11/22/12: The Little Room

There's this little room, a staircase really, leading from the kitchen to the basement. I had it in my head to put up some pegboard and turn it into extra kitchen storage. Easy, right? Here's the before:

Notice prime pegboard wall space on the left.

I had picked out a nice light green for the room. After priming and painting two coats of green, the walls bore a strong resemblance to neon barf. See for yourself, below. So, after agonizing about whether to go through the trouble of redoing it, I buckled down and got a can of white and started painting it all over again, for a grand total of five coats of paint (primer, two coats of barf, and two of white). The picture below shows the white going over the neon barf in one of the top corners:

 Right, so on to the pegboard. Scored some big sheets of new, khaki colored pegboard at our local used construction supply store for only $7/piece. But it turns out pegboard is fairly hard to cut with a circular saw, as we found out when we shredded and frayed the edges of our two nice pieces of pegboard. Just for fun, we took the hand saw to it, and, surprisingly, that worked great. So, off to construction supply for two more sheets of pegboard. And score one for the old-fashioned hand saw!

Using some 1x2's, we constructed a frame to set the pegboard away from the wall. Frame was then mounted to studs:

Who's that guy?

And finally, up went the pegboard, and all the pots and pans:

Gosh, Little Room, you were the smallest, but surely the fussiest.

11/01/12: Cider for All Saints

One of the perks of the house is the space in our basement to make hard cider. Cider-making was tricky in the cramped basement storage area of our apartment building. So, this afternoon, on our day off for the feast of All Saints, we picked up about 100 pounds of apples--Empire, McIntosh, and Idared--from an orchard north of Pittsburgh, and then had them pulped and squeezed at Sally's Cider Press in Zelienople, PA, about 45 minutes away:

You load the apples up a conveyor belt, where they're hosed down as they go up the chute:

Inside, they're ground to a pulp, which is flattened between several boards and then mechanically pressed:

There's Sally!

The juice flows down into a tank where it's pasteurized with UV light (just strong enough to kill E. coli but not all the naturally occurring wild yeasts and beneficial bacteria). We then fill some plastic gallon jugs with our cider through a spigot; today we had eight gallons--pretty sizable for 100 pounds of apples. At home, I tested the cider for acidity, soluble sugar, and pH, and then dumped it into jars and added sulfites. Cider and its accoutrements are now quite cozy in their dedicated basement area:

11/01/12: White stairs, finally . . .

Way back in July, we ripped out the carpet on the stairs and second-floor hallway, refinished the hardwoods underneath, and stripped the flaking paint from the stair risers. Well, it wasn't until recently that we got around to repainting those risers. We'd been living with stained, nasty looking wood for months (not to mention plaster patching all over the stairway walls):

Notice the quarter round, waiting to be reattached. (I ripped it out to insert some shims between the stairs to stop some insanely sharp creaking.)

 May I present Our New Stairs and Stairway Walls:

Notice Michael's expert quarter round cutting and installation skills.

 

11/01/12: Living Room. Finished.

We've finished painting quite a few rooms lately here at Mont d'Or Manor, the worst of which was the huge living room. Here again is the before view (with the mousey tan walls and our plaster patching everywhere):

We never liked the tan much; it clashed with the stained glass and the dark fireplace mantel. So, we redid it in Benjamin Moore's White Dove:

And now we have this:

09/27/12: New Kitchen Cabinet Hardware

We were growing tired of trying to pry our kitchen drawers open from the edges---they were completely handleless when we moved in:

Riddle me this: how do I get you open?

???

And here's the old cabinet hardware. A little too 'spurs and jangles' for me:

 So, we drilled new holes for the drawers and replaced the handles on all the cabinets:

Welcome to the 21st century, Handles.

09/03/12: Headboard

In case any of you were wondering how the $25 Craigslist headboard I painted back in June turned out, here it is:

9/03/12: Save time for pickling

 So, not home improvement per se, but pickling was a fun diversion from home improvement!

Beets, shishito peppers, and red onions

09/03/12: Light fixtures galore!

Dining room chandelier

Bedroom ceiling fan, finally!

09/01/12: $2 light fixture

We wanted a small oil-rubbed bronze light fixture for the guest bedroom, but we were having trouble finding something suitable. Here's what we were dealing with before:

Granted, this looks much worse than it would if it had its glass shade and were properly affixed to the ceiling. But anyway. Went down to Construction Junction, a used building materials store, and found a small silver fixture for $1 and a small school-house shaped glass shade to go with it, also for $1. Set up shop in the backyard with my oil-rubbed bronze spray paint and went to work:

  
Attached the new shade and affixed to the ceiling using the hardware from the previous fixture:

All for $2 (not including cost of the spray paint, which I plan to use on everything from now on . . .).

Here's a picture of the guest bedroom, now that we've got the bedding on and the light fixture installed:

08/23/12: The porch is back!

A beautiful job

You can't even tell it was rebuilt; looks like new, in an old sort of way.

If any of you folks in Pgh are looking for a repointer, our guy is Jim Martincic: 724-228-7372. He single-handedly rebuilt the front and sides of our porch as well as repointed a two foot section on either side of the west corner of the house, all the way up to the roof. We had him do some extra spot-pointing around the rest of the house too. It looks incredible. And he cleaned up after himself!

08/20/12: Painting the upstairs hallway

Having fun stirring the paint . . .

Gearing up for some cutting in!