We're Back!

  September to May? Clearly we've been neglecting our blog baby, but the good news it that the neglect of the blog came at the cost of  rectifying some serious self neglecting we were doing. Now that we are both feeling a bit rejuvenated we have decided that it is blog-o-clock again. So where have we been for the past few months and what the heck have we been doing? Lets play a little bit of catch up.

  Since September began I've been ridiculously busy with school. I knew that this new education program would be a change of pace for me but I was not fully prepared for the craziness that would be my life as soon as September began. So instead of being a carpentry co-pilot I was doing a lot more of this... 

and it was pretty great and rewarding, but exhausting as most great and rewarding things are. Also, our new fur baby that we welcomed into our lives last summer (read more about that here) went from looking like this...

to looking like this....

We've loved watching her grow and having her settle perfectly into our family, it has really challenged us to spend more time being active with her and less time focusing on and completing house projects. She has contributed greatly to some "fun" backyard developments for us. Especially this year as the snow melted and she discovered the soft muddy earth and how functional it was for hiding bones and other tasty treats that were bound to be stolen if not buried. 

Zach traded in his hammer, nail gun and other power tools for stock trading books and online courses. So as he pursued a long time dream of his our lofty dreams for our home fell to the back burner. In the interest of keeping our sanity, maintaining our family and trying to sleep every once and a while we knew we could not blog as often. 

However, school is now out for me and I have made the decision to throw in a few of the many hats I've been wearing lately and to get back to doing things that I enjoy, at least for the next 4 months of summer holidays. I realized that writing and maintaining this little blog fell nicely into the category of things I enjoy doing. We both agreed that sharing our projects is a really fun part of the process, it motivates us to get them done and it also has been a fun way to archive our journey as home owners. So with that all said, we are back to labouring and loving! 

We never completely stopped renovating, we simply stopped photographing every step and writing posts for our family and friends to read. So we definitely have some things to catch up on and a few projects to reveal, which I promise to do before another 9 months goes by. 

Behind Door One...

We have been working hard to take care of some finishing projects upstairs, things that will make our house a little less blah and a little more custom to us. And custom is definitely the name of the game when it comes to the doors throughout the main floor of our home. They are all 8 foot doors, which in short means that they go right to the ceiling and look extra skinny and extra awkward. Replacing them would come with a huge price tag since we would have to pay for the extra height on top of any interesting design elements. 

See what I mean? Sort of goofy, and yes the tape residue "E" doesn't help. The sad part is that I have lived with that "E" for a year now and have never made any attempts to remove it. Pretty embarrassing, but I knew if I removed it before taking these photos I would be a huge phoney. Anyways, after some "research" on Pinterest we decided that we would attempt a DIY custom door project.  

We figured out a pattern for the front of our door and went out to purchase our trim. We like to buy our trim from a contractor store instead of places like Rona or Home Depot because it is always less expensive and the employees are really knowledgeable and helpful. After making sure our rectangles were square and even, we started making our cuts on the mitre saw. 

We made 45 degree angle cuts so that the corners of the rectangles would fit together nicely. We had some experiences that really drove home the measure twice, cut once mantra. Oops! 

We used a Brad nailer to secure our trim rectangles so that they wouldn't be budging anytime soon. After this we used wood filler to fill the corner joins and the tiny nail holes in preparation to paint. In true Anderson fashion we were up later than we should've been painting in our pyjamas (hence the lack of photos, some things are better left unseen) 

After seeing how amazing our new door looked we knew we couldn't put the old door handle back on, it physically pained me to even imagine doing that. So we picked out some new handles that we felt would be in keeping with the tallness of our doors. We also went for a push down style out of the simple convenience of being able to hit it with your elbow when you have a basket full of laundry, etc.  

