I started out trying to just re-use the door that used to be in laundry room.
It isn’t a beautiful door, just a hollow core door, but at least it wasn’t painted. The new door needs to be narrower and slightly taller than the old door; so I trimmed the width, and added a piece at the bottom. When I was testing its fit, it looked so dull and out of character for this house, that I decided to go and get an old door from Building Resources. No question why this is taking me so long!
Above left you see the door I bought. It’s in pretty poor shape and has been painted and dinged up quite badly. It’s going to be a project to make this door nice.
First I stripped all the paint with the heat gun. You can see there are some deep gashes from where the door must have rubbed against something. There are also screw holes and dents in lots of places. Still a lot more to do to make this door nice.
Meanwhile, in the laundry room, I’ve almost finished putting up all the trim. To match the molding for the rest of the house, a local custom milling company used a sample of the old molding and duplicated it. In a time of poorly made, imported, machine made stuff (our couch for instance), Lowpenski Moulding are one of the treasures still operating from old San Francisco. They spell “Moulding” the English way — hence the title of the post.
Still needs painting, but it came out really nice. Above right is one of the complicated fiddly details that I enjoy.
For the last few years, our couch has had a squeaky, loose arm. Sitting across from it, I noticed that the arm looked like it was starting to come off, and the couch was sagging. With Arwen’s help, I took off the fabric on the bottom of the couch to find the problem: The frame is made of particle board, and was broken.
I don’t know for sure if we broke it, or if it arrived broken from Macy’s, but here’s a clue: There were two layers of fabric stapled over one another onto the bottom of the couch. The inner layer was torn (we bought the couch new.)
I glued, screwed and clamped new wood inside the couch, and bolted it together again. It should hold now. You can see Bella exploring inside the couch on the left. She needed an “emergency” shower when she came out – covered in strange powdery particles of filling/foam/etc that we didn’t want her to eat.
Above right, Arwen is enjoying a blanket that mole is knitting.
Here’s a picture of Bella trying on another one of my shirts:
