Moving into the Guest Bedroom

We know we’re totally late on the whole Thanksgiving weekends update, but better late than never. We decided to have a low key, low pressure Thanksgiving. That’s code for “We were too lazy to cook a turkey.” We roasted a chicken instead. And the rest of our meal was made from stuff we had lying around the house.

Squash, mashed potatoes, green beans and roast chicken. And ice cream for dessert. Not bad for a very-last-minute feast. We even roasted a dog-friendly version of our meal for Jabba:

I tried to grab a picture of it but by the time I ran back with my camera, she’d already scarfed it down. I caught Smokey mid-scarf:

Canned cat food of the filet minon variety. He horked it down in a matter of seconds. Side note: we can’t wait to rip up that fugly linoleum. We’ve tried everything — even bleach — and it still looks dirty.

We decided to take Thanksgiving day completely off. The rest of our four-day weekend was spent wrapping up the guest bedroom. We gave the French doors a coat of polyurethane, removed the plastic film from the windows, and installed the custom door handles. Then we gave the trim 2 coats of black paint to match the floors and doors. After that, it was just a matter of vacuuming, mopping and moving in.

Here’s how the doors looked before:

And after:

View from the hallway:

We love how much light the hallway gets through the guest bedroom windows. And we’re still smitten with our DIY door handles. We were worried that the black-on-black would look flat, but the pop of texture really helps add some dimension to the doors:

View from the inside looking out into the hallway:

The closet doors are back up:

And, for the first time since April, we have a fully functioning closet:

It feels so luxurious not having to live out of cardboard wardrobe boxes. But even more than that, we’re thrilled to have a closet with doors. Our apartment in Brooklyn didn’t have any closets at all, so we installed an open closet system in the bedroom. Everything was always on display, which made for some awkward times when we had company over. Overflowing hampers happen.

Right now, we have 3 things in the room: a mattress, a rug and a chair. The mattress is on the floor, college student style:

We thought about gussying up the bed. Getting rid of the white duvet that we throw on the bed for extra warmth. Fluffing the pillows. Crisping up the linen. And then we realized, the mattress is on the frikkin’ floor. What’s the point of pretending we’re fancy? We like to keep it real:

We installed a ceiling fan a couple of weekends ago:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we need a couple in our house. The guest bedroom is directly above the dining room, which is where our wood-burning stove is located. Having ceiling fans in the dining room and the guest bedroom will help circulate heat throughout the house.

As far as looks go, fans usual fall somewhere between bland and revolting. Anything even remotely attractive is way, waaaay out of our price range. So we chose fans that are really simple and plain in hopes that they won’t be too noticeable:

The chair is another piece from Bradley’s company. We snagged 6 of these puppies back in June — two with arm rests and four without. They’ll eventually end up in the dining room.

If you look closely along the bottom edge of the trim behind the chair, you can see that we need some touchup work on the floor paint. Apparently we didn’t get close enough to the wall in this part of the room. We’ll fix that when we paint the floors downstairs.

We also have to do a little touchup on the French doors:

Keepin’ it real.

We picked up a radiator pipe that let us move our tall, skinny radiator a few inches further from the curtain:

We were planning on making boxes for all of the radiators in our house so that they’re not total eyesores. But this one is so close to the window that we might just paint it and leave it exposed.

If we do leave it exposed, we’ll need to touch up some paint on the floor:

The other radiator — the short, wide one we removed — was super heavy and dented the floor a bit. We’ll also need to fix the big, gaping hole that the pipe pokes up from. You can see right down into the dining room through it:

We’re going to find or make some sort of cap to conceal that. And, finally, we’ll need to get a handle for the radiator valve:

It had one but it was so rusted that it broke when we removed the radiator. At the time, we played it off like we had the strength of The Hulk. It’s all fun and games till you realize you can’t find a replacement that’s the right size.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more updates on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words about Margot. We’re completely smitten with this special dog, and we’re thrilled to have her join our family. Now if only we could get this potty-training business down…

No More Flood Zone! Plus Some Odds & Ends Projects.

