Oy vey, so much miscellany: Baseboards, door, water heater, carpet…
But first things first: Kitteys! Synchronized sleeping anyone?
I still have quite a pile of old wood, so I’ve been planing and reusing it to make the molding in the garden room.
There is a stem wall that is wider than the walls above in the toilet room, so I boxed it in with wood. The wood in the toilet room is stained dark red-brown, so I also did that with the base boards.
Here it is ready for the toilet to go back in.
A fully functional toilet in the garage. Such luxury. Except there’s no door yet: Details.
I put a planter box outside the toilet room window, and planted a variety of plants that I think can handle the low light. We’ll see.
Another project that used quite a lot of old wood: I needed to make a table for the laundry room to fit next to the dryer.
Here’s all the wood, planed to width and ready to make into a table.
I glued boards together to make the top.
Here’s the top clamping together.
Here’s the base of the table.
I also made a drawer to go under the table.
This is the finished table.
Here it is, in the laundry room. Doesn’t look like old throwaway wood.
Back to the toilet room (what, you thought I was done already??)
For the rest of the baseboards and trim in the toilet room, I decided to just paint it white instead of deal with staining and polyurethane, etc.
Well, this was instructive: I did such a nice job of fitting the strike plate for the door (above left). Pity I measured wrong. Sadly, I measured wrong not once, but twice. As usual, I do everything three times.
Above right is the door that used to be on the toilet room upstairs. I tried to give it to building resources, but they wouldn’t take a hollow core door. I was planning to cut it up and throw it away, but I needed a door for the toilet room: So I sanded and stained it.
The picture above is after the remaining baseboards and trim were finished, and door is on the toilet room. Now it’s really a functional bathroom.
Recently, a friend mentioned that they had to have their water heater replaced because it leaked all over her garage. That reminded me: Most water heaters have an anode rod that must be replaced every few years to prevent the inside of the hot water tank from rusting. And I’ve never changed the anode rod on our water heater in the ten years (!) we’ve lived here. So I ordered one:
I also had to get a large socket to remove the old anode rod.
The old rod had completely been used up. Ooops. Well, I think most people don’t replace them, so they buy a whole new water heater more often. Hopefully this will make ours last a bit longer.
While draining the tank, lots of rusty sediment came out. Looks like the inside of the tank has been rusting.
Back to wood re-use: There were a couple of solid oak boards that I saved from the floor of the “tear off room” (remember that?) I planed them down to smooth wood, and cut a rabbet into them for trim around the door into the garden room.
There were some pretty large knot holes and rusty nail holes.
I’m getting quite good at making wood plugs to repair holes (above is a knot after it’s filled).
For the baseboards, I planed, glued, filled about 180 feet of old wood subfloor. I also routed an ogee into the top edge. Getting a bit carried away.
Here are a couple of the baseboards installed. It’s quite time consuming installing baseboards over this floor because the floor is so uneven. I have to place the baseboard into position, then mark the baseboard for the shape of the floor, cut along the baseboard with a band saw, and seal the wood before attaching it.
One additional wrinkle: In the garden room, there is a concrete stem wall behind the base boards, so I have to use concrete screws. To fill over the screw, I countersunk it, then filled with wood plugs made from the same wood as the baseboards.
Here is the hole in the baseboard before I’ve filled and sanded. You can see a completed plug at the bottom of the photo.
Upstairs in our bedroom, we still have the same wall to wall carpet that was in the house when we first bought it ten years ago. Mole has been having a lot of allergy issues lately, so I decided, on a Friday evening, to tear out the carpet in the bedroom.
It’s much easier if everything is moved out – but we just shuffled things around while I pulled up the carpet, cut it into manageable rolls, and dragged it out. The hard part, actually, is pulling out all the thousands of staples in the underlayment. I was done by midnight!
Here’s the room without blue carpet: There was tile under it: That will have to do for now with a rug.
We brought the rug into the bedroom from the living room. It had deep dents in it from the furniture: I read online that you can put ice cubes on the dents, then once they melt, fluff up the fibers. Not sure why the ice cubes, not just spray it with water — but I follow directions.
And the girls love ice cubes!
