Behind door #3....

we have a partially furnished room with a poodle in it!


Just finishing touches now!

Hydrangea!

We really don't have green thumbs but have been looking forward to living in a climate where hydrangeas will grow. The bush we put infront of the porch is in bloom at the moment.

If anyone out there has any tips for how to keep the bush from dying in winter (in the GTA in particular!) please let us know by commenting on this post. :o)

Deja Blue!

Yep, we're back in the guest bedroom. We've been patching plaster that cracked when we took off the trim and some damage from when we demoed the bathroom that shares a wall with the bed room.

Next up, more flooring!

New trick!

I recently downloaded Picasa to give it another try. One neat feature in the current version is "collages" where you can make a collage from sets of pictures.

Here are some collages made with the bathroom pictures. I expect that we will use this a lot in our blog in the future.

Before

During

After

Book review: Stanley Complete Plumbing

As a departure from our usual entries detailing our adventures with plaster and trim we thought we would share a review of a book we've found to be quite useful, Stanley: Complete Plumbing.

This book is a great reference on many aspects of plumbing. These include basic concepts such as how to replace a faucet or toilet to more advanced topics like venting and in general how the plumbing in your house works.

We originally bought this book before tackling the replacement of our bathtub/surround in our Calgary condo. This job required us to move the tub faucet up from its original location because the new tub was deeper than the old one. The Stanley book helped us learn the basics of how to work with copper pipe (soldering) so that we could complete this task.

This book has been especially useful for the 2 bathroom renovations we just completed, which both required roughing in from scratch. In the basement bathroom, we hired our neighbor (who also happens to be a contractor) to do the rough in since busting up concrete and connecting to a main drain were outside of our comfort zone. Even though we didn't do the rough in, having the book was a good resource for us to understand what the rough in would entail. This is useful when trying to do budget conscious design (e.g. plan bathroom to be near the stack and existing water supplies if possible, take advantage of existing venting where possible)

After watching the basement bathroom be roughed in and seeing that it really did follow what the book said, we tackled the upstairs bathroom rough in ourselves with the aid of this handy resource. The book covers basic bathroom rough in topics like how to lay out the pipes and how far fixtures need to be from each other. It also covers less expected topics like how to reinforce your floor joists when moving the toilet (the toilet requires a 3 inch drain line which requires care when run through joists).

For handy home owners wanting to develop their skills at plumbing this book is a great resource. It is also a good resource for home owners that want to be informed about how the plumbing in their house works (or should work if you watching someone else install it).

small note: we are not getting money from the authors/sellers of this book.

Upward and onward...

The master bedroom is now pretty much done... nearly immediately upon completion the room made like a black hole and sucked in all our crap/mess. Ok... nothing so dramatic.. we finally did laundry and moved our stuff in , so it's not quite primp-ified yet. Here are some shots of the cleaner corners of it.


Now/then...




Here is a shot of the door/closet door. We used the same solid pine door with black knob like we did in the bathroom.

Pictures of Adel White Kitchens

We're still in the process of picking our kitchen cabinet maker, but since adding Ikea to the list of contenders (specifically their Adel White cabinet) we've been scouring the Internet for pictures of kitchens that use these cabinets. We really like the price of Ikea and how it looks in store, but we wanted to see how they've turned out for other renovators.

Here are some of the nicer examples we've found.

From supershoppertoo on Flickr.

from Bytown House


From: StillG10

From : Bungalow Love

A search for "Adel White Kitchen" on Flickr is also a great source of Adel White Kitchen Pics.

Dreaming of kitchen...

The master bedroom trim work/painting is progressing. To take our minds of the tedium we've been starting to think about our kitchen reno. This reno is quite a ways off but given the amount of cash we'll probably end up dropping on it we wanted to price things out early and plan it well.

At the moment we're leaning towards Ikea's Adel white cabinets. We still have a couple more kitchen places to visit before making a final decision. The Ikea kitchen planner software has really helped us figure out what sorts of cabinets we'll be able to fit in our space. Below are some shots of our layout (click to make them larger).