How to do Built'ins Pilot

One of the things that I've learned how to do over the past couple of years in this house is build space-specific built-ins and furniture. It's a skill that I'm finding to be extremely helpful, especially in maximizing the small spaces in our house.

Since I love you guys so much I'm going to show you how to do it. I've tried to pitch the idea of teaching a class about this or writing guest posts about it on other blogs, but to no avail. SO, since I have a blog, I thought I'd just do it here.

Today I'm going to just show you what we've done for Lucie's room so far so you can see that I do actually have some experience with these projects. I'm not going to start by telling you how we did this because it's a big project. It's not a good first project for me to try to explain the process and it's not a good first project for you to attempt.

This was Lucie's space before. When we re-configured her room waay back when, we moved the closet that was in our room and turned it into an alcove in Lucie's room. Here's the finished alcove before we did the built-ins.

We had to measure the area in the alcove and take an inventory of all of the stuff we wanted to corral.

I designed the unit in five pieces. One of the big things to remember when designing built-ins is that the pieces need to fit through doors.

Here are two horrible, very distorted pictures (taken pre-new camera/photography class) that show the pieces going in.

Pieces 1,2,3, & 4 

That's the drawer for her stuffed animals. We have some serious stuffed animal storage issues.

Here is the (almost) finished unit:

You can see all five pieces here. The lower shelves are 18" deep. Unless you're storing tires, shelves should never be more than 18" deep. The upper shelves are 11" deep which is a good size for  books/dishes. If you make shelves too deep, you will lose stuff in the dark, back recesses.

We still have to finish the drawer:

I'll show you how to finish this. The "finishing skills" are transferable.

Here's a close-up of the trim that we used. I'll show you how to do that too...

I've been thinking of adding a little wash of color to the leaves, just to pretty it up a little.

So, would you like me to show you how to make stuff like this?

If I can do it, anyone can, for reals!

See you tomorrow!

H

MY NEW FLOOR!!!!! WOOT!

Yes, it's a big day here at Boissonneau central because the new bamboo kitchen floor is installed! To give you an idea of how huge this really is, I'm going to show you some horrifying before's. Horrifying both because of the shear ugliness and because they were taken at night with my old, lousy camera.

Are you ready for ugly? (You know I love me some ugly before's.) These were taken on the night that we looked at the house before we bought it. It will clearly demonstrate that we needed to have our heads examined.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

The Kitchen Before

Wow right? The lace is classy huh?

Check out those vintage 1970's cabinets. Oh and what about the little scalloped doo-dad over the sink? Nice wallpaper, right? Yeah.

Lucie doing her Vanna impression. What do you think of that lovely faux wood (A.K.A. plastic) counter tops? Oh, the fact that it's dark outside doesn't really matter. It was dark during the day too.

Now, here is the original floor:

Nice huh? Yeah, no. It was horrible so we ripped it up along with the under-layer that it was glued to. After we tore it up we had this:

TA-DAH! Sub-floor. I ask you, how do you determine when that's clean?

But then, Hun went to Lumber Liquidators to pick up the brand new bamboo floor. Here it is in the boxes, can you feel the anticipation?

But first you need a smooth, flat surface on which to lay the new floor. Quarter inch lauan to the rescue.

It required some finagling  but we got it down. Then we had to screw it in place. We had some excellent help with that.

Lu was very, very helpful. She actually did a lot of the drill wrangling and she did it very well!

SO, are you ready to see the finished floor? I know you are.

TA-DAH!!!!

What do you think? Lucie was twirling on it and saying "It's like an actual room!!!"

I love it! The whole room just feels clean and light and airy. It's such a huge difference! You can see that we still need to finish the walls and that we have to do the trim too, but this is such a boost to our collective morale.

Those are our "new" (year-old) white cabinets too. Scroll back up if you forgot what the old ones looked like.

You can see the home of my future dishwasher. We're eventually going to replace the appliances with stainless. We still have to finish the hardware too. I just feel so much better about the house now that this is down! Yes, I'm pretty darn happy!