You know that feeling you get when you come back from vacation and sleep in your own bed? Multiply that by about a bajillion and that’s how we felt when the flood watch ended and we came home on Saturday afternoon. Even when we opened the basement door and found this:

Yes, it smelled as bad as it looked.

Our sump pump is easily 30 years old. It works, but every now and then it shuts itself off and you have to give it a swift kick to get things going. We added that to our list of ancient things we need to replace, and spent the rest of Saturday cleaning the entire first floor. On Sunday, we were back to renovating as usual.

Right now we’re trying to finish up some odds-and-ends projects upstairs so we can start painting walls and sanding floors. Here’s a shot of how our hallway looked before the Labor Day weekend:

And here’s how it looks today:

Yup! We’ve been painting doors and doorways! The bathroom door in the hallway isn’t totally finished. I just leaned it up against the doorway (accidentally upside-down) to show what it’ll look like once it’s in place. The hardware is still drying and we need to strip and paint the flip-side, but that won’t take long. The guest bedroom French doors are drying against a wall and need one more coat before they’re DONE-done:

The guest bedroom closet doors are dry and ready to be put back in place:

We never loved these cheap closet doors from Lowe’s. We got them because they were the least ugly of all the doors Lowe’s had to offer. And I practically had to wrestle and hog-tie Bradley in the closet door aisle before he agreed to buy them. They’ve been the bane of his existence ever since. Once the paint dried, though, he was all oohs and aahs. Up close, they don’t really look painted — they look stained:

While our doors and doorways dried, we fixed up a few things that were bugging us about the brick wall. Here’s our before shot again:

See all of those black cracks in our exposed brick wall? Those are spots where the mortar has chipped away. There’s also a big black rectangle at the top right hand corner of the wall where a couple of bricks were removed. We’re not really sure why, but based on lathe strip and old square nails that were used to patch the hole, it was done a long, long time ago. There are also some gaps on the floor where the wooden door frame used to be:

Bradley mixed up a batch of mortar and filled in the gaps:

He scooped mortar into the gap, patted it down flat, and then scraped his trowel across to get a smooth, even surface. Here’s how that spot looked when it dried:

And here’s how the filled gaps will look with our DIY moulding against them:

As for the brick wall, Bradley only wanted to patch the areas that will eventually be covered by a storage cabinet. This way we can experiment with what looks better, a meticulous brick-pointing job or a NYC-style patch job. We see the patch job a lot in old exposed brick walls in NYC. Basically, you take some mortar and smear it right across the brick face:

No need to be neat about it; a patch job is supposed to look industrial and old-school. When done properly, it can give a brick wall a lot of character. Since this spot is going to be covered with insulation and a cabinet, Bradley decided to leave a secret message in the wall. I didn’t even notice it until it was all dry:

30 years down the line, maybe some feisty whippersnappers will rip out our OMG-that-is-sooooo-dated custom cabinet and discover our graffiti. And they’ll get all huffy and puffy about it the way we do when we discover “SCOTT” written all over the house. It’s our way of paying it forward. Setting up challenges for future generations of DIYers. (Insert evil laughter here.)

Here’s how the big patch by the ceiling looks after drying:

Here’s our “in progress” pic again that shows how the dried mortar looks from a distance:

And, just for funzies, here’s what the hallway looked like waaaaay back in late April when we picked up the keys to our house:

Technically, that’s the cleaned up before picture. When we got the house, the hallway was covered in hideous burgundy carpet. We waited about 30 minutes after our closing before we started ripping up carpet, and in all the excitement, we forgot to take a true before picture. (Read all about it in our very first post.) Here’s the earliest documented before picture of the hallway, taken when I was halfway done ripping out carpet tacks:

Ahh, memories.

