Yep, I'm a geek

Want to see what Santa (aka Jens) put in my stocking for Christmas?

Yep, it's exactly what I suggested for a cheapo stocking stuffer and I was thrilled that Santa actually took me seriously. But then again Santa knows how giddy I get picking out new paint color swatches at the home improvement stores. So there you have it ... proof that I'm really that geeky about home improvement stuff.

40 Hours to a Suck Free Living Room

I found out last week that I have a Metric Ton of vacation to burn before the end of the year.  BAD. ASS. So I figured I would use this time wisely, specifically, finish the built in’s

A) Build and install the remaining 3 drawers and drawer fronts.
 

B) Install the shoe Molding
 
C) Mask the toe kick


D) Build and install the four remaining shelves
E) Manufacture and install the remaining applied bead
F) Edge Band the remaining shelves
G) Set Nails (Ick)
Now, I should be able to get this all done.  I also plan on working on destroying my fair share of tasty beerish beverages and lifting as many heavy things as possible.  I also “plan” on documenting this for posterity.  We will see though. Wish me luck. 
In closing  a small giraffe and I  are off to be awesome and do neat shit. I recommend you do the same. 

Clap Excitedly Fu%$ers

Clap excitedly fuckers.  There is hope (read progress) on the Project That Never Ends.  Its been a while since we posted (this is Jens by the way, I normally write under Becky's name because logging her out seems to be a lot of work), with life, holidays work and being on the road progress has been slow. However its been happening.  I now have all of the doors done and hung. I will get into how and what later but for now feast your eyes.





These doors have been with out doubt the most cantankerously nit picky serious carpentry I have ever attempted.  I hung the last door tonight, and I've had it made for a month.  If I'm honest putting these things up is terrifying because when you mess them up (note not if, when) right back to the drawing board you go, all the set up has to be re done, all the calculations its all square one.  To get these 6 finished doors I've made and scraped at least that many just trying to get it right.  This has not been an easy process.  However, it has allowed me to mess around in the garage and has made my living room look like this.



and not like this



I'm pretty happy thus far (keep your mouth shut about the mess, in the before no kids, the after, one very seriously happy playful, hence the toys, kid).  Now I just need to install the drawers, fronts and shoe molding, and I'm freaking done.  Glory Glory hallelujah we’re almost done, almost.  Hopefully by the time the second kid is two, we can have this complete.  Its little goals that get you through. 

Now a picture of my dog, more than likely he is cooler than you.



Ok one more that doesn’t look like a sci fi creature.



G’night all, and to all a G’night.

Basment Reclaimation

Things are a foot in the Nestingen household.  Its amazing what a whole month free of travel will do for an avid DIYer's to-do list.  For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say we've been busy.  Our tradition of last minute, ah hell why not projects has been holding true.  For a little background we have two cats (had 'em since we lived in a 450 sq ft. studio in a less than desirable portion of St. Paul) and one very large dog.  The cats have not historically done well with change, when we bought the house they were certain there was a boogey dog around each and every corner and proceeded to mark their territory thus.  Then we rescued said boogey dog from our local shelter (see pic - below he's all brawn and no bite, there are glasses of warm milk with more ire than our dog) and the cats proceeded to lose there furry little minds and bladders all the hell over our basement.

Boogey Dog

Culprit #1

Culprit #2

My upbringing is such that when an animal continues to exhibit poor behavior, that animal has forfeit its breathing rights.  That was my upbringing, my experience is; i like my cats, and ending their furry little existences over some urine would have put undo stress on my marriage, soooooo they had to stay.  The basement carpet on the other hand HAD TO go.  We had been talking about updating the basement for a while, the flooring was a sticking point.

