Sunday, March 19, 2017

Stumbling Stool

Before
My beloved garage stool recently fell on hard times. It lost one caster quite a while ago, but I was still able to use it if I was careful. It recently lost a second wheel and I was thinking it was time for a new one until I happened upon a random comment online that talked about replacing casters just like these. I had considered that before, but I assumed the cost of new casters would be more than a new stool, so I didn't pursue it.

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Concrete Crevice

When the wiring was run for our hot tub, they had to cut a channel in the sidewalk next to the house. Ideally, it was supposed to be the width of a brick for an easy repair, but it was just barely too narrow. We just filled it with dirt and moved on, but the time finally came to fix it correctly.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

Bright Ideas and Clear Thinking

Before
Not everything from the 70s in our house was awful. There are a couple light fixtures in the hallway that are actually pretty cool. As you can see above, they are mostly clear with a crackled glass look. The only problem was the ugly CFLs inside. We lived with the lights like this for far too long.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Valance Victory

We have a very complicated relationship with the vertical blinds in our dining room. We recognize that vertical blinds are generally terrible, but we didn't have a better solution for blocking the glaring sun in the morning, so we kept them. Deep down we knew we should get a valance to cover the ugly rail for the blinds, but we could never decide exactly what it should be like, so we did nothing. That all changed when we found a giant valance sitting on the curb down the street from our house.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Front Door Facelift

This post has been a long time in the making. As you can see in the photos above, the front doors on our house were in pretty sad shape on the outside, and very golden on the inside. We wanted to do something about that for quite a while, but replacing them would be very expensive and refinishing them would be very unpleasant, so for a long time we did nothing. That changed in March of 2015 when I finally pulled the doors off the hinges and started sanding.

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Kitchen Construction Conclusion (Part 9)

Before - This is the photo from the listing when we bought the house.
Our kitchen renovation is finally complete! This post will be a summary of everything we've done to the kitchen since buying the house, along with a cost breakdown of the recent major renovation.

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Kitchen Construction, Part 8 - Coating Cabinets

Before
The final step in our kitchen renovation was revamping the cabinets. They were covered in the original 70's lacquer and were showing their age. It didn't help that the cabinets had no handles, so they've been touched by dirty hands for the past ~40 years.
Since the cabinets themselves were in relatively good shape, and we didn't want to spend a fortune, we decided to just paint them and add new hardware. It took quite a bit of doing, but they came out very nicely.

Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Kitchen Construction, Part 7 - One Wonderful Window

Before
Most of the windows in our house are the original black (why?) aluminum, single pane units from the late 70's, including the kitchen window. They also have no frames or real sills of any kind, making them look pretty sad. However, they still function acceptably as windows, so it's hard to justify replacing them, especially here in temperate SoCal where the insulating properties of double pane windows aren't so important.
Since we were updating everything else in the kitchen, we figured we should go ahead and replace that window now.

Monday, January 2, 2017

Kitchen Construction, Part 6 - Fabulous Flooring

Before
Our kitchen had terrible tile floors. It was a crappy design with a super glossy finish that showed every speck of dirt. It had to go.