We have a lot more updates to share from our very busy Labor Day weekend. And unless some other insane force of nature disrupts our progress (Tornado? Tsunami? Locusts?), we’ll be firing up our spray painter this weekend. Can’t. Wait. Stay tuned!

DIY Door Handles Part II

Remember those door handles Bradley welded for the guest bedroom French doors? They ended up sitting in our garage for a week until we finally got around to finishing them.

The first thing Bradley did was drill holes down the center of each handle. He also used a special drill bit to countersink the holes so the screws will sit flush.

The steel had rusted a bit from sitting there, so after drilling, Bradley grabbed his grinder and cleaned up the metal.

After that, he sprayed each handle with 3 coats of clear lacquer to keep it from rusting again.

And dragged both handles upstairs for the exciting part — the installation.

Bradley started out by checking to see that everything fit properly. In order for the door to sit in the frame properly, we had to cut a little notch at the top of each handle. Bradley measured and marked each handle, and then pulled out his grinder again.

With the notch cut out, the door closed all the way and sat perfectly flush within the frame. The only problem was that the added metal made it harder to close both doors at the same time. The metal would rub together and eventually the lacquer would wear off.  And we really, really don’t want to re-lacquer these things ever couple of months.

Bradley begrudgingly removed both doors.

We moaned and groaned about how frikkin’ hard it was to get the doors installed properly the first time around. A lot of threats were bandied about (“If it doesn’t go back up easily this time, lets just smash it,”) but we had no problems getting the doors back up afterwards.

Bradley made a guide to help him cut straight, and then used a circular saw to shave off a 3/8″ piece from each door. He could have taken the doors downstairs, across the yard and to the garage where his table saw is, but it seemed like way too much trouble for such an easy cut.

Once the doors were the right size, Bradley screwed the handles to the doors:

He used black screws so they wouldn’t be as noticeable.

And then he put the doors back in place.

He also added hardware to the top of each door so they stay shut.

It’s a basic ball-and-catch setup that keeps the doors from swinging open every time a breeze blows through the hallway (super annoying for the past few windy weeks!).

Here’s how the doors looked once everything was in place:

The doors will be painted black to match the floors. Or white to match the floors. We’re back on the black-or-white wagon and really can’t decide what colors we want our floors. In all honesty, it’ll probably be a last-minute decision made at Home Depot when we’re at the paint counter. That’s how we roll.

The handles are velvety smooth — no texture at all — and glossy from the lacquer:

But they have an etched look from the marks left by the grinder:

We love the contrast of the soft, smooth feel and the textured look. We also love how low profile the handles are. They stick out just enough to fit your fingers behind to pull the door closed. And, most of all, we love how they take a pretty generic French door and make it look really different.

In much less exciting news, we also installed the guest bedroom closet door handles:

Not custom and not unique, but we think they look pretty nice.

Plus, they make it way easier to open the closet doors. We were jamming our fingers under the door to pry those open in our pre-handle days.

What we learned from this project:

• Clothes make the (wo)man. Handles make the door.
• Each custom door handle cost about $20 to make. Each teeny weeny door knob we got from Lowe’s cost about $6 to buy. We might be making a lot more of our own handles.

We have a plan.

We’re making some serious headway on the Smurf room and guest bedroom. We’re hoping to be done in a couple of weekends — whee! The only problem is that we already have several guests visiting us this summer, and we can’t hole up in the guest bedroom forever. So next up on our renovation list is the master bedroom.

Or the bastard bedroom as we’ve been calling it. It’s the red-headed stepchild of our second floor. We were feeling so frustrated by the huge-but-not-really-workable room that we were ready to give up on it and just start renovating the kitchen instead. Then, out of nowhere, something clicked and we came up with a plan. Our eureka moment: we’re going to merge the 6′x6′ Purple Room and the master bedroom to make a master suite! 

