me and my Arrow

I put a coat of primer on 2/3 of the shelves in the utility room. It's too cold and humid to paint today, so I'm on another project.

It's been two years since I removed all the doors and drawers from my bathroom. I'd meant to re-paint them and re-install them with new hardware, but they've been sitting in the garage all this time. The bathroom cabinets, like the ones in my utility room, had had latex paint applied directly over oil paint, and it wasn't long before the paint started peeling off. This drawer seemed to be the worst of the bunch and was what instigated the cabinet makeover.

I thought it would be a quick job to remove that layer of latex, but it wasn't. I tried using the orbital sander, but it took off too much of the finish, down to the bare wood in places. Sanding by hand seemed way too slow and time-consuming, and I wasn't getting anywhere, so I quit.

Lately though, while removing a wallpaper border, I found my five-in-one tool did a great job of sliding under and lifting the wallpaper off the wall. Today I laid  dropcloth in the living room, brought a few drawers inside, and started scraping. In many places the layer of latex peeled off in strips; in other places it took lots of scraping. Scrape, scrape, scrape. It's a good exercise in persistence.  And me and my five-in-one tool are getting to be friends.

The most time consuming part is cleaning paint out of the routed grooves that border each piece. I am folding 80 grit sandpaper into narrow two inch lengths to slide in the grooves. It's not a big deal I guess, since these doors aren't made of particularly good wood, but I want to save some of the house's original handiwork. I think I have eight more pieces to do. If I can finish one every other day I should be done in just over two weeks.

If someone says,

"Expect the unexpected," slap them in the face & say, 

"I bet you didn't expect that!"

 

Home fixups rarely go the way I think they'll go.  I removed the doors to the vanity, removed the hinges, labeled everything, then went to work sanding the old paint off the doors & scrubbing the white paint off the dark brass hinges. After looking at the doorless vanity for a few days, though, I thought it might be better to leave the doors off. Naked like this, the vanity feels longer, leaner, and less cluttered. I thought I could put in a shelf on the left side to match the right side and make it more symmetrical.

So then the bathroom redo project slapped me upside the face. I knew water had leaked onto the floor of the cabinet and warped the pressboard pretty badly, but I thought I'd solved the problem by tightening up the connectors at the P-trap. Once I removed the two ledges inside the left cabinet and got my first good look at the underside of the sink I realized there was more water leaking from the sink. The previous owners replaced the drop-in sink at some time, but the newer sink was a little too small for the opening in the countertop. There is a small gap at the back of the sink which lets water run down under the cabinet. I then found one of the handles in the faucet was leaking water on the same side. Now I need to find a sink to fit the opening and also replace the old faucet. I wasn't looking for adventures in plumbing, but they were looking for me. I'm just hopeful that when I remove the sink I don't find the supporting pressboard underneath has turned to mush.

PS: Note the expert way in which the hole in the wall was covered with duct tape.

out with the old

Earlier this year I bought a 1970s era ranch-style house. It's much darker than a real "mid century" ranch house. This is the main bathroom in all its 70s glory: popcorn ceiling, beige marbleized formica, brass swag lights mixed with nickel faucets, fake oak hollow-core door, a frameless builders' mirror stuck to the wall behind the vanity and floral/striped wallpaper that is driving me crazy. The beige cabinet was probably painted white to help sell the house and the paint is already coming off. The drawer handles may have been shiny once but are now dark & caked with verdigris & white paint. I pieced several photos together to make this pic so the bath looks bigger & brighter than it is. In reality there's only about 3 feet between vanity & tub. It's dark. It's blah. It's gotta go.

My goal for 2014 is to make over the bath for under $500. Several months ago I replaced the original 5-gallon toilet with a new 1.2 gallon model, so I'm not counting that. I've already seen savings on my water bill, so I think it will soon pay for itself.

More to come as things progress.