All pet mess aside, carpet in a basement in our neck of the woods is a poor idea, please refer to our post " A little Wetness problem solved."  Our house is damn near 50 yrs old built in a swamp - it will get wet, it's not up for debate. Couple that with a kiddo  (by the way another one on the way in Feb. so, well, we have been, er....cough cough, busy? I digress) and the subsequent messes generated  and carpet was as good a flooring choice as broken glass, that is to say a poor choice.  Becky got wind of a linoleumesque product that was supposed to be all things to all people and hold up to every thing short of a nuclear war.  I was totally against anything linoleum. When i think of that particular flooring, I think of shag carpet, Nascar races, and grits with more cigarette ash in them than actual corn meal. I did not want a plastic floor underneath my bar and pool table.  My hand was forced however when I arrived home one Friday to see Becky acting as if she was intensely interested in my day, how it went, what went on, what I would prefer to do for dinner... I knew this level of interest could only mean one thing.  There was a project underway I was not privy too.

Sorry for the crappy photo, Basement post carpet removal pre refinishing

After a bit of coaxing she admitted that she had in fact started to remove some of the pad from below the carpet in the basement as an exploratory exercise. What she found was encouraging, the carpet came up neatly as did the pad, with the notable exception of the edges (those sucked bad). All in all the removal would be a quick project.  So after a quick discussion off we went on the demo. I had to get up close and personal with the brunt of the ammonia soaked pieces of carpet to get them out of the basement, throughout the entire process, I was mentally beating the hell out of myself for not doing it sooner, it was gross.

Once the carpet was removed we had to revisit the flooring debate. At this point I was worn down, so we went Becky's way.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that Becky's way turned out to be a pretty nice solution. It comes in vinyl planks that are look good as any wood laminate product out there, the install is fastener free, and tool minimal (pencil, tape measure and tin snips, that's it), and to top it off, totally water proof and tough as hell.  If the cats get incontinent, it won't seep in and create a smell, if the kid gets creative with his paint, it won't stain, just wipe it up. Win, win.

Getting Started Putting Down the Flooring, REALLY EASY

The install was a breeze- roughly 6 total hours of work from start to finish, easily the least amount of work to change ratio I've ever been a part of.  We painted the walls prior to putting the floor down, and decided to finish off the look with a prefinished white baseboard that looked sharp against the dark floor and walls.  I am finally able to showcase the guitars that I play (poorly) and the Adam Turman posters that are the chosen art of the basement (I don't like to plug things unless I can really say I support them, Adam Turman does awesome work, he did a great poster of a great beer and great pin up girls, sorry, but I like his stuff) . 

Post Base Board and every thing back in place 

Behind The Bar

WA LA updateed basement. We didnt go too nuts, no wall moving, no real carpentry work, just surfaces, but it makes a huge difference. We love it.  Now we just have to toss a massive party to break it in.

And now for no reason, a kid in a pile of leaves.

Fire! Robots! Weekends Well Spent

It’s a wonder what a good night’s sleep, a little jet lag, and some hyper potent 7/11 quasi coffee will do for a guy 3500 miles from home. I’m fresh as a freaking daisy bathed in summers eve feminine wash.

What you may ask does this have to do with home improvements? Stump removal and firepit installation and the like. Nothing, absolutely nothing, I’m just trying to provide a glimpse into my current state of mind. To battle a little homesickness, and meeting burn out I figured I’d pen a blog about my recent foray into firepit installation.

This particular home improvement started as is becoming custom, on a total whim. We have had a pine stump in our back yard since I took the tree down with a bow saw, a tree stand harness and WAY more luck than I deserve (whole new story for another blog) three years ago. I got an email from Becky on a sunny Friday afternoon stating that our neighbor had wrangled a stump grinder from work and would come on over and grind out a stump for us while I was at work.

AWESOME!!! Right?