It sounds insane. And it probably is, judging by the amount of work we just created for ourselves, but we’re pretty geeked about it. Here’s what we’re thinking:

You come up the stairs and walk through a single French door to enter a little seating area. There will be 2 cushy chairs with a little table between them where we can sit down by a window and read (or more likely, blog). There’s a doorless entryway that connects the reading room to the master bedroom.

Once you enter the master bedroom, you won’t see a chimney jutting out in the middle of the room. Instead, there will be a flush wall where we can set a king-sized bed in between the 2 windows. There will be a big custom closet in the room, as well as the tiny old closet that we’ll glam up with a modern sliding door that we’ll design and build ourselves. And we’ll turn it into a shoe closet. Yes. A shoe closet. Be jealous. After years of living with a strictly enforced new pair in / old pair out policy, we’re letting ourselves revert back to our shoe-obsessed ways.

The size, shape and location of the custom closet aren’t set in stone. We could actually do a really big L-shaped closet if we wanted. Or place the closet against the same wall as the shoe closet. We haven’t planned that out yet.

With glossy black floors, open doorway and even more sunlight, we’re thinking the master bedroom is going to be super sexy when we’re finished. We’re also thinking that by the time we’re finished, we’re going to go pass out in here for at least 200 years. We have a whole lotta work ahead of us…

Jackhammer? More like Jillhammer.

We showed up to our house and found every surface on the second floor covered in plaster dust. We weren’t kidding when we said this stuff gets everywhere. This time, we even found that plaster dust had somehow worked its way into our shoes, through our socks, and wedged itself between our toes. We also got a case of what we’ve started calling “plaster boogers.” And by “we” I mean only Bradley, because girls don’t get boogers.

We know that all we need to expose our brick is a prybar, a hammer and a pair of biceps, but we were dying to try out our jackhammer. We had to be careful because a jackhammer can pummel its way right through some brick, so we set it on the lowest possible setting. Bradley took it for a test drive:

It worked like a charm! So he handed the jackhammer over to me and gave me some basic instructions

• Don’t use too much pressure.
• Don’t use too little pressure.
• Don’t bust through the wall.

Then he went to go work on another project and left me all alone with the big, bad jackhammer. But first he snapped this pic:

What you can’t see is the huge smile on my face as I yell, “YEEEEEEEHAW!”

Don’t let the cockiness fool you. When I took over jackhammering duties, I was 99.9% sure that I would pee my pants once I flipped the switch on. But after several trips to the bathroom to make sure that wouldn’t happen, I channeled my inner Brutus-the-construction-worker and let ‘er rip.

I jackhammered straight into the plaster at a 90-degree angle until I broke through the paint. Then I angled the jackhammer down so I didn’t chip the brick. This loosened the plaster so it fell right off. I nicked a couple of bricks, but it was so minor that it’s not even noticeable. For the most part, the plaster came off without a problem. And I found out that jackhammers. are. awesome. Good thing, too, because we have a whole lotta brick wall to expose in the kitchen! It’s a dusty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

The best part about using the jackhammer was how fast the plaster came off the brick. I could loosen up an area with the jackhammer and then use my hand to knock down big sections of plaster instead of chipping away at small sections using the prybar & hammer method.

Also, because more of the plaster came off the wall intact, I found some more of the weird stuff they used to hold plaster together. There were a lot of dried (and surprisingly well-preserved) leaves in the mix. Those fell apart when I tried to remove them for photography purposes. Bew hew! There were also some acorns and nuts:

That one was perfectly intact and completely preserved under the plaster. If it wasn’t for the lead paint, I would have asked Bradley to taste test it for me.

I made it all the way up to the door frame using just the jackhammer and my hands, and then I ran into a little problem. See, I don’t trust our ladder. That thing has fallen on my head not once, but twice. And it’s super wobbly. I didn’t have anything but the ladder to brace myself while I applied pressure to the jackhammer, and I kept feeling like I was going to tip over. Eep! I played it safe and switched to the prybar & hammer to finish off the rest of the wall.