After it was all said and done our repurposed door looks like this! We are smitten, I actually "holla" about it every time I walk down the hall and see it. It was a great way to dress up our awkward doors and make them look custom and unique. We have all the trim ready to do 4 more, and even though I am dreading all the painting that awaits me I am pretty sure I can suck it up, strap on my candy cane pyjamas and get it done if it means that all my doors will look this lovely.  Lets check out a before and after, shall we? 

That's plenty of motivation for me to get the others done! 

Finally a tile update!

   Last post was about our first tiling adventure, or rather the steps leading up to it.  Before we went to grout we realized that something just wasn't right down there, and while we were able to pin point a couple things that we felt were throwing us off, we decided it was the wood panelling wall. 

It just had to go. We've encountered a similar situation in our main bathroom, and decided to meet it with a coat of paint instead of tearing it all down. It really worked for us in the bathroom, the wall adds some visual interest to an otherwise 'blah' room. So we decided for right now we'd see how we felt after a coat of paint. Our logic was that it would be easier to tear it down if we still hated it then it would be to tear it down, miss it and want it back up. 

 Most painting projects around here seem to get done when Zach is at work, probably because it is one of the few tasks that I feel comfortable with tackling solo. We knew it would probably be easier to paint before we laid the grout, so we removed all the tiles after we marked where they would go. Then I got down to business priming and painting.

In true cheap-o fashion we decided to paint with a colour we already had, so out came the "pecan sandy" paint can from the upstairs living room. We agreed that the sandy beige was neutral enough that it wouldn't compete with our tiles, and it would transition nicely into whatever colour we decide for the joining rooms.  Painting panelling it not for the impatient (ie: myself), unlike painting a wall it required using the roller and then cutting into all the joining boards with a smaller paint brush.

Unfortunately the bottom of our stairs is an extremely dark place, so I apologize for the questionable photo quality. Overall I was fairly happy with the paint job, but quickly realized that the trim around the door would need to be painted to match! We've been chit chatting about changing up the trim anyways, so I decided to put the paint away until we make that decision. I would hate to paint just to tear it all down. 

Also, the tiles are grouted in! We have yet to seal them and make them look nice and glossy clean since this requires the floor to sit for at least 24 hours without anyone walking on it, and with our pets around that just isn't a guarantee. So we're planning on sealing that when the pets are away so we can make sure there will be no accidents with little paws. 

The tiles are a fun change, we're working on cleaning up the grout and can't wait to seal it so that dust and dirt won't settle in the cracks. In the meantime we're tackling some pretty big projects upstairs and down all while trying to beat the snow and cold! 

Sorry, it's been a "tile"

      I thought it would be easier to keep up with the blog once I was out of school for the summer, but I was completely wrong! The weather has been so nice lately that we have been spending as little time as possible inside. Have to take advantage of it while we can, September is right around the corner. But don't let the lack of blog posts fool you, in true Zach and Michelle fashion we are always doing something around the house and we have some pretty exciting changes coming up that we're looking forward to posting about.

    In the evenings we manage to motivate ourselves to tackle some projects. It would seem that we are inching our way closer and closer to our basement reno, literally taking it one step at a time as we make our way down the stair case. So after finishing the stairs, clearly it only seemed logical to make our next project about the landing at the bottom of the stairs.

   After pulling up the hideous orange linoleum back in October the bottom of the stairs was looking pretty hairy with just bare concrete exposed. We weren't sure if we wanted to continue with laminate wood flooring, or if we wanted to try our hand at tiling. After mulling it over we decided it might be nice to tackle some tiling, the space is small and it would be a nice change. 

After doing our research we learned that we had to remove the left over linoleum glue before tiling. We used an adhesive remover appropriately called "The Glue Buster" and it did not disappoint, though it left our basement smelling something fierce (hence the mandatory breathing respirator). 

We also found out that we needed to lay a protective barrier before tiling. When tiling on concrete it is recommended to use this orange underlay, especially if you can already see cracks in your concrete which of course we had. This underlay prevents cracking of your tiles over time due to changes in the concrete. At $7.49 a sq/ft this underlay wasn't cheap, but we really didn't want to deal with cracked tiles down the road. 