No, there is no possible freaking way that I was going to let anyone else grind that stump out for two reasons; 1) I’ve been mowing around that lawn pimple for three years occasionally hacking at it with it axe out of frustration. Removing that stump was now disappointingly high on my bucket list and no one was going to take the satisfaction of that particular demolition away from me. 2) Have you seen a stump grinder? Those things are freaking sweet - all gasoline fumes, whirling chains, cutting heads that could dismember an ox. Hell yeah! Put a beer in one hand and the controls for that thing In the other and that’s more fun than shooting carnies at an all night meth bender. (Please see the pic below, I had no idea this particular stump grinder was what my wife meant by “stump grinder”. Paint a pin up girl on one side of it and call it Stumptmuousprime, it was perfect).

Once I got home and convinced my neighbor that I was mentally stable enough to operate this beast, I set the tracks in motion (that’s right, tracks, this thing could climb over a Hyundai while it threw death and destruction every possible direction), and in a disappointingly small amount of time I had reduced the offending stump to so much mulch, and created a MASSIVE hole in my lawn. Becky and I had talked jokingly about installing a firepit in lieu of the stump for many years. Now, suddenly we were faced with the reality of having what was either the start of a fire pit, or the beginning of a really crappy piece of lawn. We opted for flames.

Installing a fire pit should be simple and cheap; it’s a hole you plan on burning, regularly. It’s as simple as it gets, line a hole with a steel ring so your hole does not suddenly become, a non hole, tamp some sand in the bottom, and back fill with a little rock for drainage and WaLa let your inner pyro go. Nothing is ever that easy. Within a few moments at our local home improvement box store, we realized that in ground fire pits are not en vogue, unless there gaudy and come with a pergola. We try not to be too terribly gaudy and a pergola in the middle of our lawn for no apparent reason would give our lawn that douche flair we’ve been trying to avoid. We popped into a lawn decoration specialty place and inquired if they had a plain steel ring we could use for a fire pit liner and the man enthusiastically pointed to a perfect example of what we wanted, nice thick steel perfectly round black simple. We decided that was what we had to have, it was perfect. We sauntered back to the now oddly cheery man to inquire about the price and with an absolutely straight face he said $300.00. After the mix of emotions ranging from despair to murderous rage cleared from my head, I realized why he had that wide Cheshire grin cutting the bottom half of his face in two, he was nuts. Totally freaking batshit insane, there was no possible way we were going to pay 300 bucks for hole. We left. Plan B was decided quickly thereafter, we would buy one of the gaudy above ground fire rings (steel not terribly thick but serviceable) and submerge it below grade hiding its hideous leaf motif and working to keep our hole a hole.

Once our plan of action was in place it was relatively simple to finish digging out the hole, and tamp in the sand, place the ring, backfill with gravel, level it off and place some retaining wall bricks around the top and call it done. All in all this was one of the least technically challenging projects we have tackled, and it involved axes, large dangerous gas powered tools and a totally arbitrary reason to burn shit and drink beer. Not every project is this easy, but I try to enjoy them when they are.

Try not to cut off a finger.

Of Glory Holes, Honey Traps and Orifice Beautification

I should really back up a bit and lay some ground work for the above title.

Our house was built in 1967, there are two things relevant about the vintage of my house for the purposes of this particular allegory. 1) In 1967 there were INCREDIBLY different standards pertaining to size, shape and function of certain basic home amenities.  Take for instance a tub drain.  Today there are two sizes of tub drains available, if for what ever reason your tub drain were to fail (however unlikely that may seem, in the history of suburban man a tub drain aka "a HOLE" there have been no recorded instances of said HOLE's complete cessation of function.  Don't worry though well get there)  you could go to "Big Box Store"  and readily purchase any of a wide variety of tub drains. Some are chrome, some are brass finish, some have fancy spring activated built in plugs, some don't.  Rest assured however, they are available.  In abundance.

The second salient point that relates to my houses age is that the people who built it were craftsman.  Real callused hand, camel smoking, hand saw using, freaking craftsman. Due to the high degree of skill used in the initial construction of my house there are many sub systems that have functioned quietly and perfectly for quite a number of years.  Take for example the tubs plumbing.

My beloved spouse, and adorable baby boy were able help me understand both of the above points in detail.


