I spent the whole day helping my dad drilling a new door, from the living room to the porch we added to the house last year. Turns out 100+ year old Dutch brick walls are tough as fuck.
But it's down! We're gonna put the door frame in now.
So, has anyone else been doing some neat DIY as of late?
https://imgur.com/a/t12gf This is one of many house projects the wife and I have done in the past 6 months. Our house is 90+ years old and has been updated in bits and pieces so there's always another project. The stairs are steep and narrow and were covered with cheap long pile carpet that became very slippery when matted down. We ripped that up and found what seem to be the original stair treads underneath along with remnants of previous carpet. It took 2 hours to pull out the carpet staples by hand with pliers and then several more hours to sand down the treads to remove the paint splatters and other crap covering them. The staining and poly-coating was a long process as well, we did every other stair one weekend and then the landing plus the remaining stairs the next weekend. These are terrible stairs to try and take 2 at a time so that was fun. We ended up with a darker stain color than we had intended to use but that seems to have been a good mistake due to the condition the stairs are in, the darker color masks a lot of the crap underneath. We went with a very "Pinterest" style project and used a textured wall paper on the rises. Soon after we finished the project we had a bunch of people over to the house and these stairs got a lot of traffic which revealed the choice of material to be a poor choice as the bits of texture fall off. Under normal daily use by two people it's not so bad so we'll hold off on refinishing the rises for now.
When you wanna do those stair risers properly, I highly recommend American Tin Ceilings. I used their stuff for my tin backsplash in the kitchen, and they are GREAT. Quality product, great instructions, great tools. And the results? Great, too. :-)
Ah that's a good source for those, thanks! I was aware of those products, but they're more expensive at the Big Box hardware stores. The stuff we used was on clearance, only like $3 for the roll which did all the stairs. That's really the only reason we went with it.
I'm nowhere near as handy as most of you, so the most DIY thing I've been up to has been working on completing our Cat Highway that goes around our main room. One of the latest additions was this cat bridge across our bedroom door
I added a shower to a tub last week. Learned a few things. 1. Tile, not panels. The panels were a nightmare to put in, impossible to align, and look like trash. Tile would've been much easier and looked much better. 2. PEX is awesome. I'll do PEX again for everything. It was super-easy to work with. The hardest part was connecting to existing non-PEX, and even that was easy with push-to-connect fittings. No soldering, no torches; the only threads were on the shower mixer. 3. If you're doing a shower in PEX, the mixer-to-faucet drop must be copper, not PEX. This is because PEX has a slightly smaller inner diameter, and shower mixers are designed for copper, resulting in water going up to the showerhead when fully on. Which is what happens on mine, and googling afterward told me exactly why. I'll spend a Saturday tearing the panel off and fixing it eventually. I just bought a new house. There's a lot I want to do with it, but it's hard to find time. I may start paying contractors. I prefer doing things myself, but at some point, I have the money and not the time… Next on my list is turning a room-shaped alcove in the basement into another bedroom. Which is hard, because my city requires floating walls, and it has a drop ceiling.
Here's the other thing you will soon learn about those plastic panels: They are fucking noisy!! Taking a shower in there was really loud. So I took expanding spray foam and injected it into all the gaps behind the panels, and it cut down on the noise significantly. When I just re-did the bathroom, I pulled out the old surround and went with subway tile. SO much nicer to work with, and the finish is SO much better. (Quieter, too!)
Here's the other thing you will soon learn about those plastic panels: They are fucking noisy!! Taking a shower in there was really loud. So I took expanding spray foam and injected it into all the gaps behind the panels, and it cut down on the noise significantly. When I just re-did the bathroom, I pulled out the old surround and went with subway tile. SO much nicer to work with, and the finish is SO much better. (Quieter, too!)
Our TV sits in a corner of the living room next to a fireplace, there is a lot of dead unusable space. I've been making an angled cabinet to fit into the corner, maybe I'll put up picks if it turns out anything but ghetto carpentry. A good friend of mine just moved to Haarlem and is trying to residency/citizenship, anywhere close to you?
ooh. I always thought that expression was needlessly violent. (rob05c I ain't got notified for this, and my double post that I deleted yesterday got un-deleted. First is not a big issue, but if more posts are undeleted that might be something a bit more poignant.) (plus I also double posted this. Whoops.)
Four extensions, three cordless, a fax machine (not pictured) and two direct lines across 16 VoIP channels. Also not pictured: the six embedded computers that needed their firmware updated from everywhere from 1.02 (2009) to 2.1 (2011) to 3.1.3 (2015) before it would all work.