Eventually I had all of the plaster off of the wall and on the floor:

The cleanup — as usual — took way longer than the demolition, and in the end, we hauled 7 giant contractor bagfuls out to the garbage pile garage.

Little cheapskate tip for all you DIYers: buy your contractor bags from Costco. We got a giant box of 32 for $13. …right after we paid $8 for a tiny box of 12. Never again, Lowe’s. Never again!!

At one point, which trying to knock off a particularly stubborn piece of plaster, I banged my thumb with a hammer. Instead of sitting down and focusing on the pain, I decided to switch jobs and remove all of the “new” door frames off of the original frame. All of that white stuff under the door header is gone:

The sides still have some white paint on them, but all of the “new” door frames nailed onto the original wood doorway is removed. You can see the color of the original wood underneath:

We plan on sanding the door frame down and repainting it white to pop against the brick and the black floors (yes, we’ve finally settled on a color!).

After a whole lot of sweeping, vacuuming and dusting, we had a fully exposed brick wall:

It still needs some work. We have to wire brush it so all of the dust is off. We might have to repoint some brick where the mortar came loose. We also want to re-sheetrock the ceiling because we hate the raw edge where the ceiling meets the brick:

The wall that meets the brick on the right side is also pretty ragged looking:

We were already planning on sheetrocking it, so it’s no big deal. The wall with the French door was recently sheetrocked, and it looks so clean in comparison. It doesn’t have a corner bead on it yet, but Bradley’s cuts are pretty spot on:

This is the cleanest our floors have looked since we ripped up the carpet.

Sad, right? We’re dying to take a floor sander to it, but we’re waiting until after our painting is done. Anyway, it took a shop vac, a broom and a floor duster to get our floors so squeaky clean.

And it took one Bradley and one planer all of 20 seconds to screw up my clean floor goodness:

Without warning, Bradley opened up the French doors and started planing them down so they’d close a little easier.

Wood chips went flying all over, both in the hallway and in the guest bedroom. I cried, “Mah flooooors!” and vowed never to vacuum in this house again. Then I helped him hold the French doors open so he could sand them down and get them all smooth for painting. The drama never lasts long ’round our house. There’s too much work to do.

Spoiler alert: you can see the paint for our guest bedroom!

It’s a lovely shade of creamy tan. That’s all you’re getting out of us for now. We’re almost ready to paint, but until then, our lips are sealed. Mum’s the word. You’ll never take us alive, copper. Myah, see, myah! No talk of paint until our sanding’s done:

After Bradley finished sanding, we made one more change to the French doors. We haaaaated the way the original brass hardware looked.

So shiny and so…gold. They blinded us every time we opened the door. So we picked up some oil-rubbed bronze hardware from Lowe’s and made a quick swap:

Maybe it’s just because our new camera is way better than our crusty old point-and-shoot, but we think the before & afters are uh-may-zing:

We plan on painting the door black, so the hinges will basically disappear. Plus, matte black just feels so much better. We paid nearly $30 for the 6 hinges, so it wasn’t exactly a cheap fix. But we had a little money left over in our guest bedroom budget, so we went for it.

After cleaning up the floors — again! — we called it a day. We thought we deserved to relax a little with a brew or two:

Note the pile of plain white outlet covers that we’ll replace our not-so-pretty old outlets with. (Someday there won’t be a faux marble turquoise outlet in this house!) After our R&R, we called it a day and went out into the hall to take our final “in progress” photos. They’re not true “after” pictures because we still have some work to do, but the comparison is worth sharing. Prepare to ooh and aah. First up, our brick wall makeover:

And now our French door:

When we were packing up and leaving, we realized for the first time ever that you can actually see the brick wall from the front door.

And can we please talk about how sunny it is up there? The French door lets all the bedroom light through and everything just gleams. We love it!

