the floors had been laid completely underneath the spindles. It looked fabulous!

We asked what had happened, and were told that when it came time to cut the new floor around the spindles, the floor guy balked. Ms. Architect told him that it was his choice, cut around or remove the spindles, but that the price couldn’t go up. Luckily for us, he chose to remove the spindles. When it was time to put them back, he cut each one at the top to account for the new floor height, so that the railing would be at the correct height to match up with the railing all the way down, since the stair tread heights aren’t changing, and the parlor floor probably will not be replaced (fingers crossed!).

So, I had convinced myself that our mouse problems were over. I had ordered a couple of RatZappers, but by the time they got here it had been two weeks since I had seen any mouse droppings, and I had convinced myself that the exterminator’s poison bait had worked.

However, I woke up this morning to find this:

I guess I hadn’t cleaned up after Thanksgiving dinner as well as I thought.

So, I just set the RatZappers up under the kitchen sink, which based on the new droppings seems to be Mouse Central. I’m trying not to check under there obsessively, since I know that any movement in the kitchen might keep the mice away. But I also don’t want a dead mouse taking up space in a RatZapper when there are more mice waiting to die.

In honor of Thanksgiving, we went out and bought the cheapest card table and chair set Target had to offer.

This meal has been brought to you by the good people at Fresh Direct.

Here’s to hoping that next year at this time I’ll be cooking a homemade Thanksgiving dinner in my new kitchen.

In the shower, that is. I mentioned previously that we weren’t able to take regular stand-up showers in the new bathroom because of a water-channeling problem (The “bain” of my existence [Gates Reno])

We considered several solutions: putting in a 360 degree shower curtain (we hated that idea); filling the “canal” with cement and covering it with curved tiles that sloped into the tub (this idea seemed OK to us, but the architects didn’t think it would work very well or look very good); get a custom piece made to cover the space between the tub and the tile. That last one is the one we chose. It was definitely the most expensive solution, but also the least likely to leak.

An estimate from Corian came in at $3600. Yikes. So the architects tried a company called Avonite, and their estimate came in at half of Corian’s. So, Avonite sent someone out to make a template, and two months later the piece was ready.

When it was first placed on the tub, I was afraid it was too big – it wasn’t going down all the way.

But the installer gently pounded it down into place, with a layer of silicone between the custom piece and the tub. Twenty-four hours later, I was able to get a real shower without flooding the bathroom!

I’m not thrilled about the way it looks, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it. The color bothers me the most. When we were choosing from samples, we had a difficult time, because there are already (at least) two different shades of white in the bathroom: the white of the subway tile, which is slightly off white, and the white of the tub, which is a grayish white. We thought that we had chosen something in between the two, but it seems more beige than white.

But I’m just glad I don’t have to sit down in the tub to rinse myself off anymore.

One of the reasons the Avonite piece was so expensive is that you have to pay by the square foot for the slab, even though most of it doesn’t get used. So, if anyone has any idea what we can do to make use of this very expensive leftover, please let us know!

So, the bathroom is almost done. All that’s left is for the towel bars, medicine cabinets, etc. to be installed.