My wife is in the process of remodeling our main bathroom.  Shes been doing it in small chunks here and there.  One of the recent efforts was trying to "dress up" the tub, drain and water mixing valve.  The valve we had, broke, and my wife seized on the opportunity to "improve" the bathroom by purchasing a dress up kit from a Big Box Store, that included a new spigot, mixing valve, plug plate cover, and a new tub drain!

Non of it Fit! Not a single freaking piece!  It WAS ALL WRONG@!

The first of my two points came into very sharp focus at this point.  Its not that it almost fit, it was just a fraction of a size too big or too small.  It was beyond hope outta wack.  Up sewage creek sans paddle.

Keep in mind, to find out these things did not fit, we first had to try to install them.  If your first thought was, "you have to remove the old fixtures before you can try new ones"  you were absolutely correct.  In the case of the spigot, mixing valve and cover, No. Big. Deal.  We simply cleaned up the old pieces and put em back on.  Easy.  The tub drain was an entirely different experience.  For those of you uninitiated in how holes (yeah its a freaking hole.  Period.)  are installed let me give you a bit of a primer.  New drains (read holes) are installed using cross members that quarter the inner diameter of the drain.  Its there fore easy to slip a pair of needle nose pliers into the quadrants and simply tighten or loosen the drain to install it or remove it.  Simple.  Easy.  Straight forward.

This method of drain (read hole) construction was not used widely in 1967.  In fact I'm sure when they built my house Billy Bad Ass plumbing god finished plumbing the tub drain, holstered his wrench, sparked up an unfiltered cigarette, wiped his oakum stained hands on his flannel shirt and said "that fuckers perfect, it ain't ever coming out".  I'm sure at NO POINT during the construction of this bathroom did any one ever question the aesthetic characteristics of the hole that lets the water leave the bath tub.  Ever, not even once, id bet a kidney on it.
Then my wife showed up.
Billy bad ass and his crew of plumbers used chrome plated brass fittings that were intended to be installed, and removed only if the commies were coming and these items could be used as weapons.  As such removing the old drain plug (read Glory Hole)  required a hammer, a large flat head screwdriver, and two cut digits.  Once removed, and the new improved drain (read hole) proved to be one of the new standard sizes and as such no where near the size used in 1967.  I had to reinstall the old tub drain.

Reinstalling the tub drain, was not fun, easy, straight forward, or something that was completed in what even Job would have considered a reasonable amount of time.  I got it tough, I got it reinstalled.  It was NEVER COMING OUT AGAIN! I had a leak free tub drain (read hole).  I was in the clear.

My son disagreed.

The previously installed plug did not make it through the reinstall.  No biggie though, one of my sons squishy bath toy balls fit perfectly into the mouth of the drain (read hole).  I simply installed the ball the duration of bath time and removed it when we were done.  Simple. Easy. Straight Forward. I would even say it was fail proof.  It was in fact fail less until last night.  When my son shoved the ball down the drain well past the point of no return.  All the way down, no coat hanger drain snake was going to fish this bad boy out.  We were balled er....ah... hosed.  The squishy ball had made it to the honey trap.


sawzall, wedged in between floor joists with out slipping and absolutely FUBARing .5" water supply lines is a nerve wracking experience i need not repeat) .

With the trap replaced, and a good non big box plumbing retailer located it was a simple matter to buy a bushing and install an Orifice beautification kit, with built in drain.  Hot dog.  That and about 9 beers makes the mental rehab possible after a project like this.

I hate plumbing.

Odds and Ends

Aggghhh…. Whatever happened to the month of May? Oh yeah that’s right… I had a HUGE project to do at work with an INSANE deadline so I tried to be productive with my time and unfortunately that meant no blogging. Some recent highlights to what we’ve been up to throughout May are …

• Removing the glass shower door on our bathtub and installing a new shower curtain rod. The removal part was pretty satisfying for me – I HATED cleaning the glass doors and it seemed no matter how often I cleaned they perpetually had hard water spots on them making them look pretty hazy and gross up close. After scraping all the adhesive and caulk grossness off of the tub and tile I installed a new “hotel style” shower curtain rod and it’s such a drastic improvement in my eyes.

