South Slope Reno: August 2008
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August 30, 2008
Doors and Shades
Our arrangement with our GC calls for us to obtain and supply all ‘finish’ items, to be installed by the GC. Appliances, tile, lighting fixtures, outlets, cabinets, countertops, moldings, faucets, are all to be purchased by us.
The wife and I really didn’t have much trouble picking things out until we got to the interior doors. Then we ran into difficulty. Of course the architect has just specc’d out standard white hollow core doors, but we had better things in mind. Complicating this was the fact that we had forgotten to budget the doors altogether, so whatever we spent was over and above. And, we needed a lot of doors. Seven interior plus two sets of bi-folds.
Doors offer so many choices. Solid softwood like pine? (Not for us). Solid core with a hardwood veneer? (Our ultimate selection). Solid hardwood? Then the panel style. Arts and crafts? Plain? Paneled? And, most hardwood doors are sold unfinished, so we would have to do the finishing (not a problem).
Our furniture is all Arts and Crafts. And most of the furniture we have in the bedrooms (where the doors would end up) is cherry. At first, we decided to go with a Mission-style door in cherry. But remembering that we did a few too many Arts and Crafts touches in our old apartment, which were all ripped out by the buyer, we decided to stick to the plan for this house, which is to keep it as simple, classic, and as desirable to as many potential buyers as possible, rather than turn it into a Mission museum (pretty hard to do anyway to a South Slope brick house).
We went to look at doors in a few places in Brooklyn. We saw some beautiful doors in the $500-$700 range, which was more than we wanted to pay. We looked on the internet, but in my opinion you need to touch and heft some things and doors are one of those things. We ended up back at Home Depot, where we looked at a custom line of solid-core doors by Jeld-Wen. And it happened that HD was having a 20% off sale on custom doors. And so we placed an order for six-panel cherry veneer doors, plus bi-folds. We paid an extra $10 per door to upgrade the hinges to satin chrome. The doors averaged out to about $350 each, including tax and delivery.
Here’s a photo of the doors after delivery:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376120
Here’s a regular door, installed but unfinished (after the first one, we discovered it was easier to finish the door after the installation, not before.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376121
Here’s a door after finishing (same as embedded image):
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376124
Here is a set of bi-folds, before:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376122
and after:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376125
Before we got to the point where we could buy good furniture, we made do by obtaining old furniture either from thrift shops or from dumpsters and refinishing it ourselves. So I’ve learned a bit about finishing over the years, and the product that I keep coming back to is Formby’s Tung Oil Finish. It’s a rubbed-on penetrating oil finish, and it’s just about idiot-proof. It’s not a production finish, as it takes up to ten or more coats to achieve its magic (several more than claimed by the mfgr), but all you have to do for each of these coats is to pour it on a cloth and rub it in. At the end, simply sand down with 500 or 600 grit sandpaper and give one last coat. I’ve found that it works better on real hardwood as opposed to a veneered product like these doors, where it can end up slightly ‘patchy’, but that can be remedied (as it was here) by a final application of butchers’ wax, which is then buffed in by hand.
A note on Home Depot’s special order practices: They have deny and obscure down to a science. We were quoted three week delivery, which turned out to be six weeks. They give you, in writing, what is alleged to be a firm delivery date. A week before you call to check, and they assure you it will be in on time (even though the website keeps showing ‘not shipped’). On the promised delivery date, they will assure you it will be coming in on ‘tonight’s truck’. The next day when you call, they express amazement that they didn’t arrive, and say they have to give it to the ‘expediter’, who of course never calls back. I actually got Jeld-Wen to help me and also made two personal trips to HD to complain.
A short note on the blinds: We wanted to keep the sense of light that drew us to the house in the first place, while obtaining the needed privacy. So we went with a plain, white, single-cell honeycomb shade, that at least in these rooms goes both top-down and bottom-up. Bought from blinds.com based on past favorable experiences.
http://www.blinds.com/control/product/productID,8521
Here’s a set installed. Pretty simple DIY installation that we wouldn't bother the GC to do.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/102376123
That’s it for now! Should have a master bathroom entry soon.
August 12, 2008
Rocking, taping, flooring, priming, painting
Time for some sheetrocking, taping, priming, painting, and flooring.
This is all being done on the second floor. When finished, we plan to move up here and demo the downstairs.
Because it’s a two family house and we didn’t want to change the c of o, we are putting in a minimal kitchen. We’re going to see if we can finish the main kitchen downstairs so we don’t have to use this, but we haven’t discussed this with the GC yet. In any event, should we sell the house to someone who wants to rent out the top floor, or should we suffer a major financial reversal that will cause us to rent out the top floor, the gas and plumbing will be in place.
The room layout is as follows in this, a 16 foot wide house. I should add that we had real problems envisioning the layout upstairs, so we were fortunate enough to be friends with a noted feng shui consultant, (I’ll give him a plug here, www.alexstark.com ), and he came over and helped us lay it out. One of the problems is that, being a 66' long semi-detached house, there are windows along the side that match up with the original layout, which included a kitchen. We didn’t want to spend massive amounts of money bricking up the windows and starting from scratch, so we had to make the layout match the windows.
In the front of our house, we put our master bedroom. A door leads to a large walk-thru closet/dressing room, which in turn leads to a very large master bath. After the master bath comes a small room, which will be my computer station/office, and, in the back of the house, my wife’s room/guest bedroom which overlooks the yard.
I don’t find ‘rocking and taping to be all that exciting, but there’s a collection of images at
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/rocking
For various reasons, we went with a simple pre-finished white oak flooring. Mainly because we have a cat and a dog, and we were concerned about outgassing. One thing we like about our general contractor is that he is ‘green’ in that he is willing to make things work, and re-use things. So, when we contacted other flooring contractors, first about saving the original parquet, and then about installing new, they all wanted to install a 3/4" plywood sub-floor over the existing sub-floor before installing the finish floor. Our GC was willing to forgo the new plywood sub-floor and install over existing. Places that needed patching he was willing to remove old and substitute with new plywood. Here’s the MBR before floor installation. Note the patches in place.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580708
In the two rooms we have done (upstairs master bedroom and guest bedroom), we are happy. In some places where there is furniture, it doesn’t sit exactly flat, and that’s OK too. We saved the cost of the new sub-floor, as well as the weight. Here’s a photo of the MBR floor just being started:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580135
Here’s the finished floor in the MBR with just primer, getting ready for paint:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580114
We decided, as a cost-saving measure, to prime and paint ourselves. The ‘title’ image above is that of my petite wife, seemingly overwhelmed by the job at hand. We’ve painted together many times in the past, and we have the routine down. She paints the trim and detail stuff, I do the ceilings, and we share the walls as our schedule permits.
For the walls and ceilings, we did BM Linen White eggshell, one of our favorites through the years, and the trim was BM Bright White semi-gloss. After a coat of BM Fresh Start primer, of course.
Here are some images of the master bedroom, with the new flooring, while being painted.
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580117
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580120
Here are some images of the guest bedroom:
This one is with the unfinished bi-fold closet doors deliberately off track to allow for painting:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580123
Here the GBR is done with the doors finished (I’ll be doing a whole segment on doors and shades soon):
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580130
GBR facing out (tired of mp3's, had to bring up at part of the music system sans turntable)
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580132
Meanwhile, in order to be able to live on the second floor, we needed to make the walk-in closet happen. I’ve installed several closets using Lowes’ ClosetMaid system. It’s not high-end or crazy, but it works. Here’s the WIC painted with the floor in place:
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580126
http://www.pbase.com/dentontay/image/101580128
Of course the closet was adjusted when we actually moved upstairs.