When we last left off, I still needed to finish the bring the brick wall outlet, repair the corner baseboard, install cedar planking for the closet floor, clean and reinstall the closet doors, install plastic trim around the windows, and install the street lamp. Over the past few weeks, I’ve slowly been making progress on these and, thanks to a fire in Oakland that disrupted BART service and made it impossible for me to get to work last Thursday, I managed to actually finish some of them. I only have the last two projects (window trim and streetlight) to finish and I might be able to get those done before this weekend. Exciting! In the meantime, here’s some pictures of the projects I completed since the last post:
The first project was to get the outlet on the brick wall flush with the bricks. Because we installed the bricks directly over the drywall, there was about a 1/4 inch difference between the outlet and the wall new wall surface.
Behold the rare and mystical CAVE OUTLET.
Glenn was pretty sure we were going to have to make our own spacers for behind the outlet, but I was fairly certain that there was already a product out there somewhere that was specifically designed for solving this problem. Uneven wall surfaces or improperly installed electric boxes are such a common problem, there pretty much had to be a pre-existing solution, right? So we went to my local Ace Hardware and as it turns out, there is a product! (I love being right; it happens so infrequently.) The spacers were a little difficult to find because Ace only carried one kind and they weren’t shelved in an obvious way, but once I saw the package, I knew what they were. (In case anyone wants more information on the product, if you click on the image below, you’ll get a biggified version of the picture that makes it so you can read the packaging.)
In the package.
Out of the package.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The instructions said to fold the strips where the plastic was thinner and as it turns out, the little bumps make it so the sections click together like Legos.
Electricians’ Legos
If I remember correctly, we had to use almost a whole strip for each screw. Needless to say, we had to use much longer screws to get the outlet to attach to the box once the spacers were in place.
If you look closely, you can see the bright green plastic.
Then we just had to screw on the plate and we were done. This project cost less than $10.00 (spacers ~$4, screws ~$2) and was completed in about an hour, including drive time.
.
We started work on the next series of projects the same weekend as the outlet project, but they took a bit longer to finish. I’m going to talk about the closet as one project, even though I listed the cedar, the baseboards, and the doors as separate projects and they were completed several weeks apart.
This is what the closet looked like when we started. (Actually, this picture is from even before we painted it, but close enough.)
Note the single piece of unpainted baseboard on the back wall of the closet. See how lonely it is? See how it’s segregated from the other baseboards in the room because it doesn’t match? It’s okay, closet baseboard. Don’t be sad. I’ll get you some friends and some new clothes and help you fit in.
So, first, we let the carpet installers pull the old carpet that was in the closet when they installed the new carpet in the rest of the bedroom. Then we pulled up all the staples and and the tack strips.
Also, mom and I painted.
Next we installed the cedar board. I almost had to give up on this project because it took me a while to find it anywhere. Most of the places I went to only had rough cut cedar fence boards and several of the people I talked to had no idea what I was talking about. I eventually found some at Lowe’s for the low price of $30.00 per 15 sq. ft. box. One box technically has enough pieces for two standard closet floors, but a lot of the pieces were warped, so even though I have leftover pieces from this project, when I do the closet in the office I’ll have to buy another box. We picked and chose the best boards in the box but even some of the good ones were a little warped, so at times it was a two person job to get the planks in. One person would have to hold the board in place while the other nailed it down. SO worth it though. Look at how pretty the closet is now*.
Glenn cut back the carpet a little bit to even it out (the install cut was slightly crooked) because I was wavering on whether or not I was going to install the threshold board for the closet doors. I couldn’t find a standard (non tongue and grooved) strip of cedar and wasn’t sure if I was going to like a stained piece of wood there. Eventually, the idea of potentially fraying the carpet with repeated door opening and closing won me over and I stained a piece of pine for the threshold.
Before stain, with cedar below for comparison.
After stain, with cedar below for comparison.
.
.
.
.
.
Threshold and closet hardware installed.
.
The next part of the project was the baseboard, which we worked on the weekend before last. Remember the lonely, sad, unpainted closet baseboard from before? Well, we saved the baseboard that had been on the brick wall before the bricks were installed, so I had a supply of the right kind of baseboard for the rest of the closet; I just needed to match the paint. The Behr paint displays at Home Depot have scanners that will scan pretty much anything and color match for you, but when I went to the Home Depot in Concord, their scanner was out of order. As I did not want to wait however many weeks it would take them to fix the scanner, I had to eyeball it. It made me a little nervous and took much longer than I wanted it to, but I’m pretty sure I found the right paint. And fortunately, I only needed enough paint for the baseboards, so the $2.00 color sample I bought was more than enough.
Here’s the baseboards, painted and installed:
Look at how well you fit in now, closet baseboard! Yay conformity.
At the same time I was working on the baseboard for the closet, I did the replacement section in the opposite corner, where we’d broken some of the baseboard while preparing the large wall for bricking. Here’s a picture of the replacement baseboard installed next to the old baseboard.
The spackle knife is under the seam between the two boards because I had to paint over the spackle between the two sections and didn’t want to risk getting paint on the carpet. Check out that color match though. I’m pretty proud of that.
After the baseboards were done, I finally got to put all my clothes and shoes away (one of the things I did last Thursday). I’ve been living here for four months, and my shoes have just been in a giant pile at the foot of my bed. Putting all the clothes away was a great opportunity to actually take a look at what I had that I didn’t wear, so some of the stuff that came out did not make it back in and is instead waiting for me to sell to a consignment center.
Even though it was well into evening by the time I got all my clothes in the closet on Thursday, having everything put in it’s proper place was such a great visual representation of how much progress I’d made that I didn’t want to stop working. It was almost complete! So I grabbed my spackle knife from under the now dried baseboard and pulled the Clorox wipes from under the bathroom sink and got to work on the closet doors.
When the previous owners had painted the bedroom olive green, they let a couple drops of paint drop onto the white closet doors. The paint drops were mostly on the edges of the doors and so weren’t too noticeable, butI would have known they were there, so off they came. I scraped the paint off of the doors with the spackle knife and gave the doors a thorough scrubbing with the Clorox wipes. Then I just had to install them (which was a little awkward to do by myself, but was manageable) and adjust them to (mostly) level so that there wasn’t an awkward gap between the doors. And, then, done!
Here’s the closet, COMPLETED.
All in all, finishing the closet cost me about $50 (cedar planks ~$30, finishing nails ~$4, stain ~$7, threshold ~$5, baseboard paint ~$2, I already had spackle and Clorox wipes) and took about four days total (spread over several weeks).
I was so pumped when the closet project was done that it was difficult to fall asleep on Thursday night. I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made in this room and am really optimistic about being able to complete this room before my official housewarming party at the end of this month. (Keep your eyes open for a facebook event.) All that’s left to do is install the streetlamp and the window trim. The streetlamp is going to be much easier to install now that I’ve decided to put it in the way I originally wanted to (being intentionally vague about that) and Glenn already did the first step for installation yesterday. I think the window trim will be pretty easy too, once I figure out how to cut it. I’m thinking tin snips…
Anyway, what do you guys think? Is the room as cool as I think it is? I’m so excited!
.
.
*FYI, I highly recommend this project for anyone. In addition to being gorgeous, cedar is bug and mildew resistant. Plus your closet will smell amazing every time you open the door(s).
Den of the Truth Fox 