Unfortunately the first time we installed the new rod the location didn’t seem right and it just jutted out too far into the bathroom, but the second time around we nailed the position. A lil’ patching to cover the screw holes and touch up paint and you’d never know we had to do it twice (except that I’m telling you). Now I just need to find/DIY a shower curtain to replace the clear PVC one we have up temporarily.

• Replacing shower fixtures. This began because our five decade old shower handle finally decided to bite the dust one evening during Ivan’s bath time. It was well on it’s way out for awhile so I was glad to finally replace it. While replacing the broken plastic handle with a shiny new metal lever I figured I’d update the drain, spout, and tub overflow plate so it would all be shiny and pretty. However, when it comes to plumbing or electrical in our home nothing seems to go as planned.
  
  The overflow plate was a pretty basic replacement but we ended up returning two spouts that didn’t work before giving up and sticking with the original as well as two different drains. During one such attempt at a drain switch that didn’t work, we ended up with what Jens likes to refer to as “mini-Katrina” in our basement due to inadequate amounts of plumbers putty when putting back in to original drain (I’ll take the blame even though Jens told me to use a nickel size amount).
  
  Luckily, Jens was in the basement while I was giving Ivan a bath and could hear the water leak so we discovered it right away or it could have been much worse. We ended up with a few acoustic ceiling tiles that need to be replaced and lots of vacuuming up wet carpet (again…that seems to be a theme with us this spring).  Needless to say we couldn’t get the standard size drains to fit and after some googling we discovered that there is a rare third size that was used commonly in the late sixty’s – go figure! So that’s going to require a trip to a specialty plumbing wholesale store to replace … someday we might get around to it but for now we are living with a old, yet functioning tub drain.
• Patching the hole in our basement drywall from our little foundation repair job. Still needs to be primed and then eventually I’ll get around to painting the whole room since we picked out a paint color. That by the way was a very scientific process which involved slapping a bunch of sample swatches up, deciding that none of them were quite right, and adjusting the one that we liked the best with some white primer to lighten it up a little bit. Once we got the custom tint that we liked I put a swatch on a paint stick that I can take into the paint store and get a color match to. For right now though … that project is pretty low on my priority list.
• Making cabinet doors for the built-ins! Jens finished our first maple cabinet door for the built-ins early this week. It looks awesome!
  
  
  
  
  I can’t wait to get all the doors completed and hung bring us one step closer to finishing the project that never ends. We plan on using BLUM concealed hinges which are pretty reputable for their high quality – I plan on ordering them from amazon very soon since that’s the cheapest place I can find them. I like that they are self-closing and offer three-way door adjustment so we can fine tune the reveal all the way around our inset doors as well as make sure they are flush with the face frames. Once we Jens is done with all the construction, I get to start on the tedious job of sanding, staining, and finishing the whole shebang. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m honestly always a little bit nervous about staining wood although I shouldn’t be because I did about a dozen sample pieces to decide which stain/toner/finish combo to use.
• Restoring our original wood windows. Our exterior trim work needs repainting badly, especially on the southern exposure of the house. The paint is really starting to chip and flake off in some areas. While scraping off some of the flaking paint I also came across some areas in the exterior sill and frame where the wood felt soft and was starting to rot. So I went a little crazy and started chunking out all of the areas of rot to get down to solid wood until my windows look like this.
  
  
  
  
  Yikes, huh!? I’m glad Jens didn’t freak out when he got home and saw what I had done. Well thankfully there’s a product in existence know as wood epoxy for exactly this type of a situation. The epoxy is now cured and next on my priority list is getting around to sanding and painting it. I’ll be back with some before and after pics as well as more detail on the process.