I will see you tomorrow!
H

Please Don't Judge Me... (A.K.A. The Deck)

Well. it's been ten days since D-day and this morning the dumpster left us, packed about as full as we possibly could pack it. We actually finished the yard clean-up on Sunday, after an AMAZINGLY productive weekend. We had a couple of other projects that we wanted to get into the dumpster too, and we managed to get all of it in there. I promised you pictures, both before and after, and I'm delivering.

OK, I'm delivering with fear and trepidation because as you will see, it was bad, bad, bad, and by posting these pics, I'm admitting that we lived with this. What you're seeing is stuff that was ruined when our basement was partially flooded, the old kitchen, some other construction projects, and stuff from the former owner. 

So without further adieu, I give you.... *deep breath* The Deck.

BEFORE

Here is the "before"

Ugh. So awful.

You can see the deck is leaning to one side.

More junk, this was from the bramble patch beside the house.

And more junk. Most of this pile was stuff from flood damage.

More backyard junk from the former people.

Oh, The Horror!!!

DAY ONE

Here is our salvation! This baby holds three tons of crap! Hallelujah!

Isaac and I added a few things Friday evening, it was cold and rainy so we didn't do to much. We did find this though.

That's a rifle that was under the deck. It belonged to the former owners. I know nothing about guns, so I called the police (on the non-911 line) to have them come out and take it. I told the officer that if he came out here, it would be a pellet gun and if he didn't it would be an AK-47. It was a pellet gun. We've found that police officers seem to enjoy non-emergency, non threatening interactions with the public. Both of the officers (the first forgot to mention that the he'd been here so an hour later another officer arrived) were, uh, impressed (?) by the amount of work we had to do. The first guy liked my "To Blave" license plate. Cool.

At the end of the first day, this is what we managed to get into the dumpster. Pathetic.

DAY TWO.

The morning of day two things looked like this:

There are some bare patches where we got some things cleared out.

 No, that is not entrails, that is a braided rug that the former owners threw in the swamp.

 I took some pics from the bathroom window so you can see what I had to look at everyday...

Things are looking a little clearer now...

By our mid morning break we had this much filled:

After lunch, it looked like this:

Here it is the afternoon:

And here are the same views from the bathroom window that afternoon.

Much better!

By the end of the evening we had managed to get the deck partially apart:

Here's the dumpster when we called it a night.

Wow huh?

DAY THREE:

Let's start with some pics of the deck.

Originally we were going to recycle the deck into raised beds for our garden, but after we started taking things down we realized that it was rotten... and also pressure treated so that was out the window.

Over the rest of the day, Hun removed the deck with a sawz-all. He's a big, strong guy :-)

Lucie being a great helper... in her PJ's.

We're almost done now...

And something pretty to end the day. It was over by the foundation and it was spared.

FINI!

The junk is gone... That's the burn pit, it seems to be a regular feature of Central Maine backyards. We're going to be putting fill in that and covering it with grass, because, you know, we don't need a burn pit. We did find a nice bedstead in the burn pit. Yep, classy.

OK, that post is still back there.

 The burn pit again, we put some of the rotten wood without nails in it to start to fill it.

Hun and I shoved those stairs down from the corner of the house to under the back door. Actually, Hun most of the shoving, I just pushed and made grunting sounds so I appeared to be doing something.

There it is! Now it just looks like we have a really destructive dog who likes to dig. On the left, we need to rebuild the bulkhead. We'll be adding a brand new deck, shutters, some fresh paint, and a french door. That's a little ways down the road though. Right now we're going to turn it into lawn and enjoy the lack of junk!

I'm SO GLAD IT'S DONE!!!!! 

We were doing a couple of other projects last week so we could fully take advantage of the dumpster. I'm going to show you the other projects this week.

Phew. That was nerve-wracking but it's out there now... Be kind!!!

See you tomorrow,
H