What we learned from this project:

• Fingernails? Thumbnails? It’s almost as if they were made to be smashed by hammers.
• Plastic curtain goes up first with every demolition! We’ll never make that mistake again.
• A prybar and hammer work just fine, but a jackhammer gets the job done in half the time.

DIY: Demolish It Yourself

One of our favorite parts about renovating is the demolition part. Call us destructive, but there is nothing more satisfying than smashing a sledgehammer through some perfectly good sheet rock.

Wait. I take that back. There is nothing more satisfying than smashing a foot through some perfectly good sheet rock. We’ve done it. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

But before we could get to the foot-of-fury part of the project, we had take care of one of our least favorite parts about renovating: planning. Booo! Hiss! Boring!! …but totally necessary. We started by setting a goal.

Here’s what we planned on doing over the last weekend:

1. Tear a big ol’ hole in the wall separating the guest bedroom from the hallway
2. Install French doors.
3. Seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole (yes, door hole is a real term)

After we developed our game plan, we gathered our supplies. We put together a list of all the supplies we’ll need: sheetrock, lumber, nails, screws, etc. Bradley did all the estimating of how much of everything we’d need. I mostly just smiled and nodded and pretending to know what furring strips are. (Note: it has nothing to do with foxes or minks. Or leg waxing.)

We padded our list pretty heavily with extras. For instance, we know we’ll be putting up a lot of new walls upstairs, so we went ahead and ordered enough sheetrock for the whole floor. Our local lumberyard charges a flat $15 for delivery, so we took full advantage of it.

Our delivery arrived bright and early on Saturday morning, and we tossed  all the extra supplies (gently) into the garage for storage until they’re needed.

Ohhhh, the luxury of space. The whole garage thing is new to us, and we are loving it!

We had already researched French doors to find a good deal. We knew we wanted 60″ wide x 80″ tall doors, and found that all the places we checked charged around $350. We ordered our door from Lowe’s and picked it up ourselves to save on delivery charges.

Source

Then finally — fiiiiiinally! — the big day arrived. We’d rested up. We’d stretched out. We’d made sure our tetanus shots were up-to-date. We’d said our goodbyes to the wall on the left:

Some disclaimer-y type stuff before we get into the meat & potatoes sledgehammers and sheetrock. This kind of work is usually better left to the pros. This guy:

…is a pro. He was born with a hammer in one hand and a level in the other. (Not really sure how his mother pulled that one off, but kudos to her.) He’s torn down walls and put up walls. He knows how to re-wire the lights, and he can plumb with the best of ‘em. He also knows how to throw a perfect put-down-the-camera-and-help-me glare:

In short, he knows what he’s doing. If you’ve never done anything like this before and want to try, get help from a professional. If you attempt to do this on your own, you will die. …just kidding. You might get hurt or destroy your house, though, so play it safe.

We started our demo day by making sure we weren’t about to demolish a load-bearing wall. That would be bad. Ceiling-crashing-down-on-your-face-while-you-sleep bad. Once we figured out our wall was a-OK to demolish, we turned off all the electricity so we wouldn’t end up Benjamin Franklining ourselves. Little Pennsylvania humor for ya there. Wokka wokka!

Bradley removed all the baseboards with a big ol’ crowbar. We plan on reusing as much of the original lumber as possible, so we stashed it away for later. After that, he used a box cutter to score the edges of the wall we wanted to remove:

At this point, we put on our respirators to protect our lungs from any potential lead paint dust.

Yes, ladies, my ventilator is hot pink. Safety first, fashion second.

Once our noses were secure, out came the sledgehammer and we bashed the wall down….carefully. We wanted to keep the other side of the wall — the inside of the bedroom — in tact, so we only removed one side of the wall. The sheetrock removal process was a lot like Operation Ivy: grab, yank, toss, repeat.

We were a little surprised to find random bits of insulation stuffed into the walls. Whoever put up the wall must have had leftovers and decided to throw in them. Either way, they’re not doing any good in this interior wall. We removed the insulation stashed it away for later use as well.