Speaking of tiles, these are the ones that we chose for the area. Since it is a small area we talked about the idea of doing marble, but none of the marble samples really "spoke" to us at the store. We wanted something that wouldn't show dirt right away, especially since this is a high traffic area that has to endure muddy snowboard boots, wet dog feet and just everyday walk through to the backyard door. We also liked that these tiles were rectangle, meaning we'd have to use less of them. They seemed neutral enough that they'd match years of possible wall colour changes too. They were about $68 a box, 8 in a box and the tile size was 12 in. x 24 in. 

We rented a tile saw from Home Depot, which set us back a little more then we were hoping but it was necessary ( too bad we found out a close relative OWNS a tile saw a few weeks later). It was so worth it, we were able to make smooth cuts without damaging any tiles. It was about $70 to rent for 4 hours. 

And then the fun really began. We'll update soon on how the grouting and sealing went, and how it all looks finished! No more bare concrete for our families' tootsies... well okay, the whole basement is bare concrete right now so technically our tootsies still have some enduring to do but this is a start!

Going horizontal

A few months ago I created an inspiration board for our office. The resulting board was very feminine, and this is because I am the one who uses the office the most at the current moment. I go to school full time, and therefore can often be found in this space a lot between September and April of every year. So with that in mind the inspiration board ended up looking like this...

But I decided that it wasn't fair to make the office such a purple haven and was planning on revamping my plan for a "co-ed" office if you will. That never happened. After being accepted into a new program  for this upcoming fall semester I was feeling some apprehension about going back to school. The fear of the unknown has its grip on me. So Zach sweetly let me know that he had no problem with me claiming the office as a feminine den for the next few school years, as I would need a room that I actually wanted to be in. #greathusband!

I would have never guessed that the first step to changing our blah office would involve an old exterior door and four banister posts, but that is exactly where we started. On a trip to the Re-Store we found this great exterior door for $30 and an idea was born right there in the store. This door had seen the last of its vertical days, it was going horizontal and becoming a fabulous new desk. The bannister posts were 50% off and only cost us $15 each, which we felt was an amazing deal after the amount we paid at Rona for our bannister posts for the railing in the foyer.

The door & the legs were trimmed down to size. We did some research on the average height of an office desk, and found out that the one we had been using was 2 inches shorter than the norm at 29 inches. Which might explain why I found it such a pain in the back (literally) to spend extended amounts of time at the desk. So we brought the height up to 30 inches, because 31 ended up being a wee bit too tall for me to sit at comfortably.

Speak of the old desk, while disassembling the room to make way for the new desk I realized I hadn't shot any "before" photos and quickly took a picture mid chaos. Really not a good representation since I normally didn't keep all my books on the floor scattered like so, but it gives you an idea of the boring generic desk we had. 

We knew our best bet was to assemble the desk in the room. So we propped it up while it awaited its new legs.

We were sure to use some hefty screws to keep the legs in place. This step required a lot of levelling and adjusting but we really didn't want to have to re-do any steps in the end so we took extra care to get it just right.

Then came the necessary finishing steps, we filled the screw holes with wood filler and any other nicks that may have escaped the palm sander treatment that happened earlier outside.

Then I gave this beauty a fresh coat of paint! Of course it was "coconut pie" white left overs from other projects. That paint has never let me down, and since it would be free for this project I couldn't say no. 

Two coats later this is what we ended up with. I personally love it, and all the photos I took did it zero justice. In person it is so grand as it stretches about 7 feet across, lots of room for two people to be working at the same time. Also in person it looks really ornate, the gold really pops and the detail on the legs is really great. Definitely a must see in person for the full effect!

The office is still under work, but this desk goes a long way in transforming it in my opinion. I also picked a little something up from the Restore to help with the loss of storage we knew we'd experience by switching to this desk. I'll have some more updates on that soon!