Adventures in Remodeling - Kitchen

So, while refinishing floors and tearing out a bathroom I also decided to go ahead and take the kitchen apart because, well, it just needed it.  And I wanted it.  I figured if it wasn't there, I'd have to do something new rather than just dealing with it until god knows when.

So this was the kitchen, in all it's splendor and glory, completely unchanged from when I had owned the house 10 or so years before.  Oh yeah, I owned the house when I was married and it was foreclosed on and I lost in in the divorce.

From the lovely dropped ceiling to the doorway that you could barley fit through because the stove stuck out into it, the particle board cabinets that were falling apart and had things in them that were indescribable and the darling blue, again with the blue, linoleum flooring.  There was also a sliding glass door that didn't work and the whole thing was just UGLY.  To be nice about it.

Adventures in Remodeling - Bathroom #1

While I was tearing out the carpet and refinishing the floor and annihilating the existing kitchen, I decided just one more thing was necessary prior to my moving in and that was rip out the main bathroom and give it an overhaul.

Lovely

Sadly, I didn't get actual intact before pics because well, I just wasn't there to do the picture taking.  Regardless of the beauty you see above, saying the main bath was ugly is a HUGE understatement.

Adventures in Remodeling - Hardwood Flooring

You buy a beat up old wreck of a house and what's the first thing a girl does when she gets the keys?  Well, pull up the carpet and see if there is hardwood underneath.

Yay! Wood floors!

The next thing you do, because you don't know any better, is rip the baseboard out in an effort to "update" not realizing how incredibly expensive it will be to replace it.  Lessons learned....

Sanded, stained and finished

Antique Doorknobs

It has come to my attention that I am a horrible blogger - no, not by anyone specifically, mostly just a "note to self" type thing.

Being a horrible blogger isn't due to the fact that I do nothing and therefore have nothing to blog about, it's more the opposite.  By the time I sit down, sit still and actually have time to compose a quick post, all I really want to do is lay in bed like a teenager (I'd say zombie, but judging from the movies I've seen, zombies are quite active and, judging from experience, teenagers are some of the laziest people on the planet) and flip through channels in the hope that something worth falling asleep to is on.

So here's a quick one that I've had sitting in the Drafts folder for quite some time.

After finishing remodeling my house a little over a year ago, and by "finishing" I actually mean running out of money and calling it good (will share Adventures in Remodeling at some point), I was left with a box of antique doorknobs from all the doors in the house that were refitted with doorknobs that actually work as opposed to pretty doorknobs that are over 100 years old and look awesome but, functionality has long since escaped them.  One of the first things I did after buying the house was remove all the doors, cover the flesh colored paint on them cuz it was super creepy and install functioning doorknobs, some even with locks.  Some of the doors themselves had to be replaced but I did manage to at least keep matching doors on each floor of the house.  Because I'm weird like that.

So I bought the house in February of 2007.  By 2012 I finally figured out what to do with all those extra doorknobs.

In case it's not clear what this contraption is, it's a coat rack!  This pic is kind of crappy, but I was playing with my new camera and clearly the figuring out of the settings is not going well.

So in my box of doorknobs that came out of my 100+ year old house, I managed to find 5 that all matched with key plates.  At first I tried an adhesive (read Superglue here) to attach them to each other and that just didn't work well at all.  I was ready to go get some JB Weld or some other epoxy I'd used before when lo and behold, the b/f's friend said he could weld them together.  Best idea ever.

Once I got the doorknob and key plate welded together to make a hook, I wanted to use the door pins themselves as hooks to put backpacks on so the "dropping of the stuff while walking through the door" after school could stop.  I told the b/f what I wanted to do with the door pins and he made it happen.  They are connected to the board in some way seems magical and works, so I'm happy.  Then I went and found the wooden letters to say home, painted them gold first, then black over the top and sanded the edges so they would look old and worn out but its really hard to tell that I even put any effort into that from the pic.

All that to say, it has worked out fabulously, the thing is ALWAYS full and only two of the letters have fallen off which I remedied with a compressor and brad nailer which is what I should have done to begin with.

Another terrible phone pic, but shown in use

I don't know that I'll ever make another one, but at least if I ever do, I'll know how to make it work the first time.

Now, to find a use for the hundreds of old chandelier pieces that also came down sometime  in February of 2007....