We found some fun stuff within the wall. Like this bit of floral wallpaper:

This floral border on top of the floral wallpaper. Someone sure loved flowers on her wall:

The biggest surprise was the Gold Bond brand drywall:

And here I thought Gold Bond only made foot powder. Crazy!

Eventually the entire wall was naked, the wood was exposed and all the old sheetrock was put away in four huge contractor trash bags:

Next, we needed to cut the hole to set our French doors into. Bradley drew out the dimensions for the door on the other side of our bare wall, making sure they were level and perfect.

And, because, we’re total nerds who can’t ever walk away from a Beetlejuice reference, we drew knobs on the door and knocked 3 times.

Nobody answered (sad face). So we pulled out the Sawzall and started cutting:

I’d never used a Sawzall before, so Bradley let me have a turn. It was love at first whirr. I was totally the girl who took shop class in middle school and metal smithing in high school and college, I became pretty scared of loud power tools. I had an accident in a metal class and sliced into my left thumb and forefinger. All the way to the bone. I had to get 22 stitches and — ew ew ewwww! — I felt every single one of them because the local anesthetic didn’t quite kick in. So after that traumatic experience, I’ve been a little hesitant to jump back into using things that could chop my fingers off.

After using the Sawzall, though, I’m ready. I’m back in love with power tools, and I can’t wait to try them all. Good thing we have a lot of work to do around the house!

Anyway, we Sawzall’d right through all the wood on the bare side of the wall, but used a handsaw to finish off the parts closest to the floors so we didn’t accidentally cut through them:

The wall popped right out and we removed it to reveal our new door hole:

Door hole! We knew right away that our hunch about putting in a French door was spot on. There was so much light coming in from the bedroom windows and from the windows in the hall. We could open up all the windows and let a breeze through. Everything felt so much more open and big and airy. We had time for a quick high-five and then got back to work moving some outlets around:

We also had to cut and install a header to sit above the door. Basically, a header takes the weight of the wall off the door:

See? I told you he knows what he’s doing. Once we had the header and frame in, we made sure everything was level. And, easy peasy, we slid the door right in:

OK, not really. When we went to slide the door in, we found out that it doesn’t really fit. No matter what we tried, the door seemed too big for the door hole. We had a minor panic attack. I didn’t get any pictures of it because we were too busy running around trying to figure out what happened.

We quickly figured out what we did wrong: we were being way too precise. Our measurements and cuts were so exact that the door wouldn’t slide in. D’oh! Our jobs are kind of all about making things look perfect. Bradley’s a furniture designer and I’m an art director. With our work, when something is off by 1/16th of an inch, it looks wrong. You have to get things exact or else they look weird or ugly or off. So we measured and cut our door hole to perfectly fit our door. Turns out walls don’t really work that way. Type A / perfectionist FAIL.

We had to go back and widen some of our cuts and make a few adjustments. There were door shims involved:

After another 30 minutes of tweaking, the door finally slid in and looked fabulous.

Toot freaking toot. That’s the sound of us tooting our own horn. Above is a shot from the stair looking down the hall. And below is a shot at the end of the hallway looking down towards the stairs.

And here’s a shot of the doors open, so you can get a looksie at that the header I was talking about earlier.

Before the day was over, we had one more task. We had to seal up the old, awkwardly-positioned door hole. Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

OK, fine, you can still see it. We still have to tape and plaster and sand and paint, but we won’t get that that till next time.

This entire project took roughly 6 hours or so. We had a few other projects going on at the same time, plus we had to take a time out to accept our delivery and run to Lowe’s and Home Depot. We’re pretty geeked about our new door and how it totally opens up the cramped hall.

Stuff we learned from this project:

• Handcrafted tables and well-designed brochures can never be “too perfect.” Door holes on the other hand…
• Power tools are not toys, but they sure feel like it.
• You can’t put on a respirator without making some kind of Darth Vader joke. We dare you to try.